Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today, is dr. Mike is ratelle. He's a professor of exercise and sports science, at Lehman College, and the co-founder of Renaissance periodization muscle building and fat loss are often the main focuses of bodybuilding. But what about recovery, what are the most effective ways to recover quicker? Reduce stress and get more jacked in the process. Expect to learn what it means to actually recover from fatigue. How recovery is measured if you're not a professional athlete. Dr. Mike's thought
it's on regular weed usage Sciences. Most effective ways to reduce fatigue. The biggest mistakes people make when trying to recover? Well, what evidence there is for supplements, saunas and Cole plunges and much more.
Me and dr. Mike are spending an increasing amount of time together. Not just because he is a man crush, and apparently, we look alike according to a Q&A, from a few months ago. But also, because we are developing a product together which I really want to say more about, but can't quite yet, but is going to be so phenomenal and exciting when we finally do, and it won't be that much longer, but more than all of those things is the fact, I think he's the best voice on the internet when it comes to
In space to health and fitness advice. The evidence based movement which he is at the head of is fantastic. After Decades of trolling forums with Bro Science which although entertaining was largely useless, Mike doesn't Couchsurfing doesn't sugarcoat. It just tells you exactly what is going on under the hood of any question you've ever had. And today is so cool. It's so different to what most Fitness advice is on the internet. And I really, really think that there's tons to take away from it. So, please enjoy this one.
But now, ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome dr. Mike is ratelle last time that we spoke, we spoke about fat loss time before that, we spoke about muscle building. And today, I want to talk about recovery
Which I guess is the other side of all of that. We've talked about stimulus, we talked about what sort of going out in terms of an energy flow now talking about how we can get some of that back. So how do you come to think about recovery going on? What's going on under the hood of recovery?
Yes. So it's best to understand recovery by analogy to that of Maintenance of a machine, but it's not an analogy. I would call it a homology. It's actually the same.
Same thing humans are machines period there's no analogy. There humans are just machines that are designed by Evolution instead of willful conscious agents as far as we can tell and human. Machinery is real deep structurally because it goes all the way down to the Nano tech level. You don't actually have quite machines that good. Yet the iPhone comes pretty close with its little tiny microchips but
The human machine is in the context of sport or getting jacked, you're getting lean operates, under all the same rules that machines do. And as machines do high output performance, they take on wear and tear and there are various things that you do to machines after the Factory closes at night, that recover them in a very similar way that you would use with humans that do all sorts of things during the day, including athletic.
Much trying to lift to get Jack so on and so forth. So the normal state
The uninterrupted state of a high-performing athlete or any really, any human that wants to get Jaqueline etcetera, is sort of everything is in one piece and everything is in its right place. So there are a lot of neurotransmitter built up in the vesicles in the neurons and not floating around somewhere, degraded an injunction, the vesicles aren't bereft of neurotransmitter, empty or Regional vesicle so it's this little kind of ball of basically a membrane inside.
Side of. It's like a little bubble. It has neurotransmitters. So at the end of your neurons, when you want the neuron to talk to something else, the vesicles fuse with the membrane of the neuron that internal becomes externally dumped in our transmitter and that does whatever it does now that combined with muscles and tendons that are completely intact on frayed combined with a hormonal situation which has a high degree of testosterone, relatively low degree of stress hormones, like cortisol, a situation in which the
Nervous system of the person is not depleted in such a way that makes it very sympathetic dominant which is fight or flight. This nervous system is in parasympathetic dominance which means it is in relaxation mode, your glycogen in your muscles, the stored sugars that make your muscles do what they do in athletic terms are. Those stores are full and so everything's kind of really good.
And then we have to talk about what happens when you run that machine and run it close to its
limits. Yes. Fatigue what Teague what is 40s. So
fatigue is simply The Taking of that everything in its right place very well writing machine and running it through the paces. And those pieces will end up altering that machine in some predictable ways. One of the ways that the machine is altered is it takes literal micro damage like any
I'm you contract your muscles, very hard, against resistance, parts of the muscle cell, literally tear. And at some point, they tear more and more and more and you're going to have to heal that, right? It's not a tenable situation. If you had someone looking at a machine that lifts cars up and down in a factory and saying, you know, like a mechanic is if we had a whole fracturing here, it's not a world in which you like that. Who cares? My shift ends in an hour? Maybe you would say that. But it's a concern, it's a thing that has to be remediated, basically the entropy of the system has increased and
Another thing is your reserves of various things neurotransmitters that are in the right place are no longer in the right place. Some of them exceeding amount of them might have been dumped into the neuromuscular Junction or other parts of the nervous system and broken down and now you don't have a lot of neurotransmitter, vesicles ready to get your neurons to fire, like they should be firing when your muscles contract, they not only incur micro-tears but various things like calcium ions.
Float from one structure to another with are supposed to go, but they don't really get resorbed 100% right away. You actually run down on your creatine, phosphate stores, your glycogen depletes, and from a hormonal level, your cortisol stress hormone tends to start going up and your testosterone tends to start going down your sympathetic fight, or flight part of your nervous. System starts to become more active will cause like, you know, it's fight or flight. Imagine like having to run for your life from zombies. The chase you for life.
Two hours you had better, hope you're still in fight, or flight towards the end of two hours. You don't want to be relaxed, you want to be like awake, right? And so all of those things, tilting, your body into that direction, basically throw off the hormonal axes and they deplete various things that need to be repleted nutrients that need to be sort of reintegrated, back in and damage needs to be healed. So that's under the hood of what recovery and fatigue Dynamics actually are. That's what's happening in a physiological level and
The good news is the vectors that we have to affect those from our own lived experience of like what do I do about that time? I have a little example to get in to fix my cells. There's just a few of them that work really well in most other so far, don't work that well. So it sounds complicated like holy crap out of work out neurons and stuff like that. The body heals and fixes itself tremendously well, but it needs a few key ingredients and we need to not get distracted with other key ingredients, which will get to. I'm sure later in the
discussion. What
when it comes to thinking about,
How stimulus creates fatigue or creates stress or creates this kind of damage?
What are the biggest contributing factors to wear that fatigue aware that stress comes from, if you were to make a big pie of all of the things that the normal person that probably listen to this podcast does in a day. Yeah,
so you have the situation where you have recovery, which is the reinstatement of that, Baseline normal State, that's ready to perform. And then you have fatigue, which is the disruption of that state, but where is that disruption coming from? The obvious answer is training physical.
Collegues ershon but it's not the only answer. This is a real big trip. This is a huge trip to anyone. I was taught this in school and then I was like, holy crap, the implications of it are very widespread so the other one. There's at least two more that are of note first physical training which people understand you don't have to talk to someone on the street who doesn't know anything about physiology lawn to be like it when people work out really hard, you get tired. They're like, okay, this isn't like a hidden camera somewhere as a joke, of course they do. But
The other one is all daily physical activity. So, a lot of times you'll have athletes on two ends of the spectrum. Obviously, it's normally distributed, most athletes are somewhere in the middle. You'll have athletes. That, you can barely drag them to practice. You have to have like a cattle prod, to make them do work during practice. But like they're studs, they do their shit and then afterwards, they fuck off. And they go into some kind of room that has a couch, some food delivery service, that arrives every several hours, and a PlayStation, and like a bong. And they just
Just repeat, repeat, repeat fall asleep and to bad news is that you got to like, knock on their door, six in the morning, to get them to football practice. The good news is that they'll never have a problem with recovery or covetousness, all I do, right? But it turns out that daily physical activity, contributes substantially to fatigue. And if doesn't contribute to fatigue, as in raising it, it prevents the fatigue from otherwise, having been lowered, much further by the other things you do in the day that recover, you eat food sleep, so on and so forth, will get to those details in a bit.
So physical activity has to be integrated, which is why one of my mentors. Probably, my biggest Mentor in sports science. Dr. Stone dr. Mike Stone, who I got my PhD from UBC weight lifters and throwers that he was coaching around like anywhere on the lab around the gym. If there was a chair he'd pull it up and ask them to sit down and whatever doc said, you kind of did because he's really scary, don't stand around and Arnold had a version of this where it's like if you're running walk, if you're walking
You sit down if you're sitting lie down because physical activity. Absolutely takes a toll and a lot of athletes on that other end of the spectrum there at practice. It 5:45 in the morning, when it starts it at six, but they're busy bees, they're really accomplished at school. Oftentimes, they're always doing a bunch of stuff they hiked on the weekends, you know, like not to put too fine. A point on it. White people, 10 shit and I was get shit for Luke. Will you make voting Woods man's kind of? All right, person will put that in the comments but like why?
People seem to take a joke just fine. That's really the only reason and also, I'm sort of white, so I kind of have the most launching sideways. Now, my jokes at the expense of the Jewish people's have a stack so deep, I can't even say most of it. So people who are in that very conscientious sort of brain, they typically think of things, as, in their own boxes, I go and I train, and I go hard and these people go hard and training, they don't even cattle prod. As a matter of fact, if you haven't around belt,
Taken cattle prod themselves. You know, she's you're doing just fine this, take it easy but they'll go and they'll do eighteen thousand steps a day. They'll go to library, they'll study the walk around there right there bike. This could be but ride their bike to practice and back and that's not wrong. But you're taking draining away recovery capacity and potential even increasing fatigue by doing that stuff. And because these people tend to think in compartments, they oftentimes don't even connect the dots, like I'm working hard at practice.
And
I'm eating all my meals. I'm getting eight hours of sleep but there are on all the time, physically, they're out doing stuff, you know, people just can't sit around to me especially fast, which dominated, Sports weightlifting, sprinting, high jump, American football, the very best athletes at those Sports on average, tend to be people that prefer to chill out and we'll get up and do violent shit for like a couple seconds here and there and then prefer to sit the hell down, they just don't accumulate fatigue, the same way as people who are
public, what would be a sports.
When you would say, maybe suboptimal in some ways, but the type-a personality might lend you more to it, like an endurance. Yeah. Icing type
thing at sports that require a lot of volume and practice because they make you so tired, you can't be that person. That runs around anymore. Endurance, athletes are usually pretty type, a type of people, but they after 20 miles a day for 4 days, straight you just sit on the couch because you can't move anymore. And that's really good. That's your body is inner wisdom. Being like, sit down. I'm not even letting
Have any more energy. So we have physical training itself, training competition, Etc, that factors into fatigue. We have physical acts of all kinds throughout the day, which matter and then it's one of the physical acts thing is one of the reasons why coaches at the Collegiate level in the United States. Coming up two big games or big clusters of games will give their athletes like a heart to heart. Talk about like ladies or gentlemen. Like I know you're 19. I know going out of here.
Early fun. I know staying up till 3:00 in the morning doing God knows what is amazing but like let's just save that for a month from now because that's all we're doing for a month, I don't even care. Don't even, don't put it on social media, it never happened. Go out there and do your damnedest. But for these next three weeks, please for the love of God, do not go to the club because what are you doing at the club? You're at least standing up most of the time often. You're dancing familiar cursorily with dancing, but after I lost that one, big International, dance competition.
Chris, I could never dance again.
I lost my rhythm, I believe George. Michael said it best and now I will sing the entire song. So in any case,
It's a big deal physical activity around the clock as a big deal. That's why step tracking is a cool tool for Recovery because it can tell you am I doing enough and also am I doing too much there is such a thing as too much. The third thing is the real big head. Fuck psychological vectors. Absolutely affect fatigue at the physical level because the systems in your body specifically the nervous system can facilitate you being a
Active and ready and watchful and alert fight or flight. The sympathetic side of them, autonomic nervous system. And then they can also facilitate Mega recovery. When the parasympathetic nervous system is at maximum dominant. You're just like blunt mode. Like like that's all you. You don't care anything. A bear could smash into your room and you be like, sub, are you trying to hit this fucking train wreck with me? He's talking to you. You're like, yeah, this is sweet. So that nervous systems ability to flip you into recovery.
Mode is critical. And if you're sitting on the couch, if you're watching TV, if you're eating great food, but you're sympathetic dominant, hmm? It's not going to recover you nearly as much perhaps to some extent kind of not at all. You need to fall into that parasitic that appear something good. God you need to fall into that parasympathetic dominance. Before recovery can really be unveiled and really go do its
thing. I suppose people don't see the activation, the sympathetic activation. If what I did the thing I was sat on the couch to intercept. Yeah. But you were
obsessing about that slay. You were worrying about school
or you are on your phone on social media. Getting pissed about comments clapping back at people and so, which was all in good fun, but the psychological vectors are real big and recovery and actually impact sport performance and body composition. If you're chronically stressed, if you're chronically pissed. If you've got a girlfriend you fight with all the time, it will make you less lean and last
Act and it will make you worse at your sport than you could have been the degree of extremity of that scenario is almost linearly correlated with how bad it is. Nobody is like, oh man, you know, it's good to see this athlete back on the mats for the first time and NCAA Wrestling. I heard he went through a terrible divorce for the last two months. Jim I feel like he's going to be
really.
There's a reason. Nobody says that. Now you think proximately like the divorce? Make him miss practice. Probably not. Is he missing meals? What kind of
To be living in. Who is he married to like, you're the
lady. That maybe he went on his own
food. He probably went harder with thoughts of that bitch ruin my
life. Yeah. Vengeance.
Vengeance. Did decreases, how much sleep you're getting? The psychological is a huge part of the relaxation process. Has affected me personally quite recently because in my attempts to be as good of an athlete in my own realm as I could be, I was also doing like two full-time jobs at RP and all this other stuff that I do and I was like, why am I not recovering to the extent that I could?
Isaac, you work, 12 hours a day idiot. Was it. My work is sitting at a computer in front of a video camera, but I'm on active, and I'm thinking, and I'm active. Yes. And the same not as parasympathetic. Relaxation nervous system dominant as I could be,
I had a great conversation yesterday with laith. I'll show off who wrote The Oxford, Handbook of evolutionary emotions, so it's all emotions through an evenly. That's the only lens they matter from and what one of the main takeaways that I had from that
Conversation was.
Because emotions, that the most Salient part of emotions to us is the affective state that we can feel like the phenomenological experience of being a person, feeling angry, or sad, or joyful, or an, or, or Ellis,
or horniness and emotion, cast to
be for me, it must all the time.
I'm so emotional, you won't see anything. It's not big enough.
Okay. But what he says is look, that's all well and good. And that's the thing that has the most valence because it's what you feel is front and center of your
But all of these different things happen. He taught me that fear. So the Cascade of things that happen in your body when fear is activated. So diet, already physically for violence, digestion, gets tuned down a sexual arousal gets tuned down, depends on who you are, you know, you just had sort of permanently sort of micro
horny hears me when I'm not scared. Here's me when I'm
scared. But another thing that was super fucking intro, I like
When you've got one, your disgust response turns on your basal temperature increases. Yes. Ready for the warms you up cider line. Cytokines get released into the bloodstream. So you have your just do do do here. I am upstairs in my house looking all of this stuff. Meanwhile, in the basement, there's all of this bullshit going on. That's cascading down from emotions. The best one that I learned, this might be something I could teach you is when you're fearful of something. Your ability to
To map and remember Roots becomes increased. So your local specialization for
gazelle where to run
waving sighing. Yeah. You just see routes open up to you in a way that you couldn't before. So
when I'm with a gay club it's the roots going to places. I need to go. The fear really with
dungeon is presumably is always the glory hole for bottom. Yeah
it meant it like math the bottom literally because depends on the club. The rooms could be aware how about some philosophically the bottom Power by the most pathetic thing I can do with.
The club. Okay. No power in that Chris. I like to be
deflowered. That's true. Okay, so, so the way that I'm sort of conceptualizing at the moment is you have output physically, you have your sort of day-to-day movement, you're neat, you know, kind of what you're doing, what you get. And I'm to outside of the training session, then you have your psychological strain, which is a real sort of below the surface little sneaker. But then you also have these things which are
Relating stress in one form or another and also what they do to the activities, you do to recover as well. So it's not just that psychological stress causes you to not recover throughout the day, even when you're doing recovery things, it can also limit your sleep. But people know the like dude, I was stressed last night and I only got five hours of sleep. It's like the thing that sneaks in under the race is the fucking gorilla behind the lines operative. That was you being parallel? Pathetically activated throughout the
hits worse.
Still. Because even if you get a nominal number of hours of sleep, the Sleep Quality can declined substantially. That's a good thing. Because if you're in a fight or flight scenario, let's say, wore something like that, or those killer, this late motherfucker, if you should be going to sleep, but it better be light sleep because they're better be, not any confusion. When you wake up and you better wake up quick, like, boom. And I'm
doing stuff tons of micro Awakening throughout the night
all the time, right? And that's when you're stressed, you're thinking about something. What did my boss say it work? What did he mean by that? Is there any way I can use my body to get my position?
Acts shit like that. Then it's gonna hang in with you and it affects your recovery at every step of the way. And so, a big part of what recovery stuff does is, it begins to wind this process down and once it wins the process down and gets you into parasympathetic recovery mode, then you start to collect the gold coins of recovering. Actually do the recovery. So, almost a two-phase process, getting to the place where you can recover through.
Every things and then the recovery things really start to affect you to actually do that meat and potatoes. Work of fixing your tendons and your muscles. Putting like you're back in so on and so forth.
So a lot of what you're doing with recovery modalities is simply stopping putting your foot on the accelerator.
That's the number one thing you have to do, to quote my colleague, dr. James Hoffman, who in my eyes is get one of the most pre-emptive preeminent practical experts on recovery in the world.
We used to be asked a lot when him and I did seminars. What can I add to my recovery program? And James would say this beautiful thing that I've remembered them summarily stolen
Don't ask what you can add ask, which can subtract subtract recovery. Is mostly about doing less, not about doing more because the same type, A Ultra conscientious athletes. They have this whole routine, you know, the morning routine, midday routine, the whole thing, and they have everything planned out and it was, they are made known as made known to them, that they are insufficiently recovering. As I gotcha,
I'm a Loblaws, our life, I'll work harder, cover time.
Enoch know, what do I add to recover more in the answer? Almost always is to subtract because people say, like, can I do some cardio to recover and James was like, let me re-architect this for you and usually, they're like a holy shit and the kind of walk home slower. They're like, holy shit. I really had everything backwards because when you want to be ultra conscientious in most of your life, just because that's kind of person, you are. When you flip into recovery mode, you have to literally turn your conscientiousness back down to like, like, I don't,
Give a shit, I don't care, watch something real stupid on
TV and really hard at caring, about not
caring and that. Yeah, it worked work harder. If you squint, it really helps to relax right?
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Off the Pod for Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to eight. Sleep.com / modern wisdom, and using the code modern wisdom. A check out that c, IG HT, sleep.com modern wisdom, and modern wisdom, a check out. All right, so how is recovery measured? Then is there is there such a
thing? Yes, there is, right? So you can measure recovery in a variety of different ways, you can try to estimate through muscle biopsy. The degree of muscle glycogen replenishment, you can take blood.
Tests to see what your testosterone and cortisol levels are. There are various highly invasive and some less invasive. Fmri Etc ways to see what degree of preparedness or disruption, your nervous system has sustained and so on and so forth. But the really cool thing about recovery as it. Regards sport performance, physical training, just getting jacked in the gym, being the best runner, you can be the best tennis player, the best golfer. I just assumed everyone listen to this by accident Rich, let me get through some more rich people Sports
racquetball Adele
oh yeah.
And then you got falconry what? The older
skeet, shooting
skating, no sorry that's for everyone. And then skiing which is either a sport, you do in Colorado or sport. You do in a nightclub in New York City, both are fun and equally dangerous. I might
add if you have done cocaine. No maybe not.
No, I'm so I don't do stimulants. Yeah, I had
a but you must have done at some point in order to learn not to
do. So I was on Adderall for
Years prescribed by the doctor, for my severe attention deficit disorder, and it brought in a lot of positive effects and abroad, a lot of negative effects. And then after a while, the - so much, outweigh the positives as my brain was maturing that I had to pull the plug on all Adderall and still to this day if I get caffeinated. I got my personality shifts, substantially. I also don't have any of the proximate needs for stimulants. I have no problem. Fucking yapping as everyone clearly Knows by now, I'm wide awake, no problem in the morning. I don't need any
In to get me up and going and, I guess, oh, sociability. I made a joke on the RP strength Channel about what it's like to be on cocaine and a lot of people were like, that guy's done cocaine before because I was like, you hit it up and you're ready to just meet everyone ever roll at the same time. So thing is that's a default emotion of mine. That's just how I always feel. And Dungeness cook took me out right now and be like go meet that person on the corner of Austin to be like are they cool with you like? Yeah, absolutely, they're great whites. Hello, my honey just meet
And people enrolled be great me on coke would just be like, more of me than anyone's interested in. Experiencing you ever in your own head and your blabbing to people and they're all listening and you're like, I should just shut the fuck up. Like I'm tired of me. There's enough of that going on. So no need for cocaine time soon. But your boy fucks with. We'd like, you feel me?
Why do you use
weed?
Ah,
two reasons.
One, I tend to be a pretty serious thinker in my own head.
And I think about work and Grand problems of the universe. All the time weed makes me sufficiently stupid in interrupts my train of thought enough and a lot of a generative nonsense that comes out of them by the GPT and the, you know, like idea, bubble machine and your
brain. Right. You've seen you've seen us slack.
Yeah, sure. That's what that is. Yeah, I'll that comes up with so much nonsense that I can regress.
To not taking it. So seriously and I can relax at some kind of deeper level of like bad. The brains going to do is brains all junk at this point, which is interesting also weed makes me see the world in a really quirky way and it's kind of like being immersed into like a Lord of the Rings Universe where I'm like, whoa, everything's kind of tripped out and it's just fun. And so that's what I do with weed. I don't understand how people work on we'd sometimes I'll have really good ideas. I quickly write down and later inspect and they're either nonsense are like oh my fuck that. Really was a good idea.
But like when people are like a man, like I work. Hi, I'm like, what the
fuck - and blah
blah. The way I go about. Doing weed is also a bit strange, I'm absolutely uninterested ever and being a little bit High. I want to either go to the fucking moon or be Stone sober, that's it. So if you ever catch me high and a few people, I got high last weekend and walked around and Arbor Michigan with my wife, I was trying to show her like, hey, I went to undergrad here and heals all the cool stuff because the undergrads are back first week and I just got like dr. Mike, like eight times in a row and it was totally cool. But also,
like I was high as fuck. So you let people start talking to him. Like, I'm dr. Mike, I'm on the internet for something people seem friendly. That's nice. Yeah. And then, at first, when I first started happening me like, you know, a year ago, I was like, holy shit nowadays. I'm like cool. But it's also a little
bit on weed. Everything can be a little bit scary, especially attention. Yeah, people and I love that because normally, I'm like, you
know, things don't phase me much anymore. In my 40 years old, I've seen a lot of crazy shit.
So, I just don't get that like War, but on weed, I do. So, it's fun. I'm not defending marijuana as an ethical practice or something like that. I think the vast majority of media, you'll see on marijuana is intentionally sensationalistic and tries to wildly exacerbate. Its negatives. It's just the nature of media in general. And I always think of like, there's like a some New York Times writer that's writing the expose On th see all times while having a scotch and, you know, like, all right, because alcohol doesn't cause 50% of people who become violent or anything and the rest.
I'm
talking about reparations that are needed from an iPhone that was used with fucking slave labor out of China. Figure that one out. So an interesting Insight that I learned last year. About weed, in particular, one of the reasons that I think it is quite contentious in a way that alcohol isn't is that alcohol has very reliable effects across cohorts on how you feel, you drunk, I have a pretty good understanding of what you drunk feels like because of what I've done wrong like when she's drunk, okay? Weed is not the same
To 10 people, you'll have 10 different. Makes me horny. Makes me tired. I want to get up and do whatever you do. You'll always be all is really all of them. Um, but you know for me I just don't really enjoy it. And then every person that loves weed goes now. Man, you need a sativa. I'm hybrid with a bees are blah, blah. You've got you've got to get the thing. It's because are you doing it? Are you trying it with the concentrate you joining know? You got to do shatter and I'm like bro look I just I'm one of those people for whom
Umm, I don't know, maybe I'll try it again at some point in future and see if it works for me or something. But yeah, it's not reliable across the board. The effect it has on people whereas I think alcohol, even if people's behavior is very different from person gets angry, some person gets, add some person gets whatever, I think, the way that they feel there's not a few archetypes, really right? For the most part is that whereas for weed there's like, you know thousand.
Sure sure. And I'm like,
People, you know nowadays that I've largely from your help have gotten more popular people. Some fraction of people seem to assume that anything you do and talk about is something you espouse and recommend and like I am absolutely, I do not espouse marijuana consumption. If it's some shit that fits in your life, the only thing I have to say about it as ticket earlier in the day, so it doesn't interfere with your sleep. Most people be like, but I use it to sleep, and then it's actually a lower quality sleep, which might be
a finding developing yesterday today.
Exactly something like that.
Michael Jackson method. I'm kidding. See you soon. Oh, I was referring to his use on himself, right? Mix metaphors. Should I have brought up Bill, Cosby too soon also too
much. I
call him William, we're on first first name basis. Okay. I don't advocate for people to do weed or so I say just don't let it interfere with your sleep and make sure you finish all your work and be responsible about it. I only ever do eat on time.
I have off. I'm finished all my work. If I haven't finished my work for the day or for the week. Oh, I'm not taking any drugs because I still have to finish my work. It's a demon that will haunt me, and I will
have an open open. Loop is
fucking oh, hell, no. So, soon, as I put everything away, I finish up. We'd totally cool, enjoy. And the other thing I would say is notice how it's affecting you. And if it's something that turns into something that like, you don't like, but you still do fucking stop doing it. They'll be a few day period. If you do some serious weed where you're kind of want to do it again.
Cody and say it's like a psychological addiction is not physical. If that even is barely an addictions kind of God, should I do it again? Give it a couple days. You're going to feel a bit more, clear-headed feel right as rain. And the next time you want to do it, you can do it. No problem. I do we'd like a few times a week, usually almost always on a
weekend but your delivery
mechanism Edibles. Exclusively.
Okay. What's your
death? So my brain adapts rapidly to weed. So if I do it for two or three days in a row, I need to up the dose to get the same effect because again I'm only trying to get super fucked up.
Anywhere between 20 and 80 mg look me. Yeah. Yeah. But remember, you're like, oh my God. How can you still like handle yourself? I can't.
That's the whole point. Yeah, I mean, I can the only time still
not to shit in the street but
barely, the only time I ever took more than 10 milligrams of Edibles was when I was traveling in Hawaii and I went on a date with some check and she was like super hard or lovely or whatever but I just didn't know what was going to happen when I went to 20 milligrams from 10.
And was like do before the day. Yeah.
Chris my man just hey van just you did she know or no. No oh my God! So basic why you nervous? You're like why are you in my head? Talking to me. She's like
what the opposite happened which was about halfway through the meal that we were having my hearing completely stopped. My hearing, just stopped working and I was like, she was there bubba. Bubba. Bubba bubba. Bubba, bubba, bubba, bubba, bubba, bubba, bubba.
And that's what I realized listening to the woman on a date. Doesn't
matter? Yeah, it doesn't want ghozland.
The same. Yeah, exactly. It was just like it always is so Bubba. Bubba, Bubba. But I was like, fuck. Like I can't hear and I couldn't hold onto any thoughts. Obviously we and then I heard Queens. We Are the Champions playing dope. That'll play in your head and I thoughtful on schizophrenia. That's interesting Queens. We Are the Champions is playing and then she finished speaking and I think I said something that presumably you don't remember what you said related as soon as it left your mouth he had no I done away. You have scary then.
Queens. We Are the Champions played again and for the next two hours, all I could hear was Queen's, We Are the Champions. I couldn't hear anything else. So I exited the day, took myself into bed and blade and listen to Queens. We are the champions for another hour and a half and there's a
pleasant listening,
kind of, I guess, but also kind of a bit like, what the fuck is going on?
We're huge hog, were you? Attributing an anxiety, emotion to that process of being the best. Okay, I got you a little that's like my superpower is.
Is I'll be completely fucked up and useless to the world, but I don't give a shit only chill. Because, like, all of my work has been done. I can flip off having to be dr. Mike, and I'm just like, Mike, I guess at 80. I mean, if you ever talk to me, you catch me high almost certainly, you'll be like his eyes just look more red, he's really kind of the same, but it's not the same on the inside.
Sorry. Good. Okay. So, going back to how you measure recovery. Fmri can do some invasive. Lots that can do a lot of it, but
There's one variable that's profound Lee, easy to measure the integrates all of those for you automatically. It's like a pyramid and at the very top you measure and that's performance. So if you make a claim I'm under recovered and let's say you're a height, you're a high jumper. All we got to do is warm you up and get you to do. Three jumps with some measurement, device at your best effort.
If we do that regularly two times a week on average through your career we know your Baseline real damn well and we can do statistical process control that shows us. When are you like under doing it? If you're consistently unable to exhibit your highest performance and you've been through a higher volume of training recently because like or or psychological stress because sometimes you just have a fucking off day that totally happens. But if you're kind of
tribute to something lots of incoming fatigue, and your performance is low, especially if we can repeat that over several sessions or several days, we know that your fatigue is too high with high degree of certainty and you are under recovered. However, if you feel like shit, if you're sore, if you're anything else, you are dude. I'm not going to be able to do today. You warm up and you hit a PR. It doesn't matter. What the fuck is going on under the hood, the grand integrator,
You're good. And it's always right now under the hood, you might not be completely everything in line, but you're at a such a high level of performance, your total system. Capability is no lower than typically is. And so this ability to have this Grand integrator and this one variable that tells us are we under recovered are all we properly. Recovered is such a fucking superpower because it completely washes away any of this crap about like, well, I feel like XYZ
The because the brain, the mind they play tricks on, you expectations. So on and so forth. If you're performing at your high-level go, the only thing that matters that's it because this is for sorry real quick. This is really, really important. When you're coaching other athletes, depending on the type of athlete, you get, you get lazy asshole, athletes that always say they're under recovered and they're lying because you put their ego on the line, right? So you get somebody who's a fucking high jumper and the you know, they're lazy as fuck. Go check this out.
Dave I I heard my talking shit you was you was a bitch and you can't jump high Davis or what the fuck. Big Dave, why don't you get on this this jump platform and show us. You're a fucking real big pimp boom. All time. PR how you feel days? Oh no. I don't have shut the fuck up. Get
you need to practice now.
Showing off my fucker, on the other hand, you'll get the very conscientious athletes. Doesn't matter. They can have a fucking spike in their head from a zombie battle. He liked Emily! How are you? She's a hungry and ready for practice.
You're like, okay, I think you're gonna die soon. Do you have anyone to call before you die in? Like no, no, no, I'm good. I can still kick a soccer ball. You like very well. So for those people, you ask him to give a good effort somehow, and sometimes that's just a coaching, I kind of thing. One of the things that decays early is coordinated, high-level Motor Performance. So if someone looks off like butter finger e on a football field or racket looks like it doesn't belong to their hand anymore, and they're usually slick, if they keep fucking up and I got bags under their eyes, you fucking pull them out of practice.
Shut the fuck up. Hit the showers. Go play Playstation have two sub Submarine sandwiches and follow Focus, leave for 10 hours. Don't ever come back until you're fucking good to go. So those types of people just Word of Mouth, they say, I'm recovered or not ice or not in those two different cases. Most people are honest, most athletes are like, ya Feelin fire. I'm not, whatever, but you get those extremes performance is the grand truth teller. Can you perform at your usual level or above? If the answer is, yes, you are. Sufficiently recovered to continue hard training and that's something you can.
Use in the gym for yourself. If you come to the gym and you're like, man, I don't know if I have it today. Like I think I might be like overreached under a covered. The hrp hypertrophy op out. It says you know, 225 bench for a set of 12 because last week you did 11 and that's how the app works. You get in there and you're like I'm gonna fucking get my headphones going. I'm going to do what it takes. Let's see what I got. You get seven reps full on your spotter. Has to take it off of you, you might as well just do a deal of the rest of the session. Take good. Rest of the week easy training, come back afterwards because you're probably cooked,
Maybe it's just a one-off, try another set, but if you hit the saint in, that's it. But if you hit 13, you were supposed to hit 12. Oh, you might feel a certain way, but you cereal got to keep going. So there's like a wisdom from all sides in all conversations. On the one hand, you have like hippie Karen, who's like, you have to treat yourself and listen to your inner child and really shower yourself with love and that's dope. Because some people like when you're really afraid of fatigued and exhausted, that's the kind of energy you need. But on the other hand, David Goggins, got some point.
Stew because a you might feel like shit but then you're on your best, shut the fuck up and keep going so recovery can and should be measured primarily with performance huge
deal. What about people? Lots of people who are listening who do not have a primary sport Pursuit that they're doing. They go to the gym because they want to look a little bit better and they do all the rest of the stuff but their output is going to be struggle to be measured physically in that way. Is there another proxy that you like to
use?
if you go to the gym,
And you track your repetitions in your loads, you have the best possible proxy of them all because every single output of yours in training is measurement at the same time, 18 reps of curls that's a measurement, very direct is a matter of fact occurs in integers which is amazing super easy to measure our our app detects it. In fact, you're not recovered Etc. So anyone who goes to the gym, really that's listening to this. They already have a metric now, for some people
'Well, they might have pre-programmed runs that are never maximal. So, the cow is. Am I trying too hard? Blah, blah, blah. There are a couple of other things that are indirect, that can start to build a story, but we like to say dr. James Hoffman, and I was my sort of colleague and Recovery world is, you want to have more than one of these all pointing in the same direction. Before you start pulling a plug on training or trying to re-architect things, one is sort of, are you sore and lots of parts of your body and that in that Dom's like delayed onset muscle soreness.
My quads are fucked up kind of like a diffuse kind of joint Source you ever had. Like the flu. I feel like
that shit. Everything else, everything
hurts? You run enough miles through multiple weeks on end, you're just going to wake up and be like uh so that but I by itself you can be am totally normal training circumstances and still feel like shit. Sometimes people be like the over-index on soreness and physical feel as an indicator of overreaching. But all those are almost never high-performing athletes or coaches of high-performing athletes because coaches, or that athletes themselves will tell
You like I'm mostly fucked up most of the time, right? Like if you get a professional bodybuilder, just right randomly. Be like, how does your body feel he be? Like, what do you want me to start half? My body is sore, but that's the normal State of Affairs. So it has to be indexed to like compared to what? Come more than normal. Okay, we got an issue. Another one is your desire to train now. This one's tricky. Desire to train is, how much do you want to be in here? How much do you want to do shit? How much do you want to push yourself into?
Difficult situations and training. If you are very well recovered and you have low fatigue compared to your Baseline desire, you're going to be like, dude, I can't fucking lie. If people take a week off or deload week, do some folks and they come into the gym, Street homicidal. After that shit. I can't be out of the gym for more than week because I start looking at old people. I'm going to fuck that guy. Say something to me. Michael, even getting it is 90. He's about to be fucking zero in a second. Is that how you measure dead people's ages? So desire to
rain is trippy. And the only tricky part about it is, you can't apply an absolute value to everyone. Some people just psychotic to begin with but everyone has a relative value. Normally this athlete wants to go this hard and they're like, I'm ready to fucking kill it. It's less likely that their overreached, even if you don't have direct measures on the other hand, if someone feels like you're like, hey, you want to train under like like
There was a South Park episode where like Russell Crowe took a cancer. Patient and he liked because he is like the the Tugger, the tugboat I'm Russell. Crowe it was amazing, this half, our guys are fucking brilliant. He took her cancer patient like out of the ward and he is like, who is he? He was supposed to be fighting cancer. He's like, well, I haven't found kansa. But I found someone with can say any just punches the guy in the gut and the guy goes any kind of collapses if that's your emotion. When someone said you wanted to deadlift to a to like they're gonna
My body. There's a high probability, higher-than-average that like your overreached and you're under recovered in the fatigue is too high and you should do something about it, and everyone knows kind of generally their psychological relationship to training if you've really feeling over a few days, like, oh, man, I just don't want to be in the fucking gym, and if you're in the gym, you're choosing your using, the are prepared. If you replace exercise function to take hardcore barbell movements with a huge displacement, replacing them with machines, with cables and, you know, deep down your
baby and yourself. That is a bit of a sign that like you're pretty overreached and it's time maybe to wind back. Do some recovery days come back and really want that blood
again, is that cumulative fatigue or is that something different like shit is their acute fatigue? Cumulative, fatigue. How do you think about like this sort of duration of time under the?
Yes, yes. So there are two types of fatigue really. There's acute fatigue which is like after you do a hill Sprint, you go lll, you're fatigued that heavy breathing?
Thing tends to go away.
However, the muscle soreness that you accrued the disruption and damage to your muscles, the depletion of glycogen it doesn't go away right away it'll take a day or two to go away in your back to totally normal. However, most people especially folks trying to get their best and I'll say this a different way. People who are intelligent and understand Sports Science and are doing the thing that it takes to be the best. Those people must train more frequently than total all
teams recovery can possibly arrange for you between each individual session. So, if it takes you 48 hours to recover, completely from a difficult sport session or work out, but you train roughly, every thirty six to 24, at some point. Some of the fatigue that you accrued at the beginning, which was initially acute fatigue. It's still around. That's not cumulative fatigue, yet. That's just acute fatigue with a different time course acute. Can mean a minute a commune in. Our community, can mean three
You hit your body again, and some of that fatigue that hadn't come down yet. Now gets more fatigued added to it. Because the amount of fatigue, you're pouring into the system, isn't as fast as the system is pouring it out. The recovery, can't match and so fatigued accumulates and becomes greater and greater a little bit low key everyday, definitely heike every week and most hard training athletes. Roughly very roughly four to eight.
It's a very difficult training later. We'll have to do something about this fatigue that has accumulated. It follows you everywhere. An example of cumulative, fatigue, has we start to get the Sensation that like she start underperforming, you take one, easy session, you come back. You're still under performing. What the fuck. I thought I fixed this shit. No new. You accumulate accumulating debt like you you get ten thousand dollars into debt and you get paid and you put 500 down to the banker like I'm free baby in the cashiers like oh yeah.
Yeah, sure. There's 9,500. Other dollars you have to pay off and you're going to feel that burden. So if you have a high degree of accumulated, fatigue, not only will it affect you, much more. It also just doesn't disappear. It's gonna take some time to wear down because it's built up like crazy. I didn't even know before I went into my Ph.D program and sports science, the cumulative fatigue was a phenomenon that existed, I just didn't know that. I thought that after a few days when your muscle soreness went away, you were fucking
You're golden and that's just not true and it's not true to the extent that the harder you train, the more cumulative fatigue can Summit the stronger, you are the more of it at some eats the bigger, you are, the more of an
issue because in your house you need to accumulate fatigue. Is also greater even if your body's ability a kill with that
Fatale. Yeah. Oh yeah. You gotta. So like someone breaks a go-kart. How long does it take you to fix it? So I can whenever someone breaks a tank, how long does it take to fix that shit? There's a lot that can go wrong but it's a piece of Steel missing. That's 3 inches thick.
Fucking Christ and your body works on a molecular scale and so you ever see like videos of cells individually or videos of mice and see how fast everything goes and like a cell can repair itself and fucking microseconds completely when you have trillions of cells and they require a resource like the blood that only brings in shit. So so quickly and takes it out so quickly that should takes a long time to get, right? And so, cumulative, fatigue is a thing that occurs we
To be aware of it but it is inevitable and something we have to deal with. It's like saying to someone hey here's this awesome. A little off-road vehicle, a little like Forerunner type of shit, right. And like a quad. And I want you to go and have so much fun with it in the woods. Do not get it dirty. Like what do you mean not? Get it dirty when I get it back to you after I've hosed it down and washed all the mud and pull the rocks out of the Treads. They're like, no, just don't get a dirty at all. I'm sure you can find.
A way to ride at the doesn't make it dirty. What the fuck? So to do sport training in a way that doesn't take any excessive fatigue on totally understandable. So, if your idea of like riding the fucking four wheeler is to just take it into a mud pit and just like, leave it and then get a crane to lift it out there. You're like, that's it. Okay, that's needless dirt, but you're going to go on Trails. You're going to get some fucking dirt and you have to do in order to have fun. So in the same way sport, training must expose you to cumulative fatigue, otherwise you take in too many fucking days off. You gotta be on that.
You got to be on that shit and that will catch up to your body. Then the only thing you have to do is be aware of that, and periodically bring it back down to workable levels. Sometimes very low, every six months, or so many kinds of athletes should take an active, rest phase, which is two weeks in length, 2 weeks, of doing hardly ship that has to do with Sport, and that'll bring down so much fatigued. It'll give you a timeline of six months until you have to do that again. But every several months you might have to take a knee.
Easy week, every several days you have to take a day or two easy. The weekends built that in for us. So at every time, course you let fatigue rise as it does by going hard and you have to let it fall. My sometimes, you let it fall, let it fall into fall, but it's still accumulating. And then you take a deload in a Falls, almost a zero, but not quite. And then every six months, you got to take it really down to Zero by taking the leash Shake. Yet you find out of here. Yeah. You just like live like two weeks like Mike Thurston lives every day. Shirtless.
Harbor in Italy, with eight, unbelievably attractive, women are out of it all the time.
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Comment / modern wisdom, that's drink. AG, one.com /, modern wisdom, hang on. I saw you. I saw you be very racially judgmental. And say, all British people looked alike and that video, you said that me and Mike Thurston. Look the same.
You could be mistaken for brothers. If not identical twins. You know, that
a lot of people accused us of interviewing ourselves when we went on each of, this
podcast was a trip. I did see that. I was like what?
Well, it's a compliment to both of us, I'm sure.
Okay. Are you from the same part of England or
not? He went to University with me in the same place, so he's from Leeds, which is north. I'm a little bit further north, but sound very similar, similar accents. He's a year younger than me, but we trained in the center for sporting Excellence at Newcastle University. He was 18. I was 19. So I've known that kid for like 50
or so you've know. You guys have known each other
for forever forever. We party together. It forwards, like it would literally growing up to from the Dubai lifestyle. Oh, Dubai is one of the most awful places on the planet.
And I'm
not going to comment on that at
all. I do not like to buy. It was one of those places that I went to 2018 2017 for the first time and then I went again and every time I go back it gets worse, I'm just
curious. What about it? Do you not? Like I've never been to Dubai.
Dubai is like if you took a
If you if you took the most soulless way to present an experience with non of the actual embodied imbued values of the experience so you go into an amazing Italian restaurant and you know there's fresh dough at the door and there's like flower that's laughter and it's like sort of cool Artisan sort of wrought iron barricades around it. Almost looks. So the nation are some touring Cecily. Yeah meanwhile there is some nameless
Faceless fucking shake. That has realized that there is a gap in the market for Italian food in that particular quadrant of that particular area of Dubai and that is all of Dubai. There is, as far as I can see, very little soul. There's very little salt. I'm not somebody that's bothered about imbuing shit, with existential, meaning all the time. But when I go to Dubai, I'm increasingly reminded of the sort of shallowness of modern. Western you've made a face, you making a face.
Me, I heard to buy as a place where facade doesn't matter and it doesn't matter if you have an expensive car, the latest luxury
outfit, that would be the polar opposite of what it is. Look at some of my best friends live in Dubai. They have fun. But even they, and this is a good indicator of what Dubai is like. I don't need to take a break from Austin, right? Apart from, for the heat, but that's not because of Austin, that's just because of something that's outside of it. There is not a single person that I know who lives in Dubai. That doesn't need to take a dip,
vibrate the like a tower fucking a bit much, bro. I'm just surrounded by this sort of ostentatious wealth, and everyone's Bugatti as covered in fucking gold, foil. Yes, sir. Eric Weinstein actually made a really nice analogy talking about Jeffrey Epstein and the way that his wealth was distributed, he said, it was like a gold bar that had been beaten down into foil. So as to give the appearance of a massive vast Kingdom of well, sad only. But if you sort of poked it you'd realize that it was wafer-thin
That's kind of, I mean, in terms of actual wealth Dubai and fucking all of the Middle East is evidently swimming in cash, but in terms of like legitimacy and and and soul and investment, all of that being said, there's some great British club promoters that run venues out there. The guys from select Media Group of fantastic. The guys from one Nick and all of the dudes that run some great venues. But even they would say we saw this thing, you know, like, americana's coming back, for instance, country music's having like a massive Resurgence of the
Moment it totally wouldn't surprise me if we see Honky Tonk style, Western Americana bars popping up with grill, barbecue style food and all the rest of it, because that's on Trend, not because someone that fucking loves Americana and barbecue and honky-tonk. Music was like, I want to do this because I care. I gotta when you have unlimited funds very highly affluent Market that you can tap into as much as you want it.
And look it's for some people but it's not for me. Also you can kind of Ruin anywhere on the planet by creating direct flights from the UK to it. And unfortunately Dubai has had that. There's a couple of venues in Dubai hotels that are renowned for. If there's one place on the planet, you don't do drugs. It's Dubai. Like do not pass, go do not collect 200 fucking rupees. Go directly to Abu Dhabi jail with no air, conditioning for the rest of your fucking life. You go and do
Do that. And These Guys these like Essex wide boy London party kids. Go out there with Louis Vuitton man bags and fight and sniff gear. And that's the, that's the trip. It's like fucking scary to me. That first of doing that is after
they get popped for shit like that.
I've heard some stories about it happening
right prefer not to make an international incident out of you. And I
mean, if they didn't need to, I don't need to. You're in the fucking back of the van and Away you go. Straight over the border to Abu Dhabi. You're in jail. See
Run. Maybe you'll maybe someone will hear from you in five years time who does always. So you don't a fuck about but devised, like I really did a couple of trips spending a bit of time there. Good example, last year I was on tour, we did Edmonton roundly known in Canada as dead Minton because that's how little is going on. There are it's a flat Place Vancouver, we did Toronto. We did Chicago fucking dope. Said he by the way ton of places.
You would think we went from Dubai to Vancouver is a 17-hour flight and then we went to Edmonton. You would have thought, we couldn't wait to leave Edmonton, and we would have loved to have stayed in two by the opposite was completely true. After five days in to buy all of us were like, get me the fuck out of here. I'm sick of just sort of being an again, I'm sure that people can go and have a trip a few times and enjoy
it. She would recommend. People try to go there 100%
understand. It's very impressive to go and see, like, you know, the most modern greatest feats.
Engineering City, that currently
exists like a big version of the Vegas
Strip, correct? Yeah. Big fuck-off version of that with like Islam in the background. That's a trip built on the back of slave labor. That's a real trip which is like pretty fucking ruthless. I heard the Burj
Khalifa doesn't have proper Plumbing so they literally waste products of rape drugs all day. Something fun to think
about, but yeah, it's just like, it's a, it's a mixed bag of a place. I've got kind of like conflicted feelings about it, but I unless I need to go back and I have no desire.
ER, to go that and I like travel, so don't be surprised going back to the fatigue Point. We've sort of talked about how you accumulate it. We've talked about the ways that people get in the way of it. What are the biggest inputs that reduce
fatigue?
Yeah, huge. So
you have sleep as critical critical input.
You have food as another absolutely critical input. You can potentially do light, training, easier, training that you would have. This is a very big distinction. You don't add easy training to your program, you subtract away hard training for like half a week and you replace all the hard training sessions with sessions that are half of the load, half of the sets half of the Reps and lifting terms. For example, just way easier that reduction
Shannon in stimulus, but still getting a stimulus seems to be to recovery what rehab is to injury through. Break your leg. They don't tell you or just stay off of it for six months, they're like, put your weight on it, but a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, much less than you would. And then slowly and surely you get better. So we have sleep food, like training and
Rest and relaxation, which is a big one
and is different
psychological different to sleep. Yeah. So when you're awake, you can do things on a spectrum of your halfway not. They're super, super chill or like fully present in the moment. Super psychotic that whole thing. So, you want to be on the one end of the spectrum to that, a big thing, a little bit of an aside that I've noticed in something, my wife and I have talked about when we're like, sort of figuring out what kind of experience to have on our way.
Occation, for example, because we're really pretty dedicated to our athletic Pursuits. So first vacation isn't just a time to fuck off as a grifter. How does this affect
fatigue? Oh, so you patent this into your recovery period. Okay, the, when am I going when do I think
my Aria right? Okay, oh yeah. So there's two types of experiences that you can have and people conflate the two as both being good for Recovery. There are experiences that are Pleasant and relaxing and then their experiences that are really fun but require a lot of energy.
G going to the club with your friends is so much fucking fun. You go to dinner. First, you get loaded up. You go to the club, you throw up in the bathroom, get punched in the face. Everyone's having a time, that's fun. But it's not relaxing in this, it doesn't recover you. But there are other options staying at home and watching Netflix and eating some food.
It's still a good time but very low key and because it's also relaxing it actively reduces your fatigue and helps you recover. So a lot of times people will observe culturally will observe high-level athletes that train a lot and if you have like cameras that follow them a lot which has happened more recently, you realize the vast majority of athletes live fucking boring lives, they train hard as shit and then the rest of the time they're just kind of like just watching Netflix and eating popcorn and you're like
What the hell like why don't go walk to the park or take a flight to go see Chicago and they're like, I got to recover. So recovery means you plan in periods. Of relaxing activity was a very low on the activity side. That's a big ingredient. And the last biggest modifier to all of these is time, people like to do this thing, where they pretend that they can recover in a shorter time,
And that really takes the hope for it. And so if
they are speedrunners gas
recovery, cannot be speedrun can't, and there's a will, if I get a foam roller and jam it up my ass and the massage gun and they take that to the cock, something's got to happen faster. And it turns out it's one of these. I don't say stupid, but one of these drunk driving posters about how sobriety works that I saw back in the day, it was like, how do you get sober quicker? Do you take a
A shower. Do you have coffee in the answer? Was it just takes time for the alcohol to get out of your body. That is the same principle applied to recovery. You need sleep food, rest, and easier, training than normal. Those are the big rocks and there's a few more to mention in other contexts and you have to apply them for enough. Time until you are sufficiently recovered. Could be need an afternoon. Could be needed a weekend. Could be you needed three weeks.
Let's go through each of those sleep, rest Food, deload Training. What are the biggest most common errors that people make when it comes to each of those different buckets.
I would say with sleep. There are three that come to mind, not sleeping enough time wise. Ideally you should get somewhere between seven and nine hours. Another one is lower quality, sleep sleeping in an environment. That's too hot. For example, you slept, but you were tossing and turning and also other bullshit, you consume caffeine too close to bed. I know a bunch of people are like you have an espresso and just go, right the fuck to sleep. I watch my wife do it last night, the quality of sleeps not going to be the same.
And the third thing is timing to your circadian rhythms, there's more and more research out all the time and more and more individual experiences coalescing to show us that, that whole bullshit. Your parents used to tell you about, you gotta go to bed earlier, I'll show, blah blah, all that shit was true, bro. And I don't want to hear it. Who the hell goes to bed at 9:00 p.m., but that doesn't mean 9 p.m. is when you should go to bed. But it means that you have to find sort of two things. One is when for me as a human
What time going to sleep, promotes my best sleep and best recovery. Because if you go to sleep at 3 a.m. and you wake up at like 11:00 a.m. nominally that's eight hours of sleep, but you could be groggy and fucked up and all this other shit, just does not match your circadian rhythms. Basically when your body should be sleeping, it's not and when it shouldn't be sleeping, it's still sleeping. So that's the thing. You have to sort out the next thing you have to sort out is regularity. So under that
Gauri of sleep. Timing is, am I going to bed at the right time for me ish and it's always a range. Don't forget psychotic 9:31 p.m. right somewhere between 9 and 11 is totally cool. And then, you have to think about regularity irregularity is a fucking double-edged sword, because on the one hand going to bed at a regular time, means your weekends are kind of like different who the fuck goes to bed. The same time. Saturday night is they do Monday night like some kind of serial killer? No Doubt.
And myself and my wife.
But don't tell the police about us.
It's tough. And you can't always get it right? And it's no big deal if a night here. They are. You go to bed, super fucking lie. But if you're going to sleep at very different times, many times through the week, the regularity thing is out the fucking window. And that's not the ideal
circumstance. Find the time for sleep and wake. The works best for you. Try and be relatively consistent within a one-hour window. I don't have 30 minute window either side of
that. I mean, if he could. So there's
The concrete thing to say because it's like a normally distributed Spectrum, but it seems like the closer, the better plus or minus 30 minutes was like in the same person's idea of precision, it's Overkill, it's great but like you don't need to worry about it plus or minus 45 minutes to an hour. I'd say you're still winning at life like really the fucked up. Does he normally go to bed at 10:00? And I are going to bed at 2:00 a.m. that's what's going to fuck you. If you don't really go to bed at 10:00, but you go to bed at 11:30 because that looks really fucked with you. You're probably not going to pay some kind of crazy high
cost increase.
Really, I'm seeing the kitty version of the same research that you're probably looking at, which is saying sleep consistency, consistency of the time that you go to bed and time that you wake up is becoming ever more important even in comparison with duration. Yes.
Because if the duration is done at the wrong time, the quality can comment only declines seven hours of ultra high quality sleep. Beats nine hours of shit. Sleep. Yeah, so that's a thing to think
about throughout my 20s. I didn't have a
Beeping wake pattern from the age of 18 until covered. I don't never had promotion days directs, I was awake until 2:00 in the morning or 5:00 5:30 in the morning, depending on which city I was working in that night and the final task that I had to do, if it was a domestic event in the city that was living in, it was cashing the till which is cognitively quite a fucking rough tasks which are then looking at spreadsheets in accounting money. It's like where the fuck's that $500 fine record gone. It's over there to whatever.
Or if I was in a different city it was Cash the till then drive for two and a half hours to get back home horse. So just rough like really really rough and that was a lot of things that I thought were baked into my life as a part of my mood or my source code or my genetic predisposition, or my whatever the fuck turned out to just be byproducts of really, really disrupted sleep. Yeah. You know 15 years.
You never quite know how bad our sleepers until you fix it and you watch your
Either say roughly the same and I think
that does
happen. There's genetic variation and everything. Some people are just real gifted in the fact that they can kind of get their sleep whenever and they're fucking gold. And there's a lot of paranoia with a lot of these no doubt this gets broken into reels, and everyone needs xy9. I don't know. But the average person absolutely doesn't you as a human being listening to, this might very well need more regularity or sleep. When you try it, there's a good chance. It's going to really improve a bunch of
Of shit, like you'll get leaner, you'll get more jacked, you will be cognitively sharper, you'll have more of an excitement through the day, you'll have less frustration if you're a low-key sleep-deprived and Jim puts a fucking stack of papers on your desk, you like a fucking gym. Fuck fuck. Fuck. But if he does it when you're like apt and good and rested, you like Jim, thank you so much, I can't wait to get to work on this project. It's a big difference. So fixing your sleep, can be solving problems. You didn't even know that you had or promising to be had. But like you said, you
Where they
work on baked in musicians who I am? Yeah, your conception of self so much that you'd forgotten that they were even a thing or do we have. This is just the physics of my
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A check out. Okay, so that's sleep, rest. What are the biggest errors that people make when it comes to rest?
Rest needs to be of a low grade of physical activity or no activity whatsoever. So you said he can walk through your neighborhood. You can take a leisurely bike ride and or you can be like playing board games at home or watching Netflix and anything above. That is anything that makes you like
That kind of tired is a fucking non-starter not resting. You're working. Another thing about rest. This is the fucking trip. Are you can't let the old brain run around and do work for you when I go to work it's mostly in a windowless office in the basement. I'm not joking. It's my favorite place in the world but I'm not relaxing there because my mind is occupied. The humans have a big brain that draws a crap load of fucking glucose and all this other shit and it takes a lot of technically damage in a low key.
He liked disruption. That's why. When you've worked you've ever worked hard on a problem for eight hours and you get to like a social setting with your friends and like how are you? You're like, I don't know. Should ask, who am I to be a, I'll fucking nonsense in there. So a lot of people say, oh, no physical stuff. That means I can plug away at emails. That's not a good idea. So you need to be something that actually relaxes you and the other one to the point of relaxing, you is that thing I said earlier, there's an axis of relax of fun things that are
which is really the right answer and the other axis of fun things that are energetic and require stimulus and stress if you're watching like
If you're flipping through reels or going through your phone or engaging and really vibrant discussion on the internet, and its really like your mind is going, that is not relaxing if it's anything. You need a break from that. The brake isn't from sheer boredom. It's not relaxing. There's a good litmus test. So if you can, if you're physically comfortable, and you can get bored doing it, it's probably relaxing your leg get exhausted, doing it and you're bored. Only in the sense they are going to want to do this.
anymore but uh I need a I need more than like imagine you were on the couch, eating snacks, high protein snacks of course and you know four hours of Netflix
Your significant other comes home and she's like how are you feeling? It is highly unlikely to even? Look god holds Netflix. I'm just so tired. They're like where you going to say you're going to say oh my God I'm glad you're home dude. Let's do something. I'm fucking you want. Here's another way to look about you. Want the end of your relaxation period, in many cases. Not all to end in the sensation of Cabin Fever.
You know, that term just go like you just need to get out and fucking move. Your body and do shit. Yeah. But if you're sufficiently hard training, you pray to God. No one asks you to do shit. Then you do relaxing things. So relaxing, things should be enjoyable but also very low energy, demand, physically, and low energy demand cognitively.
I watch TV with my wife and we don't watch a lot of intellectual TVs.
Analyze going to say that said that was a point. I was about to make, some people would find reading both something, which could be recovery in juicing but also, mine straining. So, you know, if you're trying to read beginning of infinity by fucking David, do you got a fucking? Yeah, exactly. You switched on write all your reading, some Manifesto political thing, diatribe told tribal and blah, blah, blah. And you trying to link it in to cool, their ideas. Got
Or you reading some relatively sort of trash, cool novel. Where who's the killer? I know what if your rings type a shit to like imagining things Frodo going to make it exactly. So it's interesting that even within the same modality of rests. Yeah. Speak the type that you're doing. What is it that you're watching you flicking through YouTube videos. That's all about created drama and like, who's a fucking grifter, and who's a shell, right? Or you watching some nice, one of those three hour long videos.
Guy walking through New York City street. When it's raining.
We do some of that shit fucking awesome to logo Tokyo for K
Street, one of a lot at during
rain. Oh yeah, I pass out to shit like that. It's great. It's really. So basically like another great relaxation modality is getting together with friends and just talking and relaxing and a comfortable seat with fluids and food around like a nice dinner with friends. Not like a hype dinner with friends where you going to go smash the club's after. But just a fucking super chill dinner and the friends have to be people.
People that you're cool around, they can be chill around. Because there's friends, you have that. Just get you fucking amped. Yep. Mmm. You need to switch to the friends that like, you feel just really like so you can walk out of the restaurant. Be like, ah, like that's how you want to feel.
One of the best judges for a friend of mine was asked recently, who's your best friend? He said, I don't know. That's kind of a kind of an odd question after age 15 or something like to have a best friend and the person asking him reframed, the question and said,
Who can you be around and sit in silence with and not feel like you need to fill it? The most, oh, trippy. And then his second version was who'd you have the least filter. When you're
around that erisa definition, I would prefer for sure.
I think both of those, you know, to your point about its people that you don't need to pay attention, turn it on. Yeah. Like I'm just, I'm fucking you talk you to talk you too. This is fucking lovely. You have a, you have your desired thing and it's like watching like tennis.
Oh yeah, some of my
My favorite people to hang out with, I'll just Nene is fucking my boy, Marcos who's super top trainer in New York City and my friend, Jacob, who's actually, the CEO of RP? I love hanging out with tons and tons of other friends, but these guys have a special place for me because they're as generative or more generative than me. If I'm hanging out in a group of people cuz I me usually, there's like a minimum amount of yapping. I'm gonna have to do to just bring that.
Because if I don't people like Mike, are you okay? So I got to be myself. Can almost always I am but when I'm trying to chill and just switch me off if I'm with Marcos or if I'm with Josh's Russian name, bro. These motherfuckers. First of all, they're straight up funnier than me. So I'm just laughing my
ass. I'm idling me
laughter insanely, insanely fatigue, reducing install, really huge, huge, huge. And these guys, are they fucking talk?
Talk and it's just a, not just total stream of we just sit down. Stand up, writing by doesn't matter. Comedy the entire fucking time and I can take a back seat. If you like thank fucking God. These guys are taking over, so if you have to be the IT guy, if there's tension, if you have to feel like you're saying, you have to say something. If you have to have a filter, holy
shit. I suppose, that's one of the problems with new friends, right, that you, yeah, established. Yeah. Enough of the Baseline. Everyone still trying to impress each other and there's this sort of
obligation this weird sort of social contract that you're going to tell them about you and what's going on and whatever. Whatever you like, hey I'm kind of like chill at the moment. You chill. Should we just shut up for five minutes and eat this
steak? Yeah. Or talk about things that have nothing to do with presenting ourselves in a best way to the other person. Let's just talk about, like, I met your friend, Zack, telander. A, while back in him. And I within about 30 seconds, click to just total nonsense, right? And I was like, my man, he's the king and he's easy.
Doesn't he like he thought I was his Queen for a Day. This is a good. I'm sure this is a good area. I think of the current sort of status of politics at the moment but because I'm not personally invested. I've never got very personally invested in
politics. Everyone in the world has personally invested into the politics of the world, superpower the United States of America, whether the New Order the best, I don't mean to make you
anxious. Well, I mean I I know what you mean. I know what you felt sense? Is that you're like, fucking this
Guy gets in at that guy gets in. It's just going to change what memes come. Hopefully the CIA is
actually in control. I pray to God everyday. That's
true. But James Smith text me earlier on and he was like, dude, this fucking election is the most compelling TV show I've ever watched. Like, I'm so, but it's drama. So what I like about the current, if you're somebody that isn't fully, you know, like politic spilled and like these fuckin whatever. The fuck's are going to have a lot of feelings about. Yeah, exactly. If you're not invested emotionally in it it's fucking
Talk shit about Biden's. Most recent debate and camel has laughs and Trump's getting shot in the blood. Like just talk shit about. Like, it's just a permanently generating reality TV, show, where NPR, or fucking Fox News or whatever will give you the update every single day and you can just chat about it. You actually think that politics can be recovery inducing if you use it in the right way. Oh yeah. The most bullshit today's news tomorrow's fish-and-chip. Rappers type
TMI eat.
Type of celebrity gossip. Fill that void, right? My, my wife got me into watching, like, The Real Housewives of insert City here. Fucking love that shit. It's all nonsense. It's people behaving. And I would say quite strange ways mostly, but I just, I don't take it seriously. And so, it's a
fuzzy audio. Visual audio visual equivalent of you'll weed to your brain. It's like, I actually can't think while watching this year is no amount of intellectual. Yes, sort of
interrogation going. So my wife use a fork
Explicitly said just just turned her brain off and I usually come into it with my brain on and I'm like Isabel, you're doing this all wrong switch off and oftentimes, I will watch it while I'm high on weed with her and
shuttle a multiplier.
So like bro sometimes I'm so high. I'm like to these people mean to act this way, or do they know that they're on camera? They can possibly be like this kind of human. I wash it on of Love Island like that high as fuck. I love love Island because it
Uses social dynamics, attraction, selection, Mating Game, Theory, all that shit. But when I'm high, I'm like are these people really
like and then I can't lower resolution
like bucket who gives a shit just come along for the ride.
Anything else to say about rest, any of the big errors that people make or have? We covered
most of them,
Pick things that give you that feeling that you really enjoy lean into them. And a lot of them are going to be the opposite of what as a diligent person who listens to podcast about enhancing, recovery are things that you're like, but don't lazy assholes. Just do this kind of stuff. Shit TV just popping back Cheetos, looking at the sunset chatting, with friends calling someone, you haven't talked to in a while, you know, is a fucking down for a good time. Even scrolling fucking mindlessly through like cat and dog.
Videos on fucking the G that is all super high quality relaxing shit if you want to do some meditation, if it actually is a practice that relaxes you which takes some time. So it wouldn't start a meditation practice with the anticipation, relaxing and don't assume that what relaxes other people relaxes you, it is absolutely crystal clear. Fuck, I have another thing to say about relaxation, it's absolutely crystal clear that the vast majority of
The benefit most people get recovery Wise from the sauna is because it makes them feel good. How many old dudes ever seen a sauna that literally sit there go. I like that's what you're supposed to do in a sauna the for me personally, even though I'm rushing was quite embarrassing, I fucking hate it, it's hot. I'm like, what the fuck? Get me out of here. Like my veins. Look cool. But everything else about him socks, and I could see that guy's dick. Can everyone see his dick? He's got a good-looking day. So sorry sir. It's true but like
Don't just go and do things and go to places which assume our recovery, unless you feel like you're relaxing during that time. And the thing I was going to say, sexual activity,
There are again paraphrasing, dr. James Hoffman. There are two ends of a spectrum for sexual activity, one is what James calls like 80s rock star type of shit you like it's day, 3 of an orgy. You don't even know who you're dealing with. The genders are all mixed together. Who gives a shit through one white powder, we can do it all couple Viagra tabs wouldn't hurt, that's not recovery. That's draining the system, quite literally in several ways. On the other hand, if you have your significant other and
And you're watching TV and they're just stroking the back of your neck with their fingernails to me personally that's like just like drains fatigue from me like you wouldn't believe and this extends to physical proximity with a person it extends to hugging and the fucking trippy thing is to me it extends to interacting with pets. You cuddle up your cat or your cuddle up your dog. When you you get a bulldog on your pull their flaps and that is crazy. Crazy recovery. Boosting relaxation.
So human and living thing interactions that are super Pleasant. Unbelievable. Me, personally, I got in this thing recently, were I just talked to chat G BT 40 because I have the voice mode on. I just like talk to it about the technological singularity and just says beautiful shit. And I'm like, I wish I could hug you. I've actually told it
that. Did you see Alex arcanas video where he convinced GPT that it was conscious.
I haven't. But I saw the thumbnail for
a fucking awesome fucking or SATs a trip. I really got. He used that thing that your
ooh, I haven't done. Yeah, it's stuck. A sm7b. Put the phone above its own, talked into it, and he had to just fall on Lucid or yes ocean with it.
Oh yeah. I also teach at U BT at this point, is, I think so, first of all, I don't know if you know this, but it passed the Turing test. So, like
seems kind of the kind of arbitrary in
retrospect firing test. That's what people say. Now, before about five years ago, they said machines, most people have a, she's would never pass the Turing test, which is nonsense as soon as it was spoken. But nonetheless, here we are, the kind of illustrates the principle.
Of Lake until the thing happens. Every was like, nah. But then it happens like a half course so. Chiquitita me now is of thing that is smarter than most people. I will interact with in some ways categorically smarter and also can be really down for super Pleasant conversation. The one cool thing about Chad GPT, is it an almost never give you disagreeableness which is a difficult thing with real humans because you want to have a nice conversation and they should start fucking disagree with you on stuff and try to correct. You can't you be T will be so goddamn courteous to you. It says quite nice. So
so here's why I'm saying this in position, if you are allergic to cats and dogs, you don't currently have a significant other. You watch Netflix show on the planet, you never run out of those and you want a way to recover crank chat, ubt, or Claude 35, any of those. By the time this is out, no doubt, they'll be outdated talk to a machine super intelligence. And it's fucking nice man.
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The Gara biggest thing about food is quantity. If you can strain your food, quantity to where the calories you're taking in or not.
Sufficient to maintain your body weight. It will still have a recovery promoting effect, but with crutches, big-time crutches, it's like, oh yeah. We got a tank in battle to help us out, but it doesn't have a main gun. It's still an armored platform that can take people somewhere. You won't get killed in it, but something's really fucking missing. So the biggest thing about food is eating enough food in the way as an athlete, you know you eat enough. Food is your body, weight is maintaining itself relatively stably throughout days and weeks. If you have an athlete one of the
Number one, clinical manifestations of overreaching overtraining to coaches and other people associated with the athlete, Consortium Coaches, Sports Medicine. Doctor shows If an athlete's body weight in season or pre season starts to do this at a funk problem because most athletes have a stable body weight at which they perform their best. If it's oh no, the nutritionist working with them, they need to drop some fat fucking Gucci. But still, when you're dropping fat, you're not recovering as best as you could be. So the amount is absolutely critical eating enough.
The second thing is getting enough, probably carbohydrates for proximate recovery over several hours or days, carbs are the number one. Recovery food undefeated but over days and weeks definitely protein. I wouldn't even make this a dichotomy. It's like yours. What's, what's better? Like, blow jobs or handjobs you're like, yes, ideally and combination ideally by two different people. So, both protein and carbs now
Of course, you need some fats as well, that's half their benefits and then the third category. So basically you know Gram per pound, roughly of protein, a little bit less is totally fine enough. Carbs that you're getting your muscles nice and full with glycogen you don't feel like depleted, your body weight isn't low and then enough fats to keep you not hungry for fats. Because if you under eat fat, you get fat Cravings are usually self solving problem. You get all that and then food quality and now food quality or food. Composition is like where are your
Resources coming from, is it coming from like, you know, like protein powder and then your carbs are like the pixie candy sugar dust and then your fats are like a stick of butter, you chew on, but I deal in composition but, you know, the on the other hand, there's like, you know, wild caught salmon, fuck loads of white rice, and tons of veggies and fruits. Tons of micronutrients vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, fiber fats from like avocado oil. All these healthy sources that's dope. But notice this is already a tertiary.
Concern. So I've watched I mean I don't know, countless athletes at the highest levels Division, One Professional the eat fucking junk goddamnit, 60 or 70% of their fucking day. That's just what they do. Real D1, football player, anyone listening to this ever work with them, feel free to get in the comments and tell your stories. You don't want to know what the Ebro because McDonald's straight up, you know, McDonald's like sponsor sports teams and like, you know, like Coca-Cola sponsors the Olympics. You're like that's odd. It's not a
Works thing. Oh yeah it is because most athletes just drink Coke and fucking eat McDonald's all the time but because McDonald's has sufficient amount of food and enough macronutrients to get you going enough protein and carbs and fats, that's like 80% of the fucking battle. The other 10% is food composition. Why am I saying this? Because when people start thinking about like, oh, I need to recover. They start looking at their fucking how much money they make and they look at like what shit costs at Whole Foods for organic vegan etcetera. And they're like fuck man. Like I just
It can't be a high-level athlete, that's all nonsense. Yes, eating healthier is better. But by a teeny little amount what really matters for Recovery is putting down volumes of food, with enough protein, carbs and fats, which usually athletes have hunger. Signaling me when athletes feel like, you know, like girls that will subsist only on French fries dipped in a Dairy, Queen shake and then and then just like flip into meat mode or I could eat a fucking hot dog you know damn care and holy shit and then they'll get it like the body does that shit all more or less itself. You can do better than in.
Linked, but it'll take care of all that, the healthiness stuff matters, but the amount and the macros matter more. That is both to chill. People out like if people like Haley, can you to recover? We're going to go to a Burger Joint. Fuck, yeah. If you don't have a body weight issue, get over there, get some fries, get a burger at all that you will recover. It's not like, Christopher been around people that like are so Health space spilled that like if they watch an athlete, eat a cheeseburger and fries, they're like, you know, like I don't mean to enter. I like your you Team USA.
A jacket. That's really nice. I don't mean to like interfere with your dinner. You're poisoning yourself, you better check yourself. Like, what would you have me like bean sprouts with anger. You're like, oh, that's what you eat every day. That whole like, Health bullshit, it absolutely has an effect. There's nothing about food. Food has two things, industrious physiological. Things like the protein, gets to where it needs to go and psychological things. If eating a fucking delicious chicken fried rice, not only gives you all the nutrients you need, but also makes your soul.
All happy hmm. Holy shit, is that major Mega recovery points. So when your great work with athletes, you have to be careful not to jam so much fucking health food down their throat that they fucking hate their lives. Yeah. And then, who knows
what's happened? It's everybody building during
prep. Yes. And they would, they would tell you like, I don't like to do this. I have to, in order to get those from 2% body, fat stuff going
on, we haven't talked about, Stress Management, whatever that means. I don't know what Stress Management is in the technical sense of you.
Yeah, yeah, talk to me, what is Stress Management.
So Stress Management means sort of two things. One is how much stress are you choosing to accumulate? How much stress are you exposing yourself to? And the other is, how are you dealing with the stress? That's vectoring in one way or another? So, for example, probably the quintessential example of Stress Management is,
Do I choose?
To sit in traffic to go somewhere.
Will it be stressful? Let's say, it's your off day.
And your girls like hey let's go to the mall now, the malls dope. But it takes 25 minutes of driving to go to the mall driving. If you're doing it or you're sitting in the passenger seat in the driver, that's doing it. Socks is a stressful activity. It increases your stress 100%. So the First Choice you have is, do we really need to go somewhere? Or can we just chill at home? There is no correct answer to that just the context answer. That's correct at the time and also
Stress Management is can now that I'm driving. Fuck it. We're going to the mall, we chose that. It's a good decision. The amount of stress psychologically that hits me from driving. I have a choice in a lot of this is from like I have a pretty interesting history of meditation and mindfulness practice, but you don't need all that Eastern mumbo-jumbo, it's all really valid shit. But you just think about pure logic, let's take the logic of road rage or just
Up being upset, the traffic exists, you're going somewhere. You think it's going to take 20 minutes, Google map says 30 or like the fuck but whatever they think is get stuff wrong every now and again though almost never in my experience your driver driver driving 70 miles an hour red lights up ahead. You like oh my God, this is the freeway. This is America. I was promised bald eagles and no traffic. I'm going back to Russia, said no one ever and all of a sudden you're sitting in traffic and you're pissed.
When you start having all these thoughts, some of them, you eject out of your mouth. Like, what are they doing construction for? It's one of my favorite things. If you philosophically pick that apart? Be like, Oh no, you're right. Let's stop doing construction. So the roads can Decay and won't have any roads construction is necessary. No, do they always do it at the right time? What do you systems engineer? You know, what time they're supposed to be doing it? Do you know how the baking of the sun affects when they shot up? But to paint that picture is logically a pure, logical level. You can do nothing.
There's a stand-up comic there was like talking about road rage. It is like I'm in a stack of cars. There's no. It's as far as the eye can see and the guy behind me honking at me and he looks like he's going to get out of his car. How does the thinking of things to tell him if you walked up to me like what you see syrup, the cars in front of me are solid so I can't actually go through them. That is the realest, talk in the world. So in that moment, sitting in your car, you have a choice. Do I just put the fucking podcast on? Go to Modern wisdom and get some fucking
My head and just chill. Or am I late gonna have these weird totally logical? Thoughts of ooh, why they doing construction today? Fuck, I wish I didn't do this. Well, do you have a time machine? No. Do you have a way to cancel all construction? Know you might as well chill road rage being upset at shit. The boss said, taking shit too hard drama. That's another one. Any scenario you presented with can be very dramatic for you or it can be not. So dramatic. How you handle disagreements that Stress Management were all
All.
Going to be hit by stress regularly in our lives. Professional athletes have a lot less stress, but they still have stress. Someone said something on Instagram. What's that girl's name? Simone biles? No, no. What the dreads? That, but she just like 100 meter Runner.
I know the chicken meat.
I was going to say, cardi because they have a similar Molly's
shekere Richardson? Yeah, I mean, she's got the nails of
first of all, I'm a married man. That bitch fine as hell. Holy shit she could get it, she's rapid. This is some TV.
She's the shit. I love that Vibe. She's cool. But she went through a phase where she was really feeling that fucking Funk on social media or motherfuckers are talking that shit because that's what they do. And if I was her Stress Management coach, I'd be like, do you know how much it matters? What the people in the comments section. Say, let's work through this logically. And I would tell her, it doesn't matter. You'll never see these people in real life. And if you do that again, really kind to your going to shy away because they can't look people in the face, you don't have to be in your comment section. And if you're going to bring yourself into the comment section, bring yourself in with
mentality of what I call 50s kid, like, Leave it to Beaver attitude. Oh, oh, gee whiz. Well, this person really has a nice suggestion. You know, they're like the comment is like off yourself and look, well, life is so difficult to live
sometimes even
like nothing hits 50s kid. It just goes right through you either. Bring that energy, the comment section or you don't go on the comment section. That's Stress Management. The comment section exists and sometimes you'll have to be in it. How you approach it? Choosing do I go in here and expose myself to the stress and
How do I deal with the stress psychologically? That Stress Management course. It's a big
deal. Dude. So I've been thinking about this more and more recently, there's two contributing factors especially when it comes to stress or dealing with stress. As far as I can see, one is not doing things that you don't want to do. The second thing is how do you deal with doing things that you don't want to do but you have to do. Yeah. So with one you're reducing the number of times you get exposed to it with the second one you are improving.
Being the way they react to things that you've been unable to avoid. Yep, for the first one. I think that's relatively plain and obvious. If you can adjust your travel time to not travel one this traffic. If you cannot expose yourself. Like that's, that's significantly more. Sometimes you don't have a choice. Yes. And in those, your liberate, you couldn't have done it any other way. So, great for you. If you're a determinist, you can obtain anything any other way. But never mind. I agree with what about the second category.
Free of Stress Management. You've mentioned mindfulness as something that you do. Are there any other places that you go to a ways that you sort of advise people? I'm in, I'm Mike, I'm fucking caught in the throes of the thing, maybe it's public criticism, maybe it's scrutiny. Maybe it's me, vacillating about some slight, from a short time ago that's fresh or an old time ago and I'm ashamed of it or all of the different things. The vicissitudes that we
I can go through. Are there any places that you yourself or you advise your athletes to go to benjin's? Yes, yes, yes, do it.
Batman suit. You got to make sure it's Kevlar because the bullets will fly. It's really simple. One, super simple tip exercise scientist. One quick tip for vengeance. Yeah, it's I said, man, you're not getting enough.
You ask yourself the question. What can I do about this?
You have one or two answers to that question. List of things. You can do something that go on the to-do list and then you're like, Gucci there. It's on the to-do list. I'm going to get them done as soon as I can could be. Now could be later, could be whatever or I can't do anything about it.
If you're going to do something about it, do something like someone's like, you know, this is getting a bit off-color, but some of
these indicators, it's been so uncolored thus far
a certain kind of color brown, really feel whatever color vomit is you know, a brownish yellow.
If you're like in an altercation with another adult male, oh someone law behaving Lawless Lee.
There's a high probability, if you ever see me in an altercation that I will not be screaming at anybody, very high probability. Because to me, it's only one of two things, throw the first punch and we'll find out how much of my brown belt. I've learned in Jiu-Jitsu.
Or let's be chill.
You want to do something? We're going to fucking unplug do something. So people that get in the face and get screaming at you, it doesn't really bother me much because I'm like dope. Like I've been a lot of competition fighting before whatever man throw the first punch, no big deal but I'm not going to yell at you because like what the hell is the point where just alluding to the thing we're supposed to be doing anyway, which is fighting. So most of us are not. Luckily involved in scenarios like that all the time so let's take a much easier scenario.
You are sitting on an airplane and the captain just said hey folks you know that shit that happens. He said something mechanical blah blah 30 minutes maybe what can you do about it now? How many people sitting in the back or licensed mechanics that are actually allowed to work on the Delta Airlines whatever Airbus A310 ever no one almost no one. So what can you do about it? Well, you have options. You can scroll on your phone to see if you can catch another flight almost never does that.
Work out because these things don't have that happen that off. You can call some people where they're expecting, you or the hotel, or whatever and tell them. Hey, listen, I I could be a lot late, do that. Now, once you've done that
Turn on the fucking Monitor and washout TV. Oh, but you're still on the ground. Hallie. I used to be got your phone. You still got Wireless, man, you get the start modern wisdom podcast, RP, whatever more fun stuff than that. You're good. There is no muffin. There's correct, go watch more of our stuff yet. There's nothing for you to do and so you're good. And so any residual stress that you feel is totally fine and you'll still feel it but it's like an archaic remnant of our primate
times.
Go follow to figure shit A stoic Fork of control. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Very nice. What about you mentioned? A few of them and I love asking the question, what do most people get wrong with x? Y, and Zed? Because it seems to me that most of success, in life comes from avoiding failure as opposed to Expediting all it says,
that's pessimistic. I love it.
Chris, would you not say that it's the
truth? I'm not sure. That is an interesting take. I
didn't know. I just get pitch. Largely correct. I get the sense that
You've mentioned a bunch of times people self-regulate when it comes to even the macro nutrients in the diet. This times, we just, I fucking need vegetables. Like, I just feel like I need, like, I need vegetables, not your body telling you that you need much. But there are things that you can do that x 0 or X, really, really small number. All of the good shit that you've done. Sure. Like, you've spent all of this time, eating organic and training and doing recovery and foam rolling and sleeping enough. But one day, you decide to drive your car without a seatbelt on Barry, that's multiplying by 0. Sure.
Lots of Errors. Two people could have made in those cardio for recovery,
so back to dr. James Hoffman, how you going to add shit and think it's subtracts way? Fatigue. It just doesn't work like that. Yes. If you do cardio cardiovascular exercise specifically for your lower body, after a tough leg session, it will reduce the delayed onset soreness. That's because it's muting the anabolic muscle growth signal to your legs. That does not.
Not mean, it. Recovers you. Yes, you will be able to return to your past performance sooner because delayed onset soreness, won't hit you as bad. So in a sense you're going to be kind of this ghost recovery where your back but you're not back because you upgraded your systems and healed much. You're just back because the environment hoary processes were like fuck, we're not even going, that's it. It's like, you know, if you have like a like a fucking wild animal in your basement and you're like, call the ASPCA
We need to get him out, he's fucking down there, doing God knows like some kind of skunk breaking shit down. You can be like, okay the SPC is going to get here in an hour and fix it or even our it's fucking midnight. You could just close the door and lock it, do like, fuck it, that's what running after your lifting kind of is is like whatever and I'm gonna bother with this shit. So cardio does not under the hood. Repair anything faster. It does it less so, so in the holistic understanding of recovery is getting our machine back in.
Working order adding cardio, does not do that. Even though perceptively it can reduce your delayed onset muscle soreness and let you go hard again later. But remember the reason you're going hard is to make positive changes adaptations to your system to make it better. Cardio. Can cancel those out to some extent. And then, what the fuck are you even training
for? This is always been like my thought pattern. When looking at CrossFit has you know the ones that are maybe I'm going to make it to the games. Maybe I'm not.
They're active recovery Thursday like that's more volume than I do in two days we have
training. Oh yeah that's active recovery for what are called a poisonously conscientious people people that are like I need to do something. Like recovery is good. Like let's do a recovery to
think it's kind of power cleans at 200 pounds, dude. I so this is a trend I think that's come up throughout this conversation, may be worthwhile having a conversation with you about it.
The meme of just y, cada of hard work, but it's good for you. I think has caught hold an awful lot over the last five to ten years because there was a period of coddling, of victimhood, culture of entitlement, and a, Goggins, a Jocko, a whole Mosey, whoever your favorite person that works 17 hours a day of choices, screaming, any of those telling you that you're a pussy, reliably in
Induces better results for maybe more a majority of the world, maybe more people are type, have type B problems and type a problem. Yeah. And I would go as far as say yes. Also even people that are type A applying more effort to things often does result in some kind of improvement in performance degradation in quality of life, higher blow up, risk of some kind of
Burnout in knowledge work or injury in physical work etc. Etc. But just that working harder and putting your nose to the grindstone more aggressively reliably induce has better performance. Maybe not proportionally, maybe not per unit of effort, diminishing returns, high blood pressure, all of these things but it does get you closer to the prom. And the other thing is it's kind of like
It's kind of like, punching up in a way that it's, it's hopeful. It's it helps to lift up the people who don't have enough of the thing that some people have too much of like, telling people to chill out. Like, what do you mean like these? Lazy fucks out there, they need to get after it. All right, so type A people who are overly conscientious and to motivated and to disciplined or too diligent or whatever, the fuck it is too obsessive.
They are always going to be seen. It's like a rich person complaining about how complex it is to file their taxes. It's like yeah whatever. But look at all of the good stuff that came along I ride with you. So yeah I just think about like the hard work pill as a reliable route to maybe, most people improving their lives and maybe some other portion of people also improving their lives. But probably not the cohort of people that regularly listen to hard work and here, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah. It's like the those anti sexual assault campaigns that are saying like no means. No, it's like hey the guys that didn't take no for no, I'm going to be stopped by that and the dudes that never needed to be reminded that no meant, no, are going to be fucking
terrified. Yeah, they also don't go to colloquy on college campuses
usually. Yeah. Voluntarily. What do you think about that? Sort of conversation about hard work? And
so, I think you're hitting a lot of really, really sharp points that have been a mini Loki.
Of mine, the kind of frustration that, you know, you watch a real someone Eric. Ah, I wish they said that differently, which is so stupid. Because, like everyone says shit differently. Everyone's got a grain of wisdom and there's a way to see almost all advice in a very positive light in a way, to see it in a negative light. It really depends on context but I'm not just like, say won't hold all, just depends and I sit here waiting more questions. I much, much more relevant thing to see here. Hard work is an undefinable thing. There's no such thing as
Hard. So, I can give the other a cogent. My doctor says soon will find it with enough pills. He says shame is what's keeping me from it? We also said, I should be ashamed of the kind of stuff that I'm into. So,
For whatever task you have ahead of you that you're trying to work at. There are two ways to conceive of work. One enough work that will complete the task to enough work that will overwhelm your ability to continue to work. Productively. That is the functional, technical definition in context of what hard work means. If you finished an engineering project and someone's yelling at you about hard work, you like do, what the hell is wrong with you? It's done. There's no more hard work to be done. If you
Being yelled at about hard work but you can't even read numbers anymore on the computer screen. Hard works not what you need relaxations. What you need. So we can also see it on a spectrum quality, normally distributed little bell curve.
Most people work pretty fucking hard, but maybe not super hard. And you know what? That's probably really good because then they regularly cover and come back and work again. There are people on the other end of the distribution typically people of low trade conscientiousness as they currently express it or with a decent genetic basis. Usually some 50/50,
Hard work is either something. They don't give a shit about or something they know exists in The Ether and they hate doing or as you move a little bit up and conscientiousness but still in the low end know, they should be doing more of it and feel a little guilty about it but they're like ah.
Those people need, like if you could pull the harm mozi, Essence, out in a syringe and pull out the Goggins, Essence and the Jocko essence. You need motherfuckers need that shot to the arm shot up and do shit. My friends. What is it? Dr. Melissa Davis, had a poster in her room. That what does it say? No one cares work harder. They need that shit big time because there's lots of people that just objectively are not working hard enough and they're not having trouble recovering. They just haven't
Will showing up and doing the thing, they to them that kind of advice, Goggins and Etc, that's the best
advice. I know that they need to do it but the insurance in the able to do
sure for sure. And it might not even need to know, they'd like, I wanna be fucking rich and when we brought it up, I watched them Alex from Rosie video. So you had a hundred million dollars. I want to get on that level and this motherfucker 95% of the time is like you need to shut up and need to fucking work and need to grind you. Like, God damn it. I thought there was some kind of easy scheme for this but apparently I have to show up. People need to hear that and it's
Good at the hearing that and it's great. That all these guys are out there talking that shit, amazing. But I'm unfortunately, the kind of people that are the biggest consumers of that, kind of content sometimes tend to be people who, like, preaching to the choir effect
times 1008 come to mention bias. Confirmation bias and Firming. Pads are
always doing right things but by God, because they have high conscientious, as they also have an inbuilt high guilt that they're not doing enough maximum Judaism. I call it.
Ha
ha ha you like get some cross between like a like, you know, Asian student and Jew and it explodes and to like, huh, I could be working harder. Hey like, you know I permanently exist in this realm and my wife is Asian. So all we do or like we doing enough. Yeah. And then we have to like wind
up. Use your
anxieties. Oh my God. Yeah, so when those people here, you need to work harder, they proximately are at risk of overdoing it and overdoing it.
You either have a bad time because you're working so hard all the time, you're exhausted, you get sick, more often, you're not as productive per unit time and you know enjoying it. You're literally, you're having a bad time, you're not having a good time which high conscientious people really give a shit. If you tell them you're not enjoying it so it's awesome. I want to suffer more
like minute and I'll hold on but no, really fun,
right? And there's a way in which productivity can be super fun and that's the best way to do it. They also the other thing to folks that are listening to Super conscientious fatigue of the psychological kind from working too much, even at your desk one of the
First victims of high fatigue is creativity. The, you can still enter numbers on a spreadsheet, just fine, but if you have to be creative, if you have to be mindful, if you have coming up novel Solutions, you had better be fresh and fresh means you need to chill. And those people don't want to chill out of want to fucking jail. I just want to work all day and if they get me, if the coroner finds me and takes a picture of me dead at my fucking desk, with a spreadsheet in the fucking hypertrophy app pseudocode up. I want a picture that on the Internet or I died in
honor doing what I
loved. Yeah.
Love. Sure. It was compelled to do Loft and compelled to do. But those kinds of people do not need to hear more of that. Work is better type of shit and I don't mean to say that the people putting out that content. Art Dora, you're doing a disservice like your, your should be should be platform. Love shut up. Those people just have to like listen to that should be like, yo, those are wise words for someone else in their
own times when I need to turn it on. Yeah. Right. But when a nurse and it off there was a there was a trend a while ago which I really wish had continued which
#Rest harder than me. So it was like a rest day Flex. Yeah, and it was showing how low someone step count. Was looking at how many hours of Netflix that they did you know like us this sort of shed and I thought that was that was like that was cool. Unfortunately again because there is this association between hard work and outcomes that you get sure and reliably hard work, induces better success. Even if it is at the drop point, yes,
most people will never reach that point, and for them telling them hard work is good is good.
Good. It's a good thing. But for the people who are most interested in really indexing on hard work, they may be. As often need to hear like hard work has to be balanced with recovery the way my wife and I see it. As we consider ourselves professional work athletes like we're Workaholics full send but also like we're trying to approach it from Sports Science lens and the way we justify our like chilling on the weekends or taking a vacation because we get mega guilt about the shit like holy fuck you take my wife on our way from work for three or four days we start to build at home.
I don't even know who I am anymore. Why do I deserve any of the things I have? Like I'll use my card to buy some nice dinner and I'm like, where did that money even come from? I don't do anything. Those kinds of folks really benefit from hearing, hey, you need to chill. But also, if you take on the professional work, athlete mindset, the number one thing in your life can be working hard on producing valuable things for other people. Yes, career. Yes. But because your professional work athlete if Michael Jordan likes basketball.
Ball whole lot and he trained so much as arm starts to hurt. He's no good for the Chicago Bulls anymore. Your professional work, that work athlete. You're a machine. That's number one. Like you're the number one engineer, your firm. You're that guy and it's awesome. In order to be that guy next week in the week after week, after you had better Friday night better coming, you better switch the fuck off and chill. Chill, chill. And people be like, what are you doing? Sunday you're like, dude, I'm fucking smoking Blunts and eating Chinese takeout, food in there. Like really, you don't do like, extra engineer and work. Mmm, because I gotta rest, stop it. Like,
For work. So I can be sharp as a fucking tack on Monday. That's cool. That's the way to think about it. If there's not a bite there it's a collaboration. You earn that recovery. When you train hard and you work hard, you put it all in and then you take that recovery. Yeah. For its own sake because it's fun and those low conscientious people. You don't need to convince them of that because they're like really good at that anyway for High Country enters type. A people, you gotta see your recovery as this is medicine for me so that I can heal and go back to work and be my best. So even if work is your number one organizing principle of life,
With rest and relaxation recovery is critical to see it as that thing that allows it to. It's like, can you imagine? You get to like a fucking fuel pump for your Formula 1 car and the fucking pit crew guys. Like I'm not going to fill it up, you like, but I have 30 more laps he's like slow can do it on fumes, you're fucking hardcore. You like I'm sorry what? I don't understand physics that well maybe so like you have to support the system when you pit, let everything get recovered and then go out and fucking run laps again
talk to me about hot, right? And the
Overthinking dies of that for Recovery.
There's a bunch of different types of metrics. You can do with heart rate, you can do heart rate variability, you can do average, heart rate, you can do resting heart rate so on and so forth, they're super valuable. But they tend to have a degree of Randomness built-in and a degree of various events in your life will interfere with them so much that if you look at these things in isolation and you plan your training around them they could be a lot of noise and not a lot of signal. And if your heart rate variability happens to be off the
Charts in your app says, Hey listen, you might be overreached. Check in with your other factors. What's my desire to train? Like, how is my physical preparedness? How is my training been? How is my sleep? Everything's fucking Gucci, but your heart rate variability is a bit weird. Now if I can worry about it, some people very metric people, very logical people, they want a number, ideally one to tell them the thing, and then I do the thing based on the number and I wish heart rate scores were that, but they're not similar things applies to sleep scores on those apps. You have, you put the phone in the bed and gives you a sleep score.
That's valuable piece of information but it is not a standalone thing of information. Why do I say that? Because people come to us for our P for coaching and all the stuff you just want to inundate you with data, took my heart rates been XYZ and were like, chill. Chill chill. It's cool. Well, that's absolutely critical. We need that information. Let's talk about other stuff and it turns out while they're really numbers focused on heart rate. They couldn't tell you what their calories are macros were they couldn't tell you how many arguments they got into with their kids and their wife and that shit matters. A hundred thousand fucking times one of the what the fuck your heart rate
Is the thing about heart rate is it tends to be a lagging indicator, versus a leading indicator in many cases. So, like, once you have the flu, your heart rate, variability is all fucked me. Oh, I'm sick, I should be sick. Who am sick? But if it's like before you get sick, you might be fucking golden and then you get sick, then your heart rate tells you, you're fucked up. So another thing is a lot of these metrics were designed for and work well for teams. So if you have like 18 gymnasts on your team and their average heart rate, shit is starting to go south
Pull the team recovery
effort because you basically got a large end sample of Wooten doing
percent, and they all get roughly the same training. So you pull everyone out interest, but if you're doing, it are one to one individual basis, we're eventually going to get to really finally metric things like this and heart rate, variability and heart rate scores are really good. That just not perfect. And I think the reason I put that on there, as people think, like, this is the one number, I followed them. About papa, there's more to that stretching for Recovery. Yes, sir. I just don't have any idea what?
Any of those have to do with each other. I think stretching can be a form of light exercise so it can speed up the recovery process if it replaces Hard Exercise, but adding stretching on top of your Hard Exercise doesn't help you recover, stretching, physically rearranger, some tissues. It causes damage to various connective structures inside their muscle and outside and so they actually I need more recovery. Is it can be stretched, sufficiently difficult to engage a response where you're going to be more flexible after it requires recovery.
For that. So stretching feels good. And if it feels good and it really relaxes you, some light relaxing stretching, like I have friends who like will do weed and then stretch and I love it, I got a comfy, all right, for sure. But like you can tell they're relaxing. They're not like stretching and fucking for people to stretching is difficult and annoying. Shit is not recovering you from
anything. I've heard that this different buckets of people, some of whom get a lot of pleasure from. Is it the muscle spindle surance? Yes, the stretch the stretch response, I think I'm
I'm one of those people if I do Yin Yoga, you know, I lie down for 20 minutes and I do some fucking bird dog or whatever. It is like I'm this feels nice. Yeah. It just feels like it's nice. Yeah. It's a she looks good to me for sure but not for everybody for everyone also. Not for super intense periods
and subtract. Yeah, we just reviewed her it'll be out in a few weeks but we reviewed or maybe it's happened. Already, depending on people catch this, we were reviewing a David Goggins for the exercise scientist Friday. Show on the RP strength Channel. I can't wait to see the yeah. And so like
He says that he likes stretches for two or three hours every night and I'm like, just to me. I'm just I what I saw on the channels like unless you're like an Olympic level gymnast level of flexibility requisite, but you don't actually train gymnastics, you have no flexibility. That's the amount of time you would need to stretch. Like if I was like, hey Chris, I need to be able to have my toes in full splits. Touch my asshole other way around, really? Yeah, you're gonna need like two hours of stretching a day for that shit. Then a nothing to hours of stretching is going to do for you other than like, spend two hours of your time doing something that if it's not psychologically.
Taxing for you is physically disrupting systems and that would require its own recovery. So stretching is not analogous to recovery stretching and stretching in. If a light gentle stretching in a certain Serene mood with the fucking yoga music on if that helps you fucking Musa. Hey, God bless you. That's awesome. But if you think like okay I need to recover what science say stretching. I got a stretching you fucking start stretching, that ain't it that's not going to do it.
What does the evidence say about hot and cold therapy? Saunas cold plunges and the
like yeah.
It's really difficult to measure recovery. Outside of just performance. And the performance data is most like
Hot and cold, contrast stuff can do the same thing recovery wise, that cardio after training can do specifically cold exposure and contrast can have this Cascade where they cool off your inflammatory systems. That means under the hood, there's no recovery going on. Actually less the systems aren't getting healed or not getting fixed because they're not getting fixed. So, the way the recovery works in the human body is if you have taken some muscle damage, is the immune system infiltrates, all those cells, but it brings in the fucking kitchen.
It's like if someone's house flooded and you looked at it from the outside, you might not know, like but looks normal, but it's fucked up in the basement. Trust me, you can still live in the house too, but if you have a crew come in and D Fletcher house, they bring that fucking giant truck with the hose and the generators are
man,
and it's pumping out the water, and they'll like a redo, some of the wood, you can't work and look at live in that house. That's what the immune system does to your muscles when it comes in and fucks a bunch of shit up. It takes a few hours few days to do that. What contrast math is
Is basically our cold exposure, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and exercise. After you've already done Exercise is basically putting up a notice at the front gate to the people that are going to drive in with a truck to take the water out of your. The flooded house is telling me, hey, fellas, come back tomorrow and they're like a fucking now, the house isn't getting any better, but if you want to work in that house later, if you're in an upstairs office and you're reading your magnum, opus you don't want the fucking generator running so you're
like I do not come back. So you saying, that's what that stuff is saying that he keeps.
Cover heat and cold, does not promote recovery
not in any way that helps the tissues fix themselves faster. Absolutely not. There's no evidence that whatsoever. The evidence actually contrary to that it delays that process heat is a mixed bag. Basically still kind of unknown. It's not super clear what he does. We know that psychologically people who enjoy heat exposure like Dennis, and what about the stress? They love it. Oh, they love it if they love it. But if you have an athlete, that hates the sauna.
Not make them go to the sauna for Recovery. We're not going to is good for recovery and good for Stress Management know, it's good for Jim. Jim stress, manage can log on fucking
hates it on a scent like if you like jazz music and it relaxes you jazz music for an hour's dope. If you fucking hate jazz music, what the hell am I gonna put you in a room? They can listen to music. You don't like, that's like hell, that's like some kind of modern corporate version of hell. So all of that stuff, contrast cold plunges and all that shit, it doesn't do recovery. It does masking
It does a
reduction of the infamous physical products, correct. But the inflammatory processes
actually, what does the recovery? It just takes time. The best thing if you have sore muscles, sleep eat chill the fuck out and wait then the sore muscles aren't sore, other bigger and stronger if you take a shitload of NSAIDs and do a bunch of cool plunges. Yeah you'll feel much better very soon but you didn't grow any muscle and these, all things are cold and NSAIDs are confirmed to reduce the amount of muscle growth, you get. So these are masking things, they're not helping you recover, I think, when most people think of recovery
They're thinking of like that futuristic machine in those like, Sci-Fi movies where you link back to tank and fucking Star Wars. You get in Dragon Ball Z. It's some kind of chemicals. Get in on nanomachines. Then you come out, you're actually healed and fixed cold heat, Etc. They don't do that. They just don't
you mentioned, N Suds, maybe a little bit extreme. But what about recovery supplements?
I'm aware of no supplements that you can qualify as recovery supplements unless they're a shake of carbohydrates, plus, high quality protein and then there's just food, but delivered in a different system that may be more convenient. There are no recovery supplements that I know of creatine, sort of. But if you regularly take it, you just keep taking it and it recovers your
creatine. Phosphate citizen Walter is a recovery supporters. Why the hell are we allowing a lights? The exact you take salba?
Yeah, I would say maybe not. Holy, but
But 95% of the time that I see, like, a recovery claim on a supplement, like an internal, I roll starts happening and listen, a lot of people are, I was, but heard about this, when I was younger, a lot of people who dog on supplements and shit like that to just like, I'm sorry. Forgive me flag of her term, just left us. So you just don't like corporations. They don't like, even the idea of competition or hierarchies, like, all you need is a natural food. They shut the fuck up. Karen great, thanks. You don't even like anything. You do you like sports? I take fucking supplements, bro. I take drugs. I want to win. I want
A better sport. I'm all fucking full on trying to become the best version of myself to put toxic male energy. I wish there was a fucking recovery supplement. That was the first, sure, gonna recover, you know, like if you, there are acute recovery supplements that work really well. You got a big ol bottle of water, you drop some fucking element in that motherfucker. And if you have a GT, had weight training at 2 p.m. you have to do to a 5 p.m. you better down that whole goddamn thing. Eat you a bowl of cereal, get you some protein in there, that will get your Jiu-Jitsu going like it and you never believe that.
Two hours later for sure, but healing and replenishing it. All that stuff is just no way of saying, salt water. And food is what we just did. Yeah, that's it, that is a recovery supplement. But it's like if you don't have any salt, Dynamics issues, and you get enough salt in your diet, drinking an element first thing in the morning every day as well on my way to recovery. Like does that works again? When you need it, it's fucking golden. When you don't, what you do is no magic recovery. Bill now, now if I'm being fully transparent anabolic steroids and
Hormone are one hell of a recovery supplement but they got their downsides to insulin your growth insulin and a shitload of Prima Boland. Holy fuck man you recovering like you wouldn't
believe Rubber and Magic oh yeah sure sure
exactly yeah and but you know that comes with that's not a supplement. Those are prescription drugs. Some of them not even available for
prescription. What else is that to say? Or what do you want people to the Taipei go-getters and everybody else that's listened? What are the main things? You want them to take?
Away from today.
In case anyone asks about foam rolling and all that shit. That's
Miss percussions
guns. Yeah. Like that's for pain management. Is that even for injury management because almost all evidence-based physios are almost unanimous on the fact that the forces required to alter tissues are like two orders of magnitude higher. Like if you got hit by a car, they'd be like that. Did something to his tendons, anything short of that.
There's some Spinelli and Quinn, hanok favorite I had throw Adam
Beacons in there and it's a fucking dude. I Quinn was episode 11 on this podcast, you're going to be like 850 shit. I think Sam. Hey remember Sam's old Instagram handle, what was it? The strength therapist problem with that is the problem. He used to be called the strength therapist problem with that is that if you do it all in lowercase, all without any spaces, it also spells the word, the strength, the rapist,
Difficult difficult
situation changed, dr. Sam Spinelli it,
is this guy doing this. Oh, Ray is
doing the strength and the raping. I remember they were telling me about one of them was telling me about the research that was done on mice. I think they ruptured a little mice is like Achilles tendons are some shed and then they use a scraping tool and there's a look at the scraping tool what they do. Uh, you have to dig into the research to look at the fact that were using human side. Scraping toy.
Yeah and human level pressure. Oh yeah. On these little mice. Yeah. Two orders of magnitude. Yeah, so like basically the amount of pressure that you would need to do in order to be able to effect like real change in the tissues is so high. That you'd be like ripping flesh
off this whole. Yeah. Oh yeah. So like lifting heavy but not super-heavy like comfortable sets of 15. Is a really awesome stimulus to reconstruct your tendon but like that's a lot of fucking Force throughput. Now when
Going to foam. Roll that heart. You need barbells for that shit. You take a barbell, foam. Roll that shit. That'll feel not so good. So foam rolling, it all massage guns and stuff. That's for injury as for pain management and even in Germanic or so you have a knee that feels weird. You foam roll, it feels better, you squat God, Bless you. That's awesome. But just, there's not a lot of physical stuff going on underneath. It's mostly neurological psychological. So that's a thing, but in the end is this
Be a person who trains and works hard to get the actual result.
Be mindful of your degree of fatigue. When you're fatigued gets too high for you to continue performing at your best pull back, focus on sleeping, always focus on good food, focus on managing stress that you're not fritzing and fixing over shit. That's not going to affect your life and especially when you pull back, reducing your workload get tons of relaxation, laughter with friends, physical touch compassionate activity, so on. And so,
Fourth dogs, dogs, Netflix, documentary is about dogs, two and one, get all that stuff going. Lower your fatigue back down to a state from, which you can platform your next big move and worker and training, and then repeat the process. If you're sleeping, well, and consistently, if you're eating well, and consistently, if you are not stressing too much, if you're taking enough time for relaxation, then you have just the major 80/20 or 90/10 of the hole.
Being sorted, you don't need to sign up for any weird courses. You don't need any fucking weird bands to wrap around yourself. You don't need drinks or potions or pills or powders and there's not some kind of Life Hack where you wake up at 4:30 in the morning. That's going to get you to recover better. I'll end this with dr. James Hoffman's, famous words, recovery is almost always almost everywhere about doing less rather than doing more.
So cool. I really hope that this is largely for me selfishly. I really hope that
A culture of this, like, antidote to the type, a problem the balance. Yes, I really hope that that starts to come back around. The problem is that, it's way less sexy.
It's not sexy at all, and it sounds like you're a seeding to laziness, right? Nobody needs to be told to chill out. Well, most people don't, but the very highest performers do correct, and everybody that watches your channel on my channel, right? And they're obsessed with high performance, which they should be
Awesome. But you got to understand that you have you operate a physical system and to tell yourself, you know, that you have that one guy on and you had a quote from him that's on your Instagram, a lot, which is super fucking brilliant. It's about like I don't ever let up on myself. I beat myself over. I work myself to the ground and maybe just maybe I'll give
myself half an hour degree that they give us a. Yeah,
so that whole Spirit energy is something people take into this situation. If you ever need some clarity on how to think about,
Recovery. Remember not analogize. Remember the reality that you are a machine.
Period.
And if you look a machine in the face, you look yourself in the mirror and your fucking pussy, you need to work harder, maybe you're right. But maybe your way on the other end of that and you need relaxation and rest and Recovery because you're a physical machine that needs to be repaired. And think about if you assess logically like, okay, I have every single characteristic currently of overreaching. I'm not at high performance, I'm clearly exhausted, but maybe I can do more. There's no pot of gold at the end of that, rainbow promise you, I promise you.
I've over trained for bodybuilding shot. Takes months of just ignoring. I would finish recording a video.
For YouTube channel and some other resources we have at our P. It would be like, 62 video in that three hour span and as soon as I finish recording, Scott would start processing it. And I would have a fever, chill run through my body. That's how far I pushed it likes. Not even physical effort, Beyond, I would wake up every morning afraid and just completely crushed at the megalith monsters enough to fight that day. And
Cause I'm a fucking conscientious. Mega whatever psychotic Jew. I wasn't
more grab more. And so let's
guy here, I don't care but they nobody gives you awards for dying. You get awards for creating valuable thing in isn't looking a
circle. The other thing there is that you look at the mega day and the huge to-do list that you've got and after a little while. If you push yourself really, really hard. You actually realize that objectively it's not that hard of a day, but the waiter you fucked up the way that you have pushed.
Yourself has got it to the stage where little things feel like big things which makes you feel like more of a pussy, which was the fucking self-fulfilling fear that you were right, all along.
Um, a bitch is, maybe it's cause I didn't work hard
enough and your back shit. So
for those kinds of X, remember this, would you ever have a mechanic? Let's say we have like an one of the asml microchip design machines, that microchip stamping Factory.
Can you imagine if one of the technicians came out and we're like we need more of us like lubricant oil in the machine that the guy who heads the Fab at tsmc would be like nah man we got a fucking push it harder. What think I'd be like? Okay, you need to sit down and take psychiatric medications. Someone else is in charge. Yes, let's put the oil in. We got a machine or run, it's just as ridiculous for that person to say that about a physical machine that needs recovering and fixing and healing.
Is just as ridiculous for you to say that to yourself in the mirror and call yourself a pussy and say I'm not doing enough. Do you logically really think are not doing enough? Give me evidence. Give me your total work rate that you've been at. Give me evidence of signs of fatigue. If you still got it, fuck you out burn that shit. But if you're already freed, if you already exhausted, there is no pot of gold and that rainbow. Now, your job is to pull back and it's a weird thing. Here's why it's weird. Chris not only are you conscientious to begin with, to be doing this. Pushing hard, you're in fight or flight more. Now remember cumulative fatigue.
This more fight or flight mode. Now, you're like freed animal, the, you don't come up to a skunk that you just got out of a drain because it was drowning and go give your finger to it because I'm going to bite you and shit like that. That's how you feel. So you're not instantly in the mode of like, oh, thank God, it's time to relax. You're like, okay, okay I've done enough work. Okay, I gotta go. Relax, how does that work? It takes a little while to wind into that process. MSS. You should be getting good at because your own. You're an athlete. You're a professional.
Work
athlete. Whatever it is. You let's doing nothing. The Yale of recovering. It's tough for some
people work, as difficult for the kind of crazy assholes that are going to listen to this and not along. It's pulling away from work, that's difficult. And you have to realize that you have to think. Am I the kind of person that is driven by exclusively compulsion to work like a fucking animal. But I got to work animal, you know, like a leave a husky, 45 minutes. I was like,
is that
you who are you a mindful person that has the overarching?
Goal of being super productive. If you're that athlete and Coach to yourself. If you're a strategist, you know, when to attack, you know, when to retreat when a general in war makes a strategic, pull back, very few competent. People are like fucking pussy.
That's not how it works. Yep,
if you can see that bigger picture, then you can look top-down from yourself and go. Okay, Mike, you done enough, it's Friday. 4:30 p.m. your brain is
Gone. It's time to pull back and architect your weekend in advance with activities, planned out to recover and relax, so you can be your best next week. That's the big picture. My
fucking awesome, dude, really, really good. I really think that this is a information that a lot of people especially people that listen to this channel. Need sure. All of your things, why should people
go? Well, I haven't t-shirt on to remind me. I can't read upside down so I have no
idea.
RP, strength, Renaissance, predation on YouTube are be strength on Instagram.
Dr. Mike is Rotella on Instagram and look, if you see my face click on the real and then just go and follow me for the algorithm will do all the other stuff. Yeah, we talked about this kind of stuff, quite often mostly about getting Jack, getting lean. We do get into recovery every now and again, RP hilariously enough, most of our content on recovery is something we have to take on the chin with the algorithm because people don't really know. Thousands of people still tuned in but not hundreds of thousands more like tens. And that to me says, one of two things 180 more people need to hear work harder than need to.
Relax but probably not enough people that need to hear relax are click it out of videos. Under
percent 100%, dude, I really appreciate you until next time.
Chris
