Muscle Secrets They Don't Want You to Know | Dr. Andy Galpin

Welcome to the Dr Gabriel lion show in this episode I sit down with my very dear friend Dr Andy Galpin he's a full professor at California State University Fullerton he is an expert and a game changer in muscle physiology health and wellness he works with a ton of professional fighters and athletes in this episode we cover a number of things we talk about skeletal muscle biomarkers Health and Wellness biomarkers Essentially blood biomarkers sleep and how you can think for yourself when it comes to scientific information we talk about this and a whole much more and

by the way I show you and bring you a different side to Andy that I don't think you've seen before he's truly extraordinary not to mention before we get into the episode if you are not on our newsletter please go to Dr Gabriel lion.com and sign up for our free newsletter we Give a ton of evidence-based information and things that are happening and most importantly things that are free and valuable to you let's jump into this episode what's up friends did you hear the news yep that's right I am hosting my first ever Forever Strong

six week boot camp what's a boot camp you're thinking well this is going to get you leaner improve your metabolism help you move forward in your health and wellness goals and you are going to do it with me And my team alongside real people for Real Results what are you going to get you're going to get workouts meal planning you're going to get my Forever Strong muscle Centric training course so much more most important you're going to get support it's never too late to start and the time to start is now head on over to

my Instagram and DM me boot camp I'm going to send you all the information that's right head on over to my Instagram DM me boot camp and I'm There to support you along with my team it's rock and roll friends Dr Andy Galpin welcome to the show thank you so much for being in studio in Houston I know it's hot yep and uh I fed you well and so we're going to be ready to get after it yeah and there's just no chance I was going to do this on Zoom no not with you of

all people not with you I mean I how long have we been friends I don't know a long time uh we both have gray hair now yeah for sure I Have a lot less hair total uh prior to we had no children at that point potentially no marriages at that point right different worlds different Universe it's been a long time but what I think is so cool is that we've been on Parallel paths and and I asked you while the cameras were off if you ever thought you would be in the position that you are

and now uh I mean I always dreamed of it right like that's that's where you're at Um I'm also very aware of where I am at and I say that and say like everyone gets their their 15 right and I'm I'm very aware that this is mine um which is great also very aware that that 15 ends uh so I'm having a blast right now I do feel like I told you like I I do feel that I somewhat deserve it but I also feel incredibly lucky um there are many many people who could be

in my position probably deserving more have done better things more important things are more Eloquent more effective um so there's is not a really a day and I'm not really being cliche there my wife and I like actually have a little bit of a practice I love that uh and it's like man this could end any day and also could have been anybody like you you can you have to have talent you have to do the hard work thing but you also have to have that third component which is you call it luck call it

a break call it the fortune like whatever you want And and to me uh that's a big part of how I approach the entire world it's just like hey represent some people don't get that shot and some people don't get that luck well for any number of reasons right could be a thousand things deserving or undeserving and so I'm just always very very appreciative that for whatever reason uh it landed on me at least right now so yeah very very appreciative where I'm at well I think there's a few things that really Separate you and

I probably haven't told you that I think that you have a lot of Integrity I think you're a really good human and one of the things I respect most about you is you very much care about making the world better making it different than it was and is and I would love to know what it is that you hope to accomplish um you know I was actually be a couple weeks ago I was with a good friend of mine Jeff buers as I was telling you About he's uh the CEO of momenta supplements uh he's

just a friend we were doing stuff and he kind of asked a similar question and I like stumbled around for like 15 minutes because I was like I don't really know I I'm being totally honest I don't have like a I want to rid the world of obesity like I don't have anything like that I'm not going to make a difference on the world and I think what I really boiled down to the end me figuring out is like all I Really care about is I feel like because what I said a second ago I

don't feel have a burden but I almost feel like I owe everyone else who didn't get that lucky break it's like hey you did the work you have this and you have the chance here and so for everyone else that was in a worse position or you again any number of things that didn't catch it you owe them right you owe them to make sure you are Taking advantage of this opportunity in a way that's going to move things forward or at least you respecting those people who would have done it better than you and

I think really fundamentally in this as aspect of my life it's not for my kids it's like I don't it's it's really none of those things it is really that going man could have been anybody else and if they were here what would they have done so that's what you Better do and do you think that that keeps you hungry and motivated to keep going yeah for sure I mean there's obviously a part of of a lot of anyone that's forward facing has a bit of arrogance never I'm never going to walk away from that

right been accused of that plenty of times you no there's a bit of desire to be needed and wanted and attention seeking like there's all those things that roll into you right and I actually have no problem saying That that's it's not a negative thing right in context but it is still foundationally going okay also in doing that can you use that in something that's the way that's going to help the world then to me it's like that's a positive way to channel that energy attention Vigor and saying all right you're going to be up

here you better use it and then you better continue to move right like you better continue to do something that is worth it Because if you're just ping around or you're doing things just for the sake of maybe attributes that we would find less appealing less desirable then like you know what when your 15 runs out good riddens and like okay so make sure you're just respecting again that opportunity you've been given and you better not do things for the sake of doing things which is another really hard thing in our position right it's like

you just really do get addicted to That more more more another published another thing get another high-profile client get another big podcast invite like whatever it is that you're valuing you got to be really careful of making not making the thing the thing and like falling back and being like whoa whoa what are you really doing this for right is this really an instant mean are you doing this because of justification of wanting the attention even if it's not directly it's like that or whatever the Case is is this because this land you the most

finances or get you the best spot for your product or whatever it is just going like is this really moving the needle forward to where when your time's done no one remembers you that they do or they don't that doesn't matter but did you again really respect the opportunity that someone else would have done with that and if they would have created something better that enriched Human Experience more then you Better continue to do that um and if not then maybe it is time to step back and let everyone else have their shot I wanted

to ask you that question because you are very well published and you're a thought leader but the other un unusual aspect of you is yes you're very charismatic and you're a great speaker and you're a great educator and you were an educator before you were ever in the public eye totally for years and I I don't know if people understand that That you spent a lot of time in the trenches educating students and educating people that is unusual to be in the position a lot of academics don't become forward- facing I would say 99.9% of

academics also you're very young you were very young when you got tenured I think you were 34 uh I was a full professor at 35 I think yeah 36 maybe 36 yeah at at Fullerton UC see Fullerton which is an Excellent School excellent muscle physiology lab so these are very unusual aspects yes we're going to talk all about science but I also think that it's very valuable for people to know who you are yeah I appreciate that we'll get down to the business in a second um I still educate I know not only in this

sense but I still teach four academic classes per semester I teach winter and I teach summer um when I first got into this that was what it was really for in Fact when I left my PhD program uh I really didn't think I would do a single study the rest of my life where did you do your PhD uh I got my PhD at Ball State in the lab that you know the Famous Dave costell you know anything about Sports Nutrition Dave started that lab you know decades ago uh Dave really is is the one

that brought out things like oh we use carbohydrates during exercise more and like turns out hydration is important like really That foundational layer of 1960s 1970s 1980s exercise physiy was around that time as well yeah uh I mean look if you look at any like classic exercise physiology textbook from the 1990s to 2000s those the authors yeah like you're going to see um I didn't think I was going to do a single study because I was just not interested in science at that point because of I think the limitations and a number of other reasons

and I was like I'm just going to teach because I Really really enjoy that aspect and then obviously I realized I could kind of do science my way and I was like well that's way cool so I did that um and then to fast forward so we can move on what happened was I was actually working on a project with some close friends Doug Larson uh and Mike bledo who started a company years ago called Barbell Shrugged right this legendary hey guys yeah shout out guys um and and we actually had a side project called

Barell University so we were trying to make I remember that yeah I was like man what if we could make like a real kind of online university for this Human Performance type of stuff and we built a lot of it out like a ton of it out curriculum courses and flow and and all kinds of stuff and then one day Doug was called just like yo we're done with the project smart choice on his part by the way uh and I just laid on my floor and I was like oh my God I spent just

so much Time on this and then I just thought like why why did you want to do this first place and I really Dr you know like drilled back like why did you care why did you care and then I realized those core things that I wanted what I didn't want to do and I was like oh you can do 90% of that like you don't actually have to have all this stuff built out like you can just do it so that's what I did and that really was the biggest like one of the biggest

Breaks I've ever had in my career was directly because of all that stuff and just being like yo just do the education you want however you want don't worry about SEO optimization and like editing and like all the things that I didn't want to do and figuring out and how do I charge people for like I didn't want to do any of that stuff so I was like just do it what if you do it exactly how you want what's going to happen and it was again to this day the smartest career Decision I've probably

ever made in my life and if so you answer two questions number one the question of a mentor I was going to ask you about a mentor and then I was going to ask you was there a time or has there been a time where you're like um I think I kind of made it I know that we're never done but there are usually moments where I don't know you get a call from someone like Dana White or whatever it is I remember like sit a moment sitting in my Office one time my phone rang

and it just said zua LLC which is like the the parent company of the UFC I was like that was pretty dope um you know getting a call from Joe Rogan years ago to go on his show like that was especially back in the time I was like wow that that's going to be pretty big um so that was like another one and then like funny little stuff like when I paid off my student loans it's cool like that was that was really Uh I I had coach like privately coached a very famous actor God

like eight or nine years ago and it was just like the first check I was just like student loan's gone and I was like wow that was like pretty dope so those some of those things jump jumped to mind but there yeah that's probably the biggest ones and now you're just on a trajectory where you're giving actually a lot of content still away for free that that's honestly like that's the jam I have the Most like if I could figure out what I just do that and nothing else like that's probably what I spend Mass

most of my time doing it's just not possible right now and there are components to learning I think you probably love is it the challenge of learning is it the challenge of teaching information is it the challenge of distilling down the science um you know it's honestly that I think this going to sound weird but I think most of it is Vanity I I totally honestly think that because the reason I like to do it is because number one the attention the ACC like when when you do something really well in front of an audience

and like you get a huge response even if that audience is one person right you hear people talk about this all the time like when you see people say the cliche like when you see the light bulbs go off in somebody that's really you right when they go Like excited because they learn something that makes you feel good because that's that's a Van Vanity thing like you are feeling good about that and when you do that in front of a crowd of 7,000 people or 700 people and that feels like really really good so that's

part of it the other part of it is if I'm trying to learn something myself and I'm like woo just really really really struggling with it and I spend weeks or months or years on something and you Figure out like actually why is no one ever just weaved it through this way and then you go you know what I bet if I did that and put it out there a ton of people would be find it super helpful and then you do it and it is of course so it's the vanity of going like I

can do this better than anyone else has done it I haven't seen anyone who can do this as good as I can and then you're right like that's that call it whatever you want but that is a large part of why I Do it cuz I'm like man everyone's made this way more complicated than it has to be I think I can do this better I know I can do this actually y'all suck like let me go Crush all of you on this right here and that's not competitive at all totally these are like I'm

throwing these traits out on purpose right like I'm labeling arrogance labeling attention seeking like this part of it right this is this is part of but these are not negative things in this way it's Like if if the worst thing that sin I ever had is I wanted someone's attention so I made a bunch of free content in YouTube and gave it to the world like Tau them all about muscle it would be amazing I'm good with that um last question uh on you that's it we're wrapping up no that's it that was a long

show two hours normal podcast two hours you better strap in for about three times that yeah yeah what is the hardest aspect of the amount of attention and Now being put in the public um man there's a bunch of hard stuff one of it is I actually for probably 10 years had a 99% response rate if people emailed or social media like for a decade or more I was like 100% going to get back to you now it's like completely unmanageable that sucks and a lot of times it's like people like really genuinely they do

it the right way and they really and like I try especially if it's like I can answer that pretty Quickly but a lot of times you're like oh that's not like a quick answer yeah that sucks uh like I really don't like that aspect of it number one um and then like it's hard to always give to the world like when I come home my kids want everything from me my wife wants everything from me right and then you you touch your phone everything on your phone is somebody wanting something from you and you try

to not be in lack Appreciation for that right because you're like yeah dude like that's what everyone is trying to do is get in a spot where everyone wants them and so it's like man I really super appreciative every time someone wants my advice or a company wants to work with me or whatever and of of course I'm hyper appreciative that my family wants to like but it is hard when it's just like everybody is always outgoing it's just like pulling out that is hard I ask No sympathy for that because that is 100% like

that's what I I tried to do but it is a lot and and there are components of that that are it it pulls you right you want to be 100% present with your kids it's your wife and you're working a lot it's hard it's impossible even when you're not working like this is a a thing that like I've still yet to really articulate with my family side is I can't just walk out of the door at 6 p.m. of my office and like immediately Go into to Dad mode I'm I'm like trying my best right

my phone is gone all that but like you you can't do that after a 12 hour plus run and then just like shut off I can do a walk I can do like all these things it's great but then like seconds later it's just a flood back that has been the hardest on my family for sure like I always jokeing down like like don't build three companies in one year that was probably the biggest thing that did it like not a smart decision to Do that because now it's it's not the workload it's just the

diff amount of different things that are floting in there's no chance shutting out so like that is the biggest burden of not just being able to like walk out and just be like yeah and truly be honest with my kids and wife that's that's super challenging the last thing I'll say is getting back to my own internal Circle yeah I mean you know like just like when my family or my my close friends like Text like you know like I'm sorry but I I did a podcast I came back to my phone I had 84

text messages Zone it's a it's a lot to like and then if I try to do anything like take a day off you're just like it's a wraping so that part sucks for sure but also your friends understand yeah most are pretty good and uh we'll continue to spam text you until you get back to them it it doesn't matter okay I said that that was the last question but I Have one more because I think this is relevant as we take it into the scientific literature you have very good concentration and focus how do

you manage that I wish I could give you something of value here I think my most honest answer is going to be I don't know any different um I wake up in the morning and I generally have something really going on in my brain that I want to go do and I'm pretty good About about compartmentalizing so like I'm very good about being like yo my sleep stuff is not in my brain my blood work stuff is not in my brain and I'm only going to grade right now like I don't set a calendar I

don't have like any of those fancy things but like when I get into something or I get an idea I'm pretty good at shutting the world out so much so that like will infuriate my wife cuz I'm just like I'm gone like and even if I'm not in front of the computer like I'm about it I'm not even trying I'm just like I'm on another level it's so actually dope because my daughter does the same thing that's cool and I can see it and my wife's like I think she's got I'm like no no no

I know exactly what she's doing like she's in space right now and I'm like that's exactly what happens to me like I just go into space so uh I'm very good about even if there's like real Legitimate things going on I can be like okay great if if that is um if that if there's nothing I can do else about that right now I can't prepare more I can't do anything else like I'm I'm pretty good about being like that out of my brain space and now I'm like into something else where like my wife

has has a really hard time with that like until that thing was um it's not a I wish I could say that's like a book I read or a practice but like it's Somewhat of an obsession maybe or the way your brain works it's the way my brain work it's the way that um I think a lot of it is actually my upbringing a like I'm from the country and it's sort of just like well that problem's that problem there's three more over there like it doesn't matter like you have to be able to just

put that down and like go get over there and go get over there and go get over there you don't have the ability and the time To just like you can't ruminate this just is not an option because there's too many other things that another life is dependent upon you right like that fence is down like animals going to get out like what whatever is happening like it does not matter about your taxes being laid or like whatever the heck is is like doesn't matter because something is on the line right now that you just

have to like move to and you just have to execute um I'm actually looking in The background at joo's book totally accidentally but when when he came out I'm like yeah like totally resonated with me personally is I'm like you have to you task analyze compartmentalize and then just move forward so I think the only reason I can do like teach the classes run my lab run the companies like do the other stuff do the podcast is like I have to just be able to be like next next sort of next and there's a downside

to that trait like there are Real downsides I mean you're not wrong my husband who is obviously a former seal is very much like that and I think that in order to be successful in the way in which you guys are you have to be that way yeah are you the first scientist in your family oh for sure for sure uh like where I grew up like I didn't know anybody famous and like I didn't know anybody who know anybody famous I I don't know what like where did you grow up uh in Southwest Washington

like halfway between s and Portland down there uh little city called Rochester Washington it was dope like a dope little city um but like like people weren't my family are not lawyers or scientists like no one in my family has I actually was the first one to graduate the college degree my family um so yeah like even as like a undergrad student I didn't know what a PhD was uh when I got on my master's program I didn't know what the difference between A masters and a PhD was I had no idea so um yeah

first scientist for sure but uh probably not the last your daughter my kids my son my daughter's all over right now where where did you do your undergrad is that all Ball State uh no I did my undergrad at a small school in Oregon called lynfield college so I played football down there division three school did my undergraduate degree in exercise science I think it what it's called there did my masters with Andy Fry at the University of Memphis amazing M he's amazing yeah he actually did uh like the story of getting into grad school

is one of my favorite ones like that was I'll tell we we have all the time in the world for you I know we're like so far in we haven't covered probably anything people are interested in um well I I think that that's incorrect I think people are interested in who you are as a human okay well we'll see we'll see how many tune outs You get in the first 20 minutes you guys better be listening if you are a fan of this podcast I have someone on here who I deeply respect I appreciate that

um so as I mentioned like I didn't know anything about Academia even as an undergrad right I was playing football and I Lov Human Performance stuff but I there there was there was no uh Advanced place to go in this field right I remember being on like recruiting visits and asking what do you want to do Academically and then and I kind of like tell them and there's like well there's athletic training like athletic training is is more of dealing with acute injuries on the field and stuff like that it's not really what we think

of as like training an athlete right athletic training is a very specific field they're like a physical therapist um on site at all times right so I'm like I don't want to do that like I'm not really deal with the inter when like High performance stuff and they're just like there were no strength conditioning degrees exercise there wasn't any strength and conditioning degrees definitely not wow no there was nobody really doing it research in the area was very little very few Labs focused on that um and if you did get into an exercise science program

like I did you're really looking at Public Health right it is park the car in the other end of the of The um parking lot and walk like take the stairs more it was you know eat nuts and vegetabl like it's more of Public Health type of stuff there was no like Hey how do we VO2 max how do we enhance performance all these things right so I'm like cool so you're bu dealing with like obesity and all those things um so coming out of that program I'm just like I don't know what to do

so actually I'm going to tell two stories did you enjoy your education loved it exercise Physiology yeah I mean it wasn't like the high performance stuff but who cares like you're learning how muscles work and grow and how the Body Works in general and and how you're recovering and um to me it was pretty easy for me to honestly compartmentalize cuz like and the the example in class would be how this is working for somebody who has cardiovascular disease but like it's so easy in my imagination to be like okay then how's that work and

like just to Switch it over right because it's the same physiology right physiology is physiology we were kind of joking earlier but like I'll kind of jump it a little bit but like to me there's like human performance is human performance you get to use that body in your flesh to perform however you want I don't really give a [ __ ] but it's still performance right doesn't matter how old you are doesn't matter any stuff no you all want to look you want to feel and You want to perform a certain way how you

want to look and how I want to look is different I don't care you set the terms right but we all want to look a certain way you all want to feel a certain way you set the terms right I want to feel more energy I want to feel like um I'm more focused I want to feel stronger great fine right but that's still you want to feel a certain way right then you want to perform a certain way okay you want to perform a certain Way again you want to be strong you want to

be fast you want to just not hurt great it's still all the same three things right and now if you took that example and put that in uh one of my starting quarterbacks in the NFL you put that in some one of our athletes preparing for the Olympic Games cool or you put that on my wife you put that on me like I'm none of those people I still want to perform on my best right so it's not I'm not saying anything different With the one exception this is the best part in my PhD we

actually had the real cool opportunity to uh my physiology courses were actually in the medical school and so I'm in the med classes just a physiology one right um and I'm the only PhD in that class or rest like real proper MDS why uh our program is small right so if you're in our program you did it but no one else got to cross over it was like a a pretty dope like back of the door deal we got to do so I Was like cool instead of taking like a normal class over there we

got to go take the the physiology But the teacher was a PhD not an MD and he would get in there and he start getting his stuff and I don't know how your med school went but this one was like you would basically do like a full chapter a day like a chapter of the medical textbook per day like that's the rate that you're crushing brutal and you stick on one topic for like four to six weeks and Then you kind of cruise to the next one like Immunology for month and renal physiology for a

month and or two weeks or whatever and you just like Crush right and you Hammer through and you do four or five hours a day four days a week or something like that right so you get really focused on one so we would get into stuff and he would start talking about things like blood volume and I'd be like dope right and he'd start talking about hey if you're you Know a female and you have 5 liters of blood like you're going immediately into cardiac arrest concerns and you're going out of blood thinners why how

that's working what the kidneys are doing how you're altering stuff and I'm like immediately five liters of blood in a woman I'm like dude that girl is super fit right cuz you're like the same thing that you would see in a legit medical especially um uh uh trauma issue right like a medical concern is the exact same Thing You' see in high performance so I'm looking at I'm like wait what like five liters one of the biggest adaptations most pronounced adaptations to endurance training is more total blood in your body you hold more blood right

so you make more red blood cells but in order to make your blood not get super viscous think you have to retain more water right so your total blood volume goes up one of the most classic Hallmarks of High performance is more total blood at the same time also that is like if you're an unhealthy person you see the exact same numbers on a chart you're going whoa cool get this person on a diuretic immediately because retaining fluids and this is all classic signs of heart attack that's coming or from my perspective you're super fit

so like I'm just like okay great and you start to really appreciate wow physiology is physiology it's the same Thing here but now we actually got here at a different angle in this this context this is deadly in this context it is the healthiest way you can be and now you start going okay it's just physiology but now also context matters context is everything it's one of the reasons why I hate giving these direct straightforward answers on podcasts and like social media and they have to be like people don't really realize why you and I

don't post very often because I'm Like it takes me so long because you have to be really careful and like really for situations not only like this but even on a smaller scale like you want to be as accurate as possible and you want to fairly represent what's happening that just takes like a long time so it's not Mis appropriated or misinterpreted rather um so like just learning physiology that way I'm like dope so I loved all my undergraduate classes like coming back where this Started because I'm like all right you're learning how all these

systems work even when it is like cellular biology stuff um genetics even if it's boty it's like who cares you're still learning the basics of living systems and then even into areas that I didn't like like biome mechanics it's still like okay this is great and it's biome mechanics of uh this is why people's gate starts shutting down as they get older with diena kicking in or like okay Great the example is dysfunction but just imagine what would be like if it was higher function and you're just running through those games in your mind and

you're like you're learning you're thinking you're creating additional holes where like oh I wonder everyone thought about that like that could be a place where so I just loved every second of it and I loved it so um I finished that and along the way the only people in our program Were again like public health people and one of the professor Janet Peterson ah she's just she's the greatest actually you know what's funny Janet was at Cal State Fullerton really left Cal State Fullerton went to lynfield and she took over and was my professor there

and then all the years later when I I got to lynfield she was able to call down and be like and I was interviewing he's like yeah this guy amazing super super fortunate sounds like you've had a few Mentors that Janna was great have helped direct where you're going or how you were thinking 100% like direct or indirect right this is one of the powers I learned very early in my academic career is you could be mentoring somebody and have no idea you have no idea because I had a kid come back to me and

say something one day I was like What He is something like he's like you know no one's ever told me that I'm a good writer before and I was Like huh like apparently I told the kid he was a good writer it meant everything in the world to this kid and I don't even know what his name was and I was likeing that's when I was like oh dude you got to be careful like you because everything you're doing could re even though that person you know it doesn't mean anything to you you could really

be impact in their life which is kind of going back we said earlier like one of the things I I don't like is not being able to respond to people because it can make a really really big difference in somebody's life um that was like one of my my first or second year as a professor and I was like okay that like changed everything in my brain because yeah and I would say the same thing like at the time Janet had no idea that she was having that impact really no no idea were you just

cuz I'm just another kid in her class you know and it's just like It's changing my life right yeah and so in class one day she was like Hey I want to start doing blood pressure checks on campus you said that she said that okay does anyone want to volunteer and I'm like hell yeah right I'm taking you did you sit in the front no you weren't I was not a sit in the front kind of guy but she asked that and I was like yes immediately yes I'll volunteer and she's like great you not

take blood pressure and I was like Nope she's like do you want are you interested in getting in the I'm like nope nope nope yeah you knew you were never going to do medicine for sure which is which is interesting I think that because I knew I couldn't get in there's no chance I could have handled it uh I don't have the horsepower upstairs you have to be really smart like in a very specific type of way and I definitely knew there's no chance like I had an undergraduate GPA of probably 3.1 3.0 like I'm

I'm I'm really not that that kind of intelligent like I don't have a lot of me my IQ is not particularly High my wife's crushes mine my like we've tested we've had a bunch of testing done um but my scaps like it's not particularly impressive it's like very very average very average but you obtain Mastery and then you can think outside the box different yeah like I'm not creative in a scientific Real way more creative than I am operating way more right so just being able to like you have to learn and memorize so much

so much hours of memorization dead in the water I'm never getting talking about I used to study study 10 to 12 hours I believe every second of that cuz you're in like that class I'm in for four plus hours a day and then you're taking a test on again the entire renal system from a medical perspective terrible like three days Like it it was terrible there's I barely got through that course and only really got through that course because the guy was a PhD and had a big soft spot for me he was just like

I'll just give you a c or whatever I was like [ __ ] thank God there's no way I would have passed that that like I was dead last because you you in med school you get your grades like posted I know I'm dead last every single one of them I'm I'm I'm down there right you've made up for it yeah I Felt the right uh but so she asked that and I was like okay great and she's like why you're volunteering I'm like I'm only going to learn like like this is what you do

right you want your spot like you yes to everything right that's how I grew up like yes playing college football I'm taking like 16 units I have to study way longer than all of my friends like Doug and Doug Larson went to school like we I you guys went to School together yeah so we' known other since we're were like 18 we took almost every class together for four years and he's just I think I literally remember one time I got a better score in one class on one exam than him the rest just shut

out the entire four years right he's really smart guy so I remember I'm like just it's I'm just going to win by other ways like I'm going to win in other ways this is part of it so I end up taking this blood pressure thing for And I sit out in Western Oregon outside and it's like drizzling raining and not a single person comes by to get blood pressure right I'm like well that sucked but whatever like at that point you're just chalking up WIS like you just everything in the buck you can throw in

you're going after right right like nine months later Janet emailed or something was like hey one of our former alumni is working up at Adidas so Adidas's national headquarters is in Portland which I also didn't know that yeah a lot of people don't because Nike's up there and they just think of Nike but Adidas is up there too it's like an hour drive from our school and she's like there's an opening it's kind of like a corporate Wellness gig they have a gym on campus they need someone to like open the gym at 5: in

the morning and I'm like I'm on it done she's like great so I'm I'm still Playing college football I'm getting up at like 3:30 in the morning so I can drive an hour to make sure I'm there half an hour early because I grew up in like my dad works in road construction right you show up 10 minutes early you are definitely getting fired like you're You're gone so I'm like you learned your work ethic and from where you grew up oh yeah my parents my grandparents everyone I grew up with like I'm in the

country it's like the expectation right if you Show up 5 minutes before practice you're gone like that's just a wrap so I'm like I'm not blowing this opportunity I have an hour drive I have a $600 car so I'm like if it breaks down or whatever like I still have to change the tire and get there on time traffic hits like no what right so I'm getting there way early and I start to notice and by the way I didn't want a personal train like the last thing in the world I wanted to do is

be a personal really even though you Loved biome mechanics and phology I don't want to like I don't want to train these people but did you know what you wanted to do at that point no I'm just hustling okay I'm hustling right I'm like whatever it's going to take mhm I'm hustling I like being in the gym that's like great and all that but I'm like I don't want to train 45-year-old corporate people like not at all right I'm hustling I'm getting there so early that I'm just like I'm unlocking the Door right and getting

in there I noticed there's like three people four people six people that are like always there half an hour early so I asked like boss I'm like can I let him in she's like yeah I don't care like if you want to get her that early you're not getting paid I'm like I don't care I'm here I let him in and then they started asking hey will you train us I'm like yeah so I'm coaching them we're just like we're training we're going after it and There's no like personal training there right but I'm just

like doing it I'm like before the hours show up like yeah we're good let's go right and it turns out like I don't remember what it was three or four of them were on the executive board you had no idea no idea like the other two worked in like the smoothie shop I didn't know anybody from any he didn't care did not care I'm just like who cares right I'm I'm hustling it Didn't take long for one of the guys to be like yo we are actually invested in a facility in Arizona um that only

trains athletes it's called ath performance so Mark ran opened this thing up like the late 1990s at that time was the only place like it in the world right had your nutrition your chiropractors your training all this stuff in one location and he's like you don't need to be here like you need To be down there and I'm like I'm in he's like no money you got to go work for free for six months and I was like I'm in I can't say yes fast enough so graduated drove my car down there did it make

it everyone wants to know yeah the car made it for sure it made it I had nothing though like I had nothing else I was eating oranges every day on like the orange trees that I could find on my way to there I would wait for any of the athletes who left their like protein Shake and drink the rest of it I'm like smashing all those to get you really put in your time and and you didn't have anything I didn't have much I mean I had like again I had I had a lot of

opportunity in terms of like my parents were really good people there was no violence there was no like yeah I didn't so I didn't have the deal with the stuff that's really hard like I didn't have money but like I had safety yeah I had security so I didn't care Because I'm like worst case I go right back to you know back the couch like not a big deal so that that part is do you ever take a moment and reflect on not having anything yeah to now I mean for sure like I make extraordinary

life the amount of money I make right now like relative to the amount of money my parents made their whole lives like it's it's Bonker right feel really good to be able to do stuff for them oh it's dope it's it's like so dope they the best Part is like they're not in the internet either one of them really like they barely know how to use their phone for real it's it's embarrassing and they have no idea like they have no idea they're like kind of like I had to explain this to my mom because

I got stopped in the airport like three times random like at different times she's like how do people so people know you and I was like kind of a big deal mom like I have To pull but she like she's like no I know but I'm like I don't think you really get it um so yeah like the things rebble do for them now they're just like yeah it's the greatest thing um so he got to Arizona yeah so I get I get down there and I'm just hammering it right and uh it was dope

cuz I'm like Training hall of fame baseball players we had like 15 or 18 guys going in the first round of the NFL draft that Year guys end up being like real legit Vernon Davis guys that around like really really Elite guys in baseball and stuff and I was coaching them like right out the gates for the most part did you know what you're doing yeah you did that that's honestly why I didn't want to become a strength editioning coach as funny as that sounds because like literally I'll never forget like probably the third day

I was there like you're interning right there's a bunch of interns that show up at once you got A bunch of really high level coaches that are running the show by like the third day I was like and this is total arrogance but I was like yeah I could do that better than that guy like right now like I can out coach that guy right now and I was picking up on things that they ask doing stuff and I was like oh the coach missed that miss that miss that whatever and I was just like

man stuff's not challenging like it's Just not hard and and I mean no disrespect at all to anybody of course but it wasn't like a um it was strengthen Edition coaching on that level was a little bit like babysitting because those coaches couldn't kick those kids out right those coaches couldn't couldn't they didn't really have authority um to to really like run that show like so you had to be like a little bit of kind of do what the do what the High-profile people want and and anyone that is in strength like in this that

world of pro athletes like you don't if some if one of the athletes is getting paid 20x you are and they don't want to do something like you don't really have a say even though it makes them better no no like what what are you going to tell LeBron James if you're the strength coach he says I'm not doing that exercise like okay you're not gonna say Anything right like so I didn't like that and I was like damn um I don't really want to do that and then I thought like act like it just

wasn't mentally like challenging enough for me to be like again like program designers work really really really hard at that level and coaching is really really hard and the hours that those people work is just bananas but that was I was like I'm not working these hours to not have the the autonomy like I didn't like the Autonomy I didn't like if a head coach got fired I just lost my job potentially I'm like I didn't like not being in control of my own life and Destiny and it just wasn't like there's a so much

to learn in strength conditioning but I felt like I got to the kind of way I think is like I felt like I got the purple belt really fast and I was like eh eh too easy too fast for for me for that aspect of it right and then the hard part on that field is like putting In the work and I didn't want to do that I don't want to be there every day like really just getting people to execute the plan I don't like operations like I like the creativity side of it so

like I want to come up with new and Innovative things but I don't want to be there every day like going through the same process like Groundhog Day dude it's so hard but those people like it's so hard to do that that's that's the the this is the flip side of creatives right it's Really easy to come up with an idea oh holy hell is is and I was like I don't have I don't have the toughness that these people have to get through this so I'm out on this one and the athletes were with

they were I just knew didn't want to do that so I went to the actually Doug Larson and I went to the nsca the national strength and conditioning Association National Conference changed my life I was lucky again another big break Doug's lifetime Mentor who's like he worked for like hulet Packard as an engineer he just loved lifting though NSA member was like I'll take you boys down there so he drove us down there let us stay in his hotel room where was it Vegas okay so we drove over like 24hour drive or whatever 12-hour drive

or whatever to get down there whatever it was he's like I'll take care of basically like paid for most of our food and stuff like that Like I knew he was going to take care of us CU I I got back actually when I finished at uh in Arizona I literally got back uh so I moved back and I was like man I need I was about a half a gas tank away like my cards were tapped they were redlined and I was like like I just have to get and I was like driving home

and I was like watching the odometer being like got to get there got to get there made it back so I didn't like have anything I got super fortunate Though got to work with my dad like make some money building roads but then got to nsca um we get there and I'm like my mind is blown I'm like what is this thing and I'm walking around there's part of the conference they have they give away like free beer and snacks so I'm just like smashing all the snacks right and they have a big row of

posters and and people what they at scientific conferences they put up um like for like two or three hours you'll have a poster You'll make a big poster of a study you've done typically they're not published like you can kind of see what the field is working on preliminary results stuff like that and there's these big halls and I'm just walking up and down these halls and seeing all this strength and conditioning science and I was like what the is all this like where is all this you had no idea didn't know about a PhD

didn't know anything I had no idea this stuff existed I was like Science was the crappy boring crap it was all the like again blood pressure medication did this I'm like I don't know this stuff sucks I had no idea and I walked by one poster and it was a poster of these people taking muscle biopsies and they were doing like really heavy squats with chains and bands and I was like whoa what and they were looking at they did a a one rep max back squat and you had to do 10 successful reps in

a day at 100% if you failed like you had To do it again so you were there squatting a lot oh yeah you did One Max 10 one Maxes a day every day for 14 days and they took muscle biopsies before and after and I was just like what the what is this this is like you took biopsies what's a biopsy how do you do that and like all this squatting stuff and I just hammered this poor guy with questions right I'm just like not like the kind of questions you get a scientific conference like

how does this work like Like you know how how do you do these things like how does this all happen right I just remember going back and forth getting back getting two more beers coming back talking to this guy was it this one this one one poster one poster right by the time we're done like the poster session shut down and the guy was like hey you want to go over to like the bar over there we like let's keep chatting whatever and I was like yes absolutely goes by and he he buys me a

Couple more beers or whatever it was and I was like and you know we're talking he's like hey you know I think I have an opening for grad student next year do you want to come get your Masters and I was like absolutely what's the Masters like I had no idea that's crazy like no idea that guy was Andy fry wow and for people who don't know Andy fry is he's just a legend in the field yeah he I mean he recently won Lifetime Achievement Award um like the first real Muscle physiologist in strength and

conditioning like really couple other guys uh pares and stuff had done some stuff but really really Andy was like really uh mostly the overtraining research like a lot of stuff um and people have to appreciate that um strength and conditioning has been kind of separated from mus physiology it's it's been different all of exercise physiology all of Health it's part of the reason why Um like like you and I have such a incredible connection right this is like this is it's so cool to see this stuff become science this stuff become medicine this stuff become

things that are in papers and um like in in scientific journals not the strength and conditioning Journal right to get into jamama to get into New England Journal Med and and cell and stuff like that nature science to go up there um but yeah so then he told me and he's like You just happen to pick Fry's work it like in retrospect there's no other one I could have picked right cuz I'm like who else is doing the stuff and other people were there but I got in there actually I I started I did a

year with him then he left and went to Kansas started his lab out there and then I finished uh with him and as I was actually I was getting closer I was like man I don't know what I want to do I don't want to coach don't want to Personal train um and I kind of want to do more stuff like this so what are my options well no one was had phds and that type of stuff so it um he hadn't started his PhD program at Kansas yet he just got there he had no

funding yet and I was like damn no one was really doing it so I just looked and I was like well who is doing the science and the physiology part like I want to do it who cares who they're doing it in right is somebody Doing the science side that I want to do can I learn that and that I felt so arrogant and confident in the performance and strength editioning side I'm like I don't need you your help there if I can learn the science side of what I want to do and then I

can come back and do this in this population I'll be now the second person and the first guy doing it is you know 25 years older than me so like I'll be in a real good spot so that's what I did for my PhD I Did it in a bunch of stuff I didn't really care about and then when I finished right as I was getting done I had this skill set of human performance strength conditioning then molecular physiology what did you do the PHD in uh my PhD was in called human bio energetics okay

it's exercise physi just it's just a title like it's all the same stuff my like like my actual dissertation was we developed a method for measuring Individual muscle uh individual signaling proteins in single muscle fibers so it was all like a chemistry technical sort of one there's no like real intervention um but the the first part of the dissertation was actually our Sweden study uh where we had the we can probably talk about of interest um the lifelong cross country ski and the V2 Max and stuff we did there so that was Eric the guy

who fors me dissertation so I worked on that one and then mine was like a chemistry but the physiology was very cool yeah it was dope like we're able to measure proteins at a really uh small level in individual tiny muscle fibers um that like no one had ever been able to do before and didn't really go anywhere we never used the methodology really again but it was cool to show that was possible so when I finished um I was like yeah what am I going to do and I started kind of applying for jobs

And most of it is still that like public health like kind of job as a pachy yeah because I'm like you got to start loud but you got to get Federal funding you have to do Health like you can do sport but only if you really do obesity or right diabetes research or aging that's like the kind of Hallmark three in our field right you got a obesity aging or diabetes metabolic disease something like that I'm like I don't do any of that stuff and like you can do the sport Performance stuff with the with

your slush money like your leftover money from your real studies or something like that like I don't really want to do that [ __ ] at all like I want to do human performance and then I just happen to see a posting at Cal State Fullerton it was like yo we wanted someone to do molecular physiology of strength conditioning and I was like like what what and then I applied and Lee Brown who also just recently won Lifetime Achievement Award called me like I feel like it was like an hour after my application went in

he's like hey this Lee Brown full I was like of course I know who you are like president of the NCA and he's like this is like exactly what we wrote our job posting for I'm like I know this is weird he's like how how like how did this exist I'm like this is so that application process was pretty short put it that way it felt pretty good and the Guy actually the reason that job was open was because the guy had just left that job that guy played football at lynfield so he had was

a few years ahead of me gone on got his PhD from Bill Kramer at University of Connecticut I applied for my PhD to go work with Bill this guy interviewed me with Bill and I I turned that spot down for the other one so like four years later 5 years later I apply for it he's like hey I remember your name you're that lynfield Guy or whatever I'm just leaving he went to actually he left uh Fullerton and went to work for um userion or na one of the the he's been a both so I

don't know where he went but he left to go do military research and he's like you should apply for this job and I was like Don did like I'm there and then Janet called and was like yes and so I like I had all these people being like like this is the spot that you're in so when we opened our conversation 40 minutes Ago or whatever and I said I can feel very forunate this stuff because I don't I don't know some of this yeah I told you though like it's really it is a ton

of hard work but look look in just in this like 20 minutes like look how many breaks I got just like lucky lucky lucky also um fluke so not really though yeah because there's also like what I didn't tell you were the 6,000 stories where I did something and nothing happened think this is important for the Listener yeah to push ahead and to you just have to keep firing shots but you also knew what you loved I did and I think a lot of people don't spend time figuring out where their true passion lies and

if you don't well what I'll say is like I want to be really clear on that because I get this one a lot from students like I didn't know what my passion was I didn't know like I wanted to do this specific thing I just knew I was like I love Human Performance and I also know like I can get after it and I'm just going to keep going so like I didn't care about like having no income as Master student or going on a PhD student because like I don't got any money anyways so

I don't know any different like I'm not going backwards lifestyle wise right don't care I'm believable who cares right so I'm just GNA keep and I know like I don't know exactly what I do when I started that job I told you I Didn't even want to do science it was a teaching based job right I was like I was going to teach yeah what did they hire you for well I came in and I was like yo this is exactly what I want to do so Dave costell had this thing where he was like

I want to do one to one one to one is for every scientific publication I have I want to do one lay publication so in like the 1970s that's you're talking like you published the paper in Journal of Applied physiology And then you write an article in Runner's World that that that's that's interesting how it was right yeah I I suppose I didn't realize that and so coming in like Dave was retired by the time I got there so I didn't spend much time with him but I that's like a big part of the lab

culture like this is what they and I was like damn that's perfect so when I came into flon that's what I told him I wrote him and I was like yo I'm going to do one to one and I'm going to put equal emphasis so in the center for sport performance that Lee started that I run now yeah that the goal the mission of that uh Center is to produce and disseminate research that enhances performance it is produce and disseminate that is one to one we will make and we will disate not we will publish

we will disseminate which means we will get it out to the world so I came in I told them yo I'm going to do This like I'm going to go hard in the paint both ways and and I'm going to spend as much time or more getting the current information we have out to people and not just publish publish publ publ publish like Let It Die which I'm surprised because most Labs want 100% Lee Lee is a different like Lee was in charge and Lee was like no that's what you're doing like you you do

what you want and like get this out in the world like the NC A's mission statement is um Something to do with uh Bridging the Gap between science and application and I'm like that's it and like this is this is what I want to do right to be in that middle world so I come in I'm teaching we're doing studies I'm getting in them out there and that's when like the barbell Shug guys were like you gotta you have to go on social media and I was like I don't want to do like I hated

the idea of social media but I did it they're like you have to start coming on Our podcast I'm like okay that started all making sense things take off from there and then at the same time that's when I started working with the pro athletes as well did they find you I mean cuz at the time there wasn't a lot of people doing what you were doing that were good at both it was um in individual Lanes I I would say yeah I mean it was a decent time ago because I had never what I

didn't like I never stopped coaching athletes the whole way I was coaching people in my masters I was actually in the strength conditioning room as a strength conditioning coach at Ball State as well which I wasn't supposed to be but I was like like coaching team down there and stuff so I didn't stop coaching um I was training myself I was fighting I was competing I was doing different stuff I was working with Fighters so when I get to La you were working with Fighters that time oh yeah for sure because You've been working with

yeah Fighters for years when we were Master students Mike bledow started CrossFit Memphis and like the fighters and and Doug was fighting at the time the competing at MMA they're just like damn like all these science people now have a gym like let's just go over there and then we started like training competing over there and then when I got to my my PhD I found the first fight gam I could find and I'm Like join and then they're like they figure out what what you know and it's like okay great like we're g to

Trade Services here so I never stopped and like I was competing myself so I'm like like we just keep doing this and everyone is thinking how did you have the time for all that yeah well like it's funny because like I would leave the lab I think practice was like 6:30 p.m. or something like that so I like be in the lab I would leave it was right Down the street from the lab funny enough we would go train and like we trained pretty hard and we like fought a lot in practice and I get

home eat go to sleep like wake up D the next day and it was awesome because the rest of my lab mates were like the classic xiz PhD students were like they're running and maybe like doing some bro lifting it's like I'm coming in I'm just like I had a broken rib one time so I was like hunched over in my thing uh I was all Smashed up all the time they're just like what are you doing and I like you think it made you a better scientist for sure right because like that's such a

good question uh we would oh man um like we would go over you know papers would come out or we'd have scientific ideas or basic xviz stuff come up and and one of the reasons why I fell in love with fighting so much scientifically is because it doesn't fit the mold of any other energetic system Right not at all super super hard and they would say things like you can't do a b and c and I would be like well we did it last night at practice I'll show you my data like I'll show you

the numbers they're just like what right it's just like basically think about this like this um there's like lifting and then there's like long duration endurance and I'm like no no no no here's what we did in practice here's the rounds we did here's the heart rates We're at or whatever and just like no way and then it's like oh you don't do any distance running like no no nor should I like all these things coming up right um like you can't do that and be strong and be this I'm like yeah you can like

this is how you're going to do it you guys don't know anything about training you guys know a ton about your little areas of science but you guys you work out but you really do not understand how to train fore performance Like none of you have been real performance coaches because our lab actually never interacted with the strength iing people at all and they were very much like the classic oh those guys don't know the science of training sort of thing like you guys have no idea what you're doing you guys have phds in muscle

physiology but you do not have any understanding how to train muscle like at all you know how to distance run and that's like all you know or swim or Cycle right um so it was like it was a ton of being able to be like yeah and look well what if what if this what if this what if this right and like look what happens and look what these people are able to do and and they were constantly and so even like the science questions I wanted to ask the things I want to go after

the way that I would interpret papers I mean I'll never get a ton of them right we could get these giant fights like academic fights like As Doctor students coming in because they would interpret a particular paper certain way um like one of them was the classic one we there was a I didn't I wasn't a author on this paper but we did a training study in 80y olds it was 70 and 80y olds is what it was and the 70y olds got stronger and added some muscle mass but the 80-year-olds did not right and

it was like okay great and so the the the lab interpretation of the paper was there's something happening at age 80 uh where you stop responding like as well of the adaptation right and I looked at all the data and I'm like no what you saw is your training program sucked like I'm looking at your training program you did leg extensions three sets of 10 at 70% I think it was like once or twice a week that was the whole training program I'm like your training program sucked what you found out is you don't know

how to strength conditioning coach like That's what you found out so and then we were like okay look at the marker look at this marker look at this one over here blah blah blah like here's more support you're just hammering down on it but yeah like all that like came out as in my science right so I'm like how am I interpreting how am I positioning things what do I want to do um and and then really learning the skill of going man this is why I'll I'll say this not to hopefully Offend anybody but

if you really have never been a scientist really never done the work like you really don't know how to interpret research you really really really don't you can get kind of close but I like even someone like like our our good friend Lane Norton right lane did a PhD and he gets this but he also has not done a single study on his own right and I'm saying this with all love and L Lane would fully hug me right now If I said this right we love Lane yeah it's like you don't know the difference

between you've run 10 20 40 studies like you you really there's layers of understanding that come with this career researchers with careers so that's like man you and and knowing like the scientists and knowing the labs like I can pick aart and be like so I can see things in between lines just because I like I know these things so there is there's a level Of trust that has to happen with like the actual people in yes in there when like when a real scientist that's really producing research says something and that disagrees with maybe

somebody else doesn't mean they're right plenty of bias season but there's a different level of understanding how the whole game works that you can get to so yeah it totally informed um how I was doing things and it's you can see it to this day the the type of Studies we've done in my lab the things we've learned the approach I've had it is all funneled back to that same thing right the direct work with tons of Fighters it's a it's very unusual it's a very unusual combination but I did it all on purpose you

did yeah because like I saw that thing right like I looked at that thing as a master student went no one does this and that's together okay how you going to get a job well you got to do you have to have a skill set like Tim Ferris was so beautiful about this a decade ago it's not necessarily having a crazy skill set it's having a skill set in two things that don't complement each other that's where people get magic you're like how do you have a PhD in mathematics but then you're also a world

class Chef what like weird now all of a sudden like weird things and opportunities happen because you have this unique combination of skills right so I'm looking I'm like I don't see Anybody who's really understands human performance from a coaching perspective that understands cellular physiology who's also actually still competing who's really coaching people who's doing all this right if I go start a lab like that I can do whatever research I want I'm not competing against anybody because no one's doing this type of stuff Any Grant I go after I'm I'm in the open here

no one's looking at this and any athlete who I Would potentially want to work with is going to come in and be like Yo which of these people would I pick like I'm going to be the pick right people wondered like I I'll finish this rant like God we're we're so deep in you can cut all this or put at the end no no we're keeping this in when um I did uh it's been like six or seven years since the first time I went on Joe Rogan people ask I had like no following at

the time right like a thousand Followers or something like how the hell and people were like oh what publisher do you use whatever and I was like none ever zero how did he find you he dm' me but how did he find how did he find me if you go back and look at my bio yeah it said something like this like PhD muscle physiology uh MMA coach like blah blah blah and it was like it was like the four or five things that like he loves the most so people always wonder like How do

I get on I'm like well first I don't know how to get on his show up to you but like don't ask me when you're like a if you're a strength editioning coach in golf don't expect to get on there like he doesn't like that he follow I'm like I listed all the things like he was super into then looked at all my posts are science and sports and athlete stuff and he's like he probably saw that and was like that's exactly what I'm into like that's cool I don't Have posts about other stuff or

whatever it's all the sciencec so like part of that was like yo I'm doing this because no one's in this field everybody wanted to be in the NBA in the NFL and Major League Baseball I would want to be strength coaches for like those people and I'm like that's great but no one's giving a crap about these UFC people well that was 2008 turns out wow like that sport was getting big right and I'm like and I'm The only one there I'm the only person to turn to so when these Fighters start like looking and

finding where gets out like there's a scientist is doing all this work and like he also has worked with ABCD and you know these UFC Champions and all this and like all of a sudden flood gates in that Community gets opened up boom like things get going um so like from there I had already had this experience with NFL players and major league baseball Players as well too so I still had some people from there that was sending people over and then you know at that point like we'll call that Marketing in terms of like

word but marketing is only as good as then what your product is going to be so once the time came out I was like oh [ __ ] he's like look how how well people are doing uh out of his stuff and like from there it was a wrap did that inform your research for example so you Went from fighting doing all these things you then took over this sport lab uh Fullerton what was the first study that you did do you even remember because that was I don't remember when was that uh it was

14 years ago something like that 13 years ago I don't remember what our very first study was um but it was geared toward was it geared towards fighting I don't think so uh the first Couple of years I had to build the biochemistry lab I had to get the muscle biopsy on board like there was there's a lot of infrastructure like building like physically building the lab so I don't remember what our first study was but I mean some of the early ones we did I wanted to know whether or not you you'll see a

lot of times in between rounds of a fight boxing or MMA that coaches will put an ice pack like on People's neck and rub it on their shoulders and stuff like that and so I was like want to know does that actually work does it doesn't matter well so we looked at it we're like let's put him in a control condition let's put them a placebo condition let's put an ice back on people's necks like in between rounds like of a simulated fight um we didn't see any difference in like thermal regulation or performance or

any other direct or indirect markers of fatigue in The first three rounds but then it started to make a difference after that and so the basic idea was like well okay if you're fighting in a championship fight potentially putting it right back there it also does no harm so my general recommendation was like potential to work no downside whatsoever I'd strongly encourage it like definitely put that thing as high but you have to put it really on the base of your neck like or the base of your brain not on like your Lower neck put

it right up there where your thermal sensors are as high as you can and then hold it don't rub it around don't move it everywhere the longer you can apply that thing the better so that's a great example it's like okay great and I'll actually like what's actually really funny is for my first tenure review I got completely crushed from the my own Department actually because they're like you know your research isn't focused because I had Done like a muscle biopsy biochemistry one I had done that one we did a study on deadlifting with heavy

bands right so we built in on the force plate and we're looking at that and they're like you're all over the place cuz they want you to be super focused and like do one thing I would say probably most Labs I mean that's they want you to be a niche because the only way you're going to get world famous and get funing and stuff is like if you have a hyper Niche into Something right I'm like [ __ ] that I'm not doing any of that like I'm doing exactly what I want so I got

crushed on that but I was like I don't care like I'm going to do like what I want to do um well it turned out it worked out for me so yeah we were all I mean we're all still to this day like if it if I think it's a very diverse lab and I think that the papers that you publish have a a lot of University thank you to Cozy Earth for sponsoring this episode of the show I have been using cozy Earth Products forever and if you have not tried them you are definitely

late to the game cozy Earth products are made from viscus from bamboo these are the softest towels bedding clothes you will ever ever try I am telling you I recently got their Resort towels I don't even need to go to resort to use these towels quite frankly I'm using them for bath towels they are large and fluffy they feel great they're beautiful and listen cozy Earth has been Around for a while and they just continue to create new products that you can use in your daily routine I love my cozy Earth bedtime sheets well I

guess they would all be bedtime sheets but they could be nap time sheets especially as it begins to get warmer and many people are hot at night and you can turn down the temperature but the sheets for some reason stay hot cozy Earth is not that cozy Earth keeps you cool and soft and just amazing you can get yours at Cozy earth.com you'll get 30% off my listeners get 30% off using the code Dr lion that's cozy earth.com 30% off and use the code Dr Lion now back to the show talk to me about let's

talk about your lab now or I should say let's talk about some of the things that should be being done like biomarkers for muscle Health big question where do you want to go here because I got a lot to say about this topic well I think it's really important because there's the Blood biomarkers and then of course there's the physical piece the physical Imaging piece whether it's ultrasound CT MRI dexa yeah I would I mean I would love to talk about the blood biomarkers and I have messaged you many times you know Andy what can

you tell me about this or you know what can we think about muscle turnover or sarcopenia again you and I come from different perspectives I care about performance because I care about the military Operators y but other than that aside from dealing with tier one operators I deal with real people I deal with CEOs people that are getting after it you're interested in human performance again there's a spectrum of the human performance but from what can be applied clinically even if we're not even there yet blood biomarkers of skeleton muscle Health what do we know

so number one dep defining operationally what we're going after here biomarker Simply means a marker of biology your height your height is a biomarker right you're a very small one about it being um so when you this is the reason I'm saying this is to say that actually it's used nefariously marketing purposes and and I think it it sounds sexy sounds appealing right but it could be anything and so when you see a company is like oh they are really good at biomarkers they do biomarkers like it Doesn't really mean [ __ ] to be

totally honest right what does that actually mean okay so a biomarker could be any of number so you laid out a couple of different forms of flavors of those biomarkers it could be a physical thing so if we're analyzing take kind a company like axio force are you familiar with with axio Force yet okay great they actually are an upand coming company they're out actually the subconscious mind is Fascinating they are out of Andy fries lab so it's actually biome mechanics company that they the university cus Kansas and they built a force plate that is

is a soulle of a shoe so what you can actually do is you get full 3d motion analysis of how you're moving and all you do is you know take the soul out of your shoe and put their soul in full like you have a full kinematics kinetics coming off this thing um Force plates are like 40 Grand but they figured out How to put this technology into a solle of a shoe so you can put this in there right can anyone purchase that it's not available for Consumer purchase yet for the outside world but

um but you might know someone maybe axio force is spending most their time with early Parkinson's detection right now because one of the things that they're they're going after is saying hey look if we can identify changes in your Gate how your left foot's moving how you're walking right because well obviously you imagine somebody with Dementia or they're shuffling right see these clear changes in Gate right what if we can pick up those changes in Gate six months earlier a year earlier six years earlier six I don't know the number is right but we are

clearly if this is now a passive technology that's just sitting in your shoe and you're at risk or have some other Mark like I Don't know who who gets it we don't know right but now we can identify this before you start identifying other signs of neurological derivation you're not you're not feeling the loss of mental Clarity you're not seeing some of the the early signs right but they can see that marker happen earlier now we can step in and intervene prior to actually having observable changes by just that that's a biomarker that's a biomarker

of muscle quality said differently than you And I typically think of it right but we're looking at now true function right okay super interesting that's out there now whether or not their technology fully works or conceptually yeah it's the point of going after right you have other companies um that that you do something like that um then you have another form of a biomarker like what you and I do right we'll take hundreds of blood biomarkers In this I typically refer to them as blood biomarkers or probably more appropriately molecular biomarkers and we're looking at

everything from a combination of actual enzymes to metabolites to full proteins any number of things we're looking in there right and we're trying to gauge I'm imp putting words in your mouth here of what you do for your job you're trying to gain a engage a stage of like what is signal what is response Right what what is the what is the actual cause what is the symptom right and there's all these things right what what is the dysfunction what is the response and this is like way more tricky than just saying hey your testosterone's

low therefore it needs to go up like hold on here we got to go Upstream we got to go Downstream and figure out again is this the response is this the cause if so why and then you're trying to really get an understanding of What the physiology is doing because it is it is proactive and it is resp responsive so you're moving up and down I'm going to come way off that here in a second and then I'll we'll come back we'll spend most of our time there but now we've talked about like a physical

movement biomarker we've take an actual blood biomarker and now let's take another biomarker like how do you feel what yeah your subjective life experience is an Incredibly powerful biomarker right how are you going through the world how are you experiencing thing is your back hurting are you low energy are you feeling like you're struggling to recover are you not you anymore you want to go back like you just don't feel like yourself anymore like all this stuff is a biomarker So when you say like what do you go after what do we look for it

depends on what are we looking for fundamentally go all the way back to a Science principle called first principles strip this whole thing down and just start asking questions along the way till we can no longer get past an assumption we feel like is 100% no I think of this in handful number one step one is there has to be some assessment okay I I I got to have some data on you if those data are how do you feel today if it's that and you're waist circumference great if we go the all the way

to the end of that and we've got 500 Biomarkers we've got stool urine saliva I know how you walk I've done a spring blach analysis on you are you fam with spring blach oh my god oh write this one down please let me tell you a whole bunch about Springbok when we're done here Springbok allows you to run a full MRI scan but not for cancer detection for muscle analysis and so you actually get a 3D movable analysis of of the volume of every muscle on your body so I can look Directly and go okay

great your left VL your left quad Vel lateralis the outside leg muscle is 12% larger than your right side or right now that's just size it's not function doesn't talk about function or quality but now we've but that's another piece of the pie like what if I could visually physically see every muscle on your body now I can in a 20 minute scan so is is Springbok available to the public totally I mean wildly we do uh full body MRIs but we do it for Vasculature we do it for cancer detection we look for physical

injury but we don't look what is the the accuracy it's it's dialed okay Mr are really pretty good yeah is very good but you could take those things right so you imagine now you're stacking these things together and you're going okay great didn't seeing the blood blood looked fine nothing popped out there right gate looks totally normal functionality why is it what we're struggling to turn why Is this knee still hurting okay now we run through springwalk analysis we're going oh okay well maybe we're seeing this giant asymmetry in Muscle side now I don't know

what giant asymmetry means or not some asymmetry is normal like there's a ton of things to learn about that right like I don't know or maybe it's the opposite maybe we see a 15% difference in your quad size left to right but there's no pain there's no dysfunction okay great right H it's not There and then we're we're going into now we're going to your sleep and we're looking and so my point is we start start talking biomarks is like what problem are we solving and ideally step number one is assessment we have to get

some sort of data on you as nuts as that all stuff could be or as simple as how you feeling how's your energy you know how are your poops today like like what is it what's it going to be okay step number two now we have to be able to Contextualize that you call that assessment right is that good bad great all those things right so okay doc my testosterone's low is it according to what according to who we have a full conversation now to talk about reference ranges for things like blood markers yeah yikes

right right holy Toledo we could talk the entire time about that like compared to who correct High compared to what low what do you mean outside of what reference range like Based on a population of who all this stuff we could go into all this but we have to understand how am I contextualizing that front piece right we talked about it from the spring box okay you're have asymmetry but what what does normal even mean how much is okay part number one is easy unending technological growth on number one you can pick any metric of

Health and Human Performance you want and there is a great technology and there's even more Coming part two is a problem part two is a real problem right I don't know um if you don't really understand how to interpret blood work we can't get this if you don't really understand how to truly analyze sleep you're going to have problems if you don't really understand and you could okay we don't have databases of super healthy people this is a huge huge huge problem for all of us we do not for sure not the Pander to the

audience here but we for sure do not Have good data on healthy women I can scrape together like in a lot of areas like what a normal healthy 40-year old dude should look like you go into women and now you go into anything between pre-post child birth no idea like there there's a definite difference between a 35y old woman who's had children and a 35 that is not okay right now we get into other challenges which is where you thought I was going right you go into menopause right like This is just a Darth like

we're we're in Dead Space right now right we might as well be in the middle of a black Zone like really fundamentally we we we're in a black hole right now we got nothing here right then you got to go to the next step which is okay we've determined we've made our best guess based on your clinical experience based on your intuition based on the da data that is available based on okay we have some data on men at that same age then we Have some animal studies like you're doing the best you can because

people need action now with that's practice right that's evidence space that's the next step though is going all right how do I get that corrected what's my actual action and now we're still at an even bigger mystery right cuz now we're going well I didn't even know there's not enough data on if that was good bad great and there's definitely not intervention data Then what do I do how do I solve it right and so now you're leaning on people again with their experience and intuition and you're making your best sort of guess there that

is is the the stepping stone that we have to walk through this entire path on right so getting into B Marks we could go up and down this list any way you want we could maybe spend time on one one in particular one Styler something like that but that is really the full picture Of trying to assess how do we actually use this information to make my world better and the way that this is all packaged the last thing I'll say here that is all under an umbrella of population and that sucks for you right

because I need to know what works for me I do not care if something works on the population level that's a great start but science doesn't really give you answers on the personal level very often it almost always gives you Answers on the population level right this is most likely M to work the best in most people that's super super helpful that tells you very little information about you and so we have to be able to approach this whether you're you're intervening on your own behalf whether you're working with somebody like you or a great

doctor doesn't matter we have to be able to go from okay great that's where the science took us this far now how do I figure out in My system in my Approach how I collect my own data make sense of that whether I know that that's good bad terrible for me and then what is going to work for me that's the Gap we've got to close we have to help people understand how do I figure that out for me personally the science is what it is but we got to help people get that last that

last level of individualizing personalizing however you want to call this Precision Nutrition Precision recovery Precision Training for me that's the problem we've got to get to I want to ask this question but I do want to talk about myocin and certain details just just because it's not discussed enough these markers maybe even three meth methyl histadine things but before I do I'm going to throw this out there because actually you taught me about this we were at a um nutrition conference for Special Operations oh yeah um do you remember we were in San Diego oh

yeah yeah yeah it was for it was a lot of the nutritionists that worked with and work J stuff yeah jck um joint Special Operations Command Dev grew those kind of individuals um digital twin oh yeah is that where the digital twin potentially comes into play and my listeners don't know about digital twin maybe they're smarter than me maybe they know about it but most don't I just learned about this great there the the digital twin is imagine we Can take your physiology uh your genotype to phenotype so who you are at the genetic level

all the way to how that is physically expressed how tall you are how you feel what blood B bi markers you have and we could digitize that and now with that we could run endless simulations on you and predict how well you're going to respond and what ways to any intervention and big any combination of interventions so you did this for Your sleep routine supplements yeah you run that whole thing and we would see what would happen with your physiology as a result of that that human digital twin thing has been going on since the

1960s and now started off at Nasa after their Apollo mission that got screwy and they basically said here's a new standard any physical machine we sent up to space has to have a digital twin made of it so if anything goes wrong in space we can run simulations on it here Digitally and I'd have to rebuild it physically identify the problem know what the best solution would be for our crew up there and then tell them exactly what to do that then just got extended in the 1990s or so to the human made sense right

how can we start digitizing and so the first things that started to come on board were like the heart and so being able to run a digital twin of your heart and then identify which surgical intervention is going to be best for you In your particular case right using that information um there's a couple of groups that are working on the physical brain and that's getting close uh just physically not cognition not emotions not Memories not like that's very deep problem to get to the soft and hard problem of Consciousness like that is way way

we are not there yet no but just like a physical brain pretty close uh lungs and kidneys are very close as well well those are not so much so it's like They're basically here you're talking about like third step clinical trials now at this point running some last little things but and technology and costs and stuff but it it's really really quite quite here the stuff that's been worked on for the last decade or so and you you find the if you just go into Pub metet yeah I have digital twins you'll start seeing these

all over the place right this is not like a fringe thing um you'll see human digital twin For the immune system and that gets really really really challenging we're not close to that yet but that is hard because as you know the I can go in and pull out your Reno system I can go in and pull out your vascular system I can go in and pull out your pulmonary system I can't pull out your immune system it's it's every it's everything it's in every cell of your body like it's all over there right so

figuring that thing out mapping that is really really Challenging but there's other stuff we can get to so we actually like the re one of the reasons I'm here in Houston right now is is tomorrow we have a a a special little conference thing going on um we just actually finished our first round of our human digital twin project was myself and a bunch of other companies um so our sleep company our blood work company and a bunch of other companies came through and said okay what if we run all these analyses on Somebody create

a digital TN of them then put them through advanced protocols based on their response and then test them at the end and that's the actual project that we completed um with a handful of the NASA teams and and other stuff SpaceX and like some other groups that are combined on that one so we put all that stuff together um pilot study learned a lot from it but but really impressive there's a bigger conversation about like some other Things going on um but the the the the reality of that step number one like I talked about

assessment it's just getting better and getting really good we still don't know who we're comparing to like I don't know any of the things but the ability to take your physiology and upload it it's just not a if anymore like it's effectively here um being able to run digital twins on your own self and you be able to put them through like there's Actually a group called vexa uh it is out of they're in the Bay Area but it's like Silicon Valley exercise something or other group they were able to they can take very Li

limited amount of data uh and basically tell you how you're going to predict an any performance marker any time down the road I mean that's pretty extraordinary yeah with stunning accuracy I I think that they did this for the Chicago marathon and the group of people that they did it With they were within like six seconds of their Marathon performance do you think there's a space where we could say okay from you know in my brain is the Practical aspect would this give us a sense of where someone and again um recognizing the limitations of

the subjective question of feeling better let's say we have a woman and we have her do these things or we give her this number this amount of testosterone and then she feels we give her I don't Know 50 milligrams of testosterone this week it causes her free testosterone to go to 100 and she feels amazing yeah just make it up with amazing accuracy versus we give you 20 M 20 milligrams of testosterone you might see a free testosterone of 15 because that's kind of the human variability there's again I understand it's not the intracellular amount

you know we're sure yeah I mean the fact of the matter is why people who listening to this will Really care is you just saved years of experimenting years years of trial and error because and you saved when this is going to be ready you're going to save massive side effects so we give you the 50 migs of test and all of a sudden now you're crazy and you lose all your hair or whatever and you get acne yeah yeah tons of maybe testosterone wasn't the right choice for you maybe we had to figure out

a way to lower your sex hor binding Glob in or whatever it is yep right so the the issue is there's many issues with the stuff to to balance the conversation because like I want you to get cited but not too excited I was very excited it the the balance is always still remember it's only as good as data in so what data did you collect to begin with right okay that that's you have to be really careful of that then number two it's only operating on the information it has so like if it doesn't

Have any information about your mental health then like it's not going to have be able to predict that has no idea right so you have to have a more comprehensive um this is why when you have practices like your medical practice this is why you have the success you have right because you're attack you're looking at every part of this this program right everything holistically yeah everything holistically right ours is the same with Our coaching practice right like you have to do it this way I think at this point in order to move the needle

truly in a meaningful way for people it has to be all Encompass all encompassing has to be stool all of it saliva genetics everything yeah if if not like what the way that we phrase it is we're looking for performance anchors okay what what does that mean what is an anchor that is holding down your performance I didn't say sport your performance again you Define how you look feel and what perform means to you right so we we've coached hundreds of non-athletes hundreds of them right okay you tell me the terms I'm still looking for

that anchor what's that thing holding you back maybe for it is your testosterone totally great I don't do that I don't give hormones I'm not a real doctor like you I'm sending that person to you okay great I really think youting hormone therapy like you go to them not what I Do we're going to come back and say okay your biggest thing though however is maybe maybe it's something small um I'm trying to think of examples that I've had like the last couple weeks maybe it's the fact that like you don't have a consistent daily

schedule you have a variability of three to four hours to day all I do is change change that and all of a sudden watch your testosterone rise that's exactly what happened in this guy right okay Great got them up there perfect other ones it is like hey you need really a very specific protocol for six months we have to have this combination of breath work we got to get you down regulated we need to change the time of day you're working out you're not getting sun exposure we need these specific nutrients like can you can

get very very very complicated for some people because you end up in the circle right where it's like a little bit of bad sleep a Little bit worse nutrition choices little bit worse nutrition choices a little bit less energy a little bit less energy little bit more stimulant a little more stimulant a little bit worse sleep you got to break the cycle right you can't just come in and give them testosterone you can and then they're going to feel great and they're going to quit that and then they're going to come see me and you

because they're going to be like I feel horrible now yeah that's What happens right so you have to approach what is that real anchor what is the most severe you have what is the Lynch pin the Log Jam like however you want to think about it but what is the thing that is dragging and what I the tip I'll give you here is it's not the thing that's dragging necessarily like just your performance down so it's not always one to one meaning like I have low energy therefore it's an energy issue maybe not like really

maybe not at All or uh I'm not recovering like I did it's something my maybe not it is what is what is putting the most constraint on your physiology physiology will only operate to the level that it is constrained you have to figure out what is constraining that that physiology then get out of it the way right and then watch all the other peripheral things just take off because physiology is physiology it's all just one big soup in the same pot right so it's not like You can mess with one of the ingredients and expect

the other thing not to get mess with so look at the entire pot and then go you know this is the area even if you don't think you care let me give you like a direct example so people don't think it's not it's like you're not strength training at all okay great yeah but I don't really care about that I don't want to get big and bulky I don't need to put on mask like I really just care about my mental health okay Great obviously not mental health is not just strength training not saying that

but if we look at your entire panel and go yeah but here's what you're not appreciating oh and then we could go on I'll make them read your book right they got to read your book and they realize all the physiology that goes behind high quality muscle and then we can show them we can show them the papers and this is what we do like we we present like the people that work with it they get Presentations of the science of their physiology right this is what's going on this is why and so then when

we look at your Labs a is low and B is low and d is low right and then when we look at your sleep and all these things are connected back in your case to your lack of muscle M so when we think we correct this problem this is going to go up and then you're going to get the thing you want oh that's what I mean when I say what's constraining the physiology not just the Marker oh your testosterone's low it needs to go up maybe maybe not oh your insulin's down hold on here

we do not treat one to one like do not I don't treat anybody I'm not a doctor but we don't coach one to one it's not just like oh my sleep sleep's low we got to go sleep more maybe why is it low let's fix that problem and then watch everything else correct itself do you think with um the clientele you guys are working with There's there is one overarching theme I understand everyone is very individualized if you if you like energy is probably even like with our pro athletes with our Executives like I would

say then probably the biggest one we get is fatigue you you think about it the two ways like either fatigue or slash energy so I I can't train as hard as I used to I get tired sooner slash like physically I'm sleepy throughout the day like I don't have the energy Used to have um I don't have the Vigor that like the go after it as much anymore like if we collectively call that energy I'd say that is the biggest Collective thing we've had and do you find that in terms of the cause I understand

the cause is different but do you think I mean again sleep apnea is huge you sleep apnea also environmental yeah toxins in the house in the room for sure do you find that there are top there are top three yeah um issues That's that is pushing the fatigue or and or lack of energy yeah so we kind of have like a um we triage it we we walk most likely most common all the way down to more likely something like an environmental toxin important but that is down on our list of like we're not getting

there till the end most likely because we're going to start with the most OB if you are fatigued the most the number one place we're starting is your sleep if you don't have energy and you Feel tired that makes sense makes sense right we're going to exhaust that one and parent forget it of young children just forget it caffeinate that's all I got to say yeah right okay so we're starting off asleep right um there's some insane number of people in the world okay I don't want to go too far down here but here's the

reality your practice medical practice we talked about blood marrow markers being poor reference ranges look At the Sleep ones they're a [ __ ] disaster okay total disaster you mean from a um sleep apnea test here's what sleep testing looks like imagine you're you get into a snowmobile accident and your knee is totally trashed and you're like oh my gosh your knee is pointing the wrong direction it is sideways you're in screaming pain and you go into a hospital and they take an x-ray and they go well Dr lion uh there nothing broken here looks

like your knee's fine Like yeah but it's pointing the wrong direction and I can't move it but nothing's broken so you're fine that's what sleep testing is right now it is an x-ray if you officially have one of two or three things at a certain cut off you will be told you have sleep apnea you have some other clinical sleep disorder below that though you'll be told no it's not your sleep sleep's fine you're like okay great well my ACL PCL and MCL are all torn off the bone but you only Looked at the bone

structure themselves you got there if you go get a sleep test done at a almost any sleep lab you have that in addition you're going into a lab you're sleeping for a couple of nights in a very weird scenario I don't even need to explain to you you're putting wires all over your head and face like this is total under nonsense right you're not getting that there's a Litany of subclinical meaning they don't officially have sleep apnea but you are Suboptimal extremely deficient that can be explaining all of your fatigue all of it right like

there are things that are benign or things that people think are benign that are absolutely not snoring snoring is not normal no you should not be snoring I'm not saying you have a sleep disorder because you're snoring but if you are like yo can your partner hear you from the other room most nights or often yeah like that is ding ding ding ding ding like red bell that is sub Optimal sleep every day of the week y right regardless of what comes back on your one day sleep study no question if you're waking up more

than once per night for most people ding ding ding ding ding like that should not be happening unless it's CU you're three-year-old as running upstairs like like if it's under your control needs milk or needs water the other one yeah all of them right all of them last night was uh Mom Dad I have a question what um Um no go back to your room but it's a really quick question my just turned foure that's very funny um could dinosaurs eat me no bud dinosaurs are extinct huh yeah yeah bud go back to room okay

did he come back of course he did goes back to his room 5 minutes later back unbelievable is it playtime no it is not not it's 11:00 at night you should be fully this was 3:40 or something like that I'm like dude you wait a little bit longer I Would let this one slide we would have just got up but this is too early go back to bed but yeah outside of that um so there are lots of of things that are like people are like oh I guess this is normal um other one's feeling

like I'm just pretty tired all day like well I guess I am 50 now no no no no no right like these are all things people just assume of like well it's because I don't have this like giant sleep issue that you think your sleep is just like normal I'm just a bad Sleeper Man we have analyzed a lot of people sleep and we are really yet to find anybody who's just a bad sleeper I love that because that means you can fix it yeah you're sleeping poorly for a reason you haven't found it yet

but because you've also probably done very little about it um you've maybe in fact some of these people have had two three four five sleep studies I'm like well you're still doing the same x-ray you Have to get better analysis of what's actually happening and you've you've created that yeah I mean this is obviously we have our technology at my company which is Absolut rest yeah um that's that's one but um generally sleep assessments are going to look at how you're sleeping so let's say like my company is this is not meant at all to

be a plug for my company do do whatever you want our company sold out anyways good luck I really do want to Say this with it doesn't matter about my company so I'm trying to be as helpful to you as possible thank you thank you if you want to pay attention to something like this you have to step number one this like we talked about assessment what's that mean you have to figure out how you're sleeping okay if you have some sort of sleep tracker that's going to tell you how you're sleeping now I could

go on and on about why they are bad while I think sleep Staging is terrible do not pay attention to how many minutes you spent in deep SE why I actually agree with you why yeah a lot of reasons number one on the small level most trackers are at best like 85 to 90% accurate with sleep staging so for a lot of people but that's actually good enough okay fine like gives you a rough idea of plus or minus okay however bigger problems with that number two what makes you think that we know exactly how

many Minutes in each stage you should be at because we do not have normative data in these different situations but number three you're not asking your brain and body to do the same thing every day why are you asking them to have the same sleep it should not right if you spend an entire day podcasting versus an entire day running up a mountain you should not expect the same sleep staging that night should not happen so in one of those nights you turn around you're Like oh my gosh my deep sleep's down 20 minutes it

should be because then it's prioritizing other phases of your sleep deep is not just better REM is not just better light sleep is not bad fourth those stages I just laid out don't even really exist those are arbitrary and made up and the line that makes something officially deep or non deeper N1 or two changes these things have been restructured over time right and probably will continue to be they Will for sure fifth on top of all this this is all based on a system of assessing sleep called polygraphy PSG that's the gold standard I

think it's all garbage in fact I will put my stamp on this one 10 years from now I don't think people will do it anymore it's like it's fading out of the Sleep look at the look at the Sleep scientists the Sleep researchers these folks that are in these Labs like PSG is going by the wayside there are much much much better Ways to look at your Sleep Quality if you're just looking at things like timing did you go to sleep rough the same time which is very very very important fine your sleep track will

work PD is fine if you want to just look at total duration it's important it's not the most important thing but like it's okay these are things are fine but if you're really trying to figure out like you're sleep staging and your Sleep Quality uh And you're trying to understand what's actually happening there like PSG is so it's it's okay right it's okay but it's not I'll put it this way when I have $600 million athletes like we have we're not using PSG like that alone should tell you like when we have unlimited funds that's

not what we're doing we're not sticking wires all over your head and like doing that for one or two nights there are much better ways that we can go after these things so all of That just tells you how you're sleeping so throw my company out the window don't use absolute rest at all you full got to contact us yeah no but I'm just saying like it doesn't matter right pick pick your your wearable pick your tracker that you have great and let's just say everything I just said doesn't matter and it's good enough for

what you have because again it really is good enough for a lot of people if like really $200 is the limit you've got on your Budget okay like you can get some reasonable stuff but that's step number one that is how you're sleeping you got to go the next step which is why are you sleeping that way you're not going to solve anything and none of your trackers tell you any information about why are you sleeping that way that's why people don't get Solutions that's why every time I go to conferences or I talk I

maybe did this if you ever seen me speak I ask like how many of you have had a Sleep study done a lot of hands go up how many of you have ever found any value out of it down well I don't know we see a ton of major sleep apnea from head injury you're G to see that right and then they usually get told seap which is like hey we are all for or trans magnetic stimulation other things might better right um how many you know how many NFL guys get told to wear a

c all of them and you know how many actually you wear It zero three exactly I'm like it's not going to work right people rip them off like this all kinds of problems with them really not against it like tremendous tremendous solution for a lot of people saves Liv like changes lives for sure for sure it's not about that but is why okay why are you sleeping the way you're sleeping you've got to expand past the fact you just have obstructive sleep apnea if that is the case for sure definitely go after but you want

to Think about this in a couple different buckets you mentioned environment mhm there are environmental factors physically going into it I'm not talking about like the Sleep hygiene stuff like how light it is talking about CO2 pollutants in the room yeah dander poen allergens like all kinds of stuff like that in the room all these things that are happening there number two is it actually pathology do you legitimately have a sleep disorder right okay like That could be happening but that's only one of our four number three is it behavioral are you doing something are

you doing many of the obvious things one should not be doing you had caffeine late you did oh is there something wrong with that right before bed yeah well not if you're parent because you're such sleep deprivation fall right asleep anyways um are you doing really high-intensity training really late at night right are you like doing many of The things like pretty obviously shouldn't be do having giant meals right before you fall asleep right okay and then the last one the fourth one is physiological so is there actually something in your physiology that's doing this

so like are you not creating enough serotonin or melatonin is something off uh obviously a cortisol curve is like the most classic thing here right but it gets way more interesting than that micronutrients Vitamins minerals like all this stuff can be now laying the foundation of really what's happening any of that stuff um what I didn't actually put on that list but actually part of it is it psychological as well right and there's clearly PTSD trauma anxiety depression like a lot of this stuff going on so how you solve your sleep issues is you try

to look for that performance s if this thing is in Psychology I don't give a rat's crap what melatonin you Take like not going to matter right not we're not solving any issues if if this is really a brain injury I don't care what breath work you do I will help but like you okay great like you need other things like hbot or tons of other stuff going on right and so it is about going back and saying finding out how you slept that's just the start of your journey if you can find out how

you're sleeping specifically though now knowing where to start with our Solutions is Really precise like that's why people at Absolute rest have crushed it so much because we don't have to guess anymore about well like it could be this and this and we have to give you 600 things to go do and try because we have the most advanced analysis of how you're actually sleeping we now have the most direct pipeline to exactly what to do so we can just go after people with lasers and just Juggernaut the the big thing that's coming after him

and overwhelm it And just like you know go after problems so um it sometimes it's really a lot of times hopefully it's really easy cheap scalable Solutions like that's that's by far the most if we can we like to start with inactive Solutions like if it is something to do with your environment and we can open up a window you didn't do anything it's an inactive one right if if we can do something if we then have to progress to P to active ones from those passive ones And you have to have change your behavior

activity we will but obviously hey if we can start with something that you don't have to do much and we can win like that's that's where we're going to go for sure but eventually sometimes it's like hey you're going to have to change your behavior here hopefully we can but if not we'll work backwards right we work with people that run companies all over the world and like they it's like hey I can't just have you Going to bed at nine o'clock like that's not gonna happen right okay great how do you help me within

that then that's when we start getting really tricky and dialing stuff up a little bit uh but that's going to be really specific to that person and that brings me a little bit to muscle because everything yeah goes back to muscle we're muscle people here uh yes we are um so I have a couple questions there and then I do want to Circle back to this biomarkers oh yeah because I have to say I don't know if you know this but you were the one that turned me on to bente Patterson's oh yeah yeah yeah

work in Copenhagen who really looked at myo kindes and yep again I don't know if we know the amount of training that's going to release x amount of myocin but before we get to this let's close out sleep okay there is evidence to support that training can offset lack Of sleep would you agree with that no okay good tell me uh it would all be pedantic here it would depend on when you mean by offset and it would depend on what type so like clearly what you're not saying is like hey as long as you

live today and you sleep an hour tomorrow you're fine like that's not what you're saying no at all clearly it it's it's some level of like well how much and by what could you manipulate some markers yeah would you totally Amarate the issue I don't think so I think the most proper interpretation I know actually what paper you kind of referring to but there's probably some you I haven't I'm surely actually I think the most appropriate termination is if you had a bad night asleep and you train the next day that's a really good decision

right even if you're tired don't feel like we're not talking about hitting PRS but actually getting after it in a meaningful way I just didn't Want people to inter that that the opposite which is to go hey I lift I don't have to sleep just because you lift weights in the gym a few times a week you're not good to continue with your shitty sleep behaviors didn't want that interpretation so I started a little bit with like a catch the attention but um yeah like it's very it's exercise in general for sure we'll do it

but strength training H has really vigorous training but really strength Training will have some special benefit there so I will absolutely say uh like let's say tomorrow uh tomorrow our meeting starts at 7 I think which is Texas time which is two hours ahead of my time right so that's five time there is a 1,000% chance I will be lifting tomorrow morning and that's going to be a very early wakeup call yeah gross want 4 a. at all 1,00% is going to do it I could sleep in and just go for some additional drugs in

the morning um you Know go to more coffee things like that what I meant just calm down I actually packed you a little great you're you're a doctor you can do that stuff I'm not just talking about caffeine people and that's that's going to strictly be for me going I I need to be productive tomorrow and I can go 45 minutes extra I will legitimately not only like psychologically but actually very physiologically be in a better spot Tomorrow so that will happen I'm tired too like I don't I don't like waking up i' would rather

not I'm not one of those people like I those people like no I would definitely rather sleep but I I know because I have to be on tomorrow I will do that it's been a really rough run lately for a lot of stuff but it's gonna happen right like you're GNA get in that 10 done depending on what time we finish tonight I might probably do something tonight as well just just to Move through there so I think if you're positioning your statement that way it's just that to say like again if you've had done

something and for whatever reason within or outside of your control where you got suboptimal sleep even if it's acute or even mildly chronic a few days weeks something like that strength training will be a really good choice that next day just to get something through there but I wouldn't want one to use it as an excuse to continue with Poor behaviors do you think it matters the load that you're lifting could it be uh because again it's the stimulus could it be a lighter weight more reps does it need to be I would say don't

let the enemy be the per the don't look good be the enemy are perfect here fair fair get what you can and this is interesting from a muscle physiologist because we know that there's different adaptations um physiological adaptations if you're lifting heavy versus if you're lifting Light not just above and beyond hypertrophy yeah but you also got to be a human that's right you got to be a real person right I think one of the reasons also um when people ask me questions on podcasts about like protocols and stuff and different actual interventions I rarely

give straight answers I'm always just like long winded going backwards it's difficult why and it's difficult because when you ask a question like That my brain scanned the people I worked with just this week right I went okay all right starting quarterback NFL coming off injury guy playing in the Masters this weekend like Eng golfer a bunch of our non-athlete clients F couple folks that just like just need basic workout program stuff another one running a billion dollar hedge fund okay great my brain scanned that just this week right and I went that's not the

same answer for all these people no so I Can't in in my real honest effort to like really try to give all of you listening I don't know who you are so I'm trying to give an answer where I don't mislead some of you I don't want to put some of you in the wrong position because I'm only thinking of this myopic Avatar in my head of who you are listening I think some of you are probably running a bunch of companies some of you are probably MDS some of you are probably um traveling a

ton Definitely some moms out there definitely some guys trying to get jacked like you and I got to try to have an answer that is accurate for all of you and I appreciate that because to be specific it's hard even hypertrophy protocols yeah you could say yeah you know whether it's a 3x5 or or Etc but there is a whole spectrum of what can work most definitely muscle clock genes Oh yeah talk to me about that some uh data has kind of changed over the years I think it really got a huge I remember when

I was in Fellowship um I think one of the first papers had come out this is at was lab 2015 but since that time to where we are now what do we know about this is really good muscle clock chains and is there any relevance for application to us okay I'm gonna put my foot in my mouth on this a bunch but I don't mind right like science is the act of being wrong mostly right that's that's really What it is generally going to be more wrong than you are right I don't see any utility

them right now at all from like a practical use um now muscle clock je let this again set the stage a little bit if you're thinking about we're trying to get an assessment of overall quality and functionality right if you think about like biological age similar idea chronologic age okay so what we're saying is chronologically You're 32 68 whatever okay great with these Mark we're trying to figure out like yeah but like how long you going to live and live well not every 35y old 55y old is the same right so biological age phenotypical age

various calculators there's a bunch of them these classic like nine Hall marks of Aging it's probably in your book right I think you have the nine in there I mean we have certain things but we don't you pulls them out yeah yes great okay and they're All a little bit different they're telling you a little bit different values and they're all like okay now there's some that I really strongly dislike happy to like call them out by name if you want or or not and by the way you guys can pull up this paper it's

a Hallmark paper and it it discusses the nine Hallmarks of Aging I think they've added two more po but sure you guys can Google it it's free PBM we'll link it amazing so what we're trying to get to With this one is like okay now can we break this down more specifically to muscle and if I just look at how much muscle mass you have on a population level this will be pretty telling roughly telling right now if I compare muscle mass to muscle strength now muscle strength is way more telling than muscle size translation

if you were to take 60,000 people or 600,000 it doesn't matter randomly those that have more muscle mass are generally going to be Healthier than those that don't have as much if you factor in body fat things like that okay fair all right great now also strength tested these people what you would find is their data on their strength would tell you more about their overall health than their data on just their muscle size so what we generally would say is muscle size is important my muscle functionality muscle quality is more important than just muscle

size from an aging perspective right from a Longevity from a functionality from almost every sporting perspective so almost across the board how your muscles functions generally more important unless one of these is severely off the train so if you're really under muscled I don't really care how strong you are this is going to be having a a problem eventually if you're really really underused right so unless you're way off the spect talking about sarcopenia or even caia Frailty there's actually a Paper that came out today this was like I tongue and cheek here but it

was uh it was cool it they looked at calf circumference and they were able to find that calf circumference and this was in elderly people in the hospital were able to predict some percentage of prognosis right and I was just like yep like what we've been saying for decades like small Cals is not only embarrassing but it's deadly yeah but the point is like you can actually get a pretty good Assessment of people from that on these population levels but functionality typically more important the next level then below that is saying okay can we do

liquid biopsies somehow can we get a blood marker from somebody and predict their muscle quality why because in order to get muscle quality per se I have to have a functionality test which means you have to come in I have to have a lab do we have technique issues do we have warm-up issues do we have knee Injury issues how we going to get this done is one our max testing is how we to standardize this okay these are easy problems to solve but like it's still it is some barrier yeah to training to exec

ution okay what about Imaging so I want to see the muscle quality itself well that's an MRI that's really expensive and who interprets we don't want radiation or dexa which is not that great I'm not a huge fan no you're not going to get much information from that Or ultrasound okay still you like how hard you press and it's really really challenging time expends again not unsolvable problems at all but issues so like can we get easier can we pull something out of your blood and are there any markers in there and this is what

you and I have been for I feels like 10 years talking about like going after right and this is why the my kindes and cyal kindes come up and this is where the um our fenal gains project Is is like why we done that project and like there's tons of stuff there's not one particular marker but even with um uh the muscle clock you're sort of like thinking okay like can I there just different ways to try to go after this problem right what we're trying to do is identify a lot less healthy muscle versus

more healthy muscle right so then we can intervene before things get nasty or at least know like be more convincing data or whatever we want to do or at Least show people hey this is a problem and if you do not address this marker and again we're picking a marker yeah it's not the marker right but the the lack of muscle lack of healthy skeletal muscle is is more impactful than the gain in body fat over time outside outside of like true pathology or infection you're going to struggle this find more like I'm I'm I'm

doing this live Right now so I'm like looking not even at you because I'm thinking I just I don't know if you can find a marker that's G to be more predictive of your Global Health than that it's going to be really challenging maybe one could argue mental health okay but that's also diff that's more subjective as opposed to objective data of here's the marker yeah because like obviously you and I are if we're going To play a game of what's your favorite organ like can you know which one we're going to pick right tell

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go after Thalamus or something like that but man no your recovery like your your Physiological Health your immune system all these things are being regulated in large part by skeletal muscle is is you know thousand times written in your book in addition to it's your interface with the world how you experience this life the the one um like I think I don't think this example was on our our grip strength paper but um Tommy wood friend of ours and his uh his grad student was the first author of this paper a couple years ago but

one of the stuff we've Looked at a little bit is grip strength right and so people will look at like grip strength is a marker of aging and while in some part of that that is correlation right so people who are healthier older also tend to be stronger that's totally true but there's also direct causality here right there's there's absolutely 100% Direct caus it between your grip strength and your aging and if you think about this why people always ask me I'm like well let's Go a couple of steps back it's not difficult to imagine

you not being able to carry things right when you can't carry things you're less likely to go out into the world why this becomes a problem is if you look at the research on like social sciences outside of our side one of the largest determinant upon when people were retire when they have major drops in mental health and when they will stop leaving their houses when they become a burden on society Self-perceived but people do not want to feel like they're slowing the whole ship down quite literally if you know you are not going to

be able to carry your groceries through the thing you're not going to go to the grocery store anymore okay fine I'll just do electronically I'll order it I'll have it delivered in my house why because it takes me forever I can't carry my groceries I can't get through that place I'm moving slowly waits for me I get really Embarrassed I slow the whole thing down I don't want to waste people's time because I'm just too old and slow I can't get through that place so you order groceries to your house great fantastic which means now

you're never leaving your house you lack the physical activity anymore you're not holding these things anymore so you just got weaker but addition look at the social isolation you also have the mental burden of lack of purpose right so you Start looking at those things and you feel like you are a drain in society you sto doing all this stuff the physical deterioration and then you have those other really strong papers showing you fall off a cliff your physical health really falls off a cliff when you don't feel like you have a purpose in in

society not good right okay great same thing with your legs right you're not going to go on a trip you're going to skip the family vacation you're not Going to go to the kids activity because you know that that place has stairs in it and they don't have an elevator not going to go not going to go you start opting out of things because you don't feel strong in your legs and you don't feel strong in your hands if you're on you know you have to take that tram because you're going to go to the

airport and you have to take that tram to get to your car and you know that tram is really busy and you you don't Feel confident that you can stand in there with your balance while that tram is going you're going to opt out all these things right this place doesn't have a taxi service I'm not going to go you start doing that and then you have those second tertiary problems that come with all that other side of healthy so this is why we say like it is all physiology is really a circle here these

are the problems that associate that I mean doesn't mean you're not going to Have those issues if you're strong but you can just see just just avoid that trap how strong does someone need to be so if we were to and I you can't have a world record then you're off the team um it you know I how we quantify so yes there is grip strength you know basically what I'm hearing you say is grip strength leg strength and I'm sure V2 Max matters to you um do we have a sense of an optimal grip

strength so hear me Out here right so there are these charts that will say you should be able to back squat double your body weight or bench press one and a half times your your body weight for grip strength or any of these are these markers reliable in terms of optimization for an aging population so what I would say is I probably wouldn't use those markers in that population because you're going to run into technal Limitations right all the you can Google and there are plenty of reference range papers out there they're open access and

they'll break it down by dominant hand non-dominant hand they'll break it down by age demographics so 40 to 4 45 to 49 like Etc men women right hand left hand all these things for something like grip string and you can get a rough idea um whether you're in the 20th percentile 50th percentile 75 percentile or where you're at kind of on that chart there's Lots of papers that are open access like that so anyone could download those and find those you'll you'll find same thing for leg strength leg extension leg press V2 Max those three

things are like very easy to do there um by the way one would do the same thing for your body composition so you mentioned earlier we very much differentiate the two major components if you want to call Bone Minal density a third like that's great pay attention to that if you dexa but if You don't do dexa and you have how much body fat do you have it's very very important of course you're probably going to know though like right you're going to have a good sense if you have too much body fat and then

the second component is how much lean muscle mass you have and we want to look at those things separately I want to know functionality strong all those things but I also need to see what's under the hood in terms of just total amount so Even if one is okay say you're in the 50th percentile for your grip strength 40th perc off of your leg strength but we're seeing a fat-- free mass index of 12 like all right I don't care fat free mass index is not the best way ever to look at it but like

I see that I'm like that is off the reservation like you are way down there and you're 44 M this is going to be a real challenge like we have got to put some stuff on there um because we know that that numbers is Going to to decline unless you really take interventions after so we want to look at all those things but but all those charts for the most part are going to be open access that you can take a look at and you could break it down that way it's the best that we

have yeah it is the best that we have and is population level again this is population level I I struggle with it because it it you know the appendicular lean mass index I don't know so that one Okay appendicular lean mass is interesting um what you're looking at is dependencies right so so basically saying if we look at how much muscle mass you have on your arms and legs and it makes sense those are the things again that are you're going to interact with the world but think about it my appendicular lean mass is going

to be a lot smaller than yours yeah yeah but like you have like most of these things are going to account for body size I Would imagine you'd be at least average if not above average because you have a like you're small physically but you have a like very much you hear that I'm jacked you're pretty jacked I saw you doing uh so someone arm Rose it was legit I I think I think I texted you and I was like dude that's legit you're like I like no that was like legit I don't know what

you're doing but it was like a real number it was good not bad for a non-athletic real person yeah whatever But like that that would be a situation where we like okay if you're just came back a little bit low like all right you clearly don't need to add muscle why because look at the other markers you would have assumingly right and he like okay everything else is checked out functionality is there V2 Max is there wh body composition okay like you're flying I'm always going to support people getting more jacked like always but at

some point they probably should Get would it be fair to say that individuals should put put on as much healthy muscle mass as they can while they are young yeah because always like I'm always going to support that right now coming from someone who's like certainly not the most jacked person ever sitting in this chair ever or even close um but yeah like there's actually let me go back second there is there's kind of a line with skeleton mus you asked a question about uh grips rank All right there is a line of muscle mass

I'm I'm g go the U-shaped curve are you getting to that I'm I'm I'll do that right now I wasn't going to but there are idiots I mean people that would have folks think yeah that too much of muscle mass is delerious that's like so easily not true you will find published papers on this um typically from MDS but we're not that bad I was just taking a funny shot okay very clear data if you have insufficient muscle mass and you compare This to things like mortality risk survival risk all cause mortality it's just risk

doesn't mean you're actually going to die like just like you're adding Stacks to the deck right of like more more risk you know it's 10% 20% 30% 80% but again it's not taking into account metabolic disregulation anything else um which comes with low muscle mass those are issues with insulin and glucose and all the other things related to healthy skel and muscle if you look At that what you'll generally see is if you're under muscled you increase muscle things get better lifespan goes up right and that is a pretty much a straight line and some

people have published data and spoken about data incorrectly such that that line looks like a u meaning if you get like in in the mail numbers I don't know the female numbers sorry um but it's something like a fat free mass index of ballpark like 20 or so is when the line crosses so once you cross to a Fat free mass index of 20 um getting any more muscle mass makes that line go back up again so it's the U right so it goes down decreasing risk decreasing risk got to 20 now I went to

21 22 23 now I've increased the risk it's fundamentally not true we published data on this um in fact another one of our papers recently showed that if you go into the national databases at which those things are pulled from you will find zero correlation between the muscle mass in Those populations and their physical activity history and I'll say that one more time no relationship between physical activity past and muscle mass which tells you those people did not under any circumstances ACR their muscle via lifting weights they ACR it most likely from just being bigger

people right which is to say it is muscle but it is not high quality and healthy muscle what would Define high quality healthy muscle Versus unhealthy nonfunctional as in it's not strong it can't produce any function um the classic visual image is it's going to be marbled meaning you have fat infiltration in there right um you're going to have other byproducts uh inflammatory responses suboptimal ones right um typically sensitivity beta adrenic receptors uh hormone basically every hormone receptor is either way dialed up or way dialed down right so insulin anabolics estrogens like all These things

are typically off byproducts like basically every marker of healthy functionality mitochondri Health um metabolic properties of them damage like not always every case but like you'll see typically especially they're at that point yes right um so let's go back to say like I don't think that's true however I don't think there's a strong argument that once you and men get past about 20 to 21 that getting any more will exceedingly Increase your health span I think that tapers off I do think from 14 to 2122 it helps going going from 22 to 25 22 like

25 is a lot that's really big amount of muscle I don't think you get any healthier there I think at that point now we're looking at other aspects of your health your metabolic Health your VX your Lifestyles your mental health like your sleep okay great that's not the case though for strength that's Not the case for v2 Max either there are multiple multiple giant data sets you're talking about meta analyses on top of meta analyses one just came out like this week it was some insane number of papers it was some I don't was it

was like 5,000 papers in this meta analyses um if you look at Jonathan Meyer's work all the way back to step Blair's work late 1980s early 1990s you typically will see no upper limit to benefit for leg strength grip Strength or V2 Max almost never that's a pretty big statement it it does not stop so if you are that's like we we say in our coaching practice all the time I'm like yo if your vo to Max is great it's not good enough why why because like there's no number you could put on there would

be like that's good enough I'm being fa obviously I understand I understand that's the number right so what you'll see is those numbers don't tend to stop Right and you'll actually see like in these papers um the the classic one that I that I always think of here is is Jonathan's paper um it actually from the uh VA like there's like 750,000 people in this study 174,000 died in the course of study not because intervention but you know these studies work right yeah so it's hard end points is the point like who lived who did

not die or who did and you see this is when you see these like classic Comorbidity stack up right so you see diabetes you see smoking you see coronary AR disease all stacked up against V2 Max right you're looking at like those things are increasing Hazard ratios uh for all cause mortality of like 1.2 1.4 like that's not good right so you can kind of it's not how it works friends but like to be very quick it's like a a 1.4 would mean like a 40% increase in risk it doesn't mean like 40% chance you're

gonna die but like It's a so don't over interpret that but you stack the VO2 max numbers up instead of being 1.4 it's like 2.6 3.8 5.2 like the numbers are that's dwarfing yeah smoking they're dwarfing diabetes they're dwarfing stacking those things together right these numbers get large and in that you go from the so imagine think about it this way this is not what they did but I'm trying to help folks like collectively understand what generally the research will say here so You take all 700 let's make it a million make numbers easy great

put a million people in this database and we say okay we're going to break this into quartiles which means the top 250,000 scores you're in the top group you're group a the next 250,000 scores Group B you're in the 50th to 75th percentile that's what it works bottom three 250,000 in the C group I mean see the 25th there and the bottom not doing well friends means you're the bottom 25th percentile Bottom 25th percentile means 75% of people are better than you that's what it means right all right awesome if you're in that bottom group

like you're if you go from the bottom group to the second highest group that c group right you're still 30th percenti 70% of people are still higher than you you're talking about risk reductions of half you're cutting your risk of dying in half by going from just the terrible group to the still terrible But not as terrible group like that's what you're really talking about you can pull different papers and you'll see different numbers there but like you're getting the same general Point some break it into quintiles so you know 20% 20% 20 some do

25% some do quintile like they they do all different things right different databases different populations the numbers differ but it's all generally going to say the same thing if you go to the top though and You say great let's stop the group at the 90th percentile those that in the 90th percentile and compare those to the 99th percent you still see you still see wow less reduce in the 99th percent and it does not stop and so even going from 90th to 99 percentile still confers the survival Advantage for v2 Max and the same thing

has been shown in grip strength as well so there just appears to be no upper limit to benefit at the Population level like very clearly at the population level to continually getting stronger and getting your V2 Max higher and I mean that that that's a really important statement this idea that cardiorespiratory Fitness is extremely important for overall health longevity Improvement all I would literally say there is almost outside of having an infection or actual acute Disease there's just I I can't make an argument for anything else being more important for how long you're going to

live that of the controllable factors nothing is going to beat that and V2 Max people are probably thinking endurance but there's multiple ways to increase your V2 Max whether it's high-intensity interval training we know that that's effective now I've read a few papers there's not that many and maybe there's more now the relationship between V2 Max And skeletal muscle have you I mean so as a trained geriatrician um what we would look at is in terms of V2 Max we looked at papers and data sets that really it it seemed as if that the more

healthy skeletal muscle mass they had the better their V2 Max was okay so uh that's a manipulation of math a little bit okay so uh V2 Max is measured in a a metric with liters per minute so how many liters of oxygen can you bring in per minute that's absolute V2 Max right Typically we talk about V2 Max expressed in a relative term which means milliliters now we gone from liters to minutes so you got to do a little bit of unit conversion but it's milliliters per kilogram per minute per minute and so by default

bigger people have a more skewed V2 Max negatively skewed than smaller people this is why like if you take an NFL player not even that like just a guy who's over 100 kilos you tend to like get a falsely a false sense of their v2x Being lower than it actually is because their body mass is being the denominator it it's it's getting them smash so it's actually not a linear if you look at like powerlifting and weightlifting Olympic weightlifting you don't just see like who's the best lifter take your body weight and divide it or

take your however much you lifted divided by your body weight you have to actually correct for it because it doesn't scale that way like uh a strong lifter who's your size You know 70 60 kilos 50 kilos something like that you lifting double body weights not that hard but somebody who's 100 kilos lifting double body weight is really damn hard totally it scales that way so VO2 max plays a little bit of that same game high bigger people will get um falsely represented as smaller V to Max because everything's being divided by their body so

if you're looking at relative you're going to you're going to lose like the math is Going to get you a little bit there in addition when you're smaller you're physically total body mass you're less likely to have um when you're smaller you're more likely to have a better body composition just because it's hard to be 120 pounds and be 50% body fat it but you can do that at 280 pounds pretty easily yeah so it's really really hard so most likely smaller people are generally most likely leaner in those equations so you're You're misrep that

misrepresent I'm glad I asked yeah so what you're saying is it's there's not a direct correlation between skeletal muscle mass or even healthy skeletal muscle mass and V2 Max performance no there is oh there is oh for sure there's a relationship okay no question you will not see somebody I'll put it this way if you go the inverse here um you run a counterfactual you will not see somebody with a V2 Max of 75 with unhealthy Muscle no way right because V2 Max is two parts it's Central and peripheral right it is the equation for

that is your cardiac output it's cardiac output is two components your heart rate so how many times you can pump multiplied by your stroke volume how much blood comes out per pump okay that is hard that is cardiopulmonary I have to be able to get things in so uh this is where back size lung Size Matters I have to bring air in I got to get that oxygenated air Cardiopulmonary into my heart I got to get that thing pumped out okay then the second half of the equation is avo2 difference so it's the difference in

oxygen between the arterial and side which is basically saying how much can actually extract into skeletal muscle so if you have bad muscle low capary density poor ability to use it poor monoc condal function monoc condal function you have a backup of oxygenation so we start Running have to we have to kick over the anerobic side then you're going to struggle to handle that side of the equation so it is two components to it and there is no um way to say you can have dysfunction in one side and still have a high total it's

half the equation it won't be there so you can be okay just like you can have really great muscle and poor cardio pulmonary and be okay you do the opposite but you can't have great and be terrible in the Equation same thing to say if you take somebody who's got a V2 Max that's low and if all you do is train their musculature you can see huge improvements in V2 max if that muscle quality is really really really poor for that exact reason right if it is an oxygenation I'm think about it this way too

imagine going upstairs and if you're going upstairs by the time you get to the top you're like huffing and puffing You're like 70 80% it's probably not because your cardiovascular system is unfit it's often times because your legs are weak why because every step now took 70 or 85% of your one or Max this caused such a large amount of muscle mass to contract it caused large amount of energy production that you had to kick energetic demands up so high if you got your muscles super strong and now walking up those steps represented 10% if

your cardiovascular system didn't Change at all you're now way more quote unquote fit that makes a lot of sense so really they're they're interrelated 100% half the equation you can't find like you go find an elite cyclist out there male or female they are not weak in their legs they typically don't jump very high they're not powerful or springy or things like that they may not back squat very much but they like if you put them on a um look at the Watts they kick out on the bike you're going To be like oh Shez

like they're smash cring out 600 watts and you're like yo I can't get that once they're not weak people at all it's just specific training adaptation so it would only behoove you to increase your muscle quality to increase your V to Max it's only going to make life better and you will never get a really great score with that I can tell you like going back you know four hours ago when we were talking about performance anchors that's one of The things we look at so when we have that's a actually really good example when

someone comes in we see that their V2 Max is super low we then all of a sudden just naturally only put them on like a steady state endurance program or even high intensity intervals we might look at that and go yeah we're not going to high intensity intervals especially if we have something else that's causing problems so if if they are a hard charger right they're running companies They're in a job that has really like where the consequences matter like positions or Finance folks were like hey maybe you're not working 90 hours you're working 40

but every choice you make really matters all right great I probably don't want to throw you into high-intensity intervals every day that's maybe not the best approach For You especially when I'm looking at your sleep data and your respirat nervous system yeah like you're over breathing You're shot right okay I'm not going to do that to you but but your V to Max is 26 okay great I'm going to go out that a different way and we may look at this thing and go okay is that a cardiopulmonary issue if it's bull suck then I'm

probably starting with muscle I'm probably starting there and then I'm working my way backwards into it and I might get cardiopulmonary very breath work I might get it with the sauna I might get it with walk I might get it With lowering arousal like we got lots of ways we can play with the V2 Max side equation that doesn't have to just be hard charged like go you know do four minutes a death sort of thing because remember you're just looking at physiology constraints there's a thousand ways to get there and I'm looking at it

and going based on your other factors how can I get you there and that person with different situation scenario I might go yeah let's just Let's just go do this boom we're going to train we're going to run we're going to do endurance work okay but but depending on the person we're just looking for the physiology and once I get the phys physiology I'm going all right what are my different options what are my different tools to get there why we're never tied to like a methodology or a protocol all that crap because I'm just

like man you just think about the physiology what's challenged adapts What's challenged adapts what's not doesn't so I'm looking at that just going okay how what are my different options to make a challenge there and if that means we're going to put you in a pool I mean means we're going to hold your breath means we're going to go for a walk my M put you in hot or cold or whatever like I have different options there and then other folks might be like no you don't need Sonic get that son of that just wasting

your money we need to Go do this or that's too easy for you or whatever right like it just it may be negative may put them in the wrong spot like maybe making a problem worse exacerbating it's like we don't no no no we're not doing that we're going over here um so yeah we have options uh I think that's very intelligent that there are multiple ways to push the boulder up the hill and it's not always the obvious yeah in that way there's a lot of misinformation out there which I Think makes it very

difficult to move people for people to move forward I mean that's fair right um should people do hyper training in In fairness I don't know if in this entire conversation I've really given anybody who's listening like a lot of really helpful tips at this point I'm not saying that to be like self but to your point of like a lot of that was probably like okay I not I know I feel less conf about what to do and I would love I'm Happy to switch like entirely like give some specific examples I think background is

important because there's a lot of discussion on V2 Max and people go right to well how do we improve V2 Max and that's fine uh but you know a body composition you've talked a ton about that if you guys want to hear Andy talk about body composition you can find a million podcasts and his own videos his own YouTubes what do you think if you were To pick three things that people need to practically at home implement or three major I don't know myths that people are now doing or things that they're doing wrong and

again it could be three it could be five but actionable items I I know you're going to say sleep aside from sleep in terms of the health of their skeletal muscle very hard very hard to do that well without a minimal viable protein intake I'm not Sure have you read much about protein no okay is that a Macar nutrient this is new new to you yeah this is great does it have amino acids in it it you have to have Supply and I say minimal viable you you can get away with you know you probably

default to gram a pound minimum right you cut that in half okay you can get away with it maybe if you have to it's not where you and I start but it's not ideal a data out there that the lower Protein intakes are not ideal for body composition no wouldn't do that either give me halfway there aing at least halfway all right let's let's start there if if that's just where we starting seven grams per pound like I I don't want to see anybody that low but if if we had to start at0 6 one

could make an argument at0 6 I think there's not a cogun argument below that no there's just not and that's uh and you would lose the argument at Point 6 and you lose it quickly but like there could be a it's kind of low per ground thing but there is not one below that yeah that that's so that has to be there it's like a you don't get a ticket into the door like I'm not even talking about what game you get to play you don't get the door right you don't have that I don't

really care what your sleep is if you don't have the basic substrate it's going to be very difficult not gonna happen right um we have to have that I Think secondarily on that um how how high would you go well yeah I mean as you know like there's really no upper limit that you have to stay at at that point it depends on context do we have do we care about total body size in terms of calories like a lot of our athletes earn weight class space Sports so we actually do limit protein because we

have to make weight right we have to lose typically 15% of body M So so like even if we lose the muscle mass sometimes like that's a go cuz we we have to hit that number one way or the other and any amount we don't lose on the way has to happen in that last 36 hours and like just just gets bad fast right um so we would like a lot of our athletes I'd say like we honestly run around like even athletes nonathletes we run around one gram per pound is pretty there and like

we also candidly not many people are tracking it that closely once You figure out for you I'll say it this way track like crazy for two weeks figure fure out what a gr or so looks for you great idea and stay at that and go higher great idea that's all we really need to do I can like to be totally honest with you I don't think a single one of our quarterbacks in the NFL is weighing in measuring like we we don't have that we're not doing that at the Masters Tournament like they're not we're

not We're not doing that we get them to figure out what what's that roughly look like for you so whether they really at like point8 Grand maybe some days surely some days these guys are probably consuming a lot of calories getting carbohydrates and fats well again some of them are coming down cuz you're like not a lot of calories because we've got 15% of body mass oh I'm talking about the NFL oh those yeah some of them have well so one of the Dirty Secrets here is We have a lot of times in there's weights

in contracts so we have to cut weight for those things so we can't just like eat a nauseum because there's like and those are big fines too those are games we have to play there so some of them do some of them don't but yeah point is NE there um I don't know if they get to two I don't really care for the most part like two grams per pound like totally fine there nothing detrimental there's some chatter on the Internet about how going above 1.6 grams per kg so 7 grams per kg is not

going to yes I know I know benefit benefit muscle mass this is like man we don't this is so like this is why you have to you have to have basic literacy of interpretation of context right yes there's a difference between like had no benefit versus that was detrimental that's not the same thing right and also these people are have a higher percentage body weight um again I'm just Thinking about one particular study that seems to not die one one thing that I'll say on this before I know we're one in here hopefully this is

a practical tip it's very easy to make as a marketer or as a as a scientist or not it's very easy to take anything from a study and um not make this sound however you want because like that can be done and people know that but it's very easy to make a story out of it and I'm not I'm saying Like as a Still Honest interpretation of it right I I'll put it this way if you two take two scientists that worked on the same paper together they won't necessarily interpret it the same that's absolutely

true so I'm not even saying like Bad actors right that's absolutely true people that are trustworthy and good people my friends people's shows I've been on I will look at some of their I'm like no way you're an idiot no way like fully disagree with that right Yeah so it's then there is the whole other lay of the liars and the cheats and the fraud blah BL okay fine but just within the good honest people it's really hard to do that and the reason is when you take things like that you go okay great what

you don't know is the scientific background of going yeah what marker do they look at in my lab I actually think that that marker actually shows it a little bit high it's scientifically validated but I think That number is overestimates or I think it underestimates because I've seen this okay or it is yeah and that population would have worked but those people were untrained or those people were highly trained or those people weren't all excellent points so all this lays into it and if you're if you're skipping that part of the explanation then it's like

oh yeah these things have shown to be bad well no no time out like been shown to be maybe not great or didn't have a Neutral neutral thing in that situation in that context right like that's always the best answer and so rather than my my tip here is really this because you're not going to figure that out like you listening home like you're not going to figure out that level of context my tip is this pull back pull way back when somebody has a a social media post on a podcast and they give a

specific number never take that number to Heart me like any number I've just told you when I Said gram or pound never take that number to heart but it's a great Target guys yeah it's just a reasonable Target it's a reasonable Target and zooming back and going okay so then when I tracked myself and I realized I was at 0 four that's too low but don't get caught up on like well this paper show point8 well who cares that's out side of the level of accuracy you live your daily life anyways so who gives a

[ __ ] like who cares right like It's not it's not that's not the thing to pay attention to what you want to look at are like these big Global Trends looks to be a lot of different papers this is why like I I hate talking about this this particular Point like with protein because I'm like oh my God like look at the well-roundedness of the data yes look at or the of evidence that's what I mean like different populations the numbers don't care someone found someone said he did 25 GRS and I I don't

Care what's it roughly saying okay clearly it's doing a and C like I don't need any more data at this point like you can close the door on on so like to me that conversation is actually over with I like I don't I can appreciate that to be totally candid when new papers on that come out I don't read them I go the Internet by the way I go right past them you have not um we were at a meeting together um many years ago we were in Colorado do you remember mm Okay well anyway

we were at a meeting together and you were like protein don't care oh yeah probably I mean you had stopped caring because I think that the evidence the volume of evidence okay and you're just like you're just now like you're splitting such irrelevant hairs for the most part I'm like God we're done here so one gr per pound ideal body weight ish is great fine move on number two I guess we should have started with some form of resistance exercise because If you look at actually those two things compared the protein is not even close

to stimulating as strength training is true not even close true like like nothing you can boy you can really I don't care what you do protein timing casine plant-based animal I don't really care at all nothing's going to come on the same Planet as resistance training is going to be that's true people are like well Gabrielle you talk about protein yes because you can't do it Without it and 100% of people eat 100% of people eat and I'm trained in nutritional sciences and it's also still true but exercise resist training trumps nutrition now what's dope

about protein is it will stimulate muscle growth independent so if you can't or aren't training and at least you eat protein it has a protein sparing effect and so it's just context right it's like who are you speaking to if you're speaking to somebody who's willing and able to do Both okay strength training is more important if you're speaking to someone who's willing to and able to do both and they're strength training and they're not eating protein then all that protein stuff matters the most for them they've already checked box fair or the opposite person

right I'm not doing anything okay great if the barrier to entry is easier to start with protein and I'll do that in fact my example here I just did this uh I was in Maui last week right with Maui Nei jealous and we love Maui Nei yeah like I'm like those great uh protein sticks dude like that V I can go on and on that company is what they're doing is so it's one of the coolest things I've ever been a part of it's so dope but they were like youo like bringing up like all

all your higher performers and getting on this higher quality proteins blah blah blah and I was like the hell the high performers like what do you mean I'm like to me This is the best first step into health I agree they're like what and I'm like think about this there's all this conf this is literally what I said to them think about all the confusing stuff that's out there the supplements are confusing and like do I do I fast do I not fast and like all this what do I do do I exercise but this

person said this kind's bad and this is this other there's so much confusion a lot of people who are just starting their Journey like I don't know where to start I don't know where to start at all right what I told them is like I don't know anybody reasonable anybody who wouldn't say high quality protein support what do you mean like yeah if this is your first path better than exerc not better but probably prior to you starting exercise everybody eat everybody has to eat and if you go yo this is the highest quality Most

nutrient-dense red meat that we know of and low calorie very lean super lean animals that have to be harvested anyways like they're people are dying because of accidents on the road they're overrunning like there's tons they have to be harvested anyways now we have this insane nutrient profile and it's the easily objectively the best tasting uh four-legged animal like you're going to go after like no no question Right amazing and like and Jake was like dude that's that's great I'm like yeah like this is the start so if I've already be like yo like for

my family my family does not exercise for the most part right what no for sure not at all right it like there's just no no way right they're too far away for me and like all these things all I do with them was like just get protein just get protein just get protein like just get protein this is the B and this is the Biggest impact I have on their health is getting them to eat protein by far I'm I'm literally not paning to you this like you check the text like go go see the

protocol as I build them they I don't they don't don't work out they probably realistically never will would love to say that they do but they never will but I okay great as a first starting place then people will disagree about those things but I just again well not I don't think you really find Anybody who's reasonable in the space who will tell you ah protein doesn't matter I know some uh but maybe not reasonable resistance training um do you think about how much how hard just get it done what are your thoughts again this

is your this is your tips for taking people on I would love I would love love to see strength training three times a week I agree right and I would love to see within that each muscle at least twice Per week right I would strongly encourage most people to do more full body rather than doing it like muscle part splits so don't do like Mondays are your triceps and Tuesdays are your legs things like that well Monday is universal chest day oh my God no you're tell me that was a joke right that's not Mondays

Mondays is leg day every Mondays leg what it has to be no oh can we cut this please you do not have my permission to post this any of this Episode please delete my phone number no Monday is leg day oh all right we're not friends anymore oh my gosh 10 your friendship down down the tubes okay um full body training examples of that would be yeah deadlift squash it doesn't matter Actually I don't even care if you're still doing single joint or like exercises but just don't do the entire gym of one body part

okay um so even if you're doing like leg press and then you go do chest press Okay that's fine but the reason I'm generally saying this for for this audience in this Avatar is you're going to miss workouts that's going to happen right and so if you do only chest on Monday or legs or legs guys Canna eat my first born now okay yeah and you missed fill in the blank you know the reasons why now you're not getting chest again for the next seven days that's like okay that's going to be problem and then

what happens that next trip that Next thing all a sudden you go two weeks without getting a body part that that happens like in a blink of an eye right anyone who's a real person knows like oh yeah it's like very rarely or very common to have that kind of thing happen but potentially you could maintain if you were going to do push-ups or some kind of if you the damage that'd be great but in an Ideal World I personally I don't even do I was joking I don't I don't anymore do like legs Mondays

what I have is is the training I do and I do them in in that order in whatever day I can get them in so I don't have that right so I'm way off my routines like so Mondays could be any number of my different training sessions but I have just called six training workouts that I do and I do those six in a row and sometimes that's six days in a row sometimes that that six day cycle of workouts takes me 18 days to get through right because I only got three workouts In three

workouts in three workouts in so I just continue to do that so imagine building like 50 workouts and saying okay I'm gonna try in in the next two months I'm gonna try to get these 50 done in this order but like whatever days they happen they happen and it's exactly for those reasons earlier kid got sick was going to train today now I don't want to get the whole thing thrown off like I just rest today I'll do the next workout the next day I get the Opportunity on a plane plane got delayed you're in

the air like all these things happened to us right and I don't want to allow my whole schedule be missed to do it so I do it and I generally rotate I'll do like my just my full training session here um like one day most of my training right now is we'll call it like movement based stuff so I'm I'm training to uh correct asymmetries to repair some joint health to feel better um it's kind of like a little bit of a reset it's Like hey I got you know a lot of more years left

to do let's invest six months almost a year actually and like really yeah it's I told you my physique is terrible right now it is for me he's being dramatic friends he's being dramatic I told you I like attention right Brandon he's totally being dramatic okay I like attention but uh no is worth for me because like I'm not doing hypertrophy training at all I'm not doing even enough volume of what are You doing it is more of like it's really hard to articulate in something like this but it's more of like um so I

have a like anyone should I have a coach Tim G Franchesco is my coach was a coach for the Lakers the head strength coach there physical therapist he's great so it's lifting but it is um like I might do like a a specific sequence of a one-legged RDL to a reach movement and then I'll come back and reset and then it may be like a a lateral lunge with a Specific rotation like try I like it very specific thought out um different planes of motion totally differentes of motion that sounds he has like it's literally

a year-long progression of movements so wow so it is it is built out like and every every we do about like six weeks and then we'll kind of do like a little bit of a a check and then he updates and says okay this is ready to progress this isn't uh this development didn't happen like we wanted It to we're staying here with this part but this part did so we're moving up a progression here um it may be like going from gobble at box squats that went well okay to so like holding a dumbbell

in your chest while you're box squatting to then moving to removing the box so then maybe a two-c hold at the bottom position like there's all kinds of stuff and that's a very Advanced wellth thought out training program I mean that's so it's hard to kind of like Explain so it's kind of easy for me to just like give the basics but it's interesting that you're doing not just um one plane movements I haven't done like a barbell Backwater deadlift in a long long time because we're we're trying to like clean up movements different unilateral

strength I love it yep so I do that typically uh and then I'll do that say on on Monday and then the next day I'll either do more of like a real high-intensity interval Conditioning base you're talking I have assault bike Air Assault bike oh we got one in the the garage you can use it it's the best right um how long are you going and what are your rest intervals we're doing lots of different stuff but this is your more typical um could be 30 seconds on 30 seconds off for 20 rounds like for

four rounds right like and it doesn't really do you think it matters again this is for it matters but it also like mostly doesn't matter it mostly Doesn't matter yeah for me when I'm programming for like our people like paying for paying attention to everything but but for the people that are not professional athletes just get it in if if if we were like if I showed up here to your house and you're like hey I got cut up at the kids school I'll be the home in like an hour and a half I would

have been like all right I'm just gonna hop on it I don't know what would have do I would have just like done I Would have made it up I would just it would not have matter right because today I'm not like trying to optimize my workout I would have just been like let let's just burn some calories let move have fun let play people forget like exercise can also would just be for fun can be just totally wait really yeah or like the mental benefits some calories right how many um high-intensity interval training sessions

are you thrown in there uh one probably a week Or so so three to four days of lifting three days of lifting or you go through CES think of lifting conditioning lifting conditioning lifting conditioning back and forth the first conditioning one this is say would be more higher intensity interval the second one is going to be very low intensity um how long are you going if I can get 45 minutes trying just on the bike I might I might literally not even exercise I might walk I don't count Walking is exercise some people call it

fast cardio or whatever no it's walking it's just walking but sometimes if I can walk I can do that if I can get like a bike ride like a bicycle like I'm on a bicycle outside now I'm checking off multiple boxes right because now I'm getting sunlight now I'm getting out of the way like I have we have to do those things right I will do something like that um I might get on the assault bike and just Cruise Right I don't know what he's the only person on the planet that just cruises on an

assault bike yeah a lot of the times a lot of the times now I'll do my low intensity stuff in the sauna really oh yeah yeah I dial it back you don't like I won't have it at 200 205 anymore push 100% so a little little thing I'll give you I I got this actually Brian McKenzie you know Brian I do yeah Brian told me this you wrote your first did you write one about your Unplugged book yeah ran that together good friend great great stuff but he's like dude go in there like 140 150

160 degrees so that could be an infrared that's about how hot those get I don't know I don't use them Mine mine's the traditional the traditional you could use I'm being I'm being a being a pill yes of course you can use those for that but TR because they don't get super hot but the evidence supports the traditional s more but I do have an Infared I I got nothing against it I would use one if I had that there but my full sound is way Doper I'm using it um but I I'll go in

there and he's like set it to that and uh do you know 10 push-ups 20 push-ups it doesn't matter right you're just like moving get your heart rate up a little bit do that and then stand for a minute so like stay at the top stand up there like a lot of times I'll do like walking high knees I'll do like some like I'm just like Moving a little bit right and then sit for a minute how long you in there for uh those sessions like 30 minutes like nothing crazy so if anyone's listening and

wants to join Andy dude Brian has a bike in his what he just lar does too they call on Desert Storm so lared puts his like actual salt by okay hard pass I just yeah hard pass on that but I feel like I really feel like there's something special to doing very very low intensity work in the Sonic I'm Gonna I'm that way different instead of just sitting there doing nothing if you're using it for different purposes but I'm like that sounds amazing I need to like double double dip and I need to be time

efficient here and like say I'm I'm really beat up or like I'm like I don't want to sit on that damn assault bike right now or it's raining outside like something like that like I'll definitely go in the sauna you get super who whoever complained about being in The sauna right yeah and I'll do L love activity so like a lot of my low intensity stuff will be in there and I'll just like try to move um I'll shadow box stuff a lot in there like I'll just it's a great idea and don't I just

don't and if I stop I a hide just sit down for a second like I don't like I it's a great idea um but that's generally it so then I'm rotating back and forth between those let's talk about protein specifically first forms Natural Way protein Formula 1 people ask me all the time what kind of protein powder I use what kind of protein powder I recommend Formula 1 makes many different kinds of protein powders different flavors a natural one you pick it it mixes amazing it makes it extremely easy to get your protein in and

really they're it's a whey protein isolate so you're getting the majority of of your calories from protein in the shake tastes great super easy to travel with Great breakfast dinner maybe even lunch whatever you need it's got you covered and it has all the amino acids necessary will help improve body composition muscle mass all the things that protein does and by the way when do you need protein well you need it every day and that's why I love first forms protein powder their Formula 1 go to first form /d liion that's first.com dolion have you

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not wait if you are due for your blood work give this a shot it's extremely valuable back to the show so we covered first is dietary protein interchangeable with training we're on number two we're no no no we're we're on number three now okay um the next one I would be would be for high quality muscle I mean you've what I'd probably say here is um range of Motion I I did not think you were gonna say that if I'm looking back at like the issues we've had with people that either come in the program

or that like when they realize we're like this is our biggest issue that is a really big one like your joints need to be healthy and you need to have like the default of all your joints should be you should train over full range of motion a lot of people don't have that anymore and an examp of Training over a full range of motion you you like you can't do a lap pull down and have the bar all that come down to your chest you can't do a basic body weight squat right you can't um

do any kind of RDL or hinge or all the way down because your hamstrings are so tight you can't properly run you can't get in good positions um you certainly can't like do a push-up or or do different things like that you can't do a dip like we can't get into any of these basic body POS you Can't hip extend because your hand your hip flexors are so tight we can't do hip thrust is this with aging um sedentary behavior that this kind of thing happens or injury it is sometimes it's injury but it is

mostly not training over full range of motion like the the biggest way to improve range of motion and the biggest way to stop from Lost range of motion is to lift weights over full range of motion I'm I'm like not saying that to be Fous the the the strength training guy I think the data are clear on this one you can static stretch I'm not against that that's fine but lifting and Contracting over full range motion to my my opinion and from our my coaching experience like from just my personal coaching I feel like it's

so much more effective at improving range of motion and so getting people to I don't need you to be you know a Jitsu player where you can do all kinds of things with every joint but we Got to have we got to have like minimal viable here um so I'd say of our of our non athletes even with PL of our athletes but of our non-athletes and like Executive coaching program that would be the third biggest one the reason I'm saying that is because it causes so many injuries and so much pain and we get

so limited in the range in the movements we can do that you end up being like well I don't have that machine I don't have that machine and Like my warmup takes so long because everything hurts and I I don't really like to do this exercise because that like hurts my back a lot and we're just like God like if this could have been prevented if we could just get you a better range of motion now the world opens up to you and now we don't have to do all this prevention stuff we don't have

to do all these things um and so when when things hurt less you tend to do more stuff the one of the number one Reasons why I don't know about your practice but we have found that people are like resistant to exercise in general but specifically lifting because they're just like oh everything was so tight today it's like I don't want to I don't I don't want the lifting I just don't want to go through that warmup process because everything hurts so bad so I'm like all right what if we cut that problem out yeah

i' lift way more okay great so I think in order to get The strength training in we have to have that first piece to lower that barrier to entry I think those are great three actionable tips I'm going to ask you one more and then we're going to get you out of here so that you can get to Nassau oh yeah um otherwise you and I uh could talk for probably I know we never even got to buy Market at least another 3 hours the one biggest mistake you think people are making in terms of

their Exercise or overall lifestyle or yeah could be either and there's probably not one but there's you know if there's one or two major mistakes that people are making can I give you two yeah okay I'd say one would be I'm hesitant because I'm trying to give you a an insightful non-generic answer but one that's also very true I wonder if it's the same one I'm thinking so I've in my mind predicted two for oh well one for sure I'm probably we're Probably nowhere in the same never know I'm trying to I'm trying to intentionally

give one I think people help one one recommendation I would give folks is to say a lot of these details they do matter but the ones that matter most i' probably say the one that matters most whether it's exercise or nutrition or mindset or recovery or health the one that comes out to me is The top do is consistency just give your body time don't expect it in six weeks I hope it happens and we we can if you know what you're doing you can definitely get progress in six weeks a ton but if you

don't you can't afford to work with you and you don't have a private coach that's doing all these things for you you probably are a little bit inefficient with what you're doing it's Not precise to you yet but what that means is not that it's not working it just means it's going to take longer that really important right it's like hey I'm like I'm doing all this stuff I'm I'm eating this way I'm working out I'm trying to get to bed earlier like nothing's working I haven't lost weight yet I don't feel better yet I

promise you if you're eating good food you're exercising you're doing other positive behaviors I promise you it's working It's just not specific so you're not getting a specific result yet specific adaptations to impose demand it's this classic scientific principle call the said principle what that means is if you wanted to get bigger biceps getting those muscles bigger the most specific thing you can do is to do nothing but train those biceps great I promise you if you did nothing but biceps training that's all you did and You just kept going those biceps muscles would get

larger right having said that when you're over relying upon specificity you lack VAR right so we lack well-roundedness we lack other adaptations a lot of people that are trying to likey I want to have more energy I want to lose some weight I want to get a little bit stronger the nice part about it is you're doing a variation in training but because you're doing a variation in training you're not Doing specificity which means you're not seeing maximum results in any one of those areas which means in six weeks when your friend who did nothing

but bicep curs has noticeably bigger biceps in 6 weeks you have 1% bigger bicep and 1% better V2 Max and 1% healthier metab ISM like you have 1% in so if he got 10% bigger you got 10% as well but your 10 was spread across 10 different areas I think that's great I mean I think that's great you just got to give it time got To give it time that person come back in a year and now you've both gained 100% but that's all in that person's biceps and your old now it's like whoa how

did you change your physique how did you change all these things well like you did all these right things I I promise you if you're doing those actions especially if you were not doing them before it is working it is making a difference it's just not like in science we'd say Like the Fidelity of that measurement just not strong enough it's like saying look in the classic research that says like if you start strength training muscle hypertrophy doesn't really happen until so eight weeks or so but that's only because the the technology we have to

measure increases in muscle size is not accurate enough under that it's happening every single damn day it's just happening at these microscopic I love that you're saying this yes yes and You're in this case the person like you just haven't hit the threshold of your technology yet I promise you your body position your body composition improved but the only technology you have is your scale whatever right that's is not accurate enough to tell to find your changes yet so just give it time I promise you like when work we've worked with a billion moms and

a billion non nonathletic regular people and stuff like that and we've worked With the best in the world it's true in all of them it's true in all of them like you will get there if you just like hang tight and do the best you can and also remember on that same point you're going to have LS I have not lifted weights in nine days probably like not happened just unexpected things of okay great I'm not stressed about it right like I've exercised I've done other stuff but I haven't lifted weights right because I'm doing

hiking up Mountains and doing all kinds of other stuff and got super super super sore my ankles thought they were G to die but they didn't oh my God it was it was wrecked my ankles were wrecked for like a week after this but fine I'm looking at this as like is nine days going to matter across 90 years no not at all like is is nine months going to matter that that's why I'm doing what I'm doing now for like a year is a year going to matter across 120 years no not going to

Matter at all so you miss a day you missed the week don't trip don't trip it's the accumulation it's the big package here come back to me in a year did you accumulate a lot over the year you're going to win don't matter all those are little things like it's life it's cool like you're fine careful don't like use that as excuse to be lazy [ __ ] but you feel me on that one so that would be number one was that what you predicted I thought that you were going To say individuals over complicate

things similar that we over complicate the things that really matter and that that impedes us from making progress yeah it is right like s get close a lot often and keep going love it start yeah you owe me one more one more is going to go the opposite direction okay um um there's a lot of discussion a lot of chatter a lot of conversations that are interesting we've had some tangential ones today About this movement of Precision Precision Health Precision Nutrition Precision training and the reality of it is some of these areas are strong at

this point some are weak okay uh genetics as an example genetics for precision training training is garbage genetics for Precision Nutrition is mostly garbage so say that again because I think um you should be making no decisions whatsoever for your exercise Based on any genetic test anybody in the world did I don't care if you got three billion base pair of sequin I know these data very well or food based choices based on genetics there have been now five to six trials full trials on personalized nutrition based on genetics I believe all six have failed

to find any benefit from the genetic based testing any and you're talking different Labs different clinical trials different outcomes Different populations and it's like a clean slate of garbage that doesn't mean nothing is coming though there is clearly something there Precision Nutrition from genetics will get better but right now there is a few actionable things but the the the big basics of like how you globally should eat are are so clearly not the case in fact in at least two of the trials that I know of maybe the third at least two of them what

they found though was Individualized coaching mattered way more than Precision coaching what's that mean paying attention to people's preferences paying attention to their lifestyle all actually had a bigger impact than randomly putting them on you know just a random diet yeah stunning right get a coach shocking yeah get a coach that pays attention to that stuff and if your coach's main selling point is they do genetic Testing no that person is not Advanced like you have almost complete garbage and I could go even a thousand ways worse on this one but if they have not

done actual phenotype testing then like run to the heavens away meaning I don't give a [ __ ] what your MTHFR is when I can directly measure by B vitamins and homos system right I I mean yes I agree with you I do not care at all because are if you want to know That's fine but we'll be able to tell in your blood work we I know and also the relationship I I'm sorry I hate to tease this one at the end but like the relationship between your genotype of that particular one and your

actual res resulting homoy levels you're talking under 1% you've learned a lot about nothing nothing especially when you just measure homosysteine that's what you're so worried about that's right whatever I can go there's a ton to Say but this field is clearly improved it like there there are some actionable things with genetics for nutrition most of it is is utter nonsense um whether or not like you should eat carbohydrates like that's not garbage at this point there are some things but it's going to get better and so what I'll say is like the the um

the age of precision interventions is is clearly Coming I don't have a dog in the fight and any of those things but that is an area where I would say right now I'm happy to just torch that field I'm happy to torch anyone at the same time am am acknowledging it's GNA get better yeah and so all right like I watch I'm reading I'm hopeful I actually am a believer in it it's just not right now we're not there not there at all well Dr Andy gpin thank you so much for coming on we Could

go another two hours and maybe if you're back visiting the astronauts you might I'll be back I'm in Texas a lot you come you can stay bring the family um I really am glad that we were able to sit down and have this conversation I think um there's a lot of things that were really important and one of the things is you shared how you think about things and if people gain just a little bit of insight it will allow them to question what they're Hearing what they're reading maybe be aware of some of their

own limitations or the limitations of those that are talking to them and it's really valuable um you have an extraordinarily creative mind and scientific mind I appreciate been way too long I know way too long uh next round will have to be sooner yes and maybe I I'll come to you yeah might be easier for me to come here um thank you so much and we'll link where everyone can can find you um and You also have an amazing podcast coming out yeah I uh I don't know when this is going to come out but

um my show will be out uh Rob won't let me tell people but it'll be out in the summer amazing we're gonna try to hold this podcast till oh dope yeah that's right that comes out and we're going to do our best to hold it so that we can put it out before yours comes out that would be amazing cool yeah it's called perform with Dr Andy Galpin well done friend thank you [Music]