Transcript: Cold After Training: Recovery Without Blunting Adaptation

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Thanks. I Yeah, I do that. Very attached to this watch or it's attached to me, I suppose. Um my body weight in pounds divided by two, that's what I'm going to try and get across the entire day. Um as a kind of baseline and then my body weight in pounds divided by 30 Yeah. during the workout every 15 or 20 minutes. That I'm going to try and consume that amount. And then I definitely do better when I increase the amount of salt that I'm taking in anyway, 500 to um a 500 mg to a gram of salt um several times a day actually, but I'm not eating that often, which leads me to my other question, which is um I prefer to train fasted or semi-fasted, meaning first thing in the morning or within an hour or two of waking where obviously I've been fasting while I'm asleep or having not eaten anything for three or four hours before. I just feel lighter and like more uh more energetic. Yeah. If that works for me, is that okay or uh or should I try Is it better to eat something before one trains? Personal preference. Easy easy answer there. Great. Um it depends on of course how hard you trained. What the training was like, what sport you're involved with, how many total calories, etc. But in general personal preference for the average person. Yeah, that probably handles 90% of the Yeah. questions about that. Cold showers, ice baths, and cold immersion up to the neck. I I always uh preface this by saying there are not a a lot of studies. There are some, but not a lot of controlled studies looking at cold showers cuz it's harder to control the variables of where people stand. So I would say if you have access to a cold immersion of some sort, ice bath or cold immersion, great. But if you don't, cold showers would be the next best thing. The lore goes that if you do an ice bath or cold water immersion after strength or hypertrophy training that you are short-circuiting some of that. The lore also goes that cold showers might be okay, and my interpretation of those data and that

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my interpretation of those data and that discussion is that all that is probably true, but I have a hard time imagining that the effects are so robust that it can completely prevent strength gains and hypertrophy such that my stance for myself is trying to the cold exposure training away from the strength and hypertrophy training. But if you can't do it any other time, right afterward probably isn't going to throw my whole system out of whack uh and prevent the improvements. Am I diluting myself? Um Um couple of caveats here. Number one, I would say I have a personal vested interest in cold. I've been around this stuff for a long time. Um being involved and being an advisor for XPT and being in the space a long time, I'm a big believer in cold, especially cold water. Deliberate cold exposure. 100%, right? So that being said, uh I do think getting into an ice bath immediately after a hypertrophy session is getting pretty close to you just shouldn't have done the session. It is detrimental. Good to know. I wouldn't do it. I guess is the most blunt way to put it. Um if you're like, "Hey, like I'm not super concerned with growing muscle and I want these other things that come with cold water immersion, fine. It's not a zero It's not zero. It's not taking you backwards. How much does it cut you down? I don't know. We don't know that like that'd be a difficult number to come up with. Um is it 1% reduction? No, it's more than that. Is it 100? Not even close. I don't know where it lands though. It's enough though for me to go, in general, best practices don't get in the ice immediately after a workout. How long should I wait? Well, in theory, the best answer we could give you would be 4 hours because of what we talked about earlier today of of going, "Okay, immediately you've got the signaling cascade that takes seconds. You've got gene expression that's happening in this rough 4-hour window. After the genes have gone off and now you're just going through the protein synthesis process, the signal's already there and it's gone

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the signal's already there and it's gone back down to baseline. So, then reintroducing or introducing cold here is not going to disrupt that signal. That's a very um non-scientifically founded because we don't know at this point at all What is very clear though is if you get off your workout, go right into the ice it's probably 10% attenuation of growth. I don't know, maybe more depends on the person. Some people, if you look at the individual data, it's a pretty bad. It's enough to where it's like that that's a really big deal. The benefits of the ice I don't think now outweigh the benefits of of hypertrophy training. What about cold showers? I don't think cold showers are going to do much. Um you if you've been on both, you know that this is like we're not playing the same game here. Right. An ice bath or a cold water true cold water immersion up to the neck with limbs in if for 1 to 5 minutes is a completely different stimulus than in the cold shower. Especially also compared to similar like cryo. Right. It is not even the same same thing here. Um so, in general I would say don't do those. Cold shower, I don't really care. Can you work it out so you don't do them same time? That would be my hope, right? Um I would actually prefer you do the cold before. If you really had to do it um um Certainly will wake you up. Get that adrenaline burst. No, we've played with that actually years ago um doing that. Um there's actually some fun stuff you can do with the endurance piece with cold stuff, but it is totally not feasible for most people cuz you get out of you're getting water everywhere and then you're going to jump on your bike and just get and it's just a giant mess. It's fun, but but yeah, I would say walk away from it if you can. That's actually That's where I stand based on the data. Um based on my intuition and experience, I don't think it's a good thing to do. Now, having said that that's mostly concerned with maximizing hypertrophy. Strength is not as clear. There are some data to show it actually blocks strength adaptations, but because of what we talked about earlier, the mechanisms and the drivers are different. And so, I don't think it's as big a concern um for strength development. Though, I would still generally say if you can get away with staying out of the ice immediately after the workout and you can at least wait a few hours, that's the better approach. Less concerned with

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the better approach. Less concerned with strength, more concerned with hypertrophy in terms of interference effect. Um if you can do it on off days or before or any other time, that's that's the place to land. That's generally when I try to do it. I'm just kind of throwing out extreme case cuz I get asked that question a lot. What about the use of uh ice bath or cold water immersion or cold shower after endurance training? Okay. So, a couple of interesting things here. You mentioned we don't have a tremendous amount of data on cold water immersion immersion overall. So, a lot of this is moving. Um Um there have been some papers to show that cold water immersion can actually enhance mitochondrial biogenesis. And actually even for endurance stuff, it's been shown to to cause improvement in endurance adaptations relative to not. It's not enough for me to be truly confident in that statement yet. I would like to see that repeated. Not not that I have a problem with the paper, the methodology that they use in that particular study, but it it's just a like this is a weird thing. So, I want to see this repeated more often. So, I have less concern with doing it immediately post endurance cuz you could even argue that in there may be some benefit. I don't think you need to go out of your way to try to make sure you get in an ice immediately afterwards and thinking you're going to get some massive adaptation. Um we use ice a decent amount when I can get athletes to do it. But, this context is different. Number one, when we're in camp and we've got a world title fight coming up or something else. Um we've just pitched in it in a major league baseball game. I am not concerned about hypertrophy. I'm not even concerned with strength development. I am now pushing towards recovery. There's a paradigm that I think is important with all of these things to understand, which is are you pushing for optimization or adaptation? When you're pushing for adaptation, you don't want to block the signal for adaptation. This less recovery. You're not going to feel as good, and you probably should be hedging towards stress. When you're pushing for optimization, it's the opposite. So, if I'm in season and I had a pitcher just throw 125 pitches, I'm not trying to cause adaptation. I'm trying to recover as quickly as possible because 4 days from now we got to do

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because 4 days from now we got to do this again, and I got to do this across 162 games. Um I've you're going to play six day five days in a PGA golf tournament, and you're going to have to do it again every week for a bunch of weeks in a row. I need to recovery as fast as I possibly can. So, if I'm blending adaptation, fine. I'm not actually trying to do so. I'm trying to optimize. If you spend all of your time in one of those two areas, you're going to have problems. So, you need to be judicious about thinking, is this a point in my life or training cycle that I want to cause adaptations, or am I trying to optimize? You spend too much time in one of the other ones, again, you're going to have problems. So, that's in generally how I will treat um the ice for for all those adaptations. What about heat? Yeah. When and I'll frame this question differently because I I'm sure there are a number of ways in which heat can short-circuit all sorts of things. I mean, heat can in excess can kill you. Yeah. It can shut down fertility. It can um in excess, right? It can do all sorts of things, but it can also increase growth hormone, increase vasodilation, improve one's ability to sweat, which can be very beneficial in a number of contexts. Yeah. For the typical for 75% of people 75% of the time, when do you think heat is most useful? And here I'm referring to dry sauna or wet sauna. I'm not specifically talking about infrared sauna because the data there are a little unclear to me. And I I don't even know that my sense with infrared saunas is they don't go hot enough for my particular taste. You and I have a similar taste there. Okay. not crushing 200 past, I'm I'm not interested. Right. And and my sense about infrared sauna is that maybe I haven't seen the data is that um but that a lot of people like it cuz like the way they look in the infrared sauna. It feels cool. It feels like you're doing something unusual. Now, infrared light are beneficial for other reasons, actually for mitochondrial health in the retina. There's There's good data. But, infrared sauna to me they never goes hot enough. So, I'm talking about 200 or hotter or maybe 180 to 220. Obviously, do what's safe, folks, and heed all the warnings about pregnant people not going in saunas, etc.

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in saunas, etc. I assume you're lumping in hot water immersion as well. Hot water immersion, so hot baths, hot sauna. When would you like When do you think most people could leverage sauna or hot baths to benefit their training and fitness and and health? Yeah, okay. I have a handful of things to say about this topic. One of them is you never have a hard time convincing people to get hot. Everyone feels good. Like, yeah, getting hot bath. Like, can you take more hot showers? Sure. Like, no problem there, right? Um, there are a handful of studies that have looked at uh, this immediately post. And it seems to even augment hypertrophy. So, after hypertrophy training, getting in the sauna for 20 minutes? Yeah, whatever needs to be. Um, we don't have a good titration. What's the number minutes-wise? We don't have a temperature titration. Hot shower would would be a second That would be a weak second best. I would say it's a very weak. So, take a hot bath I think a hot bath is probably a lot closer to what you're looking for. It actually kind of goes back to our initial conversations. Theoretically, you're just going to aid in blood flow. So, you're going to put more nutrients in and more waste product out. Metabolic stress, all that stuff is going through. So, that's the thought anyways. We We're far from knowing. Plausible, right? Absolutely plausible. Um, something people will do. Feels good. Um, well, I would say with cold and hot, I want to caution you against a couple of things. This is true across all physiology, but you need to be really careful about moving percentages from molecular to outcome. Very careful. So, for example, it's easy to see a paper um that says, "Okay, we put you in a hot bath or something and we saw growth hormone increase 300%." That is not going to result in 300% increase in muscle size, right? In fact, 300% might result in absolutely no change in physical size, right? So the And the reason I'm saying this is because there's a lot of people in this space that will misapply the mechanisms. And they'll they'll grossly overestimate

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And they'll they'll grossly overestimate what these things can do and what they do do because they'll find something like that. Um I mean you know this, you've done enough cellular work to in the lab if I see see mTOR doubled, um um I think, "Shit, it didn't work." I need to see a 10x increase before I know it's even physiologically relevant. So reading that paper, reading someone's social media post, you're like, "Wow, it increased mTOR 38%." I'm like, "Well, it didn't work." And you're like, "Well, that's huge." I'm like, "That's not 38% increase in muscle size." So that's a very important point I want to make because I'm going to talk about the benefits here a second. But um I I do want I don't want people to be fooled into thinking that this is some crazy miracle. Um the same thing with the sauna. In terms of general health health outcomes, it is a clearly a beneficial thing. This is a really good idea to get hot a lot. It is not a substitute for exercise, though. It's a very important distinction. If the options are nothing or sauna, get in the sauna. Really really good idea. If the the exchange is, though, I don't need to work out because I did the sauna, bad. You You This is not a winning solution. You and I know some maniacs that actually work out in the sauna. Oh, we do. Um I don't necessarily recommend that. That actually could would probably kill a a large number of people, but it can be worked up to. Yeah. It certainly. Yeah. So it I want I Like every time I talk about that, I I flag that because it's just too easy to hear that and go, "Oh, well, I think Dr. Huberman said if I just get in the sauna, I don't have to work out." Like, "No. Those words have never come out of his mouth. And I'm definitely not working out in the sauna. If I'm in the sauna, I'm either sitting or I'm lying down, and I'm trying to make it through. I tend to do three 20-minute bouts across the entire week. So, I aim for 60 minutes per week of heat exposure, which is not a ton. I said I've never worked out in the sauna. Oh, so you're one of those. Yeah, people will do air squats, they'll bring the Airdyne bike in there. I'm I look at the sauna as kind of a time to get lazy and sweat. Totally fine. Um Going back to your original question. So, potential to aid, plausible aid, we need to see more research on that to really get a Do I need to put this in practice? I

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Do I need to put this in practice? I think if you try it, very little harm. I struggle to see a downside. If you make sure your hydration's on point, right? Cuz now you got to factor in the fact you just kicked out 2 or 3 lb. If you're you at at 200-plus lb, I assume, or roughly, um if you're in the sauna for 20 minutes, I would imagine you could do 2 or 3 lb. Yeah, I usually I'm I'm hover somewhere around like 225, and I drink um I drink a 32 oz. Right. It's water with a electrolyte solution that's pretty high salt afterwards, and sometimes during. And sometimes after that, if I do it late in the evening, I'll go to sleep, and I'll wake up in the middle of the night Yeah. just just feeling so parched. It's amazing how much water one loses in the sauna. Like a normal sweat rate for someone 225, especially in 20 minutes in a sauna, I would absolutely expect you to do 3 lb. Easy, without like doing it. even more water. Yeah, you're probably half the water that you need to get. And you mentioned the the possible benefits of doing it after strength hypertrophy training, which are make sense for plausible mechanistic reasons. Um not No official data there yet. What about after endurance training? Assuming somebody hydrates well enough, and they're not overheated from their endurance work, Yep. could also be of benefit. Yeah. Wow. So, more and more what I'm thinking the framework here is in an ideal world, one would train and then do sauna Yep. or heat exposure of some kind endurance training or strength hypertrophy training, and then do sauna and then do cold exposure on on off days or at least 4 hours away from the from any kind of training or if you had to do it close to train do it before training. Yeah, I love cold in the morning. We we've actually run this experiment on professional athletes where we do enough tracking with things like HRV. Which is a global metric of like overall fatigue. Okay, and you you've probably talked about that before but but problems with it but roughly ideal overall fatigue. Um HRV in general higher the score the better, right? So a low HRV is fatigue, right? Well, if you wake up and take your HRV in the morning and then you get into ice. What's going to happen is you're going

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What's going to happen is you're going to see that number plummet. The second you get out that's going to fall off the earth which means roughly you've moved into a sympathetic um um place. Surprising, you get in 30 ° water you're going to go very sympathetic very quickly. However, if you continue to watch your HRV for 30, 60, 90 and up to 2 to 3 hours post, you will generally see a an improved HRV score relative to where you started. So it's it's back to this hormetic stressor, right? A really cold shocking exposure will be a net result of you being more relaxed throughout the day in general. And we've seen that now like very consistently across years with with athletes. So so I think it's a great way to start your day. Um you won't need nearly as much coffee after spending 3 minutes in 30 ° water. 30 ° is pretty pretty darn cold. I was in the ocean this morning for about 3 minutes. It felt I didn't bring a thermometer but it felt like somewhere in the low 50s. But 50 and moving is really cold. Yeah. Water's moving, right? That's really cold. That's right. The thermal layer that that surrounds you when you sit still in cold water immersion. I'm encouraging people now if they really I was a joke that you know people like to look real stoic and tough when they're in there like they're just grinding through it with no pain at all but that the stillness is actually uh reducing the the stimulus. If they shift around a little bit, you break up that thermal layer, that's where the real action is. We we've joked about this for years. Like, do 50 ° with the whirlpool jet on? Now I'm impressed. Cuz that that is hard. You sit in 35 ° for 3 minutes, like it's But with XPT, I've seen I can't even tell you how many hundreds of people from all walks of life, on all age, that we've been able to get in 30-some degree water for 3 minutes. 50 ° with a whirlpool going? That number gets very small. Yeah, and if you don't have access to a whirlpool, this is this should be reassuring to you. You can Some people say, "Oh, you know, I don't have access to ice." And ice can actually get pretty expensive you're doing a $ 50 ice bath every day. So, you can fill your bathtub with um cool to cold water, get in, but just

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cool to cold water, get in, but just make sure that you keep sifting your limbs, and it it's chilly. Um and this the studies on the very well esta - now well-established increases in dopamine and epinephrine that occur in cold water exposure were actually done at an hour in 60 ° Fahrenheit. Yeah. And so, it you don't necessarily need it ice cold or an ice bath, but immersion is really better than the cold shower. The cold shower is kind of a it's the um it's it's kind of the espresso shot version. Yep. You know, that's it's sort of funny cuz if you look at most of those initial studies, and you think, "Man, how did they get people to sign up to spend 45 minutes in 55 ° water? 55 ° is cold, even if it's not moving, and then they're going to not spend 5 minutes in it, they're going to go an hour." If you've ever done ice baths at that temperature, you know, like, "All right, after a few minutes, it's not that bad, but man, that's a protocol." Yeah, it's kind of an a cold endurance protocol. Cuz one thing to get in for 1 minute to 3 minutes, and you know you're getting out. You could sing a song, you could do anything to distract yourself, but 45 minutes to an hour is is intense. Uh maybe they I don't know I don't think they paid the subjects, but anyway, that that study was done in Europe. I forget where it was done, but um anyway, they were hearty subjects. I want to talk a bit about overtraining and gauging recovery. Yeah. Um so there are a couple methods that um I've heard about and that I use um based on some data that I've seen, but mainly discussions with really informed people like yourself, Brian MacKenzie, uh Kelly Starrett and others. The two that I'm aware of for gauging recovery of the nervous system and kind of systemic recovery are um grip strength, especially uh grip strength on waking in the morning, Yeah. and uh the so-called carbon dioxide tolerance test, the ability to do a long controlled exhale after a few uh rhythmic deep breaths, just which I'm assuming taps into both um uh one's ability to mechanically control the diaphragm, but also how well one is regulating carbon dioxide. First question is,

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First question is, is this stuff um fiction, fact, or um a combination of kind of anecdata, as I call it? Uh are there any peer-reviewed published data? Is your lab working on these things? And um am I deluding myself using these tools, or or are they useful? It's not fiction at all. Uh there are um with with like CO2 tolerance, there's less published data. We've run um a study in our lab looking at the associations between the CO2 tolerance and what we call trait and state anxiety. Um and those are in the publication process, is what I'll say. Uh so you can't really talk about that stuff, as you know, and until it's out. But in general, I'd say like there's a reason I'm still doing it. Mhm. [clears throat] [clears throat] I'll just leave it at that. Yeah, well, assuming it's not a clinical trial, I mean, I think sharing um preliminary findings is fine as long as we highlight them as preliminary. Yeah. I'm not a reviewer, but I look forward to reading the paper. Yeah, but as you know, scientific ethically, like you need to be careful about sending telling people results before you've gone through that process. Right, which is why I'm flagging this as these results are not yet peer passed through the peer review process, so you're you're about it prior to peer review. Yep. Having said that, um there's enough in that field. I'm not the first one into that field. And so, it it I'm very confident that that's that's a real thing. Um in terms of actual tracking recovery, the big picture is this. When we run through a full analysis of when we have an athlete go through our bio a biomolecular athlete program, we're going to run and we're going to look at three major categories. Okay, category one are what we call visible stressors. And then we have hidden stressors. And then we have recovery capacity. Anytime Anytime the total stress load outpaces recovery capacity, you're either going backwards in your physical ability, or you're reducing adaptability. Now, you have levers to pull here. You can reduce stress intake, or you can increase recovery capacity. Right? What we want in an ideal situation is to be able to implement the most stress possible, because that's the driver of adaptation, recover from that.

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adaptation, recover from that. Now, we get the most adaptation. And adaptation being simply a change. Whatever change you want it to be. That's That's our gold standard, right? It's pie in the eye. Some people have endogenous differences. They just recover better. They don't. There are genetic factors. But let's talk about the ones that are manipulable. If we go to the stress side of it, you want the throttle to be pushed as far down on the ones you want stress from, and as far off of the ones you don't want stress, so that the adaptation comes in the exact area you want. And you're not burning gas in something you don't care about. Because you just you're you're taking that total stress bucket too high. Um recovery capacity over there. So, here's how you can do that. You can run some analytics and measure what we do with everyone do these these very comprehensive breakdowns to figure out what's that physiology look like, hidden and visible. And then what's the recovery capacity. Once we have that blueprint, we can now figure out what are the two or three things we need to track that are these indicators of what we call performance anchors. So, an anchor is something that kind of drags behind you or below you that slows you down. The analogy being, let's say we're going down one of these amazing canyon roads and I won't say which canyon we're in, so you can stay hidden here. Um Um and your car is going down at a certain velocity and you want to go faster. Most people's is first impulse is to hit the gas, the accelerator. We want to push. Well, that's fine, but if your foot is on the brake and you push the accelerator, you might go a little bit faster, but number one, you're wasting a lot of literal gas to go a little bit faster and two, you're burning your engine. You might you're going to blow. The easier solution is just take your foot off the brake. You're going to go faster by just stopping yourself. Then, if that's not fast enough, we can hit the accelerator. Everyone wants to just push down. Right? More stimulus, more optimization, bing here. Our first analytics are where are these performance anchors? What's dragging you back? What's What's putting down the brake? I want to move those two or three things out of the way and now let's see how far you get. Oh, look at that.

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Oh, look at that. Your recovery capacity has gone way up. Your adapt Your adaptations are happening faster now. Or we can do more work because you're recovering quicker. So, we're trying to figure out in those buckets and we have a whole host of things that we measure, biomarkers and surveys and and everything else that we go through to find out what's there. So, after we've done that, now we're just going to track a few of these recovery markers along the way to figure out what's globally happening. So, that could mean grip strength. Um I have some folks who we're going to test grip strength daily. Others, we're going to look at HRV or combinations. We may look at performance metrics like a a force plate. So, you're going to do a vertical jump every single day and we're going to see where that's at. We've used the tap test before, which is how many times you can tap your finger as fast as possible. It's a rough indicator of central nervous system. In in a say 1-minute interval. Exactly. And this is apps you can do on this like you tap his finger as fast as you can and it's going to say, "Hey, you did 60 taps today and your your average is 70."