 Right before we got on the mics, we were actually talking about just research in general. And we now, because of social media, live in this world of absolutes, like, you know, oh, because of this study, we're certain that this must be true. And the truth is that we don't actually know as much as we allude to or think we know, especially, I think, on the higher performance level type topics, especially the direction like, I want to go with you today, because we get a lot of questions around recovery. And what is the most optimal way to recovery? Are all these recovery tools and supplements that are out there, what are best to take? Or what's the best protocol after lifting to? Should I add heat? Should I add heat? Should I not? Yeah, my favorite of the studies that show like, you know, this group of people did this recovery thing, and they showed remark reduction in, you know, CK levels, or mark reduction inflammation, and then people make the conclusion, it's better. It doesn't really work that way, not necessarily. It's really confusing, because if you look at, well, let's talk about research first. When you look at research, it's not of, we know, if I'm the consumer, it's I know what researchers think. And so if you've ever read a research paper, the conclusion portion is not the concluding statement of all things in that research. It is merely a way to label what the author's concluding statements are. So when the conclusion says, you know, this is the best, no, they are wrapping it up as a reader, you can consume it. It makes it easier for us. And by doing so, the researchers accidentally gave us the power to just assume that that means that they were correct or absolute in a very finite kind of answer. But really, if you read a research paper, and this might be actually pretty interesting for your audience too, there's a way to read a research paper as a layman. So if you're a layman, like, if you're a person who's not super versed in all the literature, and you want to pick up a research paper and read it, there's a way I go about doing it that I think works for a lot of people. You read the abstract to see, is this something I even want to read about? Now, what are you looking for in the abstract? Just of interest, you can read a title for all I care. I just want you to see if you'll actually continue reading. Okay. Because sometimes you might pick up a paper and you look at it and go, oh, you know, muscle protein synthesis. Ooh, this is on my alley. And then you read the abstract and one of the methods and they talk about muscle protein synthesis rates at molecular levels and you go, well, I don't know what any of that means. So maybe I shouldn't, or maybe I want to learn more about it. So if you want to learn more about it, then read the introduction because the introduction is like a mini lit review for the consumer to kind of get their bearing as to what's going to come next. And that they referenced key studies that their paper is building off of. So if you read a paper, say about jumping, we'll just talk about that. Easy to understand. Does squatting help me jump high? They might reference a paper that doing ballistic movements increases type two fiber types. And in that you go, oh, I don't really know what a type two fiber is, but obviously it's important for this paper. They'll reference it. So you actually might have to read more papers before you get to finish to read that paper, because you don't understand the literature background. It sets up then their hypothesis at the very end of the introduction. We think doing X might lead to this outcome. But in that, it's all based on the previous literature review that they kind of laid before you. So if you're just a consumer, go read the introduction and find cool papers or, you know, citations that you're not really aware of or don't know what they mean. So you can go dive a little bit deeper to understand the context in which the researchers framing the question. Isn't that really important too to know whether or not they cherry picked studies to actually form their hypothesis or conclusion? It is important, but that's more important for the discussion. So you can cherry pick to an extent, I don't want to say I'll say that loosely, studies, because you say, look, these studies are supporting that this hypothesis might be correct. And they might actually present the counter argument. There's some studies that say that's probably not going to be correct, but we think maybe it will be. So we have our introduction. The introduction doesn't give you the concluding statements. It kind of gives you the intro. Skip the methods unless you're versed in it. That's where people get confused. Oh, I don't understand, you know, certain type two muscle fiber staining properties and how they measure muscle fibers. I don't understand how they extract mitochondria to measure biogenesis and AMPK levels and whatnot. Cool. Skip it. But if it has an easy figure to understand, go read it. Like a correlation or sometimes things that are really easy to digest can give you a little bit of guidance. But as a layman, it's going to be hard for you to understand the specific methods, especially of molecular studies, on how certain things are done. Because they'll say like, oh, this was silver staining properties. You're like, oh, silver's involved. What the hell's going on here? Like, oh. There's some kind of staining. I have no idea. So it's very easy to get lost and you stop. So I said, okay, read the abstract, read the introduction. What doesn't make sense? Then you can actually, you can do one or two things. You can skip to the conclusion, read that. Okay, this is what they kind of found. Then go back into the discussion, knowing what they found because you didn't understand the results and methods maybe because of statistics and confusing stuff that you might not be familiar with. Cool. Read the conclusion because that kind of summarizes the key results. Then go back and read the discussion. And the discussion is really where you find out the authors are like, well, we think maybe kind of this might have happened. And then you read it and then you can go, oh, but I actually read the study that they didn't mention or maybe they didn't think connected. And that actually fits really well in here in supporting their idea. And I found that because I've read other studies in this area, but I know based on that introduction that this literature that I, you know, maybe I'm versed in jumping pretty well, I can pull from different areas or different anecdotal experiences that go into that discussion to give me an understanding. Now, how important when you're looking at studies, how important is things like sample size and the type of people that they tested? Why should people look at that as well? So good question. And first off, let me give you a little background. It's never going to be perfect because people don't tell you this, but those participants are normally college students who don't want to be there. They don't have a large timeframe because a lot of times it's done by a master's students or a PhD student who's just trying to find buddies that get in the, you know, the study. They are paying people sometimes to be there, which is why compliance is always fantastic. Like, oh, wow, these guys, they all worked out for 15 straight weeks. We could have people do that, like they're paying them like a hundred bucks to do it. So give and take with it. I think it's more of an understanding of if you have a big sample and the differences are significant, but maybe not massively significant, it's tendency. We think probabilistically that this worked. If there's a smaller sample, you better have a very tight correlation or a, they're going to use p-values to determine significance. The p-values aren't great because what happens if it's, you know, 0.05 is a kind of traditional p-value? What's a p-value? So that determines significance. It's the, if you were to plot two normal curves and ignoring stats, because I don't want to get people into that, you know, the old bell curve thing. Yeah, like if you got, like this group got, you know, added two pounds to their bench press, it's not really significant, you know, two pound increase or whatever. Well, it could be if the other group didn't put on any pounds at all. And so it's a difference, and they're actually moving to effect sizes now because effect size is like a spectrum, small, medium, large, probably not significant at all. And the way that works is the difference between the means. So I have one group that bench pressed and they did one routine and the other group did another bench press routine and they on average went up three pounds and they on average went up to zero pounds. And so it'd be the difference between the means, which is three divided by the population standard deviation. And based on that, you get a number like say 0.5 or 1.2. It just says, oh, that's a large difference or a large effect size. So a lot of these people noticed that it wasn't just an average because one guy added 15 pounds. And yeah, yeah. So it takes the standard deviation population, but in a p-value situation, it's either yay or nay. Was it significant? Was it not? And as a researcher, well, maybe it wasn't significant because the time wasn't long enough. You can do certain tests to figure that out, but maybe there is a tendency for it to be kind of significant. So that's like where the effect size is coming to play. If it's small, medium, large, very large, it's no longer, is it significant? Yes. Is it not? If it's not significant, throw it away. It says, well, this is a small effect, but maybe a lot of small effects add up to something beneficial in the long run. Yeah. So what you're dealing with is, oftentimes with studies, is a bit of a self-selection bias. The kind of people that tend to volunteer for studies tend to be college-aged males. Is that going to have an effect on the potential results of the study? It depends on what you're studying, but it's something to consider. I think it makes sense. The sample size, if they did a study with two people, they could have maybe picked the two people that are going to respond a certain way. If you have 200 people, then the results might be a little bit more applicable to average people because there's so many people in this study. And then controls, maybe you could talk about controls a little bit. What does that look like? What does that mean? So controls are hard, especially for intervention, because a lot of times, a control is a group that you want to compare your outcome to. So does bench pressing make you stronger than not bench pressing? So the control group would be, well, not bench pressing, pretty straightforward. But then it's like, well, maybe I want a group. I want to see, do they get stronger if they do four by eight or if they do a two by 10? So now you need a control group. How much does someone not change? Maybe, because you do that too because you don't want a group of young guys taking it to maturation index. So if they're like adolescents, well, if they go from 13 to 14 a year long study, how much of that strength was just because they got older? Right. They didn't even work out, but they got stronger. And so that's why some of these groups are controlled. What happens when you do nothing? If you're in a study because placebo is a thing, well, how do we placebo an intervention? Well, you can't put fake weights on the bar. So you just have them do nothing and tell them you're in a study. So you have a group that doesn't do anything. You have a group that does you a two by 10 and a group that does a four by eight. So you can compare, did my four by eight make me significantly or the effect size stronger than doing nothing? So you can compare that way. And then you compare the differences between the two groups of the two by 10 and the four by eight. But that requires more participants. It requires more compliance. It requires more researchers, more hours, more funding. And so regardless of how you shake it, research is tough because there's so many levels to imagine a master or even a PhD student who's doing their thesis or they're doing their dissertation, they have to have oversight from a major professor. So how many university major professors are out there working with other major professors who don't have to have oversight over the kids? So the guy who's the expert in it is spending his time not orchestrating the study unless they have a grant or funding from government and that gives them a lot of money and incentive to do that. They got to oversee these students to make sure they're doing it properly. And they're coming into the right statistical conclusions. They're helping them write the papers. They're helping them so on and so forth. So none of these studies and people like, oh, researchers are so stupid. Well, no, don't be stupid when looking at research. It's not their fault. Just understand the nature of the beast. Yeah, because oftentimes the way we interpret it, just for the average person, we either interpret it by a headline or we interpret it by what you said, which is what the researchers thought they saw, which oftentimes is wrong and headlines in particular are sensationalized. So they'll say things like compound found in chocolate shown to speed up the metabolism. And what you don't know is it's this animal study. The compound in question was 50 million times higher in this study. The chocolate company paid for it. Yeah, or something like that, right? Willy Wonka funded it. Now, what about meta-analysis? What is their importance and significance? What are they, first of all, and why are they important? So that's when they look at all the studies that have been done on a topic. And they might have inclusion or exclusion criteria. For example, I just posted one this morning, plugged myself on my page. Well done, fit in. It's looking at strength in regards to adaptations to elite athletes. And what they did was they looked at all the studies that have studied elite athletes, and they looked at what was the optimal set in rep range. So what happens is they go through, here's my hypothesis. I wanted to see the effective dose for someone to get stronger in this population. Now, all these studies, maybe kind of studied athletes in a little bit of a different way, but they have inclusion, exclusion criteria to determine whether it fits the fold of what it should be. And then they analyze based on all the studies, they study the studies. And so this is the one where people say, oh, this is, you know, the bee's knees, because it tells us all about everything in detail from all the studies and whether or not they actually run stats on the stats. Like they run, oh, this is significant. And if you guys like nutrition studies do it quite a bit, or these interventions work best, and typically strength conditioning studies don't get that much research. And so our funding is not as cool and effective for, you know, humanity. So the smaller sample sizes, but they try to study what all the research is leading us to. And this is great for guidelines, working guidelines, but guidelines. You shouldn't read a study and say, oh, you know, Dr. Matt Rea said that, you know, if I do four sets of, four sets of an eight sets of an exercise around, you know, roughly 80% of the one RM, that's the most optimal way for twice a week to get strength gains. Well, the research, you know, that's the stats say, but maybe they didn't test if they trained every day, or they trained this way. It's just a working guideline. Well, where does adaptation factor into all of this? Because that's a, that's a whole another piece that I feel like we, that people don't get addressed when talking about a study, because a study, typically, there's a window to the right is a timeframe. And although those things may be true in this controlled environment in real life, where you live longer than six months, and you've got to continue going on, what we know, and we talk about this because you keep referencing rep range, which is a perfect topic to give this as an example. You know, let's say that, you know, the four sets of eight is the best for building strength, like you, that's what we read and we find out. Well, yes, in a group that was trained for six weeks, you prolong that group for six months or a year, we may find out that actually, you know, five sets of 15 reps lighter weight will build more muscle because they got adapted to that first. Exactly. And so it's very complex when you look at anything ever. Let's just be honest. Looking at nutrition studies, looking at biochemistry, looking at performance, research gives us working guidelines. And so let's understand adaptation first, because if we have a concept and framework of adaptation, we can then take that and apply it to what we are attempting to understand. So adaptation and short, you have a stimulus, you have a response, the body mobilizes energy and it has to defend itself from the stress, and then you adapt. Now people say, oh, it's the general adaptation syndrome and a good friend Chase Phelps of mine sent me the original paper on that. And he goes, oh, by the way, I think we've kind of misinterpreted this. So general adaptation syndrome, you guys might have heard about quite a bit, which is, oh, you know, I have a stress response, catecholamines, cortisol is released, I deal with the stressor, and then I adapt and supercompensate. So I get to a level that was higher than before. Now the general adaptation response, and we'll get back to the question, but it's important we outline this, is a general response, keyword general. So whether it's training, whether it's stress in life and all this stuff that go into it, we have a stress response. So that's more of a systemic stress response. Exactly. And people take that and they go, oh, well, that must be how muscles work. Well, if you actually read the paper, Han Saley goes, well, there's a general response and there's a specific response, why if you do, you know, quad extensions, your biceps don't get bigger, your quad gets bigger. And so the general response helps orchestrate a specific response, but the specific response can buffer the general response. And so this is where it gets tricky. So imagine I get really strong. So I've been doing bench press, I have a general response, it's a stress. I do it over a year and I get really big pecs and I get jacked. And then Adam comes and lifts with me and Adam's never bench pressed before and I give him the same weight I give him that I've been doing for me. Well, it's going to destroy you, but it buffers me. So I don't have the same stress response because my specific system, which the stress has been applied to lifting weights by bench press, is very robust. Right. So skin getting darker from adapting to the stress of the sun is more of a specific response to buffer you from the general stress response of UV rays. Calluses and, you know, digging holes. Like if you remember the movie holes, you got to get calluses, why don't you dig enough holes? Great movie on progressive overload. How was the point they're trying to make? Exactly. It's a science movie. Oh man, I totally missed that. So you train a lot of real people. And the reason why I say that, and that's why that's so important is because you also look at and, you know, break down research and you're talking about the drawbacks of research. But I think when you do both, when you train people on a regular basis for long periods of time and you read research, then you can kind of piece that all together. You know, I've had issues in the past with what I would call fitness academia, which are the researchers who don't ever train anybody. And what they do is they take their research and they think that that's what applies to everybody. And oftentimes trainers answer questions with what they don't answer them with specific answers. We tend to answer questions by saying it depends. You know, what's the best rep range for me to build muscle? Oh, that depends. What are you doing now? I got a great example first. I just got off the phone with my buddy, a professional soccer goalie. And he called me up. I'm training him remotely. And so it's always tough when you do things remotely. You don't see him in person. And you don't know always what's going on. He goes, Hey, Max, you know, I was wondering if we could go twice a week training instead of three times a week. I said, Well, okay. Well, yeah. Well, I was kind of curious. Oh, I've been doing a lot of field work and I'm feeling good. And I get a little tired in the last workout. And I said, Well, one of us, the professional goalie and one of us isn't. I'm not. And you are. And if your field work is very important, let's not have you be tired for the field work. And so yes, I understand training is important and lifting weights and maybe three times a week might be more optimal for strength gains in a perfect world. But he's has a lot of general stress because he's doing the field work too. And so there's a point of it. Yeah, I want to give him a nice working guidelines. But if he says he's tired, I'm not a professional goalie. Like, yeah, you get paid the bills to do that. So let's keep you fresh to do that. Yeah. And so that's where it's being flexible in your model. How can I get information from the person and then make it fit them? I'm not going to try and force feed a program. So that goes back to the idea of adaptations. We look at adaptation. I have my little note card right next to me because I don't remember the names. I made a cool little graph and so I'll read on. All right. All right. Power point on the screen. No. So we have what's called a minimal effective dose. That's when you train and it's enough of a stimulus to get some type of adaptation. It's minimally effective. Then there is a maximally effective dose. So that is the optimal dosage for the optimal adaptation. Then there is a maximal adaptable dose. This isn't the optimal adaptation, but it's the most load and stress you can handle while still adapting. It doesn't mean you're actually adapting more. It's actually equivalent and this is theoretical, an adaptation to minimally effective. You're borderline doing too much. Is that overreaching? Almost. It's like threshold of it. Yeah. And so it's kind of like you're doing enough, you're adapting, but your body's spending a lot of energy to recover. And so let's cover a term if I go any further because it's important. This is how my mind works. It's completely erratic and I apologize. So it's something called adaptive energy. It's how much energy your body has to adapt to a stress. And this is important when we dive into recovery in a little bit. So think of it as like a currency. If I am just buying sports cars, well, I can use all my money to buy it, but if I got to pay for a rent, if I got to pay for shoes, I got to pay for food, well, I can't buy a Ferrari. I can only buy, you know, maybe a Nissan, whatever, because I only have so much currency to spend. That food, that the shoes, the rent, those are all other stressors on the body. Some of them unavoidable, some of them avoidable, that we delegate our currency to. Psychological stress takes a currency. We got to spend it, not get enough sleep. Well, that might be taking money out of the bank, right? And we can get enough sleep and we can add currency. And so if we think about this currency model, then we go, okay, a minimal effect of dose is where just my body has more room to adapt, but I don't want to spend all my currency there because maybe something else might be going on in my life. The maximal adaptive is I just spent the right amount. I stress the body enough. I adapted to the most optimal. And then the maximal adaptable dose is when I spend money to adapt. I actually spend a lot just trying to rebuild the system. So my currency is being spilled just to recover. Yes, I'm still adapting, but more could have been delegated to actually adapting if I didn't train so hard because working so hard to get back to baseline. Then there's a region of excessive stimulus, which is where you just train too damn much and just trying to get back to baseline over and over again. And then there's like a, that's called like the maximal tolerable dose. So can you just physically tolerate that dose? Beast mode. That's a problem with that, everyone. The most I can do without dying or running myself. And then there's a region of harmful stress, which is when you actually get hurt. And I guess before that, the initial, I said they curve, by the way, and I can share it with you guys who want to use it or what not to help. This is why, so I always say to people that my goal when I go into every workout is to do the least amount of work to elicit the most amount of change. And that mentality is different than, can I crush this workout? Yeah. What's the most I could possibly do and still get some product? No, the least amount. No, no, what they would say. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is the opposite of how I try and coach and teach people is that you want to do as little as possible and still gain the most from it. So that's where the difference between Olympians and everyday people are. So the Olympians say, you know what? I'm going to push a little bit further because I want to get the maximal adaptation. But anything more than maximal is a waste of time. Right. So you're always walking this fine borderline of safety versus progress. Is this really safe? Well, no one said high performance is safe because you're walking a very, very thin line. On the other hand, if you're an everyday person, why even bother risking going over that threshold? Because you're just wasting money at that point. Let's just do enough to get an adaptation. So I can train today. I can train tomorrow. I don't set myself back because now I set myself back for other life events too. Now, I think it's also important to communicate that this is a moving, this is a moving number or target, if you will, what the optimal amount of training is for you day one versus this week or day one versus day six or whatever is different than it might be in the future. So it's not, and it's important to communicate this because people get it fixed in their mind and they think, what do you mean? You know, when I worked out five days a week before, I was in the best shape of my life. So what do you mean this is too much now? So well, it's too much now because you're not sleeping as good or done shit for a year. You got a stressful job now or you're older or whatever. It's a moving, it's a moving target. Exactly. And that's why so at the place I work at resilience, because we have people wear wearables. It's like a whoop. People go, you know, why you wear a whoop? It's not going to tell you how to train. No, it's not. But it's going to give me more information and context that person for what that target has moved to for that day. And where can we, you know, cover some ground? We had someone who's a high level exec and they work, work, work, work and they get stressed out maybe. Well, let's mitigate some of the stress so they can train harder in the weight room. And we can use that as an educational feedback tool. And so what you've done before and training matters. So what load you can handle, what has happened acutely in that day, those two weeks, your nutrition, your sleep, and then what you plan to do in the future all affect that moving target. So people, when we read a research paper, we got to understand that's a working guideline. A lot of the times, you know, eight sets of a given muscle group at 85% is a good idea for high level athletes. But sometimes it's not. It's just knowing that this target moves. And when we read research, it is never we know. It's we know the researchers think this might be it. It's a very, very important distinction because I just watched a, I swear to God, took a picture of this before I left, I was in Denver news came up new study shows sleeping nine hours or more is a cardiovascular risk factor. Oh God, I can already tell you right now. Don't sleep. I can already tell you I can, I can guess why that's a shitty study. They probably had people in there that slept a lot because they were sick or because they were unhealthy or depressed. And they didn't take them out of the study. So it showed if you sleep a lot, you're going to get what's the relationship between recovery and adaptation, your body healing versus your body adapting and, you know, over or super compensating. So it's better. So recovery is a very monetized topic. I'll put that politely because recovery sounds cool. Oh, you know, let's recover from a hangover. Let's recover, you know, your lost goods. Let's recover from training. Recovery is always like a better thing, but it's not always better. And let me tell you why. So recovery, the way our body works, it's a hormetic environment. In other words, a little bit of bad causes some good to happen. That's good. If we don't allow any bad to happen, well, then no, no good can happen. Right. So how do you build a callus? You don't build a callus by not shoveling. Yeah, but not by wearing gloves. Yeah, right. You slowly ease into it. And so when we talk about recovery, there's different categories of recovery. There's a recovery category that's adaptogenic. So it augments adaptation. It wants to help bolster your adaptive gains, sleep, nutrition, well-timed saunas, maybe some supplementation based on your own, you know, maybe some creatine, some extra protein, all those adaptogenic in nature. They're trying to help you become, make your stimulus more potent. Then there are ones that are blunting. So things like an ice, a cryotherapy, excessive anoxin supplementation. Well, that might blunt the adaptation, but based on the time, it might be a good thing. Imagine if I had three basketball games in a rut. Yeah. I don't care about adapting. I care about playing my damn basketball game. So cryo and ice and maybe... I've always made that case for like double days of football. You know, it's like, I know I have to do this same insane amount of stress, like I repeat that, you know, the whole week. So I have to take care of this. And you want to be able... So what is your priority at the time? Is it the performance? Or is it the adaptation, the training? And that's a good way to look at it. Am I training or performing? If you're performing, you don't care about the adaptation as much because you're just trying to get to the next event. That's where you make your money. So when we look at recovery, I'll put a third category in there and that's the feel good category. Oh, we don't really know what it does, but it feels pretty good. So feeling good. It's probably not going to hurt. Massage. Yeah. Massage, soft tissue, even Norma text. Oh, it feels good. We don't really think it's going to cause much physiological harm. And so by nature, that's a feel good. It's adaptogenic. It helps you adapt because it helps you, you know, feel good. Relax and feel good. And that might just be as much as, you know, turning the system down. Like you said, relax. We're just calming down so we can adapt. Yeah. So I think of it like we, we talked about calluses. It's like you rub the skin off your hand. The skin healing and coming back would be recovery. The development of the callus would be the adaptation adaptation is to make you stronger so that you can withstand the same insult you had before. The recovery is just the healing process. And what we see a lot with people in the gym is they get stuck in this recovery trap where they break down, get sore, heal and then do it again, but they never, they never allow their body to or optimize their body to actually adapt. So they use the same weight every time they work out. They go, they get sore every single time they work out, but they never really improve because it's all about healing. And that's on that ends of maximal tolerable dose, right? They're just doing so much. They got to spend so much time just to get back to baseline. They're not adapting. Beast mode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so they're, is it safe to say that they're separate things? In other words, healing and adapting can be separate things. I think people think that the, that recovery is adapting. Healing is adapting. So I would call adapting, moving beyond baseline. Okay. And healing is restoring to baseline. So in the adapter process, you do go back to baseline and beyond. So you heal and more. And when you just recover back to baseline, you're just quote unquote, you know, healing, getting back to where you were. So here's an example. It's really easy. You have a castle. I like castles. I wish I had a castle. Right? Thanks. Yeah, pretty cool. Sports cars, castles. I like where you're going here. It's a pretty cool concept so far. I got castle. I was a big Lord of the Rings guy growing up. So it's an easy reference. We have an enemy come to the gate. They knock some of the wall down. And then I go, oh, well, you know, I only have so much resource to build the wall back up to what it was. So I'm not adapting. I'm just keep building that wall back up to what it was. But if I have an enemy attack and they attack us enough that I'm like, you know, not wall barely hung on there. We should build a bigger wall. So now I'm adapting. And now when we adapt, you got to think of it like this, to build a bigger wall. It takes more resources. It takes more people to help build that wall. So to recover the baseline, it might just be, oh, I got 10 people. We can only build the wall so damn high. Because the other 10 over there are worried about the pigs pooping everywhere or something, right? It's another stress in your life or something. So let's get those pigs out of here. Let's put them in a, you know, a pig pen and we'll go 20 people build the wall, make it bigger, taller. And so now we have the ability to adapt, move beyond what we were. In other words, pay attention to the other stresses in your life that could potentially hinder you from recovering or building that bigger wall. Now let's talk about, we always hear about inflammation. Inflammation is terrible. And, you know, you read, you know, an article or whatever about a new recovery technique or device and the way that they measure its effectiveness is typically on this reduced inflammation or markers of inflammation. And that's supposed to be great. And that's supposed to be good. So what's the deal with that? Great question. Can you see a lot of reduced inflammation? Well, markers of inflammation reduced 25% by with this supplement. Therefore athletes like, yes, good. Yeah, this is great. Take this all time. So sick. Yeah. Let's take it all. No, inflammation. And by the way, they don't, if you don't understand, I'm not going to dive into the details of signaling pathways, but in short, we can pretend that inflammation occurs from what are called myo and cytokines. Myokines are just signals from the muscle, hence the myocytes or cells and cytocells. So the muscles might send a signal, hey, we've been worked. Our cast or wall just got knocked down. The little guy who's on the wall runs back to the King and says, hey, you know, our castle just got knocked down. That's the myokine from the muscle saying, hey, we need to rebuild this. So that signal is kind of important. It tells us the walls down. Now you can either not tell the King and you can take a supplement that blunts the inflammation. So that guy, instead of going to tell the King goes, I'm just going to rebuild it myself. And so they rebuild it. But the King might have said, you know, we should have built it taller because I'm smart and I'm the King. We're assuming the King is intelligent in this world. And he goes, all right, we're going to build it bigger and stronger. And so when we have inflammation in the body, we got to understand why it's there. Is it from an acute exercise? Well, we know that inflammation, like reactive oxygen species, not synonymous with inflammation, but they often occur hand in hand, are important signals for muscle growth in these pathways of IL-6 protein synthesis pathway, they believe, and that's interlucan 6, which they believe is inflammation marker, blah, blah, and short, it's a pathway to say, hey, we need help to rebuild. So what they've actually looked at, we'll go back to the antioxidants in this because it does fit right in what you're saying. Yes, perfect. Any accidents were the crown jewel of longevity at one point. Because they reduced inflammatory markers of inflammation. Well, so what happens is, react so long story short, you have mitochondria and you have some other pathways to and oxygen will become reactive. So there's an electron transport and moves around and electrons moving pairs typically together. And one time it goes by itself and it goes flying off and it reacts with an oxygen species and creates superoxide or it can go penetrate the DNA and makes lipid peroxides and you can do like a T-bar test and so on to measure that. Point is, all this stuff happens normally. So things kind of break down to a point and the body goes, oh, well, let's make it a little better. Let's not have that happen. There's a long-winded biochemistry explanation for it, but point is, you adapt. Something happens, you adapt. And so they said, well, if this is causing the bad thing, maybe we just take tons of vitamin C and we take tons of antioxidants, we'll live forever kind of deal. Like, well, unfortunately those are the signals that help rebuild our system. So we keep blunting it. We're not rebuilding anything. And they've actually shown that exogenous supplementation of excessive amounts might impair endogenous. So exogenous coming from external, endogenous, internal. Your exogenous supplementation of say, a bunch of antioxidants might blunt your endogenous synthesis of these antioxidants. So we have what's called a redox system and make this very simple. Is this like a feedback system? It is like a feedback loop. And the way to think of it is you have bad things build up and then you have the janitor's come up and clean it up. So you have kids go play recess. They throw trash everywhere and the janitor goes and cleans it up. And so on certain days, the school's clean and the janitor does a good job. It cleans up the stuff. So just like recesses the workout, the janitor comes sweeps it on up and the reactive oxygen species are leveled. But if we just have like 19 janitors and the kids are playing recess, it is going to be constantly clean everything up and you're never actually going to have a signal. But sometimes we do need the janitor's quote unquote to come in at a higher level. Maybe we have field day and we invite a bunch of schools over and there's trash everywhere. Well then we need the janitors. We need the exogenous antioxidants to maybe help reestablish what's called our redox balance. So when we train, they've shown that when we train, we have adaptations in the mitochondria. We have adaptations in this internal scavenger pathway, which is the redox system, that take up these free radicals and they say, hey, we can handle it and we're going to build higher levels of a redox defense. So that's your redox. Your oxidative stress is how much of that junk is being built. So if you have a lot of oxidative stress, but a really strong redox system, they kind of balance each other out. So if we just pour exogenous supplements in there and it takes up what our internal endogenous redox system would do, well it goes, well, we don't need to work anymore. It's like taking testosterone. Your body stops making testosterone. Yep, exactly. And it's funny. They've done studies when all these hypothesis and theories were floating around about antioxidants. They thought, oh, well, if we give people high doses of antioxidants, it should help with cancer. And they found the opposite. They give people high dose of antioxidants with cancer and the cancer cells got stronger and wouldn't die as easily with chemotherapy. Now, how does that connect to branched chain amino acids and recovery for that? Like, how is that similar? So let's finish this one first. Okay. So what happens at times, you'll have, you'll want exogenous vitamin C. And so like we're talking about recovery, there might be times you want to blunt that signaling because you need to get back to baseline, game, game, game. And so if we're blunting, that signaling pathway after a workout when we're trying to train because this much like the ice, yeah, yeah, like the ice or like the supplement we, this mystery supplement referred to that reduces inflammation. Well, maybe that's reducing our signal, but maybe if we have a lot of games in a row, maybe we want to take that. And so that's where the bastardization or the monetization of recovery comes into play. Why are we taking this? Why are we recovering? Well, it makes a lot of sense for a high performing athlete like a NBA player who's playing three games a week or what like that, who's got it. And it makes sense only in context of in season or what they're doing with training. Right, right. Off season, he's training to optimize to get to where he can handle that stress, right? And he wouldn't be wanting to use tools like that. And for sure, if you're the average gym goer who's just trying to get stronger and more. And when it comes to inflammation, this is why I've always said that you want to optimize your body's natural ways of utilizing inflammation rather than always trying to block it. Studies show that, for example, the regular use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen on a regular basis actually result in not just reduced, yeah, reduced muscle gain and strength, but also chronic tissue damage later on because you're not getting that inflammatory signal to tell the body's strength and tendons and ligaments and joints. And so just like not to tie it back to what we initially said, there's that specific adaptation that buffers the general response. In the off season, you're developing the specific muscles, the specific, whether it's the your heart, your capillaries and so on, to handle the specific demands of the season. So we have these specific buildups, these adaptations, that blunt the general responses. So now we have a more robust muscular system, a more robust redox system. We now can handle the stresses in season. So that's where it goes, okay, we have a general response, but these specific demands actually can blunt the general response. And they actually study on this, and they looked at people who, I think it was squatting a lot, they did an exercise a lot, and they made them just simply change exercises, and the amount of reactive oxygen species was significantly different. Because they were training an area that didn't have a specific buffer. Even the tissue wasn't used to it. And so all these pathways, our body's very specific. And so if we want to go ADD and bounce around between all these exercises, that might be, you know, somewhat okay for general population, but if you're an athlete, you probably don't want to do that. I want you to get really good at squatting out of the season and off season, so you can squat in season without bothering you. Let's build up your capacity, let's get you good at being familiar with something. And so like you're saying with the inflammatory pathways, when we want it to be there, we should have it there. If it's chronic inflammation, totally different. But it's also not coming from muscle and acute exercise problem as well. One of the best things I've ever found for both myself and clients that I've worked with in terms of helping the recovery process, but also not hindering the adaptation process is more low level, low intensity movement. So like somebody who's, you know, legs are really sore and I want to help them feel better, reduce some of the, maybe the symptoms of damage, but also speed up that process and get them to would be like, okay, today what we're going to do is we're going to do some light stretches and some light body weight lunges and just get you moving the muscle. That seems to have a positive effect on all those things. What's your experience on that? The question becomes is two things. I'm kind of, are you getting better because you're just doing not the main workout today, right? That could be part of it. You're just not going heavy, but also maybe doing light enough that you're stimulating, you're setting off the smoke alarm for the firefighters come, but you're not burning the house down. That's it. That's what I think. And so that's the thing. Two people go, oh, you know, how do I, if the firefighters are causes to adapt, how do I get them to come in? Well, you can, you can burn some toast. You don't need to burn your house. It doesn't need to be that crazy. People get that mixed up all the time. That's the concept of trigger sessions in one of our programs where I tell people to do light band work in between their heavy workouts, kind of keep that signal loud, but not cause too much damage. Exactly. Well, isn't part of that too. You're pumping more oxygen, more blood, more nutrients are getting to the muscles. I would think that has something to do with the speeding up recovery process. We know what researchers think, right? There's a lot of shit we don't know. It sounds good. More oxygen, but like, is oxygen not going there in the first place? I don't know. I hope it is. So let's talk about some of the more popular quote unquote recovery tools and what they're good for. Okay. Let's start with sauna. You brought that up. Dun, dun, dun. Yeah. What is, what is sauna? What is sauna good for? Who should use it? You know, when should you use it? So let's understand a sauna first and foremost. It's like a, and let's talk about infrared sauna in particular, because I think that has the most benefits when talking about saunas. Sure, whatever. I mean, either one. It's a heat stress, essentially. And so the idea between infrared is that it doesn't cause a heat gradient, because there's no moisture and the waves penetrate deeper and causes heating from the inside out. And so it's kind of the theory behind it. We can dive into that later. But the point about sauna and why saunas got really sexy is because, like, oh, they have heat shock proteins come out when you do them, like heat shock protein 70, and you have a higher GH response. Those are kind of just, you know, general stress responses, right? A growth hormone response does not mean it leads to an IGF anabolic response. Growth hormone can come out because you just need glucose to be mobilized. Because you're fasting. Yeah, exactly. They just came out and showed that, you know, fasting does not, it decreases IGF-1 levels. But a different topic, we can talk about that. Pretty cool, because, you know, Will the Wallace I was talking to you guys about earlier was like, yo, Max, don't be a dumbass because it actually increases IGF-1 binding factors so you might be more anabolic after fasting. I don't know, thanks, Will, for making me feel a little stupid, but it's okay. The point is we have modalities that are exercise mimicking. So a thing like a sauna is an exercise mimicking modality. Excellent. And that is where you sweat, you dilate, you have an HRV that goes down, so your systemic, your sympathetic nervous systems arouse. Just like you're exercising, you have a stress in terms of heat, and you have adaptation in isolation. The question becomes, should I do a workout and then go do a exercise mimicking modality? And there's two areas that fall in here, two kind of arguments. One is, is perception reality. So if I perceive this to be relaxing me, and it helps me relax the next eight hours long more after I go through my day, is that helping me more so than the stress of doing 20 minutes in the sauna? So that's one school, perception reality. How do we perceive, and does this help our perception post-workout? Does it calm us down? From a physiology standpoint, yes, growth hormone gets released, but that's not necessarily because it's anabolic. It's probably because it's stressing the body. But another kicker is people, and this is anecdotal, people don't weigh themselves before they go in. I would be willing to bet the amount of dehydration that people incur that they don't realize that they're incurring from a sauna, including electrolyte loss, is much higher than people give credit for. Because they don't go in there for 15 minutes, they'll be in there for an hour. I want to sweat it out in the sauna. I want to be drenched. I'm always drinking wine in there too. So you're an abnormality. A lot of people don't, and they don't even weigh themselves. They have no idea what they are and what they aren't afterwards. And so we have an exercise mimicking modality like a sauna. You could argue your light, Sal, your light stretching is like an exercise mimicking modality. Those areas have benefit. They've shown that it reduces all cause mortality. So it's exercise. So is it just kind of a cheap way to exercise without exercise? It seems like it would be a beneficial for the person who understands that going into the gym and doing as little as possible to elicit the most change, then falls up with a nice 20-minute sauna session could get lots of benefit. It sounds like to me what you're saying is the asshole who goes beast mode and tries to crush it and then thinks they're going to go in the sauna for more recovery is just going to stress their body even more is probably getting little to no benefit. Possibly. Unless, again, they're psychologically being like, oh, I'm relaxed. I'm not beast mode in the rest of the day. And maybe there is beast mode person and they need that break down. So then it could still even be beneficial for that person. It could be beneficial. There is one study that looked at it as an adjunct to exercise and resistance training. It showed no significant difference and it showed be anabolic. If you look at the research, it might trend towards being anabolic, but there's so many factors involved. Are you eating more now because you went and did your sauna? I think sauna is, I sauna. I do it. It's like a verb to sauna. I like it. I sauna. It's me, but it's very, it's relaxing, but you got to appreciate what it is to. So the balancing act between us. Go ahead. So best time to use sauna? Do you post workout before workout off days? You look at it as a whole. I like off days, but is your next day going to be a high level activity day? Is it a performance day the next day? Maybe not. I don't do it. Then I don't want to have a game. Maybe I do have a game. I sauna, sauna and then approaching the game. I go cold, cold because I adapt, I adapt, adapt, I stress, I stress, I blunt, I blunt. I want to get into cold. Before we do though, I think part of the benefits of sauna, at least this is my own anecdote, is I, my ability to acclimate to heat gets much better. So because I've noticed this, if I use a sauna consistently, I can stay in there longer with the same perceived, you know, effort or whatever, whereas 15 minutes before was kind of hard. Later on, 20 minutes feels the same kind of hard. So I can, I perceive the heat to be as strenuous for longer periods of time or I can withstand longer periods of time. And then I noticed when I work out, if I work out in the heat, if I work out outside, I have better performance, but I think it has more to do with the fact that I can acclimate to the heat better. And I've also noticed this with clients who come from like cold, you know, areas, I had clients from Minnesota, they'd wear shorts, want to be 50 degrees outside because they're so used to the cold or whatever. What's your thought on that? So I'll answer that, but you remind me of something I'm going to forget otherwise. I think it's really cool too, because if you say, hey Max, the argument would be, why don't I just walk on a treadmill for 20 minutes, right? As opposed to sitting in exercise mimicking modality, there's no impacts, which can be good. If you don't walk a lot and you walk 20 minutes, you're soleus and you're feeding me sore as hell. And so there are some benefits, again, to doing exercise mimicking modalities that might be better or not better, but different than doing the exercise itself. And then there's the acclimation standpoint. It doesn't actually acclimate you to the heat. I don't want to be the guy, I don't know the research detail enough. I know it takes a lot of exposure and I believe it's consistency of exposure. It's possible that it could. Is it going to be your limiting factor? I work out in an air conditioned facility, I'm pretty soft, so I don't know. I'm not outside in the heat, but if your anecdotal experience would speak louder than mine, there's possible fact that might. I don't want to say yay or nay because I just don't know shit about it. Now you mentioned cold. Let's talk about that now. So we talked about sauna, kind of like a mimic exercise mimicking activity. What about cold? What about ice baths or cryo? Cryotherapy, that kind of stuff. So again, perception is reality. If someone hates an ice bath and then get all worked up about an ice bath, maybe it's doing more harm than good. Sure. I know coaches like my athletes hate it. They'll stress, they'll complain, they'll talk about it all day. Well, then it's just adding to it. From a physiology standpoint, it's shown to blunt the acute inflammatory response. So if I'm working really hard and I got a gain tomorrow, maybe I want an ice. There's an analgesic effect, so numbness. It doesn't hurt. If I perceive my limbs not to hurt and then they don't hurt, does that make me feel better versus limping around all day and developing maybe a bad motor pattern because I'm limping the whole time? So there's part of that. Another aspect of it is I have to shiver, which increases metabolism. The Russians used to use it as a recovery modality, not because of the cold, because it made you shiver and it made you have some metabolic increase afterwards for the body to reheat itself. And you do this without having to impose a heat stress on it so you're not losing water. If I go into a cold bathtub for three minutes and I hop out, I might shiver for X amount of time. It's my metabolism sped up, but if I'm in the sun and my metabolism sped up, I'm sweating. So I don't have the same water loss. And then on top of that, some people just like to, you know, it's my thing to be an ice bath guy. Those crazy people. So anecdotally, like what I experienced from an ice bath the first time. Before this, we were doing a lot of breathing techniques with Wim Hof and we were getting what he called the hyperoxygenated state. So here you're really opening up your lungs and then you get into the ice bath. The ice bath is this external stimulus that it's like a shock. It's this crazy stress, but now it's all about how you're dealing with that. Brian McKinsey and those guys at Humberman Lab are talking about that. Yeah. So now it's like you're forced to relax your way to be able to withstand and be able to stay in there because the more you fight it, the worse the experience gets. So that's now ice bath, not as a recovery modality, but as a psychological tool. Yes. And so now it's different. It's not recovery in the sense of physiological recovery, but it might be augmenting psychological recovery. So if I can handle a stressor and how I get hit by a stressor, that's the excuse for the psychology studies. They'll put like your hand in an ice bucket and they'll see HRV response. There's like a whole body in an ice bucket now. And it's how do I breathe through it? Am I regulating my breathing so I can handle a stressor? Just like I get a phone call or a text, oh, I forgot to do this report or I got bad news. How can I regulate and self-regulate myself? Now we just talked about earlier how the body is interconnected and our currency. If I can find ways to not spend currency, my adaptive currency on psychological stress, well then I might be putting that towards adaptation. And so now you've trained yourself to become more adaptive. That's why it's so damn complex. The body sucks. It's really cool. I'll be honest with you. We really don't know much. I don't remember who told me this, but there's a big sports conference and a little side story. I apologize. And they always, you know, professional talk and all of a lot. And they gave their talks about how what they thought was right. And the neuroscientist goes on and he goes, well guys, I hate to break it till you're all wrong. He goes, because I stay to the brain and we don't know what the hell it does. And it controls everything. What about other recovery tools? I want to talk specifically about branch chain amino acids because I think it's one of the most popular bullshit supplements that are sold on the market that I think probably less than 5% of the people that are using it probably should be using it. And then the other majority of people that are using it, it's a complete waste of money for them. So let's talk about branch chain amino acids, glutamine, all these recovery supplements that are out there. So let's not lump them all together. Okay. Well, let's kind of break some of them down. So glutamine, the idea behind that they've shown in some studies as well as animal cell culture studies that might help with gastrointestinal stress from an exercise. Yeah. Good health. Good health. And the idea is that maybe just like a probiotic, if we're stressing really hard, we might have some, this has been shown in marathon runners, which is an extreme stress. We might have some disruption in the gut. And so we're just providing a piece of that protein puzzle that might be more emphasized to repair the gut. Now that's not saying that you need to drink it during your workout and your shaker bottle 24-7. It's just a piece of the puzzle in the same way leucine might elicit a greater anabolic response. So leucine is kind of your stimulator. Hey, let's build some muscle here. And that's post-workout. You had the, you know, your leucine. Typically most protein shakes have it that leaves the anabolic response. But during the workout, this kind of stems from rat studies and my studies, they show that, oh, leucine makes you super duper jacked and then turn down and then they make you super duper jacked and humans, unfortunately. But that was the idea behind it. HMB, another one, which I got popular between behind muscle wasting, which is the metabolite of leucine. All these are just pieces that fit into a very, very small, small, tiny pieces that fit into a very big puzzle. Eating a good protein shake afterwards can probably get you through it. Do I need BCAAs during the workout? I think, and this is, you're going to hate me for this. I think they're effective because they taste good, right? And this is because they're shown that glucose rinsing of the mouth increases performance. So if I have something sweet, now this doesn't be BCAA. So you said glucose rinsing. You're just like, yeah, what if these are artificially sweet and there's no glucose? Well, I don't need sensation. It might be sweet sensation that tells the body glucose is coming and releases more glucose because it's not storing it for other times. Interesting. And so they've actually shown that rinsing, not even swallowing, you can rinse and spit it out. Just the sensation of sweetness. Increases power output in certain things. Wow, that's true. And so people are like, oh, you know, my BCAAs are making me feel, oh, you know, sugar drink is making me feel pretty good. Where the taste of sugar makes you feel pretty good. Well, that's interesting. I wonder what the effects would be then to send the sensation or the signal to the brain that they're sweet, but not exercise. I wonder if that could have a potentially negative effect. I guess the argument of artificial sweeteners is spiking certain levels of insulin and glucose and whatnot without actually being food present because we want to tolerate, we want to consume. I would love to see some really shitty tasting BCAAs and people tell me how great it works. Well, then also the next question I'd have that is back to what we keep circling back to, which is adaptation. So maybe the first few times or the first week or month you're doing that, it sends that release that then after a while, the body adapts and just gets used to it. It's possible that, again, perception is reality. You now perceive this isn't actually a food source, so you're just going, fuck this, it's not affecting you in the same way. But then again, maybe it is and you can't ignore sweets. I've had a lot of candy in my life and I still like candy. It hasn't reduced the sweetness. I had about 30 gingerbread men last night, so I didn't desensitize there. That sounded worse than it, yeah. No BCAAs in them, just pure ginger. But as far as they're, so that was interesting because I've never even heard that before. I totally forgot about that. I read that a long time ago and now it's giving me more arsenal to debate the artificially sweetened things have no effect on the body type of deal. There's a big debate on it. There's actually a lot of stuff like sucralose is coming out as possible issue. They actually protein, you know it's an issue when protein companies are starting to make non-artificial sweetened proteins. They're like, oh, maybe something is going on here. You guys would have no interest in doing that because it costs a lot of money to change a product like that. Right, absolutely. Now what about the key, what I would consider to be the king of all ergogenic supplements that's not protein, which would be creatine. Creatine. Fabulous. Yeah, let's talk about creatine as a recovery tool aid and as something that helps with adaptation. They're looking at it from a standpoint of cognitive function. Creatine is very important, the creatine phosphate shuttle and how phosphate, it's an ATP technically shuttle, the phosphate shuttle through different embedded kind of networks. It's not like you're moving a giant ATP molecule pass around. There's CRP and CP, which can moved around with CR creatine and creatine phosphate, the binded version that goes to the actual source of being utilized. And it gets passed on. It's really nice schematic if you look at the creatine phosphate shuttle. It's pretty easy to understand, very well drawn out. So it's important for energy reserves because if you have more creatine, you can have more creatine phosphate and creatine phosphate is the fastest acting of the delivery systems to produce ATP. It gathers up and then if you have more pool, it'll signal earlier so you can possibly have more production of phosphate and being moved properly. Long biochemistry story short. I want to stop you there because I've been saying something for years and now you're scaring me that I may give a terrible analogy. I try and, what you just said that probably went over most people's heads. When you take creatine, I used to tell people like let's, and this is totally made up, numbers, everything just to get to paint the picture in layman's terms. I would say we go to do a bench press and we're going to do five sets of it. You do a set and let's say your body starts with 100 energy molecules. It uses 20 of those. And then while you're resting between sets, your body replenishes let's say 15 of those 20. Fair. And now somebody, and then you do that each set and it becomes a little less, a little less each time, right? Just why throughout the workout you get weaker by the, towards the end of it, because we keep using this and it doesn't fully replenish anymore. When you're on creatine, instead of that number being only replenishing 15, it replenishes 18 or 19. Sure, why not? Yeah, it sounds. Right. Okay. Just want to, to me, I think that like makes sense to a person who doesn't understand the mechanisms and how what's going on the body. I would even say it like this though. I would just say that the, the creatine doesn't necessarily make the replenishment bigger. It just, you start off with a bigger number. You got more guys in the front line. Yeah. So rather than going instead of working with 20. So I could change my analogy too. Instead of saying you have 100, you all, you have 120 now molecules that your body has to utilize. Your body can store far more creatine than you tend to get from food. So when you supplement, you get this like, I'm always looking for ways to really simplify complex things like that. I'll do my best and for you, buy all molecular people out there. If I get it wrong, you know, yell at me later and I'll change it. But we're not worried about those people. I don't care about the, the, the 100 people that are listening that are going to hang on every word and critique. I care about the fucking 60,000 that are listening that want to understand this and take away something like, okay, this has value to me or not. Let's think of it kind of like a domino example or even better, a restaurant. It's kind of like having just more bread in your initial bread basket. Yeah. So if you're out of bread or some bread's been consumed, it signals the waiter walks by and goes, my God, my as max had already five baskets of bread. I don't know. This is amazing. But aside from that, they might walk by and say, oh, some bread's missing. So we're going to go tell the bread guys in the back, assuming there's a bread guys. I don't know how restaurants work in the bread crew, that these guys need more bread. And so they are the shuttle. They don't, you know, put bread in my mouth. They don't take a new, you know, they, they bring me bread. They're bringing bread from the kitchen. The kitchen doesn't come to me. It's just more available. Yeah. They bring it to me and it's more available. So now my initial, they know Max always comes in here. And so they've been supplementing with creatine or supplementing with lots of bread. Max comes in and always eats, you know, three baskets of bread. Let's just make one basket with three baskets worth of bread in it. And so now it can be utilized and it's the front line. And that's why the creatine was like, oh, you know, it'll help endurance and all these crazy other things because it's, you know, that line of defense it can buffer. But also has a lot of benefits. I believe is it 70% of creatine goes towards methylation in the body. It's really important for sleep. They show it as sleep deprivation. If you sell it in the creatine, it can help. It's got heart health benefits. It's got hands down the single best supplement, arguably the most omnipotent supplement as a cognitive benefits, especially for vegans, vegans you don't consume. And your body, you know, it's not an essential supplement. Your body can make its own creatine through. I think there's three amino acids, right? Methionine, arginine and glycine, I believe. And however, consuming actual creatine, your body has a capability to store so much. And this is why supplementing works so well because you actually can store far more than you tend to consume from food. This is where the whole creatine loading thing came out. Like when you load creatine, you hit those limits faster than if you don't load, but I still think it's a waste of money. And then we have that, we know what researchers think. And so there's actually a lot of research that's like, oh, maybe all that creatine that's been consumed and it's really not as useful as we thought it was. And so, but why is that? Is it because it's not being stored in the muscles? Is it being, is it beneficial somewhere else down the line? And so when you, it's easy to read the back label of a supplement and be like, oh, you know, creatine is right to the muscle. What athletes should not take creatine? Are there any? Besides ones that have a bad reaction to it? I don't think really any. Some very few arguments are like, oh, you know, maybe the weight class athletes. So they stay in the same weight class? It's not like, I've never heard of, I mean, I've heard rumors like, oh, creatine will blow. You haven't read in the research studies that say you're putting on like five pounds of water mass. You'll get like three pounds. What are the things that you currently use now? I mean, you mentioned sauna, so you do intermittently use that. What are other things that you use right now? Because I would consider you a, you're not a high performance athlete where you're getting out on the NBA or one of that. But some might disagree. I wouldn't play pickup with you in a while. But you trained to be athletic sometimes. You trained to be strong, you know what I'm saying? So, you know, I think you, I think you could be a similar avatar for a lot of people that are listening, the type of stuff that you do. So I'm curious what supplements, if any supplements you do utilize and then what recovery tools are you using when we're talking about things like sauna and cryo and ice and things like that? My biggest recovery tools, by far enough sleep and food, by far. I think too much in the day to not sleep enough. If I don't sleep enough, I'll go manic. I'm really wild. I'll go emotional and not like sad. I'll just like be like erratic. And not to mention when looking at the hierarchy of things that are most impactful. It's probably one of the most impactful things for all people. And so I wear a whoop that tracks my sleep. And I think it's important for me just so I know, you know, okay, here's another one. A supplement, quote-unquote. It's not only, it supplements my sleep. I'll take, I use nasal strips. I have a deviated septum that I broke in basketball that I don't want to get fixed. So I wear nasal strips because my nasal cavity is very shallow. And when I sleep, if I have one booger in it, it'll wake me up. And so I need a bigger nose. And so it's a cute, adorable little nose, but it doesn't do any good. So that's what my fiance tells me. And then I use an eye mask or something to cover my eyes. So I have no blue light in the room. I have no TVs in the room. I have no alarm clocks in the room. I have a phone that's face down. That's on do not disturb mode, little moon mode, you can click. And so I don't have anything bothering me. I have a fan on. And I love my fiance to death because she does not move at all when we sleep. And so it's... How do you wake yourself up with that an alarm clock? I have it on my phone. Oh, okay. It's on my phone. I wish I was just a machine. Dude, you got me. Will myself to wake up. Dude, so I got something for you that I've been using. It's been a game changer. So I bought this alarm clock. Oh, is it the sun, the light one? Bro, I have the same one. It's magic. It slowly lights up and mimics a rising sun. And I just wake up. I just like wake up from it and look around. And it's like a light glow and no big deal. I've heard about that. It's up. It is freaking money. It would scare the shit out of me. What the hell is going on? And you brought up whoop a few times. We haven't really actually had somebody on the show that has broken down HRV and the science behind it. So obviously you're using this and using this with your clients. Let's talk about HRV. Yeah, I'll do that. I'll talk about it a bit. Well, before you go there, did we wrap up all the tools you're using? Okay, so we'll do HRV at the end. I'll consider that a supplement I use because it helps me track my sleep. But we'll dive into all that with what that means because that's a little digger digger. Deeper dive, deeper dig. Combine it all together. Bigger dig. You just smash it all together. Oh, it's all together. I've had like nine cups of coffee, so I apologize. That's weird. I can't tell. You're doing good. You're doing good. So we have my, I have a nasal strip. I have my sleep mask. I have a fan on. I have a cold dark room, 66 degrees. I've converted my fiance to that. Now it's only 66, no 68, no 69, no 70. Keep it cold. Keep it dark. So blackout windows. I take fish oil. I take magnesium because I think our dosages from the FDA is like 450 milligrams, the average male. But that's like, you know, FDA's basically. So you don't, I recommend a daily value. Sorry, RDA. That's like, so I don't get scurvy amount of vitamin C. And so we've got to understand when they become a pirate. Just all of a sudden. Yeah. So I take magnesium. I take magnesium by glycinate because the absorption is better. That's what I've heard. I'd actually have never done the research. Some doctor told me. So I said, sure, why not? That other stuff makes you poop a lot. You're not careful. Some of the magnesium isn't really digestible. So if you get the wrong stuff, you lose a shit a bunch, which is I did once. Got the wrong stuff. I was pooping all day for a week. And I was like, why am I so sick? Like, what is going on? And I realized the wrong magnesium. So be careful. Like it's a serious story because I thought I was like actually really ill. But I was just pounding the wrong magnesium. And then I take an L-carnitine, acetyl L-carnitine. It's a long chain fatty acid shuttle which takes long chain fatty acids and put them into the mitochondria. We take that. It's the L-carnitine thing, one of the packets I give you guys. Oh yeah, you've been sneaking that in. Yeah, good for you guys. Cognitive benefits as well. Obviously I said creatine, five grams. I have a lot of stuff I just get from people. And I don't really say I take it because of certain reasons I just take random shit sometimes because I just want to see what happens. Oh yeah, I want the same for you and Sal. We get shipped all the time, but we talk so much shit about some of them but it doesn't mean we don't play around with them every once in a while, just to see. Phosphatidylcholine is one of them that helps with, you know, it's a choline precursor, so acetylcholine, which is neuromuscular junction is sent out. It's a neurological benefit, put it that way. That's actually a big choline crisis in England and I believe that's going through right now that related to Alzheimer's and how can I benefits for it. Egg yolks, egg yolks are a good source of choline. I eat tons of egg yolks, I probably don't need it, but I take it anyway. And then I have a mineral, just a minrex kind of thing, which is a multi-mineral based on some blood work I had. But I did blood work, by the way, before all this. So it wasn't just like shooting the dark, trying to figure out what to say. Well, yeah, and what you're naming, which I love is, and this is what we try and talk to people, is that the real benefits is learning where your body is potentially deficient and supplementing for the things that you technically need is going to, you're going to get more benefit of that than chasing these high-performance supplements that make claims of, you know, make you run faster, jump higher, burn body fat, build muscle, all that. And taking too much of something can be just as bad. So if you have too much of a fat-soluble vitamin or vitamin, a mineral, and you're supplementing with a multi-mineral, multi-vitamin, you could cause yourself a lot of problems. So it's important to test. And test yourself, have a doctor that knows what they're doing. Don't test yourself and you, oh, yeah, I look like I'm low on B vitamins. Yeah. I'll take six. Like, you know, actually understand the dosages and why you're taking it. And then, like, for me, gut health was a big thing. I had to get much better. It's not perfect, but it's better. And some athletes typically have shit gut health. And I heard you guys talk about your own internal clocks that you have. You know, it's farting, psoriasis, and gut health. Yeah, nailed it. And I think that's important because for mine, it's like, okay, if I eat potato chips, it's just, you know, probably not the best for me. It doesn't rear itself through acne or other areas that some people might have or stress and anxiety. It's probably gut health. And so being consciously aware of what's going on can be beneficial as well for your own supplementation because then you understand, you know, why am I getting certain bad outputs? Right, right, right. I think that's pretty much all of the HRV. Yeah, the drum roll. So HRV is heart rate variability. When your heart beats, I'm going to do my best simple explanation. So your heart beats, you say, oh, I have an average of 60 beats a minute. Well, it actually doesn't beat on a metronome. Every beat has a different, if you just took that one-to-one beat, that integral of the two, it might be 62 beats and the next one's 59 and the next one's 58. And that's your variability. They run certain stats on it to give like a log RMSSD on it. Point is that you have heart rate variability and they have a lot of stats to quantify it. It measures your, it's a check engine light for your autonomic nervous system. So when you hear autonomic nervous system, think of autonomous nervous system. Yeah, because your heart, you don't think about your heart beating. It just happens on its own. What is working, yeah. Yeah, you weren't hoping. You're hoping. Yeah. Yeah. You just, oh, I hope it works. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to have, you know, you don't want to consciously take care of your muscle recovery. It happens autonomously. It's broken into your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic, oh, I have sympathy, someone's being chased by a lion. So your heart rate races. That is the activation, the mobilization, the movement of energy resources to accomplish and conquer a stressor, which is why we go back to, if I'm activating my sympathetic nervous system, which is for a stressor, but the stressor doesn't exist in tangibility, and that's where it's not tangible stressor, I manifest it by perception, then that's excessive arousal of a system that doesn't need to be aroused. The parasympathetic nervous system is, you basically, you're paralyzed with food after you've had Thanksgiving dinner, right? You're, it's rest and digest, it's rebuild, it's relaxed. So the sympathetic, you feel sympathy, your heart races, because there is a lion chasing someone. The parasympathetic system is relaxed. I am paralyzed from all the food I eat from dinner, kind of thing. What happens is these two work in tandem underneath the umbrella of the autonomic nervous system. Your HRV is a reflection of your autonomic nervous system. It's a reflection of the two branches, sympathetic and parasympathetic. A high HRV, a high heart rate variability, is a good thing. When you breathe in, your heart rate just speeds up. When you breathe out, it should go down, right? That's why you scare someone. No one breathes out. They don't go, whew, when you scare them, whew. They go, are they breathing? Heart rate gets raised. When you breathe out, right, it goes down. And so you want to have a large heart rate variability. And this can change based on everything in life. I stubbed my toe. I'm stressed out from work. I didn't sleep well. I didn't eat well. I worked out too much. A lot of stressors and put into the body will decrease your HRV, your heart rate variability. If I can remove them, it will go back up. And so the idea of a whoop is it tracks heart rate variability and it lets me know, am I still taxed from the day before? And what might have taxed me? Is it my workouts? Well, my workouts have been the same, but I was really stressed for work. It's probably my stress from work. It gives me more internal bio information. It also assesses how long I slept. Is my HRV down? So poor. I have a high stress still because I didn't sleep enough. Am I not sleeping enough because I'm stressed? It's kind of a vicious cycle. What's my deep sleep like? So your deep sleep, your slow wave sleep, that's the way. That's your physiological adaptiveness or resilience. That's where your body builds and repairs and sleep. That's your growth hormone gets released. It spikes. It happens earlier in sleep. Your body rebuilds and repairs. It should be about 25% of your total sleep. Deep sleep should be. 20-ish, 15%. I say 25% because why not have a good number. 15 to 20, I believe the research says. And then there's the REM, so which is your rapid eye movement sleep. This is your emotional regulation sleep. So your REM sleep is where your body and your brain plays back memories of the day without your amygdala interfering with the emotional arousal. So that's your emotional resilience. So your amygdala, if someone says something mean to you and you're emotional, your knee jerk reaction, that's your amygdala because your prefrontal cortex of your brain is the guy that has, hey, don't make stupid decisions. Your amygdala is like, let's make rapid, quick decisions, which is good and survival reasons because you don't want to process everything. But when we have an emotional interaction during the day, our amygdala gets activated during that response. And our REM sleep helps, they believe, emotionally regulate ourselves by playing back some of these memories for the day and allowing it to occur without your amygdala being involved. So there's no emotional connotation with it. So it regulates you. So they think if you get low REM sleep, you're not regulating your emotions in previous day. So you might be more, have a higher probability of emotional outburst. I don't know, something of that nature. Stress in general. And so, and then you have number of disturbances in your sleep or you're tossing and turning along. Why? Is it the new bed I got? Is it the new environment I'm in? Is it the fact I drank way too much coffee last night before bed? How long was I in light sleep for? And you can start to break this down to give yourself some more internal context. So we talked about the beginning, our currency, our adaptive currency. If we're not sleeping enough and not sleeping well enough, we're taking currency away when we could be putting currency in. So now I have some more bio information about my own currency because we as humans aren't very good psychologically at times at perceiving our own internal state. Because we want to survive. Right. And by nature, if you perceived you weren't going to survive all the time, you probably weren't going to. You wouldn't be to. So this is giving you like a nice external reading on things that you might not necessarily be able to pay attention to. But I would assume over time, looking at a device like this and then connecting it to how you feel over time, you should be able to move to a point where you may be able to identify these things without having to look at something. Based off of feeling, yeah. Yeah. And the kicker is our body works in lag times. And so you don't necessarily have a lowered HRV just because something happened the day before, but could be because of the week before. Your nervous system, your autonomic nervous system might have a delayed response to it. And so the example would be that they've shown people who they don't sleep for 36 hours because they're going through some psychological stress test and their performance or tactical military groups. And by the last day, their HRV is like perfect. Like, wow, the hell is this happening? Because they're adapting to the stressful environment. Now, that's what we would call maladaptation, bad adaptation. You don't want to adapt so bad as a norm. So they argue that people might actually be addicted to stress at times because you adapt to being stressed out. Oh yeah. And then how do you feel when there's no stress? Yeah. That's your new thermostat has set to a higher homeostatic set point. So homeostasis is just a fancy word for saying, oh, my body wants to be level here. It's like water leveling itself. Well, if I move that set point higher, so I'm used to more stress, that's why living in New York City is a cardiovascular risk factor. It is. It's actually scientifically shown that's a risk factor because there's so much stuff going on that you have adapted to being in a highly stressed environment, which means you can survive and thrive in it, but it doesn't mean you'll survive forever in it. It doesn't mean you're going to live long. It means you might not live as long. Yeah, exactly. Very interesting. You're always an interesting guy to talk to. Good. We always have a great time with you on the show. No, no. Really fun discussion, dude. Where are you heading to after this? Denver, back home. That's it? To Denver. I know we're cool. I didn't have anything, you know, back home for the holidays this week, so. How long did you take off? Did you go a whole week off? Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. A good deal, man. We always appreciate when you come on the show. You always drop so much knowledge. I know that the people in our audience who love just learning, you know, the intricacies of things, just get a kick out of you. Yeah. What are you getting into business-wise right now before we hang up? Let us know what you got going on. Yes. I'm with Paul Faberitz, who's been on here before. Yeah. Love, good buddy. Paul's my guy, and we're building a website together called EdgeU, and that is an educational platform. So I have a lot of frustrations with education, both scholastically and your own attempt to learn, because a lot of times it's biased. A lot of learning on social media or through websites are people trying to sell you something, so they want you to learn to buy. Right. And I'd rather we were at the subscription website, because yes, we're putting in time and effort, so we would like to, you know, have that time valued, but if you have the upfront fee, we're not selling anything on the back end. Right. I want it to be an open dialogue of people discussing through ways that, not currently being done. And so we have a book club, we've partnered with, not partnered, but working with Human Kinetics, which is a large publisher for a lot of the books and sports performance and science and research, and we are reading their book chapter by chapter. We're not reading it out loud, we're going through the details of it, so someone can read along with us, and they can go over chapter by chapter and hear us discuss what it means to us. So we're not replacing the book, but we're discussing how you can take information away from the book to help you as a coach. Then they're going to help us get some of their authors who wrote the book, so at the end of it all, we can talk to the author and have questions about it. But we want it to be in a way that, I'm not, you know, trying to sell you anything, I want you to actually learn. Because my frustration came from when I tried learning, the only like source that wasn't trying to sell me something was Louis Simmons. Louis Simmons would just put out his West Side Barbell all of his techniques, because he just wanted people to be really strong. Yeah, he sold some books, but wasn't like he was sitting there like, oh, at the end of this, buy X or buy this program of mine online. I would have, but he didn't sell it. And so we wanted to have a book club, we want to have webinars where we teach in a little more detail some of the things that we do. So that's like force, velocity, profiling, certain educational quote unquote webinars, the PowerPoint, more traditional. I want to be able to post what I'm reading daily, go on my website and see our website and see what I'm reading today. What research papers? Here's our research links that we're reading. It's not my research paper. I want you to read it. And this is what we're going to talk about. I have a little short Max thoughts and Paul thoughts where we hop on the mic and we just talk for seven minutes of stuff we've seen. We go over different Instagram accounts that we like in social media accounts and posts that we found interesting. So was this informative for you? Would you learn from it? How you can dive into some of these accounts that people don't know about that are very, very detailed and give you some really good information. But we want it to be a living environment. I don't want it to be something like a classroom when you purchase, this is the course I bought. I want it to be ongoing because we want people's input to be involved in it. And we want it somewhere people can go and say, look what they talked about. I'm going to go somewhere else and find it because they didn't talk in the detail I wanted to. But that's how it should be. I should be one giant kind of inspiration library almost. We should be this platform people go to and engage and can learn off of. Now are you building this or is it ready to go? So depending on when this is going to be released, it should be out as soon as we can. I think by the time this is released, it will be out. I don't know when you guys are going to put this out. I think a couple of weeks, a week or two, it'll be out soon. Week and a half. It'll be close. So in that ballpark, if we don't have it out, we'll have it out very soon. It's basically the whole framework's built out. It's all there. Beautiful. We're just uploading some stuff and you put the first website up. You can't just have one article and you have lots of articles. Awesome. Well, we'll make sure we drive people your way. But we love the content that you guys put out. Paul's a good friend of ours too. Always constantly plug his page too. I think you guys are always putting out non-bias, good information that the average consumer can learn from for sure. I appreciate it. And thank you for having me on again. That was short notice. And I lifted all the weights out there while I was waiting around. Excuse me. Good deal, man. Thanks again for coming over. Oh, awesome. I appreciate you guys. Right on, I did.