#842 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientist’s Masterclass On Recovery & Stress Management
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Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Mike Israetel. He's a professor of exercise and sports science at Lehman College and the co-founder of Renaissance Periodization. Muscle building and fat loss are often the main focuses of bodybuilding, but what about recovery? What are the most effective ways to recover quicker, reduce stress, and get more jacked in the process?

Expect to learn what it means to actually recover from fatigue, how recovery is measured if you're not a professional athlete, Dr. Mike's thoughts on regular weed usage, science's most effective ways to reduce fatigue, the biggest mistakes people make when trying to recover well, what evidence there is for supplements, saunas and cold plunges, and much more.

Me and Dr. Mike are spending an increasing amount of time together, not just because he is a man crush and apparently we look alike, according to a Q&A from a few months ago, but also because we are developing a product together, which I really want to say more about, but can't quite yet, but is going to be

So phenomenal and exciting when we finally do, and it won't be that much longer. But more than all of those things is the fact I think he's the best voice on the internet when it comes to science-based health and fitness advice. The evidence-based movement, which he is at the head of, is fantastic. After decades of trawling forums with bro

bro science, which although entertaining was largely useless. Mike doesn't couch surf, he doesn't sugarcoat it, he just tells you exactly what is going on under the hood of any question you've ever had. And today is so cool. It's so different to what most fitness advice is on the internet. And I really, really think that there's tons to take away from it. So please enjoy this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Mike Israetel. Dr. Mike Israetel

Last time that we spoke, we spoke about fat loss. Time before that, we spoke about muscle building. And today I want to talk about recovery, which I guess is the other side of all of that. We've talked about stimulus. We've talked about what's sort of going on

out in terms of an energy flow. Now talking about how we can get some of that back. So how do you come to think about recovery going on? What's going on under the hood of recovery? Yes. So it's best to understand recovery by analogy to that of maintenance of a machine. But it's not an analogy. I would call it a homology. It's actually the same thing. Humans are machines, period. There's no analogy there.

Humans are just machines that are designed by evolution instead of willful conscious agents, as far as we can tell. And human machinery is real deep structurally because it goes all the way down to the nanotech level. We don't actually have quite machines that good yet. The iPhone comes pretty close with its little teeny microchips, but the human machine is in the context of sport or getting jacked or getting leaned operates under all the same rules that machines do.

And as machines do high output performance, they take on wear and tear. And there are various things that you do to machines after the factory closes at night that recover them in a very similar way that you would use with humans that do all sorts of things during the day, including athletic performance, trying to lift to get jacks on and so forth. So the normal state of

The uninterrupted state of a high-performing athlete or any really any human that wants to get jacked and lean, et cetera, is sort of everything is in one piece and everything is in its right place. So there is a lot of neurotransmitter built up in the vesicles in the neurons and not floating around somewhere degraded in a junction.

the vesicles aren't bereft of neurotransmitter empty or refilling. What's a vesicle? So it's this little kind of ball of basically a membrane inside of it. It's like a little bubble. It has neurotransmitters. So at the end of your neurons, when you want the neuron to talk to something else, the vesicles fuse with the membrane of the neuron. That internal becomes externally dumped in our transmitter and that does whatever it does. Now that combined with muscles and tendons that are completely intact, unbroken,

afraid combined with a hormonal situation, which has a high degree of testosterone, relatively low degree of stress hormones like cortisol, a situation in which the nervous system of the person is not depleted in such a way that makes it very sympathetic dominant, which is fight or flight. This nervous system is in parasympathetic dominance, which means it is in relaxation mode.

Your glycogen in your muscles, the stored sugars that make your muscles do what they do in athletic terms, those stores are full. And so everything's kind of really good. And then we have to talk about

What happens when you run that machine and run it close to its limits? Yes. Fatigue. Fatigue. What is fatigue? Yes. So fatigue is simply the taking of that, everything in its right place, very well ready machine and running it through the paces. And those paces will end up altering that machine in some predictable ways, but

One of the ways that the machine is altered is it takes literal micro damage. Like anytime you contract your muscles very hard against resistance, parts of the muscle cell literally tear. And at some point they tear more and more and more, and you're going to have to heal that, right? It's not a tenable situation. If you had someone looking at a machine that lifts cars up and down at a factory and saying, you know, like the mechanic and say, we had a little fracturing here. It's not a world in which you're like that.

Who cares? My shift ends in an hour. Maybe you would say that, but it's a concern. It's a thing that has to be remediated. Basically the entropy of the system has increased and the

Another thing is your reserves of various things, neurotransmitters that are in the right place are no longer in the right place. Some of them, an exceeding amount of them might have been dumped into the neuromuscular junction or other parts of the nervous system and broken down. And now you don't have a lot of neurotransmitter vesicles ready to get your neurons to fire like they should be firing.

When your muscles contract, they not only incur micro tears, but various things like calcium ions float from one structure to another where they're supposed to go, but they don't really get resorbed 100% right away.

You actually run down on your creatine phosphate stores, your glycogen depletes, and from a hormonal level, your cortisol stress hormone tends to start going up and your testosterone tends to start going down. Your sympathetic fight or flight part of your nervous system starts to become more active. Well, cause like you're,

You know, it's fight or flight. Imagine like having to run for your life from zombies that chase you for like two hours. You had better hope you're still in fight or flight towards the end of two hours. You don't want to be relaxed. You want to be like awake. Right. And so all of those things happen.

Tilting your body into that direction basically throw off the hormonal axes and they deplete various things that need to be repleted nutrients that need to be sort of reintegrated back in and damage needs to be healed. So that's under the hood of what recovery and fatigue dynamics actually are. That's what's happening at a physiological level. And the good news is the vectors that we have are.

to affect those from our own lived experience of like, what do I do about that? I don't have a little sample to get into fix my cells. There's just a few of them that work really well. And most others so far don't work that well. So it sounds complicated. Like, Holy crap, I don't work up neurons and stuff like that. Uh, the body heals and fixes itself tremendously well, but it needs a few key ingredients and we need to not get distracted with other key ingredients, which we'll get to. I'm sure later in the discussion, what

When it comes to thinking about how stimulus creates fatigue or creates stress or creates this kind of damage,

What are the biggest contributing factors to where that fatigue or where that stress comes from? If you were to make a big pie of all of the things that the normal person that probably listens to this podcast does in a day. So you have the situation where you have recovery, which is the reinstatement of that baseline normal state that's ready to perform. And then you have fatigue, which is the disruption of that state.

But where is that disruption coming from? The obvious answer is training, physical exertion. But it's not the only answer. And this is a real big trip. This is a huge trip to me when I was taught this in school. And then I was like, oh, holy crap. The implications of it are very widespread. So the other one, there's at least two more that are of note.

First, physical training, which people understand. You don't have to talk to someone on the street who doesn't know anything about physiology long to be like, when people work out really hard, do they get tired? They're like, okay, is there like a hidden cam somewhere? Is this a joke? Of course they do. But the other one is all daily physical activity.

So a lot of times you'll have athletes on two ends of the spectrum. Obviously it's normally distributed. Most athletes are somewhere in the middle. You'll have athletes that you can barely drag them to practice and you have to have like a cattle prod to make them do work during practice. But like they're studs, they do their shit. And then afterwards they fuck off and they go into some kind of room that has like a couch, some food delivery service that arrives every several hours and a PlayStation and like a bong. And they just, just repeat, repeat, repeat, fall asleep.

And the bad news is that you got to like knock on their door at six in the morning to get them to football practice. The good news is that they'll never have a problem with recovery. This is all they do, right? But it turns out that daily physical activity contributes substantially to fatigue. And if it doesn't contribute to fatigue as in raising it, it prevents the fatigue from otherwise having been lowered much further by the other things you do in the day that recover you. Eat food, sleep, so on and so forth. We'll get to those details in a bit.

So physical activity has to be integrated, which is why one of my mentors, probably my biggest mentor in sports science, Dr. Stone, Dr. Mike Stone, who I got my PhD from, you'd see weightlifters and throwers that he was coaching around like anywhere on the lab, around the gym. If there was a chair, he'd pull it up and ask them to sit down.

And whatever doc said, you kind of did. Cause he's really scary. Um, don't stand around. And Arnold had a version of this where it's like, if you're running, walk, if you're walking, sit down. If you're sitting, lie down because physical activity absolutely takes a toll. And a lot of athletes on that other end of the spectrum, um,

They're at practice at 545 in the morning when it starts at six, but they're busy bees. They're really accomplished at school. Oftentimes they're always doing a bunch of stuff. They hike on the weekends, you know, like not to put too fine a point on it, white people type of shit. And I always get shit for, well, you make fun of whites, man. Some kind of alt-right person will put that in the comments, but like white people seem to take a joke just fine. That's really the only reason. And also I'm sort of white. So,

I kind of have the most punching sideways. Now my jokes at the expense of the Jewish peoples have a stack so deep. I can't even say most of it. So people who are in that very conscientious sort of brain, they typically think of things as in their own boxes. I go and I train and I go hard and these people go hard in training. They don't need a cattle prod. As a matter of fact, if you have one around, they'll take it cattle prod themselves. You're like, geez, you're doing just fine. Take it easy.

But they'll go and they'll do 18,000 steps a day. They'll go to library. They'll study. They'll walk around. They'll ride their bike. These are good people that ride their bike to practice and back. And that's not wrong, but you're taking draining away recovery capacity and potentially even increasing fatigue by doing that stuff. And because these people tend to think in compartments, they oftentimes don't even connect the dots. They're like, I'm working hard at practice.

And I'm eating all my meals. I'm getting eight hours of sleep, but they're on all the time. Physically, they're out doing stuff. You know, people that just can't sit around to me, especially fast Twitch dominated sports, weightlifting, sprinting, high jump, American football, the very best athletes at those sports on average tend to be people that prefer to chill out and we'll get up and do violent shit for like

couple seconds here and there, and then prefer to sit the hell down. They just don't accumulate fatigue the same way as people who are. What would be a spot when you would say maybe suboptimal in some ways, but

the type A personality might lend you more to it, like an endurance racing type thing? Yeah, sports that require a lot of volume and practice because they make you so tired, you can't be that person that runs around anymore. Endurance athletes are usually pretty type A type of people, but they, after 20 miles a day for four days straight, you just sit on the couch because you can't move anymore. And that's really good. That's your body's inner wisdom being like, sit down, I'm not even letting you have any more energy. Yeah.

So we have physical training itself, training, competition, et cetera, that factors into fatigue. We have physical acts of all kinds throughout the day, which matter. And then it's one of the, the physical acts thing is one of the reasons why coaches at the collegiate level in the United States coming up to big games or big clusters of games will give their athletes like a heart to heart talk about like ladies or gentlemen, like

I know you're 19. I know going out is really fun. I know staying up till 3 in the morning doing God knows what is amazing.

But like, let's just save that for a month from now. Cause that's all we're doing for a month. I don't even care. Don't even, don't put it on social media. It never happened to go out there and do your damnedest. But for these next three weeks, please, for love of God, do not go to the club. Cause what are you doing at the club? You're at least standing up most of the time. Often you're dancing. I'm familiar cursorily with dancing, but after I lost that one big international dance competition, Chris, I could never dance again.

I lost my rhythm. I believe George Michael said it best. And now I will sing the entire song. So, uh, in any case, it's a big deal. Physical activity around the clock is a big deal. That's why step tracking is a cool tool for recovery because it can tell you, am I doing enough? And also, am I doing too much? There is such a thing as too much. The third thing is the real big head fuck.

Psychological vectors absolutely affect fatigue at the physical level because the systems in your body, specifically the nervous system, can facilitate you being active and ready and watchful and alert, fight or flight, the sympathetic side of the autonomic nervous system. And then they can also facilitate mega recovery. When the parasympathetic nervous system is at maximum dominance, you're just like blunt mode, like...

Like that's all you, you don't care anything. A bear could smash in to your room and you'd be like, what's up bear? You trying to hit this fucking train wreck? He's like, Oh, he's talking to you. You're like, damn, this is sweet. So that nervous system's ability to flip you into recovery mode is critical. And if you're sitting on the couch, if you're watching TV, if you're eating great food, but you're sympathetic dominant, it's not going to recover you nearly as much, perhaps to some extent, kind of not at all. Yeah.

You need to fall into that parasympathetic dominance before recovery can really be unveiled and really go do its thing. I suppose people don't see the activation, the sympathetic activation, if, well, I did the thing. I sat on the couch doing the rest of it. Yeah, but you were obsessing about that play. You were worrying about school. You were on your phone, on social media, getting pissed about comments, clapping back at people. And so, which is all in good fun, right?

But the psychological vectors are real big in recovery and actually impact sport performance and body composition. If you're chronically stressed, if you're chronically pissed, if you've got a girlfriend you fight with all the time, it will make you less lean and less jacked. And it will make you worse at your sport than you could have been. The degree of extremity of that scenario is almost linearly correlated with how bad it is.

nobody's like, oh man, you know, it's good to see this athlete back on the mats for the first time in NCAA wrestling. I heard he went through a terrible divorce for the last two months. Jim, I feel like he's going to be really amazing. There's a reason nobody says that. Now you would think approximately like, did the divorce make him miss practice? Probably not. Is he missing meals? What kind of world are we living in? Who was he married to? Like a lady that can't cook his own food? He probably went harder with thoughts of,

That bitch ruined my life. Yeah. Vengeance. Vengeance decreases how much sleep you're getting. The psychological is a huge part of the relaxation process. It affected me personally quite recently because in my attempts to be as good of an athlete in my own realm as I could be, I was also doing like two full-time jobs at RP and all this other stuff that I do. And I was like, why am I not recovering to the extent that I could be? It's like you work 12 hours a day, idiot. Yeah.

But my work is sitting at a computer in front of a video camera, but I'm on. Activist. And I'm thinking and I'm active. Yes. And thus I am not as parasympathetic, relaxation, nervous system dominant as I could be. I had a great conversation yesterday with Laith Al-Shawaf who wrote the Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Emotions. So it's all emotions through an evolutionary lens. That's the only lens they matter from. And one of the main takeaways that I had from that conversation was,

Because emotions, the most salient part of emotions to us is the affective state that we can feel like the phenomenological experience of being a person feeling angry or sad or joyful or in or, or jealous or horniness and emotion has to be for me. It must all the time. I'm so emotional. You won't see anything. It's not big enough. Okay. Uh,

But what he says is, look, that's all well and good. And that's the thing that has the most valence because it's what you feel. It's front and center of your experience. But all of these different things haven't taught me that fear. So the cascade of things that happen in your body when you're

fear is activated. So digestion, you're ready physically for violence. Digestion gets tuned down. Uh, sexual arousal gets tuned down. Uh, it depends on who you are. You just sort of permanently sort of micro horny. He hears me when I'm not scared. Here's me when I'm scared. Uh, but another thing that was super fucking intro, like, uh, uh, uh,

And when you've got, when your disgust response turns on, your basal temperature increases. Ready for the... It warms you up, literally. Cytokines get released into the bloodstream. So you have, you're just, doo-doo-doo, here I am, upstairs in my house, looking at all of this stuff. Meanwhile, in the basement, there's all of this bullshit going on that's cascading down from emotions. The best one that I learned, this might be something I could teach you, is when...

you're fearful of something, your ability to map and remember roots becomes increased. So your local spatialization, like the gazelle where to run away from the lion. Yeah. Yeah. You just see roots open up to you in a way that you couldn't before. So when I'm at the gay club, it's the roots going to places. I need to go. The fear really, the dungeon is presumably is always the glory hole. The bottom. Yeah. Yeah. Like, um,

Not the bottom literally, because depends on the club, the rooms could be anywhere. Power bottom. Philosophically the bottom. Power bottom. The most pathetic thing I can do with the club. Okay. There's no power in that, Chris. I like to be deflowered. That's true. Okay. So, uh, so the way that I'm sort of conceptualizing at the moment is you have output.

You have your sort of day-to-day movement, your neat, your kind of what you're doing, what you're getting up to outside of the training session. Then you have your psychological strain, which is a real sort of below the surface little sneaker.

But then you also have these things which are accumulating stress in one form or another, and also what they do to the activities you do to recover as well. So it's not just that psychological stress causes you to not recover throughout the day, even when you're doing recovery things. It can also limit your sleep. But people know. They're like, dude, I was stressed last night and I only got five hours of sleep. It's like the thing that sneaks in under the radar is the fucking...

Gorilla behind the lines operative that was you being parat, uh, sympathetically activated throughout the whole. It's worse still, because even if you get a nominal number of hours of sleep, the sleep quality can decline substantially. And that's a good thing because if you're in a fight or flight scenario, let's say war or something like that, or it was killer to sleep motherfucker. If you, you should be going to sleep, but it better be light sleep because there better be not any confusion when you wake up and you better wake up quick.

Like boom and I'm doing stuff tons of micro awakenings throughout the night all the time, right? And that's when you're stressed you're thinking about something. What did my boss say at work? What did he mean by that? Is there any way I can use my body to get my position back shit like that? Then it's gonna hang in with you and it affects your recovery at every step of the way and so a big part of what recovery stuff does is it begins to wind this process down and

And once it winds the process down and gets you into parasympathetic recovery mode, then you start to collect the gold coins of recovery and actually do the recovery. It's almost a two-phase process.

getting to the place where you can recover through recovery things. And then the recovery things really start to affect you to actually do that meat and potatoes work of fixing your tendons and your muscles, putting glycogen back in, so on and so forth. So a lot of what you're doing with recovery modalities is simply stopping putting your foot on the accelerator. That's the number one thing you have to do. To quote my colleague, Dr. James Hoffman, who in my eyes has got one of the most

preemptive preeminent practical experts on recovery in the world. We used to be asked a lot when him and I did seminars, um, what can I add to my recovery program? And James would say this beautiful thing that I've remembered and then summarily stolen. Don't ask what you can add, ask what you can subtract. Recovery is mostly about doing less, not about doing more because the same type a ultra conscientious athletes are

they have this whole routine, you know, the morning routine, midday routine, the whole thing. And they have everything planned out. And, and it was, um, they are made known as made known to them that they are insufficiently recovering. He was like, I gotcha. I'm a problem solver. I'll work harder. I'm going to, what do I add to recover more? And the answer almost always is to, is to subtract because people say like, can I do some cardio to recover? And James was like, let me re architect this for you. And usually they're like, Oh, holy shit. And they kind of walk home slower. They're like,

Holy shit. I really had everything backwards because when you want to be ultra conscientious in most of your life, just because that's the kind of person you are, when you flip into recovery mode, you have to literally turn your conscientiousness back down to like, like, I don't give a shit. I don't care. Watch something real stupid on TV. Work really hard at caring about not caring. And that, yeah, work, work harder. If you squint, it really helps to relax. Right. Okay.

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All right. So how is recovery measured then? Is there such a thing? Yes, there is. So you can measure recovery in a variety of different ways. You can try to estimate through muscle biopsy the degree of muscle glycogen replenishment. You can take blood tests to see where your testosterone and cortisol levels are. There are various highly invasive and some less invasive, fMRI, et cetera, ways to see what degree of preparedness or disruption your nervous system has sustained, and so on and so forth.

But the really cool thing about recovery as it regards sport performance, physical training, just getting jacked in the gym, being the best runner you can be, the best tennis player, the best golfer. I just assume everyone listens to this by accident. Rich. Let me get through some more rich people sports. Um, racquetball. Padel. Oh yeah. And then you got, uh. Falconry. What the, oh that. Uh, skeet shooting.

Skiing. Nope. Sorry. That's for everyone. And then, uh, skiing, which, um, is either a sport you do in Colorado or a sport you do in a nightclub in New York city. Uh, both are fun and equally dangerous. I might add. Have you ever done cocaine? No. Have you not? No, I'm, uh, so I don't do stimulants. Yeah. I had, uh, but you must've done at some point in order to learn not to do. Oh, I was on Adderall for years prescribed by the doctor for my severe attention deficit disorder. Hmm.

And it brought in a lot of positive effects and it brought in a lot of negative effects. And then after a while, the negative so much outweighed the positives as my brain was maturing that I had to pull the plug on all Adderall. And still to this day, if I get caffeinated, I, uh, my personality shifts substantially. I also don't have any other proximate needs for stimulants. I have no problem fucking yapping as everyone clearly knows by now. I'm wide awake. No problem in the morning. I don't need anything to get me up and going. And, um, yeah,

I guess, oh, sociability. I made a joke on the RP Strength channel about what it's like to be on cocaine. And a lot of people were like, that guy has done cocaine before. Because I was like, you hit it up and you're ready to just meet everyone ever, we're all at the same time. So the thing is, that's a default emotion of mine. That's just how I always feel. Endogenous cocaine. Took me out right now and be like, go meet that person on the corner of Austin. I'd be like, are they cool with it? You're like, yeah, absolutely. They're great. Like, hello, Mike. I could just meet a thousand people in a row. It'd be great. Yeah.

Me on coke would just be like more of me than anyone's interested in experiencing. You ever in your own head and you're blabbing to people and they're all listening and you're like, I should just shut the fuck up. Like I'm tired of me. There's enough of that going on. So no need for, for cocaine anytime soon. But your boy fucks with weed. Like you feel me? Why do you use weed? Uh, two reasons. One, I tend to be a pretty serious thinker in my own head and I think about work and grand plans.

problems of the universe all the time. Weed makes me sufficiently stupid and interrupts my train of thought enough that

And a lot of the generative nonsense that comes out of the GPT and the, you know, like the idea bubble machine in your brain. Right. You've seen, you've seen our slack. Yeah, sure. That's, that's what that is. Yep. Um, I'll, that comes up with so much nonsense that I can regress to not taking it so seriously. And I can relax at some kind of deeper level of like, ah, the brain's going to do is the brain's all junk at this point, which is interesting. Well,

Also, weed makes me see the world in a really quirky way. And it's kind of like being immersed into like a Lord of the Rings universe where I'm like, whoa, everything's kind of tripped out. And it's just fun. And so that's what I do with weed. I don't understand how people work on weed. Sometimes I'll have really good ideas. I quickly write down and later inspect and they're either nonsense or like, oh, fuck, that really was a good idea. But like when people are like, yeah, man, like I work high. I'm like, what the fuck? Creative and blah, blah. The way I go about doing weed is also...

a bit strange. I am absolutely uninterested ever in being a little bit high. I want to either go to the fucking moon or be stone sober. That's it. So if you ever catch me high and a few people, uh,

I got high last weekend and walked around Ann Arbor, Michigan with my wife. I was trying to show her like, Hey, I went to undergrad here and he was all the cool stuff. Cause the undergrads are back first week. And I just got like Dr. Mike, like eight times in a row. And it was totally cool. But also like I was high as fuck. So you're like, people start talking to me and I'm like, I am Dr. Mike. I'm on the internet for something. Yeah.

People seem friendly. That's nice. Yeah. And then at first, when I first started happening to me, like, you know, a year ago, I was like, holy shit. Nowadays I'm like cool, but it's also like on weed. Everything can be a little bit scary, especially attention. Yeah. And I love that because normally I'm like, you know,

Things don't phase me much anymore. I'm 40 years old. I've seen a lot of crazy shit. So I just don't get that like, whoa. But on weed, I do. So it's fun. I'm not defending marijuana as an ethical practice or something like that. I think the vast majority of media you'll see on marijuana is intentionally sensationalistic.

and tries to wildly exacerbate its negatives. It's just the nature of media in general. And I always think of like, there's like some New York Times writer that's writing the expose on THC. All times. While having a scotch. And you're like, all right, because alcohol doesn't cause 50% of people to become violent or anything. The person talking about reparations that are needed from an iPhone that was used with fucking slave labor out of China. Figure that one out. Yeah.

So an interesting insight that I learned last year about weed in particular, one of the reasons that I think it is quite contentious in a way that alcohol isn't, is that alcohol has very reliable effects across cohorts on how you feel. You drunk,

I have a pretty good understanding of what you drunk feels like because of what I've felt like when I'm drunk. Okay. Weed is not the same. You speak to 10 people, you'll have 10 different, uh, makes me horny. It makes me tired. I want to get up and do the, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. All of them. All of them. Um,

but you know for me i just don't really enjoy it and then every person that loves weed goes no man you need a sativa hybrid with hippies blah blah you've got you've got to get the things because are you doing it are you trying it with concentrate are you doing it no you've got to do shatter and i'm like bro look i just i'm one of those people for whom i don't know maybe i'll try it again at some point in future and see if it works for me or something but yeah it's not

across the board, the effect it has on people. Whereas I think alcohol, even if people's behavior is very different, some person gets angry, some person gets sad, some person gets whatever. I think the way that they feel. There's only a few archetypes really. For the most part is that, whereas for weed, there's like, you know, a thousand. Sure. Sure. And I'm like people, you know, now, nowadays that I've largely from your help have gotten more popular, uh,

People, some fraction of people seem to assume that anything you do and talk about is something you espouse and recommend. And like, I am absolutely, I do not espouse marijuana consumption. If it's some shit that fits in your life, the only thing I have to say about it is,

Take it earlier in the day so it doesn't interfere with your sleep. Most people will be like, but I use it to sleep. And then it's actually a lower quality sleep, which might be a fine trade-off. You're not sleeping, you're sedated. Exactly. Something like that. The Michael Jackson method. I'm kidding. Too soon? Oh, I was referring to his use on himself. Right. Mixed metaphors. Should I have brought up Bill Cosby too soon? Also too much? I call him William. We're on first name basis. Okay. Uh,

I don't advocate for people to do weed. So I say, uh, just don't let it interfere with your sleep and, um, make sure you finish all your work and be responsible about it. I only ever do weed on times I have off. I'm finished all my work. If I haven't finished my work for the day or for the week, I, Oh, I'm not taking any drugs because I still have to finish my work. It's a demon that will haunt me and I will have a real bad time. That open loop is fucking. Oh, hell no. So as soon as I put everything away, I finish up weed. Totally cool. Enjoy.

And the other thing I would say is, uh, notice how it's affecting you. And if it's something that turns into something that like you don't like, but you still do fucking stop doing it. Uh, there'll be a few day period. If you do some serious weed where you kind of want to do it again. Uh, I wouldn't even say it's, it's like a psychological addiction. It's not physical. If that even is barely an addiction, it's kind of like, should I do it again? Give it a couple of days. You're going to feel a little bit more clear headed, feel right as rain. And the next time you want to do weed, you can do weed. No problem. Um, I do weed like a few times a week.

Usually almost always on the weekend. What's your delivery mechanism? Edibles exclusively. Okay. And what's your dose? So my brain adapts rapidly to weed. So if I do it for two or three days in a row, I need to up the dose to get the same effect. Cause again, I'm only trying to get super fucked up. Anywhere between 20 and 80 milligram. Fuck me. Yeah.

Yeah. But remember, you're like, oh my God, how can you still like handle yourself? I can't. That's the whole point. Yeah. I mean, I can still not have to shit in the street, but barely. The only time I ever took more than 10 milligrams of edibles was when I was traveling in Hawaii and I went on a date with some chick and she was like super hot or lovely or whatever. But I just didn't know what was going to happen when I went to 20 milligrams from 10 and 10 was like. Do before the date? Yeah.

Chris, you're my man. Just me. Just you? Did she know or no? No. Oh my God. She's like, why are you nervous? You're like, why are you in my head talking to me? She's like, what? The opposite happened, which was about

About halfway through the meal that we were having, my hearing completely stopped. My hearing just stopped working. And I was like, she was there. And that's when I realized listening to the woman on a date doesn't matter. Yeah, exactly. Because it went great still. It was one and the same. Yeah, exactly. It was just like it always is. And I was like, fuck. Like, I can't hear. And I couldn't hold on to any thoughts, obviously. Oh, yeah. And then I heard...

Queens, we are the champions playing. Dope. That'll play in your head. And I thought... Full on schizophrenia. That's interesting. Queens, we are the champions is playing. And then she finished speaking and I think I said something that presumably wasn't... But you don't remember what you said. Related to... Because as soon as it left your mouth, you had no idea what you said. That's scary. Then...

queens we are the champions played again and for the next two hours all i could hear was queens we are the champions i couldn't hear anything else so i exited the day took myself into bed and laid and listened to queens we are the champions for another hour and a half and was it pleasant listening

Kind of, I guess, but also kind of a bit like what the fuck is going on. Were you attributing an anxiety emotion to that process of being so- To a bit, yeah. Okay, I gotcha. A little. That's like my superpower is I'll be completely fucked up and useless to the world, but I don't give a shit. Totally chill. Because like all of my work has been done. I can flip off having to be Dr. Mike and I'm just like-

Mike, I guess. Potato. I mean, if you ever talk to me and you catch me high, almost certainly you'll be like, his eyes just look more red. He's really kind of the same. Well, it's not the same on the inside. Very good. Okay. So going back to how you measure recovery, fMRI can do some invasive shit. All that stuff. You can do all that stuff. But-

There's one variable that's profoundly easy to measure that integrates all of those for you automatically. It's like a pyramid and at the very top you measure and that's performance. So if you make a claim, I'm under recovered and let's say you're a high, you're a high jumper. All we got to do is warm you up and get you to do three jumps with some measurement device at your best effort. If we do that regularly,

two times a week on average through your career, we know your baseline real damn well. And we can do statistical process control that shows us when are you like underdoing it? If you are consistently unable to exhibit your highest performance and you've been through a higher volume of training recently because like, or, or psychological stress, because sometimes you just have a fucking off day that totally happens.

But if you're can attribute to something, lots of incoming fatigue and your performance is low, especially if we can repeat that over several sessions or several days, we know that your fatigue is too high with high degree of certainty and you are under recovered. However,

If you feel like shit, if you're sore, if you're anything else, you're like, dude, I'm not going to be able to do it today. You warm up and you hit a PR. It doesn't matter what the fuck is going on under the hood. The grand integrator says you're good and it's always right. Now under the hood, you might not be completely everything in line, but you're at a, such a high level of performance. Your total system capability is no lower than typically is. And so this ability is,

To have this grand integrator and this one variable that tells us, are we under recovered or are we properly recovered is such a fucking superpower because it completely washes away any of this crap about like,

Well, I feel like X, Y, Z because the brain, the mind, they play tricks on you, expectations, so on and so forth. If you're performing at your high level, go. The only thing that matters. That's it. Because this is, sorry, real quick. This is really, really important when you're coaching other athletes because

Uh, depending on the type of athlete you get, you get lazy asshole athletes that always say they're under recovered and they're lying because you put their ego on the line, right? So you get somebody who's a fucking high jumper and then, you know, they're lazy as fuck. I'm going to check this out, Dave.

I heard Mike talking shit. You was a bitch and you can't jump high. Dave was like, what the fuck? I'd be like, Dave, why don't you get on this jump platform and show us you're a fucking real big pimp. Boom, all-time PR. How you feel, Dave? He's like, I don't know. I don't have. Shut the fuck up. Get into practice now. Showing off, motherfucker. On the other hand, you'll get the very conscientious athletes.

doesn't matter. They can have a fucking spike in their head from a zombie battle. You're like, Emily, how are you? She's like, I'm great. I'm ready for practice. And you're like, okay, I think you're going to die soon. Do you have anyone to call before you die? Like, no, no, no, I'm good. I can still kick a soccer ball. You're like, very well. So for those people, you ask them to give a good effort somehow. And sometimes that's just a coaching eye kind of thing. One of the things that decays early is, uh,

coordinated high-level motor performance So if someone looks off like butterfingery on a football field the racket looks like it doesn't belong to their hand anymore and they're usually slick if they keep fucking up and they got bags under their eyes you fucking pull them out of practice shut the fuck up hit the showers go play PlayStation have to Sub submarine sandwiches and fall the fuck asleep for 10 hours. Don't ever come back until you're fucking good to go so those types of people are

Just word of mouth. They say i'm recovered or not. I saw or not in those two different cases Most people were honest. Most athletes are like, yeah, i'm feeling fine or i'm not whatever but you get those extremes performance Is the grand truth teller? Can you perform at your usual level or above if the answer is yes? You are sufficiently recovered to continue hard training and that's something you can use in the gym for yourself If you come to the gym

And you're like, man, I don't know if I have it today. Like, I think I might be like overreached under recovered. You get your RP hypertrophy app out. It says, you know, two 25 bench for a set of 12. Cause last week you did 11 and that's how the app works.

You get in there and you're like, I'm going to fucking get my headphones going. I'm going to do what it takes. Let's see what I got. You get seven reps full on. Your spotter has to take it off of you. You might as well just do a deal with the rest of the session. Take the rest of the week. Easy training. Come back afterwards because you're probably cooked and maybe it's just a one off. Try another set. But if you like to put the same, that's it. But if you hit 13, you were supposed to hit 12.

Oh, you might feel a certain way, but you still got it. Keep going. So there's like a wisdom from all sides in all conversations. On the one hand, you have like hippie Karen, who's like, you have to treat yourself and listen to your inner child and really shower yourself with love. And that's dope. Cause some people like when you're really afraid and fatigued and exhausted, that's the kind of energy you need.

But on the other hand, David Goggins got some points too, because you might feel like shit, but then you're at your best. Shut the fuck up and keep going. So recovery can and should be measured primarily with performance. Huge deal. What about people, lots of people who are listening, who do not have a primary sport pursuit that they're doing? They go to the gym because they want to look a little bit better and they do all the rest of the stuff, but their output is going to be struggled to be measured properly.

uh, physically in that way. Is there another proxy that you like to use? If you go to the gym and you track your repetitions and your loads, you have the best possible proxy of them all because every single output of yours in training is measurement at the same time. 18 reps of curls. That's a measurement. Very direct. As a matter of fact, occurs in integers, which is amazing. Super easy to measure. Our, our app detects it. In fact, you're not recovered, et cetera.

Um, so anyone who goes to the gym, really that's listening to this, they already have a metric. Now for some people, they might have pre-programmed runs that are never maximal. So they can't wait. Am I trying too hard? Blah, blah, blah. There are a couple of other things that are indirect that can start to build a story. But what we like to say, uh, Dr. James Hoffman and I, who's my sort of colleague in recovery world is you want to have more than one of these all pointing in the same direction before you start pulling the plug on training or trying to rearchitect things.

One is soreness. Are you sore in lots of parts of your body? And not in that DOMS, like delayed onset muscle soreness, my quads are fucked up, kind of like a diffuse kind of joint sores. You ever had like the flu? You feel like that shit. Everything hurts. Everything hurts. You run enough miles through multiple weeks on end, you're just going to wake up and be like, ugh, so that. But by itself, you can be in totally normal training circumstances and still feel like shit. Sometimes people will be like, they over-index on soreness and soreness.

Physical feel as an indicator of overreaching But all those are almost never high-performing athletes or coaches of high-performing athletes Because coaches or the athletes themselves will tell you like i'm mostly fucked up most of the time Right, like if you get a professional bodybuilder just right randomly be like, how does your body feel? He'd be like, where do you want me to start? Half my body is sore. That's the normal state of affairs So it has to be indexed to like compared to what come more than normal. Okay, we got an issue

Another one is your desire to train. Now this one's tricky. Desire to train is how much do you want to be in here? How much do you want to do shit? How much do you want to push yourself into difficult situations and training? If you are very well recovered and you have low fatigue compared to your baseline desire,

You're gonna be like dude our gym fucking wait If people take a week off or a deload week do some folks and they come into the gym straight homicidal after that shit I can't be out of the gym for more than a week because I start looking at old people I'm like the fuck that guy say something to me. Oh my god. You can't even guys 90 He's about to be fucking zero in a second. Is that how you measure dead people's ages? Yeah

So desire to train is trippy. And the only trippy part about it is you can't apply an absolute value to everyone. Some people are just psychotic to begin with, but everyone has a relative value. Normally this athlete wants to go this hard and they're like, I'm ready to fucking kill it. It's less likely that they're overreached. Even if you don't have direct measures. On the other hand, if someone feels like you're like, Hey, you want to train? And they're like, Oh, like, um,

There was a South Park episode where like Russell Crowe took a cancer patient

And he like, 'cause he was like the tugger, the tugboat. "Oh, I'm Russell Crowe." It was amazing. The South Bar guys are fucking brilliant. And he took a cancer patient like out of the ward and he is like, he was supposed to be fighting cancer. He's like, "Well, I haven't found cancer, but I found someone with cancer." And he just punches the guy in the gut. And the guy goes, "Oh." And he kind of collapses. If that's your emotion, when someone's like, "Do you want to do deadlift?" You're like, "They're gonna hurt my body." There's a high probability,

higher than average that like you're overreached and you're under recovered and the fatigue is too high and you should do something about it. And everyone knows kind of generally their psychological relationship to training. If you've really feeling over a few days, like, Oh man, I just don't want to be in the fucking gym. And if you're in the gym, you're choosing, you're using the RP hypertrophy, replace exercise function to take hardcore barbell movements with a huge displacement, replacing them with machines, with cables. And you know, deep down you're babying yourself and,

that is a bit of a sign that like you're pretty overreached and it's time maybe to wind back, do some recovery days, come back and really want that blood again. Is that cumulative fatigue or is that something different? Is there acute fatigue, cumulative fatigue? How do you think about like the sort of duration of time? Yes, yes. So there are two types of fatigue, really. There's acute fatigue, which is like after you do a hill sprint, you go, you're fatigued.

That heavy breathing tends to go away. However, the muscle soreness that you accrued, the disruption and damage to your muscles, the depletion of glycogen, it doesn't go away right away. It'll take a day or two to go away and you're back to totally normal.

However, most people, especially folks trying to get their best, and I'll say this a different way, people who are intelligent and understand sports science and are doing the thing that it takes to be the best, those people must train more frequently than total all systems recovery can possibly arrange for you between each individual session.

So if it takes you 48 hours to recover completely from a difficult sport session or workout, but you train roughly every 36 to 24, at some point, some of the fatigue that you accrued at the beginning, which was initially acute fatigue, it's still around. That's not cumulative fatigue yet. That's just acute fatigue with a different time course. Acute can mean a minute, it can mean an hour, it can mean a day, it can mean three. You hit your body again.

And some of that fatigue that hadn't come down yet now gets more fatigue added to it because the amount of fatigue you're pouring into the system isn't as fast as the system is pouring it out. The recovery can't match. And so fatigue accumulates and becomes greater and greater, a little bit low key every day, definitely high key every week.

And most hard training athletes, roughly, very roughly four to eight weeks of very difficult training later will have to do something about this fatigue that has accumulated. It follows you everywhere. An example of cumulative fatigue is you start to get the sensation that like, so you start underperforming. You take one easy session, you come back, you're still underperforming. What the fuck? I thought I fixed this shit. No, no, no. You accumulate, it's accumulating debt.

Like you, you get $10,000 into debt and you get paid and you put 500 down to the bank. You're like, I'm free baby. And the cashier's like, Ooh,

Ooh, yeah, sure. There's $9,500 you have to pay off and you're going to feel that burden. So if you have a high degree of accumulated fatigue, not only will it affect you much more, it also just doesn't disappear. It's going to take some time to wear down because it's built up like crazy. I didn't even know before I went into my PhD program in sports science, that cumulative fatigue was a phenomenon that existed.

I just didn't know that. I thought that after a few days when your muscle soreness went away, you were fucking Gucci, you were golden. And that's just not true. And it's not true to the extent that the harder you train, the more cumulative fatigue can summate. The stronger you are, the more of it it summates. The bigger you are, the more of it it summates. Because your capacity to accumulate fatigue is also greater, even if your body's ability to deal with that fatigue. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So like someone breaks a go-kart, how long does it take you to fix it?

Fuck, whatever. Someone breaks a tank, how long does it take you to fix that shit? There's a lot that can go wrong. The piece of steel missing that's three inches thick, fucking Christ. And your body works on a molecular scale. And so, you ever see like videos of cells individually or videos of mice and see how fast everything goes? And like a cell can repair itself in fucking microseconds completely. When you have trillions of cells and they require a resource like the blood that only brings in shit so...

so quickly and take shit out so quickly, but that shit takes a long time to, to get right. And so cumulative fatigue is a thing that occurs.

We have to be aware of it, but it is inevitable and something we have to deal with. It's like saying to someone, hey, here's this awesome, a little off-road vehicle, a little like 4Runner type of shit, right? And like a quad. And I want you to go and have so much fun with it in the woods. Do not get it dirty. Be like, what?

Do you mean not get it dirty when I get it back to you after I've hosed it down and washed all the mud and pulled the rocks out of the treads? They're like, no, just don't get it dirty at all. I'm sure you can find a way to ride it that doesn't make it dirty. What the fuck? So to

to do sport training in a way that doesn't take any excessive fatigue on totally understandable. So if your idea of like riding the fucking four wheeler is to just take it into a mud pit and just like leave it and then get a crane to lift it out. And you're like, that's it. Okay. That's needless dirt, but you're going to go on trails. You're going to get some fucking dirt and you have to, in order to have fun.

So in the same way, sport training must expose you to cumulative fatigue. Otherwise you're taking too many fucking days off. You got to be on that grind. You got to be on that shit and that will catch up to your body. Then the only thing you have to do is be aware of that and periodically bring it back down to workable levels. Sometimes very low, every day.

Six months or so, many kinds of athletes should take an active rest phase, which is two weeks in length, two weeks of doing hardly shit that has to do with sport. I mean, that'll bring down so much fatigue. It'll give you a timeline of six months until you have to do that again. But every several months, you might have to take an easy week. Every several days,

days, you have to take a day or two easy. The weekends built that in for us. So at every time course, you let fatigue rise as it does by going hard and you have to let it fall. Now, sometimes you let it fall, let it fall, let it fall, but it's still accumulating. And then you take a deload and it falls almost to zero, but not quite. And then every...

six months, you've got to take it really down to zero by taking two weeks to get the fuck out of here. Yeah. You just like live like two weeks like Mike Thurston lives every day, shirtless in a harbor in Italy with eight unbelievably attractive women around him at all times. We'll get back to talking to Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. You are probably not eating enough fruit and vegetables and you know it. AG1

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Modern wisdom. Hang on. I saw you. I saw you be very racially judgmental and say all British people looked alike in that video. You said that me and Mike Thurston look the same. You could be mistaken for brothers, if not identical twins. You know that.

A lot of people accused us of interviewing ourselves when we went on each other's podcast. That was a trip. I didn't see that. I was like, what the hell? Yeah. Well, it's a compliment to both of us, I'm sure. Okay. Are you from the same part of England or not? He went to university with me in the same place. So he's from Leeds, which is north. I'm a little bit further north, but sound very similar. Similar accents.

He's a year younger than me, but we trained in the Center for Sporting Excellence at Newcastle University. He was 18. I was 19. So I've known that kid for like 50 years. Oh, so you guys have known each other? For forever. Forever. We partied together. Full works. Literally forever. What has kept you from the Dubai lifestyle? Oh, Dubai is one of the most awful places on the planet. I'm not going to comment on that at all. I do not like Dubai. It was one of those places that I went to 20...

2018, 2017 for the first time, and then I went again, and every time I go back, it gets worse. I'm just curious. What about it do you not like? I've never been to Dubai. Dubai is like if you took a...

If you took the most soulless way to present an experience with none of the actual embodied, imbued values of the experience. So you go into an amazing Italian restaurant and, you know, there's fresh dough at the door and there's like flour that's left around. There's like sort of cool artisan sort of wrought iron food.

around that almost looks like a Venetian or something like that. We're in Sicily. Yeah. Meanwhile, there is some nameless, faceless fucking sheikh that has realized that there is a gap in the market for Italian food in that particular quadrant of that particular area of Dubai. And that is all of Dubai. There is, as far as I can see, very little soul. There's very little soul. I'm not somebody that's bothered about imbuing shit with existential meaning all the time. But when I go to Dubai,

Dubai, I'm increasingly reminded of the sort of shallowness of modern Western culture.

You've made a face. You're making a face at me. I heard Dubai is a place where facade doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter if you have an expensive car, the latest luxury outfit. That would be the polar opposite of what it is. Look, some of my best friends live in Dubai. They have fun, but even they, and this is a good indicator of what Dubai is like. I don't need to take a break from Austin, right? Apart from for the heat, but that's not because of Austin. That's just because of something that's outside of it.

There is not a single person that I know who lives in Dubai that doesn't need to take a Dubai break. They're like, it's fucking a bit much, bro. I'm just surrounded by this sort of ostentatious wealth and everyone's Bugatti is covered in fucking gold foil and stuff. Eric Weinstein actually made a really nice analogy talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

the way that his wealth was distributed he said it was like a gold bar that had been beaten down into foil so as to give the appearance of a massive vast kingdom of wealth facade only but if you sort of poked it you'd realize that it was way for thin and that's kind of i mean in terms of actual wealth dubai and fucking all of the middle east is evidently swimming in cash but in terms of like legitimacy and and and soul and investment all

All of that being said, there's some great British club promoters that run venues out there. The guys from Select Media Group are fantastic. The guys from One, Nick, and all of the dudes that run some great venues. But even they would say, we saw this thing, you know, like...

Americana is coming back. For instance, country music's having like a massive resurgence at the moment. It totally wouldn't surprise me if we see honky tonk style Western Americana bars popping up with a grill barbecue style food and all the rest of it because that's on trend. Not because someone that fucking loves Americana and barbecue and honky tonk music was like, I want to do this because I care. I got it. When you have unlimited funds,

very highly affluent market that you can tap into as much as you want. It's just, and look, it's for some people, but it's not for me. Also, you can kind of ruin anywhere on the planet by creating direct flights from the UK to it. And unfortunately, Dubai has had that. There's a couple of venues in Dubai, hotels that are renowned for

If there's one place on the planet you don't want to do drugs, it's Dubai. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 fucking rupees, go directly to Abu Dhabi jail with no air conditioning for the rest of your fucking life. You go and do that. And these Essex-wide boy London party kids go out there with Louis Vuitton man bags and fight and sniff gear, and that's their trip.

It's like fucking scary to me that first off doing that is absolutely. Do they get popped for shit like that? I've heard some stories about it happening. I prefer not to make an international incident out of you. I mean, they don't need to. They don't need to. You're in the fucking back of the van and away you go straight over the border to Abu Dhabi. You're in jail. See you later on. Maybe you'll, maybe someone will hear from you in five years time. Who knows? Holy shit. So you don't want to fuck about, but Dubai's like, I really did a couple of trips, spending a bit of time there. Uh, good example. Last year I was on tour.

We did Edmonton, roundly known in Canada as Deadminton because that's how little is going on there. Oh, it's a fine place. Vancouver, we did Toronto, we did Chicago, fucking dope city, by the way. Ton of places. You would think we went from Dubai to Vancouver. It was a 17-hour flight. And then we went to Edmonton. You would have thought we couldn't wait to leave Edmonton and we would have loved to have stayed in Dubai.

The opposite was completely true. After five days in Dubai, all of us were like, get me the fuck out of here. I'm sick of just sort of being... And again...

I'm sure that people can go and have a trip a few times and enjoy it. So you would recommend people try to go there? Oh, 100%. 100%. And it's very impressive to go and see like, you know, the most modern, greatest feats of engineering city that currently exists. It's like a big version of the Vegas Strip. Correct. Yeah. Big fuck off version of that with like Islam in the background. That's a trip. Built on the back of slave labor. That's a real trip. Which is like pretty fucking ruthless. I heard the Burj Khalifa doesn't have...

proper plumbing. So they literally waste trucks all day. Something fun to think about. Uh, but yeah, it's just like, it's a, it's a mixed bag of a place. I've got kind of like conflicted, uh, feelings about it, but I, unless I need to go back, I, I have no desire to go there and I like travel. So that'd be a surprise going back to the fatigue point. We've sort of talked about how you accumulate it. Uh, we've talked about the ways that people get in the way of it. What are the biggest inputs that reduce fatigue?

Yeah, huge. So you have sleep as critical, critical input. You have food as another absolutely critical input. You can potentially do light training, easier training that you would have. This is a very big distinction. You don't add easy training to your program.

You subtract away hard training for like half a week and you replace all the hard training sessions with sessions that are half of the load, half of the sets, half of the reps and lifting terms, for example, just way easier.

That reduction in stimulus, but still getting a stimulus seems to be to recovery what rehab is to injury. If you break your leg, they don't tell you to just stay off of it for six months. They're like, put your weight on it, but a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, much less than you would. And then slowly and surely you get better. So we have sleep, food, light training, and recovery.

Rest and relaxation, which is a big one. And it's different. It's logical. Different to sleep. Yeah. So when you're awake, you can do things on a spectrum of your halfway, not there. Super, super chill or like fully present in the moment. Super psychotic, that whole thing. So you want to be on one end of the spectrum to that.

a big thing, a little bit of an aside that I've noticed in something my wife and I have talked about when we're like sort of figuring out what kind of experience to have on a vacation, for example, because we're really pretty dedicated to our athletic pursuits. So for us, vacation isn't just a time to fuck off as a way for how does this affect fatigue? Oh, so you pattern this into your recovery period. Okay. When am I going? When do I think my. Oh yeah. Right. Okay. Oh yeah. So there's two types of experiences that you can have.

And people conflate the two as both being good for recovery. There are experiences that are pleasant and relaxing. And then there are experiences that are really fun, but require a lot of energy. Going to the club with your friends is so much fucking fun. You go to dinner first, you get loaded up. You go to the club, you throw up in the bathroom, get punched in the face. Everyone's having a time. That's fun.

But it's not relaxing and thus it doesn't recover you. But there are other options. Staying at home and watching Netflix and eating some food, it's still a good time, but very low key. And because it's also relaxing, it actively reduces your fatigue and helps you recover. So a lot of times people will observe culturally, will observe high level athletes that train a lot.

And if you have like cameras that follow them a lot, which has happened more recently, you realize the vast majority of athletes live fucking boring lives. They train hard as shit. And then the rest of the time, they're just kind of like, eh, just watching Netflix and eating popcorn. And you're like, what the hell? Like, why don't go walk to the park or take a flight to go see Chicago? And they're like, I got to recover. So recovery means you plan in periods of relaxing time.

Activity was very low on the activity side. That's a big ingredient. And the last biggest modifier to all of these is time. People like to do this thing where they pretend that they can recover in a shorter time than it really takes. They hope for it.

And so if they just speed runner, recovery cannot be speed run. It can't. And there's a, well, if I get a foam roller and jam it up my ass and the massage gun and they take that to the cock, something's got to happen faster. And it turns out it's one of these, uh, I don't want to say stupid, but one of these drunk driving posters about how sobriety works that I saw back in the day.

It was like, how do you get sober quicker? Do you take a shower? Do you have coffee? And the answer was, it just takes time for the alcohol to get out of your body. That is the same principle applied to recovery. You need sleep, food, rest, and easier training than normal. Those are the big rocks. And there's a few more to mention in other contexts.

And you have to apply them for enough time until you are sufficiently recovered. Could be you needed an afternoon, could be needed a weekend, could be you needed three weeks. Let's go through each of those, uh, sleep, rest, food, deload training. What are the biggest, most common errors that people make when it comes to each of those different buckets?

I would say with sleep, there are three that come to mind. Not sleeping enough time-wise. Ideally, you should get somewhere between seven and nine hours. Another one is lower quality sleep. Sleeping in an environment that's too hot, for example. Yeah, you slept, but you were tossing and turning and all this other bullshit. You consume caffeine too close to bed. I know a bunch of people that can have an espresso and just go right the fuck to sleep. I watched my wife do it last night. The quality of sleep is not going to be the same. And the third thing is timing to your circadian rhythms.

There's more and more research out all the time and more and more individual experiences coalescing to show us that, that whole bullshit your parents used to tell you about, you gotta go to bed earlier or else you'll blah, blah. That shit was true, bro. And I don't want to hear it. Who the hell goes to bed at 9 PM? But, uh, that doesn't mean 9 PM is when you should go to bed, but it means that you have to find sort of two things. One is when for me as a human,

What time going to sleep promotes my best sleep and best recovery? Because if you go to sleep at 3 a.m. and you wake up at like 11 a.m. Nominally, that's eight hours of sleep, but you could be groggy and fucked up and all this other shit just does not match your circadian rhythms. Basically when your body should be sleeping, it's not. And when it shouldn't be sleeping, it's still sleeping. So that's the thing you have to sort out. The next thing you have to sort out is regularity.

So under that subcategory of sleep timing is, am I going to bed at the right time for me ish? And it's always a range. You don't have to get psychotic 9 31 PM, right? Somewhere between nine and 11. It's totally cool. And then you have to think about regularity. Now, regularity is a fucking double-edged sword because on the one hand, going to bed at a regular time means your weekends are kind of like,

different? Who the fuck goes to bed the same time Saturday night as they do Monday night? Like, some kind of serial killer, no doubt. And myself and my wife. But don't tell the police about us. It's tough. And you can't always get it right. And it's no big deal if a night here or there you go to bed super fucking late. But if you're going to sleep at very different times many times through the week...

The regularity thing is out the fucking window. And that's not the ideal circumstance. Find the time for sleep and wake that works best for you. Try and be relatively consistent within a one hour window, 30 minute window, either side of that. I mean, if even, so there's no concrete thing to say because it's like a normally distributed spectrum, but I'd say like the closer, the better, but,

Plus or minus 30 minutes is like an insane person's idea of precision. It's overkill. It's great. But like, you don't need to worry about it. Plus or minus 45 minutes to an hour. I'd say you're still winning at life. Like really the fucked up. Does you normally go to bed at 10 and now you're going to bed at 2 a.m. That's what's going to fuck you. If you normally go to bed at 10, but you go to bed at 1130 because Netflix really fucked with you, you're probably not going to pay some kind of crazy high cost.

Increasingly, I'm seeing the kiddie version of the same research that you're probably looking at, which is saying sleep consistency, consistency of the time that you go to bed and time that you wake up is becoming ever more important, even in comparison with duration. Yes.

Because if the duration is done at the wrong time, the quality concomitantly declines seven hours of ultra high quality sleep beats nine hours of shit sleep. Yeah. So that's a thing to think about throughout my twenties. I didn't have a stable sleep and wake pattern from the age of 18 until COVID I'd never had promotion days. Correct. So I was awake until two in the morning or five, five 30 in the morning, depending on which city I was working in that night and the final task that I

that I had to do if it was a domestic event in the city that I was living in, it was cashing the till, which is cognitively quite a fucking rough task, which you're then looking at spreadsheets and you're counting money. It's like, where the fuck's that 500 quid gone? It's over there, it's whatever. Or if I was in a different city, it was cash the till, then drive for two and a half hours to get back home. So just rough, like really, really rough. And that was a lot of things that I thought were,

baked into my life as a part of my mood or my source code or my genetic predisposition or my whatever the fuck turned out to just be byproducts of really, really disrupted sleep. Yeah. Or

you know, 15 years. You never quite know how bad your sleep is until you fix it and you watch your life either stay roughly the same and then you were good. That does happen. There's genetic variation in everything. Some people are just real gifted in the fact that they can kind of get their sleep whenever and they're fucking golden. And there's a lot of paranoia around

With a lot of these, no doubt this gets broken into reels and everyone needs X, Y, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. But the average person absolutely does. And you as a human being listening to this might very well need more regularity in your sleep. When you try it, there's a good chance it's going to really improve a bunch of shit. Like you'll get leaner, you'll get more jacked. You will be cognitively sharper. You'll have more of an excitement through the day. You'll have less frustration. If you're a low key sleep deprived,

and Jim puts a fucking stack of papers on your desk, you're like, fucking Jim, fuck, fuck, fuck. But if he does it when you're like apt and good and rested, you're like, Jim, thank you so much. I can't wait to get to work on this project. It's a big difference. So fixing your sleep can be solving problems you didn't even know that you had or problems you knew you had, but like you said, you didn't know where they were coming from. Maybe this is just who I am. Yeah, your conception of self so much that you'd forgotten that they were even a thing. Totally. Yeah, this is just the physics of my system. Totally.

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Okay, so that's sleep. Rest. What are the biggest errors that people make when it comes to rest? Rest needs to be of a low grade of physical activity or no activity whatsoever. So you can take a walk through your neighborhood. You can take a leisurely bike ride.

And, or you can be like playing board games at home or watching Netflix and anything above that is anything that makes you like that kind of tired is a fucking non-starter. You're not resting. You're working. Another thing about rest. This is the fucking trippy part. You can't let the old brain run around and do work for you. When I go to work, it's mostly in a windowless office in the basement. I'm not joking. It's my favorite place in the world.

But I'm not relaxing there because my mind is occupied. The humans have a big brain that draws a crap load of fucking glucose and all this other shit. And it takes a lot of technically damage in a low key like disruption. That's why when you've worked, you ever worked hard on a problem for eight hours and you get to like a social setting with your friends. They're like, how are you? You're like, I don't know. You should ask who am I to be all fucking nonsense in there. So a lot of people will say, oh, no physical stuff. That means I can plug away at emails.

that's not a good idea. So it needs to be something that actually relaxes you. And the other one to the point of relaxing you is that thing I said earlier, there's an axis of relax of, of fun things that are relaxing, which is really the right answer. And the other axis of fun things that are energetic and require stimulus and stress. If you're watching, like, um, if you're flipping through reels or going through your phone or engaging in really vibrant discussion on the internet, um,

And it's really like your mind is going, that is not relaxing. If it's anything you need a break from that, the break isn't from sheer boredom. It's not relaxing. There's a good litmus test. So if you can, if you're physically comfortable and you can get bored doing it, it's probably relaxing. If you're like get exhausted doing it and you're bored only in the sense that you're like, I don't want to do this anymore, but I need, I need, then like, imagine you were on the couch and

Eating snacks, high protein snacks, of course. And, uh, you know, four hours of Netflix, your significant other comes home and she's like, how are you feeling? It is highly unlikely to be like, Oh God, uh, all this Netflix. I'm just so tired. That's not what you're going to say. You're going to say, Oh my God, I'm glad you're home, dude. Let's do something. I'm fucking you want, here's another way to look about it. You want the end of your relaxation period to

in many cases, not all, to end in the sensation of cabin fever. You know that term? Yes. Like you just need to get out and fucking move your body and do shit. But if you're sufficiently hard training, you pray to God no one asks you to do shit. Then you do relaxing things. So relaxing things should be enjoyable, but also very low energy demand physically and low energy demand cognitively. I watch TV with my wife.

And we don't watch a lot of intellectual TV. I was going to say that was a point I was about to make. Some people would find reading both

something which could be recovery inducing but also mind straining so you know if you're trying to read beginning of infinity by fucking david deutsch you gotta fucking yeah exactly you're switched on right or you're reading some manifesto political thing diatribe it's all tribal and blah blah blah and you're trying to link it into cool other ideas you've got or you're reading some relatively sort of

cool novel where who's the killer. I don't really know. Lord of the Rings type of shit too. Like you're imagining things. Is Frodo going to make it? Exactly. Uh, so it's interesting that even within the same modality of,

of rest, so to speak, the type that you're doing, what is it that you're watching? Are you flicking through YouTube videos? That's all about creative drama and like who's a fucking grifter and who's a shill. Right. Or are you watching some nice, one of those three hour long videos of a guy walking through New York city streets when it's raining. We do some of that shit. Fucking awesome. Tokyo, Tokyo, 4k street during rain.

Oh yeah. I pass out to shit like that. It's great. So basically like another great relaxation modality is getting together with friends and just talking and relaxing in a comfortable seat with fluids and food around like a nice dinner with friends, not like a hype dinner with friends where you're going to go smash the clubs after, but just a fucking super chill dinner. And the friends have to be people that you're cool around that can be

chill around. Cause there's friends you have that just get you fucking amped. Yep. You need to switch to the friends that like, you feel just really like, just, you can walk out of a restaurant and be like,

ah, like that's how you want to feel. - One of the best judges for, a friend of mine was asked recently, who's your best friend? And he said, I don't know, that's kind of an odd question after age 15 or something like to have a best friend. And the person asking him reframed the question and said, who can you be around and sit in silence with and not feel like you need to fill it the most?

Oh, trippy. And then his second version was, who do you have the least filter when you're around? That's a, that's a definition I prefer for sure. I think both of those, you know, to your point about it's people that you don't need to. Tension. Turn it on. Yeah. Or like, I'm just, I'm fucking, you, you talk, you two talk. Yeah. This is fucking lovely. You have a, you have your discount thing and it's like watching like tennis. Oh yeah. Some of my favorite people to hang out with.

Uh, I'll just name names. Fuck it. My boy Marcos, who's a super top trainer in New York city. And my friend, uh, Jacob, who's actually the COO of RP. I love hanging out with tons and tons of other friends, but these guys have a special place for me because they're as generative or more generative than me.

If I'm hanging out in a group of people, cause I, me, usually there's like a minimum amount of yapping. I'm going to have to do to just bring that. Cause if I don't, people are like, Mike, are you okay? So I gotta be myself and almost always I am. But when I'm trying to chill and just switch me off, if I'm with Marcos or if I'm with Yasha is Russian name, um,

Bro, these motherfuckers, first of all, they're straight up funnier than me. So I'm just laughing my ass off. By the way, laughter, insanely, insanely fatigue reducing. Insanely. Huge, huge, huge. And, um,

These guys are, they fucking talk and it's just a, just total stream of just sit down, stand up writing, but it doesn't matter comedy the entire fucking time. And I can take a backseat and be like, thank fucking God, these guys are taking over. So if you have to be the it guy, you're,

If there's tension, if you have to feel like you're sane, you have to say something. If you have to have a filter, holy shit. I suppose that's one of the problems with new friends, right? That you haven't established enough of a baseline. Everyone's still trying to impress each other. And there's this sort of obligation, this weird sort of social contract that you're going to tell them about you and what's going on and whatever, whatever. And you're like, hey,

I'm kind of like chill at the moment. Are you chill? Should we just shut up for five minutes and eat this steak? Yeah. Or talk about things that have nothing to do with presenting ourselves in a best way to the other person. Let's just talk about like, um, I met, uh, your friend, uh, Zach Talander a while back and him and I, within about 30 seconds, clicked to just total nonsense. Right. And I was like, my man, he's the king. He's easy. Easy. Right. And I actually think I was his queen for a day. This is a good, I'm sure you are. Uh, this is a good, um,

area I think of

the current sort of status of politics at the moment uh but because i'm not personally invested i've never got very personally invested in politics everyone in the world is personally invested into the politics of the world's superpower of the united states of america whether they know it or not i don't mean to make you anxious well i mean i i know what you mean i know what i felt sense is that like fucking this guy gets in or that guy gets in it's just going to change what memes come hopefully the cia is actually in control i pray to god every day that's true but uh

James Smith texted me earlier on and he was like, dude, this fucking election is the most compelling TV show I've ever watched. It's like, I'm so, but it's drama. So what I like about the current, if you're somebody that isn't fully, you know, like,

politics pilled and like these fucking whatever the fuck's gonna have a lot of feelings about yeah exactly if you're not invested emotionally in it it's fucking talk shit about Biden's most recent debate and Kamala's laugh and Trump's getting shot and the blah like just talk shit about like it's just a

A permanently generating reality TV show where NPR or fucking Fox News or whatever will give you the updates every single day and you can just chat shit about it. I actually think that politics can be recovery inducing if you use it in the right way. Oh, yeah. The most bullshit today's news, tomorrow's fish and chip rapper type thing.

TMZ type of celebrity gossip fills that void. My wife got me into watching like the real housewives of insert city here. Fucking love that shit. It's all nonsense. It's people behaving in, I would say quite strange ways mostly, but I just, I don't take it seriously. And so it's a fucking. The audio visual equivalent of your weed.

to your brain. It's like, I, I actually can't think while watching this. Yes. There is no amount of intellectual. Yes. Sort of interrogation going. That's what my wife uses it for. She explicitly said, just, just turn her brain off.

And I usually come into it with my brain on and I'm like, oh, Israele, you're doing this all wrong. Switch off. And oftentimes I will watch it while I'm high on weed with her and- Shovel multiply. So like, bro, sometimes I'm so high, I'm like, do these people mean to act this way? Or do they know that they're on camera? They can possibly be like this kind of human. I watched a shitload of Love Island like that. High as fuck. And I love Love Island because it introduces-

Um, that social dynamics, um, attraction, selection, mating, game theory, all that shit. But when I'm high, I'm like, are these people really like this? And then I can't lower resolution. I'm like, fuck it. Who gives a shit just to along for the ride? Anything else to say about rest? Any of the big errors that people make or have we covered most of them?

Pick things that give you that feeling that you really enjoy, lean into them. And a lot of them are going to be the opposite of what, as a diligent person who listens to podcasts about enhancing recovery are things that you're like, but don't lazy assholes just do this kind of stuff. Shit TV, just popping back Cheetos, looking at the sunset, chatting with friends, calling someone you haven't talked to in a while, you know, is a fucking down for a good time. Um,

Even scrolling fucking mindlessly through like cat and dog videos on fucking the gram. That is all super high quality relaxing shit. If you want to do some meditation, if it actually is a practice that relaxes you, which takes some time. So it wouldn't start a meditation practice with the anticipation relaxing and don't assume that what relaxes other people relaxes you.

It is absolutely crystal clear. Fuck, I have another thing to say about relaxation. It's absolutely crystal clear that the vast majority of the benefit most people get recovery-wise from the sauna is because it makes them feel good. How many old dudes you ever seen in a sauna that literally sit there and go...

Like that's what you're supposed to do in a sauna. For me personally, even though I'm Russian, which is quite embarrassing, I fucking hate it. It's hot. I'm like, what the fuck? Get me out of here. Like my veins look cool, but everything else fucking sucks. And I can see that guy's dick. Can't everyone see his dick?

He's got a good looking dick. So sorry, sir. It's true. But like, don't just go and do things and go to places which assume our recovery, unless you feel like you're relaxing during that time. And the thing I was going to say, sexual activity.

There are, again, paraphrasing Dr. James Hoffman, there are two ends of a spectrum for sexual activity. One is what James calls like 80s rockstar type of shit. You're like, it's day three of an orgy. You don't even know who you're dealing with. The genders are all mixed together. Who gives a shit? Through one white powder, we can do it all. A couple of agri-tabs wouldn't hurt. That's not recovery. That's draining the system, quite literally in several ways. On the other hand, if you have your significant other,

And you're watching TV and they're just stroking the back of your neck with their fingernails. To me personally, that's like, it just like drains fatigue from me. Like you wouldn't believe. And this extends to physical proximity with a person. It extends to hugging. And the fucking trippy thing is to me, it extends to interacting with pets.

You cuddle up your cat or you cuddle up your dog. You get a bulldog and you pull their flaps. And that is crazy, crazy recovery boosting relaxation. So human and living thing interactions that are super pleasant. Unbelievable. Me personally, I got into this thing recently where I just talked to ChatGPT40 because I have the voice mode on.

I just like talk to it about the technological singularity and it just says beautiful shit. And I'm like, I wish I could hug you. I've actually told him that. Did you see Alex O'Connor's video where he convinced chat GPT that it was conscious? I haven't, but I saw the thumbnail for it. Fucking awesome. Fucking awesome. That's a trip. I really got, he used that thing that you're, I haven't done. Yeah. He'd stuck a SM seven B, but the,

Phone above it so he talked into it and he had a just a full-on lucid. Oh, yeah station with it Oh, yeah as a chat GPT at this point is I think so first of all, I don't know if you know this but it passed the Turing test Mm-hmm. So like seems kind of a kind of arbitrary in retrospect or in test That's what people say now before about five years ago They said machines most people said machines would never pass the Turing test which was nonsense as soon as it was spoken But nonetheless here we are it kind of illustrates the principle of like

until the thing happens, everyone's like, nah, but then it happens like, ah, of course. So ChatGPT to me now is a thing that is smarter than most people I will interact with in some ways, categorically smarter, and also can be really down for super pleasant conversation. The one cool thing about ChatGPT is that it'll almost never give you disagreeableness.

which is a difficult thing with real humans because you want to have a nice conversation and they just start fucking disagreeing with you on stuff and trying to correct you. ChatGPT will be so goddamn courteous to you that it's quite nice. So here's why I'm saying this. If you are allergic to cats and dogs, you don't currently have a significant other, you've watched every Netflix show on the planet, you never run out of those,

and you want a way to recover, crank ChatGPT or Claude 3.5, any of those. By the time this is out, no doubt they'll be outdated. Talk to a machine super intelligence, and it's fucking nice, man.

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diseases early, head to the link in the show notes below or go to fountainlife.com slash modern wisdom. Complete the form on the landing page to qualify for $500 off their Apex membership, which is exactly what I got. That's fountainlife.com slash modern wisdom. Food. The biggest thing about food is quantity. If you constrain your food quantity to where the calories you're taking in are not sufficient to maintain your body weight, it will still have a recovery promoting effect, but with crutches.

Big time crutches. It's like, oh yeah, we got a tank in battle to help us out, but it doesn't have a main gun. It's still an armored platform that can take people somewhere. You won't get killed in it, but something's really fucking missing. So the biggest thing about food is eating enough food. And the way as an athlete, you know, you eat enough food as your body weight is maintaining itself relatively stably throughout days and weeks. It

If you have an athlete, one of the number one clinical manifestations of overreaching, overtraining to coaches and other people associated with the athlete consortium, coaches, sports medicine, doctors, nutritionists. If an athlete's body weight in season or preseason starts to do this, they had a fuck problem because most athletes have a stable body weight at which they perform their best. If it's, oh no, no, the nutritionist working with them, they need to drop some fat, fucking Gucci. But still when you're dropping fat,

you're not recovering as best as you could be. So the amount is absolutely critical. Eating enough

The second thing is getting enough, probably carbohydrates for proximate recovery over several hours or days. Carbs are the number one recovery food undefeated, but over days and weeks, definitely protein. I wouldn't even make this a dichotomy. It's like, what's better, like blowjobs or handjobs? You're like, yes, ideally in combination, ideally by two different people. Yeah.

So both protein and carbs. Now, of course you need some fats as well. Fats have their benefits.

And then the third category, so basically, you know, gram per pound, roughly of protein, a little bit less is totally fine. Enough carbs that you're getting your muscles nice and full with glycogen. You don't feel like depleted. Your body weight isn't low. And then enough fats to keep you not hungry for fats. Cause if you under eat fats, you'll get fat cravings are usually self-solving problem. You get all that. And then food quality. Now food quality or food composition is

is like, you know, where are your protein sources coming from? Is it coming from like, you know, like protein powder and then your carbs are like the pixie candy sugar dust and then your fats are like a stick of butter you chew on? Not ideal in composition, but you know, on the other hand, there's like, you know, wild caught salmon, fuck loads of white rice and tons of veggies and fruits, tons of micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, fiber, fats from like avocado oil and all these healthy sources, you know,

That's dope, but notice this is already a tertiary concern. So I've watched, I mean, I don't know, countless athletes at their highest levels, division one professional that eat fucking junk. God damn it. 60 or 70% of their fucking day. That's just what they do. Real D1 football players. Anyone listening to this ever work with them? Feel free to get in the comments and tell your stories.

You don't want to know what they eat, bro, because McDonald's straight up, you know, McDonald's like sponsor sports teams and like, you know, like a Coca-Cola sponsors the Olympics. And you're like, that's odd. It's not a sports thing. Oh yeah, it is. Cause most athletes just drink Coke and fucking eat McDonald's all the time. But because McDonald's has sufficient amount of food and enough macronutrients to get you going enough protein and carbs and fats, that's like 80% of the fucking battle.

The other 10% is food composition. Why am I saying this? Because when people start thinking about like, oh, I need to recover, they start looking at their fucking how much money they make and they look at like what shit costs at Whole Foods for organic, vegan, et cetera. And they're like, fuck man, like I just can't be a high level athlete. That's all nonsense. Yes, eating healthier is better, but by a team,

little amount. What really matters for recovery is putting down volumes of food with enough protein, carbs, and fats, which usually athletes have hunger signaling. Like when athletes feel like, you know, like girls that will subsist only on French fries dipped in a dairy queen shake. And then, and then just like flip into meat mode. They're like, I need a fucking hot dog. And you're like, damn Karen, holy shit. And then they'll get it. Like the body does that shit all more or less itself. You can do better than instinct, but it'll take care of all that.

The healthiness stuff matters, but the amount and the macros matter more. That is both to chill people out. Like if people are like, hey, like you need to recover, we're going to go to a burger joint. Fuck yeah. If you don't have a body weight issue, get over there, get some fries, get a burger, get all that. You will recover. It's not like, Chris, have you ever been around people that like,

are so health space pilled that like if they watch an athlete eat a cheeseburger and fries, they're like, do you know, like, I don't mean to enter. I like your U team USA jacket. That's really nice. I don't mean to like interfere with your dinner. You're poisoning yourself. You better check yourself. Like, what would you have me like, um, bean sprouts with anger. And you're like, Oh, that's what you eat every day. That whole like health bullshit. It absolutely has an effect. Um,

There's nothing about food. Food has two things it does for you. It's physiological things, like the protein gets to where it needs to go, and psychological things. If eating a fucking delicious chicken fried rice not only gives you all the nutrients you need, but also makes your soul happy, holy shit is that major mega recovery points. So when you work with athletes, you have to be careful not to jam so much fucking health food down their throat that they fucking hate their lives. And then who knows what's happening. Yeah, it's everybody build it during prep.

Yes. And they would, they would tell you like, I don't like to do this. I have to, in order to get this 2% body fat stuff going on. We haven't talked about stress management, whatever that means. I don't know what stress management is in the technical sense of the term. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to me. What is stress management? So stress management means sort of two things.

One is how much stress are you choosing to accumulate? How much stress are you exposing yourself to? And the other is how are you dealing with the stress that's vectoring in one way or another? So for example, probably the quintessential example of stress management is do I choose to sit in traffic to go somewhere? Will it be stressful? Let's say it's your off day and your girl's like, Hey, let's go to the mall.

Now the mall's dope, but it takes 25 minutes of driving to go to the mall. Driving, if you're doing it or you're sitting in a passenger seat and the driver that's doing it sucks, is a stressful activity. It increases your stress 100%. So the first choice you have is, do we really need to go somewhere or can we just chill at home? There is no correct answer to that, just the context answer that's correct at the time. And also stress management is, okay, now that I'm driving, fuck it, we're going to the mall. We chose that. It's a good decision.

The amount of stress psychologically that hits me from driving, I have a choice in. A lot of this is from, like, I have a pretty interesting history of meditation and mindfulness practice, but you don't need all that Eastern mumbo jumbo. It's all really valid shit, but you just think about pure logic. Let's take the logic of road rage or just being upset that traffic exists.

You're going somewhere you think it's going to take 20 minutes. Google Maps says 30. You're like, the fuck? But whatever. The thing is, get stuff wrong every now and again, though almost never in my experience. You're driving, driving, driving, 70 miles an hour, red lights up ahead. You're like, oh my God, this is the freeway. This is America. I was promised bald eagles and no traffic. I'm going back to Russia, said no one ever. And all of a sudden you're sitting in traffic and you're pissed.

And you start to have all these thoughts. Some of them you eject out of your mouth. Like, what are they doing construction for? It's one of my favorite things. If you philosophically pick that apart, be like, oh no, you're right. Let's stop doing construction. So the roads can decay and we don't have any roads. Construction is necessary. No, do they always do it at the right time? What are you, a systems engineer? You know what time they're supposed to be doing it? Do you know how the baking of the sun affects when... Shut up. But to paint that picture is...

logically at a pure logical level. You can do nothing. There's a standup comic that was like talking about road rage. And he's like, I'm in a stack of cars. There's no, it's as far as the eye can see. And the guy behind me is honking at me and he looks like he's going to get out of his car. And I was thinking of things to tell him. If you walked up to me, like what you see, sir, the cars in front of me are solid. So I can't actually go through them. That is the realest talk in the world. So in that moment, sitting in your car, you have a choice.

Do I just put the fucking podcast on, go to modern wisdom and get some fucking knowledge in my head and just chill? Or am I like going to have these weird, totally logical thoughts of why they're doing construction today or fuck, I wish I didn't do this. Well, do you have a time machine? No. Do you have a way to cancel all construction? No. You might as well chill. Road rage, being upset at shit the boss said, taking shit to heart, drama. That's another one.

Any scenario you presented with can be very dramatic for you, or it can be not so dramatic. How you handle disagreements, that's stress management. We're all going to be hit by stress regularly in our lives. Professional athletes have a lot less stress, but they still have stress. Someone said something on Instagram. What's that girl's name?

Simone Biles? No, no, with the dreads. She's just like a 100-meter runner. Oh, I know the chick you mean. I was going to say Cardi B because they have a similar vibe. Sha'Carri Richardson. Yeah, I mean, she's got the nails. First of all, I'm a married man. That bitch fine as hell. Holy shit, she could get it. She's rapid. Is this on TV? She's the shit. I love that vibe. She's cool. But she went through a phase where she was really feeling that fucking funk on social media when motherfuckers were talking that shit because that's what they do.

And if I was her stress management coach, I'd be like, do you know how much it matters what the people in the comment section say? Let's work through this logically. And I would tell her, it doesn't matter. You'll never see these people in real life. And if you do that, they're going to be really kind to you. They're going to shy away because they can't look people in the face. You don't have to be in your comment section. And if you're going to bring yourself into the comment section, bring yourself in with a mentality of what I call 50s kid, like leave it to be her attitude.

Oh, gee whiz, well, this person really has a nice suggestion. You know, they're like, the comment is like off yourself and like, well, life is difficult to live sometimes. Even Freud spoke about it. You know, like nothing hits 50s kid. It just goes right through him. You either bring that energy to the comment section or you don't go in the comment section. That's stress management. The comment section exists. And sometimes you'll have to be in it. How you approach it.

choosing do I go in here and expose myself to the stress and how do I deal with the stress psychologically that stress management Chris it's a big deal dude so I've been thinking about this more and more recently there's two contributing factors especially when it comes to stress or dealing with stress as far as I can see one is not doing things that you don't want to do

The second thing is how do you deal with doing things that you don't want to do, but you have to do. So with one, you're reducing the number of times that you get exposed to it. With the second one, you are improving the way that you react to things that you've been unable to avoid. Yep.

For the first one, I think that's relatively plain and obvious. If you can adjust your travel time to not travel when there's traffic, if you can not expose yourself, like that's significantly more obvious. Sometimes you don't have a choice. Yes. And in those, you're liberate. You couldn't have done it any other way. So great for you. If you're a determinist, you couldn't have done anything any other way, but never mind.

I agree with that. What about the second category of stress management? You've mentioned mindfulness as something that you do. Are there any other places that you go to or ways that you sort of advise people? I'm in, I'm Mike, I'm fucking caught in throws of the thing. Maybe it's public criticism. Maybe it's scrutiny. Maybe it's me.

vacillating about some slight from a short time ago that's fresh or an old time ago and i'm ashamed of it or all of the different things the vicissitudes that we fucking go through are there any places that you yourself or you advise your athletes to go to vengeance yes yes let's do it yes batman suit you got to make sure it's kevlar because the bullets will fly um

It's really simple. One super simple tip. Exercise scientists. One quick tip for vengeance. Yep. Sorry, I said vengeance again, didn't I? Oh boy. Oh boy. You ask yourself the question, what can I do about this? You have one of two answers to that question. A list of things you can do. Something. That go on the to-do list. And then you're like, Gucci, that's on the to-do list. I'm going to get them done as soon as I can. Could be now, could be later, could be whatever. Or I can't do anything about it.

If you're going to do something about it, do something like someone's like, you know, this is kind of a bit off of color, but some of these. Because it's been so on color thus far. A certain kind of color, brown, really. Whatever color vomit is, you know, a brownish yellow. If you're like in an altercation with another adult male or someone law behaving lawlessly, there's a high probability. If you ever see me in an altercation,

I will not be screaming at anybody. Very high probability. Because to me, it's only one of two things. Throw the first punch and we'll find out how much of my brown belt I've earned in jujitsu. Or let's be chill. You want to do something or we're going to fucking unplug? Do something. So people like get in the face and get screaming at you. It doesn't really bother me much because I'm like dope. Like I've been in a lot of competition fighting before. Whatever, man. Throw the first punch. No big deal. I'm not going to yell at you because like, what the hell is the point? We're just alluding to the thing we're supposed to be doing anyway, which is fighting.

So most of us are not luckily involved in scenarios like that all the time. So let's take a much easier scenario. You are sitting on an airplane and the captain just said, Hey folks, you know that shit that happens. He's like something mechanical, blah, blah, 30 minutes. Maybe what can you do about it? Now, how many people sitting in the back are licensed mechanics that are actually allowed to work on the Delta airlines, whatever Airbus A3, whatever, no one, almost no one.

Uh, so what can you do about it? Well, you have options. You can scroll on your phone to see if you can catch another flight. Almost never does that work out because these things don't have that happen that often. You can call some people where they're expecting you or the hotel or whatever and tell them, Hey, listen, I could be a lot late. Do that. Now, once you've done that,

Turn on the fucking monitor and watch TV. Oh, but you're still on the ground. Hell yeah. You still got your phone. You still got wireless, man. You get the start modern wisdom podcast, RP, whatever, uh, more fun stuff than that. You're good. There is no more fun. There's correct. Go watch more of our stuff. Yeah. Um, there's nothing for you to do.

And so you're good. And so any residual stress that you feel is totally fine and you'll still feel it, but it's like an archaic remnant of our primate times. You go full stupid to figure shit out. Stoic fork of control. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Very nice. Uh, what about, you mentioned a few of them and I love asking the question, uh, what do most people get wrong with X, Y, and Z? Because it seems to me that, uh,

Most of success in life comes from avoiding failure as opposed to expediting success. That's pessimistic. I love it, Chris. Would you not say that it's the truth? I'm not sure. That is an interesting take. I don't know. I just get... It's largely correct. I get the sense that...

You've mentioned it a bunch of times, people self-regulate when it comes to even the macronutrients within their diet. There's times where you just think, I fucking need vegetables. Like, I just feel kind of like I need vegetables. Not your body telling you that you need vegetables. But there are things that you can do that multiply by zero or multiply by a really, really small number, all of the good shit that you've done. Like, you've spent all of this time eating organic and training and doing recovery and foam rolling and sleeping enough, but one day you decide to drive your car without a seatbelt on. Bad idea. That's multiplying by zero. Sure. Um...

Lots of errors that people could have made in those. Cardio for recovery. So back to Dr. James Hoffman, how are you going to add shit and think it subtracts away fatigue? It just doesn't work like that. Yes, if you do cardio, cardiovascular exercise specifically for your lower body after a tough leg session, it will reduce the delayed onset soreness.

That's because it's muting the anabolic muscle growth signal to your legs. That does not mean it recovers you. Yes, you will be able to return to your past performance sooner because delayed onset soreness won't hit you as bad. So in a sense, you're going to be kind of this ghost recovery where you're back, but you're not back because you upgraded your systems and healed much. You're just back because the inflammatory processes were like, eh, I'm

Fuck it. We're not even going there. That's it. It's like, um, you know, if you have like a, like a fucking wild animal in your basement and you're like, call the ASPCA, we need to get them out. He's fucking down there doing God knows like some kind of skunk breaking shit down. You can be like, uh, okay. The ASPCA is going to get here in an hour and fix it. Or you can be like an hour. It's fucking midnight. You could just close the door and lock it and be like, fuck it. That's what running after your lifting kind of is. It's like, whatever. We're not even gonna bother with this shit.

So cardio does not under the hood repair anything faster. It does it less so. So in the holistic understanding of recovery is getting our machine back in working order.

Adding cardio does not do that, even though perceptively it can reduce your delayed onset muscle soreness and let you go hard again later. But remember, the reason you're going hard is to make positive changes, adaptations to your system to make it better. Cardio can cancel those out to some extent. And then what the fuck are you even training for? This has always been like my thought pattern when looking at CrossFit is, you know, the ones that maybe I'm going to make it to the games. Maybe I'm not, uh,

their active recovery Thursday. Like that's more volume than I do in two days of training. Oh yeah. That's active recovery for what I'd call like, um, poisonously conscientious people, people that are like, I need to do something like recovery is good. Like let's do recovery. It's kind of power cleans at 200 pounds. Dude. I said, this is a trend I think that's come up throughout this conversation. Maybe it's

worthwhile having a conversation with you about it, that the meme of just work harder, of hard work, of it's good for you, I think has caught hold an awful lot over the last five to 10 years because there was a period of coddling, of victimhood culture, of entitlement, and a Goggins, a Jocko, a Hormozy, or whoever your favorite person that works 17 hours a day of choices is,

screaming in your face telling you that you're a pussy reliably induces better results for maybe more a majority of the world maybe uh more people are type have type b problems than type a problem yeah and i would go as far as to say yes also even people that are type a applying more effort to things often does result in some kind of improvement in performance derogation in quality of life

a higher blow-up risk of some kind of burnout in knowledge work or injury in physical work, et cetera, et cetera. But just that working harder and putting your nose to the grindstone more aggressively reliably induces better performance, maybe not proportionally, maybe not per unit of effort, diminishing returns, higher blow-up risk, all of these things, but it does get you closer to the problem. And the other thing is it's kind of like, it's kind of like

punching up in a way that it's, it's hopeful. It's, it helps to lift up the people who don't have enough of the thing that some people have too much of like telling people to chill out. It's like, what do you mean? Like these lazy fucks out there, they need to get after it. Uh, so type a people who are overly conscientious and too motivated and too disciplined or too diligent or whatever the fuck it is too obsessive. Um,

They are always going to be seen. It's like a rich person complaining about how complex it is to file their taxes. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. But look at all of the good stuff that came along for the ride with you. So yeah, I just think about like the hard work pill as a reliable route to maybe most people improving their lives and maybe some other portion of people also improving their lives.

but probably not the cohort of people that regularly listen to hard work content. You know what I mean? It's like those anti-sexual assault campaigns that are saying like, no means no. It's like, hey, the guys that didn't take no for no aren't going to be stopped by that. And the dudes that never needed to be reminded that no meant no are going to be fucking terrified. Yeah, they also don't go to colloquia on college campuses usually.

Yeah. Voluntarily. What do you think about that sort of conversation about hard work and stuff? I think you're hitting on a lot of really, really sharp points that have been a mini low-key frustration of mine. The kind of frustration that, you know, you watch a reel with someone, you're like, oh, I wish they said that differently, which is so stupid because like everyone says shit differently. Everyone's got a grain of wisdom and there's a way to see almost all advice in a very positive light and a way to see it in a negative light.

It really depends on context, but I'm not just like saying, well, it all just depends. Then I sit here awaiting more questions. I had much, much more relevant thing to say here. Hard work is an undefinable thing. There's no such thing as hard. Um, so I can give the other cogent. My doctor says soon we'll find it with enough pills. He says, shame is what's keeping me from being, but he also said I should be ashamed of the kind of stuff that I'm into. So, um,

For whatever task you have ahead of you that you're trying to work at, there are two ways to conceive of work. One, enough work that will complete the task. Two, enough work that will overwhelm your ability to continue to work productively. That is the functional technical definition in context of what hard work means. If you finished an engineering project and someone's yelling at you about hard work, you're like, dude, what the hell is wrong with you? It's done.

There's no more hard work to be done. If you are being yelled at about hard work, but you can't even read numbers anymore on the computer screen, hard work's not what you need. Relaxation's what you need. So we can also see it on a spectrum quality. Normally distributed, little bell curve.

Most people work pretty fucking hard, but maybe not super hard. And you know what? That's probably really good because then they regularly recover and come back and work again. There are people on the other end of the distribution, typically people of low trait conscientiousness as they currently express it or with a decent genetic basis, usually some 50-50. Hard work is either something they don't give a shit about or

or something they know exists in the ether and they hate doing, or as you move a little bit up in conscientiousness, but still in the low end, no, they should be doing more of it and feel a little guilty about it. But they're like, ah, those people need, like, if you could pull the Hormozy essence out in a syringe and pull out the Goggins essence and the Jocko essence, you need motherfuckers need that shot to the arm, shot up and do shit. Uh, my friends, um,

what is it dr melissa davis had a poster in her room that what does it say no one cares work harder they need that big time because there's lots of people that

Just objectively are not working hard enough and they're not having trouble recovering They're just having trouble showing up and doing the thing they to them that kind of advice Goggins and etc That's the best advice. They know that they need to do it, but they're Incentively able to for sure for sure and they might not even need to know that like I want to be fucking rich I'm gonna be bread it up. I watched some Alex Formosi videos see a hundred hundred million dollars I want to get on that level and this motherfucker 95% of the time is like you need to shut up and need to fucking work and need to grind you're like God damn it

I thought there was some kind of easy scheme for this, but apparently I just have to show up. People need to hear that. And it's good that they're hearing that. And it's great that all these guys are out there talking that shit. Amazing. But unfortunately, the kind of people that are the biggest consumers of that kind of content,

sometimes tend to be people who like preaching to the choir effect times 10. It's confirmation bias. Confirmation bias. It's confirming their position. Because they're already doing the thing. But because they have high conscientiousness, they also have an inbuilt high guilt that they're not doing enough.

Maximum Judaism, I call it. You like get some cross between like a, like, you know, Asian student and Jew and it explodes into like, oh, I could be working harder. Oh,

Like, you know, I permanently exist in this realm and my wife is Asian. So all we do are like, oh God, are we doing enough? Yeah. And then we have to like wind up. Use your anxieties. Oh my God. Yeah. So when those people hear you need to work harder, they approximately are at risk of overdoing it. And overdoing it means you either have a bad time because you're working so hard all the time, you're exhausted, you get sick more often, you're not as productive, bring in a time. And you're not enjoying it.

You're literally, you're having a bad time. You're not having a good time, which high conscientious people don't really give a shit. If you tell them you're not enjoying it, they're like, awesome. I want to suffer more. You're like, no, no, no, no. Hold on. No joy fun. Right. And there's a way in which productivity can be super fun. And that's the best way to do it. They also, the other thing to folks that are listening to super conscientious fatigue of the psychological kind from working too much, even at your desk. One of the first victims of high fatigue is creativity.

Now you can still enter numbers in a spreadsheet just fine, but if you have to be creative, if you have to be mindful, if you've come up novel solutions, you had better be fresh and fresh means you need to chill. And those people don't want to chill. I don't want to fucking chill. I just want to work all day. If they get me, if the coroner finds me and takes a picture of me dead at my fucking desk with a spreadsheet and the fucking hypertrophy have pseudocode up, I want a picture of that on the internet. I died in honor doing what I loved.

Yeah, loved. Sure. It was compelled to do loved and compelled to do, but those kinds of people do not need to hear more of that work is better type of shit. And I don't mean to say that the people putting out that content are doing a disservice. You should be, you shouldn't be platforming. Shut up. Those people just have to like, listen to that shit and be like, yo, those are wise words.

for someone else in their own time. And for when I need to turn it on. Yeah, for sure. But not when I need to turn it off. There was a trend a while ago, which I really wish had continued, which was hashtag rest harder than me. So it was like a rest day flex. And it was showing how low someone's step count was, looking at how many hours of Netflix that they do, you know, like this sort of shit. And I thought that was cool. Unfortunately, again, because...

There is this association between hard work and outcomes that you get. Sure. And reliably hard work induces better success, even if it is at the- To a point. Yes. Most people will never reach that point. And for them, telling them hard work is good is good. It's a good thing. But for the people who are most interested in really indexing on hard work, they maybe as often need to hear like hard work has to be balanced with recovery. The way my wife and I see it,

is we consider ourselves professional work athletes. Like we're workaholics, full send, but also like we're trying to approach it from a sports science lens. And the way we justify our like chilling on the weekends or taking a vacation, because we get mega guilt about the shit. Like, holy fuck, you take my wife and I away from work for three or four days, we start to be like, oh my God, like I don't even know who I am anymore. Why do I deserve any of the things I have? Like I'll use my card to buy some nice dinner and I'm like, where did that money even come from? I don't do anything. Um,

Those kinds of folks really benefit from hearing, Hey, you need to chill. But also if you take on the professional work athlete mindset, the number one thing in your life can be working hard and producing valuable things for other people. Yes. Career. Yes. But because you're a professional work athlete, if Michael Jordan likes basketball a whole lot and he trained so much as arm starts to hurt, he's no good for the Chicago bulls anymore.

You're a professional work athlete. You're a machine that's number one. Like you're the number one engineer at your firm. You're that guy and it's awesome. In order to be that guy next week and the week after and the week after, you had better Friday night, better come and you had better switch the fuck off.

And chill, chill, chill. And people will be like, what are you doing Sunday? You're like, dude, I'm fucking smoking blunts and eating Chinese takeout food. And they're like, really? You don't do like extra engineering work? Mm-mm. Because I got to rest up. You're like, rest up for what? So I can be sharp as a fucking tack on Monday. That's cool. That's the way to think about it. There's not a fight there. It's a collaboration. Right. You,

earn that recovery when you train hard and you work hard, you put it all in and then you take that recovery. Yeah. For its own sake. Cause it's fun. And those low conscientious people, you don't need to convince them of that. Cause they're like really good at that anyway.

For high conscientious type A people, you got to see your recovery as this is medicine for me so that I can heal and go back to work and be my best. So even if work is your number one organizing principle of life, rest and relaxation recovery is critical to see it as that thing that allows it to. It's like, can you imagine you get to like a fucking fuel pump for your formula one car and the fucking pit crew guys, like, I'm not going to fill it up. You're like, but I have 30 more laps. He's like, fucking do it on fumes. You're fucking hardcore. You're like,

I'm sorry, what? I don't understand physics that well, maybe. So like you have to support the system. When you pit, let everything get recovered and then go out and fucking run laps again. Talk to me about heart rate and the...

overthinking BS of that for recovery. There's a bunch of different types of metrics you can do with heart rate. You can do heart rate variability. You can do average heart rate. You can do resting heart rates on and so forth. They're super valuable, but they tend to have a degree of randomness built in and a degree of various events in your life will interfere with them so much that if you look at these things in isolation and you plan your training around them, they could be a lot of noise and not a lot of signal.

And if your heart rate variability happens to be off the charts and your app says, Hey, listen, you might be overreached. Check in with your other factors. What's my desire to train? Like, how is my physical preparedness? How has my training been? How is my sleep? If everything's fucking Gucci, but your heart rate variability is a bit weird, don't fucking worry about it. Some people, very metric people, very logical people. They want a number.

Ideally one to tell them the thing and then I do the thing based on the number and I wish heart rate scores were that but they're not similar things applies to sleep scores on those apps you have you put the phone in the bed that gives you a sleep score. That's valuable piece of information, but it is not a standalone thing of information. Why do I say that? Because people come to us for RP for coaching and all this stuff.

I just want to inundate you with data. Like, well, my heart rate's been XYZ. And we're like, chill, chill, chill. It's cool. Well, that's absolutely critical. We need that information. Let's talk about other stuff. And it turns out, while they're really numbers focused on heart rate, they couldn't tell you what their calories or macros were. They couldn't tell you how many arguments they got into with their kids and their wife. And that shit matters like 100,000 fucking times more than what the fuck your heart rate is. The other thing about heart rate is it tends to be a lagging indicator versus a leading indicator in many cases. So like,

once you have the flu, your heart rate variability is all fucked. And you're like, Oh, I'm sick. I should be sick. Oh, I am sick. But if it's like before you get sick, you might be fucking golden. And then you get sick. Then your heart rate tells you you're fucked up. So another thing is a lot of these metrics were designed for and work well for teams. So if you have like, um, 18 gymnasts on your team and their average heart rate shit is starting to go south,

pull the team, uh, recovery. Oh, because you basically got a large end sample of what you're doing. A hundred percent. And they all get roughly the same training. So you pull everyone out. Uh, but if you're doing it on a one-to-one individual basis, we're eventually going to get to really finely metric things like this and heart rate variability and heart rate scores are really good. They're just not perfect. And I think the reason I put that on there is people think like, this is the one number I followed, but there's more to that.

Stretching for recovery. Yes. I just don't have any idea what any of those have to do with each other. I think stretching is

can be a form of light exercise. So it can speed up the recovery process if it replaces hard exercise, but adding stretching on top of your hard exercise doesn't help you recover. Stretching physically rearranges some tissues that causes damage to various connective structures inside your muscle and outside. And so they actually need more recovery. So if you stretch sufficiently difficult to engage a response where you're going to be more flexible after, it requires recovery for that. So stretchability

Stretching feels good. And if it feels good and it really relaxes you, some light, relaxing stretching. Like I have friends who like will do weed and then stretch and they love it. I get it. Right. For sure. But like you can tell they're relaxing. They're not like stretching and fucking for people that stretching is difficult and annoying. Shit is not recovering you from anything. I've heard that there's different buckets of people, some of whom get a lot of pleasure from, is it the muscle spindle? Sure. Yes. The stretch, the stretch response. I think I'm one of those people.

People, uh, uh, if I do yin yoga, you know, I lie down for 20 minutes and I do some fucking bird dog or whatever it is. Like, I'm like, ah, this feels nice. Yeah. It just feels like it's nice. Yeah, for sure. It feels good to me. For sure. But not for everybody. Not for everyone. Also not for super intense periods. Correct. Yeah. We just reviewed a, it'll be out in a few weeks, but we reviewed, or maybe it's out now already, depending on when people catch this.

We're reviewing a David Goggins for the actress, I scientist Friday show on the RP strength channel. I can't wait to see that. Yeah. And so like, he says that he like stretches for two or three hours every night. And I'm like, to me, I'm just, I, I, what I said on the channel is like, unless you're like an Olympic level gymnast level of flexibility requisite, but you don't actually train gymnastics. So you have no flexibility. That's the amount of time you would need to stretch.

Like if I was like, Hey Chris, I need to be able to have my toes in full splits, touch my asshole all the way around. You're going to need like two hours of stretching a day for that shit. Then ain't nothing. Two hours of stretching is going to do for you other than like spend two hours of your time doing something that if it's not psychologically relaxing for you is physically disrupting systems and that would require its own recovery. So stretching is not analogous to recovery. Stretching is stretching. And if,

light, gentle stretching in a certain serene mood with the fucking yoga music on. If that helps you fucking moosa, hey, God bless you. That's awesome. But if you think like, okay, I need to recover. What science say? Stretching. I got to start stretching. You fucking start stretching. That ain't it. That's not going to do it. What does the evidence say about hot and cold therapy, saunas, cold plunges and the like? Yeah. It's really difficult to measure recovery outside of just performance. And the performance data is mostly like, eh,

Hot and cold contrast stuff can do the same thing recovery wise that cardio after training can do specifically cold exposure and contrast can have this cascade where they cool off your inflammatory systems. That means under the hood, there's no recovery going on actually less.

Uh, the systems aren't getting healed. They're not getting fixed because they're not getting fixed. So the way the recovery works in the human body is if you have taken on some muscle damage is the immune system infiltrates all those cells, but it brings in the fucking kitchen sink. It's like if someone's a house flooded and you looked at it from the outside, you might not know like, but it looks normal, but it's fucked up in the basement. Trust me. You can still live in the house too. But if you have a crew come in and deflood your house, they bring that fucking giant truck with the hose and the generators are like, man,

and it's pumping out the water and they got like a redo some of the wood. You can't work and look and live in that house. That's what the immune system does to your muscles. When it comes in, it fucks a bunch of shit up. It takes a few hours, a few days to do that. What contrast bath is, is basically, or cold exposure,

non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and exercise after you've already done exercise is basically putting up a notice at the front gate to the people that are going to drive in with a truck to take the water out of your, the flooded house is tell them like, Hey, fellas, come back tomorrow. And they're like, Oh, fuck it. Now the house isn't getting any better.

But if you want to work in that house later, if you're in an upstairs office and you're writing your magnum opus, you don't want the fucking generator running. So you're like, come back. So you're saying that's what that stuff is. You're saying that masks recovery. Heat and cold does not promote recovery. Not in any way that helps the tissues, uh,

fix themselves faster? Absolutely not. There's no evidence that whatsoever. The evidence is actually contrary to that. It delays that process. Heat is a mixed bag, basically still kind of unknown. It's not super clear what heat does. We know that psychologically,

people who enjoy heat exposure like sauna. What about the stress? They love it. Oh, they love it. If they love it. But if you have an athlete that hates the sauna, do not make them go to the sauna for recovery. Because sauna is good for recovery and good for stress management. No, it's good for gym and gym stress management. John fucking hates it.

A hundred percent. Like if you like jazz music and it relaxes you jazz music for an hour is dope. If you fucking hate jazz music, what the hell am I going to put you in a room? Make you listen to music. You don't like that's like hell. That's like some kind of modern corporate version of hell. So all of that stuff, contrast cold, uh,

plunges and all that shit. It doesn't do recovery. It does masking. It does a reduction of the inflammatory process. From a physical perspective. Correct. But the inflammatory process is actually what does the recovery. It just takes time. The best thing, if you have sore muscles, sleep, eat, chill the fuck out, and wait.

Then the sore muscles aren't sore, now they're bigger and stronger. If you take a shitload of NSAIDs and do a bunch of cold plunges, yeah, you'll feel much better very soon, but you didn't grow any muscle. And these all things are cold and NSAIDs are confirmed to reduce the amount of muscle growth you get. So these are masking things. They're not helping you recover. I think when most people think recovery, they're thinking of like that few

futuristic machine in those like sci-fi movies where you like the bacta tank and fucking star wars you get in a dragon ball z if some kind of chemicals get in little nano machines then you come out you're actually healed and fixed uh cold heat etc they don't do that they just don't you mentioned NSAIDs maybe a little bit extreme but what about recovery supplements

I'm aware of no supplements that you can qualify as recovery supplements unless they're a shake of carbohydrates plus high quality protein. And then there's just food, but delivered in a different system that may be more convenient. There are no recovery supplements that I know of. Creatine, sort of, but if you regularly take it, you just keep taking it and it recovers your creatine phosphate. As much as water is a recovery supplement. Water is one hell of a recovery supplement. Probably electrolytes to keep you tic-tac-toe. Yeah. I would say maybe...

maybe not wholly, but 95% of the time that I see like a recovery claim on a supplement, like an internal eye roll starts happening. And listen, a lot of people, and I was butthurt about this when I was younger, a lot of people who dog on supplements and shit like that, they're just like, I'm sorry, forgive me. For lack of a better term, just leftists. They just don't like corporations. They don't like even the idea of competition or hierarchies. It's like, all you need is natural food. Shut the fuck up, Karen. Great, thanks. You don't even like anything. You don't even like sports. I take fucking supplements, bro.

i take drugs i want to win i want to be better at sport i'm all full-on trying to become the best version of myself type of toxic male energy

I wish there was a fucking recovery supplement that was for sure going to recover you. Now, like if you, there are acute recovery supplements that work really well. You get a big old bottle of water, you drop some fucking element into that motherfucker. And if you have a jujitsu, you had weight training at 2 PM, you have jujitsu at 5 PM, you better down that whole goddamn thing. Eat you a bowl of cereal, get you some protein in there that will get your jujitsu going. Like, and you never believe three hours later for sure. But,

but healing and replenishing and all that stuff. There's just no way of saying saltwater and food is what we just did. Yep. That's it. That is a recovery supplement. But it's like, if you don't have any salt dynamics issues and you get enough salt in your diet, drinking an element first thing in the morning every day is well on my way to recovery. Like that's not how that works. When you need it, it's fucking golden. When you don't,

What you doing? There's no magic recovery pill. Now, now if I'm being fully transparent, anabolic steroids and growth hormone are one hell of a recovery supplement, but they got their downsides to insulin, your growth, insulin, and a shitload of prima Bolan. Holy fuck, man. You're recovering like you wouldn't believe rubber and magic. Oh yeah, sure. Exactly. Yeah. And, but you know, that comes with a, that's not a supplement. Those are prescription drugs. Some of them not even available for prescription.

What else is there to say or what do you want people to, the type A go-getters and everybody else that's listened, what are the main things that you want them to take away from today? In case anyone asks about foam rolling and all that shit, that's most of not recovery. LAUGHTER

percussion guns. Yeah. Like that's for pain management. It's not even for injury management because almost all evidence-based physios are almost unanimous on the fact that the forces required to alter tissues are like two orders of magnitude higher. Like if you got hit by a car, they'd be like, that did something to his tendons. Anything short of that. Uh, Sam Spinelli and Quinn Hennick, uh,

Oh, my favorite. I throw Adam Meekins in there and it's a fucking. Dude, Quinn was episode 11 on this podcast. You're going to be like 850. Shit. And I think Sam, hey, remember Sam's old Instagram handle? What was it? The Strength Therapist. Problem with that is, the problem, he used to be called the Strength Therapist. Problem with that is that if you do it all in lowercase, all without any spaces, it also spells the word, the strength, the rapist.

Difficult, difficult situation. Then changed to Dr. Sam Spinelli. What is this guy doing? Oh, oh, he's doing the strength and the raping. Um, I remember they were telling me about, well, one of them was telling me about the, um,

research that was done on mice. I think they ruptured the little mice's Achilles tendons or some shit. And then they use a scraping tool. And they say, look at this scraping tool. You have to dig into the research to look at the fact they were using human-sized scraping tools and human-level pressure on these little mice. Yeah, two orders of magnitude. Yeah, so basically the amount of pressure that you would need to do in order to be able to affect real change in the tissues is so high that you'd be ripping flesh off. Oh, yeah.

Oh yeah. So like lifting heavy, but not super heavy, like a comfortable sets of 15 is a really awesome stimulus to reconstruct your tendon. But like, that's a lot of fucking force throughput. No one's going to foam roll that hard.

Um, you need barbells for that shit. You take a barbell foam roll that shit. That'll feel not so good. So foam rolling and all the massage guns and stuff that's for injury as for pain management, not even in your management. So you have a knee that feels weird. You foam roll. It feels better. You squat. God bless you. That's awesome. But just, there's not a lot of physical stuff going on underneath. It's mostly neurological, psychological. Uh, so that's a thing. But in the end, it's this be a person who trains and works hard to get the actual results.

Be mindful of your degree of fatigue. When your fatigue gets too high for you to continue performing at your best, pull back, focus on sleeping always, focus on good food, focus on managing stress that you're not fritzing and fitsing over shit that's not going to affect your life.

And especially when you pull back, reducing your workload, get tons of relaxation, laughter with friends, physical touch, compassionate activity, so on and so forth. Dogs, Netflix, documentaries about dogs, two in one. Get all that stuff going.

lower your fatigue back down to a state from which you can platform your next big move and worker and training, and then repeat the process. If you're sleeping well and consistently, if you're eating well and consistently, if you are not stressing too much, if you're taking enough time for relaxation, then you have just the major 80, 20, 90, 10 of the whole thing sorted and

You don't need to sign up for any weird courses. You don't need any fucking weird bands to wrap around yourself. You don't need drinks or potions or pills or powders. And there's not some kind of life hack where you wake up at 4.30 in the morning that's going to get you to recover better. I'll end this with Dr. James Hoffman's famous words. Recovery is almost always and almost everywhere about doing less rather than doing more. So cool. I really hope that, um,

And this is largely for me, selfishly. I really hope that a culture of this like antidote to the type A problem. The balance. Yes. I really hope that that starts to come back around. The problem is that it's way less sexy.

It's not sexy at all. And it sounds like you're acceding to laziness. Nobody needs to be told to chill out. Well, most people don't, but the very highest performers do. Correct. Uh, and everybody that watches your channel and my channel, right. And they're obsessed with high performance, which they should be. It's awesome. But you got to understand that you have, you operate a physical system.

And to tell yourself, you know, that you had that one guy on and you had a quote from him that's on your Instagram a lot, which is super fucking brilliant. It's about like, I don't ever let up on myself. I beat myself over. I work myself to the ground and maybe just, maybe I'll give myself half an hour to breathe at the end of the day. Yeah. So that whole spirit energy is something people take into this situation. If you ever need some clarity on how to think about recovery, remember not analogize, remember the reality that you are a machine.

Period. And if you look a machine in the face, you look yourself in the mirror and you're fucking pussy, you need to work harder. Maybe you're right, but maybe you're way on the other end of that and you need relaxation and rest and recovery because you're a physical machine that needs to be repaired. And think about if you assess logically, like, okay, I have every single characteristic currently of overreaching. I'm not at high performance. I'm clearly exhausted.

but maybe I can do more. There's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Promise you. I promise you. I've over-trained for a bodybuilding show. It takes months of just ignoring. I would finish recording a video for a YouTube channel and some other resources we have at RP. It would be like sixth video in that three hour span. And as soon as I finished recording, Scott would start processing it. And I would have a fever chill run through my body. Like, yeah.

That's how far I pushed it. It's not even a physical effort. Beyond. I would wake up every morning afraid and just completely crushed at the megalith monsters I'd have to fight that day. And because I'm a fucking conscientious mega whatever psychotic Jew, I was like, more. Grab more. I'll die here. I don't care. But nobody gives you awards for dying. You get awards for creating valuable things and looking a certain way. The other thing there is that you look at the mega...

and the huge to-do list that you've got. And after a little while, if you push yourself really, really hard, you actually realize that objectively, it's not that hard of a day, but what's

The way that you have fucked up, the way that you have pushed yourself has got it to the stage where little things feel like big things, which makes you feel like more of a pussy, which was the fucking self-fulfilling fear that you had all along. Did I become a bitch? Maybe it's because I didn't work hard enough. You're back in that shit. So for those kinds of times, remember this. Would you ever...

have a mechanic. Let's say we have like an, one of the ASML microchip design machines, that microchip stamping factory. Can you imagine if one of the technicians came out and we're like, we need more of this, like lubricant oil in the machine that the guy who heads the fab at TSMC would be like,

Nah, man, we got to fucking push it harder. What? That guy would be like, okay, you need to sit down and take psychiatric medications. Someone else is in charge. Yes. Let's put the oil in. We've got a machine to run. It's just as ridiculous for that person to say that about a physical machine that needs recovering and fixing and healing.

It's just as ridiculous for you to say that to yourself in the mirror and call yourself a pussy and say, I'm not doing enough. Do you logically really think you're not doing enough? Give me evidence. Give me your total work rate that you've been at. Give me evidence of signs of fatigue. If you still got it, fuck yeah, burn that shit. But if you're already afraid, if you're already exhausted, there is no pot of gold in that rainbow. Now your job is to pull back. And it's a weird thing. Here's why it's weird, Chris. Not only are you conscientious to begin with, to be doing this, pushing hard,

You're in fight or flight more now. Remember cumulative fatigue causes more fight or flight mode. Now you're like a frayed animal. Like you don't come up to a skunk that you just got out of a drain because it was drowning and go give your finger to it because it'll bite you and shit like that. That's how you feel. So you're not instantly in the mode of like, oh, thank God it's time to relax. You're like, okay, okay. I've done enough work. Okay. I got to go relax. How does that work? You

It takes a little while to wind into that process process. You should be getting good at because you're on, you're an athlete. You're a professional work athlete, whatever it is. You're doing nothing. The skill of recovering. It's tough for some people. Work is difficult for the kind of crazy assholes that are going to listen to this and nod along. Yeah.

It's pulling away from work that's difficult. And you have to realize that. And you have to think, am I the kind of person that is driven by exclusively compulsion to work like a fucking animal? It's a kind of work animal. You know, like leave a Husky for five minutes. I was like, I need to pull a sled. Is that you? Or are you a mindful person that has the overarching goal of being super productive? If you're that athlete and coach to yourself, if you're a strategist, you know when to attack, you know when to retreat.

When a general in war makes a strategic pullback, very few competent people are like, fucking pussy. That's not how it works. Yep.

If you can see that bigger picture, then you can look top down from yourself and go, okay, Mike, you've done enough. It's Friday, 4.30 PM. Your brain is gone. It's time to pull back and architect your weekend in advance with activities planned out to recover and relax so you can be your best next week. That's the big picture. Fucking awesome, dude. Really, really good. I really think that this is a...

information that a lot of people, especially people that listen to this channel need. For sure. All of your things, where should people go? Well, I have a t-shirt on to remind me. I can't read upside down, so I have no idea. RP Strength, Renaissance Periodization on YouTube, RP Strength on Instagram, Dr. Mike Isertel on Instagram. And look, if you see my face, click on the reel and then just go and... Follow me. The algorithm will do all the other stuff. Yeah, we talk about this kind of stuff quite often, mostly about getting jacked, getting lean. We do get into recovery every now and again, RP. Hilariously enough...

Most of our content on recovery is something we just have to take on the chin with the algorithm because people don't really know. Thousands of people still tune in, but not hundreds of thousands, more like tens. And that to me says one of two things. One, maybe more people need to hear work harder than need to hear relax, but probably not enough people that need to hear relax are clicking on the videos. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Dude, I really appreciate you. Until next time. I love it.

Get away, get off it