A MASTERCLASS On Weight Loss, Stress Management, Building Muscle & Reversing Your Age w/Andy Galpin EP 1247

Today’s guest is Dr. Andy Galpin, the creator of the Exercise Physiology Laboratory at CSU Fullerton, as well as their Director of Sports Performance. His studies prove that most people don’t fully understand the influence exercise habits, food consumption, and technology usage have on your long-term health performance. The co-author of Unplugged: Evolve From Technology to Upgrade Your Fitness Performance and Consciousness joins us to explain why awareness is the key to living a longer, healthier life. In this episode we discuss:Why stress is so important to muscle development. The importance of maintaining your fast twitch muscles.5 top foods to help optimize your health. Common dieting myths and misconceptions. And so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1247Mel Robbins: The “Secret” Mindset Habit to Building Confidence and Overcoming Scarcity: https://link.chtbl.com/970-podDr. Joe Dispenza on Healing the Body and Transforming the Mind: https://link.chtbl.com/826-podMaster Your Mind and Defy the Odds with David Goggins: https://link.chtbl.com/715-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Andy Galpin?

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

• 0:14Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:37Lewis Howes?

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

• 1:08Andy Galpin?

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

• 1:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32Andy Galpin?

  Right? Like, I don't want you to be so sensitive to where if you have a drink of alcohol, you have a mental breakdown for seven months. Like, that's not, that's way too sensitive. But I want you so resilient to it that you could drink excessively and have no physical consequence, right? Because you're going to pay for that eventually. So that's something we probably want to be generally sensitive to.

• 1:51Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:51Andy Galpin?

  Generally resilient is probably something to like even carbon dioxide buildup.

• 1:57Andy Galpin?

  So what you don't realize, and we could go into metabolism a little bit if you want, but every time you take a breath in, you're breathing in oxygen, O2. When you exhale, you're breathing out CO2. So the difference is you've added a carbon. Where does that carbon come from? Your fat and your carbohydrates that are stored in your body, which are your two primary ways in which you derive cellular energy, are just big, long chains of carbon. In fact, that's why we call it a carbohydrate.

• 2:21Lewis Howes?

  So when you breathe, you're breathing out fat?

• 2:23Andy Galpin?

  Or carbon, or carbohydrate. It's just a carbon. It doesn't matter. So whether you're getting your fuel from this carbon that's been hydrated, which is, that's all carbohydrates are. One molecule of carbon plus one molecule of water. Well, fat is typically in this, what we call triglyceride form. So it has these three carbon backbones and it has tri, one, two, three, long chains of carbons. So either way, you're talking about a 40-carbon molecule or a six-carbon molecule. It's being metabolized in the cell in either direction. One's gonna go through the mitochondria initially. One's gonna go in the cytoplasm and then through mitochondria, but they're, either way, they're gonna end in the mitochondria. They're gonna come out as carbon. That carbon's gonna be attached to oxygen.

• 3:10Lewis Howes?

  The mitochondria is in, is in the entire body or is it mostly in the brain?

• 3:14Andy Galpin?

  Mostly muscle.

• 3:15Lewis Howes?

  Mostly the muscle, not in the brain?

• 3:17Andy Galpin?

  It's gonna be a lot up there. You have more muscle than you have brain.

• 3:19Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 3:20Andy Galpin?

  So total volume-wise, it's gonna be a lot.

• 3:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 3:24Andy Galpin?

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

• 4:02Lewis Howes?

  You pass out?

• 4:03Andy Galpin?

  Or you're gone.

• 4:04Lewis Howes?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:06Andy Galpin?

  Because there's no elevation in CO2.

• 4:07Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 4:08Andy Galpin?

  So this is why we have to put smells and things like that in various gases so that you can have some signal.

• 4:14Lewis Howes?

  No, hey, this isn't good. I gotta get out.

• 4:15Andy Galpin?

  Or you have to have a carbon monoxide monitor in your house, right? So, point is, CO2 has a direct physical, psychological connection. This is a two-way street. It's what we call bidirectional. So an elevation or change in, say, state or trade anxiety, so they mount like you get something happened right now and you freaked out, bad text, real, actual thing, it doesn't matter. You will see an acute change in CO2 levels.

• 4:40Lewis Howes?

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

• 4:56Andy Galpin?

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

• 4:59Lewis Howes?

  What is that?

• 5:00Andy Galpin?

  So you're gonna see adrenaline, you're gonna see epinephrine, which is same basic word. You're gonna see norepinephrine, cortisol, all these things, this stress response is gonna happen instantaneously. From that, you're gonna see a physiological response. So you're gonna see a change in heart rate, you're gonna see a change in ventilation, you'll see a change in dilation of your eyes and focus, you'll tend to see actually change in vision because you're gonna wanna narrow in what's the danger, what's the threat. So you have a whole host of physiological responses that are coming from a psychological stress. And it goes both ways. So a physical stress can also then cause a state of psychological awareness. So you can give yourself psychological anxiety from a change in physiology, exercise.

• 5:44Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 5:45Andy Galpin?

  CO2 starts to rise, oh my gosh, you can't focus, you're not making good decisions, your vision changes, everything happens in this bidirectional way. So with CO2, and we've seen this in our lab, if someone is very tolerant and resistant, which is where we started this question at, to elevations in CO2.

• 6:06Lewis Howes?

  Meaning that they can push themselves longer distances when training, they can have high heart rate?

• 6:13Andy Galpin?

  It's simpler than that.

• 6:14Lewis Howes?

  What is it?

• 6:14Andy Galpin?

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

• 6:27Lewis Howes?

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

• 6:30Andy Galpin?

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

• 6:47Lewis Howes?

  React, yeah.

• 6:48Andy Galpin?

  Your ventilation strategy. You're resilient to it, right? Someone who's sensitive to it has the smallest little thing come in and they're gone.

• 6:57Lewis Howes?

  Right, the wreck.

• 6:59Andy Galpin?

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

• 7:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Andy Galpin?

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

• 7:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Andy Galpin?

  Right?

• 7:32Lewis Howes?

  26.2, but yeah, it's counting.

• 7:34Andy Galpin?

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

• 7:54Lewis Howes?

  The heart rate monitor or something else?

• 7:55Andy Galpin?

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

• 8:15Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. It's an assessment tool. It's more of like, where am I at?

• 8:18Andy Galpin?

  Totally.

• 8:19Lewis Howes?

  Not a continuum tool necessarily.

• 8:21Andy Galpin?

  Hundred percent.

• 8:22Lewis Howes?

  An assessment every now and then, okay, let me recheck later.

• 8:24Andy Galpin?

  Yep.

• 8:25Lewis Howes?

  But using your brain or your body or your own senses to assess on a consistent basis is what I'm hearing is probably more.

• 8:31Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 8:31Lewis Howes?

  In alignment to a healthier, long-term, constructive life.

• 8:34Andy Galpin?

  Absolutely, because then what happens when you're Michael Phelps and you're in the pool in the Olympics?

• 8:38Lewis Howes?

  And you're like, I need my.

• 8:39Andy Galpin?

  Where your goggles broke.

• 8:40Lewis Howes?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:41Andy Galpin?

  And he still broke a world record.

• 8:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Andy Galpin?

  I don't know if you're familiar with this story. But what happened is goggles break in the middle of the race, right? You can't see. Now, you know how important that is to be able to see when you're swimming, especially when you're trying to break a world record? Cause you can't veer, right? You finish it and the story goes, his coach had actually made him practice without his goggles. In case something like that.

• 9:00Lewis Howes?

  To prepare for it, yeah.

• 9:01Andy Galpin?

  So he learned how many strokes it takes. He learned how far he's traveling and he could just count. And then he knew when to reach.

• 9:07Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh. It's amazing, isn't it?

• 9:09Andy Galpin?

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

• 9:33Lewis Howes?

  We have all these comforts, right?

• 9:35Andy Galpin?

  We went too far, right? We developed culture for safety in numbers, right? We developed agriculture for safety of food. We developed indoors for safety of thermal stress. And we've strove for one central goal. Every technological advancement we've ever done is to mitigate stress. Now what happens when you go into space? And we have completely reduced all stress? Your physiology tanks in a matter of days. So getting to Mars is not going to be a rocket problem. It's going to be a physiology problem.

• 10:05Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 10:06Andy Galpin?

  We can't replace enough stress with our current lifestyles. Your question initially, and I'm whatever 10 minutes into finally answering your question. Why are we at these problems? It's simply because we have not realized what stressors we want to place on ourself. And which ones were acceptable removing. We've just removed all as fast as we can. So if you want to take this from a lifestyle, if you want to take this from a happiness, if you want to take this from a movement or nutrition, any of these ones, it's going to work.

• 10:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Andy Galpin?

  We have to have a better understanding of what are we trying to go after? So we have to come back and now artificially engage in weird stress, like exercise.

• 10:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Cause it feels like.

• 10:46Lewis Howes?

  I think I can speak for most of the human race. And correct me if I'm wrong here. It feels like most of the human race wants to be happy, wants to be healthy.

• 10:57Andy Galpin?

  Sure.

• 10:57Lewis Howes?

  Wants to have quality relationships and feel loved.

• 11:01Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Lewis Howes?

  Wants to, and wants to live a longer life. They want to be around longer. Yeah, maybe I'm off, but tell me if I'm wrong if that's, but I feel like most humanity wants those things.

• 11:13Andy Galpin?

  I think you're probably pretty close.

• 11:14Lewis Howes?

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

• 11:44Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, clearly. There's no doubt, right? So you're gonna.

• 11:48Lewis Howes?

  And when it's too much stress, like you're actually going to die earlier because you're stressing yourself too much.

• 11:52Andy Galpin?

  This isn't, this is what we do. This is the entire point of everything I do with the professional ethic, right? We're trying to assess what we'll call hidden stressors, visible stressors. We're going to match that with a recovery capacity, right? If you outkick your coverage, in other words, your hidden or visible stressors are higher than your recovery capacity. You're going to block adaptation.

• 12:13Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 12:14Andy Galpin?

  Right? Now, if I can move the lever on increasing recovery capacity, or I can reduce a stress, total stress load, fine. Well, the backside of that coin is the only way we get adaptation is through stress. So a reduction of stress is not optimization.

• 12:29Lewis Howes?

  What's adaptation?

• 12:30Andy Galpin?

  Any change.

• 12:31Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 12:32Andy Galpin?

  Any change.

• 12:33Lewis Howes?

  The only way we grow is through stress.

• 12:36Andy Galpin?

  Or shrink.

• 12:37Lewis Howes?

  Interesting, okay.

• 12:38Andy Galpin?

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

• 12:55Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 12:56Andy Galpin?

  Not without.

• 12:57Lewis Howes?

  The body is optimized with stress.

• 12:58Andy Galpin?

  Yeah. It functions its best with stress because it needs to continually provide maintenance. Imagine if in this building, you just fired every maintenance person. It's not going to work its best.

• 13:10Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 13:11Andy Galpin?

  You want to have some small changes there. Let's get the carpet out. Let's do this. Let's change out. You're going to see improvements, right?

• 13:17Lewis Howes?

  Take the trash out, everything, yeah.

• 13:18Andy Galpin?

  Totally, yeah. Right? That's like a figurative and a quite literal example. So another paradigm that's important to think about is what we'll call optimization versus adaptation.

• 13:28Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 13:30Andy Galpin?

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

• 13:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Andy Galpin?

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

• 14:39Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 14:41Andy Galpin?

  If you try to practice that every single day, you're going to become incredibly sensitive.

• 14:46Lewis Howes?

  If something's off.

• 14:47Andy Galpin?

  Anything is off, you just.

• 14:49Lewis Howes?

  Ah, interesting. So you have the optimal routine. But if your alarm clock goes off too soon, or you get a phone call, or something happens and you wake up.

• 14:58Andy Galpin?

  Dog wakes up in the middle of the night.

• 14:59Lewis Howes?

  Now, the whole day is off.

• 15:00Andy Galpin?

  The whole thing is screwed.

• 15:01Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 15:02Andy Galpin?

  Because you became way too sensitive. So I want you to have.

• 15:05Lewis Howes?

  You became too reliant on it to being perfect in a certain way.

• 15:09Andy Galpin?

  And we've seen this a lot with breathwork stuff, where people are just like, if I don't get my whole breathwork in, like, I can't focus. If I don't have my nitrobook, and I don't have my full, like, that's not, if you can't function without coffee.

• 15:19Lewis Howes?

  That's not good.

• 15:20Andy Galpin?

  And caffeine's fantastic.

• 15:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Andy Galpin?

  Like, that's a really bad position to be in because you're back to being precious now.

• 15:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Andy Galpin?

  If anything happens.

• 15:29Lewis Howes?

  You're not resilient.

• 15:29Andy Galpin?

  I can't take you in the woods, we can't go hunting for five days because you're not gonna be able to plug in your head. Like, like, no.

• 15:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Andy Galpin?

  We need to be able to survive in difficult situations.

• 15:40Lewis Howes?

  Huh.

• 15:40Andy Galpin?

  Obviously, our lives, what we consider to be a difficult situation now is far less than what it, on average, used to be.

• 15:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Andy Galpin?

  Um, certainly, some people are dealing with really difficult things, but for the most part, as a global average in this country, the bar has gone up. Life, life is pretty good.

• 15:57Lewis Howes?

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

• 15:58Andy Galpin?

  So how do we figure this out? We need to think through, from an athletic perspective, it's very easy, right? In the offseason, for example, we're not driving optimization. I'm not peaking you for tomorrow, when I'm six months out from a game. I'm driving adaptation. Here's what that means. You're not going to feel great today. Things aren't going to be perfect. Um, our HRV numbers are gonna be down, our, I'm not gonna give you an optimal pre and post workout.

• 16:24Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:25Andy Galpin?

  And we're not gonna dial these things in. We're going to put the body under higher stress in the areas we want. We're gonna remove them in the areas we don't want, but general stress load's gonna go up. I may.

• 16:34Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 16:34Andy Galpin?

  I may cut out a little bit of your recovery capacity.

• 16:37Lewis Howes?

  Make it uncomfortable for you.

• 16:38Andy Galpin?

  I want you to become more resilient. I want the physiological requirements for recovery to have to go, we don't have enough here. Upregulate.

• 16:47Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 16:47Andy Galpin?

  Build more mitochondria, be more tolerant to, um, the connective tissue, be more tolerant to the stress load.

• 16:53Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:53Andy Galpin?

  Whatever thing we're trying to push.

• 16:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you're gonna feel more soreness today, you have to push through the soreness, whatever, yeah.

• 16:58Andy Galpin?

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

• 17:13Lewis Howes?

  Like tapering off?

• 17:15Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Andy Galpin?

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

• 17:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, so we can get ready for the playoffs.

• 17:23Andy Galpin?

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

• 17:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 17:46Andy Galpin?

  Through the taper.

• 17:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow. And how long is the taper, like?

• 17:49Andy Galpin?

  Three weeks.

• 17:49Lewis Howes?

  Couple of weeks, yeah.

• 17:51Andy Galpin?

  And we've seen this with as little as two. And this is now like a, generally, a 50% reduction in volume. So if you're running 30 miles a week and you go down to 15 for a week, you could quite literally see a giant increase in fast twitch muscle fiber size by simply doing less.

• 18:04Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 18:06Andy Galpin?

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

• 18:10Lewis Howes?

  For like three months, yeah.

• 18:12Andy Galpin?

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

• 18:55Andy Galpin?

  However, if you always choose delayed gratification, you're now asking a recipe for mental health issues.

• 19:02Lewis Howes?

  Give me an example of why.

• 19:03Andy Galpin?

  You're not present. You have this big thing, and congratulations, like you, you made the big sale. Okay, yeah, but we know like, we gotta... You're always kicking the... You're never having that piece of cake. You're never taking that day off. You're never present. And you've probably had a million people on the show before talk about the importance of presence, right? If you're worried about the past,

• 19:24Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 19:25Andy Galpin?

  You know what that is. If you're worried about the future, that's a different thing. So having some semblance of presence is critical. So you want to pay attention to, hey, you haven't been happy. I've had this happen with athletes, winning Olympic gold medals.

• 19:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and then depression right after.

• 19:40Andy Galpin?

  Immediate depression, right? I can't tell you how.

• 19:43Lewis Howes?

  Have you seen that movie, The Weight of Gold?

• 19:45Andy Galpin?

  No.

• 19:45Lewis Howes?

  It's a documentary called The Weight of Gold.

• 19:47Andy Galpin?

  Yep.

• 19:47Lewis Howes?

  You should, you should watch it. It's powerful. And it's about kind of like the depression cycle that these elite athletes have after the Olympics, specifically with Olympics because,

• 19:56Andy Galpin?

  Very real.

• 19:57Lewis Howes?

  Because it's like you train for eight or 16 years for one moment, and then there's no more vision, there's no more goal, once you retire, I guess, so.

• 20:05Andy Galpin?

  It's even more acute than that.

• 20:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Andy Galpin?

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

• 20:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, or like the next day, it's like.

• 20:18Andy Galpin?

  You're not even happy right then. And that's because it's too much of like, okay, yeah, we had a great day, but like.

• 20:24Lewis Howes?

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

• 20:30Andy Galpin?

  That's workaholics, like you're gonna have all these problems. If you're too focused on acute happiness, though.

• 20:38Lewis Howes?

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

• 20:42Andy Galpin?

  Probably, I have four or five hours worth today, it's probably good.

• 20:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Andy Galpin?

  Now you're getting there. So, all these things are a calculation you're running, and I think you can challenge these with every aspect of your day. Whether that's your work, it's your food, it's your relationships. All of these things, you need to think carefully and go, you know what? Maybe I should, uh, I'm gonna invest in more sleep right now, right? And I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna eat it with my job right now.

• 21:06Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 21:07Andy Galpin?

  We have what we call a snapshot or a quadrant. So you get 10 points.

• 21:11Lewis Howes?

  Give me an example.

• 21:12Andy Galpin?

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

• 21:14Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 21:15Andy Galpin?

  You ready for this?

• 21:17Andy Galpin?

  You have four categories. Category one is relationships.

• 21:20Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so this is like a four quadrant?

• 21:22Andy Galpin?

  Bingo, bingo.

• 21:23Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 21:25Lewis Howes?

  Relationships.

• 21:26Andy Galpin?

  Category two is physical. Category three is recovery.

• 21:33Andy Galpin?

  And category four is you have relationships with physical recovery and business, of course, business, like business life, like job, all that stuff.

• 21:47Andy Galpin?

  So now each one of these categories is changing based on you. So what's relationship means to you? Like, that's not the same for me. What's business mean? So whatever these things need to make sense for you, make sense for you. And you get 10 points.

• 21:59Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 22:00Andy Galpin?

  So the question, and this is part of our initial system.

• 22:02Lewis Howes?

  One through 10.

• 22:02Andy Galpin?

  One through 10 total. So you've got to tell me how many points you want to put in every category.

• 22:07Lewis Howes?

  You only have 10 total points in each category or all?

• 22:10Andy Galpin?

  Total.

• 22:10Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so what's the points mean? Like?

• 22:13Andy Galpin?

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

• 22:28Lewis Howes?

  I feel like I put a lot of my relationships. I feel like I put a lot in all of these, though.

• 22:34Lewis Howes?

  So if I give nine here, then I only get zero.

• 22:37Andy Galpin?

  Your 10 may be higher than my 10, right? But your 10 is still your max capacity.

• 22:40Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure. So I can only use 10 points in all, total? So you're going to do 3, 3, 3, 4.

• 22:47Andy Galpin?

  And now what's that number?

• 22:49Lewis Howes?

  Oh, so 3, 3, 3, 1, right? It's like?

• 22:50Andy Galpin?

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

• 22:56Lewis Howes?

  I mean, it's like, it's hard.

• 23:00Andy Galpin?

  So how much are you doing for physical and mental recovery every single day?

• 23:06Andy Galpin?

  Relative to, let's start with business.

• 23:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is...

• 23:10Andy Galpin?

  How much of your day is focused around business-related things?

• 23:15Lewis Howes?

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

• 23:18Andy Galpin?

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

• 23:24Lewis Howes?

  I feel like this is probably a 4.

• 23:27Andy Galpin?

  4, great. So now we've got 6 points left across the next 3 categories. How much is your physical training, your exercise, your breath work?

• 23:33Lewis Howes?

  This is probably a 2, 1, 1.5? Can I do that? Okay, I'll do a 2.

• 23:39Andy Galpin?

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

• 23:46Lewis Howes?

  This is probably a 3 and then a 1, right?

• 23:48Andy Galpin?

  All right, cool, fine. So here's what I'd say, and there's nothing wrong, your split is your split.

• 23:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Andy Galpin?

  Here's what I'd say is, is that split matching your current goals?

• 23:58Lewis Howes?

  Well, I mean.

• 23:59Andy Galpin?

  And here's the thing, physical to recovery can never be higher than a two to one ratio. So you can't have a four in physical training and a one recovery.

• 24:06Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh. So this is perfect then. This is perfect.

• 24:10Lewis Howes?

  Two to one.

• 24:10Andy Galpin?

  If you don't want to make much progress in your physical training. Cause you're only giving 20%.

• 24:14Lewis Howes?

  Right, well, I'm thinking about the time, like, spend an hour, two hours a day of my time towards physical training, nutrition, I guess, yeah.

• 24:23Andy Galpin?

  But like, so that's up to you, right?

• 24:26Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 24:27Andy Galpin?

  So what we're going to do then is we're going to take that and we're going to put that in front out here with the rest of your team. And you're going to put that on your cell phone, right? And every couple of whiles, we're going to check in and say, Louis, did you, you haven't done, you skipped your mobility again today. Are we really getting to here? Are we getting half as much time in your physical training as we are in your business? And the answer is no, you're not holding consistently against what you said. And this was our agreement. And you made this agreement to your boyfriend or whoever your coach is, right? So we're helping understand and then we're going to do this again. And you may say, hey, look, right now, like, we got this stuff moving business wise.

• 25:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, so put more energy here as opposed to, yeah.

• 25:02Andy Galpin?

  It's just acknowledging it. And it's hugely helpful for the high performers because we want your family to see this too. That's when you go, hey, look, we're in the playoffs right now.

• 25:12Lewis Howes?

  Not going to have time for you.

• 25:13Andy Galpin?

  Dad's going six in physical, going four in recovery.

• 25:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, not the zero.

• 25:18Andy Galpin?

  I have athletes that do this, it's like, they're 10 weeks out and they hug their family and okay, like dad is going to see you in 10 weeks.

• 25:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 25:24Andy Galpin?

  They're not moving out, but like.

• 25:26Lewis Howes?

  They're focused.

• 25:27Andy Galpin?

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

• 25:36Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 25:37Andy Galpin?

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

• 25:51Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 25:52Andy Galpin?

  It's not, you're going.

• 25:53Lewis Howes?

  Well, this is why I love, I loved, I love looking at life in seasons, just from like sports, you know, as an athlete, it's like, you can never have a season non-stop forever. There's always an end to a season and then there's the postseason or the off-season, whatever you want to call it. And then there's a preseason and then there's a season and then there's the playoffs. So it's like. That end of the season, you gotta give yourself a date when the end will be.

• 26:17Andy Galpin?

  Hundred percent.

• 26:18Lewis Howes?

  So you can reassess and say, is this working for me? Do I still wanna be doing this? Do I wanna try something new in my life? And create a new vision for the next season of your life, which I think is valuable.

• 26:28Andy Galpin?

  I couldn't agree more because if not, you end up getting this. And this, like, by the way, this is the most common split.

• 26:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Andy Galpin?

  By like eighty percent of people are gonna put this on their first try. Exactly that. I could actually, I probably should have done like a magic trick before. So I'm gonna guess he's gonna go four, three, two, one.

• 26:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:42Andy Galpin?

  It's everyone, right? If you run that the rest of your life, you're just going to continue to move at a very slow rate. You have to come and go, okay, you know what? Look, we did spend the next six months. We built this company. We got this project.

• 26:56Lewis Howes?

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

• 27:08Andy Galpin?

  No, not really. I don't think, because if you end up having an equal balance of everything, you get very little done. I actually liked.

• 27:15Lewis Howes?

  Sprints.

• 27:16Andy Galpin?

  Totally. I haven't slept and we went nuts for two months, whatever the thing is. I'm gonna go full recovery. We're gonna go to business and maybe we're gonna do it for two weeks. Fine.

• 27:27Lewis Howes?

  You're taking a month off already.

• 27:28Andy Galpin?

  Not even, it could just be like, look, I'm gonna, I'm gonna work from eleven AM to two. I'll work three hours a day, whatever the case is, and it's just not gonna get done. We're gonna lose that sale. We're gonna like, money's gonna come down twenty percent, fine. But I have to repay back this physical debt. We have to pay this emotional debt back. I gotta spend time with my.

• 27:47Lewis Howes?

  Relationship debt.

• 27:48Andy Galpin?

  I haven't called my mom yet back, like, I'm gonna hate myself if. All these things you know are true. You just have to now invest and go. Cuz like, I know, like, I know you have to just do the hundred hour work week sometimes.

• 28:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. If you're launching something, if you want it to be successful.

• 28:03Andy Galpin?

  You have to.

• 28:04Lewis Howes?

  You can't just show up two hours a day on a business that no one knows about.

• 28:06Andy Galpin?

  When we're preparing for world title fights or four years into an Olympic quad, there are plenty of times when it is just like, nothing else is going on.

• 28:14Lewis Howes?

  You don't get to call your mom. No, it's. She gets one minute a day.

• 28:18Andy Galpin?

  Going to the cabin, no mom, no kids.

• 28:20Lewis Howes?

  Here's the thing, here's one thing I wanna ask you about is, um, sleep. You know, one of the things that I've heard from a lot of the sleep scientists and doctors out there, from, you know, Dr. Matthew Walker to Huberman to Shawn Stevenson, who studied a lot about this as well.

• 28:37Lewis Howes?

  So you can't pay off sleep debt is what I've heard. Like if you're, you know, two hours behind on sleep, what you should be getting. The brain just functions slower from what I've been told by scientists. And if you keep doing two hours less every day, or you only get four hours or five hours of sleep, like the body is not going to be able to recover. You're going to be slower thinking based on the studies that they've done. So what have you seen where if people are lacking sleep, are able to still be focused and recover? And can you pay off that debt if you miss a few hours every week? For years, can your body actually recover?

• 29:13Andy Galpin?

  Um, it's a bit of a pedantic argument.

• 29:16Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 29:16Andy Galpin?

  Um, my general response is I like the message of no, I'll just like sleep when I'm like, I hate that idea.

• 29:24Lewis Howes?

  No, sleeping, I'm dead. Yeah.

• 29:25Andy Galpin?

  No, no, no, like you're going to be dead.

• 29:27Lewis Howes?

  You're gonna die sooner.

• 29:28Andy Galpin?

  It's no good, right? So I, as a general thing, I think it's a good message to put like, hey, you need to invest in your physical health and sleep is a huge cornerstone to that. Having said that, I think people, and these are not Matthew Walker's words, by the way. It's just people have interpreted as him was saying, there is some confusion on what sleep debt is and is not. So if you missed two hours of sleep last night, that's not two hours. Well, you can't travel back in time.

• 29:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Andy Galpin?

  So yes, technically you'll never recover those two hours. Like literally not going to happen. Totally get it. But don't think because you've not slept two hours tonight, that you'll never recover some physical state ever possible again. That's not sleep debt. What he's saying is you can't sleep three hours a night during the week and then sleep 15 on the weekends and think that that's equal.

• 30:13Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:14Andy Galpin?

  That's a bad idea. So I would absolutely agree with the idea of sleep debt like that is something you want to avoid. Um, I would also agree that if you want to perform cognitively and physically at your highest level, sleep should be a major core.

• 30:29Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:30Andy Galpin?

  I would probably argue the top. So I've spent so much time in that area. So I'm a huge proponent of that. I'm a big believer in it. Um, now, having said that, I deal with athletes that are, take a major league baseball player. We're going to go into different time zones.

• 30:45Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 30:45Andy Galpin?

  Every three or four days.

• 30:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's tough.

• 30:48Andy Galpin?

  Um, we, we, we have to deal with this problem. And so we have to come up with solutions for that, and we do. Um, you can recover.

• 30:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:56Andy Galpin?

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

• 31:19Lewis Howes?

  When you mean an insult, a huge insult, meaning like, okay, I'm going to the gym, I'm hitting it hard for a couple hours, I'm gonna tear the muscles to a certain point.

• 31:27Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, there's actually not much muscle tearing there, but you get the idea.

• 31:30Lewis Howes?

  Be sore, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna be sore, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be in pain, right? Okay. And then I'm gonna go to fatigue, whatever it is. So you're saying a big insult in the body.

• 31:41Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 31:41Lewis Howes?

  Stress.

• 31:42Andy Galpin?

  A totally important point that you don't care about, I promise I won't lose the message here.

• 31:46Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 31:47Andy Galpin?

  You do not need to get sore for a quality workout, at all.

• 31:49Lewis Howes?

  For a quality workout.

• 31:50Andy Galpin?

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

• 32:14Lewis Howes?

  Cold, hot, yeah.

• 32:16Andy Galpin?

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

• 32:28Lewis Howes?

  We want that.

• 32:29Andy Galpin?

  You match it with an equal amount of rigor recovery.

• 32:33Lewis Howes?

  Sleep, rest.

• 32:35Andy Galpin?

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

• 33:19Andy Galpin?

  of metrics, your HRV score when you get in the ice is going to plummet. You're gonna flip into sympathetic nervous system. And remember, low HRV is bad.

• 33:30Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 33:32Andy Galpin?

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

• 33:58Lewis Howes?

  Relax for 20 minutes, yeah.

• 34:01Andy Galpin?

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

• 34:10Lewis Howes?

  Higher base state of what?

• 34:12Andy Galpin?

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

• 34:19Lewis Howes?

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

• 34:21Andy Galpin?

  You're higher. You're performing better, you're more under control.

• 34:24Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 34:24Andy Galpin?

  So less.

• 34:25Lewis Howes?

  Is that good to do on a daily basis, these short shocks, whether it be extreme hot, extreme cold, extreme whatever? You know, extreme sprinting really quick, something like that?

• 34:34Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Lewis Howes?

  On a daily or?

• 34:36Andy Galpin?

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

• 34:47Lewis Howes?

  Focus.

• 34:48Andy Galpin?

  You can make a get like, yeah, I'm gonna do 90 minutes of just completely involved work. I'm gonna do a meditation session, I'm gonna.

• 34:54Lewis Howes?

  Breath work.

• 34:55Andy Galpin?

  I'm gonna be totally engaged with my partner and just really have a 45-minute conversation where we're just locked, like, physical touch, all of these things can represent these short intense bursts, right? So if you're an exerciser like us, like that's gonna come a lot of the times in the form of.

• 35:10Lewis Howes?

  Working out, yeah.

• 35:11Andy Galpin?

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

• 35:31Lewis Howes?

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

• 35:32Andy Galpin?

  You're not totally focused, and then like work builds up, and then like you're kind of a jerk to your kid. That's. That's a recipe for all things bad, right? Loss of productivity, loss of relationships, all these things got worse and we didn't drive adaptation. So we didn't get better.

• 35:50Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 35:51Andy Galpin?

  Because of it. So those are the areas we want to stay away from. You could, I could give you physiological examples, but you're getting the point, right? And so that's where we want to be mindful of. With sleep, for example, chronic slight under sleep is going to lead to that area of,

• 36:11Andy Galpin?

  okay, like I just, now all of a sudden, I don't feel great and I feel like my energy's down. And we just have these continual degradation of physiological state. So then we have to come in and spend way too much time running diagnosis and figure out, okay, is this, it's one of four, bad sleep is one of four areas. It's psychology. It is physiology. It is environment. Or it is your pathology.

• 36:38Lewis Howes?

  What is pathology?

• 36:39Andy Galpin?

  So you could have something going on, like if we ran, you could have,

• 36:46Andy Galpin?

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

• 37:01Lewis Howes?

  Right. So the four parts of bad sleep is psychology, which essentially like the way you're, maybe you're thinking or ruminating all day or worrying about something and you're not able to calm your thoughts.

• 37:11Andy Galpin?

  Yes. And this, this comes into a variety of areas. Either I can't turn my brain off at night.

• 37:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Andy Galpin?

  This is.

• 37:16Lewis Howes?

  This used to be me for most of my life.

• 37:17Andy Galpin?

  Totally.

• 37:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Andy Galpin?

  Super easy fixes for that, by the way, for the most part.

• 37:21Lewis Howes?

  I wish I had that.

• 37:21Andy Galpin?

  Well.

• 37:23Lewis Howes?

  I feel like I had, I feel like I had that and the environment. We didn't have air conditioning when I was a kid growing up.

• 37:28Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Lewis Howes?

  So I was just sweating in the middle of the summer, just like, I can't sleep. And then you're just like ruminating on why you can't sleep. No sheets, no blankets, just like. My dad didn't let me have a fan on me because like it's going to make you sick. You know, just like, so I couldn't have a fan on. And he was like, this is going to make you sick.

• 37:48Lewis Howes?

  So I just had to sit there like for two hours every night, like hoping to sleep.

• 37:51Andy Galpin?

  Well, you became very resilient to the high temperatures.

• 37:53Lewis Howes?

  I know, right? Gosh, man. So I feel like the psychology, the environment is one thing. And you hear people talking about having a sleep sanctuary and really like the different things you can do with dark out.

• 38:05Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Lewis Howes?

  The snake plants to create more oxygen, the sheets, the temperature, everything for the optimized sleep is the key, right?

• 38:15Andy Galpin?

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

• 38:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, the light is found.

• 38:21Andy Galpin?

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

• 38:28Lewis Howes?

  I like that.

• 38:28Andy Galpin?

  And it's going to run full environmental diagnostics.

• 38:30Lewis Howes?

  I want to try that.

• 38:31Andy Galpin?

  So this is going to measure everything from like your CO2 cloud, which is, again, going back to our beginning of our conversation, you're going to take a breath in and you're going to breathe out CO2. Well, when you're sleeping, that, because you're not going, you're just barely moving. So that CO2 basically seeps out.

• 38:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 38:48Andy Galpin?

  Well, if that CO2 hovers around your face and you're re-inhaling CO2, what's happening?

• 38:54Lewis Howes?

  It's not good.

• 38:54Andy Galpin?

  It's going right back up again. Shooting awake, or even if you're not physically shooting awake, you're going to be shot out of sleep stages.

• 39:01Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 39:02Andy Galpin?

  Right, which is what we're trying to get into, right? And you can go back to, I'm sure, listen to your episodes with Walker and Andrew, and they've talked about the very sleep stages. So if we can figure out, hey, you know what, like, actually, it's not, you don't need to wear the blue blockers, not that you don't, but like, you don't have all these things that people are thinking.

• 39:18Lewis Howes?

  Screens, everything.

• 39:19Andy Galpin?

  You've tried all these supplementation, you've tried changing your diet, you've changing all these things, you're done and you're still not sleeping? Well, maybe it's as simple as the fact that the air ventilation in your room isn't moving the air off your face.

• 39:29Lewis Howes?

  Oh, so having some circulation.

• 39:31Andy Galpin?

  Totally. It has to be the right type of circulation because if the air conditioner goes, now we've fallen, sorry if that was really loud.

• 39:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:40Andy Galpin?

  It's fallen now back into there.

• 39:41Lewis Howes?

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

• 39:56Andy Galpin?

  You're very normal. Most people are gonna say, put a big, that's why white noise machines.

• 40:01Lewis Howes?

  Like a little fan or something. Yeah, just to hear.

• 40:03Andy Galpin?

  Right. It also drowns out the bottom level of noise.

• 40:06Lewis Howes?

  That's true. Any other little sounds that you might hear from the outside. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 40:10Andy Galpin?

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

• 40:13Lewis Howes?

  You said pathology. What was the third one? Psychology, environment, something else in pathology?

• 40:18Andy Galpin?

  Physiology.

• 40:19Lewis Howes?

  Physiology. This is like.

• 40:20Andy Galpin?

  So this is where.

• 40:21Lewis Howes?

  Your body's twitching or you're sore, you're in pain.

• 40:23Andy Galpin?

  No, this is gonna be quite literally your melatonin levels throughout the night before. Throughout the day, it's cortisol levels, it's DHA levels, it's everything that goes, the serotonin, dopamine. All these things that you can do supplementation wise or food wise are affecting the physiology. So what we're gonna try to do is run through if you do the very standard sleep hygiene stuff. And that's not working.

• 40:50Andy Galpin?

  Now we've gotta go down one of these areas to figure out, maybe there's simply a polygyn, pollen or some environmental thing going on in the air. That's blocking up your nose and all of a sudden you can't breathe through your nose. Now you've gone to mouth breathing at night and you've probably talked about that a bunch.

• 41:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:07Andy Galpin?

  Why that's bad.

• 41:08Lewis Howes?

  James Nestor, yeah.

• 41:10Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, you can look at the nitric oxide issues, so endothelial functions down. So if you're a little bit older and you've lost nitric oxide function and/or you're not getting high nitric oxide concentrations out of your food. And now if you've got the double whammy, which tends to happen for food and age.

• 41:27Lewis Howes?

  Boom.

• 41:28Andy Galpin?

  Now we have physiological problems. So it may not be any of the environment or psychology, but you're kicking awake and then when you kick awake, you start thinking.

• 41:38Andy Galpin?

  And now you think it's a psychology problem, but really your physiology was just too close to high alert. And any little thing shot you off. And so you weren't resilient at all because you're right on that threshold

• 41:50Andy Galpin?

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

• 42:06Lewis Howes?

  Executives and yeah.

• 42:08Andy Galpin?

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

• 42:18Lewis Howes?

  The ability to calm down.

• 42:19Andy Galpin?

  For sure.

• 42:20Lewis Howes?

  At any moment, yeah.

• 42:21Andy Galpin?

  And meditation, breath work, all this stuff is really effective. However, it tends to do very well when you simply give it a very specific task, which sounds counterintuitive. So you should awake and you can't go back to sleep because you're thinking about whatever the thing is. Two ways to solve this. Number one, if it's like, I gotta do this tomorrow and this, this, this. A very easy solution is to just keep this right by your bed. Wake up and write, okay, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you'll be like, alright.

• 42:46Lewis Howes?

  Get it out, yeah.

• 42:47Andy Galpin?

  Or the other way is I try to solve my hardest problems in bed when I can't sleep. I specifically, not my emotionally difficult ones, but my hardest, what I call wonders. Thought like, you know, I haven't really thought through this concept of optimism. How would this, and I'm just, I'm thinking really hard on something. How am I gonna write, like, you know, like, what do those data mean, like, huh? Gone. Because you've just, you've stayed changed. You've given the brain a task and then it goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, like, that's not what we're doing right now.

• 43:20Lewis Howes?

  Really, interesting.

• 43:21Andy Galpin?

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

• 43:32Lewis Howes?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:33Andy Galpin?

  But you really like. What's the thing where you're just like, man, sometimes, like, sometimes I'll think about, I'm a sports fan. I played college football like you. Sometimes I think about like, God, can I name the entire 1995 Mariners roster? Like, I think I can't. Who the hell plays second base? Like, I'm, I'm, I'm.

• 43:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:50Andy Galpin?

  You just go through that stuff. So you give it something to do.

• 43:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Andy Galpin?

  It's the same thing with like a parenting or working with employees. Rather than just telling them what not to do.

• 43:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Andy Galpin?

  You're more effective generally telling it what to do and making it do something and giving it options. Hey, you can think about this, this, or this. I'm not just gonna run out and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Because it's really hard for you to just like, stop thinking about this damn meeting. Like, that's just, that's really difficult to do.

• 44:14Lewis Howes?

  Doesn't work.

• 44:14Andy Galpin?

  So you know what? Okay, you can have these three options. Think about this, this, or this. And you just go. And at worst case, you lay there in bed happy.

• 44:20Lewis Howes?

  Yes, thinking about something, yeah.

• 44:22Andy Galpin?

  Worst case.

• 44:24Lewis Howes?

  Something I've heard recently from different longevity experts is that building muscle mass

• 44:34Lewis Howes?

  is one of the key indicators to living a longer life.

• 44:39Lewis Howes?

  I don't know if that's accurate in your studies.

• 44:41Andy Galpin?

  It's extremely accurate.

• 44:41Lewis Howes?

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

• 44:53Andy Galpin?

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

• 45:25Lewis Howes?

  Is this the same for men and women?

• 45:26Andy Galpin?

  Yes.

• 45:27Lewis Howes?

  So should women be thinking about building muscle?

• 45:30Andy Galpin?

  Hundred percent. If you look very clearly at the longevity data, you're going to see a handful of things jump out. If you look at studies, and this is Stephen Blair's stuff from 1990, way back, we've known that things like your VO2 max. And this is something that, again, has been in every exercise physiology textbook for 35 years, right? It's nothing new, so it's not like a controversial hot new thing. It's like very well established. VO2 max is a huge predictor of longevity, lifespan and health span. More recently, but even last 20 years, muscle function, so muscle size and muscle quality. In fact, a really nice review paper came out just this week, Journal of Physiology, showing that skeletal muscle cells, so remember, your muscle,

• 46:15Andy Galpin?

  any one of your muscles is made up of millions of individual muscle cells. So think about a ponytail. So a ponytail is one, but it's just a composite.

• 46:23Lewis Howes?

  Tons of hairs.

• 46:24Andy Galpin?

  Tons of hair. Skeletal muscle is long and thin. And in fact, it's one of the biggest cells in all of biology by volume. So human skeletal muscle is massive. It's multi-nucleated, which is also very unique, which means all your DNA is held in the nucleus.

• 46:39Lewis Howes?

  Of the muscle.

• 46:39Andy Galpin?

  Of the cells, of every cell. That's just how those work. Most cells have one nucleus per cell. Skeletal muscle has thousands. Now, you imagine having a muscle cell this long, right? And you can see it with your naked eye. You can, I've got stuff where I can pull it up with a tweezer and hold it up in air. You can see a muscle cell with your naked eye.

• 47:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 47:01Andy Galpin?

  We've done that before. In that thing, it could be a few inches long, it's going to have thousands of nuclei spread throughout it. And what this does is allow you tremendous adaptability. So imagine you're running a company all over the nation. If you had one manager, and there's a branch in Wisconsin, and there's a branch in Florida, and a printer breaks in Wisconsin, and they gotta call you. Or you could have a general manager in every single location. Repair happens much faster, which means we can have more turnover, we can accept more jobs, we can endure more stress. We can handle more stress, right? In fact, we've seen this in some of our athletes, that the ones who recover faster and handle more volume have more of these mitochondria, or, sorry, have more of these mitochondria. So, the nucleation

• 47:45Andy Galpin?

  is what allows you to handle and recover from stress, because it's controlling your DNA, and it's coming in and saying, we've had an insult here, reproduce the genes necessary to build the protein, in this case myosin actin, the proteins that make muscles contract, or, more, whatever the case is, it's gonna build. So you have these greater amount of control there. So having more and higher quality muscle function just simply allows you to go through more physical stress. More physical stress then has tangential benefits to the cardiovascular system, bone system, brain, like everything else is gonna then benefit from your ability to continue to put yourself in physical stress. You're going to feel better. One of the key associates of muscle strength and size through time

• 48:29Andy Galpin?

  is general physical activity. So imagine standing up out of this chair is an 85% one rep max. You're not gonna do it very often. So by having strong legs, in particular for men and women, means you're much more likely to get up and go check the mail, get up and go for the walk, which means general physical activity goes up, and we have all those secondary benefits associated. So it is hugely important. And the last thing I'll say here is, not only is it important for general muscle, but it is incredibly important to preserve your fast twitch muscle fibers.

• 49:00Lewis Howes?

  How do you do that?

• 49:02Andy Galpin?

  You need to expose them to stress, which means you need to make them move forcefully. That's the central place. So, think about it this way. You've got these millions of muscle fibers inside a muscle. Some of them are what we call fast twitch, which means they contract at a lot of velocity, but they tend to be fatigable. So they use primarily or mostly carbohydrates for fuel, and less fat and less mitochondria. Great. Their purpose is explosion force production.

• 49:32Andy Galpin?

  Then you have a bunch of slow twitch fibers and they're the opposite. So they don't contract with much velocity. They tend to be smaller, but not always. But they tend to have a lot more mitochondria. So these are, these are your anti-gravity muscles. So your spinal erectors are mostly slow twitch because they're supposed to be on lightly contracted and just keeping you erect. Your hamstrings are fast twitch muscles. You don't need your hamstrings very often, but you need them to explode. Right? So each person has a different amount of fast twitch and slow twitch muscles and they differ from muscle to muscle based on functionality. Even within like the calf, there's two primary muscles. There's a soleus and a gastroc. Soleus is keeping you vertical and a gastroc is the one like if you flex your toe towards

• 50:15Andy Galpin?

  your face, it's the one that pops out on the inside. That's explosion. So what happens is general activities of daily living are always going to activate slow twitch fibers. Right? So when I take a drink of this cup.

• 50:29Lewis Howes?

  You're not sprinting. Yeah.

• 50:30Andy Galpin?

  I'm actually not activating any fast twitch muscle fibers because if I did, I wouldn't be able to down-regulate force production. So I want to start with what's the least amount of force needed. We call the size principle. So Eldwood Heneman, famous neuroscientist, 1950s. He said, there's this idea that you're going to activate the low threshold neurons first. Right? So you're scratching your arm and doing this, right? I'm going to activate the smallest, weakest nerve set. And if you realize I need more force here, you'll activate a little bit bigger. And even more force will go a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger until that's enough. Right? Well, these fast twitch fibers at the higher threshold.

• 51:11Andy Galpin?

  Imagine going years and now decades of never turning them on because you never did anything that required high force production. Well, eventually those endings die. They die.

• 51:24Lewis Howes?

  You're not, you don't have fast twitch anymore. You can't sprint, you can't jump, you can't lift everything.

• 51:28Andy Galpin?

  It's the nerve that stops sending the signals. The muscle fiber can die away and go or it can stay there. But the nerve then says, you know what? We're going to re-inervate and grab some of these fast twitch fibers and convert them into slow twitch. And so you have these huge swaths of slow twitch fibers. You can't produce force. And so once those are dead. It's gonzo, right? Regrowing a nerve is out of there.

• 51:52Lewis Howes?

  What's the best ways to?

• 51:54Andy Galpin?

  Anything that requires high force.

• 51:56Lewis Howes?

  High force meaning?

• 51:57Andy Galpin?

  Anything that feels kind of heavy.

• 51:59Lewis Howes?

  Lifting heavy.

• 52:00Andy Galpin?

  Can be jumping, can be plyometrics, it can be. Start where you're at. So don't go to the gym if you haven't lifted in 10 years.

• 52:07Lewis Howes?

  Squatting 300 pounds.

• 52:10Andy Galpin?

  Start with simple movements. Start with single joint machines if you have to. I don't care. And what's heavy? Well, what feels heavy? Okay, great. Next time, a little more, a little more. And stay in movement patterns that are efficient and get a little bit sore is okay, but pushing more soreness is not equivalent for better.

• 52:27Lewis Howes?

  Really? Why is, could you improve without getting sore?

• 52:31Andy Galpin?

  Uh huh, yeah. It's like a whole job.

• 52:33Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 52:34Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Lewis Howes?

  So when, when has soreness happened? When it's like, okay, if you do this much, you won't feel sore. But if you go one rep more, you're gonna feel sore.

• 52:42Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, a couple of things to note there. People tend to explain soreness as micro tears in muscle fibers. That can happen, but that's not the primary reason. Most likely you're disturbing, this is like probably way outside of your audience's interest level. You're disturbing calcium concentrations and from the sarcoplasmic reticulum to the muscle fibers. So it's not a muscle damage, although that can occur. The things that tend to make you more sore are the eccentric portion. So this is the lowering of stuff. So imagine if you were to do a bench press and you lowered it to your chest. That's eccentric. That's gonna cause more damage than the part where you lift it off your chest. So if you're doing a lot of eccentric related movements.

• 53:20Lewis Howes?

  You're gonna get more sore.

• 53:21Andy Galpin?

  More sore.

• 53:21Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 53:22Andy Galpin?

  But you're gonna get stronger too.

• 53:23Lewis Howes?

  So if you're doing a pull up, when you go down and slowly, that's when you're gonna feel sore. But it's gonna make you stronger.

• 53:29Andy Galpin?

  Yes.

• 53:30Lewis Howes?

  So how do you get stronger without soreness?

• 53:32Andy Galpin?

  Control volume.

• 53:34Lewis Howes?

  So how many reps you do?

• 53:35Andy Galpin?

  It totally depends on the person. So you gotta figure this out, right? What's the reps I can do? What's the load I can do? And what's the movement pattern? And then how frequently can I do this where? Here's my rule of thumb. If you grade soreness on a scale of one to 10.

• 53:48Lewis Howes?

  Like I can't walk as a 10.

• 53:50Andy Galpin?

  Totally. If you go to zero, you're probably in a place where you didn't cause enough stress. No stress, no adaptation. If you go 10.

• 53:59Lewis Howes?

  You can't move.

• 54:00Andy Galpin?

  You've gone so far in that direction.

• 54:02Lewis Howes?

  Probably hurt yourself.

• 54:03Andy Galpin?

  Most definitely, but also think about it, you're not going to be able to train again very soon.

• 54:06Lewis Howes?

  For four or five days, you can't, you're not going to function.

• 54:08Andy Galpin?

  Worse.

• 54:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Andy Galpin?

  Right? And you're going to stop moving, you're going to do all these things. So you actually have killed your own productivity. Three.

• 54:15Lewis Howes?

  That's where you want to be. And when does soreness usually occur, the next day or two days later?

• 54:20Andy Galpin?

  Depends on the person.

• 54:21Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 54:22Andy Galpin?

  It's going to be anywhere in that, it's what we call DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness. It's anywhere in that 48 to 72 hour, 24 hour.

• 54:28Lewis Howes?

  So what are you usually at then in soreness level? Are you a three, a six, seven?

• 54:32Andy Galpin?

  Uh, I will spend most of my time three to one.

• 54:36Lewis Howes?

  Okay. And you're seeing.

• 54:37Andy Galpin?

  Sometimes I'm going to four, to five, to six, depending on the phase I'm in.

• 54:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Andy Galpin?

  If I'm trying to really push it, but then I'm going to do that for four or five weeks.

• 54:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. But you see that you're getting stronger at a three, you see that like you're becoming.

• 54:50Andy Galpin?

  You get stronger to zero. No question, right? So if you go heavy enough, um, under controlled range of motion with a low enough volume. So imagine this. I'll give you what I call my three to five principle. So for development of, of strength and power. Now, these are not the same thing, but they're close. Three to five is a very simple rule. If you're an advanced coach, you can go past this, but for the average person, this is a good starting place. So I want you to choose three to five exercises. So if you're feeling better that day, maybe it's closer to four or five. If you're feeling worse or just starting, closer to three. Three to five exercises. I want you to do three to five reps per set.

• 55:32Andy Galpin?

  I want you to do three to five total sets. So imagine you're going to go in and you're going to do goblet squat. You're going to do a bench press and you're going to do some pull-ups. Three exercises. You'll do one, two, three reps. Take a break. And you do that three times. There's your three sets, you know, and maybe you do your pull-ups for three, you could do your bench for three, and you could do your squats for three. And you do that three times.

• 55:58Lewis Howes?

  And that's it.

• 55:59Andy Galpin?

  You're done, right? Three to five minutes rest.

• 56:02Lewis Howes?

  Three to five exercises, three to five reps per set, three to five sets.

• 56:05Andy Galpin?

  And three to five minutes rest between sets. You know, for the working muscle. So you do your pull-up, you can do other stuff, but by the time you do your pull-ups again, it should be around three to five minutes.

• 56:17Andy Galpin?

  Three to five times per week.

• 56:18Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 56:20Andy Galpin?

  So again, that's a very general rule, but if you do that, if you want power, stay pretty light and move fast. If you want strength.

• 56:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, do longer, yeah.

• 56:32Andy Galpin?

  Go heavier, just go heavier.

• 56:33Lewis Howes?

  Heavier.

• 56:33Andy Galpin?

  Heavier, right? Now, the three to five minutes of rest is like, it's quite exaggerated.

• 56:37Lewis Howes?

  It's a long time of rest, yeah. For those, for three reps, you're like, okay, I don't need to stay there for three minutes.

• 56:43Andy Galpin?

  Well, if you're doing a 95% deadlift.

• 56:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Andy Galpin?

  You're gonna take three to five minutes.

• 56:46Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 56:47Andy Galpin?

  If you're doing a 95% bicep curl.

• 56:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:49Andy Galpin?

  You probably need 20 seconds.

• 56:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 56:51Andy Galpin?

  So it's just a rough idea. Again, for heavy or for strength, it's heavy. Right? Because you need to activate those fast twitch neurons. Hypertrophy is a totally different story, but for strength and power, that's, it's a very good starting place. Days you feel better, do more. You're not gonna get tremendously sore from that stuff because the volume's not really high. So the total amount of work is, it's not a lot. It can be pretty short. You're gonna get minimal things there.

• 57:19Lewis Howes?

  So if people had 15 minutes a day, that's all they had to give their physical workout, this would be the strategy I'm hearing?

• 57:25Andy Galpin?

  You could, if you want to do a little bit of power, you're like, hey, I don't know what I'm doing here at all. Let's go. Okay, let's do some, if you know how to do some kettlebell swings. All right, we're gonna do some of those. We'll maybe do some split squats. So our lunge variation, something like that, and maybe we'll do some pushups.

• 57:42Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 57:42Andy Galpin?

  Boom, boom, boom. And you're gonna go push up, split squat, kettlebell swing, and you're gonna pop, pop, pop on those kettlebell swings, and you're gonna push up as fast as you can. You're gonna run through that thing four times.

• 57:52Lewis Howes?

  And done.

• 57:53Andy Galpin?

  It's minimal viable.

• 57:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 57:55Andy Galpin?

  Effective. Not best, but effective.

• 57:57Lewis Howes?

  Right. What's best? 45 minutes?

• 58:00Andy Galpin?

  No, time domain is relevant.

• 58:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 58:02Andy Galpin?

  In fact, typically,

• 58:05Andy Galpin?

  the longer the workout is, is longer is required for more pure strength and power. Because you need so much rest.

• 58:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you need rest.

• 58:12Andy Galpin?

  You want to go for hypertrophy or conditioning or something like that.

• 58:15Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 58:15Andy Galpin?

  Those can be 20 minutes. No question. And so it really depends if you're trying to develop skill. You need more rest and that's gonna be longer. I have actually a whole series of videos on YouTube where I just I walk down all these things. If you want to know exactly how to do hypertrophy, if you want to exactly how to do endurance or speed or skill in like five minute chunks of just like hear all the numbers. It's a really easy place to go. That three or five rules is a pretty good rule.

• 58:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'm curious about nutrition. Say we're we're training at a high level physically. How important is the quality of nutrition and the right type of foods we're eating in order to optimize our bodies as well? Or can we train super hard and get away with it if we're having the sugar and alcohol and breads and processed foods as well?

• 59:01Andy Galpin?

  It depends on your definition and get away with it.

• 59:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 59:04Andy Galpin?

  I don't work with people who are interested in getting away with it.

• 59:06Lewis Howes?

  Right. They're gonna optimize the area.

• 59:08Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, so the answer is when we program nutrition, we don't do it. Calories are considered, of course. It's a it's a standard place. Macronutrients, but most people stop there. Our stuff is you're gonna get a nutrition plan that is micronutrient developed. So it's not just this is much protein and this is much carbohydrates I want. That's gonna be there. But it's gonna be this is I want this food choice, this food choice, this food choice, because we need to get this much vitamin A, I want this much zinc, based on your labs, what we figured out. So that's the level of precision we get with these high performers. It is micronutrient developed. Supplementation will then fill in any gaps, especially if we have a time constraint or a calorie constraint. For example, I've got a fighter and they've gotta do all this, but then they've also

• 59:52Andy Galpin?

  have to lose 35 pounds. I can't just give them more food.

• 59:55Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy, yeah.

• 59:56Andy Galpin?

  So we have to play with some supplements. But the base of it is this, right? So yeah, we're gonna get there. Can you get away with it? Yeah, like if you saw what most professional athletes eat.

• 1:00:07Lewis Howes?

  Right, they?

• 1:00:08Andy Galpin?

  Completely, completely nuts.

• 1:00:12Andy Galpin?

  So yeah, you can, but like you're not gonna get in the best spot. No, no way. We're gonna figure out what their body can handle and what they can utilize the most. And for a high performer, especially someone who's burning a lot of energy, we have to really be really careful about generally scaring them away from foods. So we want to make sure that if something is not fit for them, we don't want them on there. But sugar is a very beneficial nutrient. Carbohydrates are very, very beneficial for performance.

• 1:00:49Lewis Howes?

  It's when you're eating it though, right?

• 1:00:51Andy Galpin?

  Well, it's everything. What are you eating it with? What type are you, are you drinking a Capri Sun? Well, there's some times when that's, that's not a terrible choice. Sometimes not at all for what we do, right? If the average everyday person is just walking around drinking, like, of course, like, I'm never, I'm never going to advocate for that. That's never going to be the message. Most people are burning very little energy. We probably don't need much pure sugar. Most people don't really know what sugar means. They think sugar and they think Capri Suns. They don't really understand what carbohydrates are. So that, like, there's a lot of misinformation around those topics. In general, carbohydrates themselves nor sugar are not inherently dangerous.

• 1:01:34Andy Galpin?

  Everything has a hormetic curve, right? So everything has a toxicity curve. Water has a toxicity curve, right? If you don't have enough of it, you're going to die of dehydration. Too much, you're drowned. Everything has a toxicity profile. So it's about understanding the context and where that person is at. And what they're doing. So there are plenty of times where we're going to avoid certain nutrients situations. But then there's others where we're going to use it to the advantage. So I am, I am very fundamentally against the demonization of any strategy. I am very much pro understanding what's the pro and what's the con. And then deploying the right tool to get the quickest result in the situation.

• 1:02:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I think people hear carbs and sugar and they're thinking, well, that's gonna, they're gonna gain a lot of fat, right? It's gonna be a lot of fat if you're having too much sugar, too many carbs. If you're not training and that's what you're doing is eating that. I think a lot of people are worried about the obesity that's happening. You know, what is it, a third now or more than a third of the US is obese?

• 1:02:30Andy Galpin?

  It's an extraordinary number.

• 1:02:32Lewis Howes?

  And now it's going.

• 1:02:32Andy Galpin?

  Depending on how you want to classify it, it's either 100 million or 200 million. Either way, it's outrageous.

• 1:02:38Lewis Howes?

  How?

• 1:02:40Lewis Howes?

  How scary of a factor is obesity for us? How worried should we be about gaining too much excess fat?

• 1:02:49Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Lewis Howes?

  Towards our mental states, our moods, our emotions, our thoughts, our longevity, all these things. And so that's part one. And then what would be the main factors that you could say if people don't have all data obsessed over this? But the main factors that's like, I've got a few things I can do every day to try to burn that fat. What would you say would be those things?

• 1:03:12Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, let's do the first one. Keep in mind a couple of things. My scientific practice, so what we do in our lab and when I work with athletes, general health is just not an area of my expertise.

• 1:03:24Lewis Howes?

  Right, you're looking at optimized freaks of nature.

• 1:03:27Andy Galpin?

  So it's not the fact that I like am disregarding the obesity. It's just not my area of scientific expertise.

• 1:03:34Lewis Howes?

  You see human specimens that are elite performers.

• 1:03:37Andy Galpin?

  And the occasional executives and stuff like that. That, okay, great. So we've done plenty of that. We have a whole program for just that stuff where we can come in and you get basically the pro athlete treatment. And then you get on a health plan that gets you there. So when I typically respond to questions and interviews, my brain is coming from, my default setting is, is this something I would do with my athlete? Yes or no, right? Other folks, their default setting is public health. So then they say things, I roll my eyes, I'm like, that's totally irrelevant for. But then they're rolling their eyes at me and I'm like, you can't do that.

• 1:04:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:14Andy Galpin?

  So it's, I just want folks at home to understand like it's where we're coming from. Perspective wise, who are we finding interesting? Having said all that, I think you would be very difficult to make a cogent argument that obesity is not a big deal. You're going to have a very difficult time scientifically arguing obesity is okay. Like this is, this is not a place, um, I don't want my professional athletes being obese. I don't care if it's the offensive lineman, like it's not adding, it's not helping.

• 1:04:44Lewis Howes?

  You can be big and strong, but not obese.

• 1:04:47Andy Galpin?

  Now, sometimes it's like, hey, it's just not worth, the juice is not worth the squeeze. So we just, we just do what it is. I've got athletes right now competing in, in season. That I'm like, God, I think it'd be great if we lost 10, but it's so far down their list of hidden stressors.

• 1:05:04Lewis Howes?

  They're trying to optimize these other areas. Yeah.

• 1:05:06Andy Galpin?

  And we have found other things that are massive performance anchors that were like, you know what? You're in season right now. There's only so much bandwidth you have. Let's pull these ones out of the ground. And we'll get, we'll lose some weight in the offseason. Okay, fine. So having said that, it doesn't take long perusing the research. From every perspective, realize, okay, this is a problem. The second question, okay, like what, what do we do about it?

• 1:05:31Andy Galpin?

  I think it's also difficult to make a coach an argument that anyone has an answer because nothing's worked.

• 1:05:36Andy Galpin?

  Show me, show me how it's worked.

• 1:05:38Lewis Howes?

  Well, it worked for some people, but it's not working for the, the global population because people aren't taking action consistently, probably, right?

• 1:05:44Andy Galpin?

  Yep. So you could make the argument that, okay, pick whatever eating style you want. Fine. Like, well, it's not working. Well, work for the, okay, sure, but it's not like, what, what argument do you want to make? Okay. Do you want to make the argument of what's the, going to be the singular solution for mankind? Well, that's, you, you, I'm going to walk out of that conversation. That's not an answer. Or do you want to talk about like, what's generally going to be helpful for most people?

• 1:06:08Andy Galpin?

  So I tend to defer to that because you're like, well, let's give people possible solutions. I have seen general population folks thrive on a number of different eating strategies. You can fast, you can not fast. You can eat a lot of carbohydrates and be fantastically healthy. You could eat very limited and be fantastically healthy. Protein seems to be the linchpin that is most effective for most people. So in general, again.

• 1:06:34Lewis Howes?

  Having more protein or less protein?

• 1:06:35Andy Galpin?

  More. If you make sure you hit enough protein. The carbohydrate to fat ratio for the general population seems to be not irrelevant, but it, it gives you context options. I feel like I do better on high fat. Okay, great. I feel like I do better on high, okay, like great. Most people are going to do most better if they lock around protein for a number of physiological reasons. So.

• 1:07:00Andy Galpin?

  We don't have the answers to all this stuff though. So we have to, we do have to acknowledge there's a little bit of, there's not one magic food.

• 1:07:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:08Andy Galpin?

  That's causing these problems. It is clearly an issue of hyper palatability. I think you're gonna have a hard time arguing that that's not a big contributor.

• 1:07:15Lewis Howes?

  What is that?

• 1:07:16Andy Galpin?

  The fact that food is so available and so good.

• 1:07:18Lewis Howes?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. You can eat some abundance of it constantly.

• 1:07:22Andy Galpin?

  Completely, right? Like that.

• 1:07:23Lewis Howes?

  Too many calories, a lot of sugar, too much, too much of all of it.

• 1:07:27Andy Galpin?

  Well, too much fat, too. It's both, right? There's way too much of all of it floating around. You've matched that with our lifestyle changes. Okay, great.

• 1:07:35Lewis Howes?

  That we're not physically exercising as much, we're not stressing the body the way we should be.

• 1:07:39Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, but that's not really helping people because everyone says like eat less and move more. Well, that didn't work either. So what are the solutions? Well, a lot of people are gonna come in and say, we need to develop drug stuff because people aren't gonna just do this.

• 1:07:52Andy Galpin?

  Okay, like I'm not on that train, but I get what you're saying because nothing's worked. We can't educate. That's not working. Doesn't matter, oh, this was wrong. It doesn't, that doesn't matter because there's so many people. It would have worked in a hundred million with all seven billion. It didn't.

• 1:08:08Andy Galpin?

  So landing on a solution here is, it's going to be, the only way out of this is going, we have these three or four things. And this one worked for these people and this one worked for these people. It's just, it's never gonna be the demonization of a food item. That's never going to be the answer. It's never going to be a single pharmaceutical. Like I will argue very hardly against that one. It's never gonna be a single mental health treatment. It's never gonna be a.

• 1:08:35Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:08:36Andy Galpin?

  It's probably unfortunately the long game of like, well,

• 1:08:41Andy Galpin?

  let's understand that food matters. And here are a bunch of ways. You wanna go paleo, you wanna go medic training. Okay.

• 1:08:49Lewis Howes?

  Start testing stuff.

• 1:08:50Andy Galpin?

  These are all options. Some of those things were less scientifically valid years ago and now actually it's like, "Well, okay, that actually looks like that that works." And, um, well, you can make a lot of complaining about a lot of them, but...

• 1:09:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah. There's some results here.

• 1:09:04Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, on all sides of those, positive and negative, right? Like, you've seen the keto thing run up and then run back down and realize like...

• 1:09:10Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. The paleo thing and just be called different names over the years.

• 1:09:14Andy Galpin?

  Totally, right.

• 1:09:15Lewis Howes?

  Atkins to paleo to keto to, yeah, it's like, what's the next variant?

• 1:09:19Andy Galpin?

  What seems to be core to it is there has got to be some sort of caloric regulation.

• 1:09:23Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:24Andy Galpin?

  There has to be. I'm not saying calories in, calories out, that's all you have to do, track your calorie.

• 1:09:28Lewis Howes?

  There needs to be some of it.

• 1:09:29Andy Galpin?

  Some, there has to be calories.

• 1:09:31Lewis Howes?

  Because calories are energy. So if you're adding more, yeah.

• 1:09:33Andy Galpin?

  There has to be some regulation and there's a lot of ways to do it, but that has to be there.

• 1:09:37Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:37Andy Galpin?

  More evidence recently is showing that ultra-processed foods are inherently worse, even though they're not for calories.

• 1:09:44Lewis Howes?

  That seems to be true. Processed food is not as good for you as...

• 1:09:48Andy Galpin?

  Totally, right?

• 1:09:49Lewis Howes?

  Organic, unprocessed, yeah.

• 1:09:52Andy Galpin?

  I mean, there's a lot of little problems within all those categories, but like as a global message...

• 1:09:58Lewis Howes?

  Now, here's the thing. You work with a lot of elite athletes and executives and there's, uh, you know, so many different documentaries and people on both sides of the spectrum saying, "Meat is the way" and then others saying, "Plant-based is the way." And they, they both have cases that, that show different sides that seem pretty compelling. And what have you seen? And there's elite athletes that eat meat that seem to be crushing it. And there's elite athletes that eat plants that seem to be crushing it as well. So where, where's, with the athletes you're working with, what are they mostly eating?

• 1:10:36Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Lewis Howes?

  And who are the ones that you're seeing have stronger recovery, stronger, faster growth, um, less injuries, all these, I mean, the higher performance? What are their nutrition levels typically like?

• 1:10:49Andy Galpin?

  Yeah. I'm just going to intentionally ignore the first half of your question.

• 1:10:55Andy Galpin?

  My PSA is stay as far away from those documentaries as possible.

• 1:11:00Lewis Howes?

  All documentaries.

• 1:11:01Andy Galpin?

  All of them.

• 1:11:02Lewis Howes?

  Plant-based, the meat-based.

• 1:11:03Andy Galpin?

  All of them.

• 1:11:04Lewis Howes?

  Cause they're all skewing towards one.

• 1:11:05Andy Galpin?

  Of course.

• 1:11:06Lewis Howes?

  Reason. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:08Andy Galpin?

  You know what's sort of funny? This is totally unrelated, but it's kind of not. Folks in the journalism space, whether they're making a documentary or selling a book, they love to point out the conflict of interest in bad science. If you think you're getting unbiased like Clear, I've yet to see one where it's like, hey, here's a fair, because it wouldn't be interesting. It wouldn't be like, oh, right? It wouldn't be, well, like, have a drink of water and that's equivalent to 28 cigarettes or whatever, like.

• 1:11:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Andy Galpin?

  Off immediately, right? That's, it's not true. It's not, it's not a genuine conversation, right? So all those things are the lowest level of information, which is sad, because.

• 1:11:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:41Andy Galpin?

  It's a fun way to learn, right?

• 1:11:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:11:45Andy Galpin?

  Number one there. Um, number two, for the real part of your conversation is what do our athletes typically eat? Number one, the entire field is moving towards precision.

• 1:11:55Lewis Howes?

  Precision.

• 1:11:56Andy Galpin?

  Absolutely. And this is being able to say, okay, what is right for my body? Now, we have typically said, we've always said that message, but what's that mean? Well, try this, try that. Okay, no, it's not going to work. Go do this diet for six months. I need an answer faster. Can I run analytics on myself right now and get better precision instantaneously? That's where this whole thing is going. That's our answer. Those stuff, some of those things are available now. Some are better than others. Some are, I'd say, hot garbage. I'm not going to name any of them for those reasons, but the ones I don't like now, I still like the concept. They're moving the needle. They're, they're trying to move in this direction.

• 1:12:39Andy Galpin?

  Now, some of them are just trying to take money from you and sell false promises. But in general, the food, the, the place, the field is acknowledging, we need to be able to let people know what's most likely to work for them quickly.

• 1:12:53Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:53Andy Galpin?

  Versus let them run a six-month. People aren't going to do that.

• 1:12:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Andy Galpin?

  There's just no way. So with our folks, everything is that, right? It's, it's a combination of three main areas. We're going to run labs in a lot of areas. We're going to do, um, what we generally think of these as like surveys. So we're going to do questionnaires. And there's a lot of evidence-based questionnaires for think about even things that are. Controversial scientifically. There are evidence-based questionnaires for toxicity exposure. There's evidence-based questionnaires for gut health. There's a lot of nonsense around dysbiosis and leaky gut, but there's also science there. So being able to figure out what is the garbage and the guy trying to sell you the next book and convince you that carrots or grapes or I don't know, I'm making things up. I don't think I've ever heard. Yes.

• 1:13:43Andy Galpin?

  Call anybody out. But there's signs there too, right? So let's not throw the whole thing out. There are evidence-based questionnaires that can help you get guided there. So we're going to look at labs. We're going to look at questionnaires. And then we're going to look at symptomology. Right? How do you feel? Are you noticing this? And then there are, there's science that would be able to say, hey, this is correlated. This symptom is correlated with this. Okay, fine. Correlation is limited to what correlation is. But when you see things land in the middle of that triangle, imagine a Venn diagram. Your symptomology matches your screening. Your screening matches some indicators of labs. Are the labs perfect? No. Are the screens perfect? No. Are these perfect? No. But when something lands in the middle, you've got pretty good indication that to me, I'm taking action. I don't know 100% because we don't have a great diagnostic for gut health.

• 1:14:28Andy Galpin?

  But we have some and we don't have a perfect diagnos- you see what I'm saying here? Yes. When something lands in the middle of that target, to me, that starts to become actionable. So that's what we're doing. And we're going to put them on whatever programs they need, whether this is, um, let's say that they are not, they don't respond well to carbohydrates. Are they in a position to where they need to? If they're not, then we're just going to say, okay. But if you start pulling, for example, carbohydrates out of a diet, you become very sensitive to carbohydrates. So when you reintroduce, you blow up and you think, oh, my God, I'm terrible. Well, no, you're not bad with carbs. You have down-regulated your ability to handle it because it hasn't seen it in a long time. Right. That's a trainable thing. If the athlete, I feel like is in a sport or position where they need to train that,

• 1:15:12Andy Galpin?

  then we're going to actually train it. If not, like we're going to say, hey, your, your weight, your body does not handle this. It's not worth the thing. Are we in a season? We're pulling it most likely. If we're out of season and we need to get there, we're going to build it. Cause some discomfort, cause some performance drop. You get the idea. In general, our athletes are eating mostly whole food. Right? They're typically going to eat- Five or so meals a day. Roughly.

• 1:15:39Lewis Howes?

  Cause they're performing so high, they're training so hard.

• 1:15:42Andy Galpin?

  A lot of times you're training twice a day.

• 1:15:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, they need it.

• 1:15:43Andy Galpin?

  They don't do as well on two meals a day or one, they tend to perform much worse. Because we need that recovery to happen within hours because we're doing it again.

• 1:15:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's crazy. So you need the nutrients to come in to be able to train again.

• 1:15:56Andy Galpin?

  Totally. Like, we don't have 48 hours to recover muscle glycogen. I have four hours.

• 1:16:00Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:16:00Andy Galpin?

  Cause we're going to train again that day. Hard.

• 1:16:03Lewis Howes?

  It's amazing. So what's, so Whole Foods.

• 1:16:06Andy Galpin?

  Whole Foods is our base.

• 1:16:07Lewis Howes?

  Plants, fruits, nuts, seeds, all of it.

• 1:16:09Andy Galpin?

  Hundred percent. Yeah, all of it. We're going to go for everything.

• 1:16:11Lewis Howes?

  Is there anyone just plant-based or just meat-based?

• 1:16:14Andy Galpin?

  I have worked with plant-based athletes before. We have had success. I firmly believe, I think the science will show you this. You can perform very well physically, even as an athlete on a plant-based diet.

• 1:16:26Lewis Howes?

  Is this, what, what sports are we talking? Is this?

• 1:16:28Andy Galpin?

  MMA, we've worked with for sure.

• 1:16:30Lewis Howes?

  Plant-based, only plant-based?

• 1:16:32Andy Galpin?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:16:32Lewis Howes?

  And they performed well?

• 1:16:33Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:34Lewis Howes?

  They recovered well?

• 1:16:35Andy Galpin?

  Successful MMA fighter for a number of years. Never won a world championship, but that's.

• 1:16:39Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. That's hard. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:41Andy Galpin?

  I would say, yeah, multiple times. We've done it in multiple sports, actually.

• 1:16:45Lewis Howes?

  You've also trained.

• 1:16:46Andy Galpin?

  It's harder.

• 1:16:47Lewis Howes?

  It's harder. Tell me why.

• 1:16:48Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, it's harder. We have to change things more often. We have to be very careful and pay attention to protein intake. It's more difficult to get because think about this. Plant-based foods. Can't, you can run these, these crazy schemes where you're like, well, look, the same amount of protein in four ounces of sirloin is the same in this amount of broccoli or peanut butter. Great, but the peanut butter has four times the calorie intake. When I have a fighter in camp where we are cutting.

• 1:17:22Lewis Howes?

  He's got to cut weight, he can't eat that.

• 1:17:23Andy Galpin?

  I cannot do that.

• 1:17:24Lewis Howes?

  He's got to have like pea protein powder or something or whatever, yeah.

• 1:17:27Andy Galpin?

  And then we're starting to lose effectiveness and ability.

• 1:17:29Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:30Andy Galpin?

  So in someone who, again, not, like, when you don't have these targets and you want to say, can I live a lifestyle? Yeah, sure, and you can do, but calories do start to matter. And this is one of the reasons why we generally call. Animal sources of protein generally higher sources because it means they have more bioavailable, more complete proteins at a lower calorie intake.

• 1:17:51Lewis Howes?

  And there's no plant-based protein that has a lower calorie intake right now, or there's?

• 1:17:55Andy Galpin?

  To, to the amount of relative amino acids, it's difficult to get.

• 1:17:58Lewis Howes?

  It's tough, gotcha. So it's possible it's harder, what you're saying.

• 1:18:02Andy Galpin?

  It is generally harder.

• 1:18:03Lewis Howes?

  For elite level athletes is what I'm hearing you say. For the general population, it's just trying to live a good life.

• 1:18:08Andy Galpin?

  I can't think of a situation in which an athlete would come to me who's not currently plant-based and I would go, I think you'd do better on a plant-based. I don't think, I've never had that conversation in over a decade of professional athletes. I've had many come to me and I've said, okay, like.

• 1:18:26Lewis Howes?

  If you want to be plant-based, this is what it's gonna take.

• 1:18:28Andy Galpin?

  Right.

• 1:18:28Lewis Howes?

  It might be harder.

• 1:18:29Andy Galpin?

  Totally. And again, some of them have to, like, it's not actually been that difficult. Like a baseball player, it's not really, like, the physical demands are not incredible.

• 1:18:37Lewis Howes?

  Right. And if you've already been training and you have a baseline, you don't have to be like building mass muscle.

• 1:18:43Andy Galpin?

  For an NBA player, it's been more of a struggle.

• 1:18:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, because you're burning a lot of calories all day long, running up and down.

• 1:18:48Andy Galpin?

  But it can't, like, so if those things are there, it's not inherently better for you. So like, show me the day that it's better.

• 1:18:56Lewis Howes?

  Plant-based?

• 1:18:57Andy Galpin?

  Yeah. You're not gonna, you're not gonna be able to show me it's better. We have no indication at any scientific level that a plant-based diet would be advantageous for an athlete.

• 1:19:06Lewis Howes?

  For an athlete, gotcha. What about for a human?

• 1:19:08Andy Galpin?

  I don't think we have any evidence to suggest that it's advantageous for a human either.

• 1:19:12Lewis Howes?

  So don't look into these documentaries, obviously.

• 1:19:13Andy Galpin?

  No, don't watch, I mean, they're just truly, again, they're not genuine. That's the biggest issue.

• 1:19:18Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. They're one-sided, is what you're saying.

• 1:19:19Andy Galpin?

  To be honest, I've watched a few of them and I've got those.

• 1:19:22Lewis Howes?

  The Game Changers, obviously, you saw that one.

• 1:19:23Andy Galpin?

  I couldn't do it.

• 1:19:24Lewis Howes?

  You couldn't watch?

• 1:19:25Andy Galpin?

  No, I couldn't do it. I knew, I knew.

• 1:19:28Lewis Howes?

  It's just so one-sided.

• 1:19:29Andy Galpin?

  I'm in the community. I knew, I knew this thing was coming. I had actually.

• 1:19:33Lewis Howes?

  It's because they don't also interview the elite on the other side and say.

• 1:19:37Andy Galpin?

  There's a host of problems. Let's just say, I knew about that documentary a long time before it ever came out. I get interviewed across this stuff a lot and it's just like, I don't want to support. I knew.

• 1:19:47Lewis Howes?

  On either side, you're not watching documentaries.

• 1:19:49Andy Galpin?

  I knew where it was coming and I knew it wasn't gonna be fair.

• 1:19:51Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:19:52Andy Galpin?

  I'm not gonna waste my time. I'm not gonna support these things, which sucks because, again. People eating vegetables is great.

• 1:19:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. You're not saying you don't eat lots of plants and vegetables.

• 1:20:02Andy Galpin?

  Well, I feel like the whole community got stained a little bit.

• 1:20:06Andy Galpin?

  Because of a bad actor. A disingenuous person. It's like, I don't, like, I don't want that message. I just want, like, people to know, hey, if you're gonna do it. And there's people who are actually really good in that community. Who, this is, and it's, hey, it's not a fantasy. It's also not, like, show me evidence that in a reasonable diet, that addition of meat is worse. You're not gonna see that either. So they make these false, they do a lot of logical fallacies. Burden of proof, they're really good at flipping. And a whole bunch of things. So I find those things generally very uninteresting to talk about. Cause you're just like, we're never gonna go here. But if an athlete came to me, or a general person said, hey, this is what I wanna do.

• 1:20:45Andy Galpin?

  I would say, okay, if you're willing to run analytics, and we can make sure that your micronutrients are on point, then, like, we can do this. Having said that, too, most people who are eating even meat-based are not doing it well either. So it's not like, it's not like, like, well, okay, you're getting, like.

• 1:21:02Lewis Howes?

  What are they doing wrong?

• 1:21:03Andy Galpin?

  Just like, same thing, right? Not regulating nutrient intake. Totally disregarding micronutrients, because of lack of understanding. Not regulating

• 1:21:13Andy Galpin?

  food intake. Consistency seems to be a very big deal. So if you look across more recent literature, you're gonna see that the simple act of eating at a consistent frame allows you to, we'll say, burn more calories. So you can adjust more calories, say, the same way, by eating consistently, compared against an inconsistent eating pattern. So just basic principles like that. We've talked about having some caloric regulation. I don't care how you do it. Having a mostly whole food nutrient-based thing. Regulation of, this is what I call my 90%, by the way. It's like 90% of quality diets. Are going to do 90% of the same thing. Right? It's the standard principles. It's regulation of variety of colors.

• 1:21:56Andy Galpin?

  So for polyphenol and a whole host of other important intake, you probably want a decently widespread of colors. You want dark, rich colors. You need to understand fiber intake one way or the other. These are the principles that are going to work mostly for most people.

• 1:22:12Lewis Howes?

  Do you want more fiber or less fiber?

• 1:22:14Andy Galpin?

  Well, so that's another example of, let's go back to the water.

• 1:22:18Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. You want the right amount. Yeah. You don't want to flood yourself with too much fiber, is what you're saying.

• 1:22:24Andy Galpin?

  You're going to know. You're going to know really quickly. Yeah, so in that example, the typical number we're going to throw around is like 10 grams or so per 1,000 calories. So if you're eating 2,000 calories a day, you're aiming for 20 to 30 grams of fiber.

• 1:22:38Lewis Howes?

  What does that look like in terms of, say, broccoli? Is that like a cup of broccoli?

• 1:22:41Andy Galpin?

  That'd be a lot of broccoli.

• 1:22:43Lewis Howes?

  That's a lot of broccoli.

• 1:22:43Andy Galpin?

  That would be more broccoli than you want to eat.

• 1:22:46Lewis Howes?

  You want 10% fiber.

• 1:22:48Andy Galpin?

  10 grams.

• 1:22:49Lewis Howes?

  10 grams of fiber.

• 1:22:50Andy Galpin?

  Per 1,000 calories.

• 1:22:51Lewis Howes?

  Per 1,000 calories.

• 1:22:52Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, so if you, I'll give you, I'll give you a date.

• 1:22:56Andy Galpin?

  I just did this yesterday. So let's say I've got a NBA player. Just did these labs yesterday. I'll use a different example. Let's go with something that's more, I'll do a baseball player because the lifestyle is more akin to it than the whole person. Right? You're going to wake up and maybe you're going to have something like

• 1:23:15Andy Galpin?

  three or four eggs, maybe a little bit of diced up vegetables in there, maybe some aromatics, onion, garlic, or whatever, or eggs. If you're just like, that's too much. Maybe you're going to have a little bit of blueberries. You're going to have some raspberries and then maybe even a little bit of avocado. If we want to go heavier on carbohydrates, we're going to kick out the avocado and maybe go sourdough. Piece of sourdough bread, something like this. If we have a specific micronutrient issue, then we're going to choose. The fruit intentionally. So I want you with a pear this morning, not blueberries. I want you with whatever the case may be. You're gonna go there and then you're probably gonna have some sort of nutrients three or so hours later, which are gonna be mostly, say a protein

• 1:23:56Andy Galpin?

  source. So say this is a yogurt with, maybe plain yogurt. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's a little bit of granola if you're gonna go train right after it.

• 1:24:04Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:24:05Andy Galpin?

  You know, something like that. No problem. Lunch, it's gonna look very Mediterranean, paleo-ish, right? So it's gonna be a lot of greens and a lot of vegetable and then it's, depending on the person, maybe salmon, maybe not. Maybe we need to go way away from fish for a while. Maybe beef, whatever these things. So it's gonna be some sort of animal protein for the most part with a big plate of vegetables. Then they're gonna go for another meal after that if they're on four meals a day, or they're gonna go to dinner. And I typically like to give them more carbohydrates at night.

• 1:24:37Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:24:38Andy Galpin?

  Yeah. So same thing, but then they would get maybe rice, or quinoa, or sweet potatoes, or a whole host of things, depending on like their structure of their day.

• 1:24:48Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:24:49Andy Galpin?

  That's like a pretty standard template, if you will. I like doing a lot of carbohydrates at night. It really helps recovery.

• 1:24:56Lewis Howes?

  For athletes.

• 1:24:56Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, and it really helps sleep.

• 1:24:58Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:24:59Andy Galpin?

  You give 50 to 75 grams of carbohydrate a handful of hours before sleep.

• 1:25:04Lewis Howes?

  You'll knock out. But that doesn't help burn fat necessarily, right?

• 1:25:09Andy Galpin?

  You're not gonna gain fat either.

• 1:25:10Lewis Howes?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:25:11Andy Galpin?

  No, not at all.

• 1:25:12Lewis Howes?

  But you're not gonna burn it?

• 1:25:13Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:14Lewis Howes?

  If you have carbs at night necessarily, right?

• 1:25:15Andy Galpin?

  It's, the whole idea that if you eat carbs at night, you're gonna store them and therefore gain more fat has been widely scientifically refuted.

• 1:25:22Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:22Andy Galpin?

  In fact, if you look at like Mike Ormsby's stuff out of Florida State, like very clearly shown that nutrients at night tend to add in fat loss.

• 1:25:30Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:30Andy Galpin?

  And preservation of muscle, specifically protein, and even some carbs at night.

• 1:25:35Lewis Howes?

  So a little bit of rice at night is okay, or sweet potatoes?

• 1:25:38Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:39Andy Galpin?

  You need to balance this with your personal physiology, right?

• 1:25:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:42Andy Galpin?

  So some athletes I have eat right before bed. I feel great. Some people, boy, that's a recipe for not sleeping.

• 1:25:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:50Andy Galpin?

  High fat meals before bed tends to be a real big problem. Right? You're gonna have, but not everyone. So we're gonna figure this out. This is a part of our day that we're gonna construct that says, do you need to stop eating three hours before? Four hours before, 90 minutes, what's the number? Do we do a bigger meal and then a snack? Do we do a snack and then a big, like, what do we need to do?

• 1:26:11Andy Galpin?

  I've had a lot of athletes that do very well with a really big chunk of carbohydrates, like almost immediately before bed, and then they just.

• 1:26:18Lewis Howes?

  They're recovering and.

• 1:26:19Andy Galpin?

  They wake up, then the recovery is.

• 1:26:20Lewis Howes?

  You got energy.

• 1:26:21Andy Galpin?

  Shoots up. Exactly.

• 1:26:22Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:26:23Andy Galpin?

  Now, you're not gonna wanna do Capri Sun and like.

• 1:26:26Lewis Howes?

  Some healthy carbs. Yeah.

• 1:26:27Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, you're gonna do starch, right? Like, this is a really good thing to do.

• 1:26:30Lewis Howes?

  Sweet potatoes, potatoes, yeah.

• 1:26:31Andy Galpin?

  All those things.

• 1:26:32Lewis Howes?

  Rice, yeah. Interesting.

• 1:26:33Andy Galpin?

  You're gonna feel really, really good. Calories matter, right? So as long as you're in a rough understanding of where your total carbohydrates are and your rough fat and everything like that, you're gonna be fine mixing and matching. But do keep in mind physiology is unique, right? If you're like, man, if I have carbs at night, I blow up. I believe you.

• 1:26:50Lewis Howes?

  Then don't do it.

• 1:26:51Andy Galpin?

  I totally believe you. I don't think you're a liar.

• 1:26:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:53Andy Galpin?

  But if you're just like, oh, no, I heard in a podcast.

• 1:26:57Andy Galpin?

  No, we've got enough science to suggest that you're gonna be just fine, especially as a moderate performer.

• 1:27:02Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:27:03Andy Galpin?

  To recover.

• 1:27:03Lewis Howes?

  If you could, I mean, this is a hypothetical question, but if you could only choose, let's say for three months, you can only choose five, five foods a day that you could eat.

• 1:27:15Andy Galpin?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:27:15Lewis Howes?

  To help you optimize your life and this is not gonna be peak performance and training and this and this, but it's just gonna be one of the best lifestyle I can live.

• 1:27:23Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, okay. I'm gonna give you an Andy Galpin answer.

• 1:27:25Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:27:25Andy Galpin?

  So as you've probably seen, I'm generally one to be like, wow, it depends, bro. Like, I hate giving you these things, right? I'm gonna give you stuff, right? You, as I mentioned a little bit ago, you will do better when you establish consistency.

• 1:27:37Lewis Howes?

  Yes. Interesting.

• 1:27:38Andy Galpin?

  I'm not against people doing a few, like you just outlined, of like basically eating the same thing every day.

• 1:27:43Lewis Howes?

  You're not against it, yeah.

• 1:27:44Andy Galpin?

  Not against it at all. I am against it as a long-term strategy because of the need for micronutrient variation. Micronutrients, though, on like a daily basis, don't matter. Right? So if you've got a lot of vitamin C today, but you didn't get a lot tomorrow.

• 1:27:57Lewis Howes?

  It's okay.

• 1:27:58Andy Galpin?

  Micronutrients are fine. Macronutrients matter today. Micronutrients tend to take weeks to months.

• 1:28:03Lewis Howes?

  What's the difference between micro and macronutrients?

• 1:28:05Andy Galpin?

  Macronutrients are carbohydrates, protein, and fat.

• 1:28:08Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:28:09Andy Galpin?

  Energy or structure. Fats and carbohydrates provide you with cellular energy. Protein provides structure. Some energy, but very little. Macronutrients tend to be measured in big units like grams. Micronutrients typically split into a handful of categories. Minerals, vitamins, and then things like polyphenols.

• 1:28:29Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:28:30Andy Galpin?

  Right? Any of those nutrients that are lower there, those tend to be measured in very small units. So micrograms or milligrams or very small things.

• 1:28:39Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 1:28:40Andy Galpin?

  Vitamins, technically, the definition is vital amin. That's where the word vitamin comes from. So it's vital to survive. Amin being like a small part of amino acid. So these are structures that have been identified throughout history that play a role in health. So for example, you can live without carbohydrates. You cannot live without vitamins. And if you have a clinical deficiency in a vitamin, you're going to get a disease immediately. You're not going to get a disease from having low carbs.

• 1:29:10Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:29:12Andy Galpin?

  That's the structural difference. Now, vitamins tend to be broken up into a couple of categories. You have fat soluble. So these are ones that they're absorb the best when you eat them with fat. And they're going to be stored in your own fat. Then you have water soluble ones like vitamin C. So vitamin C is going to come in, go into your bloodstream. Any excess, for the most part, you're just going to urinate out. Fat soluble ones like vitamin D are going to stay around for a long time. And so because fat soluble ones stay around, you don't have to have them necessarily every day. Because they're around, and if your body needs it, it'll pull some out of tissue. Minerals, zinc, magnesium, rocks, basically, are quite different. You can play with vitamins, like if you took a multivitamin every day, fine.

• 1:29:56Andy Galpin?

  You don't want to play with minerals. They have a much bigger physiological consequence. Magnesium is pretty okay. Like if you're just, not a bad strategy, right? But if you are just taking iron or you're taking zinc, you could cause a whole lot of important physiological problems. So you want to be very careful about dosing things. You want to go even further. Now you talk hormones, right? You play with hormones, you're in a whole new ballgame.

• 1:30:23Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:30:23Andy Galpin?

  Don't play with minerals.

• 1:30:26Andy Galpin?

  Multi, you're fine. Like that's not one where I'm like, whoa, don't take a multivitamin until you've had blood work done like.

• 1:30:31Lewis Howes?

  That's fine.

• 1:30:32Andy Galpin?

  You're probably fine. But I wouldn't go crush, especially for men, I wouldn't go crush iron as a supplement. Unless you've had blood work done. You can get into danger real fast.

• 1:30:40Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:30:41Andy Galpin?

  Women, probably fine.

• 1:30:42Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:30:43Andy Galpin?

  So there's different things to pay attention to. So the micronutrients tend to be stable. When we change someone's diet and we're running their panels.

• 1:30:53Andy Galpin?

  I don't really run blood again for typically another 90 to 120 days because it takes that long for nutrient status to really change that much. If you, if you're low on vitamin D and we give it to you, like it's going to be a while before we see a nose change.

• 1:31:08Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:31:09Andy Galpin?

  Macronutrients, it's instantaneous.

• 1:31:11Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:31:11Andy Galpin?

  It's, it's, you ate more carbs today. How did you feel? I felt better. I felt worse. Okay, great. I gave you multivitamin today. How do you feel?

• 1:31:18Lewis Howes?

  You can't feel it.

• 1:31:19Andy Galpin?

  You're not gonna feel anything for a very long time. So that's the general.

• 1:31:23Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:31:24Andy Galpin?

  To answer your actual question.

• 1:31:26Lewis Howes?

  The five foods you need on a daily basis. You give me five foods and three supplements.

• 1:31:30Andy Galpin?

  Okay, yeah, that's easy. Supplement number one, multivitamin. Supplement number two, creatine.

• 1:31:35Lewis Howes?

  For everyone.

• 1:31:36Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, no question.

• 1:31:38Lewis Howes?

  All ages.

• 1:31:39Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, no doubt.

• 1:31:40Lewis Howes?

  I mean, over 18 or something or.

• 1:31:42Andy Galpin?

  You could even go earlier than that.

• 1:31:42Lewis Howes?

  Creatine, you think we should have every day?

• 1:31:44Andy Galpin?

  It is the most efficacious single supplement you'll, you'll ever find.

• 1:31:49Lewis Howes?

  Really? Tell me why.

• 1:31:51Andy Galpin?

  Boy, we should probably have done this the very first question.

• 1:31:54Lewis Howes?

  Creatine, what does it do for you?

• 1:31:56Andy Galpin?

  It is probably the number one to three most studied supplement.

• 1:32:01Lewis Howes?

  And this is like back, bringing me back to like 16 year olds back in high school, like creatine, getting that pump.

• 1:32:05Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, yeah, right? You remember getting mad when you hear about your, like a guy you're playing is like, oh, he's all hopped up on creatine.

• 1:32:13Andy Galpin?

  That's cheating, second boy, protein and creatine.

• 1:32:17Lewis Howes?

  So much stronger.

• 1:32:19Andy Galpin?

  Well, it works.

• 1:32:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So tell me why it's creatine.

• 1:32:22Andy Galpin?

  So in the 1990s.

• 1:32:23Lewis Howes?

  I haven't heard creatine in years, probably.

• 1:32:25Andy Galpin?

  Really?

• 1:32:25Lewis Howes?

  I haven't heard anyone talk about creatine in maybe ever on the show.

• 1:32:30Andy Galpin?

  No way.

• 1:32:31Lewis Howes?

  I don't think anyone has told me, any nutritionist, scientist, doctor,

• 1:32:37Lewis Howes?

  you know.

• 1:32:37Andy Galpin?

  You're missing the biggest rock.

• 1:32:39Lewis Howes?

  I don't think anyone has told me creatine in the last nine years.

• 1:32:42Andy Galpin?

  It's number one.

• 1:32:43Lewis Howes?

  That I can remember. Tell me why creatine is the number one thing we should be taking on a daily basis.

• 1:32:47Andy Galpin?

  Tremendous amount of science, right? Which is a, means it's very robust. It works under a lot of different situations, under a lot of, it's not only going to work for old people, or it's only going to work like other supplements where, for example, if you're, everything has a curve, right?

• 1:33:03Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:33:03Andy Galpin?

  It's hormetic curve. So if you are at the top of that curve and you're at its optimal range, whatever that means, right? Of vitamin C, for example, and I give you more vitamin C.

• 1:33:14Lewis Howes?

  Nothing happens.

• 1:33:15Andy Galpin?

  If I continue to give you more, and continue to give you more, continue to give you more, you actually start to get worse. Right? Because now you're overcrowding.

• 1:33:21Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Too much vitamin C.

• 1:33:23Andy Galpin?

  Well, too much anything, right? Now, vitamin C is like, again, pretty safe.

• 1:33:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:27Andy Galpin?

  And that curve is long with vitamin C. But other, other things that curve is short, right?

• 1:33:34Andy Galpin?

  We could go with any toxin, same thing, right?

• 1:33:36Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:33:36Andy Galpin?

  They just have a really tight curve and it's like, hey, milligram and two milligrams death.

• 1:33:40Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:33:41Andy Galpin?

  Vitamin C is more like, okay, three grams, five grams, 10 grams, like you're still fine. Vitamin D, same thing, like you could do.

• 1:33:46Lewis Howes?

  You could do a lot of vitamin D.

• 1:33:47Andy Galpin?

  Tons of vitamin D. Now there's some, like, we're, we're actually, like, I can't tell you how many times we have improved people's physiology right now by pulling them off vitamin D.

• 1:33:59Andy Galpin?

  We just got some labs back about two weeks ago and doubled testosterone from simply removing vitamin D.

• 1:34:05Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:34:06Andy Galpin?

  You play with things that have hormone-like effects.

• 1:34:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, interesting. Okay. But creatine though.

• 1:34:11Andy Galpin?

  Like, without, generally vitamin D is super safe.

• 1:34:13Lewis Howes?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:34:16Andy Galpin?

  You should be paying attention.

• 1:34:17Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:34:19Andy Galpin?

  I like precision.

• 1:34:21Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:34:21Andy Galpin?

  Having said that.

• 1:34:25Andy Galpin?

  Everything has this curve, right? So if you are here with vitamin C and I give you too much, actually, things get worse. If you're clinically deficient and I give you that same amount, then things got better. So you have to understand where on the curve you are with some of these things. Testosterone is another easy example. If you're at a normal range, going normal to a little bit higher has very nil functional effects. But if you're a little bit low to going to normal has huge positive beneficial effects. Okay. Creatine doesn't have a curve like that necessarily. So there's no clinical deficiencies of creatine unless you have some of these really weird conditions. But having said that, you can really kind of take it a lot and it doesn't kick back. There's no feedback loops.

• 1:35:09Lewis Howes?

  So you just keep powder, straight powder to the water, drink creatine all day?

• 1:35:13Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, it's not gonna go cause your bones to start excreting excess calcium or anything like other vitamins and particularly minerals will do. It's not a hormone, so it's not gonna change your regulation and production of growth hormone or anything like that, like other stuff. So number one, ton of science. It works on a lot of populations, meaning if you're a little bit low on your creatine or you're already good, you're still gonna have an effect. It's okay. It's very cheap.

• 1:35:39Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:35:39Andy Galpin?

  It's very accessible. Creatine monohydrate is all you need to really get to.

• 1:35:44Andy Galpin?

  It's been, the safety profile is outstanding. So we have very little evidence to suggest it's gonna be detrimental to anybody.

• 1:35:51Lewis Howes?

  Long term.

• 1:35:52Andy Galpin?

  Long term or short term.

• 1:35:55Andy Galpin?

  All that on one side and say, okay, so what's the risk of taking it? Well, basically, nothing, right? Because of all this, which is different from any, not any, but a lot of other supplements.

• 1:36:05Lewis Howes?

  So you take creatine every day?

• 1:36:06Andy Galpin?

  Positive effects. Let's get here. You can't take it every day.

• 1:36:10Lewis Howes?

  Do you take it every day?

• 1:36:10Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, I try to.

• 1:36:11Lewis Howes?

  You try to.

• 1:36:12Andy Galpin?

  For the most part, yeah.

• 1:36:15Andy Galpin?

  I'll go through, I'll go through phases internally where I do different things diet-wise and stuff-wise, but like, yeah. So to not get off topic here.

• 1:36:26Andy Galpin?

  We associate it with stronger, bigger. Mm hmm. And the eighteen, nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties, that was the game pretty clear. And then I sort of left the field because I was just like, we know the answer. It's super safe and it works for athletes. And then other people started picking it up and going, well, what about for things like brain function? What about recovery from traumatic brain injury? What about cognitive decline? What about neurological health? There is actually strong data suggesting a relationship between creatine and depression. There is a, and to be very clear there, creatine is not solving depression. Like, that's not how depression works, right? Has there some data to suggest it may be helpful? Yes.

• 1:37:09Andy Galpin?

  There's a lot of other health benefits associated with it because think about it this way. The way you make energy biologically is it's going to come from a number of sources. Creatine is actually the very first one. People think carbs and fat, and those are the predominant sources, but the very first place is actually creatine. It's a one, this stoichiometry is great. It's one to one. One thing of creatine, one molecule of ATP. So you're not, it's not a high energy producer, but it's the fastest. It's stored in, inside the cells themselves and they can directly create basically ATP. Kind of, there's one step in movement, you get the idea. So it's very fast, but it burns very fast. The brain loves that. Astrocytes around the brain love it.

• 1:37:53Andy Galpin?

  And when you look at all the trials that have been done with any of these populations, cognitive decline, injury, neurological function, there is a lot of research moving with creatine in all of those areas. Again, it's not a treatment and it's not a cure for Alzheimer's. Sure. Some of the data suggests it's not doing much and then some of it is like, maybe there's a slowing of the reduction or slowing of the progression. Some say maybe not. Wow. But there's enough health benefits globally that we're basically saying, look, a lot of decline in cognitive, whether it's function or mental health.

• 1:38:31Andy Galpin?

  It's looking like an energy problem. Again, not exclusively, but it's a big deal there. This is why you see trials with lactate, providing folks with lactate and seeing really good improvements in brain function with George Brooks and stuff doing that with brain injuries.

• 1:38:43Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:38:45Andy Galpin?

  Well, it's because those things like energy. And we know that they prefer glucose because it's a fast energy source. Well, they actually love creatine as well in some of the places. So it is.

• 1:38:54Lewis Howes?

  Creatine.

• 1:38:55Andy Galpin?

  It is a very, very.

• 1:38:57Lewis Howes?

  Useful supplement.

• 1:38:59Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, no question.

• 1:39:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow, okay.

• 1:39:01Andy Galpin?

  For your third one.

• 1:39:02Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:39:03Andy Galpin?

  You know, you could throw in, in general, fish oil. Again, I don't think we probably need to be smashing out as much fish oil as I would have said five or eight years ago, but safety profile is high.

• 1:39:16Lewis Howes?

  Add some in there, okay. And what about, so those are the three supplements, what about the five foods?

• 1:39:20Andy Galpin?

  Okay, if you want to talk bang for your buck, it's very hard to get past eggs.

• 1:39:25Lewis Howes?

  Really? Man, I heard, it's just so, I heard someone say that eggs are like one of the worst things.

• 1:39:29Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, that's not.

• 1:39:32Lewis Howes?

  Okay, this is the, this is the challenge. I bring on people from all different nutritional, scientific backgrounds who will say these different things. And I think that's challenging for people is to figure out what really works for them.

• 1:39:44Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:44Lewis Howes?

  But I agree, so eggs.

• 1:39:46Andy Galpin?

  Well, remember, science is a verb, not a noun. It's an action. It's a moving target.

• 1:39:51Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:39:52Andy Galpin?

  You want it to be that way.

• 1:39:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:54Andy Galpin?

  Right, so it's good.

• 1:39:56Lewis Howes?

  I love eggs, so for me, that's a good.

• 1:39:57Andy Galpin?

  Yeah. I have some folks that eggs are a death sentence for them. So yeah, again, I believe you're like, oh, I get no, my nose runs immediately things. Great, take them out.

• 1:40:08Lewis Howes?

  Don't do it, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:09Andy Galpin?

  Most people though, it's nutrient density wise.

• 1:40:11Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:40:12Andy Galpin?

  That's a pretty good one. I'll go with the potato.

• 1:40:15Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:40:16Andy Galpin?

  Man, and talk about.

• 1:40:17Lewis Howes?

  There's a lot of benefits with potatoes, for sure.

• 1:40:19Andy Galpin?

  Tons of benefits as well as functionality in terms of, it works well for the whole family. You can cook it a ton of different ways. Preparation methods, they all change the nutrient profile, by the way. All of it. So you can make it into a resistance starch if you want. You can make it into a faster acting carbohydrate if you want. You can make it in a mash. You can make it, like you can do different things. It's cheap, high quality, and a ton of nutrient variety, lots of fiber, lots of good things, energy source.

• 1:40:50Lewis Howes?

  Potato, yeah.

• 1:40:51Andy Galpin?

  So those are a pretty good one. I would say.

• 1:40:55Andy Galpin?

  I'm torn between blueberries.

• 1:40:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I've heard that as a comment with a lot of experts.

• 1:41:01Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, it's actually a super.

• 1:41:02Lewis Howes?

  Top five, yeah.

• 1:41:03Andy Galpin?

  Like, it's a fun nootropic hack.

• 1:41:05Lewis Howes?

  I just don't like blueberries.

• 1:41:06Andy Galpin?

  Blueberries before performance, like, big, big help. There's been a lot of, there's been some literature showing it having a, like, a fairly robust nootropic effect acutely. So you take it right now, like, before you go perform.

• 1:41:19Lewis Howes?

  It's gonna help you, yeah.

• 1:41:21Andy Galpin?

  It has doubled the, mostly doubled the amount of carbohydrates relative to other berries. So if, like, calories are a concern, then maybe you would wanna switch it for raspberries.

• 1:41:32Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:41:33Andy Galpin?

  You know, something like that.

• 1:41:33Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. Blueberries, okay.

• 1:41:36Andy Galpin?

  That's a pretty good one. Let's see.

• 1:41:39Andy Galpin?

  Another one that's a pretty big staple.

• 1:41:45Andy Galpin?

  In meat, meat in general is probably gonna be pretty high on my list if you can let McCount meat as one food item.

• 1:41:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, okay. Not like, if you're doing, what's the optimal meat? If you're just like, I can only do this type of fish, or I wanna do this type of steak?

• 1:41:57Andy Galpin?

  I'm probably gonna take, like, personally, I'm going for antelope.

• 1:42:02Lewis Howes?

  Antelope?

• 1:42:02Andy Galpin?

  Yeah. That's just 'cause my freezer's stocked with it.

• 1:42:04Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:42:05Andy Galpin?

  Almost every year.

• 1:42:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:07Andy Galpin?

  We eat pretty much exclusively game meat for our meat choice, if not fish.

• 1:42:11Lewis Howes?

  Okay. Fish?

• 1:42:12Andy Galpin?

  Elk, Neil deer, and antelope are, like, my house lives off those things.

• 1:42:17Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:42:18Andy Galpin?

  I realize that's not very.

• 1:42:19Lewis Howes?

  But if someone, the general population, would you say fish, then?

• 1:42:23Andy Galpin?

  I'm not against fish at all. The only reason I'm hesitating is you have to be very careful of mercury toxicity.

• 1:42:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:31Andy Galpin?

  It's a real issue. We've had this problem a lot over the years with folks who just love professional athletes at fish in the offseason and stuff like that, so.

• 1:42:41Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:42:41Andy Galpin?

  Depending on your fish choice.

• 1:42:43Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:42:44Andy Galpin?

  Stacked against each other, heavy metals aside, fish is a very high-quality meat.

• 1:42:49Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, okay.

• 1:42:49Andy Galpin?

  It's a very good profile.

• 1:42:52Lewis Howes?

  And the fifth thing? Lots of any vegetables in here, right? I got potatoes in there, but.

• 1:42:56Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, no leafy greens.

• 1:42:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:59Andy Galpin?

  I guess you could say, I mean, I guess the easy answer is broccoli. It's probably the most robust. It can be cooked in a lot of different ways. Nutritive profile changes based on cooking preparation. So you can get variety by just cooking it differently.

• 1:43:13Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 1:43:14Andy Galpin?

  It's not people's favorite.

• 1:43:15Lewis Howes?

  I like broccoli.

• 1:43:16Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, I'm okay with it.

• 1:43:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:18Andy Galpin?

  But like put a little hot sauce, you're okay.

• 1:43:19Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right. But it's really, there's a lot of benefits of broccoli, right?

• 1:43:22Andy Galpin?

  Tons, yeah, tons.

• 1:43:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:24Andy Galpin?

  In a lot of ways, so.

• 1:43:26Lewis Howes?

  Cool.

• 1:43:27Andy Galpin?

  That's probably like my five where you're like, well, that's the least interesting five that anyone's ever said.

• 1:43:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's all good.

• 1:43:32Andy Galpin?

  That's a pretty good, um, what I would really say, I guess my advice for someone is whether you want to do the five meals a day thing or three meals a day, one meal a day for the average person. It doesn't really matter. Get a plan. Get somewhat organized and try to be fairly consistent, right? And then if you want to move parts out, so you go, you know what, like my meat option for today is I'm gonna go salmon today and then tomorrow I'm gonna go sirloin and then I'm gonna go lamb, like all these things have pros and cons, right? But you still have a structure. So you have freedom with a little bit of structure and you, you, you're not out there going like, what am I doing today? Pizza or burritos or like.

• 1:44:06Lewis Howes?

  Mac and cheese, yeah.

• 1:44:07Andy Galpin?

  You're totally just off reservation.

• 1:44:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:44:09Andy Galpin?

  Um, if you can kind of do that.

• 1:44:10Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:44:11Andy Galpin?

  For three months, two months, whatever the case is, um, the one key I'll say here is you want to eat for the average person in a way that fosters abundance and not scarcity. So don't go on a diet.

• 1:44:25Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:25Andy Galpin?

  Don't have cheat meals.

• 1:44:27Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:27Andy Galpin?

  Just eat.

• 1:44:28Lewis Howes?

  Just eat.

• 1:44:29Andy Galpin?

  And make food good. If you don't make food good, you're now thinking about.

• 1:44:34Lewis Howes?

  Cheating. You're like, what's all these bad foods I can eat?

• 1:44:37Andy Galpin?

  Totally. So if you're like, hey, look, um, having a piece of wheat toast in the morning, like it's just like my favorite thing, but they have it.

• 1:44:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:45Andy Galpin?

  The cost to benefit ratio is pretty high. Like if you're like, I could, I like toast, but like whatever, I like a hundred, well then, okay, maybe, maybe you cut that out and you, you wouldn't know that toast is bad, but you get it like point, point here is like, figure out what are the non-movable parts? And then give yourself the ability to, to do that and then make things taste like you want. If you're just like, oh God, like. Like, okay, eggs, but like, I can't. Then don't eat eggs.

• 1:45:09Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:45:10Andy Galpin?

  Get them the hell out of there and find foods where you're like, dude, I could do this, I could do this, it is. And then preparation sells, right? So like, maybe when I use these herbs and spices and do it this way, I can handle it. Do you have a chance?

• 1:45:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21Andy Galpin?

  But a crash diet, like we've just seen.

• 1:45:24Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't work.

• 1:45:25Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it doesn't.

• 1:45:26Andy Galpin?

  And one of the most popular studies or papers I've ever published was on intermittent dieting. Like, I can't even tell you how many downloads, it's just ridiculous, but like, the evidence is very clear. Yo-yo dieting is a huge problem. It's really bad for your physiology. It's not just the fact that you gain the weight back, it has detrimental, you'll be in a worse spot than when you started. And there has, we have explanations of leptin and insulin, like the whole gamut. There's problems, so you really want to be cautious of hard to paint for a month and then completely have to resonate to like.

• 1:46:00Lewis Howes?

  Be more consistent, yeah.

• 1:46:01Andy Galpin?

  Sustainable.

• 1:46:02Lewis Howes?

  But you're also saying like, having some restriction or fasting incorporation is also can be helpful, like if you're.

• 1:46:10Andy Galpin?

  For some people.

• 1:46:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:11Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:11Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 1:46:12Andy Galpin?

  There's no magic to fasting, there's no special benefit to it. If it is a good system for you, great.

• 1:46:18Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:46:18Andy Galpin?

  If it's not, then don't.

• 1:46:21Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:46:21Andy Galpin?

  There's no, like, don't make yourself.

• 1:46:25Andy Galpin?

  It's that immediate restorative gratification, so, right? So if it's like, if it's just ruining your life, it's not worth it.

• 1:46:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, don't do it.

• 1:46:33Andy Galpin?

  If you're like, well, that kind of sucks, but like, it's the only way I can control myself, then it's probably worth the exchange.

• 1:46:39Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:46:39Andy Galpin?

  I mean, I have a friend who's like this with even carbohydrates. And we've gone through this so many times and he knows, he's like, I know carbohydrates are not bad. I can't control myself with them, though. So for me, I have to just go.

• 1:46:52Lewis Howes?

  I can't eat them.

• 1:46:53Andy Galpin?

  And he goes to these wildly, like, he's in this space, so he like. He goes through these wild changes in diets like all the time. And he's like, that's the only way I can keep my brain from just going completely bonkers. So I'm like, okay, it's not necessary, but if you have to live really hard rules. And he's like, well, that's the only way I can do it.

• 1:47:11Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:47:12Andy Galpin?

  Great. So some people do really well with the Band-Aid pulled off and just

• 1:47:15Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:47:16Andy Galpin?

  You eat this same lunch every single day. One of the reasons why I love working with bodybuilders is like they're kind of like that. If I told them to eat that, they'd be like, dope, let's go.

• 1:47:24Lewis Howes?

  Okay, let's go, yeah.

• 1:47:25Andy Galpin?

  Like, let's go broccoli chicken, cool. And other people are like, oh, my God, I made it to day and a half and I quit. This is terrible.

• 1:47:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:32Andy Galpin?

  So make sure it matches.

• 1:47:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Well, I have heard from a lot of different of the longevity, I guess, scientists. There are benefits to fasting for longevity. I don't know if that's

• 1:47:42Andy Galpin?

  I would say that's extremely contentious.

• 1:47:44Lewis Howes?

  Okay. Intermittent fasting or even?

• 1:47:47Andy Galpin?

  I am not convinced at all that that adds a special benefit to aging at all.

• 1:47:52Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:47:54Lewis Howes?

  What about for burning fat or helping? Fasting doesn't help burn fat?

• 1:47:59Andy Galpin?

  No, that that data is clear.

• 1:48:00Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:48:01Andy Galpin?

  No, not at all. No, in terms of like, if you look at the literature on fat loss over the course of, pick your numbers. 16 weeks, six months, six years, you're going to see no inherent benefit of fat loss with fasting.

• 1:48:12Lewis Howes?

  So what is the benefit of fasting then?

• 1:48:13Andy Galpin?

  When protein is accounted for.

• 1:48:15Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:48:16Andy Galpin?

  So if you're matched for protein, if it's a strategy to help you eat less food,

• 1:48:24Andy Galpin?

  then it will definitely work.

• 1:48:25Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:48:26Andy Galpin?

  And there appears to be very little physiological harm to fasting.

• 1:48:30Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:48:30Andy Galpin?

  No downside, especially for non-athlete. I'm not against it at all. So I want to make it clear, like, I'm not at all against, I use it personally.

• 1:48:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:37Andy Galpin?

  Not all the time. I'll use intermittent fasting, I'll use prolonged fasting as for other reasons.

• 1:48:45Andy Galpin?

  We don't typically use it with an athlete in the season, though we will use it off-season occasionally. So I'm not against any of these things, but I don't think it's fair to think it is a, if you don't do this, you won't live as long as you could have.

• 1:48:59Andy Galpin?

  I think that is extremely scientifically debatable.

• 1:49:02Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:49:02Andy Galpin?

  Which is, I think, the most fair way to say it. So I could be wrong.

• 1:49:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:05Andy Galpin?

  And I'm open to that.

• 1:49:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:07Andy Galpin?

  I could be right, though.

• 1:49:08Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:49:10Andy Galpin?

  If you look at fat loss, I think that's much clearer, that there's no special benefit for fat loss.

• 1:49:15Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:49:16Andy Galpin?

  Really? No.

• 1:49:18Lewis Howes?

  By fasting, there's no, you won't burn fat.

• 1:49:20Andy Galpin?

  When calories and protein are equated, absolutely not.

• 1:49:22Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:22Andy Galpin?

  And those trials have been done.

• 1:49:24Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:49:25Andy Galpin?

  You have intervention trials, you have observational stuff, and it all is like landing in pretty much the same spot that that's not a huge

• 1:49:35Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:36Andy Galpin?

  For the group.

• 1:49:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:37Andy Galpin?

  For the individual, maybe, right? If it is better for you, better for you.

• 1:49:41Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:49:41Andy Galpin?

  Always the case. But as a net positive, like, do you really need to go out of your way to fast to lose weight? No.

• 1:49:48Lewis Howes?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:49:49Andy Galpin?

  No, not at all.

• 1:49:49Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:51Andy Galpin?

  It's a great strategy.

• 1:49:52Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. It works, yeah.

• 1:49:54Andy Galpin?

  But we have a lot of people who have lost a lot of weight.

• 1:49:57Lewis Howes?

  Without fasting.

• 1:49:58Andy Galpin?

  Totally.

• 1:49:58Lewis Howes?

  Well, there you go.

• 1:49:59Andy Galpin?

  So, this is a difference of, I would say, it's not that

• 1:50:06Andy Galpin?

  folks that are in a different position than I am are liars. That's not how science works. You can't, they can't fake data. I choose to assume that they're all

• 1:50:17Lewis Howes?

  Doing their best, yeah.

• 1:50:18Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, of course. It's a difference of opinion of what is an actionable piece of evidence versus not. So some people think they'll see evidence in, say, an animal study, and that is actionable. Well, in this particular case,

• 1:50:34Andy Galpin?

  we can't say differently. I can't tell you what's going to worsen aging.

• 1:50:39Andy Galpin?

  I don't have any evidence to suggest it makes it worse.

• 1:50:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:50:41Andy Galpin?

  I don't have any, it's very hard to do a human longevity study. So they say, hey, look, there's no downside, there's a plausible upside, it's worth the risk.

• 1:50:50Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:50:51Andy Galpin?

  I say, well...

• 1:50:54Andy Galpin?

  You have a plausible upside, you have no risk, but your plausibility is questionable. The things that are working in the animal don't carry over to the human, which we've seen in other things. I don't think it does anything. So it's simply a matter of what you choose to be actionable or not. You move that up to the human trials. I think where it differs is this. Let's say, I'm making this up, but let's say there was a study on fasting in animals and it showed it worked. And then someone were able to do a magical 60-year trial in humans and it showed it didn't. Well, if the people then continue to push the animal stuff saying it worked, then that's malpractice, that's misinformation. Because you have evidence in humans that challenged that thesis and it showed it clearly didn't work. That's not the case.

• 1:51:38Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:51:38Andy Galpin?

  Right now it is. This is the only level of evidence we have.

• 1:51:41Lewis Howes?

  We're seeing that it's working here with these animals, and so it could work.

• 1:51:45Andy Galpin?

  I think the rest of the evidence stacked on top of that, and my thought is, this is not going to carry over to humans.

• 1:51:51Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 1:51:52Andy Galpin?

  I don't think it is. They think it does. And that's the differentiation.

• 1:51:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 1:51:57Andy Galpin?

  We see this with, in the case of the fat loss, we have carried these, not we, but scientists have collected, have run these trials on humans and it did not work. And so that's why I'm very firm in that one. Because we've run those experiments in the humans and it didn't work.

• 1:52:10Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:52:11Andy Galpin?

  And to me, then, to use mechanism study, or animal or cell culture models, or yeast models, or anything like that, in the face of humid evidence that's not just observational, to me now it's like, what are you doing here? Like, we have good evidence in humans. These studies could be wrong and other stuff, so like, you don't need to change your career or anything. But to me, I'm going to, the message I will send then is, hey, like, this is not a necessary thing. It's not particularly special or advantageous. But this is a moving field.

• 1:52:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:43Andy Galpin?

  No question about it. So we don't know per se what matters for fat loss.

• 1:52:50Andy Galpin?

  Consistency, number one, right? Not within your timing, but if you don't stick to some principles, whatever those principles are, it's not going to work, right? So, we always say like, the number one thing for fat loss is adherence. Whatever your plan is, if you don't do it, it's like, you're out the gates. The vast majority of people simply don't adhere. So, conversation over.

• 1:53:08Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:53:09Andy Galpin?

  Just like, can we work on that side of the equation? Then, then that really matters. There's a lot of other reasons I love fasting, for like, really fun stuff, but we have done this.

• 1:53:18Lewis Howes?

  So, you like it, you do it, you recommend it for certain things.

• 1:53:21Andy Galpin?

  I think, I think the message, though, that you have to do it to improve your longevity, I think is wrong.

• 1:53:25Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Well, I don't think it's have to to do that, but I've seen there's benefits.

• 1:53:29Andy Galpin?

  I don't think it will. I'll even say further, I don't think it will age in your longevity at all. I don't think that there is, as a general rule, a positive needed effect of aging, or of fasting.

• 1:53:41Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:53:42Andy Galpin?

  I think there is a positive needed effect of caloric control. Like, that, that seems to be pretty clear.

• 1:53:48Lewis Howes?

  So, less calories.

• 1:53:49Andy Galpin?

  Controlled calories.

• 1:53:50Lewis Howes?

  Controlled calories can help you live longer.

• 1:53:52Andy Galpin?

  You don't see people at 105 at 400 pounds, like, you're just not gonna see that stuff. If fasting is your method of that, fantastic.

• 1:53:59Lewis Howes?

  I see what you're saying.

• 1:54:01Andy Galpin?

  Great. And we've, I've done studies, so, 2010, I worked with a guy named Per Tesh, very famous muscle physiologist in Stockholm. And we studied athletes that were 80 years old or more, so 80, 90 year old athletes. So, these were people that were Olympic and world champions in the 1940s and 50s. And they have not stopped competing.

• 1:54:19Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:54:20Andy Galpin?

  Skiers.

• 1:54:21Lewis Howes?

  Skiers?

• 1:54:22Andy Galpin?

  Yep. They have a race over there, which is like their equivalent of the Boston Marathon, but it's the ski version. So, thousands of entrants a year.

• 1:54:30Lewis Howes?

  You're talking about, not downhill scheme, but.

• 1:54:33Andy Galpin?

  Cross country.

• 1:54:33Lewis Howes?

  Cross country scheme, yeah. You're not breaking legs. Breaking hips when you fall.

• 1:54:38Andy Galpin?

  Yeah. The best in the world are doing two hours.

• 1:54:42Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:54:42Andy Galpin?

  You know, the average person, four to five. So, it's like a rough cultural equivalent. So, these folks were, have done that race for 40 to 50 consecutive years. They've not stopped competing, right? They're entering these things. And we've, we've gone over there, we've taken blood, we've taken muscle samples, we run VO2 maxes on them, like, the whole shebang, right? So, these are the most successful folks. In fact, we broke an unofficial official record of, we had a 92 year old with a VO2 max, close to 40 milliliters per kilogram per minute, which is the, what like, an average college kid would be.

• 1:55:12Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:55:13Andy Galpin?

  Outrageous.

• 1:55:14Lewis Howes?

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:55:16Andy Galpin?

  Yep. These folks are not fasting.

• 1:55:19Lewis Howes?

  Well, they can't when they're competing at that high level also.

• 1:55:23Andy Galpin?

  Maybe, maybe not, right?

• 1:55:24Lewis Howes?

  If you're not training like that.

• 1:55:26Andy Galpin?

  Totally.

• 1:55:26Lewis Howes?

  You wouldn't be able to, but I think for the average.

• 1:55:28Andy Galpin?

  So to me, I'm like.

• 1:55:29Lewis Howes?

  Who's sitting around all day and not moving their body.

• 1:55:31Andy Galpin?

  Yep. I guess my point here is I don't think you're gonna get to 90 super well if that training part is not a piece of the equation.

• 1:55:40Lewis Howes?

  You need the training part.

• 1:55:41Andy Galpin?

  You gotta have the training part, right?

• 1:55:42Lewis Howes?

  And so with your training, you're gonna be eating.

• 1:55:44Andy Galpin?

  A little more.

• 1:55:44Lewis Howes?

  You can't be, yeah.

• 1:55:45Andy Galpin?

  Totally. So those folks.

• 1:55:47Lewis Howes?

  So it depends where you're at and that's your son.

• 1:55:49Andy Galpin?

  Yeah. So all of these, again, need to be moved forward as viable options. Now, I'll even say this. If you would've asked me this question eight years ago, I would've, I would've probably tried to convince you that there are negative effects of fasting.

• 1:56:05Andy Galpin?

  I was wrong. I think it's very, we have some athletes that'll even do it.

• 1:56:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:11Andy Galpin?

  And be fine. You can clearly do it. So I've changed my position on that piece a lot, but to think that it is a requirement for fat loss, no. Because when we've tested any number of athletes and looked at things like metabolic efficiency or metabolic flexibility, these are grossly misconstrued in the pop culture. Metabolic flexibility is not what most people think it is to me. It is very trainable. It can be moved. It is very, very important. And you do not at all have to go on a low carbohydrate diet or fast at all to become really effective at burning fat.

• 1:56:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:48Andy Galpin?

  Burning fat is also not the greatest proxy for fat loss.

• 1:56:53Lewis Howes?

  What is the best thing to do to burn fat and for fat loss then?

• 1:56:57Andy Galpin?

  So there's no single best thing, right? It's gonna depend on you. So I'll give you some things. Okay, I have a lot of videos you can go if you wanna see this entire breakdown of metabolism. But think about it very quickly this way.

• 1:57:12Andy Galpin?

  Carbohydrates and fat are the primary places you're gonna get energy from, right? And think about this as in general carbohydrate is there for faster time, less energy per molecule, per weight. However, it's less. This is important. Carbohydrate is more oxygen efficient than fat. But the total net energy per gram of fat is far higher, like tenfold. If you're concerned with fat loss, it's not about burning fat. Because if you burn a ton of carbohydrate, you have to restore the carbohydrate some way. And you can't, it's difficult to convert fat into carbohydrate.

• 1:57:53Andy Galpin?

  But here's what happens. If you burn more fat, if you eat more fat, if you eat more fat, you're going to burn more fat because you've given your body more fat. But you're also gonna store more fat. Right. Because you're giving yourself. More fat. Right? If you eat more carbohydrates, you're going to burn more carbohydrates, but you're going to? Burn more. Store more carbohydrates. Store. So how do we burn it then? Cool. All you have to do is make sure the total balance of two of them is lower than what you're burning. It doesn't matter. If you want to keep the carbohydrates up and the fat low, fine. You want to keep the fat high and the carbs low? Fine. You want to keep them both like kinda low? It doesn't matter. In terms of actual fat loss, six months or six weeks or whatever down the run,

• 1:58:38Andy Galpin?

  it doesn't matter. We can play games by giving you food before your workout and bias is what we call biasy energetics. So if I want you to burn more fat, I'm gonna give you more fat before your workout. But you know what's gonna happen? You're gonna store more fat. Yeah. I'm gonna give you carbohydrates in the direction. If I need the energy faster, like in a sport like a 100 meter dash track and field, we're gonna hedge towards carbohydrate. If we want to do a long prolonged exercise, that time doesn't matter, like your marathon, we're gonna go more towards. Now, a fast marathon is still gonna be carbohydrates. A fast marathon, even a two hour marathon is still 85% carbohydrates. If we're doing a six hour marathon, what should I be eating before? You can do, you have the bandwidth to do whatever you want. There's a lot of.

• 1:59:21Andy Galpin?

  I'm not trying to, I'm just trying to get through it. So what happens is because it's regulating these places, your body's gonna say if we have excess fat come in, we're gonna burn some of it as fuel as we can, but we're also gonna store more because we have excess, right? So this de novo lipogenesis, this ability to take extra carbohydrates, and then the leftover ones get stored as fat, is very difficult to do. What happens is you just store them as carbohydrates. So imagine this, you had too many carbs. This is how carbs make you fat, by the way. It's not that those things get converted into fat. That's a very difficult process. You're gonna take a bunch of those carbohydrates and you're gonna store it. You're gonna max out muscle. And you're gonna max out blood glucose. And you're gonna max out the liver. And then what happens to the rest?

• 2:00:05Andy Galpin?

  Well, it says, hey, any little bit of fat that we're burning right now, turn it off. Because we have so much extra carbohydrate. We're only going, and so you become very carbohydrate burning, doing things like this, what we're doing, which should be a very fat dominant thing, because we don't need energy quickly right now. So the excess carbohydrate ingestion is not converting into fat. It's simply lowering the rate of fat burning.

• 2:00:31Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 2:00:33Andy Galpin?

  Ingestion of over fat does the same thing in the opposite direction. So this is how it's gonna lead to excess storage of actual fat. It's not that you're converting one from the other. It's the fact that it's regulating, or what we call partitioning, total utilization. So you have the bandwidth for fat loss to do whatever you want. So the idea of metabolic flexibility is when you need energy quickly, you're gonna move towards the carbohydrate side. But when you don't, you're gonna be able to be really good at the other side of the equation. You do not need to fast. You do not need to have lower carbohydrates to get good at fat burning. That's complete garbage.

• 2:01:12Lewis Howes?

  What do you need to do?

• 2:01:13Andy Galpin?

  You need to be able to be good at fat burning. If you wanna get better at it, can you, here's a quick test. If you can wake up in the morning and go like for a 30-minute jog, without food, and like you feel fine, maybe you're hungry, but you feel fine, then you're probably decent at fat burning. If you are a complete wreck and you can't get 15 feet, then you're probably very poor at using fat as a fuel source. So if we have you do like a time trial on whatever thing you do, and you just, you tank, you should have more than enough energy. You might be hungry because you're used to eating breakfast, but you don't have, your blood sugar's not gonna be low. You have way more than enough blood sugar to do what you're going to do. So that's a very easy litmus test. If you wanna push that ability.

• 2:01:56Andy Galpin?

  You can practice fasting. It will work. You don't have to. You can get simply better at doing things like nasal only.

• 2:02:05Lewis Howes?

  Breathing.

• 2:02:05Andy Galpin?

  Endurance stuff, right? So do whatever it takes, breathe through your nose only. You can train, you can do a little bit of fasting training. You don't have to. You could work on simply eating fat before your workouts.

• 2:02:16Lewis Howes?

  Not carbs.

• 2:02:17Andy Galpin?

  Push that system.

• 2:02:18Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 2:02:18Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, right? Like, all of these things are very easy to work. And we've had athletes that have problems at the side, too. They're so good at fat burning that they're slow starters. So we have to work on their ability to use carbohydrates. So we push that into the spectrum. So it's very easy to do, to move, well, conceptually, it's easy to do.

• 2:02:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 2:02:38Andy Galpin?

  It doesn't mean it's gonna work. And it's gonna be a little bit of a struggle for those folks.

• 2:02:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:43Andy Galpin?

  So that's generally how you can get fat burning done. It's, movement can work, but you don't have to. Diet is your biggest.

• 2:02:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:52Andy Galpin?

  Player there, no question.

• 2:02:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:54Andy Galpin?

  The last thing I'll say about that is, energy control is real. If you are crushing your energy control with stimulants, you can just guarantee a loss of physiological function. So if you're in this situation, okay, I'm doing 10mg or 5mg of melatonin at night. Okay, great, fine, because I can't sleep. Wake up the next morning, and I'm doing stimulants, whatever, however you want to justify them, all day. And I ask, how's your sleep? You're like, pretty good. And I ask, how's your energy? Pretty good. And we look at physiology, I'm like, well, your physiology's not very great. I feel fine. Well, you don't actually feel fine. You're just cycling drug to drug to drug to drug to drug to drug.

• 2:03:36Andy Galpin?

  And I'm not against either one of those things, right? But you're sort of blinding yourself a little bit, because if I take either one away.

• 2:03:43Lewis Howes?

  How are you gonna feel?

• 2:03:45Andy Galpin?

  You feel awful. You can't, oh, no energy. Okay, great. So you're actually not very good at producing energy. You're very good at giving something else to produce energy for you. That's not an optimal physiological state.

• 2:03:57Lewis Howes?

  That's not good, yeah.

• 2:03:58Andy Galpin?

  Optimal physiological state is you can't sleep fine without anything. You can perform fine. Maybe we're a little bit better when we use them. And now these things give us like, a little bit of extra juice. But that's a difference between taking us from really good to some extra juice to like, I can't function.

• 2:04:11Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 2:04:12Andy Galpin?

  And I can't tell you how many labs we've had come back recently where people have Next morning melatonin concentrations that are 10 or 100x upper range limits. They're walking around sedated, even though melatonin is supposed to have like a 60 or 90 minute half life, right? It should be gone fairly quickly. They're taking so much of it. In fact, a study came out very recently showing the actual amount of melatonin in your supplements can range up to 100,000x what you think you're taking. So you think you're taking 3mg.

• 2:04:43Lewis Howes?

  But it's more.

• 2:04:44Andy Galpin?

  Way more.

• 2:04:44Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 2:04:45Andy Galpin?

  And so people are walking around sedated and that's where they're going to nootropics and more coffee and more nicotine, which again, I'm not, it's any of those things. But like, we have to have a little bit more control. The easiest way around all this stuff is like, eat a simple diet, drink water, regulate stress, sleep. Okay, let's come back to baseline. What do I feel like when I'm not taking microdosing LSD? Like, what do I take when I'm not?

• 2:05:08Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 2:05:09Andy Galpin?

  Like when I'm not doing?

• 2:05:10Lewis Howes?

  Smoking weed every day, yeah.

• 2:05:11Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, like.

• 2:05:12Lewis Howes?

  Having gummies and this and this.

• 2:05:13Andy Galpin?

  Totally, right? And then you can go, okay, actually, like, I was just regulating everything coming in. And now we can start playing here and here.

• 2:05:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:24Andy Galpin?

  We have then generally pulled people off of things more than we've put people on things.

• 2:05:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:05:28Andy Galpin?

  Because you just lose any sense of normalcy, which is a challenge.

• 2:05:32Lewis Howes?

  Lots of information here, Andy. You've got a YouTube channel with a lot of this stuff that people want to nerd out and go into the data. They can see all your YouTube videos there. Your Instagram is really fun to check out. A lot of good tips there. You've got a book as well, which is about getting unplugged, right? It's evolving from technology to upgrade your fitness performance and consciousness. I wanted to go more into consciousness and exercise and things like that, but I think maybe we'll have to have you come back on next time to give people some, some time to digest this. But you also have your lab. I don't know if people are able to go to the lab if they're in, if they're in LA. It's more for just high-performance athletes, but.

• 2:06:12Andy Galpin?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:13Lewis Howes?

  You've got a whole center there where you're sharing the research online from the lab, which is really cool. People can go to andygalpin.com, your YouTube as well. That's just Andy, Dr. Andy Galpin?

• 2:06:26Andy Galpin?

  I think it's just Andy Galpin.

• 2:06:27Lewis Howes?

  Andy Galpin was there. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. We'll have it all linked up as well. How else can we be supportive to you today? What can we do to support you besides checking out your site and all the information you have?

• 2:06:39Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, I think the, a couple of things.

• 2:06:44Andy Galpin?

  So my YouTube page, a little bit more context there. I built that a number of years ago, simply because I thought it's kind of weird how people want and need general exercise and nutrition information. And I can only do this 35 students at a time and I'm waiting, like this is just not a thing. So I just thought like, can I just start taking all of my university lectures?

• 2:07:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:06Andy Galpin?

  All the seminars I give, all the private speaking engagements, and can I just put them up on YouTube for free? Turns out you can.

• 2:07:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:12Andy Galpin?

  So that's all it is. So you can take any of my graduate level courses in strength and conditioning, nutrition, all these things, or some of the more advanced talks I give. Like I just put them up there and 5, 25, 55 minute physiology ones. That's just all I just pay. I don't have like a, I don't have a company or anything that does that. So that is a Patreon model.

• 2:07:32Lewis Howes?

  Cool.

• 2:07:33Andy Galpin?

  So if anyone wants to support that, I take that money and I have an intern actually, a student, and he's like, I know how to produce videos, I know how to post YouTube.

• 2:07:40Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 2:07:41Andy Galpin?

  And we're actually trying to up the ante on that quite a bit to make them way more user friendly and stuff and provide notes and all that stuff. So that's probably the easiest way. If you're more of the high-ticket person and you're interested in supporting research, we are, you know, our lab is a nonprofit, so we can get a nice kickback on lab donations, so.

• 2:08:01Lewis Howes?

  That's great, man.

• 2:08:02Andy Galpin?

  That's always a.

• 2:08:03Lewis Howes?

  Something you need, more resources.

• 2:08:05Andy Galpin?

  Yeah, we don't fund, this type of research is not fundable. We're not making drugs or we're not doing this.

• 2:08:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:08:10Andy Galpin?

  So.

• 2:08:11Lewis Howes?

  They can go to your website and learn more about that, right? Where they can donate?

• 2:08:15Andy Galpin?

  Yes. I don't have any of that stuff up there now.

• 2:08:18Lewis Howes?

  You'll put it up there after this talk.

• 2:08:20Andy Galpin?

  And then that'll have links to our other programs, so the Absolute Rest Program from Sleep Tech. I'll make sure that gets up on the website.

• 2:08:29Lewis Howes?

  Absolute Rest, yeah.

• 2:08:30Andy Galpin?

  Our Rapid Health Optimization Program, which is our.

• 2:08:34Andy Galpin?

  The executive programs, if you want kind of the athlete thing and then you want someone to take you through the training and stress reduction or breathing, whatever it is we find. So rapid health optimization program. And then if you are more the athlete type, that we have our biomolecular athlete. That's outside of the equation.

• 2:08:52Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 2:08:52Andy Galpin?

  We can run all those labs and everything and get you your complete biomolecular blueprint and then provide solutions.

• 2:08:59Lewis Howes?

  Oh, that's cool. So you can run labs for people?

• 2:09:01Andy Galpin?

  We can.

• 2:09:01Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. I love it.

• 2:09:03Andy Galpin?

  It's not a high throughput thing.

• 2:09:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:06Andy Galpin?

  There's a waiting list.

• 2:09:06Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure, sure. Start off that waiting list.

• 2:09:10Andy Galpin?

  Depends on how are you, are you up sometimes?

• 2:09:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I know. I get skipped out live, yeah.

• 2:09:14Andy Galpin?

  We had a couple just jump in, I'm like, wow, you're the, we're the number one player in the world in multiple major American sports.

• 2:09:20Lewis Howes?

  Nice.

• 2:09:20Andy Galpin?

  Yeah. They got to jump the line.

• 2:09:22Lewis Howes?

  They'll get it there tomorrow.

• 2:09:23Andy Galpin?

  No offense, but they got to jump.

• 2:09:25Lewis Howes?

  I love this Andy. A couple of final questions for you, we'll wrap things up. This is called the three truths. Imagine it's your last day on earth many years away, you get to live as long as you want to live and you accomplish all your dreams, but for whatever reason, you got to take all of your information with you or it's no longer around. All your content, your work, your books, your videos, this, it's gone for whatever reason. But you have three lessons you get to share with the world, three truths that you would leave behind from all of your life experience, knowledge, research, whatever it might be, as profound or simple as the truths might be, what would you say are those three truths for you?

• 2:10:03Andy Galpin?

  Wow, that's an interesting one.

• 2:10:08Andy Galpin?

  Number one would be,

• 2:10:12Andy Galpin?

  I'm just gonna steal this, I just think I'm gonna say ownership.

• 2:10:17Andy Galpin?

  I'm a huge, huge proponent of that. I don't think I need to explain that more, you know what I mean. Your listeners should probably heard people talk about that. Number two.

• 2:10:29Andy Galpin?

  I'll say, I'll just keep it one word, perspective. And what I mean by that is,

• 2:10:41Andy Galpin?

  truth is not as common as you think. We live in gradients. And what seems to be completely true for you may not be completely true for somebody else because of their perspective. And we need to understand that science is not a thing that produces proof. It's very difficult, borderline impossible to prove.

• 2:11:02Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 2:11:03Andy Galpin?

  All we do is play on levels of certainty.

• 2:11:07Andy Galpin?

  If you go back to any parts of our conversation, there are some of those things where I'd say I have tremendous certainty on.

• 2:11:13Andy Galpin?

  You need water to perform very well, right? And you need an X amount of water, I'm pretty certain about that. Other things we've talked about, I start to lose, I may still be like, yeah, this is true, but I have less certainty and I'm willing to entertain ideas of movement. I'm probably not willing to entertain an idea that you don't need water.

• 2:11:32Andy Galpin?

  There would have to be tremendous evidence for me to even not swipe right by your post.

• 2:11:37Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 2:11:37Andy Galpin?

  I'm not listening. I'm not listening or reading a post about how all you need to eat is liver.

• 2:11:44Andy Galpin?

  The burden of proof there is so extraordinary, like, maybe I'm wrong about that in 10 years, I'll see, but most likely I'm not. Because so many of those things come and you're most likely to be right, most times, up here. But then there's some things where I'm like, yeah.

• 2:11:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, so perspective is key, yeah.

• 2:12:00Andy Galpin?

  You have to understand where you're at on that spectrum. The last one would be,

• 2:12:07Andy Galpin?

  I'll call it intentionality.

• 2:12:08Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 2:12:10Andy Galpin?

  And what I mean by that is,

• 2:12:14Andy Galpin?

  and this is part of the stuff we got to at the end of my book, that

• 2:12:18Andy Galpin?

  we talked about, are you pushing towards adaptability or pushing towards optimization? Are you, most people don't even realize that every action you're doing is moving you in one of these directions. So if you can just zoom back a little bit and start to think through, I'm gonna change this one, okay, I'm gonna explain this better, I'm gonna call this first principles.

• 2:12:36Lewis Howes?

  First principles?

• 2:12:37Andy Galpin?

  First principles. Are you familiar with first principles thinking?

• 2:12:40Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 2:12:40Andy Galpin?

  Okay, I'm surprised, it's a very common thing in the business leader space.

• 2:12:48Andy Galpin?

  So first principles is a line of thinking that suggests go back to the very foundational beginning, go all the way to the bottom to where there is no more assumptions and you just simply work your way up. Anytime you see an assumption, you stop and you confirm your case is in fact true there. And this works so well for managing relationships. You can already see the application there, right? Where are we going to go down to? What fundamental truth do we agree upon? Let's go back, wherever that is, if that's a very bottom level, we're going to agree upon that truth. And we're just going to go to the next level. Do we agree here? Yes. And you're just going to walk up until you find a place of like, and you'll just, you

• 2:13:29Andy Galpin?

  will, you'll be so shocked with how many assumptions are baked in to things you're just assuming. So questioning those assumptions and going back and it works for relationship stuff. It works for nutrition. It works for, should I be doing this today? It works for, do I really have to go see this person? Do I really have to? Just come back to first principles. Where's the fundamental thing that we agree upon? And then where is the assumption breaking down? And you'll just be shocked, like, I didn't realize I assumed.

• 2:14:00Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:14:01Andy Galpin?

  You were willing to put your career in front of your wife.

• 2:14:09Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:14:10Andy Galpin?

  You weren't, okay, like this is, now I see why you're mad that I gave you this recommendation because I thought here, you didn't, we missed. So go back to the very first principles and when you're solving problems, whether it's with your company, or it's physiology, or new tech, or whatever it is, just start there and walk up. This is Elon Musk, right? Everyone said you can't make batteries, blah, blah, blah. He's going back to me, okay, what do we assume? You're assuming we can't make batteries cheap. Why? Well, you can't. Why? Can't. Why? Oh, we got an opportunity, right? That's all he did.

• 2:14:40Lewis Howes?

  If you could, how would you do it?

• 2:14:41Andy Galpin?

  Totally, right? This is, I could give you examples of scientists in our field who you think things are just like, they're in our textbooks and I've taught. I give you so many examples of things I've taught over the years and I'm like, oh.

• 2:14:53Andy Galpin?

  I just assumed that was written in the book, right?

• 2:14:55Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:55Andy Galpin?

  And then somebody came along and said, where's that paper?

• 2:14:58Lewis Howes?

  Questioning the assumption.

• 2:14:59Andy Galpin?

  Where's the paper? Where's the first paper? You go back and you're like, actually, this is shown one time, 1970, in six people. And then it just like...

• 2:15:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:06Andy Galpin?

  That was, that totally changed the way we train most like hypertrophy. Brad Schoenfeld just did that, right? And it's like, we have so many people, you're like, I never thought to assume.

• 2:15:16Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 2:15:18Andy Galpin?

  So just really go back to first principles thinking and...

• 2:15:21Lewis Howes?

  I love it. My man, I love this. I want to acknowledge you, Andy, for the, the constant search of moving the human body forward. You know, the constant research that you're diving into, the constant testing and tweaking, the optimizing of humans. I think it's really cool that you have a lab that you get to work with great athletes all the time, college athletes, pro athletes, and see what's working for the rest of us. So, thank you for doing all the work and, and the research and diving in and publishing this information and making it available for us as well for free on, on YouTube and everywhere else. So, really appreciate it, Andy. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

• 2:16:02Andy Galpin?

  Exceeding your own expectations.

• 2:16:06Andy Galpin?

  Whatever your coverage is, when you outkick it for yourself, I think you've done great.

• 2:16:10Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 2:16:11Andy Galpin?

  That's all I'm gonna say.

• 2:16:12Lewis Howes?

  My man, appreciate it.

• 2:16:13Andy Galpin?

  Thanks, Andy.

• 2:16:14Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now, it's time to go out there and do something great.