 Next question is from Matt Ammo. How do stimulants affect the anabolic process in recovery? Oh, what a great question, because this is one of the answers that irritates people because it depends. If, so stimulants, what do they do to the body, right? They stimulate the central nervous system. Classic stimulant would be caffeine. You take caffeine, it produces an increase in catecholamine production. It makes you feel more alert, more energized. In a healthy state, if you're healthy, it's not gonna negatively affect hormones like testosterone, might actually improve insulin sensitivity in some people. It could fuel good workouts, reduce your, increase your pain tolerance so your workouts can be a little bit harder, might have some brain health properties. And so in that case, if you're healthy, nothing wrong with stimulants. The problem becomes or happens when your health is in the wrong, it's the wrong kind of health to throw stimulants at. If you are not getting good sleep, if you have a lot of stress, if your testosterone level is a low as a result of all this, or you're a woman and your period is off because of this, or your progesterone estrogen feels off, your libido feels off, you're just in a bad state of health, stimulants just increase the stress that you place on your body. It could cause cortisol to come up even higher, although temporarily you probably feel good from that extra cortisol. It is not a good thing to throw on that fire. It's like gasoline on the fire. And when I work with clients who are in this state of being one of the first things I do is I wean them off of stimulants because the stimulants are making everything worse. So it really does depend. It's a problem for a lot of people. I mean myself included in terms of like what that provides. I know how I feel after I'll have a stimulant or have some coffee. And what I've noticed is obviously the trends within our industry is to really cater to that into going into the workout. So it becomes ritualized where I have to have my pre-workout. I have to have this and then it's not working as much. So I have to add more and I keep adding more and more. And then you start having real negative results from that. And so you can really put yourself in a position where it's like I'm so reliant on this to produce these workouts for me but now I'm just adding more stress and more things that are really like taking me in a downward progression. I really don't think this was a big deal just 20 years ago. We now we live in the Starbucks generation and the pre-workout generation. Like 20 plus years ago, I mean it was coffee every now and then. And then there was probably a very small percentage of those people that even were probably drinking in that regular basis. And I would probably argue that it wasn't a lot of the fitness people that were. There was also the perception that coffee wasn't healthy which kind of prevented people from over there. Coffee-cigarettes combo. Yeah, exactly. So it really wasn't in the health and fitness space like it is. And like anything else in the health and fitness space we take something that has a little bit of benefit and good and we abuse the shit out of it until we find out like the unintended consequences. And I think this is becoming more and more of a conversation that I've had to have in just the last five years than I had to have in the previous 15 years. And I don't think it would have been that big of a deal except for it's just become so accepted now. It's become so accepted to start your day off with your pot of coffee at home. Then you get to work and you get your Starbucks and then you go to your before your pre-workout if you didn't already guzzle down a rock star before. And then you have a pre-workout before you know it you're having a thousand milligrams of caffeine every single day and you've worked your way slowly up to that and you don't even realize how stimulated you are, how much it's affecting your sleep, how much it's affecting your recovery. But yeah, I know it can. And to your original points, it does depend. It does depend on who I'm talking. Somebody who uses stimulants judiciously and intermittently, probably not a big deal. I try not to, I mean, I can't tell you it's probably been, I wanna say a month maybe or so since the last time I grabbed a pre-workout before but I have coffee on a very regular basis almost every day in the morning. But I'm aware of that, right? That I wanna intermittently use something that strong so I get the effects from it and then I don't get the adverse effects from having too much of it. What's the scientific term for adrenal fatigue? HPA axis dysfunction. Yeah, that's what the hypothalamus, the pituitary and the adrenals are just not communicating well and if your hormones are off, stimulants are not a good idea, both in men and in women. It can cause more problems, not directly necessarily. So it's not like the caffeine or the stimulant itself is causing a lowering of testosterone or issues with estrogen or progesterone necessarily, although in women there may be some estrogen issues but that's disputable. It's really through the indirect effect of increasing the stress in the body. So you're already stressed, then you add stimulant on top of that, it's lifting it up even higher so now the stress level is even higher through chemicals and then because of that, now things start to feel bad. Now here's the shitty part, if you're in this state of being, backing out of it can suck. Oh yeah. Because then you go through the whole like, oh my gosh, I feel like garbage. Withdraw. Yeah, because your body's adapted to having some of the stimulus. So here's a recommendation, cut your stimulant use, if you need to reduce it or need to go off for a second, cut your stimulant use down by a quarter and then once that feels okay, cut it down by another quarter until you're down to zero. Going cold turkey can be really, I know people who do it, but it can be real nasty. I've focused on drinking water too, that's a big priority for me. And honestly, if you're somebody who's wondering, like how do I know if I'm somebody who's being affected by this? I think it's just a good practice for anybody to wing on and off all the time. I just think that anything that you are doing in your life that you find yourself doing every single day, even if it's just two coffees, right? Like just two coffees a day or maybe you don't even do coffee, you just do pre-workouts every time before you work out. I mean, I think there's a healthy relationship with the ability to be able to just say, I'm not gonna use that for two weeks or three weeks. So forget just what it may be doing for muscle building. I think the psychological ability to do that, I think is important. Yeah, if you feel like you need it, like I have to have it. Right. Then you might want to visit it. That's your sign right there. It's like the conversation I used to have with clients that would refuse to drink wine. And I'd be like, listen, they refuse to eliminate wine. Yeah, refuse to eliminate wine in their diet. Like, oh, I'm not giving up my wine. It's just like, well, you might want to look into that a little bit. You know what I'm saying? Like if you think that you have to have your wine every single, and I'm not saying that you can't have things like that and enjoy it. I'm totally for somebody. I had a glass of wine last weekend. I'm not against having a glass of wine. But if you've become so dependent on any substance every single day, you've got to start questioning that about you. And nobody can do that better than yourself. And so you need to evaluate that and ask yourself if you claim that you need a pre-workout every single time you work out, there's probably a little bit of a problem there.