#822 - Dr Andy Galpin - The New Science Of Heart Health, VO2 Max & Sleep Hacking

25:00I was like, okay, great. Let's just stretch out a little bit and all of a sudden, let's just go through a 315 on, let's just do set of 10 on squats. You'd be like, like, you need to be childish, right? But then you're gonna do that on a salt bike. You're like, yeah, that's normal. That's totally fine. No, no, your legs are normal. It's a, it's a like blatant disregard for the difficulty of cardio work. It's like a middle thing. It's a middle finger to cardio stuff. It's like, ah, no, this is bumps and tums. It'll be fine. It's also because you're one minute and on the bike and you're just like, oh my god, this is terrible.

25:30And so you're like, yeah, five minutes was a lot. It was hard. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Okay, so day one day one. I just want got our work done here. We're out of there Tuesday now. We're gonna build back in our lower intensity easier thing All right, so maybe you're going for your hike. You're gonna go rock. You're gonna go do whatever you want to do I will typically personally do like a 30 -minute station of three nasal breathing only what I mean by that is 10 minutes on a bike 10 minutes on a treadmill 10 minutes on a rower, something like that, right? Because I don't want to sit in a row for 30 minutes.

26:05I can't, I actually can't handle any of those. Something's going to hurt on me afterwards for the most part. So I'll do whatever, right? I might jump rope. I might do all kinds of stuff like that. With our athletes, we will actually even do shorter. So we'll do oftentimes like five minute things. We'll set up five to seven stations. It might be bench press 50 % everyone are max. It might be push -ups. It might be an active walking lunge thing, five minutes, and it's going to be nasal only to keep things down. I don't want any muscular endurance. We're not sweating that hard, but we're moving in a lot of different ways.

26:40We'll do Turkish get -ups or more athletic movements so that we're not just like lifting weights up and down sort of the whole time. So we try to move, and your joints honestly tend to feel better afterwards. You kind of day you finish that you have less energy you're in the hole today you're actually feel like oh man I should go to work right now like I feel locked in I feel pretty good that can be 20 to 40 minutes it can be longer if you really think go two hours I don't like care but I would say under 20 is just kind of moving it's not really going to be enough to stimulate what we're looking for here so we would plug that in uh Wednesday is probably where we're going to incorporate uh you mentioned lifting so there's going to be some lifting in there whatever we're doing is So you're trying to get stronger, do your strength training stuff.

27:26If you're trying to simply improve VO2 max, then we might do some corrective exercises here. Am I corrective? I mean, this could be overhead presses, it could be heavy rows. This could be big hip thrusts or light press. Whatever we're doing to feel strong, feel joints, whatever that thing is we're trying to do, we're not going to go to max effort here, but we're not just warming up either. We're going to get work done, right? because we're going to make sure that muscular endurance wise, that's not causing our problems. And so this would look more like someone of a bodybuilder work out, though it's not single joint, it's not joint isolation stuff, it's typically more compound things, and it's still going to be, we'll call it that eight to 15 rep range of your big things, probably two to three sets, with that first set being, you know, six, seven, RPE, you know, out of 10.

28:21That can set maybe a little bit higher, but you're not going to nine at all, right? So we're gonna get some work done there. You're gonna leave the gym filling up on, you're gonna be sweating, but you're not gonna be destroyed, either. And then if you have a few isolation exercises for a lagging body port or a body part, you're specifically going to emphasize, especially if it's upper body, like trash, I don't care. like, you know, just zero or, or, zero or, just get it after who cares, right? Try, try to push down so you're dead. Like go ahead, right? All good. So, um, that would be probably Wednesday.

28:53If you want to also add in additional day two, so you want to do another thing, but this is what I would encourage walking. So on this day, we should have done a 10 minute, 15 minute walk in the morning, another 10, 15 minute one in the afternoon, really, really little level stuff. If you can do three in a day, great, but we're getting stuff in. Now, that leads us to Thursday. So Thursday is probably when we're going to come back and it's going to lift closer to Monday, or it's going to be our shorter, higher one, but we're not going to go all the way up to that ceiling. It's very difficult for people to go to Max Heart Rate more than twice per week, the average person.

29:30Pro at least, yeah, every day, right or close. But most people, especially if you and a job, that is sympathetically driven or any life I should say, not even a job. If there's just a lot of processing sympathetically, you walk out of that thing and you always red line yourself all day and then you red -distance like something gym. We end up, people end up spending a lot of money to unwind that problem because it gets a bad spot pretty fast. So, but we're going to work here. And this would be more of like this in the day for an Norwegian. This is four fours. You don't have to actually get all the way to the top end here, but you're going to put in good, consistent, hard work.

30:07We're going to get there if you want to do a slightly different protocol. That's fine. But this could be a call it 85 % day. And so if you wanted to do 30 on 30 off, you're moving. But this is not like motivational music playing, like everything in my life counts right now, Rocky music, like I have to finish, like you can only go into that hole so often, right? or distance of sliding down. So, just call this four by four day, if you want to make life easier and we're good there. Now into Friday, by the way, any of these days could have been a pure off day if you wanted a course or needed to, travel day, whatever the case is.

30:49Friday, we're gonna go back into Tuesday, right? So now when our longer duration thing, probably picking up the intensity just a little bit on those 30 minutes, still nasal breathing, but like, try to get some real work done. and then Saturday we're going back into movement. So this is where lifting again and we're basic movement and that leaves the Sunday for any different stuff you wanna do. If you wanna slide in, if you're lifting, you wanna slide more recovery stuff in, you wanna slide other stuff in. Autos reality is, that's a buffer day. Cause probably something happened in those six days where you didn't get your training in.

31:18And so now you can kinda slide things back one day and make sure you get six good training days done out of seven. One of the things that you mentioned that was motivation to do this. I would imagine that for a lot of people, one of the biggest hurdles to doing top -end VO2 max work is fear of the difficulty. It's the trepidation that you have as you walk into the gym knowing if I'm going to do this properly, it's really going to hurt and that means my heart rate is going to be high and that's kind of scary and I get anxious thinking about that and that sucks. from a motivation, sustaining, the will to train, over time, intra session or intra workout VO2 max motivation, what have you come to learn as levers and ways that people can kind of really sink in?

32:10Yeah, that's a really great question because you have people that go into one of two big camps on this one. Camp one is we'll call this CrossFit Camp, which is if I'm not throwing up the the workout it didn't count. Right? And it's not it's not I'm not taking a shot at all. But these are people that do not have the problem you just described. This is actually the opposite. I feel like I didn't do anything if I don't peg myself all the way to the end every day. That's a problem. And then you have the other group, which is more like you described, which is going, hey, I just worked all these hours, I had this going on and like now my whole workout, I can get it done, but I can't do that.

32:49There's this. That happens to me all the time. I have 27 jobs and kids. Sometimes I'm just like, oh, God, I have 30 minutes. I can get a workout. But that's not going to happen. And I just know, right? All right, great. So I personally, and the way we often coach, is I, this is why I don't like having set workouts on set days of the week. Example I gave you was like Mondays the hard day. I never do that. I just have to workouts in order and I just do the next one and order regardless, right? And so if something came up on Monday and I couldn't train I'm not doing Tuesday's work on a Tuesday. I'm doing Mondays workout So there are no Monday workouts.

33:30It is just this is the order we do them in and I try to get 20 in and 30 days Sometimes that's seven in a row. Sometimes that's you know one one ought sometimes it's 14 days in a row because I got a break and lined up that way. I never take a day off unless I'm forcing because my schedule forces me to do it often enough anyways it works out. Right so that's how I end up doing it. Um that said this gives you the ability to win that flight on the late and you land it in and the other thing happened your kid was sick all night and you're like yes today is supposed to be that max effort one mile not doing it today I'm just going to slide in that lower intensity one and there's a game you're going to play here, right?

34:10Because if you do that often enough, you end up just 30 minute kind of easy one every day when you didn't have to, right? At the same time, there's also I'd rather people do that than choose nothing. Right? If the option is, okay, then I don't have time to do that perfect workout at that intensity. And therefore, Dr. Andy said, if I don't do it at all the way up to max, it doesn't do any benefits. So therefore, I'm just not not going to do it. That's not the case. Still working at 8 % still has benefit. Or can it 40 % still has benefit over 0%. There is never a case in which exercise is doing nothing.

34:49That does not happen. It's not the optimal benefit potentially, but it's never zero. And so I always want to make people, especially if people that are struggling, if exercise is new to them, if it's just even not new, but it's not a huge passion, like it is, hours. I still want to win. I want to win as many times as we can. And if we see it sliding into that spot where it's like, all right, it's been three weeks, we haven't done anything hard. Then it's time to reassess what we're doing. But often is the case. As you know this, once you get in there and get moving, you're like, all right, I can do this.

35:28And then you end up going and doing the hard thing, anyways, but if you never show up in the gym, that answer's going to be zero every time. So I just don't want people not training. Is the primary thing I'm worried about. Yeah, this is one of the, I guess, V2 max training is the cardio equivalent of 1RM's. And well, like 1RM days, they're scary. And you know, it's the one that you're tempted to miss. So you're the hurdle to doing it is like embedded in the difficulty and the difficulty is precisely the signal for the outcome that you're trying to get. So it's this sort of very vicious cycle of the thing that you want to do, being the thing that discourages you from doing the thing.

36:06So, yeah, I mean, you know, I'm speaking to myself here as someone who's trying to improve my cardiovascular fitness after many years of just lifting heavy things. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're the same here friend. You know, that's us. I see you. One thing I will often describe is, think about them on. All right, so I got this from a friend of mine, Kenny Can, many years ago, I actually started one of the first CrossFit Gems, tough, can or something like that. CrossFit don't like for many, many years. And he realized this problem of, hey, you can't just go red line every single day. So he set up a structure, we said 70 % of our training.

36:43How many trains that is? 70 % of them are going to be practice. What he means by that is you're still going to You're still going to get sweaty. It's going to be hard. But the goal is to get better at something. Get better at technique. Get better at holding your ribcage when you get tired. You're getting better at something much like you if you were to go to play sports. And you go to practice every day. You're not thinking you're trying to win that practice. You're intentionally doing a drill where someone's holding your arm behind you. Or there's six basketball players against your setting odds against you on purpose.

37:15You know you're not going to win, but you're trying to specifically get better at something. 70 % of the basketball practice or whatever is Practice related right great that leaves you then 20 % or so the time Where we're gonna practice competing Okay, so we're gonna scrimmage we're gonna actually try to get the best score possible So here here's our 20 -minute test Chris Let's see how you can get the highest amount of mileage whatever the thing is we can be right We're going to compete and this is we're gonna pace ourselves So we're not going to go as hard as we're going to try to win. We're going to try to beat the person, the leaderboard, whatever the case may be, right?

37:52We're going to change our technique and our position. We want to get the highest score in the bench, right? In terms of a weight up there. That's 20%. That leaves us 10 % of the time where we're going to touch death, right? We're going to touch this, which means we might do that same 20 minute workout. And I want you sprinting step number one. I know you're going to blow up in three minutes. I know. The point is you're going to get a worse score. You will do way better if you pace yourself, but I don't want a good score here. I want this to I want this to be how Horrible can you feel can you put the rock?

38:24I saw your your lower cat and I just got back from cam. So I'm using this analogy Oh, wow. He made you do the thing Of course he I beg them. I'm like come on dude. We have to reschedule. He's like oh, we'll just skip I'm like no No, like I will come back up later. We are going up that mountain. Yeah, yeah, right like we're gonna put the 70 pound mount a rock on your shoulder and we're going to sprint. And yeah, that means we're going to triple our time. It's going to take us two and a half hours. You have to know. Because this is today's point, right? That's 10%. And so mentally, if the athlete and the client knows that, hey, I just need you to get there mentally 10 % of the time.

39:02Think of the average person working out four times for a week. Okay? Over the months, that's 16 workouts. 10 % means twice. twice a month. Can you give me that? Can you give me that max one mile twice this month? I'm not feeling this week. Not feeling today. This okay, cool, cool, cool. 70 % is still going to be practice. 70 % still going to be or 20 % still going to be compete. We're going to pace twice though. So only 20 once and twice. I need you to get there. And now we have that like, okay, you have the breathing room but then we also have a context of going at, I don't know, last time I really went, who knows, because we have a set schedule.

39:42Yeah. That's nice. I like, I was talking to Mike Izretel about fat loss a couple of weeks ago, and he was saying that he treats his step count across the week the same way as he treats his calorie intake across the week. That if he has one day where he only hits 5K, then tomorrow he may be tries to do 13 and the day after that, he tries to do 13 and then he's like, oh no, we're back. We're back to where we're supposed to be. And yeah, I like the idea of not being so dogmatic with a week, which is just an arbitrary measure in any case, but taking a slightly broader window. And then within that, it allows you to kind of play around with things a bit more.

40:19Yeah, and this is actually a really important thing. I know you've had Mike on, I don't know, probably not. I feel like I see you guys posting clips from your show three times a week for the last year and a half. So he must have been on a show quite a time. He is my biggest fan. I believe that. I do believe that. Yeah. Do you even return his calls or texts anymore? I bet you never. I haven't spoken to him in months actually, not directly. Yeah. I bet if we left a year phone, there's probably three or four hundred unanswered messages from him to you. It's the picture messages that are really concerning.

40:52That's really what we should be worried about. But I'm very much understood. The point being, This is one of the things that separates people that are either plateauing or struggling to get results with training despite working hard. Like, man, I'm really getting after I am, whether it's the nutrition side or the training side. Are you just worried about one workout? Are you just worried about one week and your entire programming thinking is just on a 70 window? These are the kind of problems you run into, right? We have to step back and look at what's the month look like? like what's the two months or three months at minimum.

41:30And now if we're playing that kind of a game, if you're playing your step count per month game, that's way more effective than playing just today. And now you have to put the work in today to eventually get there, I think, in the 30 days, but really taking a big picture back and going, okay, great, this week, how did that layer on the last week and the week ahead of that? And then what's this month look like? We actually do it, we program it by quarter. So what's quarter Q1, Q2, Q3 with all of our stuff? with everybody or in season off season post fight like whatever the case is from the different athletes and that's that's really how you don't make missteps like that and how you can make small things that feel like nothing like one effort ten minute walk today all of a sudden make big things or hey you know it's okay to back off right now because we got this and we got this and whatever this becomes huge for our boxers and fighters because it's just like they feel like they have to fight hard every day and we can show them know though this is what we're going to get done in the next 60 days, it's like, oh, there's sense of relief there.

42:29Because like, I know we'll get after it when you get after it, but I don't have to just randomly take days off and I feel like death. Who was some of the fighters that you work with that people might know? Can you talk about them? Yeah, I mean, I've worked with, with funny of, um, different fighters, boxers, UFC fighter. Um, right now I still currently worked a lot with Ryan or Tegga. So I worked with him for many years, Tatiana Suarez, um, for many years, but even, Matt Brown recently, who just recently retired, Matt should be in the Hall of Fame any day, hopefully. I think I think he has the most wins in UFC history or most fights, most knockouts as well.

43:07So those folks might leave for World Championship boxing. I just actually started working with Jordan Panthan, who's a really high level boxer. So we've been around a ton of them, lots of wrestlers, a bunch of things. So a whole number of them, those are ones that I'm coaching right now. What else is there to say about VO2 max? Any other common assumptions, errors that people make, any unclosed loops that you think that you need to dial in? One thing, part of the reason I push back so hard on the protocol thing is because I really want people to not see those as limitations. And what I mean by that is to thinking, oh, because I didn't do the 4x4 perfectly.

43:52Therefore, I can't train or I'm not going to get better. And I've made that before, but I like being, or that point earlier, but I like being very direct in that you have unlimited options of VL2MX. It is really equivalent, in my opinion, to bodybuilding training, where I almost call it idiot proof. In the sense that the training is hard for sure. And the programming at the highest levels gets complicated. But at the entry point, midpoint, moderate point, If there's any part of a protocol you're heard on a program that you feel like you can't do Oh, I'd love to do that but I my knee. I love to do that, but I can't I don't have access to You're okay.

44:31You're totally fine. You can still get whatever it needs to be done regardless of the exercise equipment you have Regardless of the time limitations you have regardless of the weather outside there are still lots of options that work So if you get inspired by Ronda doing her awesome stuff or peer or whatever and you hear the exact protocol and you go, I can't do that. Therefore, it's not going to work. I want to make sure you know that that is not the case. So you can modify these things in tonnaways and still get all of the benefits if not more. What else or what? What do you wish that more people knew about cardiovascular fitness?

45:08It seems to me that with in part of this video, two max revolution that we're seeing at the moment, massive proliferation of heart disease, big concerns that people have over protecting the heart over the long term, what do you wish that more people knew about cardiovascular fitness? You would be stunned how little effort it takes to see benefit. Like, really quite stunned how little exercise has to happen. You would see big results, especially if you are in those bottom 20 or 25 % of fitness. So if you are really in a bad spot, it takes nothing. As little I'm talking about is 20 seconds. So there's a handful of studies out of Canada that have been done on things like exercise snacks.

45:56So these are literally 20 second bursts, one to three times per day, in office related settings. So imagine you're in your suit and you're tying all that, you get it from your desk, you spread 20 seconds up a step and you go right back to work. Those have been shown in multiple studies for multiple labs to enhance VO2 max. Now it's not going to do it if you're highly trained athlete. I'm not saying, oh, don't do any other workouts. All you have to do is this 20 -second sprint once. What I'm going all the way down to the bottom is that's how little you're stimulus you need for your body to actually pay attention.

46:33Now the benefits in VO2 max who are protocol like that are small. You're talking a few percentage points. But look at the power of that, right? It can certainly maintain where you're at. And so if you are in a situation where whatever you can't have access, can't afford a gym membership or who? Now I told Andrew, he remembered about this couple years ago and still this day, like I'll see him in the studio just like sprinting around the studio like full get up. That's running away from his demons. He's not doing the O2 Max work. Of course. Yeah. or running away from his cell phone or whatever else.

47:09So yeah, these things can really, really help. So if you just do the bare minimum, that will matter. And it will matter for about as many physiological variables as one can think. Sure your longevity, sure your heart disease. Yes, of course. But blood sugar regulation. Energy throughout the day. In fact, in the studies I'm mentioning, not only did they look at VO2 max, but they also looked at executive function, decision making, and word recall. All that improved. So, I mean, you really can enhance your life in whatever metric matters to you. Some people like you and I, to be honest, like that's related stuff doesn't do much for me.

47:52Like, alright, I'm young, I'm pretty up. I'm okay. But then improving my word recall by 20%. That's fantastic. Make better decisions. I don't have to redo my work. That would be nice. There's data on money. People make more money. Like you finance your mind. No, for sure. Like you see, there was sleep all the time too. I think the number was sleep is actually like in America, most recent estimate was poor sleep. It is, causes a $400 billion loss in America along. On average, people lose something like six working days because of slightly not not like massive ads that just slightly more sleep causes a total throughout the year of about six equal working day.

48:32We actually have a client is that productivity loss in productivity errors call crashes full works. All of it got sick more. Yeah, just you know kind of checked out that 10 minutes early today and went home because it was a little tired today. It was the reading my work faster all those things. We have a client in my in my sleep company. who is a financial trader. And he tracks, we have his sleep data track for a long time with his financial trades and it is a very statistically significant correlation. So he keeps re -up and he keeps repaying because he's like no matter what I pay you guys, I make more money.

49:09Just like sleeping better, we're like great. So what's your sleep company? It's called Absolute Rest. Okay, is that sleep coaching? Is that a product? What is it? It's both of it. So at the height we have two things actually one of them we just released like a month ago There's more consumer grade version But for the first handful of years where it started is this elite program Where we come in and we can actually build full sleep labs in people's houses So you can get a full clinical grade FDA approved sleep study done every single night in your house or or take it with you, take it wherever you want.

49:49So we have full, it's all wireless too. Like you've ever seen people in the sleep clinics and have the wires like all that stuff's gone, you know, needing those things. So we can run all that from your house. But we, in addition to that, now we've got the highest fidelity understanding of how you sleep, right? We're not missing data and making assumptions. And because of that, we now wanna go, well, why are you sleeping that way? And so we're not just stopping and being like, well, your sleep's shitty and people are like, great, I got a sleep study down, they told me how that, they like, it didn't help at all.

50:18Why are you sleeping that way? Well, number one, then we're going to start up and look at your environment. So we have a full environmental scanner that sits next to your bed and is scanning your room at all times for CO2 concentrations, humidity, particulates, volatile organics, dander, mold, pollen, allergens, all those things are being continuously scanned in your room to make sure it's not environmentally related. We're doing blood work specific to sleep -related physiology, We have psychological valuation, one of our co -founders, it's a Harvard, a psychiatrist, a psychologist of sleep. And then we have any pathology screen, of course.

50:56And so we have an understanding of exactly why our sleep net is all positionally done too. So if the problem was on your left side or right side or whatever that thing is happening. So all those data come back to our scientist who are the most published scientists in the world in sleep, folks that handle the astronauts in the space station and all that. They go over all those data, give you your results back there, and then put you on a several month long coaching program where you can check in and see and we fix sleep very successfully because of that. So, we have been doing that for a very long time, and then just about a month ago we released what's called Sleep Lens, which is a fingertip version of our sleep program.

51:37And so now we can do this at about a tenth of the price. And so we can run a full FDA approved equivalent to being in a sleep lab from your fingertip. It's not a wearable, it's not a tracker. You're gonna like check your sleep score. We can medically diagnose sleep disorders on this thing. And we can look at hundreds of measures per second as opposed to like one measure per five minutes. Wow. So sleep is, you know, between VO2 max. I think it's 11, episode 11 .09 or 11 .59 was Matthew Walker on Rogan and that was the day that I got red -pilled about my sleep because I'd been a clothe out of a sleeper.

52:18Oh, not a good sleeper. I was a club promoter for so long and baked into my weekly routine from the age of 18 until the age of 32 or 33 when COVID came along was I was awake until at least three or four in the morning, running a nightclub. And the beautiful thing about being a club promoter is that the very final task you have to do is the most cognitively demanding one. So you have to count the till, make sure the all of the money is where you say it is, enter into a spreadsheet, so you're looking at a beautiful bright screen for a little while, drive home, put it in the office, put it in the safe, make sure that everything's okay.

52:54And then within 20 minutes go, right okay, brain. I know that you just did all that mental arithmetic, best of luck getting yourself to sleep. And I did that. And that was just life, that was life for me. You know, those are the times when we'd be driving we ran events in Manchester, which is about two and a half hours from where we were based. And I would do that drive every other week for half a decade. And I'd get back at, I get back at 5am. There was sometimes where I'd hit rush hour leaving Newcastle going to Manchester at 5pm. And then I would hit rush hour getting back home the next day, which felt particularly unfair.

53:27But yeah, I think that that was a big turning point for me. I don't think that I'd really considered sleep. It sounds so stupid in retrospect. It makes me sound like a total idiot. But I just hadn't considered how important sleep was for cognition, for performance, for mood, all of this stuff. And I think, yeah, between VO2, Max and Sleep, that's been probably two of the biggest red pill changes that I've seen in terms of prioritization over the last five years. Yeah, I mean we coach major league baseball players. I coach NBA players. I coach Travis Barker the drummer for you know, blink when 82.

54:05I was just with Travis last weekend. So we had a 5K in the morning. So let's see. We were probably there at 7 am getting warmed up and all that stuff. Travis ran 20 to 122 minutes for 5K. It's pretty good, right? And then better than me. We were in a staple set or a key up for form whatever so far stadium and for 70 ,000 people until I don't know I left it midnight I think something like that and then who knows when he like got home got to sleep and all that right so I'm dealing He's on tour right now is insult like today like okay playing for the 70 ,000 people be a fucking drummer and for the 70 ,000 people on stage and then go to but good luck, right?

54:53Like absolutely good luck. And he is a maniac with his health. He's dialed, he runs every day, he's up super early, but it's the same problem. It's like by the time we get off stage, you get wound down all that stuff, it's five in the morning. Like who knows what we could do, right? Not because he's out party, but just because again, I literally am on stage as a rock star until midnight, and now try to come down and see. Okay, so we deal with those problems really routinely, as well as our executives that are running companies, different time zones working and all those things. We have to land and golfers too, would live now.

55:29Man, I coach John Rom and he's in live now. So he's all over the world time change. All right, so we deal with this problem a lot. And funny enough, man, we have this. I don't know when this show's gonna come out, but just yesterday episode five of my podcast came out all on sleep enhancement. And so one of the things you will see really consistently is, yeah, I mean Matthew Walker has done such an amazing job helping people understand that if you don't sleep well, everything in your health goes down. But there's an entirely different side of the equation, which is the performance, the enhancing ability to go from okay sleep to good sleep.

56:10There's a whole bunch of studies that have been done on sleep banking and sleep extension. So these are people that are already sleeping okay. and they go from good to what I call great sleep. And you see market and massive improvements in everything from reaction time to three points of free -throw shooting accuracy in division one basketball players. Professional tennis players having 20 % reduction in cortisol, serving accuracy improving. Body composition, VO2 max, cyclists, rugby players, like there's lots and lots of data going from I sleep seven seven and a half hours to I sleep better than that.

56:49It's not just duration, right? I'm just giving a number. And then look what happens to physiology. There's probably 30 plus studies at a Walter Reed that have been done on looking at things like sleep banking and sleep extension prior to sleep that deprimand. So you know you're going, this is oftentimes the military, but this is you're going to do training camp. You're going to do some situation in which say you're going to be traveling internationally in meetings and speaking events and you're going to do a seminar. Okay, great. We know that because that cognitive function, physical performance is going to go down.

57:23But if you can get ahead of sleep before you go, the drop will be attenuated. So you'll have much less of a reduction in your performance when you know the shit's going to hit the fan one way or the other, right? So before season, before going back on on tour, we're taking a ton of advantage of these things in between sessions. So there is a lot you can do. And as much as you to an access school, nothing has a more ubiquitous benefit to every aspect of anything you care about your body than sleep well. Assume that most of the people listening have been redpilled on most of Matthew Walker's stuff that look, I know that I should be aiming to get eight hours a night.

58:05I know that eight hours of sleep is not derived from eight hours in bed because sleep efficiency is a thing that being consistent, cool dark room, etc., etc. You mentioned, does this entire other world of enhancement? What are, what are the big move is there that most people don't know about? Right. I love the way you say that because I feel like every time sleep comes up, people tune out because they're like, yes, cool dark, quiet, and then that's like all truth. Correct. What else can we do? Okay. Well, let's go backwards. Why don't people sleep well to begin with. That's actually causing most of your problem.

58:42So we're going to look at this in different parts. Seapuration is one thing, honestly, it's the variable we probably paid the least amount of attention to. Really? Yeah. It's fine, but either people sleep five hours, and it's like, hey, do you want to spend 10 grand? Because I can also just tell you, you have to sleep more. Like I could do that, but maybe a problem. So what's more interesting is the like, I'm in bed for eight hours. Here's the problem starts right either falling asleep problems. I get up a lot. It is often things that are benign. There are people think benign that are not. Oh, I sleep.

59:19I snore a ton. Oh really? Interesting. That's not normal. Doesn't necessarily mean you have sleep disorder, but it's very generally likely that something bad is happening. Oh, okay. I wake up two or three times to go pee in the night. Oh, that's not normal either. Like, should not be happening. That number should be basically zero. Right, that is, I'm just getting old. Nope, nope, nope, nope, those are not answers either. Shouldn't be happening. We see a lot of, oh, I feel terrible all day. Energy's low, libido's low, focus is low, brain fog's low. I think I have COVID related, long COVID something like, okay, all possible, right?

59:54Sure. How's your sleep? Obviously pretty well, really. Take a look at it. This happened actually with one of our professional athletes. used a wearable, we'll say, and had like a 90 plus percent score on the wearable consistently, we run them through stuff immediately clinically diagnosable sleep disorder. Like this is not just not a test. What was the what was the sleep disorder that was missed so obviously by the wearable? Well wearables can't diagnose any sleep disorders. Of course, but I would I would have I would have guessed that if you have a disorder it would show up somehow in some of those markers.

1:00:31No, it won't because the vast majority of cheap consumer wearables are going to be looking at so low resolution that any it's an X -ray. So imagine you fell off the mountain today as you're running and your knees destroyed, you got hella back down and they took you down there. And I'm like, oh man, his knee is torn up and it will take an X -ray. And then arch comes back goes, no broken bones, you're fine. Like, well, okay, but your MCL's torn, ACL's torn is kneecaps dislocated. It's an X -ray. It can only look at a few things and it's looking at it at a very, very low resolution. Typically, wearables are going to take a measurement once every five minutes.

1:01:09So if you had any event that happened not within that very small time window, it all gets missed. That's something I remember I had a... Fuck. Who's elite HIV? Jol J. Mason. Oh, yeah, with Morpheus. Yes. I remember speaking to him and he was telling me about how HIV, when you do it in those bracket windows like that, if you're laid on your front versus if you're laid on your side, if you're at a particular stage of sleep and you can kind of do this odd dance routine during sleep that gives a really skewed set of data, which I found particularly interesting. All right, so I know that I'm branching off, but I promise I'll bring you back.

1:01:53What are the metrics that you guys, when you do your sleep studies are looking at, which are being missed? What are the things that pick up these sleep disorders? Okay, so you wanna think about this this way. When most people are, this is cool, you haven't fun. When most people think about sleep, or I were thinking about duration, and their sleep score on your wearables, I can go on, but I think you get the point that those are not a good way. One of the main reasons why is what people tend to be concerned about is how long that I sleep and how much time that I spend in various stages. Deep, ram, things like that.

1:02:29Roll all that out of the way. It's completely garbage. Not only from a technology perspective, but what I simply mean is the constant. The idea of sleep stages is almost nonsensical for everybody. The amount of time you spend in a sleep stage, I'm not going to say is totally irrelevant, of it, but it's way less important than most people think. Because of a handful of things, your brain is going to engineer what we call the architect. So how the architecture of your sleep based upon the demands and what it needs. And so you are not going through the same physical or cognitive demands every single day.

1:03:04Thus you don't need the same sleep staging every single day. When your brain is doing something with your sleep staging, it's doing it for a reason. And then you're going in there and listening to Andrew Heurman and taking a supplement to hack that sleep stage and now you're going against what your brain is trying to do. You're causing problems. The sleep staging is not accurately depicted. They also change the record. They are changed arbitrarily. This is not a deep sleep. This is now not deep sleep. So we see people consistently over time like, oh my god, my deep sleep is gone way down. What do you mean?

1:03:38Oh no, no, one, an algorithm could have been just changed in the background. Now, like you're two years of data has gone and that happens all the time. But I mean, even medically, the medical side of the equation can change their definition of these things and has happened many times. So we don't also even know at all how much sleep staging you should be in for any given sort of purpose. It would be the equivalent of saying, you should do this exact type of training every single day of the rest of your life. Why? Well, because that's the average type of training the average person does. Well, that's fucking unhelpful.

1:04:13That's about as unhelpful as it could possibly get. And so that's not going to provide you any insight into what's going on. More importantly, then the time you spend, let's just throw that away. Let's say you could accurately measure your sleep stages. It's not the time you spend in those stages. It's the depth in those stages that matter. I don't know where if any tracker or wearable, that can actually measure any of that. And so if you and I both spent an hour in deep sleep, whatever that means, but your amplitude within that is five times higher than mine. You're going to have much more restorative sleep than I.

1:04:47And this is your classic. My scores are okay. I'm in the right time, but I'm still feeling with arctic. I'm still feeling whatever other thing were issued. And we've seen this a ton from TRT complex. So people that have gone on testosterone, and because the energy's low, you know, you We're filling the blanks there. Fine, like not against that at all. When we come back, we're like, why did you think you needed testosterone? When we take a look at your sleep, like if you're tired, the first place we should look is sleep. Like this is pretty obvious, right? Like what's energy intake look like? Food, nutrition.

1:05:21And what sleep look like? Those are that, that's our mountain, right? We don't need to think we're in some weird spot. And so again, testosterone's fine. That's the one I take as a cracker. That was not the point. But the point is going like, whoa, We have to really pay attention how sleep actually works. So when I say like duration like it is what it is I am more looking at things like What is the amplitude Within these sleep stages. So what's the quality of that? What's the consistency of your sleep wake cycles and rhythms? What is the actual Next day feelings what's your symptomology? Right how's that actually doing and we're gonna measure that cognitively?

1:05:59So I'm not going to ask you how you feel. We're going to measure cognitive speed, processing speed, reaction time, things like that. I was going to say what are the tests that you do for the? Yeah, we have, we don't do anything without testing for the most part. We're going to track metrics on this is technology and performance. This is our game, right? So we're not messing around with any of that stuff. So we're going to test all those. We're going to look at things like respiratory rate. We're going to look at HRV. And now since we do this as a tie variability, ability, I can differentiate and tell you, oh, this was a problem of your unfit.

1:06:35Right? So I can give you that example maybe. Okay. I can very easily triangulate and say, all right, you're resting. I take a look at you and I say, all right, symptomology is there. We're not feeling refreshed. We think something is going on obviously. All right. Awesome. Now we look and you don't have any clinical insomnia. Right. We're not having these obvious signs are there. But just because you don't have clinical apnea or whatever. doesn't mean you don't have some clinical. So maybe we see a little bit of sub -tunnel apnea. Okay, well you're kind of a bigger guy body mass tends to go up that tends to start happening.

1:07:09All right, now why are you having an apnea? Hmm interesting. Well apnea could be done for could be anatomical. So we're gonna actually run a scan of your face and we're gonna be able to see is ranting anatomical things going on. It's a naval cavity thing. It could be a tongue later to issue. And so their tongue believe it or not. Their tongue strengthening exercises we can do that'll stop your tongue from flopping back and again. Flasid tongue. I knew I had a flasid tongue. I mean, I didn't want to say it, but yeah. If it never gets used, it's pretty obvious, man. It's pretty obvious. Right? So we just need to firm you up a little bit.

1:07:43Is, you know, turgid, nice turgid tongue. Turgid tongue. It could be as simple as that, right? It could be as simple as position. So maybe the, all of your apnea are happening when you're laying in a right shoulder. Now all we have to do is to keep you to stop laying in a right shoulder and all of a sudden your sleep changes instantaneously and we've had this. I can't even count how many times things like that have happened. It could also be things like environmental. So one of the things I've talked about a lot in the past is the fact that when you take a breath and you inhale oxygen, you take a breath out, you exhale, CO2.

1:08:18Okay, now in a normal situation that's fine, as you're sleeping, you're not exhaling very hard. So that breath, if you're watching the video here, is coming just kind of like seeping out of your mouth That stays right in front of your face and forms what's called the CO2 cloud And you take your neck breath and you re -breathe back in subnet CO2 Most people that's not a big deal. However, if you're highly sensitive to CO2 Or if the CO2 concentrations in your room start getting really high Why? Because all your doors and windows are shut because you have a sleeping partner because you have an animal and there's well, your kid is in there too.

1:08:52More bodies in a room poor ventilation. When that number crosses 900 parts per million, you will see consistent research showing poor sleep onset, wakeful events, next day restfulness, next day concentration, next day cognitive function, all in CO2 levels start to rise above 900. So it could be simply that. It has nothing to do with anything else going on besides the fact that you're choking yourself on CO2. CO2 levels rising your body. That's one of your primary levers that kicks you from autonomic to parasympathetic nervous system. This is fight or flight to rest and death. You've been taught me about this test that they do where they get people to take a single breath in from some mask that's got a really high concentration of carbon dioxide and it's able to reliably bring on a panic attack.

1:09:40A single breath is able to reliably. There's been many, many decades of research in psychiatry that uses CO2 to induce panic. That's like one of the most standard models for anxiety and panic disorder research is inhaling CO2. Wow. Yeah. That's been around for a very long time. A lower level version of that when you have poor ventilation and high amounts of CO2 in your room. Yep. Or if none of that's happening and you're simply intolerant to CO2, you're hypersensitive to it, your concentration and your bedroom could be very, very low, but it's still kicking off that entire sympathetic cascade because you're overly triggered to your CO2.

1:10:19So I can see that because I can see your HRV, I can see your heart rate, and I can see your oxygenation. So I will very quickly be able to be like, this is the problem. To hell with your tongue exercises, to hell with your supplementation and all those other things, whatever in your particular case, this is simply about you developing better CO2 tolerance. We see this one really routinely. The opposite could be the other the case. We see that those things are fine. Heart rate is actually so the way I can try and get like this is because we can look at HRV we can look at CO2 and we can look at O2 concentration and I can look at your VO2 max.

1:10:52Now I can identify oh if you're resting hearts really really high but your HRV is also high. That means you're nice and down regulated and your respiratory rate is low. You're not over breathing, right? And then I look at your VO2 max and your VO2 max is shit. I know, oh, okay, you're unfit. You're just unfit. We have got to get that's our problem. You're not over breathing. It's not an O2 issue. It's not an environment. It's not a tongue thing. You're just unfit to a position where you're having any deviation. That small apnea you have. That small amount of apnea have rather is causing such a big effect because you don't have any breathing room.

1:11:30The VO2 you need to have just to sleep is just barely below your threshold when you're awake. So slight deviations cause you to choke. O2 gets low and now you're having this response. Or the opposite. And the last one I'll give you. But we could be super fit, very low resting heart rate. HRV is high and or respiratory rate is high. You're not down -regulated. You're exhausted. So your sleep onset is really, really short. you're falling asleep immediately, but you wake up often, you wake up, you have a hard time going back to sleep, and or when you even sleep through the night, you still feel very fatigued the next day.

1:12:08And when you look respiratory rates over the high, you're dumping CO2. You're getting rid of it too much. This causes respiratory alkalosis, and I can confirm this by looking at your hydration status because in response to respiratory alkalosis, your kidneys will put you into metabolic acidosis, which means it's very, very hard to retain electrolytes and all of a sudden you're waking up and peeing can a ton often but there's not a lot of volume in it. It's not super clear. You're not overly hydrated. We're consistently seeing signs and symptoms of dehydration in your lab work and your blood and now we know about it being about a bone.

1:12:41This is all simply coming down the fact that you're overly sympathetically driven. You're over breathing. We correct that. See problems go away. Wow. I love the 360 view of all of this. It's very impressive. Very impressive and comprehensive. Okay, getting back into sleep enhancements not for noobs. Sleep enhancements not for noobs. Yeah, so this is where it comes down to going okay. We're sleeping okay. You're falling asleep fine and You're maybe waking up a couple of times and we'll just we'll just call your sleep, you know kind of like The way I call your podcast. It's okay. It's not great, but it's just like it's okay, right?

1:13:22Like It's all right. If I have to, I'm going to watch it, but I'm not going to go out. Right? So what we're looking at there could be duration, could be timing, could be consistently created those things. And we're just going to go there and polish it all the way up. Right. And so this is making sure we want to change the rhetoric here. This is not about you getting the most sleep. This is not about you having to have a 90 minute routine to get to bed every night. I want to actually develop the most resilient sleepers possible. That is our goal. We always shy away from optimization. That's like the most anti -science word you could ever develop.

1:13:59But like sometimes you just use it. We would rather be resilient. What's that mean? Even when you do have a slightly crummy night or a suboptimal night, we're still performing at the highest level possible the next day. When we don't have our environment, when we're not in the same position, you're not in your house today, you're out traveling, right? I won't tell the world where you are. Right, I know the groupies, so just never leave you alone. All of the women of Bozeman, Montana will come with their cows. Now I'm gonna be wait, I'm gonna be back home by the time this comes out. They can send all of the cows over to Hilton, wherever the fuck I am in Bozeman at the moment.

1:14:35That's a trick, you guys know that, right? He's still in Bozeman. He just try to throw you off the track. Uh -huh. Bozeman. He's KG. Yeah, so we want to make you as resilient as possible, right? You're in a different environment, different bedroom. I want to make it such that when you are traveling, when you're on the road, we still get in there and we still have a great night of sleep or, or pretty good. And what you'll tend to see happen is if you can just keep people out of catastrophe with sleep, you're okay. You don't have to have these perfect nights. What really gets people is those really big dips and you can't come back out of those holes.

1:15:08recovering that sleep that is really, really challenging. So we just want to make sure it's the same thing we use with with our, for example, our baseball players. The key to having a good ER, right? And winning a side -young. Every time we've been able to do that with somebody, it's just we avoid them giving up 10 runs in one inning. You just can't have a terrible day. You don't have to throw great every single day. No horrible days. And that's really what we're after is super, super resilient. That baseline starts to come up just a little bit over were three, six months, it's a complete game changer.

1:15:39So what we're doing is we're making sure number one environment as consistent as possible. And so we will engineer their bedrooms at home such that it is transportable with minimal effort. And the reason that matters is one of the biggest problems people have with sleep on the road is what's called the first night effect. First time in a new environment, whether you travel all the time or not, even if it's an environment you've been in, It's your second home, it's your vacation home, it's your parents home. A lot of people will struggle to sleep the first night in it, right? It's a whole host of things going on.

1:16:15But one of the things you're going to avoid that is making sure that environment smells and looks visually and sounds like your house. Most of those problems go away. So what do we do? You engineer a particular sound in your house that can be transportable. You engineer a particular smell. This can be as simple as you take a little bit of a lavender, very subtle lavender scent and put it next to your bed at home. Take that with you on the road. You put that thing down, you make the visual of the same thing, you make the hearing the same thing while they're using a very light noise machine, keep the noise machine under 35 decibels by the way, above that actually starts hurting sleep.

1:16:54So it's very, very quiet. Now the environment is mimicked on the road and it doesn't matter where you go, you can avoid not all the problems, but you can avoid a lot of them. Pillow Sheets is another really common one. Take your pillow sheet with you. You can't typically take your full eight -sleep and you're all that stuff with you, but if you take your pillow sheet, that stuff can go a long way. And then lastly, keep the same routine. So if you shower and then do A, B, and C, do that exact same thing. Take your same soap with you. Take your same smells as much of that you can, that is not again completely unbearable.

1:17:32That will go a very, very long way to that. So just that step alone for our NBA guys that are traveling new cities every three to five days. That stuff makes a big deal. Our corporate people who live on airplanes. Same thing. Like you spend actually more of your life on hotels than you do at home. It makes a huge deal. That's one small example of how we can make them a little bit more resilient and just take that baseline and keep it out. I love the idea. And I think that you are out ahead of the trend that I'm starting to see a good bit of pushback. We spoke about this for a long time yesterday and this stupidly long hike I did yesterday, which was the perils of overoptimization and kind of pushback against protocol maxing.

1:18:17And for all of the brilliant things that we've been given by health information and the democratization of access to scientific studies and what you should do and what you could do, I think lots of people are made more sick by trying to be optimal than they would be by just embracing their suboptimal habits, this sort of rumination and oh my god, I didn't get my my friend George tells this great story. This was when he was first red -pilled. I think it was Matthew Walker. So he has this elaborate 90 minute, wind down routine before bed and he's got no lights anywhere in the entire room and he's had his red light glasses on for ages and you know he's been doing his 448 breathing to down regulate everything and he's brushing his teeth in the dark.

1:19:04And then as he's doing that his then girlfriend burst into the room turn the light on blinds him because he hasn't seen any fucking light for the last 90 minutes. Blinds him. He's seething. He's raging because he's just spent 90 minutes trying to do this, they get into bed, she falls asleep straight away and he's laid there staring at the ceiling, hating her. And that's, it just perfectly encapsulates this fragility that gets built into the system when you rely on a two elaborate of a routine. I have many things to say about this. So I'm not sure how long you want me to go, but I will say just a few things that are short.

1:19:40I wrote a book by one and only ever book, seven or eight years ago now with Brian McKenzie. and this was the entire premise of the book the most part. You really want to stay away from optimization. You're going to play a game at all times. On this side of the equation, you've got optimal. On the other side of the equation, you've got adaptation. With your playing on one, you're not getting the other one. Sorry, explain that to me. Yes. If you are optimizing, let's just say this one. You have that 90 minute routine. Okay, and you go through this and that gets you a perfect night of sleep. Amazing.

1:20:16Every time you do that, you are making yourself less and less resilient to any change in that routine. Okay, now the girlfriend was the opposite. The girlfriend, if you said, hey, I need you to have a perfect night of sleep. Everything is going to align tomorrow. You're going to get $50 million based on your sleep score. She wouldn't know what to do because she is all in resilient adaptation phase, right? it's just like whatever happens, still be able to get to sleep. But you have no ability on understanding what makes you. So it's not one that's better than the other one. But if you spend all of your time optimizing, think of this in the perspective of eating sugar.

1:20:54Okay, think about this. Another way to say this is immediate versus delayed gratification. Okay, if you're always choosing immediate gratification, if you're always choosing do the thing that makes me feel the best right now, Optimize for two day, okay? You're gonna go, all right, I'm gonna wake up, I'll have some ice cream, I'm gonna turn my phone off of a video game, you're gonna do the thing that makes you feel the best right now. That is maximizing how you feel and perform in this very moment. You're optimized. It's immediate gratification. But you know by doing that, you're making life a little bit worse, right?

1:21:30You do that every single day, you're gonna get unhealthy. You're gonna get unhealthy, you're not gonna get productive, you're gonna lose money, you're gonna lose your job. So long -term wise, you're compromising the long term. You're compromising your adaptability. If you do the opposite, which is you never live in the moment, you're always worried about tomorrow. You're never having a break for today. You know the problems that are associated with people not being present, not being grateful for what they have, not so on and so forth. So you don't want to always be worried about 50 years from now and you don't want to always be just worried about this exact day.

1:22:03The same thing happens with optimization and adaptation. If I want you to play the best Ronald golf in your entire life, we would relax today, get a massage, do some breath work, we would not talk to anybody else, we maybe do some light warm up and we'd show. If that's all you did every day, eventually your golf game would get worse and worse because you're never actually practicing and getting better. So if I wanted you to get up that mountain yesterday on your hike and have the greatest hike your life, we would have had a completely different strategy the five days before, or we would have gone can, hain style, and we would have done the opposite.

1:22:38We would have been like the hell of all of this. We're going to get up that hill with the most difficulty possible. We're not going to perform our best, but we're going to see. Now that challenge is going to cause adaptations because you're stressed more, you're more fatigue, you're more challenge, that's going to push you to, when we get close to the Olympics, all of our athletes in the Olympics will be optimizing. Maximizing recovery. What's they're going to take there? Right now, as we're still a few months out, we're still adapting. I don't care if I'm skating their best scores ever. We're not PRing today.

1:23:14I don't care. We're doing stuff that causes fatigue. Their performance is going down because we're pushing adaptations. We're causing stress in the system intentionally for a longer term adaptation. That's the game you're always playing. So every single choice you make every day, you're causing adaptation or you're peaking. Okay. Immediate gratification, the lay gratification. You can't always choose both, they're the opposite. How much time you spend on each is not an easy answer, but you have to acknowledge both of those are going on. I love the, just this idea of optimizing building fragility into the system and adaptability being robust, I think is absolutely bang on.

1:23:56Two things. First one, for the person who has access and understands a lot of the ways that they should be, should be optimizing, how do you advise someone to emotionally let go of that fear of control? And then second thing is I need you to explain how that makes sense to me with regards to sleep, given that there are so many things in sleep that are routineized. All right, correct. I'll do those both at the same time. No. Are you familiar with the idea of orthosomnia? No. This is an insomnia -induced from seek trackers.

1:24:45Okay. Okay. I just answered both your questions. Here's what's gonna happen. In some folks, not all, not even most, just some folks. And I can tell this story because he gave me permission to do so. John wrong, one of the best golfers in the world. We just went through this. And he was like, man, I wouldn't pack a list of your thing. Boom, he's not looking at a sleep track anymore. Now he still wears it so I can track. But he doesn't look at his stuff. He doesn't have the apple, whatever. He doesn't access it himself, yeah. That's right. So with our stuff at absolute rest, you don't even, like, there's no sleep scores anyways.

1:25:20I think we have five -fifth -year data, the data matter. They don't care about your score. So, here's what can happen. If you're very compulsive and you're worried about optimizing your sleep score and you're going after your sleep score, what can start to happen is your physiology and psychology will realize the first thing I'm going to do tomorrow morning is check that score. And there's a lot writing on that score. My happiness, my unhappiness, my sadness, my joy, all this is being driven by the that score. Now we'll create an anticipatory response. Your brain will start back feeling that thing and you will start having worse sleep the night off.

1:25:53We'll wake up earlier because you're waiting for a big emotional up or down 6 a .m. the next day when that alarm goes off. Okay. That can in the worst case scenarios, then lead to insomnia all night laying around restless. We see this in people trying to work on their sleep before sleep. You it's eight o 'clock. You go to bed at 10 and you put the kids down. You shut the laptop up and now all of a sudden panic sets in. And I'm like, fuck. Okay, two hours from now, I'm going to have to drive to sleep. And I know I never get to sleep on time. And I'm trying to really work on it. I'm doing these things.

1:26:26And I just got to hope I fall asleep tonight. I hope I don't let you see where I'm going at this, right? I can keep going in this example. But this is really, really common with people who are struggling with sleep and are really trying to work on it. It's almost like we're working too much on it. And now you're creating an attisperatory response. I gave you the attisperatory response and the wake up. But now this can happen prior to going to bed as well. Both can a cases are the same thing. You've created a physiological pattern That is now compromising their falling asleep or waking asleep all based on the result the score the metric Okay, this is the anti -layered Hamilton This is the fragile.

1:27:06This is you are not resilient. We should be able to have a great night of sleep regardless. When we work with our social forces, folks, we have to get sufficient sleep in any situation. I'm an outdoorsman. I love my whole setup, but when I'm out hunting, you need to be able to sleep in the tent at a 45 degree angle and sliding off the mountain. I'll damn night, like I just had to do it pretty recently, right? Raining on all those things. The goal is to get enough quality sleep in those situations when I don't have the The sun is still out. All that stuff is going on, right? And you still have to be able to sleep, period.

1:27:42Because you're going to be up in four hours to go chase an elk or whatever you're going to do, right? So all that stuff is going on. So going back to our examples, that's two situations where when anticipatory responses are real and falling asleep and or staying asleep. So in someone that's having that problem, just like when we do a jawn, actually jawned it to himself and then he told me afterwards. But in the other folks that we're coaching, we will often take that score away from them. Many times I'll say again, can you continue to wear the thing? But actually one nice thing about the old days in Ora is manually on the back end coaches could go turn that off.

1:28:15So if I was coaching you, I could go turn off your thing. You don't get to see your score. Yeah, I mean, we've been talking about this a lot. George had a self -imposed bout of insomnia and went through a lot of the lessons I think you're talking about here. He did some CBT for Insomnia II, and he found this study where they paid people to different cohorts. They paid one group to fall asleep quickly. You're nodding, I'm guessing that you know this study quite well. Shock horror, the group that was paid to fall asleep more quickly fell asleep less quickly than the group that it didn't matter. That was just the control.

1:28:53Sleep is this very vicious counter -insuative. the harder you try the less quickly it comes, at least in the moment. I guess you prepare it truly, you can do things in advance. But even in that, if you've, oh, this is my first night on my new eight sleep, I really hope that this goes well. And maybe the physiological improvement of being in a temperature -controlled mattress helps, but this sort of rumination in the brain and all the rest of it, it's wild. It's wild, this sort of vicious feedback loop that you have. and one of his suggestions, one of G's suggestions is to imagine if Woop or, or, or a, um, gave you your score for the entire week of sleep at the end of the week, um, because you don't have this rapid iteration.

1:29:38Oh, I feel great today and you're looking to go, what? 70 % I was only asleep for six, six hours and 15 minutes, but I feel, oh, maybe I'm going to have a bad day and you go, well, what the fuck? And then you do sleep well. And if you have a bad score, But the only time that it's good is if you have a good night's sleep with a good score, that's it. The only time that you ever actually win. So the second I have that Don Ram story was he was like, you know, he was dealing with that and then he goes, yo, I just left. I don't remember what he went from like Singapore to Houston or something. And he's like, and he doesn't, he's very health conscious.

1:30:09So I don't want to misrepresent how he act normally. But in this case, he was like, I drink a whole bottle of wine. I changed four time zones. I got home for a couple of hours and I said my seat score was 90 something. Because like this is bullshit gonna add up there So to your point, okay, some people These problems can happen because of anticipatory response Other people though will still see benefits so I don't want this to come off as all this stuff sucks It doesn't work because there can be accountability benefits You know, I have this seen this a lot with our athletes is like hey, we need you in bed by midnight or whatever They know Andy's going to look and they know they can get it's extra me the morning.

1:30:49They're like, they were going to play that next little game of call of duty, but all right, they go in a bit. So accountability really does and can help awareness can be a huge benefit. Some people think they're sleeping well, think they're getting and they're really, really not right. So there can be simply, okay, some ability to go. I'm trying A, B and C different, nightly routine, different nutritional product, whatever. How do I know if it's okay? So that there can be benefit there. Most people on aggregate do better when they pay attention. So we just do want to recognize some people though will be in these situations like we talked about where it can create a bad physical, physical pattern or loop.

1:31:29And one of the ways that you can get around this is probably what your friend George did or a version of this and this is extreme. It is not our first or second or third or fourth or fifth or even tenth stop on the train, but it is a stop on the train. There's research behind it and anyone who's dealt with true insomnia personally or has worked with people in this will be very familiar with this and it can be quite effective but there is something called sleep restriction training that you can do. So if you're struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep, then And one of the worst things one can do is roommate on that.

1:32:06And so I gave you the example of the hours before going to sleep. You start already ruminating on the fact that you're not going to fall asleep very quickly. People have talked Matthew Walker has talked about if you're going to lay in bed for an hour, get out of bed. Do not set yourself on a pattern up. When you get into bed, you close the lights off, you're exhausted. You feel like you're going to fall asleep immediately and then you get into bed and you lay there. right? This happens for many reasons, but one of them is a, this isn't, this is a physiological pattern that's been, this been made.

1:32:36You have to break that pattern. So one way to do that is you do not get into bed at all until you are ready to absolutely fall asleep. And if you're there for more than a few minutes, you get out of it. And you just do not allow yourself to be in that position. Think of that. With the case of sleep restriction training, what one would do is just one example. You could do this a lot of ways, but one example would be, you're going to set the alarm for 5 a .m. and you're not going to get into bed until midnight. Period. And no matter what, you will get up at 5 a .m. and you'll get up and we're going to do that for an entire week.

1:33:10It's going to happen. Yeah. Well, you say that. Remember, you haven't, you know, anybody who's ever dealt with insomnia? Yeah. Uh, except for George, not really. They're not sleeping five hours on it anyways. So for you and I, it's like, I've had kids. I've been in many hunting. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, different five as it is.

1:33:47So great. Okay. And we're going to get out. And those first few nights that week are going to be brutal. And you may lay there for your hour, like you normally do. And so you may get four and a half hours, you might get four, you might get three and a half hours and you're going to get up. Well, what will eventually happen is you will start to policy quickly and you will fill in after three or four or five days, you'll fill in those five hours with the perfect sleep, sleep architecture because your physiology will realize we do not have any options. There's no room to get up and pee. It's like down out because it knows five is coming.

1:34:18It will know the forcing function. Yes, sir. It's forcing it to happen, right? And then every week you add 15 minutes back. So next week you get into bed at 11 .45. You know what will happen? You'll fall asleep immediately. Ooh, we got 50. You're still. No, you'll still. But the body, that's what the body is going to think. The body is going to think, oh, wow, we've got, we've got an additional little bit. We better take advantage of it. Hell yeah, it's going to go. We're so damn tired. Get it like immediately, right? It doesn't always work, but it's honestly quite effective. And then you add 15 minutes back and then you keep backfilling until you can get to your seven or seven and a half or wherever your nine and a half, wherever your target number is.

1:34:59So you can keep running on that for a very long time until it is needed. And it is brutal. You can just do the math there. That's going to be five, six weeks. And you can't nap throughout the day like you can. That's a bad thing. And so making sure that one often superscript painting, but the point I'm bringing up there is that really highlights how patterning matters to physiology. And so going through a 90 minute routine like your friend is nice in the sense that it does set up a nice productive positive pattern. But you don't want to put yourself in a position where you've optimized so much that you've lost all resilience.

1:35:40And so if you don't have that, you can no longer fall asleep for hours and hours and hours because things are. So, well, I typically will coach. It's the same with counting calories. Right? Like what? That's an abrupt change. I will categorize people nutritionally as either cooks or bakers. Okay? I'm going to tie this back in a second. What I mean by that is, do you know the difference between cooking and baking?

1:36:05one makes really good donuts.

1:36:11Yes, which one would make the really good donuts? Bake. Obviously, you don't fucking donate do you? You know, well, something's going wrong. Okay. It's detail and precision. The most part, right? If you're baking, it's not, unless you're a really high level chef, it's not my feel, right? It is a quarter of a teaspoon and eighth of a tablespoon. And do you say tablespoon of teaspoon? Ah, fuck it doesn't matter. Just throw one of them in there. Like your doughnut's gonna be terrible. It's not gonna come off, right? Baking is high precision in specific order at specific measurements. Cooking is the opposite.

1:36:45Cooking is what probably, I don't know you very well, but probably what you and I do. Open the refrigerator, find some meat thing, put it in a pan with some oil, and some sort of vegetable or starch or something else, and then hit it with some hot sauce and cheese and plate that shit and we're out of here, right? Like, that's cooking to me and you, right? It's gonna be delicious. Everyone wins, we're happy, right? Now, if you are a baker and I give you cooking like instructions or coaching, you're gonna have huge anxiety, if I'm like, all right, what are we gonna do to get better? Make sure you're down -regulated to just get cool and hot and cool.

1:37:21No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, You want all the protocol protocol, okay? If I don't give you that, it's gonna give you anxiety. Gonna make your sleep worse. If I don't give you that level of nutrition, detail, if I go, oh, how have some almonds? How many almonds? Like there's an actual example that happened without any mind. Like, it was like a panic text. It was like, talk, talk, talk. How many almonds, you didn't say how many? You said like a small handful, whatever, what's a small handful? And I was like, and she was like, was that eight? I was like, yeah, it was eight.

1:37:53How many did you have? She's like, I hate it. I'm like, Oh, thank God it wasn't sick. She's like, no, no, it was a fool. I literally. There's like an actual story many years ago, right? I'm like, yeah, okay. She was a bait. Like she needed to know exactly other athletes of the opposite. If you're a cook and I give you that level of detail, I need you to weigh and measure every single thing. I need you to have this exact routine by this, this, it's stifling. It's overwhelming. It's like, Oh my God. It's too much control. I don't know how much freedom there. I feel like I can't do all that stuff right.

1:38:25And so we want to match people's general personality trait with the type of information and the style. So some of our people are getting really rough concepts, maybe one thing to pay attention to with their sleep stuff, with their nutrition and other folks are getting very specific timed protocols. Based on if I feel like that time protocol is going to send you into a world of negative, I take the details away. If I feel like a loose structure, like here's you too much freedom and you make bad choices, I take your freedom away. Right? So, Brian or take is a great example of that. Like I have to take his freedom away.

1:39:04I have to take everything away. He has to feel like he's in prison again. He's just like, dude, I have to have a, like, those are his words, not mine. It's just like, it has to be, I can't have any, I want it because he doesn't want to make choices. He doesn't like self -discipline at all. He will follow exactly what I say endlessly, but he's like, I don't want to make any choices throughout the day With this stuff. I want to train and only think about fighting great, okay? Other athletes I coach like NBA players Not I have a single NBA player who wants to be coached like that not one Like they will be like to help like I'd get middle fingers and it fire right like it's just like it's got to be concepts and One or two things to pay attention to per month That's it, right I can name it, guys, NFL guys, some of the apps, some are, you know, whatever.

1:39:53Okay, you get to point. So with sleep, we want to think of the same thing, right? And what I brought up calories is, okay, I think it's important, regardless of whether you're a cook or a baker for your sleep, for your training, for your mental health work, for your breath work, for your nutrition. You should start by going through a phase as a baker. You need to weigh in measure all your food for 30 days. At least once, we need to try very specific sleep routine. We need to, I need exact repetitions and video film of your lifting. How much did you get? I need all of it. Now I don't have to do it forever, but you really never know what's working, what's not working.

1:40:32I don't know if you really are calibrated. Do you really know what a spoonful of peanut butter was? That's the common example up there. Same thing. We gotta know. How did you sleep pill? I feel good. No, no, I need more detail. I need to know exactly what's going on on everything. And then from there, once we've got calibrated, now we can back off if you want. I know high level people who still weigh and measure their food. 20 years, and not in competing anymore. It's like, okay, great. Some people give me 30 days or 14 days. What's it going to take? Let me get real data, let you get real understanding.

1:41:06And now we can back off and go by feel more. But you can't just start by going by feel. Dude, I talk about this all the time. It's such a... I feel like we're best friends. We are now. We are now. As long as my kids retaliate, can come along as well. I'm sure that that'll be fine. No, that's not negotiable. He's out. It's me or him. Yeah, now. Right now. It's you. Sorry. You're not Jewish, are you? No, my kids are. All right. Oh, God. They're allowed once every other time. I need to get rid of my outfit. You know, that's fair. I'll do that too. That's a deal. So I say that everybody should go through an obsessive period of productivity, time tracking, time blocking, Pomodoro technique, because it is impossible for you to play with the rules of the game if you haven't first learned the rules of the game.

1:41:55Like what the fuck are you doing here trying to be free flowing with your fucking discipline of choice? You didn't, what are you free flowing with? That's just not knowing how to play. You don't know the rules, you don't know the physics of the system. So yeah, I think focus on precision and then for some people they stay in precision. Maybe the people that need a little bit more control and then other people that are a little bit more creative artisticgy, right brainy type person. Maybe they sort of they play with it a little bit. Taking it back to the enhancements for sleep. I love that idea.

1:42:30I love the idea about recreating the environment as best you can when you're on the road. That's definitely something that I'm gonna consider. One question on that and then let's get into some stuff that you can do at home. Earplugs, I've become a huge fan of earplugs since moving to America. Main reason being that it just seems to be a really loud country, even like the wildlife is loud, the birds are at least three times louder than those of the UK. Everything's bigger in Texas, including the volume of the fucking wildlife. Earplugs versus white noise, have you got any concerns around earplugs?

1:43:03Obviously, my thinking being that you can replicate the environment pretty precisely in that it's silence. Yeah, this is personal preference. So I'm not aware we actually have a paper in review right now on sleep environment. And I don't know of any data specifically indicating one is better than the other. The only nox against white noise is oftentimes too loud. As I mentioned earlier, 35 decibels is the limit and you actually see see problems when you get above 35. So don't turn your sleep not noise machine up too loud. In addition to that there's a whole list of papers coming out on a new technology called pink noise and that seems to be much more effective.

1:43:47I don't know of any pink noise machines that are available commercially yet but you want to keep your eye on that as a plausibly better solution than white noise. We have some folks that use ear plugs. One of my business partners, Dan Garner, he uses them every night at home nonetheless. I will use them a lot hunting and in other activities camping because you're sleeping next to somebody who snores, things like that. But I don't use them ever at home. So I have no fundamental issue with them as long as they're not causing any pain, you know, things like that. There's so many different companies making good earplugs at this day.

1:44:22That's just fine. There's a pair that I got. I tried 10 pairs from Amazon and settled on one specifically for sleep and they've got little rubber fins on them and they're fucking brilliant and they can just go, there's a pair everywhere in the bag that I try to take on planes in my toiletries bag in my house and my bedside drop everywhere. And yeah, if push comes to shove and the neighbors next door are having a party or some, something else happens. It's just boom, everything. Yeah, I honestly don't use them at home because I have two little kids. Security. Yeah, I understand. I'm relishing in my time where I can be totally, like just totally disregard personal safety because it's only me that is the potential culprit.

1:45:09As soon as the kids come along, yeah, it's that was jealousy out of my mouth. In case you didn't hear that. That was just what it is. All right, let's get back into advanced or moderate, like purple belt techniques for sleep enhancement in the home. Okay, great. So past all the top level stuff, quite dark. Be consistent with your timing as another one, try to go to bed and wake up around the same time every day plus or minus 30 minutes is what we say, realistically 45 minutes is where you're at. Specifically, try to keep your wake up time really consistent. That's almost always easier. Sometimes it's hard to fall asleep and you're not ready to go to sleep, but it's always easy to wake up at the same time because you can you can engineer that.

1:45:51So start there. Now all that stuff out of the way. Other things you want to think about are extending sleep throughout the day. So this could come in one of a couple of forms. A nap. There's a lot of research benefits on refreshment, cognitive function, reaction time, physical force production, endurance, sport performance, all are enhanced with is snapping during the day. 20 to 90 minutes is the typical one, and you almost always want to be done with your naps before 4 p .m. Just a rough guideline depending on how when you train. Like having a coffee too late in the day. Mingo. So what happens is throughout the day you build up sleep pressure, and if that pressure is released too late in the night, you don't have enough time to build up back up, and that's why we're gonna struggle with all the sleep.

1:46:39So I don't nap ever. I can't stand napping. It doesn't work for me at all. I don't like it. And so I will never choose that option. If I need extended duration, I'm either going to bed earlier. That's my preference. My wife Natasha prefer to sleep in a little bit later. I cannot stand sleeping. I cannot stand it at all. I'd rather go to bed at 6 p .m. I'm not sleeping and it's never going to happen. I will never nap either. What I can do though is this is when a breathwork, a down regulation session is highly effective. So if you can't nap, don't want to nap. I actually just dealt with this with work with a lot of people who run venture capital, and run things like that, and they're like, you know, we're in Manhattan office.

1:47:29Like I am not, I'm not fucking taking a 20 minute nap. Like on Wall Street. You're like, no, I like, okay, cool. Can we do stuff that looks like you're at your desk? And so this is, if you're watching, you're gonna see me do this right now, right? You can simply be at your desk. Your eyes can be closed or open, and you can close your mouth, and you can do very structured, very slow breathing, right? This could look like meditation, this could be not meditation. It could be NSDR or not. NSDR is super easy to do. Progressive relaxation techniques. So if I'm sitting at my desk, My eyes are open, my mouth is closed, and I'm progressively squeezing the tip of my toes and I'm relaxing it.

1:48:08I could have earphones in going through an actual script. I'm going to walk it from my toes to my ankles to my knees all the way up and down my head and back down. No one even knows we're not working. Those things are not the same as sleep, but they are somewhat equivalent. You can get sleep like responses, physiologically from stuff like that, and it can be seven minutes long. 20 is better, but I'll take what's your favorite what's your favorite? NSDR or rejuvenation practices? Is there a YouTube video that you keep coming back to? Is there an app that you like to follow? So we use yeah, that's a great question.

1:48:44We use a handful of different ones. So we will use Andrew's got a few scripts out now that that we'll use specifically where he's doing NSDR. Andrew, we're going to have those. I will use Sam Harris as an app called Waking Up. We use that a lot. A ton of our people will do that and you can just go through any number of things there. There's another organization, a company I've been a part of since the very beginning called XPT. XPT has an app that was founded by Brian McKenzie and Laird Hamilton and Gabi Reese. They have a ton of protocols. Some of the protocols are very yoga -y sort of, you know, that feel and then some of them are from actual Navy seals.

1:49:25Are people deep in the military? So depending on which type of just voice or cadence or whatever makes you feel more than the thing. And so I will pull that thing out pretty consistently and they have a bunch of them. They have four minute ones. They have 45 minute long ones. Those ones are really common. I personally don't use any of those. Very often, I will always do my own thing. I'm always going to lay down for that to the most part. I'm going to be closed. And I'm just going to do basic stuff. For me, that is very much as simple as just regulating in and back out. And I try, it's kind of my version of Transcendental Meditation.

1:50:05I'm not actually focusing on my breath per se, but all I'm paying attention to is breathing. and I don't care what the cadence is. I don't actually count, because I don't wanna be actively engaged in that. I'm just worrying about chilling, and chilling, and any thought that comes in my head, I push out. I just want to be neutral. I don't want anything going on. So it's kinda like the opposite of focusing on breath, it's the focus on nothing. If my mind drifts, it drifts, it's fine, but then we just come right back to, this is your, this is your Zen time. If I'm really not able to do that, which is very often, I'm going to do that outside.

1:50:45So what I'm going to, that means is I'm going to walk and I'm not going to have headphones in. I'm not going to listen to podcasts. I'm not going to listen to music. My mouth is going to be closed. I'll probably take in the dogs and we're going to walk. I don't know where I'm going or how long I'm doing and I'm doing the same thing. mouth is closed, praying through my nose and I'm very much intentionally not working. Okay, that little bit of ralzer reduction is insanely powerful for me personally. I can't speak to anybody else, but for me, given the fact that I have, I don't think I have any more work than anybody else has to do, but I just have it in so many different areas.

1:51:19I like oftentimes feel like I just can't ever get out of it. And so I just need some time where I can just be like, you're not doing anything. You're not doing research. You're not doing coaching. You're not worrying about your companies. Nothing. And that can be seven minutes, six minutes. Can we one lap around the block? But that is given that you're also trying to get sleep, you're trying to get your step count in throughout the day. You're stacking that on top of it. You're getting a little bit of sunlight, you're low commoting, you're moving your eyes from left to right. Your ocular focus is being changed as well.

1:51:55Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Passive gaze, whatever it's called. All about stuff. It's like hearing, being, all changing. Code way. Yup, so like neurologically, I don't even count that to my step count stuff. I'm simply doing it as a mental reset and in track. Like I'll notice too when my restaurant race starts getting pretty high, when I'm working, it's like, what are you doing? Well, you run an marathon or or writing a paper? Like let's let's have. What is it? Email apnea that people that? Yeah. For sure like mouth drops. Chains open like hunch forward and you're just going nuts. And so then I'll try to just go boom, go out there.

1:52:34You've mentioned a couple of times, I, I had it in my head. I remember I definitely didn't make it up. I definitely heard it from someone that sleep banking basically wasn't a thing. Has this changed? Was there a camp of people that was saying that sleep banking wasn't a thing? Have I totally fucking hallucinate this?

1:52:58I'm actually by so many people on the internet, how wrong am I about this one? This is crazy. So I'm glad that I can teach you my learnings of how internet people and educate scientists on science. So, um, great. This is a bunch of knuckleheads. I don't think how they ability to listen and comprehend what Matthew Walker says. So it's actually very straightforward and there is no argument and It's people that I'm sorry for being a bit sardonic. But this one is holy cleedo. I'll give you the backstory. So many years ago when Matt came out this book, it was great. Like one of the things he talked about is sleep debt.

1:53:38And you can't repassally debt. And I remember, got seven or eight years ago, I was speaking, I think for the saddle sounders, and Stephen Lockley was up there. Stephen's at Harvard. Stephen works for my company now, but this was years ago. So he's one that build up, built all the circadian rhythm stuff for the International Space Station, the light and all that stuff. Excellent. I talked a little about this and he was like, well, yeah, no one has a time machine. So yes, if you sleep for five hours tonight, you can know ever, ever, ever go back and regain those three hours. Yes, yes, yes. No one's arguing that point at all.

1:54:14It's a basic physics problem. Of course, that's exactly what Matthew was saying. What he was trying to tell you is just because you sleep for five hours a night throughout the week. And then you sleep 20 hours a day on Saturday. And your total amount of hours are the same. That's not that's not equivalent. And he's a hundred percent correct. Again, I don't know. And the scientist in this area who would make a cogent argument that that's incorrect. We all agree on this point. He's, I think it was on, I think it was his episode with Jill that this sort of all started and probably his many other, but he's like, you can't repassleep that, you can't repassleep that.

1:54:54And that's when he met and he's 100 % correct. However, as I mentioned, there are now probably over 50 studies on sleep extension and sleep banking. If you go to any professional sleep society, scientific conference and clinic, like you're going to see these things very routinely come up. This is very, very well accepted in the field that you can sleep longer. Think about it this way. Imagine you slept for five hours last night. I slept for less than that. I guarantee you. I slept for five hours in the loudest fucking campsite in all of Montana. Yes. I can't stand that. You go all the one, Tana, and you're thinking like big sky country.

1:55:38How the fuck are you around of the people. Oh, this was this was wildlife. This wasn't this is the fact that the sun rises at it starts to get light at about 4 a .m. and it's your birds wielding megaphones that are I was a I was in the teetons last year hunting elk and the first night before we went to bed well one of the guys out there was like I just so you know uh we'll have some visitors tonight I was like, okay, it's been two, three in the morning and just bang, bang, bang on the tents. And there was a moose that was coming through camp every night just smashing. And just wrecking everyone.

1:56:18Yeah, this is fine. So I have a friend who's been on the show a lot, the guy called Yusef. He has, you may They know the name for this medical issue. If he is woken suddenly during the night, he makes a gelp, makes a loud, yelping noise. And it's quite common apparently he's the perfect avatar for the person who deals with this. So it's a male in his sort of around about 30, in his early 30s. No previous history of psychiatric disorders. and so this has happened a number of times. It's happened when he went to go and see George in Dubai and he heard, George's first thought when he heard this yelp was I hope that that girl is okay.

1:57:07That was his first instinct. We went to a bachelor party in the UK a couple of years ago, classic British bachelor party where we're sharing twin rooms of single beds. So I'm like, right, okay, whatever, like, you know, I'm in it, we're doing it. And we've been out for dinner and we've had a couple of beers and we went go - carly whatever the classic sort of stag -do thing is and it's three in the morning I roll over and rip one of the biggest farts that I've ever ripped. That wakes him up. So what you hear is whoo from him in bed next to me. What you fucking killed me. But yeah the number of different sleep maladies that you can have from mooses to birds wielding megathons to a friend that makes a shrieking noise when he's woken suddenly.

1:57:54There's lots of ways that he can be disrupted. Yeah, yeah. That's right. I think, for the most, never banged on my that trip, but no, I get it. Well, these are what we were talking about. You would say that you'd had limited sleep last night and you're talking about the banking. That's what it was. Okay, great. So you and I slept for five hours last night. just because we didn't get our eight if that's the number does not mean we are now going to be asleep that the rest of our lives right so like tell me how that would work like okay if you ever miss a minute of sleep you therefore gonna add that on so by the time you're what four years old you're now in 75 ,000 hours asleep like how does this work of course it gets reset right so there's Yes, if you sleep for five hours tonight and you sleep for more hours tomorrow night, you'll feel better.

1:58:47Like that's yes. So again, I don't I don't think it's really difficult to comprehend both of those two things. I think logically logically it kind of makes sense when you think about I always think about this to do with money that if I buy That sandwich for five bucks. I will never get that five bucks back ever and if I eat that sandwich I will never not be able to have not consumed those calories. Those calories are in me for the rest of time But I think when you start to it's like a deterministic view of Health or finances or sleep when you start to think like that it it might be right It might be truthful, but functionally it's false that the way that it actually shows up to you is is kind of pointless Yeah, I feel like it's people who Perhaps you need to set up the campfire, have a glass whisking, go, wait a minute.

1:59:43Does that make sense? Let's just slow down for a second. Does that make sense? That that debt is just going to accumulate every minute the rest of your life and you can't do it. And which is certainly not what Matthew was saying. So the sleep -dut thing is that. It is, yes. Can't go back in time. 2, yes you can't just sleep terrible and sleep more and those would be equivalent. So four hours one night, 12 the next and all of a sudden you're back to even. That's not how it works either. But it's also not this permanent debt you carry the rest of your life and you'll never recover from. So the idea then with sleep banking and sleep extension is two things.

2:00:24So banking, the way I define it is getting ahead. So sleeping extra time prior to known sleep debt. extension is simply going adding more time throughout the day. So these are the studies that have taken people and said you're already sleeping again eight hours. Can we get you to nine and a half for 10? We have some of them to 45 minutes to 90 minutes per night. The research there is little is three days up the seven right weeks. I think the cherry ma who did this classic study I'm referring to now, I stand for the basketball players. This was in the original basketball players and she got them to sleep 90 extra minutes per night for five to seven weeks.

2:01:03So it can be done. Some of the athletes chose to sleep in some chose to go to bed earlier some chose to add maps. But you extended sleep and most of the research will do that. They'll say however you want try to ask you know up to 90 minutes. Some added 10 minutes some added two hours right so not everyone's gonna get 90 extra minutes, but you're going to get some on there. Now, those tend to be optimization strategies. It is very hard to sleep 10 hours a night without a sleep disorder for forever. It's certainly many can argue it's not necessary. It's definitely not necessary to do that. Most of the research on high performing, high energy expenditure athletes will indicate eight, nine plus hours per night is generally the, what we go after.

2:01:53There is not a perfect correlation between caloric expenditure and sleep needs, but there is some relationship. Jeffrey Dermas, Dada Tonnestoff in this, he was the sleep scientist for the Atlanta Falcons and the TNSA and things like that. And he's got a good data on this. And again, it's not a perfect relationship between caloric expenditure, but there is a relationship. of people that are in sports or activity levels that burn way more calories will perform better when they generally cross nine plus hours of sleep. If you're fairly sedentary, but you work out pretty hard, you don't probably need nine hours, right?

2:02:30What we're thinking about folks are training twice a day or running a hundred miles per week. Some other activities with large, large amounts of chloricose menageral. So that is extending sleep. The banking one as I mentioned, I know of again, of at least 30 studies or more on this where you lead prior to training camp, prior to preseason trainings, prior to, especially in the military, tons and tons of work in the military, where we make sure that we are getting a maximum amount of sleep for the week to month prior to known sleep deprivation and you see those problems that happen when the sleep deprivation comes on, those are attenuated.

2:03:09So I just don't know how much more research one needs to say like that's a real thing. You're shooting accuracy in terms of firearm shooting, neurological control, mental cognition decision making, memory recall. It just holds on that when you go through those known periods of sleep deprivation. So we have a lot of athletes and a lot of coaches and scientists will have their athletes in the preseason. Try to bank, right? You're good as much sleep as you can so that at least we're not going into our season and sleep that. Yeah. That's the biggest thing about it. Dude, so interesting. I did a tour last year and I wish that I'd been red -pilled on sleep banking beforehand because I was wrecked for a full month.

2:03:53Is there anything else that we haven't talked about from a purple belt sleep enhancement perspective that are other big movers? Yeah. Nutrition is a really big one. Okay. There's a lot of focus and conversation on supplementation for sleep and that's fine. but nutrition should be paid attention to far before that. So the timing and type will have a huge to determine upon the quality of your sleep and you can run a lot of self -testing on this, right? So here's what I mean. The classic thing we'll say is you generally don't want to have a large meal in the two to three hours prior to going to sleep.

2:04:30That's mostly true, but it's also not always true. And so you can test that. Some people will respond eating before bed, much better. Generally, never going to be a big meal. That's going to lead to digestive issues. But blood sugar regulation is a really big key to groginess. The sleep inertia to what you feel that next morning when you wake up, you're like, man, I'm like, I feel like a truck hit me, that kind of thing. A large portion of that is determined by blood glucose. So if you're waking up with very low blood glucose, then, hey, nutrition is our play here almost churning unless we got to see if there's sort of some kind.

2:05:09So you want to take her with that. There's lots of different things. I mean, go all the way back. I think I'm pretty sure I don't can't guarantee you, but I'm pretty sure Tim Ferris wrote about this in four -hour body, right? 15 years ago, whatever, right? Having an apple before bed, having some sort of slow releasing glycemic index carbohydrate can really stabilize, but it goes any nailed it. He was dead on, man. Like those things can be really, really helpful. Last thing I'll say about about this is carbohydrates. So one way to really help people sleep at night is a nice amount of carbohydrate in their last feeding.

2:05:44There's a lot of dogmo over the years about, don't have carbs at night because of fat and like all this other stupid shit. And hopefully the door is closed on that because we have thank you Mike Ormus B and all the folks have done all the research and that. So it's like not happening at all as long as calories and all that is equated for. But having a nice bowl of carbohydrate prepared to bed is really, really helpful. We recently, not recently actually been a while now, but we had a client a couple of years ago who was struggling with a handful of things, sleep, sleep, sleep was falling, sleep, fine, shooting awake at 2 -3 in the morning.

2:06:22Right? Just like, boom, this was happening. And the guy's pretty dumb. Has a lot of resources in this space. Good to get a figure out. I'm like, all right. So we start taking a look, we pull up his blood work. Clear, clear thing happens here. We look at insulin, insulin is low. Okay, interesting. Sex hormone binding glabialins way up. There is a known inverse relationship between those two. Insulin is low, SHBG is going to go up. Because sex hormone binding glabialins up testosterone is down. Okay, so for each testosterone is down. All right, so it's another classic like in mid 50s kind of guy or early 50s.

2:06:56Um, high runner, very successful dude financially, and it's like, okay, maybe it's time for me to do testosterone fine if you want to choose that, but I know your answer. I know why you're shooting away. That was going on. Okay, we start looking at melatonin, is there a tonin? We start looking at B vitamin status. We see all these things and we see classic sign of insufficient carbohydrate. Let me guess, and I can tell him you're probably trying to keep it under 150 grams of carbs per day. Yep, 100 % pretty active dude too. Not insane, but pretty active. I'm like, great. What you need is another 75 grams of carbohydrate at dinner What all we did was that insulin went back up sex hormone buying glad and went back down testosterone went right back up slept completely through the night basically always and Guess what happens to serotonin melatonin?

2:07:43They go right back in normal cortisol curve is perfect waking up grogginus out of the way problem solved Why would you say to people who maybe like the idea of a little bit of carbs before they go to bed or in that window, what are some of your favorite sources that people can eat for digestion so they're not in too much discomfort when they get horizontal and timing before bed? Yep, Timoring, Tinker with it. If you need three hours, three hours fine. If two hours is fine, if an hour is fine, whatever it is, start at three and work your way back if you have to. Now we end up dealing with a lot of people who three hours is not an option because they're training twice a day or again they're playing a game at night and then it's like okay great.

2:08:30Game got over at 10 .30 and now you want me to have dinner when and then go to bed when so then I'll have dinner at 11 .30 and I guess I'll stay up to 2 .30 just because my three I'm not going to happen right. So we don't always have that but take a look. Started three work you way back if you'd like. You can also then try a very small snack right before bed and by right before bed that could be 45 minutes before bed, right? Whatever it is to you. I will eat pretty much like right before bed a lot and I'm just fine out of it but not everyone necessarily goes. So timing wise, three hours is a fine starting place but just as needed and see what works for you.

2:09:10In terms of amount, Almost always if you're having some sort of starch rice potato whatever sits well with you cano It beings the wealthy great like what what are the natural more starchies? Fruit is fine. There's a actually there's a lot of research on kiwis Kiwis are very effective for helping people fall asleep So that's another great way to to fruit to try this could be your before bed snack kiwi could be a part of your dinner You could try it that way. So don't be scared about fruits within our fruits and the evenings. We will do that. In fact, if we're trying to manage carbohydrates, oftentimes we'll restrict them during the day or in the morning and put more at night.

2:09:56Better recovery, better sleep, feeling better, and you'll feel just as fine the next day. So those would be the types as well as the timing that I would start people with. Fuck yeah. Andy Galpin, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I'm a I've been oh yeah, absolutely headshot today. I love it. I had 10 things I wanted to talk about and we spoke about VO2 max and sleep for two and a bit hours and I couldn't be happier Dude, you're great. You're really really fantastic. I can see why Robin Andrew pushed you to get cracking because I think it's a much needed rebalancing to some of the sort of in the weeds deep stuff and I think I think you're fucking great.

2:10:40So why can people go out there when they keep up to date with all of your things? Do you want to check out your stuff? Why should they head on the internet? Yeah, obviously the podcast is the best place for form with Dr. Andy Gelpin. Is the name of that? And like I said, only 10 episodes there. So that's season one, you will get through it all and maybe if those guys can talk me back in the season two next year, we'll come back for another round. But that is up and live on all your podcast places and YouTube as well. And then on Twitter and Instagram of Dr. Andy Galper, the easiest place to find access to that.

2:11:15I pretty much use those for science communication exclusively. So that's where we'll put out all of our stuff. And you can go from there to find all the links to absolute rest and our blood work company, Vitality and our coaching programs are rapid and all those things are pretty easy to find so so we got it all Hallelujah, dude. What a good first little foray into becoming best friends. Yeah, man. Appreciate it We're gonna get you to connect afterwards here. We'll make sure that sleep is getting truly dialed into you because I'm not fully convinced you're there Okay, all right, all right, dude.

2:11:50Thank you so much for the day. All right, man. Good to connect