Transcript: Mastering Recovery: Heat, Cold, Creatine, and the Signals That Matter

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on a four 20 minutes? Yeah, whatever it 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. Or take a hot bath maybe. 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, 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 possible. Um something people will do, feels good. Um I 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 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 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

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see see mTOR doubled, um I think 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 in a second. But, um 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 This is not a winning solution. You and I know some maniacs that actually work out in the sauna. Oh, we do. I don't necessarily recommend that. That actually would probably kill 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

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entire week. So I aim for 60 minutes per week of heat exposure. if I said I've never worked out in the sauna. Oh, so you're one of those. Yeah, people 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 possibly aid. We need to see more research on that to really get a you know, 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. bev - it's water with a electrolyte solution that's pretty high salt afterwards and sometimes during. Yeah. 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 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 lbs. Easy without like really I should be drinking 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 and not know official data there yet. What about after endurance training? Assuming somebody hydrates well enough and they're not overheated from their endurance work.

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endurance work. Yep. Could also be a 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 off days or at least 4 hours away from the from any kind of training or if you had to do it close to training 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 probably talked about that before, but problems with it but roughly idea of 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 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 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

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consistently across years with with athletes. 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. Yeah. 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 the 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 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've joked about this for years. Like do 50 ° with a 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 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 if you're doing a $ 50 ice bath every day. So, you can fill your bathtub with cool to cold water, get in, but just make sure that you keep sifting your limbs, and it it's chilly. And this the studies on the very well estab - now well-established increases in dopamine and epinephrine that occur in

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dopamine and epinephrine that occur in cold water exposure were actually done at an hour in 60 ° Fahrenheit. And so, it you don't necessarily need an 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. Yeah. 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 is it it's kind of an a cold endurance protocol cuz it's 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 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. Yep. 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

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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 one's ability to mechanically control the diaphragm, but also how well one is regulating carbon dioxide. 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. 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. Great. 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. 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 re - passed through the peer review process, so you're hearing about it prior to peer review. Yep. Having said that, um

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Yep. Having said that, um there's enough in that field. I'm not the first one into that field, and so it it's 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 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 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. 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're 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.

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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 and your car's 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 bing. Here our first analytics are where are these performance anchors? What's dragging you back? What's han - 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. Your recovery capacity has gone way up. Your adap - 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

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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 fingers 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 fingers fast as you can and it's going to say, "Hey, you did 60 taps today and your your average is 75." I like that cuz it taps into ha, no pun intended, um into upper motor neuron capacity. Because a lot of things like like grip strength obviously I have to send the deliberate signal to my hand to grip, but at some point the lower motor neurons are going to be taking over the majority of the work. Like the signal is probably one and done, whereas the um tapping is going to be uh repetitive um sending of signals from upper motor neurons. Yep. So some of the athletes I work with we track blood every day. We track urine every day. We track um ideally a combination of subjective and objective measures. Everything from how did you feel last night to environmental sensors of their bedroom. Uh full PSG's going on running like actual sleep diagnostics not an Oura ring, nothing against Oura, but like full analytics. And some of them it's as simple as how do you feel today

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how do you feel today and what was your vertical jump? Right? So we're going to put people in a position to succeed. We're going to figure out what's the lever that they need to pull as well as what's their aptitude, what sport are they in, what can we realistically get away with and some of them will take machines with them and we'll do blood every day and urine and and all kinds of stuff and some of them it's a lot lower. For myself I I'm not a as I mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of devices. I try to wear the wrist wristwatch. I tend to go off feel which is not It's not the ideal objective way to gauge things, but um part of my reasoning for this is my colleague from the psychology department Dr. Alia Crum has done some studies where they've given people deliberately given people false feedback about their sleep. So told people you didn't sleep very well or they've told people you slept really well and performance can be driven in the expected direction based on feedback independent of how well people slept or didn't sleep. Now that doesn't mean you can take someone that only slept 2 hours or was up every 30 seconds cuz of apnea and tell them they slept great and they're going to perform great cognitive tasks, but you can take someone who slept very well, tell them that their recovery quotient wasn't very good and their their output is going to be worse. And that's my concern about a lot of devices out there, not to name specific devices, but it's still unclear to the general public what the specific algorithms are to generate these recovery scores, right? And so many of the things that reportedly track sleep aren't tracking sleep. They're tracking heart rate and breathing, which are correlates of sleep depth, but that's different. And again,

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depth, but that's different. And again, I'm not knocking those. I I think the sleep trackers, if nothing else, have provided a forum whereby people are very conscious of getting good sleep. It's sort of like knowing the total caloric intake of your food. People go, "Wow, I'm actually eating a lot more than I thought." Or less in some cases, but often it's the case is that it's more. So I I think for the typical person, I'm wondering whether or not like myself because I'm not a a competitive athlete or certainly not a professional athlete. Um I'm competitive with myself, I suppose, but no one else. Morning pulse rate I tend to take when I I'm waking. If I wake out of a really stressful dream, I might relax a little bit and then just take my pulse rate kind of get a range and see if it's spiking for whatever reason. I don't tend to measure grip strength, although I've you can just use a classic uh scale, um old-fashioned scale with the needle now old-fashioned, um or some other more technical devices probably um good if there's a low-cost one. Yeah, they're all low-cost. And then the carbon dioxide tolerance test. So, we haven't really talked about that in in specific ways. My understanding of it is it's uh four deep slow breaths in through the nose, out through the nose, and then a big inhale, as max exhale, and then time duration of exhale through the nose, and then stopping the stopwatch at the point where lungs are empty, not necessarily as long as one could hold their breath. Did I get that right? Pretty much. Okay. And I guess we should credit you and Brian Mackenzie. Yeah, those guys. Yeah. And and the folks um under uh Brian's umbrella for uh really establishing this as a really good metric.

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metric. When and how can I use the carbon dioxide tolerance test to gauge recovery upon waking, um post-training session? Yeah. Would that be a good time? Uh number one answer is whatever you do do be consistent. So, do it under the like any good science experiment, do it under the exact same conditions as you can. That generally means somewhere in the morning, cuz that's when you're probably going to have the most control, most stability um going. So, yeah, like you would take any HRV or other metric, wake up, get under control, get stabilized, take your metric. Got it. Going to be pretty good. Got it. Sodium bicarbonate, baking soda. Um rumor has it and data has it that it can actually be a pretty effective training tool. Very effective. Could you explain a little bit of about how it works and how one might explore using sodium bicarbonate to enhance training output in a couple of different contexts? Yeah. So, there's a handful of these ubiquitously effective supplements for performance. Sodium bicarbonate is one of them. It's a very ingenious idea cuz it's so simple. Effectively, muscle contraction happens because enzymatic function occurs within a fairly specific pH range, right? So, if it gets extremely acidic, it doesn't like it. And so, whether you're running through aerobic glycolysis or anaerobic or anything else, all of these things require even ATP hydrolysis requires ATPases. An enzyme has to The enzymes

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ATPases. An enzyme has to The enzymes don't function well outside of this fairly special range. So, what happens is generally fatigue this the sensations of fatigue are actually caused by some signal that, "Hey, we're starting to run out of pH." Or we're getting in the wrong range. You're not out of gas, usually. You're not too low on oxygen. You're not running low on muscle glycogen yet. You're typically going to see signs or feel signals of fatigue way prior to that. Mostly being pH issues. That being said, what if we could regulate pH better? Enter bicarbonate, right? So, um without going too far into metabolism, effectively what happens is this. You take an inhale, and you're mostly breathing in oxygen, O2. When you exhale, you're breathing out CO2. So, the difference is you've gained a carbon somehow. Well, all of your carbohydrates in your body come in the form of long carbon chains. In fact, that's what a carbohydrate means. It is a one carbon molecule that has one water molecule attached. It's a carbon that has been hydrated. In the case of like glucose, blood sugar, it's a six-carbon molecule. Right? In terms of fat, which are the only two places you're going to get most of your cellular energy, carbohydrates and fat, that is also a big long block and chain of carbons. So, whether you're getting your energy from fat or carbohydrate, you're going to split those atoms. So, in other words, you've got six carbons attached to each other. And in this part of chemistry, it's exergonic. So, when you break that carbon bond, so break one of those carbons off from the other, that's going to release energy. Just like if you had

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to release energy. Just like if you had a pencil in here, and I snapped it, It go bang and pop. I broke the bonds that were connecting that graphite to the next piece of graphite and that released energy cuz I put energy into the system, etc. Okay. As a result though, we've now had, you know, say five or six carbons chained together, we broke one off the end, which is not how it works, but making the point. And now you have one free floating carbon. You use that energy release to then go make ATP, to then go make your muscles contract. But now you've got carbon floating around. You can associate free floating carbon with being at a higher acidic level. It's not going to happen. The only way that you're going to go through this process is if your body says, "Do we have an oxygen molecule available that we can bind this to immediately?" Yes, we do. That carbon attaches to that oxygen molecule. You can't just put CO2 in the blood because of what we just talked about. So, you're going to bind it through this bicarbonate process. It's going to go through your blood, it's going to go into the lungs, it's going to go back into its carbon dioxide molecule, it's going to trans - go through the alveoli into the lungs and you're going to exhale. So, you went from carbon to this bicarbonate system back into carbon, exhale. So, inhaled O2. Plants go the opposite, by the way. So, they're going to breathe in the CO2, they're going to cleave off that carbon, stack those carbons together, and that's how they get larger. Um in your blood, those six carbon chains are called glucose. If we store that in your muscle, we call it glycogen. So, we take a bunch of glucose and stack it together. In a plant, we call that starch. That's effectively what it is, right?

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That's effectively what it is, right? So, you take a bunch of carbon from the atmosphere, stuck it all together, and that's the starch. Um if you want to do it in the form of fruit, we take that starch like from the ground, you put it up through um the tree, go all the way up to the top, put it into the flower, break it up into these big huge chunks of starch into little forms called fructose or glucose. That's why fruit has fructose in it and that's why tubers and stuff have starch in them. Basically, starch in an animal is glycogen in us. Okay, all that to say if that's happening and we know that a byproduct specifically of anaerobic glycolysis meaning the breakdown of carbohydrates for fuel typically in a very fast pace with low oxygen availability. The downside of that equation is acid production. We know that that's a problem cuz I I started the conversation off there intentionally. So what if we could reduce the acid build up? Now you know how pH kind of works. I went and kind of double negatives there, right? You don't want too much acid build up. Then could we prolong and sustain energy um in a more effective pace especially in this anaerobic um interval kind of environment. And again, that's important because in those things failure is not a result of running out of fuel or oxygen. It's a result of fatigue building up way too quickly. Is that also true for resistance training? Uh There's maybe more of the the creatine phosphate system. That can be an issue. It could simply be an issue of force production. You just don't have enough force At least you're not out of energy. You just can't muster enough um force.

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can't muster enough um force. You do enough reps then it's going to be an issue there. Uh creatine phosphate would be the big winner Mhm. depending. Um So to come back a little bit to the beginning and then I'll I'm circling this all together intentionally. All right. Well, the way that we produce energy is going to be in two primary categories anaerobic and aerobic. Aerobic meaning with oxygen anaerobic meaning without. In terms of muscle contraction, you're pretty much talking about carbohydrates or fat. Now fat is going to be exclusively aerobic. Meaning I'm going to use fat from the entire body roughly equally. So you're doing a sprint up a hill and your hamstrings or your glutes or your quads are on fire. You can't You're not just going to use the fat that's directly in those hamstrings. You're going to lose it from the entire body. It has to go through lipolysis so it's in the stored form in adipose tissue. It's got to get broken down, put in the blood. Blood's going to have to go through your body, get taken up in a muscle, taken up through muscle into the mitochondria. Then we're going to have to go through this process called beta oxidation. So, remember, carbohydrates and glucose especially is a six-carbon molecule. Fat, if it's in the form of a triglyceride, it is a three-carbon glycerol backbone and three, you know, tri 1 2 3, fatty acids. Three-carbon backbone and those fatty acids are just big long chains of carbon. That's all it is, right? So, we're going to break that thing down, put it in the blood, move it up, move it into our mitochondria. You can't walk those things across the mitochondria wall, they're too big. So, what you have to do is cleave them

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So, what you have to do is cleave them off into little chunks. And it turns out we break them off into two-carbon chunks, so we call it beta, as in two. Move those into mitochondria. That can go through this little thing called Krebs cycle or tricarboxylic acid cycle. And you kick out a bunch of energy out of that. You had two carbons, so as a result of that process, you're going to generate two carbon dioxides. But remember, you can only go through that process if oxygen is available because you have to be able to place those carbons onto something. Or acid gets up way too high too fast. This is one of the reasons why fat is a nice fuel source, but it's very slow. It's takes physical time to move from the back of your shoulder into your blood, down your hamstring, uptake. In addition, it's required oxygen availability. If [snorts] you need energy faster, you simply don't have the time to bring in the oxygen, transport it through, go through capillaries, exchange through tissues, etc. Carbohydrate on the other hand is going to be stored locally in the exercising muscle cell. And specifically in the cytoplasm. As glycogen. As glu - yeah, as glycogen. And it's stored there. So, what's going to happen initially, your initial demands for exercise or for fuel are going to come from the glycogen stored within the muscle fiber itself. It's just going to break right there. And you're going to be off to the races. So, you have the six-carbon molecule, you're going to break it into two separate three-carbon molecules. Okay, boom. That breaking provides you a tiny bit of energy. Very small, but some. Now, you're going to take those two three-carbon molecules and you want to be able to oxidize them. Cuz that's your only next step. But in order to do that, you got to go to those mitochondria. So,

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you got to go to those mitochondria. So, you got to break one of those molecules off. So, then you'll be back to your two-carbon molecule, just like you did with fat. That's going to go into mitochondria and then it's going to go through the exact same Krebs cycle. Two carbons, etc. But hold on. If you don't have sufficient oxygen or sufficient mitochondria availability, and you're stuck at that two three-carbon place, what the do you do? You have problems, right? Now, we have to say, "Okay, wait a minute. We have two a three-carbon molecule, and we have a bunch of this acid built up. Now, acid functionally is is hydrogen. That That's what pH, potential hydrogen, is what pH stands for, right? So, if hydrogen is building up as a byproduct of muscular contraction, and then you're having this three-carbon molecule, what it can actually do is grab one of those hydrogens. And those three-carbon molecules, by the way, are called pyruvate or pyruvic acid, right? If you take a pyruvic acid and you grab hydrogen, put it on top of it, we now have a different name for it. It's called hydrogen peroxide. Lactate. Bingo, right? That's what lactate or lactic acid is, right? So, we've now built that up. So, number one reason why lactate's not causing your fatigue, it's actually preventing it, and then it does a bunch of other really cool stuff. But the point is, that system can't last so so long. That gets overwhelmed very quickly. What are you going to do with the rest of this hydrogen? Well, if you started off in a normal pH range, you you don't have very far to go before you've now gone into that level of too much acidity. If you start off at a more

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much acidity. If you start off at a more basic, and we and basic I don't mean simple, I mean chemistry, right? A more alkaline, then that same amount of increase in pH is no longer now just put you back in your physiological range. So, sodium bicarbonate, whether taken as a cream or a powder or baking soda or anything else can simply put you in a more alkaline state even acutely. So, this is something you can take right now before your your workout um you're going to delay what we call delay the progression of fatigue. And how would people start to approach this practice? I My understanding is you can do this with common you know, store-bought baking soda. No question. Um there's always a concern about gastric distress that it's a very effective laxative sometimes an unwanted laxative effect. But how would one approach this before let's say I'm I'm going to I'm doing the mile repeats Yep. exercise mile repeats protocol that we talked about earlier. I'm doing that for a few months and now I want to try the sodium bicarb Yep. approach. I'm well hydrated. Hopefully I'm well rested. I'm ready to go. When am I going to drink this sodium bicarb solution? What How would I make the solution? Let's say I'm I take 10 oz of water. Yeah. How much bicarb do I want to sodium bicarb should I put in there? Can we come up with it like is it half a teaspoon? Is it a teaspoon? Um here's how I'm going to tell you. You will thank me by starting lower. You can always go more later. So, a little pinch. You cannot go backwards. How about I start with a quarter teaspoon? Fine. Half of honestly half is fine. Half a teaspoon.

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Half a teaspoon. Totally fine. Dissolve that. Slug that down. I I read a study recently that showed that people will hit their the the peak benefits of this at different times, but it's somewhere if I if memory serves me correctly somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes later. So, I might want to drink it on the way to the track. It can be as low as 20. Okay. So, maybe as I get to the tracks since I'm going to do some warm-up with some walking jogging. I I say 45 minutes. Okay. That's just a very rough standard. But yeah, you're right. It is individualized and you probably want to play with that a little bit. If not just somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to an hour. Okay. And then um the perceived and real fatigue if done correctly the perceived and real fatigue ought to be reduced. Yes. I can do more work without feeling exhausted. Will I feel less of a lactate burn done in air quotes for those listening? I realize that's a very crude way to describe a complex physiological process. Yep. Um fantastic. Can sodium bicarbonate be used repeatedly for longer duration training? Yep. And if I were going to use it with weight training for whatever reason. Maybe I'm doing circuit type training or I'm doing the super set type strength training that you talked about before push pull where it's a little bit more cardiovascularly demanding. Yep. Um then maybe I'd sip that throughout the workout. Make sure there's a bathroom nearby it sounds like cuz I do I am aware that many people get pretty serious gastric distress. very quickly. Okay. Great. Well, it sounds like an amazing training tool. I really appreciate you sharing it cuz I think it's it's one that doesn't get a

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think it's it's one that doesn't get a lot of airtime these days cuz it's been around but sounds like it has some pretty impressive effects. Yeah, you know what's sort of funny about that is I mean I get it pop culture is what it is but still to this day if you want to talk about sort of your most effective general health / performance supplementation it's the same three to four to five. And then it's because they work really well. Without going into the chemistry of each one in the practice of each one cuz I definitely want to get you back to talk about nutrition and supplementation at some point but I think we need a full couple of hours to get that right at least. Um if you as a teaser would you mind just listing off the other supplements that you have found are very effective for for many people. So sodium bicarbonate or baking soda is one. What are some of the other ones? Yep. We'll go kind of reverse order. Beta alanine is another very classically effective one. Um [clears throat] similar idea as sodium bicarbonate so it's going to beta alanine is going to come in and it's going to be converted and stored as what's called carnosine in the muscle and carnosine is an intracellular buffer. So, in other words, it's just going to delay the build-up of acid. Um so so a fatigue blocker, if you will. So, very effective, very cheap, very safe. Um well-studied. The top one though of all of them by far that has an incredibly strong safety profile, it has It is a cheap It is a simple form to get. Has a important magnitude of effect and is uh effective across multiple domains of physical health and performance. And it

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physical health and performance. And it is because of that, it is my crown jewel. It is in my opinion, without question, the Michael Jordan of all supplementation. And that's creatine monohydrate. It effects so many things. We typically think about it as it's muscle stuff, right? You You talked kind of you quickly were talking about the creatine phosphate system. But we have to realize um the mass majority of research on creatine phosphate is not in sport performance and it has not been for 20 years. It's in clinical. And it has everything from effects um on the neurological system to there have been associations to mental health and depression. And to be very clear, I am certainly not saying you can take creatine and cure anything. And I'm not saying it's going to stop you from depression or anything, but I'm saying there's there's a lot of research in these areas and there's a reason people are doing it. Yeah, I completely agree. And if you're willing, I'd love to have you back for us to do a discussion on creatine and the brain or creatine and the nervous system. That'd be a lot of fun and maybe we can do a a kind of a journal club in advance of that. For those [clears throat] that don't know a journal