 The next question is from Anne Hellfey. Do you have any tips on how to balance hormones as a female when training load is near athlete levels? You know, somewhere along the lines of fitness, we started to equate high-performance athletics or high-performance athlete as health. Yeah, totally. It's not, what you're looking at is extreme. Well, it's because that's what the marketers use. Yes. I mean, all your big, you know, brand, Nike's and all your fitness companies. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All these big brands, they use athletes to market health and fitness, but the reality is they're not the greatest example. No, and by the way, same thing goes for the competitors on magazines. You know, the people that we choose to represent health and fitness are not the best examples of health and fitness. No, not even close. I mean, studies are quite clear on this. There's this kind of bell-looking curve when it comes to exercise where a little bit does you some benefit, then you do more, and you get way more benefit. Then you do more, and you get a little bit more benefit, then you do more, and uh-oh, now I'm starting to get negative effects in terms of longevity and health. And then the more I apply, the less benefit I get in terms of health and longevity. Now, my performance may increase beyond that, but in terms of longevity and overall health, I'm gonna start to decline. This is the case with high-performance athletes. If you are a high-performing athlete, if you compete in distance running, or powerlifting, or bodybuilding, or gymnastics, or football, or jiu-jitsu, and you do it at a, this is your priority, and you push yourself to very, very athletic levels. You are sacrificing health and longevity. You're sacrificing the health of your joints in some of these cases. You're sacrificing your hormone health in some of these cases. Definitely true for women. It is very common for female athletes to lose their period, or to have an irregular period, and to have imbalances between the progesterone and estrogen. And it's because you're training at a very, very high level. So, you know, here's the problem and the challenge. If you wanna balance your hormones and you're training at athlete levels, the first thing you need to do is reduce your training volume. You gotta compromise. You're gonna have to reduce some of your performance for longevity and health. And this is when just being honest with yourself, because there's nothing wrong with either one, right? If you wanna be at that super high level of athlete, understand it comes with its own consequences inside of it. Yeah, this was always a conundrum working with athletes. It's always like, how much, like, how can I find the best recovery? Can we do this HRV thing? Can I get in a cryo chamber? Like, you know, like all these like aggressive ways to intervene, you know, the recovery to speed up that process, to get them right back on the field and going like balls to the wall, you know, out there. And it's like, at the end of the day, like this is the decision that you have. You wanna be the best at this particular motivation, like this goal of mine is to be the best athlete I possibly can. And so I'm gonna go all in. I'm gonna use this intensity while I have it, but this isn't a long-term approach that is sustainable. Well, this is also where there's a misunderstanding for the average weekend warrior that wants to train like an athlete too. There's this misunderstanding of how athletes truly train. A professional athlete or at least a professional athlete that has a good coach and a good trainer is training their athletes to peak. They're not just training like a superstar year-round, weekend, week-out, like so that you need to keep- It's a total balancing game. It is, and what a good coach, a good coach is watching things like hormones, right? Hormones and stress and recovery and they're not taking their athlete client to their limits until it's time, until I know it's almost game time. We're getting ready for season. We're gonna prep the body, prep the body, prep the body, prep the body. Okay, here we're getting closer. We're gonna start ramping up, ramping up, ramping up, ramping up. And then it's almost time for game time, right? Or season, whatever. And I want you at the max, but then I'm gonna, and then season's there. Now I'm gonna pull back on your training volume because now you have to perform on game day. And so there's a real fine dance of training like a real true athlete. But unfortunately, because of marketing, you know, you see like these cool athletes doing stuff on Instagram or you have Nike promoting like shit. And you see stuff and you're like, oh yeah, identify as an athlete. Motivational. Yeah, and so you train, you as a weekend warrior, an average person, you wanna train like this athlete. But the reality is we're only seeing a sliver of what goes into really training a high performance athlete. So much of that is recovery and taking care of the body and leading up to this high performance. The best strength conditioning coaches out there are way more concerned with longevity and being able to keep their athletes healthy and injury free. And those coaches, you know, like a Mike Boyle or somebody out there that are world renowned for keeping, you know, professional athletes, the entire team, the whole season, like they're still able to play. That's a huge thing. Look at the Niners. We were talking about this in the beginning of the episode. Like what good does that do getting out on the field in one of the first games of the season, you get injured. Like that's the end right there. Yeah, the best trainers at that level are the ones that are the best at managing injury prevention and recovery. They're not the best ones at pushing people to the extremes. That's the easy way to go. Like just focus on, yeah, pushing. Yeah, and you know, women are especially sensitive to this. Their bodies are especially sensitive to pushing super, super hard all the time and getting really, really lean. Like women with six pack abs. Like if you have visible six pack abs, you're pretty close to being too lean for optimal health. If not already being too lean for, now men can do this because we tend to hold less body fat anyway. So it's, you know, if you're following like these, you know, people on Instagram and social media and you're like, wow, I want to look like that. There's a trade-off. There's always going to be a trade-off and pushing to that level, your trade-off is your general health, which means your hormones are going to be, this happens to men too, by the way. Men who push really, really hard, you start to see testosterone levels start to drop and you start to see oxidative damage start to increase. And it's, you know, it never really works out well. If you're trying to have both, you got to pick one or the other and then manage the other one as best you can, but you can't have both. You can't be this extreme crazy, you know, top level athlete training at those levels and also have like amazing balance in your health. In fact, the very nature of your training is imbalanced. There's nothing balanced about training at that level. And be careful of like saying things like, oh, but I feel so good after I train like this, because that's the argument I think someone's making right now listening to you talk about. It's like, oh, but when I train this way, I feel so good afterwards. And that's what, you know, we haven't talked about cortisol junkies in a long time and this is common. You get someone who trains that way and they get this huge adrenaline rush afterwards and it feels amazing. You feel amazing and accomplished afterwards because your body's getting flooded with all that cortisol. Well, you can fall in love with feelings, right? And so there's a very different feeling from feeling balanced in your body where you have good health, general health, good strength, relatively lean body fat percentage, a healthy body fat percentage, decent mobility, good sleep. That feels a particular way. Then there's the feeling of high performance and I understand why someone would fall in love with that. I've been at that level. I know what that feels like. It does feel awesome. I feel like I'm strong as hell. I feel like I have lots of like hyper energy. I could tackle the world. It's a different feeling. Both of them feel different. Both of them feel good. You can fall in love with one and think, oh, this is what healthy feels like. Maybe not. In fact, oftentimes the feelings we fall in love with are the ones that aren't healthy. This is, by the way, this is one of the reasons why certain exercises get a bad rap. You know, like squats and deadlifts. Oh, squatting and deadlifts, doesn't that help people blow out their discs? Well, when you're talking about, you know, extreme athletes squatting. You're really getting after it. Yeah, 700 pounds or 800 pounds or people, you know, strength athletes who are pushing themselves to insane extreme levels that you never would. Yes, now you're talking about higher rates of injury and stuff like that. But for the average person, those exercises are not just safe. They reduce your risk of injury. So it is a bit of a balancing act, but I've trained many a female athlete with this problem. And it was a conversation where I sat down with them and said, what do you want more? Do you like being 12% body fat more and being at high performance? Or do you want to balance out your hormones, regain your fertility and your libido? Which one do you want more? Because we can't do both. And then once they decide, okay, I want to do the hormone thing, literally scale the workouts back, scale everything down. In essence, reduce their performance. In essence, reduce that extreme level of performance that they had, but then they get the hormones back, the fertility back and all that kind of stuff.