 Our next caller is Connie from North Carolina. Hey Connie, how can we help you? Hey guys, thanks for taking my call. I was wondering if you had any advice for someone who frequently gets migraines or headaches from deadlifting and squatting. So I'm pretty new to weightlifting. I've been deadlifting and squatting pretty consistently the past six weeks. I've seen pretty good gains. So my squats gone up about 80 pounds, deadlift about 100 pounds. And I feel really good with the exception of these random headaches and migraines that I've been getting immediately after doing these two lifts. I've also been experiencing some neck stiffness or soreness. Sometimes the left side of my neck will go numb like a few days after the workout. And I've rechecked my form over and over. I've even gotten a couple of personal trainers from my gym to check my form. They actually said it looked pretty good. I know that I have like mobility issues in my ankles and feet. But yeah, I don't know what that would have to do with my neck. So any suggestions on where to go from here? Because I'm just really at a loss. Sal, doesn't Jessica battle with migraines? She does, but not like this. You know, it's interesting. Connie, by the way, I think you've won a couple shirts from us. I recognize your name. Is that true? I don't think that was me, but it might have been my sister. She's obsessed with you guys. So I'm a bit trucker lady. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. I recognize the last name. Okay, so interesting you're saying what you're saying, because I've actually had a few clients with exactly this same issue. And it was really tough for us to figure out what the problem was. But eventually we did come up with some stuff that started to help. So I got to ask you a few more questions before I can try helping out here. Number one, are you doing any caffeine before you work out? Not specifically. And in fact, so I'll usually go to the gym around five, five 30 before work. And I will have caffeine later in the day before I start my work day, but not before I go to the gym now. Okay. So, okay, so a couple of things you're going to have to juggle here. Because you work out so late, this may impact sleep later. So you're going to have to play with this. But caffeine before your workout actually could help. It could definitely help. Caffeine has got a positive effect on headaches typically. In fact, it's one of the ingredients. In excedrine. In excedrine, yeah, caffeine, I believe with aspirin. But what it does is it helps the blood vessels from expanding to... What's happening with the deadlift and the squat is you're building a lot of pressure in your head. And then the pressure is immediately released when you drop the bar. And I think it's that switch that's causing some of these problems. Caffeine can help. And so does how you're doing your lift. Now, not necessarily your form, but rather when you're doing the lift, usually the way I recommend people squat and deadlift is they take a deep breath in, they hold their breath, which braces the core. They do the lift. Then they take a breath in between reps. I'm going to tell you to not do that because I think that might be contributing to your headache. Are you doing that by the way? Don't feel bad. That's how you're supposed to do it. But are you doing that? I've never really done the queuing of the breath. In fact, I might be holding my breath. I have no idea. I don't really pay attention to my breath. I'm more just trying to focus on the muscle that I'm trying to target. Gotcha. When you're doing your lift, I want you to breathe out and try to be relaxed in your head and neck as you breathe out. This may affect how much weight you can lift, but so what? It's probably a better trade off than having a migraine. So as you're doing the lift, I want you to breathe like this. As you're doing the lift to prevent that pressure from building up in your head and causing that problem. I think one of the things that I like about this is have you tried increasing your sodium intake before your workout? I have not. I'm seeing a nutritionist right now who's like, back off the sodium. Oh, yeah. In fact, did these headaches start when you started backing off on the sodium? It's hard to tell because I've started around the same time. So I started the workouts around the same time. Yeah. That's the nutritionist. One of the things that I remember clients that had some similar and the tooth one was actually sodium and hydration, like drinking water and then sodium. And then the other one was she had really locked up traps. And so she was getting like tension headaches. And then when she would load the bar on there and we had squat or overhead press, we would get these migraines that would flare up every once in a while. So what I'd have to do is before we'd ever go and exercise this kind of release of the cross ball to kind of open her up and relax that before we go into doing any movements where those would fire like crazy. So those are the two and my experience that I've dealt with that helps. So hydration, sodium, which Sal already alluded to and Justin. And then the other thing is, I don't know if you have really, really tight traps. Sometimes when you have really tight traps, you get those tension headaches, especially when you load a bar on your traps. I've also had clients that had really bad TMJ, which also had contributed to, you know, neck strain and lots of tightness in that direction, which then inevitably led to headaches as well. But yeah, that's more, you know, tension related. So, but definitely hydration is something to consider, you know, as far as like what I've found with my clients that really, once they emphasize that a lot, it did help. Now, Connie, I forgot to ask you why your nutritionist is having you reduce your sodium. Do you have high blood pressure? No. I mean, I tried to get her to give me an answer because I did hear you guys say it was good, especially with weightlifting to have higher sodium. And she just was like, yeah, don't do it. Do you have a, do you eat a diet that's high in heavily processed foods or is it pretty much whole foods? Yeah, no, it's pretty whole food, pretty much whole foods. What a weird recommendation. That's based off of old science. Yes. Okay. So try this out. It's fine if you're, you don't have any contraindications. You're not eating a lot of heavily processed food. Try this. Okay. Try having, now we work with element, which is a, you know, a Rob Bulls company makes electrolytes. It's a thousand milligrams of sodium. Tastes really good. Try drinking a packet of that about 30 minutes before you work out. Take a little bit of caffeine. If you, if you want, you could start with like 60, 70 milligrams, 100 milligrams, even 50 milligrams before you work out. And then try the breathing while you lift and see if that makes a difference. I have, I bet it would make, if it doesn't at least get, if it doesn't at least help, it might even get rid of the migraines that you're getting when you're doing the squats and the deadlifts. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. I wanted to mention too, I do wear a mask at the gym because it's required. I don't know if that's necessarily relevant. It's not helping the cause. Yeah. I mean, if you're doing high rep stuff, then yeah, I would say that it might be an issue, but if you're doing, you know, if you're, you know, 10, 12 reps, I don't think it's making that big of a difference. It's not helping though. That's for sure. Okay. Well, awesome. Yeah. I'll try some of these things. And I wanted to thank you guys so much for this podcast. I had so many paradigm shattering moments and you guys are awesome. So authentic. And I really appreciate it. Your help navigating such a confusing world as health and fitness. But yeah. Well, thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. This is like one of those ones where obviously very tough to do via podcast without like, you know, cause here's a, it's with a trial and error. Exactly. I mean, we all threw a ton of things. And hopefully she actually, you know, she listens to this, hopefully she teases some of those out and actually just applies one or two at a time and then sees what happens, applies the other one or two at a time to get to the bottom of it. Because if she throws out all the advice or throws all the advice that we gave at one time, she might not know exactly what the problem is. But those are the two things that came to my mind right away is the hydration, sodium thing I've dealt with that. And then the really tight traps before you go. Yeah. And again, without knowing more, it's hard, right? Cause maybe the dietitian or the person working on nutrition found, well, there might be a reason, right? There might be. Yeah. But she didn't say she knew. She said it wasn't blood pressure. I mean, who knows it could be something with her kidneys. So I don't, I want to make sure that. But the nutritionist isn't doing blood work. I don't know. I don't know if she's working with like in the hospital or what the deal is. I feel like if she was working with someone that was doing blood work, they would have gave back it. They would diagnosed her. Yeah. It could also just be based off of old crappy science, you know, where you're. It's my, my feeling. Yeah. It's just, it's just like that's one of the things they do. Oh, drop your calories. They just try and drop sodium. They just, you know, that's just one of the blanket things that they have. But I mean, I had a client who felt exactly the same way. We do the deadlifts and afterwards it would just all of a sudden start throbbing in her head. Yeah. She had her take 50 milligrams of caffeine before the workout and do her breathing. Yeah. Gone. Completely gone. It made that big of a difference.