Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimal Nutrition & Supplementation for Fitness | Huberman Lab Guest Series

[Music] welcome to the huberman lab guest Series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine today's episode marks the sixth and final of the six episode series on fitness exercise and performance and today's discussion is all about nutrition and supplementation to maximize your fitness exercise and performance goals Dr Andy Galpin I'm super excited to discuss today's topic which is nutrition and supplementation for performance and recovery and I'm particularly excited about this conversation because I've been interested in supplementation and nutrition for performance really since my teens but also because in recent years we've witnessed a massive transformation in the general public in terms of their view of supplementation and nutrition first of all more people are thinking about nutrition what is good nutrition what is not a very barbed wire topic as you know but there are some truths in there that we'll discuss but also supplementation you know whereas 10 15 years ago I think most people um would either be really into supplements that was a small percentage of people but the majority of people were either told or were thinking oh you know vitamins you mostly excrete them they're just expensive urine nowadays it seems that many people including many of my colleagues and Physicians all the way down to sports performance experts are taking and making recommendations about certain supplements and so the way that I like to think about supplements is that they aren't necessarily just supplements which makes it sound like they are augmenting what should already be there but you're not quite getting enough of but indeed a lot of these things we call supplements are very potent compounds that can transform our ability to perform in the short term to recover from exercise and that can really shape brain chemistry hormone patterns acutely and when taken long term so I'm very excited about today's topic and to be able to try and sort through this let's call it a cloud hopefully not a storm but this cloud of supplements that are out there because indeed many of them are excellent and can provide us a lot some of them are terrible and then some just don't do anything and therefore are terrible because either they have side effects or because they're very expensive and they don't do anything and then of course within the realm of nutrition there's an equal amount of of confusion but that's why I'm talking to you because you're going to put Clarity and structure and definition on these incredibly important topics you you absolutely nailed it there one of the major reasons supplements can work is because you can consume nutrients in extremely high concentrations such that you would not get in nature through food having said that you really do want to focus on the basic sleep nutrition hydration and I'm going to get into very specific detail later with some of those things that said there are plenty of situations and circumstances when supplementation can do exactly what you said also though because you are taking them in such high concentrations they can also be unproductive they can be destructive or they can be counterproductive so in case if you're taking a couple of supplements over here it may actually be counteracting the benefits of some of the other supplements over there so in the ideal situation we would be able to work like snipers here so we would be able to run full biological testing so extensive blood work and saliva and urine and stool and have an in-depth analysis of your gut microbiome and your stress patterns and your time of day and your cortisol curve and like all the things that we do in our high performance folks with that then we can get extremely high Precision supplementation and and quite honestly our philosophy is we only give individuals exactly what they need so even some of the standard uh generally safe and effective supplements we don't really necessarily use them if there's no specific need we've talked about the consequences of this with things like antioxidants but even simple stuff like stimulants and other tools that are effective for Recovery we don't use them unless we have a reason that said that's not the reality for a lot of people they're not going to be able to do something like that or somebody who can help them in that so there are a handful of supplements that I would consider to be in my my 80 20 rule which is sort of like the 20 of supplements that are going to give you 80 of the benefit for the lowest cost and so what I can actually do is just sort of start there even though this like burns my skin and my soul a little bit I absolutely hate this I am the context guy I'm the it it depends it's high Precision guy but let's be real um there are a number of supplements that are fairly effective and fairly cheap for a wide range of outcomes so this is for general public this is for people who want to do the three buckets right you want to look a certain way so supplements that could enhance muscle growth and fat loss non-hormonal based supplements of course supplements that can improve energy or physical performance again from everything from you know squatting more to feeling better in your yoga class to having more energy throughout the day to our third major bucket that we've been talking about throughout this entire series which are longevity so we can cover those first if you'd like to start there yes absolutely let's start there oftentimes when we think of supplements we immediately jump to High Sport performance type of things or vigorous workouts or muscle building though that doesn't necessarily have to be the case take for example creatine and I've spoken about this at lengthens with Darren kandow who's done a tremendous amount of research I was just up at his lab recently in Canada and he has covered extensively in fact I think I put up a post perhaps I could draw this up um where he laid out all the Myriad of benefits of creatine this is taken in the you know typically three to five grams per day of dose of creatine monohydrate which has the most research behind it seems to be extremely low side effects in almost anyone and the benefits including course things like muscle performance and strength and things like that and if you go back to our discussion and our episode on metabolism and endurance we talked about the phosphoryl creatine system so you can figure out kind of what this is going to do in terms of effect that said there's excellent information and data coming out and all on the benefits of bone mineral density and creatine there's a ton of work looking at a host of cognitive factors from memory executive function to effects potentially on even things like depression mood to alzheimer's Parkinson's uh all forms of neurodegenerative disease in fact it's it's pretty obvious the brain loves creatine as a fuel and so not only we sort of discussed in the episode as being the fuel for skeletal muscle contraction but the brain needs to do that as well the astrocytes are on the brain need to be able to provide energy Etc so it's very clear that metabolism in the brain is reduced with things like TBI and potentially concussions so um now to be extremely clear creatine does not prevent any of those diseases it does not treat any of them and the data are mixed but it's more and more are coming some show a little bit of benefits I'm showing you know maybe none but I'm not aware of any research in those areas that show it has any downside for the most part side effects are extremely minimal if not null and then potentially some benefit and depending on the specific study so we could put up a if you'd like a couple of links directly to those meta-analyzes and folks can go through those things one by one so um I only say that to again maybe expand our understanding or thinking about what these types of supplements can do it's not just about growing muscle or you know high performance it's everything to again there's an association with recovery so creatine is fantastic for recovery for muscle for muscle damage it helps and can potentially Aid in fat loss and a whole host of things so you can actually also even look at websites like examine.com I have you know no affiliation with them whatsoever but if you want to just type in something like creatine monohydrate you can see a whole list and you're going to see thousands of studies of the potential benefits of creatine so that is is always number one on my list I'm relieved to hear that creatine sits at the top of your supplementation list because well first of all I started taking it when I was in college at that time I was taking it in this kind of loading mode where you take it in um you know anywhere from uh 15 to 25 grams per day often causing some gastric distress often combining with fruit juice to try and shuttle it into the muscles sure and then so-called maintenance phase of reducing to 10 or 15 grams per day now days I just take about five grams or so although later I know you're gonna tell me why I should probably be taking more than five grams per day given my body weight so I know we'll get into some of those specifics a little bit later but in addition to experiencing Direct effects on muscle size and strength which I did I don't know how it contributed to my cognitive function or if it does now because there's really no way to tease that out with with standard at home tests like a scale but it is very clear to me based on the literature that you described and some of which we've covered on other episodes of the podcast that the phospho creatine system is vitally important for forebrain function right the forebrain of course being the the portion of brain broadly speaking the portion of brain just behind your forehead that is responsible for planning action setting rules and context so even as simple as if you're going downfield in a game of soccer or basketball and you're on offense and then uh you make an attempt on goal or basket and then it switches and you go back now you're on defense that being on defense is very different than being on offense and that goal excuse me that that rule switching is a prefrontal cortical function as is every context dependent way of thinking or acting and so anything that can favor function of the forebrain I think is good for uh humans in general it suppresses anxiety allows us to interpret what's going on for us and so I'm very um relieved and gratified to hear that creatine sits at the top of the list also as I'm sure you'll point out again later creatine is for the most part a relatively affordable supplement for most people so here we're not talking about something that's really esoteric or that you have to you know fly to some remote location to get an infusion of right um but although I apologize to all you because I know the price has skyrocketed recently really yeah why is that I think it's just well nobody knows but it's quote unquote Supply and uh demand issue if you will so those prices have gone up there's also of course been shipping problems in the world and things so uh every time I talk about creatine right now people just flame me for like oh my God it's so expensive now I'm like I know I'm sorry but honestly it's only so expensive because you're used to being so cheap so when you when you counter the fact that you're like right yeah like relative to the other stuff you're probably taking relative to any other number of purchases um for the it still lands very high in my Roi List my you know my 80 20 because of that it's um it can be taken any time of the day it doesn't have to be in magical combination you talked about co-ingesting with carbohydrates that can enhance uh how quickly you can get into the system in fact it's it's going to work on the exact same mechanisms will probably potentially talk about hydration but these things are shuttled so anytime you bring in carbohydrate that's going to be shipped into tissue as quickly as it can creatine then goes along super ride and then it brings water into the right that's how you enhance hydration that's why it's important to have carbohydrates when you're trying to hydrate so you're just going to take it in there and that's also why you get quote-unquote cell swelling which is a good thing like you're it's just enhancing hydration we actually use it a ton in our post way in protocols so and individuals that have to cut water weight creatine is a great thing to throw back in there it's going to help you rehydrate it's also why when you take 30 grams of it it can pull a bunch of fluid in the intestines and and there you go with your little bit of GI distress so um yeah there's a lot of fun things you can talk about there I just had to flag that because every time I've been talking about it recently and I say it's cheap people are killing me for it so I apologize I don't know how to make it any cheaper but it's still fairly fairly affordable yeah I would say relatively inexpensive compared to a lot of supplements out there and when thinking about the return on investment is um it's quite good yeah so like actually sorry it started to cut you out but I was also thinking there's been a number of studies on sleep deprivation as well with creatine that can help so obviously sleep deprivation will generally reduce cognitive function and creatine can ameliorate some of that drop so if you think about it in that context I had a crummy night of sleep well and if that enables you to perform a little bit better in your job then you would make up the dollar or so whatever you paid for that day's supply of creatine so it is something kind of on that note it's not going to work as an acute response so it's not something you're like I feel terrible let me throw some creatine Down the Hatch I'll feel better that's not going to work it's going to take several weeks to have a noticeable effect it needs to be stored in tissue it needs to be built up before you can actually do much of anything so it is unlike some of the other things like stimulants or caffeine that have an acute you know response right now and so if you're going to take it you probably need to consume it consistently if you can't do that then really there's no point in doing it and the loading phase you mentioned distance were here is something you can do again if you need to enhance the storage of it really quickly so say for example we've done this in some military cases where it's like you get back to base and you've only got a week and you got to go back out we may actually have to do a little bit of a loading phase then but if that's not the case the loading phase is unnecessary it's not really harmful other than maybe GI stress and maybe waste but you're going to have three or four weeks it's going to reach full saturation plenty of time to to be there in that if you're in that three to seven grams per day range I'm glad you mentioned the slow accumulating positive effects of creatine as compared to so-called acute effects because the way that I think of Health promoting and performance enhancing protocols like viewing morning sunlight or um endurance exercise for that matter or creatine or sleep for instance is that while they can have effects in the immediate term you might feel a little bit or in the case of a good night's sleep a lot better it's really the accumulative effect of raising your Baseline level of functioning you know there's another way to think about it is um these supplements or behaviors and quality nutrition when done consistently over time and that doesn't mean 100 of the time but you know because probably 80 of the time sure lead to a sort of uh buoyancy in your system that allows you to be more resilient under conditions where conditions aren't perfect right and if conditions are made perfect or close to perfect and you already have that buoyancy that's when you really start to see the ultra high performance effects um that are so much fun but they have to be established through consistent supplementation consistent nutritional intake so today I know we're going to distinguish between uh normally they're called chronic and acute effects but that makes it sound like chronic illness the moment people hear chronic well they might think of other things but but in the context of Health they typically think of you know chronic illness and we're not talking about that what we're talking about is slow modulatory effects in the body a lot of things in the body take time to build up but once they've built up they they clearly can benefit us and then other things as you mentioned you know a stimulant for instance has a very acute effect that it's going to occur with you know Peak within 30 minutes and wear off within you know four hours or so can also have some chronic effects but typically it's a short-lived effect so we just want to frame up the the language that we'll be using and I'm really excited to dive into this topic and I think creatine is a beautiful example of a supplement that has positive chronic mental and physical benefits down the road I can come back and talk a little bit more about creatine and we can cover some other information regarding best practices for for getting the most out of it as well as we'll certainly dive into some of the common side effects or at least a thought of side effects while we're here though I also could throw in a few other of these high impact low-cost generally safe things that are my 80 20 rule if you will so the way I actually kind of think about it is you want one from each of three categories and these categories are fuel stimulants and fatigue blockers so creatine is actually in the fuel it's not a stimulant as we talked about The Chronic effect there so we've already knocked that one off another one from the fatigue blocker is going to be anything like beta alanine or sodium bicarbonate and then from the stimulant yeast of course we have anything like a beetroot juice to a caffeine or something of the equivalent so we can come back again and talk about all those in more detail a little bit later before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is also separate from Dr Andy galpin's teaching and research roles at Cal State Fullerton it is however part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme we'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is momentous momentous makes supplements of the absolute highest quality the huberman Lab podcast is proud to be partnering with momentous for several important reasons first of all as I mentioned their supplements are of extremely high quality second of all their supplements are generally in single ingredient formulations if you're going to develop a supplementation protocol you're going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations with single ingredient formulations you can devise the most logical and effect active and cost-effective supplementation regimen for your goals in addition momentous supplement ship internationally and this is of course important because we realize that many of the huberman Lab podcast listeners reside outside the United States if you'd like to try the various supplements mentioned on the huberman Lab podcast in particular supplements for Hormone Health for Sleep optimization for Focus as well as a number of other things including exercise recovery you can go to live momentous spelled ous so that's live momentous.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how 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a good job of hydrating enough how much of that is true um is alkaline water worthwhile for changing the alkalinity of my body I learned when I was in college and graduate school that the alkalinity of the different tissues in your body is very well controlled in order to keep you alive and that you don't want it to shift too much or you can enter pretty horrible states of seizure vomiting and even death so tell me about hydration and woven into that if you would educate me on electrolytes and hydration because I think most often when people ingest electrolytes sure they could be ingesting salt tablets they're probably getting some electrolytes by the way electrolyte sodium magnesium potassium through their food I think most people think about drinking electrolytes so water and electrolytes I think is a vitally important topic to kick this off with sure we can jump right into your alkaline water while there's perhaps much to say about this we can maybe revisit this in another seven part series all on its own uh I would just say it this way there's probably a few things you should do before worrying about the alkalinity of your water and I'll just leave it at that meaning the alkalinity of the water is sort of irrelevant not that you won't go that far is just it's probably remember we started started off talking about 80 20. well this would be in my like 99 one in terms of like if we're really at the level of worrying about the pH of your drinking fluid we have optimized so many other things that then we can talk about it but until we have nailed months and years of work on other things this is just not going to make much of an impact great then perhaps you could tell us about what volume of water we should be drinking when we should be drinking that water relative to training and just generally and um yeah and anything else relate to water and electrolytes that can improve mental Performance Physical performance and offset any you know ill effects I like the fact that you mentioned physical and mental performance because it's clear in both cases we hear that we need to drink more water and I can give you some numbers and I will in a second what we also need to recognize is there's this is hormesis we talked about hormesis a few episodes ago and this is the case right whether we talked about food or hydration or I think I gave you the example of cyanide naturally occurring in your food hot water is the same way so if you are under hydrated or dehydrated then there is a clear negative effect on your body and as I increase the level or improve the level of hydration things get better whether this are physical performance or whether this is mental performance in fact we know that a body weight reduction of as low as two percent via dehydration so imagine you're doing a bout of exercise and you're sweating and you lose two percent of your body weight that alone is enough to reduce accuracy and performance so the classic study we talk about here was in basketball players so shooting accuracy so free throw shooting I think is specifically what they looked at significant reduction in performance with as little as two percent dehydration that that level you also see a significant increase in perception of difficulty of exercise and so only right at two percent and again when I say two percent I mean percent body weight lost right that's what that means you start getting the three four five percent dehydration you start having a significant reduction in blood volume and that's incredibly important for endurance um your blood becomes viscous it gets hard to pump through um and you're going to start having all kinds of issues so being dehydrated is again not only going to reduce performance but because of the mental aspect which we just walked through and neuromuscular issue you're going to lose accuracy you're going to lose total endurance performance and you're going to lose speed and power so we have the Triad there no matter what you're interested in it's going to be harmed by being dehydrated that also is happening then if you're starting your program dehydrated so if you're already one percent or so dehydrated maybe you're like a little under hydrated and you lose a little bit of sweat you've already hit that two percent and so we're starting to see reductions um in performance there the same happens on the other side of that hormetic curve so if you are optimally hydrated in some large window but you start going past that we can start running into equal problems remember there's a there is a need for an optimal concentration of sodium and potassium and chloride between your cell inside your cell and outside your cell these are electrolytes this is what we call osmolality and osmolarity is really going to think of it like concentration and osmosis if you remember those terms so if we are trying to create a muscle contraction that requires an electrical gradient and so sodium and potassium specifically in magnesium calcium are positively charged and chloride is negatively charged and we need to have a certain amount inside the cell and outside the cell so that the positives and the negatives are balanced appropriately so that when we move one we change the voltage and we have in the case of a muscle contraction okay I just came through a whole lot of physiology there to say if you then go mess with fluid only and you say if I were to give you a bolus of you know three liters of pure water right now you're going to dilute your blood and so there's not going to be as many chemical uh there won't be as many electrical signals in there because you've taken the same amount of sodium potassium Etc and put it in a larger volume of pure water so that gradient has now changed that becomes a significant problem for contraction I mean quite literally it can kill you this is what we call hyponatremia so notremia spelled n a hypo being low hyponatremia if you actually go to the Periodic Chart n a is what we use for sodium so hypernetes because the word is natremia actually so that what that literally means is low sodium and you didn't get that from sweating out all your sodium you actually get hyponatremia from drinking in too much water so it's not that the total amount of sodium gets low it's the fact that the concentration gets low from excessive fluid intake so in the Extremes in fact if you look at the literature you'll see anywhere between like two to fifteen percent of people who finish endurance races are are into hyponatremia now that varies wildly if you're doing Iron Man and Kona versus like you know the marathon in Denver in in October right it's going to be totally different depending on weather conditions but these are all important so while like death happens that is sort of extreme if you back up just a little bit you start seeing the same types of performance sacraments in fact the symptoms can be identical brain fog confusion performance uh irritation a GI distress and you think man these are symptoms of dehydration so then you drink more water and you're just exacerbating the problem and I can actually um give you one little example of this we had an executive actually female CEO uh I'll say she's probably when I was in her early 40s and so she came to us and she thought man for sure she has some sort of gut problem going on because we hear a lot about kind of like gut health and how it affects everything and so she's just like I have brain fog and I've done all these things and I got blood work done and everything's fine like nothing's going on I think I must have some sort of gut thinger going on or whatever and it's okay and we just started going through her stuff and uh she was I think about 170 pounds plus or minus and she was consuming like 250 to 60 ounces of water a day that's a ton of water and we were like holy what are you doing this for and she says like that's sort of like my thing it was but she didn't realize it was more of like a nervous tick than it was anything else right she just like sips of sip sip sip water I'm like man how often do you go pee and she's like yeah like every you know 30 minutes or something I'm like fantastic sleep problems focused and so she's smashing caffeine she was at like eight cups of coffee a day which is also going to add to excretion of sodium totally right so it's like okay we don't really need to come in and run a sleep study on you we're just going to lower your water and she was like what yeah we dropped her down to like 180 so basically an ounce per pound of body weight which is still high because she did train 180 ounces correct yeah she does work out so she needed to replenish some stuff and we'll cover these numbers in a second instantaneously I mean like two days in she's like oh my God I haven't slept six to eight hours in years and then after that it was like basically tears coming back to us right my focus my brain fog is gone because she's in a very high pressure job um it's like everything's coming back like now she was down to three or so cups off a day like the whole thing digestion improved all of it she was sick like to her only problem after all the analyzes was she was just drinking way way too much water and adding more salt to her would not have solved the problem because she would have just had simply way too much fluid in her system she was having all kinds of ADH problems and aldosterone like the whole thing and then that that rolls into cortisol the whole like system gets goes into chaos so it is important that you pay attention hydration even though as you sort of mentioned people tend to just kind of like roll their eyes around it because if you're in the middle it's fine but if you're anywhere past not even the extreme extremes but just that first standard deviation away you're going to have problems and you might be thinking adrenal fatigue you might be thinking you're testing like you're going to think all these things and you simply just haven't actually dialed in your hydration yeah uh I think people sometimes roll their eyes at the discussion of hydration because it just doesn't sound very sexy it's not like doesn't sound like a neurotransmitter or a hormone it doesn't sound like testosterone or estrogen or DHEA or dopamine but it actually is all of those things it sits at a level beneath all of those but not beneath on a hierarchy beneath in in terms of a foundation it's actually the without proper electrolyte balance and hydration none of the cells of the body can function and then I think people also hear that oh you know we are 70 water and somehow like it that statistic Alone um or that fact alone doesn't seem to uh stimulate any kind of action will take away right it's like great you know uh like gravity also you know keeps us you know from jumping his eyes we like you know what do I do and so I think um it's it's important that people understand that every cellular process in the body critically relies on having enough sodium magnesium potassium around and the the way that it's concentrated in fluid water is really the way that you allow every cell in their body to function as well as it possibly could and respond to all the sorts of kind of quote unquote High Performance Tools that we're talking about the other thing I've observed many times over is that if people are ingesting too much water and also drinking a lot of caffeine and their electrolytes are low they get shaky and they actually can have anxiety like symptoms so when people come into my lab to do studies on anxiety and fear we ask a few questions and those questions include how much water they've had that day also a sort of bizarre fact but one that I think is worth mentioning is that when the bladder is full it stimulates a sort of anxiety if you ever had to urinate very badly and you're in the car or you can't urinate and then you get to the door like that's talk about anxiety um and that's because there's a direct neural pathway from the bladder that registers the mechanosensors how much stretch there is on the bladder that sends a signal to the brain stem alertness areas broadly speaking Locus ceruleus and others that wake us up these are the when we're awake it makes us more awake and when we're asleep this is what wakes us up to urinate in the middle of the night yeah that's actually why you can use uh night urination as a pretty good diagnostic of sleep disorders so if because of vasopressin right almost exactly what you're talking about if you're having sleep disorder issues and you're staying awake and a vasopressin gets taken off right an APN goes straight to the kidneys your kidneys are supposed to be dormant basically at night you're not supposed to be filtering a lot and producing a lot of urine at night if that's happening and say you you have any number of apneas kicking on or anything going on vasopressin keeps going keep sending signal kidneys start filtering so if you're waking up and peeing multiple times a night that's called nocturia that is a very very good sign that either one of two things happen you one you have some sort of sleep disorder or two you're drinking outrageous amounts of water and so that's actually a bit of a backward cycle now right because you're drinking way too much water you're waking up and peeing all night that's actually ruining your sleep and so we have seen this a number of times with our sleep company as we go in and it's just like you don't need any of this crap you just need to be properly hydrated alternatively if your hydration is sound and you're still waking up more than one time a night to pee on average then you almost well I shouldn't say like that but there's a potential that you actually have some sort of sleep system or sleep condition going in so the rule of thumb on that is so we're here once or night once a night or so of urination is fine if it is routinely or consistently more than two you need to make some adjustments start with hydration it's the simplest way right getting a full sleep study done just figure out hydration we've had this happen a number of times where people want to get more health conscious and they just get they hear things like this and they're like I gotta get on my water and then they just start train wrecking their sleep and then waking it up so if you're waking up multiple times and you're urinating and it is a large amount of urine for you and it is clear that's probably not sleep apne induced noctria that's probably excessive hydration if you're waking up a bunch of times and it's fairly small amounts of urine then it's probably not the fluid issue it's probably the fact that the vasopressin is kicking your kidneys into gear so that's not a perfect criteria but it's just like a quick little tool you can sort of use that's actually one of the reasons why we measure almost always your body weight at night as well as in the morning so that that's like the combat sport in the UFC fighters boxers we call that your float so how much you floated overnight I like to know that number because I want to know as well your first morning void so when you wake up then you went to bed at 200 pounds you woke up the next morning at 195. it's like oh you floated five pounds did you pee last night yeah yeah three times interesting another case you woke up you went to bed at 200 pounds you wake up at 199.5 okay you're dehydrated because you should have a a certain amount of fluid that you're just Whispering out as you're breathing throughout your nose throughout night ideally uh guaranteed you're gonna wake up what was your urine like oh yeah a little bit pretty dark like shocker you're dehydrated so you can kind of look at numbers like that a general float is something like a pound to two pounds for the 170 plus pound person as you scale up that number then go up a little bit but you can kind of use these to triage a little bit about what's going on um with this kind of combination everything is everything right so it's like it's not just about one system so you're gonna pay attention you can also look uh well I don't if you don't jump into it we can but there's a whole bunch of ways I can teach you to diagnose hydration and maybe we can start there and then we can talk about hydration numbers yes I'd love to talk about diagnostics for hydration over hydration dehydration to start off would you be willing to give us some numbers how much water should we be drinking the classic rule here and you're making me do what I hate right I want to give all the caveats first but I'll go straight to your number half an ounce per pound of body weight is a rough rule so if you weigh again 200 pounds that would mean you drink 100 ounces of water a day most water bottles are like 12 to 20 ounces something like that so you know you end up drinking six of those or so a day kind of like plus or minus which is not that unreasonable this does depend on a number of factors which I could go over but that is a rough starting place the only other thing to add to that is that does not account for exercise induced water loss or sauna or anything like that so that's assuming just like basal daily needs if you are exercising or sweating at all for any reasons or work related so folks that work outside are in the Heat or a human environment these numbers all change and you can slide this scale up but you generally want to drink about 125 percent of the fluids you've lost during that physical activity back and how much do you lose per hour of exercise that number ranges between one to five pounds depending on the person it can even be higher with some of our athletes like I can think of a number of NFL players right now it's not uncommon for those guys to do eight or nine pounds even not even like crazy circumstances if it's August and we're in Jacksonville it's not wild for us those guys go nine ten pounds but what about the typical person who goes to a air-conditioned gym or goes out for a run on a day that is somewhere between let's say 55 degrees Fahrenheit and 85 degrees Fahrenheit you're probably looking at like a pound it's not extremely high if you are totally soaked might be like a pound and a half to two pounds if you're like come back and like your pits are a little sweaty and there's a little bit of water kind of on your neckline it's probably like a more like a pound or so so in that case you might drink back a pound and a half of water okay so just to review these numbers to make sure that I'm on the correct page here a half an ounce of fluid per pound of body weight is a sort of a foundation for hydration and then you want to replace a hundred and twenty five percent of the fluid lost during exercise and exercise varies where exercise is done varies whether or not people are wearing uniforms or helmets is going to impact how much fluid they lose Etc in a very hot environment that the amount of fluid lost can be anywhere from you know one to five maybe even ten pounds easy per hour of hard hard exertion for most exercise done in conditions of 55 degrees Fahrenheit to 72 excuse me 85 degrees Fahrenheit done with some degree of effort one might lose a pound or or two pounds of water super easy way to find out all you have to do is weigh yourself naked go do your workout come back in dry off weigh yourself naked that'll tell you exactly what you lost so if you went in you were 160 pounds you come back out you wait you're 158 you lost two pounds drink back two and a half pounds of water you're good so that is uh is that honestly it's like fairly gold standard for identifying you can actually buy a whole bunch of technology for this and they are using the exact same equation which is your body weight when you were there now if you do that though you do need to account for any fluid you drink during the workout sure because that then offsets it simple but I think important question we're talking about a half an ounce of fluid per pound of body weight does that include things like coffee tea soda pre-workout drinks mid-workout drinks uh mate matcha whatever the you know there's a yerba mate there's a there are a million things out there um or just water any fluid for the most part is going to count and is it true that fluids that contain caffeine generally cause us to secrete sodium yeah okay so do you recommend including electrolyte powder or a small pinch of sodium or any number of other supplement type electrolytes that can replace that sodium magnesium and potassium a couple of things we have to pay attention to accurately answer that question well you also sort of asked about you may have not even realize is does caffeine actually enhance dehydration which is not really what you asked but it's probably a lot of people thought that as well so caffeine can but coffee doesn't necessarily do that because remember you're co-ingesting that with fluid and so uh we used to say that all the time how coffee dehydrates you it doesn't it might make your urine yellow that certainly gives off a odor in your urine but in general coffee will not do that because you're just if you were to now be taking caffeine pills alone now there is a bit of a diuretic effect there and so you're going to year and how much maybe not enough for you to be really concerned with especially when you balance that against the ergogenic effects and benefits of caffeine it's not something we are concerned about second part of your question do you need to then offset the loss of sodium I'm not super concerned about the amount of sodium lost to caffeine I am more concerned about simply the amount of sodium being correct because of the bigger circumstances like how much is actually in your system and how much you lost in the training session so it's not the caffeine that I care about that much relative to you know if you lost three grams of sodium because of the training and you added another few milligrams because the caffeine I don't really care or didn't I'm glad you brought up the difference between a substance like caffeine and the vehicle It's contained in like coffee this is all really important and it also raises a question about individual differences in sweating ability and I call it sweating ability because I have a good friend I've known for ages really um actually work with him in my laboratory as well and he's one of these people that the moment he starts any physical activity it's like a flood warning right he just soaks through clothing it's just the sweating adaptation is is exceedingly robust in him other people less so so is it true that sweating in our ability to dump heat through it by loss of water is something that um we tend to vary on and that also that we can build up that capacity I know a number of people are probably thinking ew gross why would I want to sweat more but there's actually a huge advantage to be able to dump body heat during exertion because body heat in some ways sets the cap for performance a lot many many ways including mental performance is stay alert often is enhanced by being cold and of course we all want to warm up properly but um in terms of loss of fluid through sweating is there a way to easily bin ourselves into kind of a low sweater medium sweater heavy sweater that sounds like an article of clothing but in any case you know what I'm you know man another a lot to say here we should wish we had a whole series on this listen if we have to go 17 hours we can do it just everybody hydrate well I think we've shown the listeners uh that is a real threat that's a very real threat podcasting to failure you don't have to do every set in the gym to failure but here we are attempting a podcast failure in it in all seriousness um what what is the role of sweating ability and is this something that any of us should care about or train for or pay attention to or is this just kind of getting into the Arcane number one you can train your ability to sweat this is important for heat acclimation and why that matters when you sweat that actually is not what regulates your temperature uh you what you want to have happen is the fluid to hit your skin and that to be evaporated that's the actual mechanism so in fact if you stop sweating and like you can guarantee within a short amount of time you're going to be done moving oh very interesting I hope people heard that and really are are highlighting that in their mind that sweating is a process of bringing fluid from your body onto the surface of your skin and then the heat dumping aspect of sweating is the evaporation of that off off your body which brings to mind all sorts of ideas about how to dress during exercise Etc but what you said is that if you are not sweating enough you are limiting your output capacity so it's not just about having enough fluid to switch wet yeah it's also about being able to sweat and being uh dressed appropriately to allow that sweat to move to evaporate off your body yep and heat acclimation training is as simple as it sounds so just practice it more so if you're going into a process where you either need to be in a hot environment or you need to improve your sweat rate you just need to practice sweating and your body will get compared to that I practice the sauna practice a Jacuzzi just get in those things and you will improve your ability to do that now there is a huge genetic component I have one individual actually a UFC fighter I've been working with and I don't mind mentioning his name he'll give me full permission Scott Holtzman many many years um he's actually fighting right now actually today he'll be going he is like he he is like you described like buckets and buckets and buckets of fluids come off this guy when he's tying his shoes like he just goes right like and we've we've improved that I actually sweat too much we worked on that a lot early in his career and we got some improvements down to get him to hold on to the fluids better that being said I've worked at the other individuals in his weight category and it's the opposite right so we can have them literally do the exact same training session together and Scott will dump six pounds and other folks at his size will dump two two and a half so there's a genetic component that is just there and you don't need to worry about it there um so can you identify if you are a heavy salt sweater or not well you have a whole bunch of routes for this number one is you can use the old free cost free test of just looking at your clothing and if you're seeing that white residue all over it so you've you've all have the friend who probably wears that same baseball hat that they've had for eight years if it is covered in the white junk all over the place that's a sign of a higher salt sweater if the opposite happens and it's like you can pull their clothing back and there's just nothing there they are maybe a little bit of a lower salt sweater you can also use any number of hydration tests I know that there is some coming out in the market very very soon that can give you theoretically real time measurements it's like a CGM would be although I haven't seen any data on if those are accurate or not I haven't used one yet but there are a number that are out super cheap you know 10 15 20 bucks all the way up to a couple hundred dollars you can buy these patches put them on you and get a reasonably close estimate and again if those things are 5 or 10 or 20 off I don't know I have to see independent data come out first but even if they are you're not worried about the specific milligrams right whether you sweat out you know 1250 milligrams in a workout or if it's 1340 it doesn't really matter you're trying to look for big big numbers right are you losing 500 milligrams using three and a half grams while you're at so those things will get you in a ballpark to do exactly what you decide am I high medium or low and there's a lot of them that I've used in the past so that that's another way to go about it then what you want to do is probably match your electrolyte intake to something close to what you sweat that's the ideal scenario you can get a lot of information about hydration from blood you can look at like acute markers of dehydration like hemoglobin hematocrit if you're like if your hemoglobin is like 15 plus it's funny we've talked about this in a few episodes before but I see that and I'm like man that dude's super fit that's like a 15 uh for him would be pretty high 14 or so would be pretty good for a female that's also the exact same thing as a sign of acute dehydration um so hematocrite same thing if you're north of 50 you're probably dehydrated so you can get a lot there are also though a lot of biomarkers that can tell you more about chronic dehydration so you can run through those things as well so good blood chemistry test can tell you a lot and you can actually get some insights in your sodium and potassium albumin is another fantastic way to measure longer term uh hydration status now one of these amazing globulins that we've sort of talked a lot about so you can do all those things you can also simply measure the body weight pre and post and use a sweat patch or not and use the the Freer version of your clothing test and get a rough idea of where you're getting it from so those are good places to start I want to go back though and make sure I wasn't over terrifying the audience too much on a server piece if you're performing a type of training or exercise or sport in which you're not losing more than two percent of your body weight you don't need to be overly concerned about hydrating in the sport and so we can actually get into some equations for how much water to drink during training right now but if you if you're again losing less than that it's not critical you can have some fluids it like makes you feel better but you're not going to be experiencing tremendous amounts of performance sacraments if you're you know again out playing a baseball game and is 50 degrees out you're fine um you can drink some water but that's not going to be compromising performance or recovery so we can actually then if you'd like I can go through the three-step system for optimizing hydration but those are I want to make sure I planted that flag so people aren't just terrified that they got to be guzzling down water if they're you know going to their physical therapist for some stretching that's probably not super important I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor at athletic greens athletic greens is a vitamin mineral probiotic and adaptogen drink designed to help you meet all of your foundational nutritional needs I've been taking athletic greens daily since 2012. so I'm delighted that they're a sponsor of this podcast the reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or twice a day is that it helps me meet all of my foundational nutritional needs that is it covers my vitamins my minerals and the probiotics are especially important to me athletic greens also contains adaptogens which are critical for recovering from stress from exercise from work or just general life if you'd like to try athletic greens you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin d3k2 again if you'd like to try athletic greens go to athleticgreens.com huberman to claim the special offer I would love for you to tell us what I refer to as the Galpin equation understanding of course that you did not name it the Galpin equation listen folks scientists can have things named after them but in general it's not reflective of healthy psychology if they name things after themselves correct sometimes yes neuroanatomists used to do that but in any case Dr Andy Galpin did not name the Galpin equation after himself I named it after him and the Galpin equation for how much fluid to ingest during exercise is you want to take your body weight in pounds and divide that by 30 and you want to consume that number which would be in ounces about every 15 to 20 minutes so in the example of you being 200 pounds you would take 200 divided by 30 which is let's just call that number seven to be close which means you would consume about seven ounces of water every 15 or 20 minutes or so okay now as a little bit of a point while I also did not name it I also didn't do the research it's important to point out that other scientists figured these things out I just read their papers and made that derivation of their equation to make it a little bit easier for us folks who do not work on the metric system okay a couple of things first of all I'm not 200 pounds but it doesn't matter how much I weigh because the point is that the listener correct should take their body weight in pounds divided by 30 in just that number of ounces in fluid every 15 minutes and then for those out there outside the US that are accustomed to thinking in milliliters and liters not ounces and kilograms not pounds what is the Galpin equation in the metric system this would be two milliliters per kilogram which again if you were let's say 200 pounds that's going to be something roughly like we'll call it 90 kilos and so if you did two milliliters per kilo you'd be something like 180 milliliters of fluid again every 15 or 20 minutes great and how should people ingest that fluid and of course I would imagine it's through their mouth um I would hope I hope there are other orifices that it might suffice but let's not go there they're drinking that water consistently or is it every 15 minutes they Slug it back does it matter okay yeah that's very good a handful of things in general when you talk hydration the slower and steady you can go the better in fact the reason these this two milliliters per kilogram number came out is because a number of Trials were run when they looked at that every 15 minutes just one bolus of it you know um in different derivations and it's pretty clear that the slower Pace one could do it the better so whether you're doing it every 10 minutes or 15 or 20 minutes the reason we actually give that Gap is because you have to be also offset a little bit of GI distress in fact like kind of the the four golden rules of recovery if you will um we use sort of three R's you need to rebuild rehydrate and replenish what that really means is you need to have a continuous glucose stream you need to have a continuous amino acid stream you need to hydrate and you need to do all one two and three without disturbing your gut too much and so in this particular case it was sort of found that we can hit that level in general and be just fine for most people so I mean a little bit of context the example we gave there in both cases it's something like six to seven ounces for 15 or 20 minutes if you think about that there's 16 ounces in a pound and most water bottles like if you go buy a water bottle in a store here it's they generally come in like 16 ounce bottles ish so six or seven ounces is really like a third of a water bottle Maybe every 15 or 20 or so minutes so it's not some egregious amount of water that you have to slam down now that is influenced heavily by how hydrated you started the session with so how high are you came in external factors like heat humidity temperature things like that but that gives you a rough idea that again and these are numbers that you would need to consume to optimize performance at the end of that then is when you would look to see how much I lost like we talked about earlier and then add back that 125 percent taking into account how much fluid you ingested so if you're 200 pounds and you drink a total of say a pound of water during the training and you started off at 200 and you finished at 198. you actually lost three pounds not two pounds because you lost three you drank one during it so your final net number is two so now you don't you really need to drink back 125 of that remaining two pounds two and a half pounds something like that these numbers especially that 125 are they're just rough guidelines some actually papers suggest it's all the way up to 150 percent so it's just like an idea don't measure out whether you need 5.5 ounces or 6.2 ounces like it just sort of gives you an idea of where to start all right a few sips every 15 or 20 minutes is close enough I've actually started using uh the Galpin equation to determine how much fluid I need for mental work given the now robust data that are out there on the relationship between hydration and mental work it's um been very effective for me and again there are peer-reviewed studies that that support the idea that hydration is important for proper mental Clarity and energy and focus and that even being slightly dehydrated can disrupt that but if one is drinking so much water that they're frequently going to the restroom and can't comfortably uh focus on the work they're doing that's also an issue so um that's very helpful what are the three most critical features of hydration and then I'd like to move on to um some of the more particulars about supplementation and nutrition three parts start hydrated maintain hydration throughout part three is hydrate post to fix it okay we gave you the half ounce per pound of body weight equation so you start the training hydrated we gave you the you know two milliliters per kilogram slash body weight divided by 30. to stay hydrated let me give you the 125 but I can actually just give you sort of I'm giving you another list here I'm sorry but it is my five-step cheater guide for optimizing hydration for performance all right step number one drink a lot of water first thing in the morning this gets everything kickstarted get you going it also saves you from having to drink a bunch of water at night which is then going to compromise your sleep what's a lot depending on how big you are the general thing I'll tell people is like one of the very first things you should do throughout your day you wake up go to the bathroom as you're consuming your sunlight consume water this is maybe chugging a full glass that's honestly what I do it's not the best route but I'll just get 16 ounces 16 ounces or so is great it's fine if you're larger um you know I'm 165 to 70 pounds depending on what's going on maybe a little higher sometimes if you're 225 pounds maybe that number is 30 ounces okay so you just sort of scale up and down and the only reason I say a lot is it just depends on what you're doing and I also should clarify I don't really literally mean chug just like sips because the faster you drink water the faster it's going to expand blood volume the faster it stands blood volume the faster you get rid of it um I don't think a lot of people will know that yeah this is maybe this is clarifying this is also we sort of talked about earlier if you drink too much water you'll dilute the system well if you have a diluted system your body's first reaction is to rid of water to bring total blood volume down right remember if you were to go to a doctor and they look at your total blood volume they're like man you're five and a half liters you're gonna be like holy crap you're going to be put on a diuretic because you don't want to have a heart attack blood pressure I wonder if people are drinking a 16 ounce glass of water or other fluid all at once before going to sleep and that's why they're waking up in the middle of the night totally given what you just said probably a better um protocol would be to sip on a glass of water in the final hour two hours before sleep generally the number we say is three hours in the three hours proceeding sleep you want to basically limit fluid intake to sipping as needed I think that's I'm going to start that tonight because I wake up generally once per night to use the bathroom and I do drink some fluids before I go to sleep mostly because I'm pretty thirsty at that time yeah um but I'm gonna start sipping that water in the uh three hours heading into sleep yeah so you can actually pay attention to his um to go back this is actually I love doing this stuff but if you're waking up at night and you have a very dry mouth not for me all right because it can be one of two things you might actually be dehydrated and so then what the mistake people make is like man my mouth is so dry I keep getting up to drink water at night that makes you then pee too much what that also indicates is probably your mouth breathing so a lot of ways to fix people waking up and urinating too much at night is to tape your mouth and or use a dilator over your nose and then what happens is you don't feel like you have a dry mouth so you don't get up to consume any extra water throughout the night so that actually reduces your your fluid intake so you don't have the problem of actually now having too much fluid to do it and so it's another reasons why mouth taping can really really help and if you are having those issues and or snoring those are not benign that's a really like you really should get some work on those um something you're not sleeping very well is the way I'll say it it doesn't doesn't necessarily mean something life-threatening but it's not a good thing so you're going to run kind of your triaging things back and forth so if you're like I'm waking up to pee a lot but my mouth isn't thirsty okay great then you may actually have just a water consumption issue if it is my mouth is dry but I'm actually waking up and I'm having these large urinations then you're not actually dehydrated you're just breathing through your mouth if you're waking up and your mouth is dry and there's not a lot of pee there then you actually might actually legitimately be under hydrated so a little bit of a game you can play there well that's super informative I think that um the point alone that gulping a bunch of water all at once is going to cause you to need to excrete that water soon after um is a really important point also for people that are going to I don't know give a talk or um you don't want to have to get up to use the restroom you have to sit through a long meeting yeah um clearly I'm violating all these rules up until right now I've been you know not I sort of followed the seagull approach to uh to consuming fluids just in um enormous volumes I'm going to start sipping um fluids instead um what are some of the other rules of hydration so you're going to wake up you're going to start your day and start hydrated so you know you're consuming a larger percentage of your water earlier in the day then you get all the performance enhancing effects of water and you don't have to worry about it compromising your sleep so that's step number one also now you're gonna start your session closer to hydration all right great number two eat mostly real Whole Foods why interesting what you may or not have thought about is a huge determinant of your hydration status is your food choices if you look at different foods for example most fruit watermelon watermelon is like 95 plus percent water fantastic Source also by the way since we're here it is not extremely high in carbohydrate it's not extremely high in sugar it is by percentage but since it is almost exclusively water you're eating it is not something that is extremely dangerous in terms of sugar I there alone probably all the things we've talked about in the six six episodes uh that comment right there will probably blow the internet to pieces and I'll probably get hate mail for life for it but from people water throwing watermelons yeah yeah oh my gosh well I don't think the point is that sugar is necessarily bad I think the point is that for most people they're ingesting too much sugar most people yeah um and it's interesting oftentimes the people who are justifying the ingestion of sugar are exactly the kind of people that should not ingest so much sugar so there's a little bit of a well a user bias the point here is if you're eating whole real food this is like now we're kind of splitting hairs about those things so so morning hydration yeah now important Point here if you compare it to other Foods um like actually meat is is a very high percentage of fluid depending on how well or long you've cooked it you just remember you said earlier over 70 water right so if you're eating meat you're getting actually a big chunk of water as you cook it of course you lose some of that but meat can be like I wouldn't call it a hydrating food item but it is not as low as something like a biscuit which can be actually like 10 water that's why it's like dry and dense which doesn't mean it's bad for you but there if you're eating highly processed foods almost by association that means they've been dehydrated or portionably right so you're just getting less total fluid intake in addition they have also been highly salted in general right so now we're in this position where we're under hydrated and highly salted bad spot if you now switch over to mostly again just mostly whole real food-ish whatever that means to you then your hydration is going to Skyrocket you're going to have a lot so you're eating a ton of food in fact it should be a large percentage of the fluid intake you have actually should be coming from your food you shouldn't have to be smashing water bottles after a water bottle all day in that case though you do need to add salt back so we do see this a lot with people who try to make a transition from maybe a sub-optimal Nutritional Lifestyle and they give up a little bit of other processed food and they come over and they start having problems because they're not actually consuming enough salt so add that back easy way to do that you can use electrolytes and we could talk about those numbers if you want if you just salt your food that you're making you know to taste that's going to get most people in a pretty good spot so start hydrated consume hydrating Foods step number two step number three you want to pre-hydrate if you know you're going to do a workout session and it's going to be hot and long or one of those things you want to look for that half a pound a per body weight of ounces so that's the number we're looking for to start our hydration session we do that we're pretty much taken care of and then like I said adjust depending on lifestyle humidity and other factors like that you can use what is called the what system w-u-t I think Bob kennethick has done a ton of research in this area if you want to read more look up his research it is simply weight urine and thirst so in other words check your body weight look at your urine color and engage your thirst and actually you can use through those three things and those can significantly predict actual hydration status independent of actually measuring osmolality or anything like that so those three metrics alone are pretty good indicator of where you're at so you're going to have that normal amount of water plus or minus if you miss that number for whatever reason you get distracted the number we typically tell people is like something like 400 to 500 milliliters of water in the hour proceeding the training all right so that's like 13 to 20 ounces so like you know you're gonna go work out at three o'clock it's two o'clock and you realize oh man I have not drinking much water today you don't need to go smash tons and tons and tons just look for something like that you know call it a bottle of water if you will if that's not enough if you're in a really tough spot you can do more like uh five to eight ounces 15 or 20 minutes before exercise you want to be really careful about drinking a bunch of water like in the seconds before exercise because you're just going to feel a whole bunch of water bouncing up and down in your stomach and nobody likes that so one to three hundred milliliters 15 or so 20 minutes before that assumes you're in this like 185 pound range ish again if you're talking people of much larger size you may need to increase those values accordingly if you do all that then you use the Galpin equation for your intra workout hydration and you're in a pretty good spot what you want to consume in that is what I call Sweat what I mean by that is you don't actually want to necessarily consume water only during a workout you want to consume something that is ISO osmotic to your blood so something that is the same concentration that you lost in your sweat so if you've done a sweat test you would then drink a fluid that is of the same osmolality the short version of that something in the neighborhood of 200 to 400 milligrams of sodium most electrolytes products are going to be something like that now I know element is is a thousand milligrams and it's a lot higher but most products now that you're going to find are 250 to 400 milligrams and they're typically in the like two to maybe up to three to one sodium to potassium range right coconut water is actually cool it's like basically the opposite like a cup of coconut water I think has something like 200 milligrams of sodium but like 600 milligrams of potassium so um like total spoiler alert but will we use coconut water a lot of hydration just add a little pinch of salt because that'll bring the sodium way back up yeah one note about sodium um obviously people who have pre-hypertension or hypertension want to be careful with their sodium intake um anytime I've suggested that people might consider ingesting more sodium you know it's sort of uh it's like it's like putting a Target on your on your back and yet the data are pretty good showing that if people are not getting enough sodium their mental Clarity their focus their mental stamina their physical stamina really suffers and then people argue well most of us are getting too much salt that often is true for people that are eating a lot of processed foods and not training and not training but for many uh people who are already sort of health conscious who are training they're largely consuming or I should say they're consuming largely non-processed or minimally processed foods and especially for folks who are not ingesting many carbohydrates and are consuming caffeine totally you know a lot of people don't know that carbohydrates hold water and that makes it sound bad it's not necessarily that you know you're going to get subcutaneous swelling of your body now it's recovery it's it's bringing water into your system and it holds water so when you drop carbohydrate starches in particular you urinate a lot more and when you drink caffeine you also urinate a lot more as as you pointed out earlier so you start combining a few things like slightly lower carbohydrate or low carbohydrate eating really quote unquote clean you're not getting a lot of salt in your food and drinking caffeine and then exercising and then pretty soon those numbers that come along with um you know a gram of sodium in your electrolyte drink are not all that outrageous and what you find is people feel much much better when they're getting enough sodium and of course I should um say that there's no reason why someone has to ingest a supplement like element or something there are plenty of other ways to bring sodium into your system you use a pinch of pink salt or Himalayan salt or sea salt or even just table salt in water or just making sure that you're salting your food enough and I think that there too salt appetite and salt taste is a pretty good guide if you taste something and it tastes really salty to you that's an indication that either it's really salty or your salt stores are kind of tapped off you're okay whereas if you're craving salt and you and you're thinking gosh I really want to put salt on this already salty thing not necessarily but oftentimes that means that you are salt efficient so salt appetite is a pretty hardwired set of neural circuits and hormones and I think we would all be wise to learn to tap into the our kind of intuition about salt intake but of course also to measure your blood pressure Etc yeah of course if you think you have some sort of contraindication there that work with the medical specialist without without question um those situations you laid out though are very real a lot of people are living like that and so it's important for those folks to understand if you are going through symptoms fatigue lack of focus cognitive function performance isn't there then hey like you may be under salted and again actually a good amount of blood chemistry work can unravel that a lot and it can sort of tell you if you're going out of whack there are a number of folks who are extremely sensitive to sodium in terms of health risk and that that is a real thing again work with your um individual folks on that I don't work with anyone for disease treatment or management at all I've said that probably four times I'll say it six more times um I only take people who are healthy and try to make them perform at their best possible level so it's actually funny you mentioned that because I was going to give people my recommendation for sodium intake in general throughout the day and then I decided I'm not going to say that because all it's going to do is make all the rest of the people who aren't coming to come after me for the watermelon comment come after me for that so by the end of today's episode the goal is that there everyone's coming after you but also everyone has learned something of value you've already given us a tremendous insights and actionable information on Creatine and hydration and along those lines I'd love for you to tell us about some of the things that we can do with supplementation in order to enhance training by taking certain things before we train and I also have the question of how long before training should we start thinking about supplying nutrients and supplements for the training session I'm not sure I've actually finished my fiber maybe I wasn't clear enough about the last one so I just want to tie that that bow and then we'll go to the next one yeah no it was probably my fault so that uh in addition to the Galloping equation in terms of amount uh I'm recording I recommended at you know roughly three to one sodium to potassium recommendation and I gave you some rough numbers for things like that I actually in all honesty use probably six to ten different electrolyte companies depending on the situation some of them are really good in the case again like element that's nice about that is there's no carbohydrate however the downside is there's no carbohydrate so sometimes I want carbohydrates in the training because as you mentioned there's significant evidence going back actually several decades on the benefit of carbohydrate during exercise so if you're in a situation uh where you're trying to again maximize actual exercise performance you especially if it is either long duration so more than two hours or extremely high intensity and this has to be well north of 100 of your VO2 max in that situation as we talked about in the endurance episode you can actually start having a decrement performance because of a drop of muscle glycogen uh Global glycogen can start coming down if that's the case augmenting with carbohydrates during the training that is going to enhance performance it's going to do what we call spare the liver and it's going to keep my second rule of my four which is maintain a glucose ingestion it's going to keep that going in general what you're going to find is the number is like a five to nine percent glucose concentration in your fluid which turns out to be like exactly the number that most sports drinks have as well as I think that's pretty much exactly what a coconut water is the downside of sports drinks since we're here is they actually tend to be undersalted and so that they don't provide enough of them if you look at the numbers they're going to say something like 60 to 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour is the Target and now if you're using the sort of Galloping equation and you're splitting that up into 15 minute intervals it's something again like 20 or so grams of carbs per 15 to 20 minutes if you're doing again an hour long plus training though so admittedly 100 grams uh is a bit much for some folks depending on your size so I would recommend starting in that uh 60 gram or so range again per hour total is what you want to get to and only in the situation in which muscle glycogen depletion is becoming a limiting factor to Performance so the other benefit of that is as you mentioned that actually drives water into the cell and so you're going to be in that nice sweet spot of you're actually keeping glucose going which is going to enhance performance and you're helping hydration at the same time so the other little part that's important to pay attention to here is the type of carbohydrate matters so you can use actually a whole combination of things called resistant starches which I will use for a long bouts of exercise but in the middle of the workout you're going to want to focus on glucose and fructose mostly glucose typically at least a two or three to one ratio of glucose to fructose and the reason is those actually get into tissue through separate Transporters and so what happens is once the glucose Transporters get full you can't bring anything else in however since fructose comes in a separate route you can maximize total carbohydrate intake by using two different unique forms there's a lot of ways you can do this but this is where the momentous fuel product is is that specifically has that exactly in it so it's fantastic you can use food no problem you can use the combination of things like honey and different easily absorbable and usable and things that you can actually like maybe put in a drink to get away with so there's lots of routes for it but you want to look in that that sort of combination of five to nine percent roughly glucose for there so you do need to train your gut so do not do anything and there's a generally A good rule do not do anything in your competition that you've never done in practice so try these food items try these amounts the carbohydrate numbers try the sodium numbers try the total amount of water start low you can always increase what you don't want to do is have to run out during the middle of your spin class and Sprint to the bathroom and hope nobody's in your way which in the lab we've seen we'll just say accidents like that occur more than once so just be careful of your stomach I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health and well-being can only be analyzed from a quality blood test one issue with a lot of blood tests and DNA tests out there however is that you get information back about various levels of lipids and hormones and metabolic factors Etc but you don't know what to do with that information inside tracker makes knowing what to do with all that information exceedingly easy they have a personalized platform that lets you see what your specific numbers are of course but then also what sorts of Behavioral do's and don'ts what sorts of nutritional changes what sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you if you'd like to try inside tracker you can visit insidetracker.com and to get 20 off any of inside tracker's plans again that's inside tracker.com huberman to get 20 off I realize I jumped the gun a little bit asking about supplementation for before during and after a workout um because what I neglected to ask about was training in the fasted State this is something that we talked about in an earlier episode but I think it's worth highlighting now um Sometimes the best way to supplement if you will a workout or pre-workout is ingesting nothing I'm one of these people I actually prefer to do my weight training somewhere between seven and eight a.m each morning sometimes a little earlier sometimes a little bit later I drink fluid water and I do ingest caffeine prior to those training days on days when I don't train I do as I often recommend uh people do delay my caffeine intake 90 to 120 minutes after waking but in any event it's water and caffeine yerba mate or coffee or some sort of stimulant for weight training workouts and generally not for cardiovascular training workouts although sometimes yes so I'm training fasted that said I'm ingesting carbohydrate the night before to make sure that my I have glycogen stores that are topped off and uh so it's fasted but with that caveat what are your thoughts on training fasted and what I just described is fasted overnight but some people are training in the afternoon and they may opt to not eat anything in the you know two to four hours prior to training or maybe even longer I personally find that caffeine hits my system a lot better when I'm fasted better meaning it just seems to have more of a potent effect there are some reasons for that um and of course we dissuade people from ingesting caffeine too late in the day because it'll disrupt sleep so I'm not saying fast for three hours then drink caffeine but who knows maybe that's in your protocol the simple version of this question is what are your thoughts on training fasted and if people are going to train fasted how should they modulate their fluid intake if at all what happens with exercise in the endurance and Metabolism episode we walk through and the fact that no matter what you're using for fuel carbohydrates or fat or even other potential sources the end product of all of those is ATP CO2 and water right so you're trying to make ATP that is the fuel for exercise now ATP is adenosine triphosphate so one two three phosphates on top of an adenosine well what you may have not put together is if you hydrolyze ATP and you break off one of those phosphates you now have ADP if you do it again you have amp addressing monophosphide if you do it one more time now you just have adenosine and if you have then therefore run through a lot of exercise burned a lot of energy you have increased the amount of adenosine that's floating around now if you have a high concentration of adenosine what's that going to make you want to do that's going to bind to certain receptors and we know when those receptors get bound to you fall asleep bingo caffeine will competitively bind to those receptors therefore that's why caffeine stops you from feeling like you want to go to sleep right so we have a very clear relationship between exercise fuel in fact if you look at the literature there's a pretty clear relationship between the more caloric expenditure in different sports and the higher amount of hours needed for sleep so there's a nice tie between how hard you're exercising how much energy you're burning how much you need to sleep stimulants which brings us all the way back to your question of fueling so do I need a fuel prior to my exercise about if you're going to be limited in your exercise bout buy fuel then fueling is necessary one way or the other if it is a type of training that is not then it's not going to matter and so the examples we gave if you're doing if you're going to go do a 30-second bout of maximal exertion and you're going to do it one time you don't need to worry about fueling at all we're eating within your workout because it's only 30 seconds yeah you got 30 seconds you don't need to worry about hydration post exercise you don't need to worry about recovery total energy expenditure was nothing if you're going to go um you know you're going to go practice you're going to go to the driving range and practice your golf swing you don't need to worry about it the total amount of energy expenditure is just not high in fact in that case you might want to keep it somewhat low because you want to keep blood glucose fairly even and you don't want to bring into the system you certainly wouldn't want to use stimulants right because you may get over exerted inside in all of these things we probably should have started off our conversation with this in terms of macronutrients the total amount throughout the day is more important generally than the timing of them which is why you can do things like have a bunch of carbohydrate at night not eat the next morning and lift and be just fine it doesn't matter that you didn't have them in a few hours before your muscle glycogen is topped off your liver is glycogen is topped off you're absolutely fine you have plenty of fuel even if you're to wait a few more hours in fact even if you were to do conditioning you're probably fine I I have plenty of athletes that prefer to do many of their training sessions faster in the morning for personal reasons not because it enhances performance but if it doesn't enhance or harm it then and it's a personal preference thing fine if you're going to go do a session though where you're going to be really concerned with muscle glycogen depletion and again you can go back that episode to learn of different types when those thresholds hits and what you worry about then a feeling would be important you would either need to have something before the session or consume it during the session so one of the other things we'd like to say here is recovery starts during the previous workout right so if you're working out right now and you optimize nutrition right now even if you don't necessarily need it for the current workout if you can get ahead on recovery then you're going to be fine the next day and the differentiation here between carbohydrate and protein is important so the total amount of protein you ingest throughout the day is probably a bigger determinant for things like muscle growth than the timing so the post exercise anabolic window it doesn't necessarily matter carbohydrate is different the timing of that does matter it needs to be around and available you can maximize both hydration and muscle glycogen resynthesis which is restoring the muscle glycogen you burn during exercise I also work with athletes that train multiple times a day so in those particular cases a recovery window is half what you normally have so if you're in a situation where you have two or three days before you work out again you don't need to worry about getting carbohydrate in before during or after Because by the time you go to train again you will have restored your muscle glycogen levels easily however if you're training every day or twice in a day then the timing of carbohydrate really starts to matter in that case I see no reason to not ingest those nutrients either before during or after you don't need to necessarily do it but you can the general rule of thumb I give is something like this if you're doing something where you're trying to really work hard whether this is hypertrophy training or a lot of endurance energy expenditure is going to be high potential muscle damage is high and or energy utilization is high what you want to look for is a number something in the area of like half a gram of carbohydrate per pound of body weight so you weigh 200 pounds you want to make sure that either pre-mid or post or total you bring in 100 grams of carbohydrate it's just a very rough number to start protein is about half of that so it's about a quarter of your body weight right so those numbers would be if you're 200 pounds make sure you have 100 grams of carbs and 50 grams of protein and again it doesn't necessarily have to be before or during or after and you'll be in a good spot all you need to do then is Alter what I do I should say is Alter the amount of carbohydrate based on energy expenditure so a lower energy and easier workout instead of having 100 grams of carbs I might tack that down to 75 or even 50 and be it a one to one carb protein ratio if it was even harder more sun hotter outside more fluid loss I might go from 100 grams of carbs up to 150 or 200 and get closer to like a three to one or four to one carbohydrate to protein ratio so those are the numbers that I generally go by well as I take a sip of My Double Espresso Americano here I'd love for you to tell us about stimulants sure there's no shortage of these in most of our lives and of course you can cover the health benefits of it later you maybe you have an episode yes we have an episode on caffeine and it does have certain health benefits although one has to use caffeine correctly in order to drive those yeah so there's caffeine is the easy one to start with and we won't belabor the point here uh the evidence is strong it has a negrogenic effect you can take it at whatever dosage is reasonable for you and of course there is a bit of a learning curve there such that obviously the more you take it the more you need to take even though there's actually some recent evidence showing even folks who are acclimated to it will still see an ergogenic benefit even though if they don't feel a big boost of this so typically that takes 30 to 45 minutes or so but it's highly dependent upon the person so some people can smell coffee and immediately feel better and that's probably working actually through a different mechanism of anticipation but you can take it there the half-life of it is you know four to six hours or something like that it totally depends on the person so don't let it ruin your sleep but if you take it prior to Performance it has a noticeable effect on particularly endurance maximum strength may be less well quite clearly less so in fact the data are mixed there on whether it actually does anything for Peak strength although I think most people would uh Rec would suggest that you know you're going to take it prior to trying to truly lift as high as trying to you know lift a one repetition Max or similar but most of the the documented effects are on the the endurance based activities yes so my read of the literature uh in terms of performance enhancing effects of caffeine are that one to three milligrams I want to make sure that people hear the units correctly before people Blitz themselves out with that caffeine one to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight about 30 minutes prior to exercise has a definite performance enhancing effect it also has a definite mental performance enhancing effect especially when people who are regular caffeine users have abstained from caffeine for anywhere from 2 to 15 days and and that's an extremely rare circumstance but even if they have not it appears that one to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight of caffeine taken about again it's not super precise as far as I can see now about 30 minutes before the event starts um can really enhance reaction time and power output and as well as as you mentioned endurance when I was researching the caffeine episode one interesting caveat that um I discovered was that if people are not caffeine adapted they are not regular users of caffeine the sudden introduction of caffeine can really degrade performance mostly because people don't know how to operate at that high level of autonomic arousal have you ever observed that yeah 100 in fact there's actually data going up as high as 10 milligrams per kilogram of body weight wow which is in fact once you cross the five milligram per kilogram threshold you will start seeing performance decrements so there's absolutely such a thing of ruining your performance with too much caffeine so most people listening to this if you're thinking wow they said caffeine I'm all in and then you just stop listening and now you you know go for your quad espresso shot before your every time you go to work out you probably are passing that threshold if you think about those numbers one to three milligrams per kilogram body weight if you weigh 100 kilograms that's 220 pounds that'd be something like two to five hundred milligrams of caffeine which is like a pretty high amount but you know a coffee is going to get you close and espresso is going to get you somewhat in that ballpark depending on source and stuff um so you don't really need to go and blister your brain with caffeine in fact if you do is it's quite common and in fact likely that you'll actually make performance worse right yeah the amount of caffeine in different coffees and sodas Etc of course varies one thing that people ought to know is that the smallest of commercially available um coffees at the most popular commercial vendor so um generally contain anywhere from 250 to 350 milligrams of caffeine what that means is that the so-called medium and the large contain as much as 500 milligrams or one gram of caffeine so for you morning large coffee at a commercial vendor drinkers if you're wondering why you get a headache if you're 30 minutes late on that caffeine or um if you can't access that caffeine at all or even if you're drinking coffee excuse me from another source you're finding like oh it's really not doing it for me it's because the amount of caffeine in the now commercially sold uh coffees is exceedingly high it's about two or three times higher than the standard lookup tables that you'll see on the internet so I'm not saying that to demonize caffeine we can pretty quickly adapt to and form a tolerance to caffeine some people never really can get over the Jitters other people um are just fine with even a thousand milligrams of caffeine but only because they've been drinking a lot of caffeine consistently anyway it's also wildly inconsistent from location to location uh The Brew type the functionality so yeah that stuff can be very hard to figure out what's happening there's only one way really to uh objectively measure caffeine and that's use caffeine tablets and they work pretty well actually uh someone I know who's prominent in the podcast space uses 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine in tablet form combined with tea so they've now conditioned themselves to think that herbal tea actually has this caffeinating effect but um tablet form caffeine while I'm not recommending it to to outright it is going to give you the best sense of how much caffeine you can tolerate and how much is performance enhancing or is performance degrading there's actually another line of supplementation we can go down here which is not technically a stimulant but it's something I use to help performance when you don't want caffeine and so this thing specifically if you're one of those folks who have to exercise at night and you want a little bit of boost for your training but you don't want to have caffeine because it messes up your sleep and this is when you can turn to the whole like citrulline Arginine nitric oxide sort of route and we'll skip the explanation there but effectively what happens is nitric oxide is this wonderful compound that causes vasodilation and of course that's going to Aid then in transporting nutrients in and out of the cell so it has an ergogenic effect the you have a number of ways you can go about this some of them have more pros and cons than others and and there are more and more data coming out specifically on citrulline more recently if you look though in my opinion the most consistent evidence for the most consistent effect is in the supplement of beetroot or beetroot juice or extract or something like that so you can find those supplements and they tend to again they're pretty effective and enhancing performs specifically anything moderate to longer duration endurance performance and they are not a stimulant so they won't ruin your sleep that much you know one note of caution for those of you that are interested in citrulline or beetroot because they are in the Arginine pathway if you're somebody who has a predisposition to cold sores um oral cold sores that is or other forms of cold sores that um because activation of the Arginine pathway can exacerbate some of the neural related aspects of cold sores and that's because the viruses that cause those cold sores actually live on neurons then you want to be very cautious with citrulline especially high dose citrulline I can really amplify that the cold sore response what about non-stimulant yet um Focus enhancing supplements things like Alpha GPC for example I routinely use 300 to 600 milligrams of alpha GPC prior to hard physical training typically weight training but occasionally I'll take 300 milligrams of alpha GPC prior to a mental work bout less often these days because I kind of reserve it for physical training and I don't tend to use it every day maybe once every you know third or fourth workout combined with caffeine so that combination is pretty uh pretty potent I find and so technically because it's a cholinergic Agonist it's not a stimulant in the traditional sense but it has a focusing and an alertness promoting aspect to it what are your thoughts on those sorts of compounds there's not much human perform exercise performance data on those there are certainly cognitive functioning tests on those so you're not going to find a lot of information no though there isn't none we actually will use many of these substances you could globally call them nootropics which is you know any substance that specifically only has brain function is a rough way to think about it we'll use them prior to more challenging bouts of training this is something that we'll pull out say on sparring day only or the most important training session or a session when you're trying to work on Pitch command or when you're trying to enhance work on your shot and as a basketball player or you're really trying to improve a certain swing as a golfer or something like that but we do not use them every day we do not use them with every person so yeah we will use those they are not stimulants but they can be performance enhancing and another kind of way to think about this is if you're in the case of caloric restriction so whether you're trying to lose weight or we're actually trying to control weight for you know weight purposes in terms of a sports where you have to be in a certain weight class or something like that well we may not be able to give you food in fact we may not be able to give you stimulants because of the sleep thing or because we're already like maxed on a sibilance now we can go this route and so at least like mentally you're a little bit there and you're more likely to be alert and focused and you can train harder despite the fact that we didn't actually change fuel now that's a little bit of a short game in terms of that's not your permanent solution you eventually need to bring calories up or you know whatever other trains you're training or whatever we're going to do but it can work in a nice short pinch I'm very interested to learn from you about fatigue reducers and I'm hoping that rhodiola rosea will come up in the conversation yeah great let's just start right there then there's actually a lot of research on this despite most people not having heard of it I think I mentioned in a previous episode I've used it a lot over many many years you have to be a little bit careful of it there's well first of all no we only we should have said this at the onset no supplement is the Panacea right nothing's going to work for everything in Rodeo is no no different it can have a number of effects if you look across the literature you're going to find generally somewhere between a small benefit to little benefit it but not often is it detrimental with a few exceptions I know of a handful of papers that would be two specifically where it may actually reduce muscular endurance okay fine if you think about what's happening is one of the benefits that has been seen so far with Rhodiola is it is helpful at managing cortisol but cortisol suppression is not a necessarily a good thing we talked about how if you do an acute out of stress cortisol will go way up and that is a sign of acute stress however a sign of long-term excessive stress is cortisol suppression and so this is a thing to be really careful of is if you're feeling down or lethargic or tired and you think your adrenals are messed up and then you start taking cortisol modulators you could be making the problem worse because now your cortisol is actually suppressed and now you're taking these things to blunt it or keep it low and then you continue to feel lethargic and lack of desire and libido and focus and sort of all these things so cortisol is not a bad thing we want this to be going up and down uh any amounts that we want so if we're thinking about like for example waking up um you would want generally something like a 50 reduction in the first hour in terms of cortisol concentrations however if you're extremely suppressed already um going down is is only going to be a problem so rhodiola is is has a a good evidence base to support it for that um you'll see actually a number of studies that have looked at it in a whole host of areas for benefits so something good to do um the difficult part with rhodiola to be quite honest is getting it from a high quality brand and Source it's difficult to get as a single source which is a very very important thing to do with supplements to try to get them sourced alone Rodeo that typically comes in combination with any other herbals or other stuff adrenal support etc etc and also then getting them then third party certified which for most folks is not necessary but for any athletes that need to go through drug testing systems you should not take any supplement at all that does not have some sort of third-party certification so those are the challenges that being said if you've ever ran into somebody who's taking rhodiola and they're like I didn't do anything for me it it's possible that's you know nothing works for everyone it also could be just very poor quality sourcing so if you look at uh the there have been a number of papers on um its perception of fatigue and you've sort of mentioned that you felt pretty immediate effects of taking it a few times yeah I'm fairly sensitive of supplements but I've started taking uh rhodiola before workouts and found that I could push much harder much longer through the workout normally I would or typically before taking it um that is in sessions where I did not take it I would be able to work out very hard for 20 minutes or so the next 10 minutes I could get some work output and then the remaining uh period of time it was kind of a tapering off now granted these are very intense training sessions these are not the endurance training sessions these are the weight training sessions that one one time per week per body part type sessions uh what I've noticed is I can complete the entire 60 minutes with with minimal fatigue now I mean obviously I hit fatigues within sets and of course you know I get you remain human despite taking it but um I found to be very useful and I've been using it whenever I use Alpha GPC prior to workouts yeah and I've been impressed by by it overall I do want to highlight something that you said because I think it's so so vitally important which is that using single ingredient formulations for most things is critical to figuring out what works for you what doesn't what dosages you need being able to take things uh two on one off um two days on one day off for instance being able to increase dosage in the morning and then maybe reduce the dosage and combine with something else in the afternoon single ingredient formulations are pretty much the only way to do that there's perhaps only one supplement that I take at all and that's athletic greens is there have been a regular podcast sponsor for a long time that is a cocktail of many many things and those are all adaptogens as well as some probiotics and vitamins and things like that so I'm not opposed to Blends where the Blends include a lot of nutrients that are synergistic but for all pill capsule based supplements where I'm looking for a very targeted effect and it's not just about foundational nutrition I really believe strongly that single ingredient formulations are the way that you can build a rational approach to supplementation and also make adjustments if something isn't making you feel better and also make adjustments if something's really working for you so for instance some people might take Alpha GPC 300 milligrams and not feel anything go up to 600 milligrams not feel anything maybe just feel kind of they don't like it other people like myself took 300 milligrams of alpha GPC the first time I was like wow this really puts me in the zone but I want to be really careful how often I use it I did mention I go up to 600 milligrams occasionally but that really puts me on the outer threshold of kind of overall levels of focus and amped up such that if I drink too much caffeine it can tilt me over the edge so I encourage people to become scientists of themselves and the only way to do that is to try and limit the number of variables and the final point is that I think that single ingredient formulations are by far the best in terms of changing things over time you know this could be um uh women during their menstrual cycle might find that during certain phases of the cycle they're more sensitive to certain things than not others and for men and women it may be that you know certain times of year even and uh certain supplements might go better closer to sleep some earlier in the day and on and on and on there's just no real way in my opinion to have a supplementation protocol that involves lots and lots of Blends one or two Blends okay but lots of Blends I think that's um I actually think that's the potentially dangerous territory yeah I mean just take rhodiola as a good example I know a new meta-analysis came out just in the last few months looking at it and they found in general you see again a slight to moderate Improvement and everything from Power output to fatigue resistant antioxidant effects to endurance performance so it's like okay great maybe there's a little bit here now let's say you went to do it and the only way you could access rhodiola is in common Nation with that and some lion's mane and you know some other of these adaptogens and was like well wait a minute I just wanted to take this to get a better workout but now it also came with the stimulant or this cortisol suppressor or cortisol activator well now also you can't take it at night or you can't take it in the morning because you're already you already had coffee your options are just way limited so I think the biggest part of all that is you if something doesn't feel good you have absolutely no idea you don't know if it was a rollio you don't know if it was the boswellian it is in there you don't know if it was any of the other things that were smashed in there or it could be something as simple as the um the the citric acid they use like some other combination of thing and now here you are thinking that some supplement that actually works for you doesn't and you throw that out of your repertoire for the rest of your life which is you know not the biggest crime but it's not needed and you're not really going to know so yeah I fully stamped you can look back at my course lectures for the last decade and you will see like stamped number one on the supplement the sections is make sure you're taking single ingredient supplements at all costs the last part about that too is you're more likely to ensure the amount that is on the label is correct so if you're taking rhodiola and it says you know it's 100 milligrams in there and if that's only thing that's in there you're more likely than not to actually get something close now they're never perfect but it will be close if it's in a combination of 20 other things you actually don't have any idea if that's in there in fact there have been many papers on melatonin and vitamin D and a number of other supplements in which when you actually just pull them off the shelf these are these are standard studies where they would go and buy us in like 20 to 25 different supplements in the case of melatonin and we'll actually measure the amount of melatonin actually in them and despite the fact that the label says five milligrams they can be up to a 500 to a thousand fold actual concentration in that supplement and then you wonder why some people react great to melatonin and some people that absolutely destroys you and this is also why like we'll actually we'll see this constantly well people will have like 500 times the upper limit of melatonin the morning after when the half-life is supposed to be more like 90 minutes it should be totally gone but we're seeing extremely high I'm not even talking like double I'm talking 10 20 30X the upper limit range for melatonin the next morning and then it's like well what are you taking he's like oh I got this melatonin at X store or X website and you're like holy cow um so I'm not opposed to melatonin theoretically um but you have to be careful with that one in particular so any supplement has that to be true so you want to buy them from as many places as you can that are high quality and if they are third party tested even if you're not a performance athlete I want to stress this even if you're not a performance athlete third party certified and tested supplements are you're less likely to just just get wildly high concentrations or low concentrations of active ingredients and so relative to other ones who you might get for cheaper but you could be totally wrecking Yourself by getting you know 50 milligrams of melatonin every night and not realizing it so then of course the next morning you drown yourself in caffeine and then you can see what death cycle you're in now yeah and people could look for third party certification on the packaging and um some websites will allow you to zoom in on the bottle beforehand it's largely listed on on certain vendor websites a brief point about supplement cost and blends and I promise this will be a brief point different ingredients meaning different types of supplements have widely varying costs in order to you know create to get them to manufacture them so often does what you'll find is that blends will um include the least amount of the most expensive uh ingredient right um not always the case there are some there are certain exceptions to this and I mentioned some Blends that I like a few minutes ago that are for foundational nutrition adaptogens and probiotics athletic greens of course just being one of several examples out there but when it comes to say a sleep Blend or a pre-workout blend there are some decent products out there but a lot of them tend to put in more of the least expensive ingredients and less of the ones that you're actively seeking and so those tend to be caffeine tends to be a kind of a buffer against the other things meaning if you pre-workout that putting caffeine in there isn't necessarily a bad thing but if it has five other things in there oftentimes what manufacturers will cheat on is the actual amount of the things that are costly so again single ingredient formulations for eighty percent of your supplements I think is really the way to go and the other thing I know is going to come up as we're talking about all these supplements is this issue of dependency I often get this question and when I solicit for questions uh on social media in anticipation of this episode number of people said okay so if you take a sleep formulation do I need to take it every night if I don't take it will I have an incredibly hard time sleeping if I take a pre-workout every time I train will uh will I need it it's a great question some people will take supplement holidays as they may be called for a couple of days each week back back to back some people take them straight through I myself take a sleep cocktail we've described this it's magnesium theanine and things this is not one ingredient these are multiple ingredients in fact precisely because some people who have sleep walking and Vivid dream issues can't take theanine before bed in any case I've had times when I either forgot my supplements that's rare or I just didn't have what I needed or just simply took a break for a night and it was not a problem but in terms of pre-workout I do think that people become dependent on being in that really ramped up state but I don't think we view all this as like true dependency kind of like addiction totally right I mean I Define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure so you know I I suppose people could get addicted to pre-workout but it seems a little unlikely more likely there would be a dependency such that if you didn't have your pre-workout you might feel like oh you're not motivated to train so what are your thoughts on um taking little holidays from supplements and varying the frequency of supplement and in particular as it relates to stimulants and fatigue reducers the end goal anytime I coach somebody is to get them into a physiological state in which they require no or close to no supplementation that's the target we should really be in a position to where our lifestyle our sunlight exposure our Stress Management our physical activity our sleep and our hydration and our whole food nutrition provide us almost everything we need now look again there are some foundational items that we can give people we've put together a little bundle actually for this that the basic things that you can go look at but that's the goal right so the target is to be let your physiology run the guy your physiology is way smarter than we are even if I take a bunch of biomarkers from you your physiology still knows better than those few markers can tell me so that's always where we're ending up I actually personally don't like people being in a position that they have to take a supplement for anything so I don't like it if you have to take a supplement to have a good night of sleep I don't like it if you have to have a supplement to train we will use any of these stimulants very very carefully with any of the athletes we work with and certainly for the non-athletes because at least the athletes we have an end date we have a fight schedule we have a season we have a game you're going to pitch whatever when you don't have that it's sort of like you're in this endless cycle of oh you're just going to do that all day every day um we don't really need to be in that spot so what I the way that I describe My Philosophy is I will use those short-term tactics to symptom manage if I have to so if somebody comes to me and like you're feeling awful and we've got to get through the hump okay great maybe we'll give you something for Sleep immediately to get you sleeping that allows us to then come back and work on the causal problem right so this is what is why are you having a hard time sleeping anyways if you have to take a nine cocktail supplement to sleep then all we're doing is is blinding the reason why are you in that position to begin with right so we see this all the time whether it is sleep problems whether it's cortisol or testosterone the question is well why is that low now we may give you something again to manage it immediately but the task the the mystery I'm going to try to unveil is why why is it there to begin with this could be something like this is natural for you and your lack of energy is something else or it could be actually it is not a natural level for you but something is suppressing it any number of you've got some infection going on there's some allergic reaction to something in your environment there's a you know mold Mercury like that one comes up a lot you'll see Mercury and folks and that's causing a lot of problems um or any number of heavy metals or toxins any host of things psychological distress bad daily habit you don't ever see the sun like you don't ever sweat you don't ever drink we was talking about so many things so I'm always going to hunt for that and I hate using this phrase it's highly maligned for a good reason but root cause all right so we're trying to find that it's like are we making sure that we're not causing this problem and I'm not going to want to give you a supplement to cover up something if we're not even trying to solve the problem of what's being there that being said am I that concerned about people taking a multivitamin just all throughout no not really am I concerned about people taking creatine no like go ahead those ones are generally pretty fine to to just take but anything else I want a reason I really don't like giving people anything in a super physiological concentration or a superfood concentration right so again an amount you wouldn't find in a normal food dosage unless we have really a specific reason some of these things are more problematic others are less problematic so when an ant to answer the question of dependency you have a combination of actual physiological dependency caffeine like that actually creates a physiological dependency versus a emotional or psychological dependency or just a I like drinking this like that's my habit that's my routine there's a fancy scientific phrase for that but it doesn't matter so yeah we want to get off that and like again my personal philosophy is I don't want you dependent upon anything I want to create extremely resilient people and I want to create physiological resilience we actually have a fancy little algorithm we use to measure that in people and so we can actually calculate that number and the goal of us is to push that number higher so that we don't have to have anything so many situations pop up in your real life that you're not going to have your supplements or you're not going to have your routine or you're not going to have your journal or whatever but also for the long term I don't want to create a situation in which this is a short-term success that you have to now do that the rest of your life no let's just get out of the way let's fix the problem if there is something symptom management that's real while we're actually searching for a better foundational habits um the last thing I want to say about this is if you're only covering symptom you're really missing signal right which is if you're constantly tired throughout the day and all you're doing is giving yourself a number of Alpha gpcs and caffeines Etc even though there's good literature okay are you really just using that to allow your poor sleep hygiene to happen if I took those away I bet you you would actually start addressing your sleep if that's the Cause right all right you're stress or your poor hydration like you would go hunting for the problem and so like you want to walk a fine line here of going like Hey look is an athletic greens supplement that big a deal no probably not but wait a minute am I actually now covering up the pain point that is maybe needed it's a signal to actually get my ass in gear to go make one of these changes um whatever it needs to be so I know I got like a little bit meta on you a little bit philosophical but that's honestly how I approach it yeah I think it's really important a friend of mine who's a physician has a great saying um which is Better Living Through Chemistry still requires Better Living oh um that's golden that's so good you know and it pertains also to things like antidepressants and ADHD drugs and things of that sort most all of those things were developed as tools to allow people to move from a maladaptive State okay maladaptive it's hard to Define but think about in any domain of life you can either be back on your heels flat-footed or forward Center of mass and there are times when people are so compromised neurochemically that they need to use pharmacology in order to get into a flat-footed position yeah you know they're really back on their heels flat footed or forward Center or mass but the idea was always that those things were developed as things to allow people to engage in the sorts of behaviors that can produce the same sorts of neurochemical shifts and if people are thinking well what sorts of behaviors can induce these neurochemical shifts I'll just zoom out myself for a moment here and say I am a big proponent I believe you are as well if I may in doing behavioral tools first whenever possible really establishing good habits the do's and don'ts which we've talked a lot about in this series and in this episode then excellent nutrition which involves do's and don'ts volume food Choice timing all the factors and then also supplementation and also they're sometimes a case for prescription drugs certainly and often brain machine interface or body machine interface measuring stuff using devices but that the foundation of behaviors and good nutrition are really truly foundational and it's hard in anything to skip steps but supplements and prescription drugs are one place where people often skip steps and then they they don't actually learn how to cultivate the best behavioral practices including the don'ts as you mentioned and then just one more point along these lines you know you talked about taking anything for energy is really uh disruptive to the system and it is because especially caffeine while it has its uses and even health benefits it's really borrowing it it's against the adenosine system with interest and so because caffeine acts as an adenosine antagonist effectively while caffeine is present in those receptors you don't feel as sleepy you have more energy your reaction time goes down memories enhance Focus performance of all kinds yes but then when that caffeine is dislodged from the receptor then the adenosine can act even more potently at those receptors so it's sort of like being able to borrow against the normal variations in wakefulness and sleep and this is why we encourage people if they're not training first thing in the morning to push their caffeine intake out about 90 to 120 minutes after waking so they can clear some of that adenosine in the morning which tends to happen even after we wake up um people can listen to episodes on Master your sleep or perfect sleep for the caffeine episode to understand more about that but the the final thing I just want to say here and then it prompts a question is you know in thinking about supplement protocols I think a lot of people assume that once they start taking something they're going to have to take it all the time and one idea perhaps is that people have some Alpha GPC around that they could take and granted it'd be great if people could try things without having to buy a whole product I think companies hopefully are listening to this and we'll give people a sample to see if something works for them and then give them an opportunity to try it to have things around but not necessarily assume you're going to take it every time right some things you take every day foundational nutrition supplements for instance but then also to take a look at how well you're eating or not eating right at times when I'm eating much better I consuming you know low sugar fermented foods which are great for the gut microbiome I consume less probiotics if ever I've been really compromised for whatever reason then I will take pill form probiotics but I don't take those all the time because I get them from food and from certain you know Green strings like athletic greens and so forth so I think that nutrition and supplement are tethered in this way in my mind and I don't think that most people think of supplementation as something that where you can induce a lot of variability in when and how you take them but as far as I'm concerned as long as they're single ingredient formulations you can be um you can use supplements once a week if you want you can use them seven days a week you could use them twice a day four times a day every day or you could use them not at all agreed yeah some of them will have an effect randomly like that others will not and we talked about creating being one of them it's if you're going to take it once or so a week then there's I mean basically no benefit that's a very good point creatine um beta alanine is another fantastic example of something you need to take consistently if you want some sort of benefit it needs to be built up in muscle we need to use that to create uh carnosine which is what's actually going to help us with our fatigue management that's why we call it like an acid buffer so in our previous metabolism episode we talked about that being a major cause of fatigue the wonderful part the one of the reasons why beta alanine works so effectively is it blocks that buildup so that is an example of another one that you would want to take other things like fish oil you could certainly skip a day here and there it wouldn't be that big a deal I also do support your comment if you can take absolutely none of these things and and be just fine um in terms of and we'll come back maybe to Beta alanine in a second in terms of some other fun stuff my colleague Greg osiki ran a really cool number of studies looking at how exercise actually Alters the microbiome this is actually an area that we I probably have 300 stool samples sitting in my freezer in my lab oh goodness another reason to pause before entering your lab yeah another reason to not apply to come be one of my graduate students unless you want to deal with that we actually have a number we've applied for a couple of Grants to look more into this specifically with females so hopefully we can get that funded but nonetheless you can actually see some a pretty traumatic and I say that word on purpose changes in the gut microbiome there's one in particular study I was thinking of that Greg did is he looked at the the changes pre-post and ultra marathon and even within a single bot of exercise I can't remember some of the markers but I know one of the markers was specifically increased by like 14 000 percent uh after a single bout of exercise now this is an ultra marathon this is like like totally absurd amount of exercise relative to what normal people would do would be but that number I remember like it was like fourteen thousand two hundred twenty nine percent or like something some random number like that of something meaningful yeah something meaningful I can't remember which marker uh that was that had changed um I know streptococcus was in there streptococcus went up like maybe something more like 30 or 40 or 50 so the point is we haven't even had the proper time and we don't to even launch into the microbiome supplementation there needs to be ultra specific you wouldn't be best served to just jump in and take random things there um that's it's a whole area of emerging science we know very very very little about it but there is a number of actionable things one could do there so probably something to not mess with uh would certainly work with a qualified physician if you think you have something going on clinical or you know some actual problem there don't work with someone who's not a specialist a medical doctor there but just randomly assigning a bunch of probiotics or prebiotics without intention is Maybe the next Forefront of human performance research but we'll have to maybe come back in a few years and dive into that in detail or perhaps you can bring somebody out as an expert in that to discuss that yeah gut microbiome is fascinating I think of sleep as the most powerful performance enhancing activity uh of course you still have to do the activity yeah I consider it foundational like it basically raises the tide on mental health physical health performance of all kinds um there's recent data that during sleep your body goes through all its various forms of metabolism possible yep which is amazing this was measured from breath in human subjects breath metabolites in human subjects so obviously uh if one is thinking about supplementation and wondering okay what's what's the best supplement to enhance performance you gave some great rationale for why creatine would be an excellent choice provided to your eating well and hydrating well and then to my mind the next thing on the list would be anything that allows you to improve the quality and maybe even the duration of your sleep although if you wake up and you feel rested throughout the day and only need a short nap in the afternoon not everyone needs one but then generally that means you're feeling okay people sometimes get flipped onto this idea that they have insomnia insomnia is excessive daytime sleepiness where you're falling asleep during the day that's insomnia it could also be narcolepsy but that's insomnia but supplementation to improve the quality or duration of sleep or both seems to me like the most direct route even though actually technically it's an indirect route to to Performance enhancement and then thinking about things that increase alertness and stimulants and fatigue reducers do you think that's a good logic yeah we go to absurd lengths to dial sleep in as much as we can I mean the honest answer is like truly absurd this is a conflict of interest that my company I'm a part of this absolute rest is anyone that company we actually go out to your house and run a full clinical grade sleep study in you your bedroom on you and run that over multiple nights so instead of having to go to a Sleep Clinic and have it done in this weird hospital room or sort of setting with these people looking at you through a mirror it's like totally creepy um that is important because that's the only way to truly determine how you are sleeping now that said the technology of wearable trackers is getting better in fact I would actually predict those things will reach a level of accuracy equivalent to the PSG in the next couple of years and probably will get FDA approval to be able to diagnose officially Sleep Disorders um that's my total my prediction from some inside information I don't know that to be true but it is getting a lot better right now those wearables are not accurate enough to meet that threshold so the we do is we bring up basically all the equipment to do that so we'll come in and do that now once we understand exactly how you're sleeping the next question is to answer why are you sleeping that way and so this is a full four-fold system number one is we're going to look at biology which means you're going to take saliva and blood and we're looking at everything from neurotransmitters concentrations to vitamins B6 B12 Etc that are important for Sleep performance so we're going to see is that is it a physiological problem is there something happening there is cortisol DHEA ratio that we've previously talked about or is something like that off if it's not physiology then we're going on the next one which is environmental we run a full environmental scan of your bedroom during those nights of sleep that were there and that's really important because we can look at everything from dander and pollen and allergens that are in the air a quick tip here is wash your sheets at least once a week one of the common most common places that people get allergens in the air is actually from accumulation on your sheets so if you clean those more often you'll be in a better spot and next one the next one there also is like keep your I'm sorry this hurts my heart I don't even I in in truthfulness I violate this but keep your pets out of your bedroom and certainly keep them off your bed our Ghost Face Killer is my dog and milky is my other one they don't go on my bed but they're right next to my bed so we violate that one but full environmental scan includes all those things of course there's we measure light and temperature and humidity and everything else that's going on in the room um volatile Organics that are coming out of the mattress formaldehyde lead out of the wall like all these things that could potentially disrupt your sleep and we want to make sure that none of those things are kicking on uh we see this constantly people will have things like trying to be cool and they want to be cold at night because that's important and so they'll turn an air conditioner on or a fan but the air conditioner kicking on and off at night actually can shoot you out of various sleep stations so you want to be really careful about it's going the last metric on that is actually CO2 and so what you remember from our metabolism discussion is when you exhale you're breathing out CO2 well if your room is closed and the ventilation isn't great the amount of CO2 in your room starts to build up and we actually very specifically know the threshold based on information collected from the International Space Station actually we know the Threshold at which CO2 crosses and starts disrupting sleep so we want to make sure that you're not sitting in this CO2 bath in front of your face and then breathing it back in and disrupting your sleep so environment is the second one the third one is actually now psychology so um one of the members on our team is a Harvard MD in Psychiatry and put together an entire sleep scan survey so we run through all that to see if there's anxiety depression anything like that psychologically going on and then the first fourth one there is if you have some sort of actual sleep pathology and so this again will include some eye tracking stuff that we can use so we take all those data they go back to our team uh we work in combination with with Steve Locke from Harvard who's done a ton of stuff he actually set up a lot of the Circadian rhythm stuff in the National Space Station as well uh himself Jeffrey Drummer and MD PhD Etc and all these folks in a room go over your data identify what's going on then build action plans off of that occasionally those action plans will include supplementation but only if necessary we're really going to try to come back and work through a system to improve the Sleep however is needed so I realize that is not totally accessible for a lot of people but like if you really need to go to the end of the Earth to figure out sleep that service is available absolute rest sounds like an amazing tool given that most people won't be able to use it um or access it although we will provide a link in case people are interested in it and do want to try it you mentioned a few things that I think everyone should uh assay their sleeping environment for and um determine whether or not they are hindering their sleep without realizing for instance the air conditioning going on and off or this could be heater going on and off or um central heating or cooling unit um this could be keeping the room dark uh this could be cleaning your sheets certainly that doesn't require um uh that one sign up for absolute rest so cleaning one sheets routinely keeping pets out of the bedroom as you admitted you don't entirely um different opinions about that but if you're having sleep issues the dander from animals may be part of those issues and then one that I'll just add which I think is pretty interesting is there's some beautiful data out of Michael turman's Lab at Columbia Medical School in New York on negative ionization and this sounds pretty uh wacky kind of new AGP I'm sure some people like do a negative ionization but listen the Turman lab is a serious laboratory focus on circadian biology for many decades now negative ion concentrations are higher near Coastal locations so if you've ever gone to the sea or gone on vacation and you sleep better near a body of water that's actually a real thing and there are negative ionization machines but there are also some things that one can do in order to increase the negative ion concentration in their sleeping environment that are nearly zero cost if not zero cost you can look those up online and we probably will do an entire episode about this in the future but I think what you described for absolute rest really highlights a more General set of themes that I think are really important which is your sleep environment is an environment it's got a lot going on in it and it's worth running through the checklist that you described and asking you know where where things you know maybe not optimized but where am I really getting in my own way in terms of sleep all of this again being related to the fact that getting excellent sleep consistently is a completely transform everything that you do and not getting excellent sleep consistently which is a challenge for so so many people will also transform everything that you do and think and feel but in the negative Direction yeah I can also offer a few tips on sleep based on things we find most consistently for those that can't go through uh the whole protocol um one quick little actually app called time shifter is really cool for anyone that's dealing with consistent travel and jet lag so you can go and enter your location your time where you're going with the location and then it'll actually back calculate and it'll give you full light uh stimulant food hydration and stuff protocol and you just follow along with that and we've used that for many years actually especially when traveling to like Abu Dhabi for vice and Mongolia and and Brazil for the Olympics and sort of all over the place so that's I think that app is still available I hope so um it's great um a nice tool um a couple of things we found major if you're dealing with acid reflux so if you're someone who has problems like that you can just Elevate the head of your bed by like six inches so if you you know put little piece of wood or something underneath it you can also buy very inexpensive pillows that can Elevate that now that's not solving the problem but at least can help you sleep whether it's just that night or if it's a consistent problem you can do there um if you're snoring like I said it's not really benign you should probably take a look at that your first step there is mouth tape if that doesn't work you can go through what's called myofunctional therapy um which I don't know if you've covered that before but it's basically tongue exercises and that can be quite effective specifically for people who have problems with REM sleep so myofunctional therapy um it's just a it's kind of like you do like depending on the protocol uh some tongue exercises kind of the morning afternoon or night and that takes a while to be honest you're probably going to need at least six weeks before you start seeing anything but that actually is is pretty well demonstrated to help us sleep so you can probably Google we could find a link for for exact protocols I don't want to describe all them but yeah you're going to strengthen your tongue so that it stops falling in the back of your neck and waking you up at night so that's a really free easy free protocol to use um if you're struggling with no it could be insomnia but it could be just things like when you get into bed you're super tired and you can't fall asleep or things like that kind of a basic rule of thumb we use is only two things happen in your bed and if you can make sure those are the only two things you do in your bed the problems of falling asleep or insomnia tend to go down those two things are you have sex and you sleep and nothing else goes down in your bed and so you can make that environment very special and that can help uh quite effectively improve your ability to fall asleep and then not wake up early so keeping that environment specific to what it's for uh can be effective the only other thing I would think of is and I hate to say this because it's not super practical but it's just quite clear at this point sleeping with a partner in your bed it's just not very good for sleep so good luck with that one I know um you can do a couple of things if it helps uh you can get two smaller beds and put them right next to each other if you can actually have separate sheets that alone can be helpful um so if you get I mean if you're on a king-sized bed or something and again I know some people they're just like there's no chance but if you want to know the cost for your like the oh my goodness so um the only last thing I want to mention here is something that's popped up just a few times recently but you're going to see more of uh which is called orthosomnia uh so that is a term that is people are growing concerned over uh which is wearables and sleep trackers causing sleep issues so people be basically become too obsessed with optimizing maximizing scores and that alone will actually it's actually you so you learn when to wake up and so you have actually uh an anticipatory response when many hours prior to waking up so if you actually learn to have a little bit of a what's a little molecule of like excitement and reward oh dopamine that's the one if you start getting that because you wake up and you get super excited to check your score or your phone it's the same thing if you check your phone or Twitter or whatever immediately morning that'll actually start carving back your wake up time because you start launching it so it can ruin sleep becoming too obsessed so what I'll say is if you're going to use a sleep tracker and you just like don't care you want to check it and you have fun with it great but if like you are really really interested in it and you pay a lot of attention to it don't check your sleep score for at least the first 60 minutes after waking up and then you'll that should help you that's a great tool I think that um end piece of advice I think generally because I think a lot of people are waking up in the middle of the night checking their phone two or three times per night I'm kind of wondering why they're doing that and I'm guessing it's this anticipatory wake-up circuit yeah you absolutely should use either your night mode or do not disturb or airplane mode or something overnight or leave it out of the room yeah I mean if you have to wake up and like some people have um like a family member who's maybe not in great health and so they have to get their phone around in case they call or things like that so I get it you're like I can't leave it out leave it in there leave it in do not disturb and enter in their phone number or whoever's phone number so only they can get through but keep it black and white so if you do have to look at your phone at night you see black and white and you do not have notifications so make sure that there's no notification for no email and a no DM like get all that stuff off your screen and so you look at the did anybody call did anybody text of importance um what time is it no emergency going on black and white okay right back to sleep so that can help a little bit one of the supplements that I found is extremely useful for being able to fall back asleep if I've woken up in the middle of the night and for some reason can't um and is also very effective for enhancing sleep when one is ingesting fewer carbohydrates an issue that a lot of people run into or for people that are fasting for many hours before sleep you know people are trying to not eat anything within you know two to four hours but is inositol 900 milligrams of my myoinositol I I find again this is anec data to be clear that if I wake up in the middle of the night and I've taken 900 milligrams of inositol B4 initially falling asleep that I fall back asleep much more easily so that's why I've added 900 milligrams of inositol to my so-called sleep stack I've also tried just taking it alone and it works well alone but it works better of course with the mag 3 and 8 apogenic themine sleep stack the um that also in terms of tools for Sleep the the app reverie that was developed by my colleague Dr David Spiegel who's a medical doctor at Stanford Psychiatry Stanford School of Medicine Psychiatry there is a free trial there's a nominal cost if you use it um month to month but the data are really strong that people that use that I think it's 8 to 11 minute sleep hypnosis once a week and it doesn't have to be in the middle of the night when you wake up really helps improve people's ability to fall asleep quickly stay asleep fall back asleep if they wake up in the middle of the night in some cases curing insomnia in other cases really just helping people with their General sleep issues and I mentioned this because obviously it's the technology it's not a supplement but I know that some people are supplement diverse also if you look at by at the cost comparison between taking the Sleep stack totally um and the reverie app it's Pennies on the dollar really um so again I'm a proponent of both for myself but I realize that people have varying budgets and again I should say as always behavioral tools first and I think of the reverie app as more or less a behavioral tool yeah it's uh it's really just a tool any of these breath work protocols hypnosis protocols they're just a tool for you to touch back in with your own physiology rather than a a substance that's coming in so I fully support those we have used a number of those um in in protocols there's some other tricks that we can pull in those areas um I probably shouldn't say this but the real of it is depending on what's keeping you up sometimes we recommend just getting up and getting it done like if it's a really like if it's a a project or a thing or whatever like sometimes it rather than laying there all night not sleeping you can get up get it done and then if you stay awake fine at least the anxiety is gone or sometimes you can actually go back to sleep because you're like especially if the task only literally would take like 10 or 15 minutes um it may ruin your sleep but you're you're going to have room sleep anyways so you can try that tool um you don't want to pull that card very often and you have to have be very careful with what you consider to be something Worthy of doing that but that is like between me and you and nobody else here that's a tool I have used personally more than a few times where it's just like I get an idea I don't lose it or like the solution for something you've been noodling on for a long time Pops in your head and just like and you're not wanting to forget it just get up get it done and get on with your day in several previous episodes you emphasized how exercise induces various adaptations depending on the type specificity volume intensity Etc of the exercise and that during exercise the degree of adaptation that one triggers is often associated with things that normally we don't associate with exercise related health things like huge increases in blood pressure during exercise huge increases in inflammatory markers muscle damage right these all things all sound terrible but as you beautifully explained all of that triggers adaptations that then bring those markers below the Baseline with which they were previous to the exercise so that's the adaptation in the recovery within the Romo supplementation of nutrition I'm aware of a number of things some herbal some lipid-based other compounds that are used for various things but that are known to have a potent anti-inflammatory effect things like omega-3 fatty acids ashwagandha for its effect on cortisol although that's a bit indirect to the inflammatory pathway um curcumin and things of that sort given that we want inflammation in order to trigger the adaptation response to exercise and given that we want to reduce inflammation in the recovery period can we put together a logical framework as to when is best to take anything anti-inflammatory whether it's supplement base or prescription or over-the-counter drug and when to strictly avoid taking any anti-inflammatory supplement or um a behavioral tool you mentioned ice can reduce inflammation that's why you don't want to do it too close to exercise anyway I think you get the gist of the question what about specific supplements related to inflammation and anti-inflammatory responses what are the best ones when should we take them when should we avoid taking them the way that I think about it is understanding what we call the fitness fatigue model so what I mean by that is whenever you do some sort of insult the whole idea is for you to come back and get an adaptation now recovery is not adaptation right recovers recovery adaptation is what happens after you're recovered right so it's a very important distinction there Fitness fatigue model says basically you've done something and you've got an adaptation and you've enhanced Fitness and by Fitness in this case I mean it as a non-specific term so you got stronger you've improved your endurance like whatever thing you're trying to train for at the same time though you're fatigue elevated so what happens is if Fitness increases at the same or similar rate as fatigue your performance actually isn't any better and so you may think oh my program isn't working I need to then train harder or I need to take more anti-inflammatory or whatever the things are when reality all you really need to do is reduce fatigue and if you do that your performance will increase and all the training adaptations will be actualized so the way that we do that is a couple of things first and foremost is actually a taper so the the first step I think of if someone is training very very hard and you're not seeing any results and we want to think about supplementation before I get there I want to think about taper and deload if you're actually training hard and sleep and everything else is taken care of so just without going too far into taper some general General parameters there you want to think about about a 50 reduction in training volume over the course of About a Week for every eight weeks of training super super rough right so if you've been training hard for three months for something you might want to taper for two weeks something like that right it's sort of a rough estimate that taper you actually don't need to reduce intensity because intensity is not the driver of fatigue it tends to be volume so as long as your volume is reduced by 50 you can maintain intensity you can maintain in fact I generally would recommend maintaining frequency so if you're used to working out four days a week keep it four days a week you can go down a little bit in frequency but if you go down too much in frequency you actually tend to feel super lethargic so I wouldn't do that if you do those things correctly you can typically see somewhere between like a three to eight percent Improvement of performance um within a matter of days so it's important to do that um we actually ran a study on cross-country Runners years ago testing on a metabolic heart muscle biopsies blood a whole bunch of things and we did it pre and post three weeks of taper and we actually this is cool because we did this in competitive season so these were Collegiate cross-country Runners and we got them to come to our lab three weeks before their conference Championship ran them all through a bunch of testing biopsied them they went through their three-week taper and then we biopsied them again and then they went and ran um their conference championships and stuff well what happened was they end up hitting about a 50 reduction because what they did is they took out what we call the junk volume so they kept their race tempos high intensity stuff in there they kept the recovery stuff and then that Medium Pace they just basically reduced now they were terrified as any endurance Runner or Dare it's athlete or participant would understand when you take volume away they tend to get very nervous and so they didn't like like that but as a result of that what we saw is their VO2 max despite the fact that they covered half the mileage their VO2 max did not go down in three weeks of reduced taper your Fitness is is extremely stable and in fact once we actually looked at their data the enzymes in their muscle will be responsible for oxidative metabolism were maintained and so you don't have to worry about losing uh Again Fitness whether we're talking about overall performance or even oxygen capacity mitochondrial function Etc that was all preserved obviously we saw performance go up what was actually really interesting is we saw I think it was around a 10 percent increase in type 2 which are fast twitch muscle fiber size so we saw a 10 percent increase in fast food fiber size at the end of three weeks of tapering now what you may think is like wow I guess tapering is anabolic but that's probably not what happened what realistically probably happened was their volume of training was actually causing their fibers to be reduced in size and then once we removed that fatigue they just recovered back to normal so that's a good example of what I'm talking about once you remove the fatigue you can actually see enhancements in performance not because you're necessarily getting better but because you're removing the simulated suppressing you so that being said the way that you want to think about recovery like this is although recovery especially like injury recovery like seems chaotic biology is very organized and there's a very specific three-step process that you're going to go through for recovery and then there are different supplements that can help you in each of those three areas so area one is basically inflammation so this is when the cytokine storm comes rolling out it starts signaling the injuries there in this case even if it's muscle damage and activates the immune system to kick on and that whole repair process happens there um what you're trying to do effectively in fact this is why you probably ever wonder like why is inflammation a thing and what you're trying to do is bring in fluid enhance the size and increase blood flow in so you can get nutrients for repair and immune cells and everything like that in the system and get the waste out so short-term inflammation even in the case of muscle soreness is the example we we talked about in the previous episode but any inflammation it is part of the necessary process that's why you would not want to take an anti-inflammatory in that state and so why you also would not want to do things like an ice bath so in that immediate inflammatory response time window this is you know seconds to hours after training you would want to stay away from things like that um a good option here are things like Omega-3s good evidence something somewhere in the neighborhood of like two to five grams total typically like a one-to-one EPA to DHA ratio is fine similarly this is another example of when good doesn't mean more is better because for example there is actually evidence showing up to 15 grams will harm the immune response and so you don't just want to be like man I'm super sore I'm training harder I'm just going to go to 10 grams a year more and more you're actually causing yourself more of a problem so antioxidants anti-inflammatories are fine again Omega-3s in that dosage are a decent thing you can also do something like 500 milligrams of curcumin three times a day that's going to be enough to keep you in a decent spot there are some other things that you could look up maybe some potential benefit for ginger and baswellia and some things like that for inflammation but under unless we're in like very specific circumstances where we have like an injury we're probably not going to those you know areas I just wanted to highlight one thing that came up in a previous episode some not all people but some including myself are very sensitive to curcumin yep it has a very potent effect in reducing DHT dihydro testosterone and leads to all sorts of clamping of testosterone-associated positive things so um I have experienced that myself I've had people write to me and say I don't understand I started taking a supplement curcumin is supposed to be a great anti-inflammatory it flatlined my libido it took away my drive and kind of wondering what's going on there those people are very likely to be very DHT sensitive curcumin while it's a potent anti-inflammatory can also potently reduce DHT but some people tolerate it quite well and are hearing this and probably think that's ridiculous well it's certainly substantiated by the biochemical Pathways that curcumin Taps into in the known roles of DHT on libido aggression power output Etc and mood so just be wary that um a there's no way to predict this one simply has to figure it out empirically meaning you have to try and see if you like it or don't the good news is is those negative effects on DHT can to reverse pretty quickly after ceasing to take curcumin so just a mention of something that came up in a previous episode but in case people didn't hear that on that segment um just wanted to highlight those those facts further evidence do I I strongly discourage strongly discourage taking anything in the anti-inflammatory antioxidant realm unless you actually have a reason to do so if you're waking up and you're like maybe I'm inflamed that's probably not a good approach right let's have a reason to do so step two is actually what we call proliferation and that's kind of like the cleanup crew that's when you're going to be going in there and cleaning out dead cells and debris and misfolded proteins and things like that at this stage a fantastic evidence-based supplement is glutamine glutamine 20 grams a day we typically honestly split it up into two dosage 10 grams morning 10 grams a night it's a conditional amino acid which means you can make it your body can make enough of it at times and other times you may want to support it generally those conditional times are things like burn victims high stress situations or injury things like that so there isn't also like a ton of downside to glutamine because it can go through transamination which means your body can take it and say like we don't need anything here for our Muscle Recovery let's make it into something else and use it um for whatever else is needing so it's kind of another one of these like low risk uh products is also why you see it in a lot of recovery products if you're ever wondering like what the heck is that in there I don't need amino acids and you're thinking it's like for protein synthesis it's really not it's because of this it is uh beneficial to this proliferation process I've been taking glutamine for years um I tend to take it in higher dosages several times throughout the day if I remember feeling particularly run down I know there are decent data not great but decent data on the role of glutamine for leaky gut totally we're off saying leaky gut that's getting a little bit into the realm of uh like not super well substantiated but in the in the peer-reviewed literature but some a lot of anecdata and um and certainly some peer-reviewed work but not a ton and then there is also growing interest in the idea that glutamine because it can trigger activation of the neurons in the gut that signal to the dopamine pathway in the brain that it can be used to offset sugar Cravings this is kind of an interesting new uh an emerging theme which makes sense given the biology of the neurons in the gut that respond to specific amino acids including glutamine essential fatty acids and sugar and because they respond to any uh and all three of those anyone or combination of those I should say to trigger this dopamine response some people have taken to a teaspoon or so of gluten of glutamine in some water or other drink a couple times throughout the day as a way to reduce their sugar Cravings because what it's essentially doing is it's tricking the pathway into into activation of those neurons through an alternate ligand receptor interaction right also another interesting point there are very I'm trying to think right now off the top of my head I can't think of a time and I've used glutamine a lot I can't think of a time where I've ever heard anybody come back with any side effect reports I think if you take enough of it you can get some gastric distress but of course you take enough of any powdered substance mixed in water you're going to get a gastric distress response and what I've noticed about gastric distress with things like creatine glutamine and even protein powders for that matter I use a high quality whey protein powder routinely is that if you build up to it over the course of a few days then you can get away with using much higher dosages without any issue yeah yeah um beta alanine is the same thing by the way we sort of talked about that earlier if uh you've ever tried that and you're like oh my gosh like I feel like I've just rolled around in grass and my skin is itching everywhere what's that ants under the skin sensation yeah all that stuff yeah you can just take a little bit of a lower dosage and be fine but for the most part and then you will build up a tolerance to that pretty quickly so you can up that dosage along the way so what we will oftentimes do there start at a dosage that's pretty minimal like 2 grams and then every week or so you can go up another gram until you get to whatever final point you want to be five six grams a day you know whatever so that's another way you can sort of mitigate that problem so the third step in this recovery process after inflammation proliferation we're now into Remodeling and this is when you're actually you know quote unquote growing back bigger and stronger um this is where the majority of the repair is actually taking place and at this point we're basically playing a micronutrient and macronutrient game right by that I mean we've talked about basic macronutrients one thing to pay attention to oftentimes if people are hurt whether they had an injury or they've had uh just they're super sore and they are concerned about eating excess calories they tend to want to eat less food during this process because they're like I'm not working out so much so I'm gonna eat less calories well one of the things that you have to pay attention to is injury can increase basal metabolic rate by up to 10 percent wow so what you want to do in general is just take your calories up about 10 at least that's what I recommend um if that is an extended period of time then yes you may put on a slight amount of body fat or something but if that also means you come back some percentage faster then it's worth the exchange so we recommend that in terms of your carbohydrate or fat split I'm not super worried about it my general recommendation is just don't make any major changes relative to what you were doing right keep yourself pretty much in the same spot in terms of protein this is the big one you want to make sure you're absolutely at one gram per pound of body weight because we need those amino acids to come in and start helping with recovery one gram of protein per pound of body weight or more or one gram or more yeah I mean there's gonna be very little downside to having more um remember protein and carbohydrates both stimulate insulin and remember insulin is anabolic and so we're trying to drive this process of recovery that's why you want both so you wouldn't want to skimp on carbohydrates in this phase nor would you want to skimp on protein because you need the activation the drive into the tissue as well as the structure going back to one of our earlier conversations and at this point in the week I honestly can't remember at all what episode we covered this in but I gave an analogy about use making a campfire and using fat and carbohydrates is the wood and the log and the protein were the the metal structure so you need that Supply if you're trying to bank if you've cleared out in the previous step damaged proteins and you need to make new ones to recover that process you have to have the raw Supply and material so you wouldn't want to avoid either one of those things there's actually some indirect inflammation management that comes from fatty acids which you actually sort of alluded to earlier I don't think you need to necessarily go crazy you don't need to change your fat intake that much just don't drop it you know I depending on where you're at so if you're a little bit of a higher carb lower fat person great if you're moderate great if you're the indirect if you're higher fat lower carb person awesome just don't make an extreme change and don't and try to not be on the extremes of either one of those ratios but the only specific number to pay attention to again is that protein number and if you go a little bit high or even a lot high it's totally fine just don't go low so that's the the macronutrient portion of remodeling in terms of micronutrients to be honest you just get your bases covered this is when a basic multivitamin is effective what you're really trying to look at here are vitamin A and zinc they actually have independent mechanisms that are helpful here but those are typically covered in most multivitamins so we generally just give people a multivitamin magnesium is actually has some some benefits here something like six milligrams per kilogram of body weight is the dosage you're looking for there magnesium citrate is probably has the most evidence in terms of this respect but it doesn't mean I actually have no reason to think you couldn't use glycinate or if you're using another form for sleep that's probably fine I don't know that for sure but I can't think of a reason why the other forms of magnesium would all of a sudden not work so you could probably choose whichever form you like um albeit citrate has probably the most research in this aspect the only other things you would probably consider here three things calcium might be on your list particularly if you're trying to if you're concerned with some sort of bone injury and we've sort of gone past like recovering we're actually like into injury so you'll see that in recovery products occasionally and that's why and then the last two ones of course are vitamin D and that's pretty well researched and then the last one is actually uh something that can help you if you're at this stage and you still are dealing with a lot of soreness or not and that is tart cherry juice and that's actually effective for both Dom's muscle injury muscle soreness and actually has another benefit of potentially aiding with sleep so I'm not a bad one to turn to as well there's a number of companies that make these things um yeah and then there's actually more ongoing research that I know of on those areas but a promising literature we'll say not often but every once in a while on this podcast I will solicit social media for questions from the audience where I should say the audience to be and then ask some of those questions on the fly during the podcast I did this with Dr Lex Friedman I'm going to do it with you your goal is to answer each of these questions certainly not all of them thousands of them within the last couple of hours to answer each of these questions in three or four sentences I certainly won't be counting the number of sentences that you speak so just know that if you want to go over a little bit that's fine but feel free to refer to your Instagram site at a future time where you might go more in depth or to refer to a study or um if you like you can also say pass if you don't think that you can answer the question um succinctly enough for this format and here the goal is not to put you on the spot the goal is simply to allow the audience to ask some questions directly and I I confess I'm looking at these for the first time so I'll try and be quick with my with my reading um some of these we may have touched on in previous episodes or in this episode even in which case you can just kind of cue us to the reminder this is not directly related to supplementation but it is related to nutrition and I don't think we touched on this directly can we do intermittent fasting AKA time restricted feeding with keto and still gain muscle mass TBD the I am quite clear such study does not exist so I don't know I think I've alluded to before that we did run an intermittent fasting 16-8 hypertrophy study there was no keto arm the results of that study by the time this comes out we'll probably be ready though I'm not sure so I can't comment on I haven't looked at the data but regarding whether or not if you did that with keto or not I can't comment scientifically do you ever prescribe the use of Gaba supplements well I can't prescribe anything to make sure we're clear but you're a professor you can profess I can profess uh we generally don't spend too much time on Gaba rarely is it okay to weight train fasted than not break the fast and eat for three or four hours after training so in other words train fasted I do this but then also not eat immediately following training and wait another three to four hours after training once we have our results remind fasting study back we will we will have a better answer here my General recommendation as it stands now though is as long as your total protein intake is sufficient you should be in a decent spot great a lot of questions about fasting and training just to yeah to know that um can you train high performance fasted and how long before um you need to refuel the body yeah you can certainly do that I know of actually many athletes some athletes that will do that though the vast majority will not as it gets higher and higher in intensity and or duration it gets more challenging but it really does come down to what you did the day before as well so if you ate sufficient calories a day before didn't train and your glycogen stores are topped off you have a fighting chance now the duration part of that equation is really kind of dependent upon you um so are you really talking 30 45 minutes 16 minutes you're probably fine whether you're out past that in several hours you may not be and then the only other comment I would make is there is keep in mind whenever you think about fasting and any other let's say against the textbook you know quote unquote style you really really need to be careful in thinking the difference between can I do it and is it optimal so I have absolutely no reason to think fasting like that would improve performance I only work for the most part with people who are trying to perform at the highest level possible so I can't think of a scenario which I would go too fasting to try to enhance performance so whether or not you can maintain some level of performance probably will it provide any benefit I struggle to find scenarios in which that would actually make you perform better how do different forms of carbohydrates impact performance and then right below it another question about carbohydrates which is does carbohydrate cycling work so these are two uh questions from people that I think don't know one another but a lot of questions about carbohydrates and performance which we've touched on anything else that you want to add to that conversation I don't think I really maybe you might want to think about carb loading uh Slash carb cycling so carbohydrate loading does help however a misconception there is it's just you know a big bowl of pasta the night before that can help top off storages but really optimal carbohydrate loading prior to a long duration endurance performance is probably best over the course of three or four days so you want to gradually increase carbohydrate intake for multiple days rather than just have one big bowl of pasta Branch chain amino acids and essential amino acid supplementation yay nay or as I would say meh uh meh usually if your total protein intake is fine then you don't really have a need for them um if you're for whatever any number of valid reasons total protein is not then going to an essential amino acid would be my first step rather than a BCAA now admittedly we actually do use essential amino acids somewhat regularly because it's also sort of like a there's no real harm other than if you're price conscious and you're sort of like I'm wasting money that's fine the people I work with generally again that's not a few dollars for to maximize recoveries is not that very so we will sometimes use that pre-meter post training in some circumstances uh total protein would be my a high quality way something like that um if you can't use whey for whatever reason there are plenty of high quality vegan proteins you could use if you want to top all that off though and add some essential amino acids it wouldn't hurt anything and may potentially help slightly so you choose based on that algorithm ah I was hoping somebody would ask this I've touched on it a little bit it's a little bit of a loaded question the way they phrased it so um at risk of leading the witness does the mythical anabolic window really exist and I'm just laughing because the way they posed the question they're already telling us what their stance is um making it more effective as to create hypertrophy to eat within a certain time frame after working out I'm going to assume that this person genuinely wants to know whether or not the anabolic window really exists or not um because they refer to it as mythical I'm going to assume that they're um suspicious but what's the deal as the anabolic window a real thing the post-exercise anabolic window is extremely real so what this is uh you can see more detail in a number of videos on my YouTube page I believe it is the idea that you need to must consume some sort of nutrients specifically usually protein in the some time domain 30 or 60 Minutes a post exercise in order to maximize growth so is that window real yes are you hyper sensitized to nutrients in that time frame yes is it very important that you rehydrate replenish muscle glycogen and rebuild tissue quickly after exercise to maximize recovery absolutely is not real though in the sense that you that you have to have it within 30 minutes in the case of protein as we talked about a second ago your total protein intake throughout the day is more important timing though for things like carbohydrate especially if you're training multiple times a day it is very real so it is a very real thing it's just you may or may not actually care about it it may not be important for your context garlic seems like an appropriate question what if any functional roles does garlic have in performance Garlic's actually really cool there's a number of things you can dive into that are outside of my three to four sentences considering I'm at like two and a half probably already um you're not going to find strong human data on garlic extract however there is a little bit suggesting it can actually enhance recovery from injury or potentially tissue damage so you've got to kind of be careful though because in order to understand what's happening you have to differentiate between innate an Adaptive recovery processes and when we say things like immunity realize friends that's not one thing that's just like a very colloquial term for a number of things again it's a verb like it's a noun right the immune system but it immunity is a bunch of processes or processes if you're about to correct my speech I'll correct yours right back um not yours Andy yeah listeners processes tomato tomato it's a verb immunity is a verb this is my problem with immune boosters same issue right you're like whoa what are you boosting specifically because in fact if you're boosting the wrong part of unity during the wrong phase of recovery with garlic you may be actually hurting in the process because you're theoretically could be trying to down regulate that portion so you can upregulate a next portion that's the faster way to say it if you will so um we actually you may see more data come out that says the garlic extracts overrated I don't know I actually don't even know yet we just don't have enough human data on it but yeah there's some stuff there if you want to look hard enough I'm going to ask this question for myself because I'm curious to know the answer selfish tart cherry extract pretty effective actually for two things uh potentially aiding in sleep getting to sleep as well as muscle soreness that's the bulk of the research is in muscle soreness and seems to be a moderate effect there I think for people that might be interested in dosages of things like tart cherry extract garlic Etc um obviously Dr Andy galpin's Instagram and Twitter are great places to ask questions like that and to find questions answers to questions like that as well as examine.com as a terrific website um they actually recently overhauled their entire website so they have this human effect Matrix that shows the um the effects and the the strength of different effects in human studies of many many different compounds um relating to everything to you know Hormone Health in men and women sports performance cognitive performance it doesn't cover everything but it certainly covers a lot with links to studies there's a lot that's available at completely zero cost by joining examine.com you can access some additional features and this is by the way not a paid endorsement from examine.com I'm simply a long time user of examine.com myself um and so I just want a cue people to it and again many of the resources there are available completely free of costs It's a Wonderful site so for dosages of garlic tart cherry extract and things of that sort whether or not you're getting it from food or you're getting it from extra powders rather um all of that information is is pretty nicely laid out there so unless you have something to add to that I was just going to cue people to that resource no I've been using that since the first day that website was launched I I was made aware that it was coming I've been fortunate to know those guys for a while so yeah I've used it I've used it in all my classes I use it I don't even know probably weekly at this point another nice feature that's actually on there is they have a series of like they'll do some topical reviews basically so they'll write a big paper out on muscle damage or blood pressure or testosterone testosterone enhancement or um hormone uh you know menstrual cycle and and yeah PCOS I think they do one on and all kinds of stuff so you can search by topic uh like you know energy or recovery or whatever or even search by you know black cumin seed extractor like whatever number of things you want to do and they'll also tell you if there's any interactions to pay attention to so it's really really nice so be carefully if you're taking a and b or whatever so yeah it's wonderful wonderful yeah they've done a marvelous job so thank you examine.com keep keep up the amazing work well we've come close to the end of this episode and that means that we're close to the end of this series where you have so graciously joined us for six full episodes of The huberman Lab podcast to educate us on all things Fitness episode one you reviewed and educated us on assessing our level of Fitness in fact I learned so many ways of assessing Fitness that I had not thought about and also assessing my recovery capacity for instance one thing that I'm definitely going to implement from that episode is a routine broad jump test and uh an in-home high jump jump and touch test if people don't know what I'm referring to that's all contained in that episode It's Time stamped these are very straightforward zero cost ways to assess one's level of Fitness there are a few others that require a bare minimum of Technology like taking your pulse rate in very specific ways at specific times also some timing of mile runs and some other things relate to strength and hypertrophy and on and on really it's a it's a buffet of options that we can select from and I already know the four or five that I've started implementing this week I've recognized how I'm pretty good in a couple of areas I'm doing maybe maybe better than pretty well in one area but that I'm doing a abysmally poorly in a few areas that um I just wasn't aware of and so I've already started um taking on ways to uh adjust that over time and I'll keep people posted so that first episode was absolutely incredible and just provides so much actionable knowledge and the rationale behind it the second episode you educated us about strength speed and hypertrophy training and there too an immense amount of incredible knowledge we got way down into the details you explained sets reps the rationale for sets reps rest cadence number of workouts per week I'm definitely going to take away my need to do some speed Based training and some power Based training normally I think in terms of strength or hypertrophy and I'm relieved to learn that a lot of the speed and power Based training is low intensity enough that it can be done fairly often and incorporated into my program which already touches on strength and hypertrophy and indeed some endurance work as well so amazing tips that you provided there I'm certainly going to implement the three to five program that you describe three to five exercises done for three to five repetitions three to five minutes between sets uh you're doing this three to five times per week and so on and so forth all the details again time stamped um in the strength and hypertrophy uh episode show note so just incredible we even use that to set up PR with you this week that's right I did PR this week thanks thanks to your input and following that program and um I'm really grateful for that it does feel good to break through a barrier um and I intend to break through more barriers but not just with strength and hypertrophy because episode three you taught us all about endurance the four different forms of endurance how to train for each of those different forms the value of doing even very brief 22nd Sprints or bouts of jumping jacks throughout the day which to some people might just sound like a you know like a little hack or a gimmick but no these are actually tapping into fuel systems and modes of neuromuscular interactions that greatly Aid other forms of endurance like long duration endurance I would love to return to my um High School mile time I won't reveal what that is because this is not really about me but I plan to start doing um if not mile repeats than doing some mile mile runs and testing there once a week you laid out a beautiful program for how to do that and then in the next episode you wowed us again with a description of the science and the tools and this right down to the details but all laid out very cleanly and clearly as to how to design an optimal fitness program what are the things that really represent an optimal program what questions does one have to answer before designing a program what are some of the barriers in the way this concept of Defenders as things that prevent you from reaching your goals and one of the key things I have it right here in front of me that I took away from that episode is was this quadrant approach of really thinking about and figuring out how much one intends to devote to work career calling let's make that one bin relationships another been Fitness in the other bin and Recovery in the other bin and um here we'll tip our hat to our good friend Kenny Kane um for um mentioning that overall um scheme for doing things it's been immensely useful and I've actually charted it out and thought about and drawn out which Different Things fall into each of these categories you might think it's obvious okay relationships but that includes a lot of different things and there's crossover between these bins um in terms of how you can combine enhancing relationships with Fitness work recovery and so on so that episode is just again a treasure Trove of knowledge and then in the next episode you you educated us on recovery in all its forms in the very short term in within the workout immediately after the workout and from workout to workout ways to really accelerate recovery assess recovery and as you pointed out for people like me who always assume that we don't recover very well and that some sort of character trait or nervous system thing or genetic to really think about how my training is impacting my level of recovery and in doing so is revealed to me that I have far more capacity than I thought I had and already this week I've managed to train more often doing more work and I feel better than ever um and that's also despite the fact that we've spent a fair amount of time in these chairs across from one another it's a kind way to say it well it's it's been it's been a pleasure and then in today's episode you explained nutrition and supplementation as it relates to Performance and of course that touches into recovery but also optimal mental States for training how to approach one's training and how to extract the most from training through quality nutrition right so what to eat and when which carbohydrates protein amounts Windows of opportunity Windows you absolutely don't want to miss and then some that are a bit more flexible and then we went deep into the weeds of magnesium garlic tart cherry extract Alpha GPC we touched on neural transmitter related systems hormone-related systems we went deep into a discussion about sleep because of course sleep is the foundation for recovery and performance of all kinds emotional mental and physical recovery and performance and in taking us through this enormous Arc of a journey through Fitness I think it's fair to say that you've given us your knowledge contained in your head I was telling someone just the other day that one of the things that I always lamented in science is that I would encounter these incredible professors and scientists and in other domains of life too and you just wish there was some way to download their brain because they had so much knowledge inside them and um I'm looking for a USB or USBC port on you and I don't see one yet but what you've effectively done for us across these six episodes is to download the actionable knowledge and you know it's wonderful the information you've provided is clear it's super interesting it's highly highly actionable and in many cases it's counterintuitive and surprising but once one understands the logic behind it as you've provided for us also then it all makes sense in a way that's extremely satisfying and extremely motivating so it's certainly motivating me to change the way that I train in a number of ways and I promise that I'll report back to our audience and to you as to what my results are but really as we both agree this is not about me this is not about you this is really about the people listening and so for those of you listening I hope you can appreciate what an Incredible Gift it is to have somebody of Dr Andy galpin's experience and um drive and uh scholarly background who also works with athletes and everyday people just to splay out all this knowledge for us systematically over six episodes Dr Andy Galpin thank you ever so much I appreciate that far too kind of uh words to me there if you've been following along through this entire Journey as you called it you know I like first principles thinking and I like lists so I'm gonna get you with one more list and I got five things on this final list get your pen and Pat out please number one I want to really emphasize science itself is a verb which means it's ongoing and changing I I did my best over the course of these many many many hours to provide my interpretation of the science to provide my practical knowledge and things that I use but that's fallible science changes there are many many things in my career that I was very sure the uh that the evidence was clear on and then it changed so as you move forward do not think of any of the recommendations I gave you whether they were about supplement dosages and timing rep ranges or breathing tactics anything in between just use them as guidelines so number one science is a verb number two I really want to thank the audience this has been an extremely long haul as some of you have somehow I'm sure which I'm not sure how but some of you have probably made it through this entire journey and listened to all six episodes and you should probably get some sort of free huberman lab shirt or something or a plaque or I don't know how about a galp in plaque ah I got from black how about a internet high five and even if you just dropped in for a few of the episodes uh you know I appreciate you taking the time there's a lot of things you could be doing with your time and to make to spend those resources on my words is touching number three uh I want to actually thank you of course Andrew and the whole team and the crew up here for three things number one um I think it's incredibly important that you have gone out of your way to give other people credit for their work you go out of your way on your large platforms and social media to tag people to give scientists credit for their work and most people do not do that and that's something you don't have to do and I think that is a culture you know I know why you do it you come from science that's just what you do you give people credit for their work but you go out of your way to do that and so I want to thank you for that the next one is many people who have outlets and platforms will try to fill those with people who are going to grow their platforms it doesn't mean these people are wrong or bad but I think what's extremely special about what you've created here is again you have gone out of your way to bring on the direct source of information I can't even imagine how many of your podcasts guests have never been on a podcast before or have been on a very short number of them and you've made an extremely large platform doing nothing but talking about super deep dork science directly from the scientists themselves and to create a community like that it's um I'm so happy that science is is made it here and you've shown the world um people aren't stupid people want detail and people want science and you've given it them um the last one of course let's see if I get through this is uh thank you for what you've done for me in my career I understand there could have been any number of people in this chair to put me on your platform once was um incredibly gracious but to do it for 600 hours or whatever we did in this series is uh um I can't thank you enough for that opportunity so I hope I lived up to it and I had a tremendous time and then thank you for being such a gracious host well you more than exceeded uh expectations you are absolutely the person to be in this chair talking about these topics with me and for the world and like once again I just want to say thank you as a colleague as a public educator as an exercise scientist and as a friend if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for us or comments or suggestions about topics you'd like us to cover or guess you'd like me to include on the huberman Lab podcast please put those in the comments section on YouTube we do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and during today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast I'd also like to inform you about the huberman Lab podcast free newsletter it's called the neural network newsletter and each month the neural network newsletter is sent out and it contains summaries of podcast episodes specific protocols discussed on the human Lab podcast all in Fairly concise format and all completely zero cost you can sign up for the neural network newsletter by going to hubermanlab.com go to the menu and click on newsletter you provide us your email we do not share it with anybody and as I mentioned before it's completely zero cost by going to huberman lab com you can also go into the menu tab and go to newsletter and see some example newsletters from months past thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion about fitness exercise and performance with Dr Andy Galpin and as always thank you for your interest in science [Music]

Channel: Andrew Huberman

Views: 1,422,712

Keywords: andrew huberman, huberman lab podcast, huberman podcast, dr. andrew huberman, neuroscience, huberman lab, andrew huberman podcast, the huberman lab podcast, science podcast, andy galpin, nutrition, supplementation, fitness

Id: q37ARYnRDGc

Length: 185min 33sec (11133 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023

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Transcript of this episode with timestamps and speakers: https://podscript.ai/podcasts/huberman-lab-podcast/guest-series-dr-andy-galpin-optimal-nutrition-supplementation-for-fitness/