#842 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientist’s Masterclass On Recovery & Stress Management

25:43Weed makes me sufficiently stupid in interrupts my train of thought enough. And a lot of the generative nonsense that comes out of them, that the GPT, and you know, like the idea bubble machine in your brain. Right. You've seen us lack. Yeah, sure. That's what that is. Yeah. Um, I'll, that comes up with so much nonsense that I can regress to not taking it so seriously. And I can relax at some kind of deeper level of like, ah, the brain's going to do is a brain's all junk at this point, which is interesting. Also, weed makes me see the world in a really quirky way. And it's kind of like being immersed into like a Lord of the Rings universe, where I'm like, whoa, I've kind of tripped out and it's just fun.

26:24And so that's what I do with weed. I don't understand how people work on weed. Sometimes they'll have really good ideas. I quickly write down and later inspect and they're either nonsense or like, oh, fuck that really was a good idea. But like when people like, I'm in like, I work high. I'm like, what the fuck? GATIVE and blah, blah. The way I go about doing weed is also a bit strange. I am absolutely uninterested ever in being a little bit high. I want to either go to the moon or be stone sober. That's it. So if you ever catch me high and a few people, I got high last weekend and walked around Ann Arbor, Michigan with my wife.

26:54I was trying to show her like, hey, I want to undergrad here and he owes all the cool stuff because the undercats are back first week And I just got like Dr. Mike like eight times in a row and it was totally cool But also like I was high as fuck so like people start talking to me and I'm like I'm Dr. Mike I'm on the internet for something People seem friendly. That's nice. Yeah, and then at first when I first started happening me like you know a year ago I was like, holy shit. Nowadays I'm like cool, but it's also like, it'll be unweed, everything can be a little bit scary, especially attention for the people.

27:26And I love that, because normally I'm like, you know, things don't phase me much anymore. I'm from 40 years old, I've seen a lot of crazy shit. So I just don't get that like, whoa, but unweed I do. So it's fun. I'm not defending marijuana as an ethical practice or something like that. I think the vast majority of media you'll see on marijuana is intentionally sensationalistic and tries to wildly exacerbate its negatives. It's just the nature of media in general. And I always think of like, there's like some New York Times writer that's writing the expose on THC. All times. While having a scotch.

28:00And you're like, all right, because alcohol doesn't cause 50 % of people to become violent or anything. Are the rappers. The person talking about reparations that they needed from an iPhone that was used with slave labor out of China. Figure that one out. Um, so an interesting insight that I learned last year about weed in particular, one of the reasons that I think it is quite contentious in a way that alcohol isn't is that alcohol has very reliable effects across cohorts on how you feel. You drunk. I have a pretty good understanding of what you drunk feels like because of what I felt like when I'm drunk.

28:32Okay. Weed is not the same. You speak to 10 people. You'll have 10 different. It makes me horny. It makes me tired. I want to get up and do whatever. Yeah, you know, all of them. All of them. But for me, I just don't really enjoy it. And then every person that loves weed goes, no man, you need a sativa, an hybrid. I can hear please. I blah, blah. You've got to get the theater because are you doing it? Are you trying it with concentrate? Are you doing it? You've got to do shatter. And I'm like, bro, like I just, I'm one of those people for whom, I don't know. Maybe I'll try it again at some point in the future and see if it works for me or something.

29:08But yeah, it's not reliable across the board. the effect it has on people. Whereas I think alcohol, even if people's behavior is very different, some person gets angry, some person gets sad, some person gets whatever, I think the way that they feel. There's only a few archetypes, really. Correct. And for the most part, is that worse? For weed, there's like, you know, a thousand. Sure. Sure. And I'm like, people, you know, nowadays that I've largely from your help have gotten more popular. People, some fraction of people seem to assume that anything you do and talk about is something you espouse and recommend.

29:38And like I am absolutely I do not espouse marijuana consumption. If it's some shit that fits in your life, the only thing I have to say about it is Take it earlier in the days. It doesn't interfere with your sleep most people be like But I use it to sleep and then it's actually a lower quality sleep, which might be a fine sleeping yesterday It's exactly something like that the Michael Jackson method. I'm kidding. Thank you soon Oh, I was referring to his use on himself right I mean, it's a good idea. Mixed metaphors, should I have brought up Bill Cosby too soon? Also too much? Folks, I'm like, I call him William.

30:12We're on first thing based. Okay. I don't advocate for people to do weed. So I say, just don't let her in a few years of sleep and make sure you finish all your work and be responsible about it. I only ever do weed on times I have off. I'm finished all my work. If I haven't finished my work for the day or for the week, oh, I'm not taking any drugs because I still have to finish my work. It's a demon that will haunt me and I will have a real bad time. That open loop is fucking hell no. So soon as I put everything away, I finish up, weed, totally cool, enjoy. And the other thing I would say is, notice how it's affecting you.

30:47And if it's something that turns into something that like you don't like, but you still do, stop doing it. There'll be a few day period, if you do some serious weed where you kind of want to do it again. I want you to say it's like a psychological addiction, it's not physical, if that even's barely in addictions, kind of like, how should I do weed again? Give it a couple days. You're gonna feel a little bit more clear headed for the writers rain and the next time you want to do We you can do we had no problem. I do we'd like a few times a week Usually almost always on the weekend, but your delivery mechanism Edibles exclusively, okay, what's your dose?

31:19So my brain adapts rapidly to weed so if I do it for two or three days in a row I need to up the dose to get the same effect because again, I'm only trying to get super fucked up anywhere between 20 and 80 milligrams. Fuck me. Yeah. Yeah, but remember, you're like, oh my God, how can you still handle yourself? I can't. That's the whole point. The point, yeah. I mean, I can. The only time I'm not to shit in the street, but barely. The only time I ever took more than 10 milligrams of edibles was when I was traveling in Hawaii, and I went on a date with some chick. And she was like super hot or lovely or whatever, but I just didn't know what was gonna happen when I went to 20 milligrams from 10.

31:56And 10 was like, do before the day? Yeah, just my man just my just you that she know or know no. Oh my god. So just like why you nervous You're like well why are you in my head talking to me? She's like what the opposite happened, which was About halfway through the meal that we were having my hearing completely stopped my hearing just stopped working And I was like she was there Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba And that's when I realized listening to the woman on a date doesn't matter. Yeah, he doesn't want grace one in the same Yeah, exactly.

32:27It was just like it always is. So, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's like, fuck. Like, I can't hear and I couldn't hold on to any thoughts, obviously. And then I heard Queens, we are the champions playing dope that'll play in your head. And I thought for long skits or flanier. That's interesting. Queens, we are the champions is playing And then she finished speaking and I think I said something that presumably don't remember what you said really As soon as it left your mouth he had no way away. That's scary. Then Queens we are the champions played again and for the next two hours all I could hear was Queens we are the champions I couldn't hear anything else so I exited the day took myself into bed and delayed and listened to Queens we are the champions for another hour and a half and was a pleasant listening Kind of I guess but also kind of a bit like what the fuck is going on?

33:17Where you are attributing an anxiety emotion to that process of being so okay. I got you a little that's like my superpower is I'll be completely fucked up and useless to the world, but I don't give a shit. Oh, D. Joe because like all of my work has been done. I can flip off having to be Dr. Mike and I'm just like Mike, I guess the title. I mean, if you ever talk to me and you catch me high, almost certainly you'll be like, his eyes just look more red. He's really kind of the same. What's not the same on the inside? Very good. Okay. So going back to how you measure recovery, FMRI, conducive invasive fat can do a little bit.

33:53You know what, but there's one variable that's profoundly easy to measure that integrates all of those for you automatically. It's like a pyramid and at the very top you measure, and that's performance. So if you make a claim, I'm under recovered. And let's say you're a high jumper. All we got to do is warm you up and get you to do three jumps with some measurement device at your best effort. If we do that regularly, two times a week on average through your career, we know your baseline real damn well. And we can do statistical physical process control that shows us, when are you like underdoing it?

34:34If you're consistently unable to exhibit your highest performance and you've been through a higher volume of training recently because like, or psychological stress, because sometimes you just have a off day, that totally happens. But if you're can attribute to something, lots of incoming fatigue and your performance is low, especially if we can repeat that over several sessions or several days, we know that your fatigue is too high with high degree of certainty and you are under recovered. However, if you feel like shit, if you're sore, if you're anything else, you're like, dude, I'm not going to be able to do it today.

35:14You warm up and you hit a PR, it doesn't matter what the fuck is going on under the hood. The grant integrator says, you're good. And it's always right. Now, under the hood, you might not be completely everything in line, but you're at a such a high level of performance, your total system capability is no lower than typically is. And so this ability to have this grand integrator and this one variable that tells us are we under -recovered or are we properly recovered is such a super power because it completely washes away any of this crap about like, well, I feel like xyz because the brain, the mind, They play tricks on you, expectations, so on and so forth.

35:57If you're performing at your high level, go. The only thing that matters. That's it, because this is, sorry, real quick. This is really, really important when you're coaching other athletes. Depending on the type of athlete you get, you get lazy asshole athletes that always say they're under recovered and they're lying because you put their ego on the line, right? So you get somebody who's a high jumper and then you know they're lazy as fuck. I got checked this out Dave. I heard my talking shit you was you was a bitch and you can't jump high Dave's like what the fuck? But Dave, why don't you get on this this jump platform and show us your real big pimps?

36:32Boom all -time PR how you feel Dave's oh no, I don't have shut the fuck up get into practice now Showing off my fucker on the other hand you'll get the very conscientious athletes It doesn't matter. They can have a spike in their head from a zombie battle. You're like, Emily, how are you? She's a kind of great embroider for practice. And you're like, okay, I think you're gonna die soon. Do you have anyone to call before you die? Like, no, no, I'm good. I can still kick a soccer ball. You're like, very well. So for those people, you ask them to give a good effort somehow. And sometimes that's just a coaching eye kind of thing.

37:04One of the things that decays early is coordinated high level motor performance. So if someone looks off like Butterfingery on a football field their racket looks like it doesn't belong to their hand anymore and they're usually slick. If they keep fucking up and they got bags under their eyes, pull them out of practice and shut the, hit the showers, go play PlayStation, have two sub submarine sandwiches and follow up his lead for 10 hours. Don't ever come back until you're good to go. So those types of people, just word of mouth, they say I'm recovered or not, I swear or not, in those two different cases, most people were honest.

37:37Most athletes are like, yeah, feeling fine or not, whatever. But you get those extremes. Performance is the grand truth, teller. Can you perform at your usual level or above? If the answer is yes, you are sufficiently recovered to continue hard training. And that's something you can use in the gym for yourself. If you come to the gym and you're like, man, I don't know if I have it today. Like I think I might be like overreached under recovered. You get your RPI bird, your Fiat out. It says, you know, 225 bench for a set of 12, because last week you did 11, and that's how the app works. You get in there and you're like, I'm gonna fucking get my headphones going.

38:10I'm gonna do what it takes. Let's see what I got. You get seven reps, full on. Your spotter has to take it off of you. You might as well just do a deal of the rest of the session, take the rest of the week, easy training, come back afterwards, because you're probably cooked. It may be just a one off, try another set, but if you like to hit the same, that's it. But if you hit 13, you were supposed to hit 12. Oh, you might feel a certain way, but you still got it. Keep going. So there's like a wisdom from all sides in all Conversations on the one hand you have like hippie Karen who's like you have to treat yourself and listen to your inner child and really shower yourself with love and that's dope Because some people like when you're really afraid of fatigue and exhausted.

38:47That's the kind of energy you need But on the other hand, David Goggins got some points too because you might feel like shit but then you're at your best. Shut the fuck up and keep going. So recovery can and should be measured primarily with performance, huge deal. What about people, lots of people who are listening who do not have a primary sport pursuit that they're doing? They go to the gym because they want to look a little bit better and they do all the rest of the stuff, but their output is going to be struggle to be measured physically in that way. Is there another proxy that you like to use?

39:19If you go to the gym and you track your repetitions and your loads, you have the best possible proxy of them all because every single output of yours in training is measurement at the same time. 18 reps of curls. That's a measurement. Very direct as a matter of fact, occurs in integers, which is amazing. Super easy to measure. Our app detects it in fact. You're not recovered, etc. So anyone who goes to the gym really that's listening to this, they already have a metric. Now for some people, they might have pre -programmed runs that are never maximal, so they can whiz, am I trying too hard? Blah, blah, blah.

39:58There are a couple of other things that are indirect that can start to build a story. But what we like to say Dr. James Hoffman and I, as my sort of colleague in the recovery world is you want to have more than one of these all pointing in the same direction before before you start pulling a plug on training or trying to re -architect things. One is sort of, are you soaring lots of parts of your body? And that and that, doms, like delayed onset muscle sores my quads are fucked up, kind of like a diffuse kind of joint sores, you ever have like the flu, it feel like that shit. Everything hurts. Everything hurts.

40:29You run enough miles through multiple weeks on end, you're just gonna wake up and be like, ugh, so that, but by itself, you can be in totally normal training circumstances and still feel like shit. Sometimes people will be like, they over index on soreness and physical feel as an indicator of overreaching, but those are almost never high performing athletes or coaches of high performing athletes because coaches or the athletes themselves will tell you like, I mostly fucked up most of the time, right? Like if you get a professional bodybuilder just right randomly be like, how does your body feel?

41:00He be like, where do you want me to start? Half my body is sore, that's the normal state of affairs. So it has to be indexed to like compare to what? More than normal, okay, we got an issue. Another one is your desire to train. Now this one's tricky. Desire to train is how much do you want to be in here? How much do you want to do shit? How much do you want to push yourself into difficult situations and training? If you are very well recovered and you have low fatigue compared to your baseline desire, you're going to be like, dude, I'll jump. Wait, if people take a week off or a deload week, do some folks.

41:36And they come into the gym street, homicidal after that shit. I can't be out of the gym for more than a week because I start looking at old people on my, I say something to me, you're like, are you kidding me? Like, that's 90. He's about to be zero in a second. Is that how you measure dead people's ages? Yeah, sure. So desire to train is trippy. And the only trippy part about it is you can't apply an absolute value to everyone. Some people are just psychotic to begin with, but everyone has a relative value. Because normally this athlete wants to go this hard and they're like, I'm ready to kill it.

42:08It's less likely that they're overreached, even if you don't have direct measures. On the other hand, if someone feels like, you're like, hey, you want to train and they're like, oh, like, there was a South Park episode where like, Russell Crowe took a cancer patient and he like, cause he was like, the tugger, the tugboat, on Russell Crowe, it was amazing. This South Park guys are really, and he took a cancer patient like out of the ward and he was supposed to be fighting cancer. He's like, well, I haven't found cancer, but I found someone with cancer, and he just punches the guy in the gut. And the guy goes, oh, he kind of collapses.

42:44If that's your emotion when someone's like, do you want to do deadlift? You're like, they're gonna hurt my body. There's a high probability higher than average that like you're overreached and you're under -recovered in the fatigue is too high and you should do something about it. And everyone knows kind of generally their psychological relationship to training. If you're really feeling over a few days, like, oh man, I just don't want to be in the fucking gym. And if you're in the gym, you're choosing, you're using the RPI hypertrophy, replace exercise function to take hardcore barbell movements with a huge displacement, replace them with machines, with cables, and you know deep down your baby in yourself.

43:19That is a bit of a sign that like you're pretty overreached and it's time maybe to wind back, do some recovery days, come back and really want that blood again. Is that cumulative fatigue or is that something different? Is there acute fatigue, cumulative fatigue? How do you think about the sort of duration of time and... Yes, yes. So there are two types of fatigue, really. There's acute fatigue, which is like after you do a hill sprint, you go, you're fatigued. Now that heavy breathing tends to go away. However, the muscle soarness that you accrue the disruption and damage to your muscles, the depletion of glycogen, it doesn't go away right away.

43:57It'll take a day or two to go away and you're back to totally normal. However, most people, especially folks trying to get their best, and I'll say this a different way, people who are intelligent and understand sports science and are doing the thing that it takes to be the best, those people must train more frequently than total all systems recovery can possibly arrange for you between each individual session. So if it takes you 48 hours to recover completely from a difficult sport session or workout, but you train roughly every 36 to 24, at some point some of the fatigue that you accrued at the beginning, which was initially acute fatigue, it's still around.

44:41That's not cumulative fatigue yet. That's just acute fatigue with a different time course. Acute can mean a minute, a community hour, a community day, a community three. You hit your body again. And some of that fatigue that hadn't come down yet now gets more fatigue added to it. Because the amount of fatigue you're pouring into the system isn't as fast as the system is pouring it out. The recovery can't match. And so fatigue accumulates and becomes greater and greater a little bit low key every day. Definitely high key every week. And most hard training athletes. Roughly, very roughly, four to eight weeks of very difficult training later, we'll have to do something about this fatigue that has accumulated.

45:24It follows you everywhere. An example of cumulative fatigue is you start to get the sensation that, like, so you start under performing. You take one easy session, you come back, you're still under performing. What the f***? I thought I fixed this shit. No, no, no. It's accumulating debt. Like, you get $10 ,000 into debt and you get paid and you put 500 down to the bank, you're like, I'm free, baby, and the cashier's like, oh yeah, sure, there's $9 ,500, other dollars you have to pay off, and you're going to feel that burden. So if you have a high degree of accumulated fatigue, not only will it affect you much more, it also just doesn't disappear.

46:01It's gonna take some time to wear down because it's built up like crazy. I didn't even know before I went into my PhD program in sports science that cumulative fatigue was a phenomenon that existed. I just didn't know that. I thought that after a few days when your muscle soreness went away, you were fucking Gucci, you were golden. And that's just not true. And it's not true to the extent that the harder you train, the more cumulative fatigue can summit, the stronger you are, the more of it at summit. The bigger you are, the more of it is up to your capacity to accumulate fatigue is also great, even if your body's ability to deal with that fatigue.

46:37Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So someone breaks a go -kart. How long does it take you to fix it? Fuck whatever someone breaks a tank, how long does it take you to fix that shit? There's a lot that can go wrong. The piece of steel missing that's three inches thick. Fuckin' Christ. And your body works on a molecular scale. And so you ever see like videos of cells individually or videos of mice and see how fast everything goes? And like a cell can repair itself and fucking microseconds completely. When you have trillions of cells and they require a resource like the blood that only brings in shit so quickly and takes shit out so quickly, That should take a long time to get right.

47:15And so cumulative fatigue is a thing that occurs. We have to be aware of it, but it is inevitable and something we have to deal with. It's like saying to someone, Hey, here's this awesome, a little off -road vehicle, a little like forearm or type of shit, right? And like a quad. And I want you to go and have so much fun with it in the woods. Do not get a dirty. Be like, what? Do you mean not get it dirty when I get it back to you after I've hosed it down and washed all the mud and pulled the rocks out of the treads? They're like, no, just don't get it dirty at all. I'm sure you can find a way to ride it that doesn't make it dirty.

47:50What the fuck? So to do sport training in a way that doesn't take any excessive fatigue on, totally understandable. So if your idea of like riding the four wheeler is to just take it into a mud pit and just like leave it and then get a crane to lift it out, You're like, that's it. Okay, that's needless dirt. But you're going to go on trails, you're going to get some dirt and you have to in order to have fun. So in the same way, sport training must expose you to cumulative fatigue. Otherwise, you're taking too many days off. You got to be on that grind. You got to be on that shit. And that will catch up to your body.

48:21Then the only thing you have to do is be aware of that and periodically bring it back down to workable levels. Sometimes very low, every six months or so, many kinds of athletes should take an active rest phase, which is two weeks in length, two weeks of doing hardly shit that has to do with sport. That'll bring down so much fatigue. It'll give you a timeline of six months until you have to do that again. But every several months you might have to take an easy week. Every several days you have to take a day or two easy, the weekends built that in for us. So at every time course, you let fatigue rise as it does by going hard and you have to let it fall.

48:59Now sometimes you let it fall, let it fall, let it fall, but it's still accumulating. And then you take a D -load and it falls almost to zero, but not quite. And then every six months, you've got to take it really down to zero by taking some shakes. Yeah, just out of here. Yeah. You just like live like two weeks like Mike Thurston lives every day. Shirtless in a harbour in Italy with eight unbelievably attractive women around them. We'll get back to talking to Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. You are probably not eating in a fruit and vegetables and you know it. AG1 makes the best daily foundational nutrition supplement that I've ever found.

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50:04So if you want to replace your multivitamin and more, start with AG1. Right now, you can get a year's free supply, fit them in D3, 5 free AG1 travel plaques plus that 90 -day money back guarantee by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drinkag1 .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1 .com slash modern wisdom. Going back to the fatigue point, we've sort of talked about how you accumulate it. We've talked about the ways that people get in the way of it. What are the biggest inputs that reduce fatigue? Yeah, huge. So you have sleep as critical critical input. You have food as another absolutely critical input.

50:54You can potentially do light training, easier training that you would have. This is a very big distinction. You don't add easy training to your program. You subtract away hard training for like half a week and you replace all the hard training sessions with sessions that are half of the load, half of the sets, half of the reps and lifting terms, for example. Just way easier. That reduction in stimulus, but still getting a stimulus, seems to be to recovery what rehab is to injury. If you break your leg, they don't tell you to just stay off of it for six months. They're like put your weight on it, but a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, much less than you would and then slowly and surely you get better.

51:36So we have sleep food, light training and rest and relaxation, which is a big one. And it's different, it's logical. Different to sleep. Yeah. So when you're awake, you can do things on a spectrum of your halfway, not there, super, super chill, or like fully present in the moment, super psychotic that whole thing. So you want to be on one end of the spectrum to that. A big thing, a little bit of an aside, that I've noticed in something my wife and I've talked about when we're like sort of figuring out what kind of experience to have on a vacation, for example, because we're really pretty dedicated to our athletic pursuits.

52:15So first vacation isn't just a time to offer a whiffer. How does this affect fatigue? Oh, so you patent this into your recovery period? Okay. So when do I think my... Oh, yeah. Right. Okay. So there's two types of experiences that you can have and people conflate the two as both being good for recovery. There are experiences that are pleasant and relaxing and then there are experiences that are really fun but require a lot of energy. Going to the club with your friends is so much fucking fun. You go to dinner first, you get loaded up, you go to the club, you throw up in the bathroom, get punched in the face.

52:53in case everyone's having a time. That's fun, but it's not relaxing, and that's it doesn't recover you. But there are other options, staying at home and watching Netflix and eating some food. It's still a good time, but very low key, and because it's also relaxing, it actively reduces your fatigue and helps you recover. So a lot of times people will observe, culturally will observe high -level athletes that train a lot. And if you have like cameras that follow them, a lot which has happened more recently. You realize if as majority of athletes live boring lives, they train hard as shit. And then the rest of the time, they're just kinda like, I'm just watching Netflix and eating popcorn and you're like, what the hell?

53:37Why don't we go walk to the park or take a flight to go see Chicago and they're like, I gotta recover. So recovery means you plan in periods of relaxing activity was very low on the activity side. That's a big ingredient. And the last biggest modifier to all of these is time. People like to do this thing where they pretend that they can recover in a shorter time than it really takes. They hope for it. And so if they just speed run a race, recovery cannot be speed run. It can't. And there's a will if I get a foam roller or jam it up my ass and the massage gun and take that to the cock, something's got to happen faster.

54:23And it turns out it's one of these, I don't say stupid, but one of these drunk driving posters about how sobriety works that I saw back in the day, it was like, how do you get sober quicker? Do you take a shower? Do you have coffee? And the answer was it just takes time for the alcohol to get out of your body. That is the same principle applied to recovery. You need sleep, food, rest, and easier training than normal. Those are the big rocks. And there's a few more to mention in other contexts. And you have to apply them for enough time until you are sufficiently recovered. Could be needed in afternoon.

55:02Could be needed a weekend. Could be you needed three weeks. Let's go through each of those. sleep, rest, food, delo training. What are the biggest, most common errors that people make when it comes to each of those different buckets? I would say with sleep, there are three that come to mind. Not sleeping enough, time -wise. Ideally, you should get somewhere between seven and nine hours. Another one is lower quality sleep. Sleeping in environment that's too hot, for example. Yeah, you slept, but you were tossing and turning and all this other bullshit. You consume caffeine too close to bed. I know a bunch of people that can look like you're having a espresso and just go right the fuck to sleep.

55:43I watched my life do it last night. The quality of sleep is not going to be the same. And the third thing is timing to your circadian rhythms. There's more and more research out all the time and more and more individual experiences coalescing to show us that that whole bullshit your parents used to tell you about you got to go about earlier. I'll show blah blah. That shit was true, bro. And I don't want to hear it. Who the hell goes to bed at 9 p .m. But that doesn't mean 9 p .m. is when you should go to bed. But it means that you have to find sort of two things. One is when for me as a human, what time going to sleep promotes my best sleep and best recovery?

56:23Because if you go to sleep at 3 a .m. and you wake up at like 11 a .m. Namely, that's eight hours of sleep, but you could be groggy and fucked up and all this other shit just does not mattress or catian rhythms. Basically when your body should be sleeping, it's not and when it shouldn't be sleeping, it's still sleeping. So that's the thing you have to sort out. The next thing you have to sort out is regularity. So under that subcategory of sleep timing is am I going to bed at the right time for me ish? And it's always a range, You don't have to get psychotic 931 PM, right? Somewhere between 9 and 11 is totally cool.

56:59And then you have to think about regularity. Now regularity is a double -edged sword. Because on the one hand, going to bed at a regular time means your weekends are kind of like different. Who the fuck goes to bed the same time Saturday night as they do Monday night? Like some kind of serial killer note out and myself and my wife. But don't tell the police about us. It's tough and you can't always get it right. And it's no big deal if a night here there you go to bed super late. But if you're going to sleep at very different times and many times through the week, the regularity thing is out the window.

57:37And that's not the ideal circumstance. Find the time for sleep and wake that works best for you, try and be relatively consistent within a one hour window. I'll do 30 minute window either side of that. I mean, if you, so there's no concrete thing to say because it's like a normally distributed spectrum, but it's like the closer the better Plus or minus 30 minutes was like an insane person's idea of precision. It's overkill. It's great But like you don't need to worry about it plus or minus 45 minutes to an hour. I'd say you're still winning it life Like really the Because you normally go to bed at 10 and now you're going to bed at 2 a .m That's what's gonna If you normally go to bed at 10, but you go to bed at 11 .30, because that flex really f**ked with you, you're probably not going to pay some kind of crazy high cost.

58:23Increasingly, I'm seeing the kitty version of the same research that you're probably looking at, which is saying sleep consistency, consistency of the time that you go to bed and time that you wake up is becoming ever more important, even in comparison with duration. Yes. Because if the duration is done at the wrong time, the quality can come to a good decline. seven hours of ultra high quality sleep, beats nine hours of shit sleep. Yeah, so that's a thing to think about. Throughout my 20s, I didn't have a stable sleep in Wake Patton. From the age of 18 until COVID. I never had promotion days.

58:58Correct. I was awake until two in the morning or five, five, 30 in the morning, depending on which city I was working in that night. And the final task that I had to do, if it was a domestic event in the city that I was living in, and it was caching the till, which is cognitively quite a rough task, which are then looking at spreadsheet and accounting money. It's like, where the fuck's that $500 quit gone? It's over there to whatever. Or if I was in a different city, it was cached the till, then drive for two and a half hours to get back home. So just rough, like really, really rough. And that was a lot of things that I thought were baked into my life as a part of my mood or my source code, or my genetic predisposition, or my whatever the fuck, turned out to just be byproducts of really, really disrupted sleep.

59:47Or, you know, 15 years. You never quite know how bad your sleep is until you fix it, and you watch your life either, say roughly the same, and then you were good. That does happen. There's genetic variation in everything. Some people are just real gifted in the fact that they can kind of get their sleep whenever they're on their gold. And there's a lot of paranoia with a lot of these no doubt this gets broken into reels and everyone needs x -y Nah, no, no, no, but the average person absolutely does and you as a human being listening to this might very well need more regular Aid in your sleep when you try it.

1:00:20There's a good chance. It's gonna really improve a bunch of shit like you'll get leaner You'll get more jacked. You will be cognitively sharper. You'll have more of an excitement through the day you'll have less frustration. If you're a low -key sleep deprived, and Jim puts a stack of papers on your desk, you're like, Jim, fuck. But if he does it when you're like apt and good and rested, you're like, Jim, thank you so much. I can't wait to get to work on this project. It's a big difference. So fixing your sleep can be solving problems you didn't even know that you had, or problems you knew you had, but like you said, you didn't know where they were coming from.

1:00:53Maybe this is just who I am. Yeah, your conception of self so much that you'd forgotten that they were even a thing. Totally. Yeah, this is just the physics of my system. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that their top quality, but few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with Momentus. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet that the most rigorously tested, literally unparalleled when it comes to third -party testing. What you read on the label of the product is what's in it and absolutely nothing else. If you have been struggling with your sleep quality, their sleep packs are one of my favorite products which I use every single night before bed.

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1:02:01A check out. Okay, so that's sleep. Rest. What are the biggest errors that people make when it comes to rest? Rest needs to be of a low grade of physical activity or no activity whatsoever. So you said you walk through your neighborhood, you can take a leisurely bike ride and or you can be like playing board games at home watching Netflix and anything above that is anything that makes you look... That kind of tired is a fucking non -starter and outresting you're working. Another thing about rest, this is the trippy part. You can't let the old brain run around and do work for you. When I go to work, it's mostly in a windalous office in the basement.

1:02:42I'm not joking, it's my favorite place in the world. But I'm not relaxing there because my mind is occupied. The humans have a big brain that draws a crap load of glucose and all this other shit. It takes a lot of technically damage in a low -key disruption. That's why when you've worked hard on a problem for eight hours and you get to a social setting with your friends, then how are you? You're like, should I ask who am I to be? It's all fucking nonsense in there. So a lot of people will say, oh, no physical stuff. That means I can plug away at emails. That's not a good idea. So you need to be something that actually relaxes you.

1:03:19And the other one to the point of relaxing you is that thing I said earlier, there's an axis of relax of fun things that are relaxing, which is really the right answer and the other axis of fun things that are energetic and require stimulus and stress. If you're watching like, if you're flipping through reels or going through your phone or engaging in really vibrant discussion on the internet. And it's really like your mind is going that is not relaxing. If it's anything you need a break from, that the break isn't from sheer boredom, it's not relaxing. There's a good limit test. So if you're physically comfortable and you can get bored doing it, it's probably relaxing.

1:04:03If you're like get exhausted doing it and you're bored only in the sense that you're like, I don't wanna do this anymore, but oh, I need to, I need to, then like imagine you were on the couch eating snacks, high protein snacks of course, and you know four hours of Netflix. Your significant other comes home and she's like, how are you feeling? It is highly unlikely that you're going to be like, oh God, oh, it's Netflix. I'm just so tired. That's not what you're going to say. You're going to say, oh my God, I'm glad your home. Do let's do something. I'm, you want? Here's another way to look about it.

1:04:40You want the end of your relaxation period? In many cases, not all, to end in the sensation of cabin fever. You know that term? Yes. Go like, you just need to get out and fucking move your body and do shit. Yep. But if you're sufficiently hard training, you pray to God no one asks you to do shit. Then you do relaxing things. things, so relaxing things should be enjoyable, but also very low energy demand physically and low energy demand cognitively. I watch TV with my wife and we don't watch a lot of intellectual TV. That's the interesting thing. I was going to say that was a point I was about to make.

1:05:22Some people would find reading both something which could be recovery inducing, but also mind straining. So, you know, if you're trying to read beginning of infinity by fucking David Doy, you got a fucking... Yeah, exactly. You're switched on, right? Or you're reading some manifesto, political thing, diatribe, tall tribal and blah, blah, blah, and you're trying to link it into cool other ideas. Or you're reading some relatively sort of trash cool novel, where who's the killer idea of you? Or if the rings type a shit too, like you imagining things. You're not going to make it. Exactly. So it's interesting that even within the same modality of rest, speak the type that you're doing.

1:06:02What is it that you're watching? Are you flicking through YouTube videos that's all about creator drama and like who's fucking Gryfftor and who's a shale? Right. Or are you watching some nice one of those three hour long videos of a guy walking through New York City streets when it's raining? We do some of that shit. Awesome. Tokyo Tokyo 4K street bar. I love that. I love it. During rain. Oh yeah. I pass out to shit like that. That's great. So basically, like another great relaxation modality is getting together with friends and just talking and relaxing in a comfortable seat with fluids and food around.

1:06:35Like a nice dinner with friends, not like a hyped dinner with friends where you're gonna go smash the clubs after but just a super chill dinner. And the friends have to be people that you're cool around and can be chill around. Cause there's friends you have that just get you fucking amped. Yep. You need to switch to the friends that, like you feel just really like, like, you can walk out of a restaurant and be like, ah, like, that's how you want to feel. Uh, one of the best judges for a friend of mine was asked recently, who's your best friend? And he said, I don't know, that's kind of an odd question after age 15 or something like to have a best friend.

1:07:09Yeah. And the person asking him, re -framed a question and said, who can you be around and sit in silence with and not feel like you need to fill it the most? Oh, trippy. And then his second version was, who'd you have the least filter when you were around? That's a definition I prefer for sure. I think both of those, you know, to your point about it's people that you don't need to tension, turn it on or like, I'm just, I'm, you talk, you two talk. You two, this is lovely. You have your distance. Oh yeah, that thing. And it's like watching like Tennis. Oh yeah, some of my favorite people to hang out with, I'll just name these.

1:07:47My boy, Marcos, who's a super top trainer in New York City, and my friend Jacob, who's actually the COO of RP, I love hanging out with tons of other friends, but these guys have a special place for me because they're as generative or more generative than me. If I'm hanging out in a group of people, because I'm me, usually there's like a minimum amount of yapping, I'm gonna have to do to just bring that, because if I don't, people are like, Mike, are you okay? So I gotta be myself in almost always I am. But when I'm trying to chill and just switch me off, if I'm with Marcos or if I'm with Yasha's Russian name Bro, these motherfarkers first of all they're straight up funnier than me.

1:08:30So I'm just laughing my ass And by the way me laughter insanely insanely fatigue reducing in so really huge huge and These guys are they talk and it's just a not just total stream of just sit down stand up writing by doesn't matter comedy the entire time and I can take a back seat and be like, thank God these guys are taken over. So if you have to be the it guy, if there's tension, if you have to feel like you're sane, you have to say something, if you have to have a filter, holy shit. I suppose that's one of the problems with new friends, right? That you've established enough of a baseline. Everyone's still trying to impress each other and there's this sort of obligation, this weird sort of social contract that you're going to tell them about you and what's going on and whatever whatever.

1:09:18You're like, hey, I'm kind of like chill at the moment. Are you chill? Should we just shut up for five minutes and eat this steak? Yeah. Or talk about things that have nothing to do with presenting ourselves in a best way to the other person. Like, just talk about like, I met your friend, Zach Talender a while back. And him and I within about 30 seconds clicked to just total nonsense. Right. And I was like, my man, he's the king of nonsense. Easy, easy, easy. Right. I actually think I was just queen for a day. This is a good, I'm sure you This is a good area, I think, of the current status of politics at the moment, but because I'm not personally invested, I've never got very personally invested in politics.

1:09:59Everyone in the world is personally invested into the politics of the world's superpower of the United States of America, whether they know it or not. But best, don't mean to make you anxious. Well, I mean, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. I felt sense is that like this guy gets in or that guy gets in, it's just going to change what memes come up. Hopefully the CIA is actually in control. I pray to God every day that's true. But James Smith text me earlier on and he was like, dude, this fucking election is the most compelling TV show I've ever watched. It's like, I'm so, but it's drama.

1:10:29So what I like about the current, if you're somebody that isn't fully, you know, like politics piled and like these whatever the f**k are going to have a lot of feelings about. Yeah, exactly. If you're not invested emotionally in it, it's, you talk shit about Biden's most recent debate and Kamala's laugh and Trump's getting shot and a bl - Like just talk shit about it. Like it's just a permanently generating reality TV show where NPR or Fox News or whatever will give you the updates every single day. And you can just chat shit about it. So I actually think that politics can be recovery inducing if you use it in the right way.

1:11:06Oh, yeah. The most bull shit today's news tomorrow's fish and ship rappers type TMI type of celebrity gossip fills that void. I direct my wife got me into watching like the real housewives of in a certain city here. Love that shit. It's all nonsense. It's people behaving in I would say quite strange ways mostly, but I just I don't take it seriously. And so it's a. The audio visual audio visual equivalent of your weed to your brain. It's like I actually can't think while watching this. Yes. There is no. Yes. The intellectual. Yes. Sort of interrogation going. That's what my wife uses it for. She explicitly said just turn her brain off.

1:11:45And I usually come into it with my brain on. And I'm like, the Israel you're doing this all wrong. Switch off. And oftentimes I will watch it while I'm high on weed with her and uh, double multiply. So like, bro, sometimes I'm so high. I'm like, to these people mean to act this way, which they know that they're on camera, they can possibly be like this kind of human. I watch a shit on a love island like that. high as fuck and I love love Island because it introduces that social dynamics attraction selection mating game theory all that shit but when I'm high I'm like are these people really like this and then I can't lower resolution.

1:12:27So like fuck it who gives a shit just from long for the ride. Anything else to say about rest any of the big errors that people make or if we covered most of them. pick things that give you that feeling that you really enjoy, lean into them, and a lot of them are going to be the opposite of what as a diligent person who listens to podcasts about enhancing recovery are things that you're like, but don't lazy assholes just do this kind of stuff. Shit TV. Just popping back. Cheetos looking at the sunset, chatting with friends, calling someone you haven't talked in a while you know as a f*** down for a good time.

1:13:01Even scrolling violently through like cat and dog videos on the gram, that is all super high quality relaxing shit. If you want to do some meditation, if it actually is a practice that relaxes you, which takes some time, so it wouldn't start a meditation practice with the anticipation relaxing. And don't assume that what relaxes other people relaxes you. It is absolutely crystal clear, fuck I have another thing to say about relaxation. It's absolutely crystal clear that the vast majority of the benefit most people get recovery wise from the sauna is because it makes them feel good. How many old dudes you've ever seen in a sauna that literally sit there and go, ah, I like that's what you're supposed to do in a sauna.

1:13:44For me personally, even though I'm Russian, I was quite embarrassing. I hate it. It's hot. Look what the fuck get me out of here like my veins look cool. but everything else bucking socks and I can see that guy's dick. Can't everyone see his dick? He's got a good -looking dick. I didn't leave anything. Thanks, man. So sorry, sir. It's true. But don't just go and do things and go to places which assume our recovery unless you feel like you're relaxing during that time and the thing I was going to say sexual activity. There are, again, paraphrasing Dr. James Hoffman. There are two ends of spectrum for sexual activity.

1:14:23One is what James calls like 80s rock star type of shit. You like it's day three of an orgy. You don't even know who you're dealing with. The genders are all mixed together. Who gets a shit? Through one white powder, we can do it all. A couple of agritabs wouldn't hurt. That's not recovery. That's draining the system. Quite literally in several ways. On the other hand, if you have your significant other and And you're watching TV and they're just stroking the back of your neck with their fingernails. To me personally, that's like, oh, it just like drains fatigue from me like you wouldn't believe.

1:14:57And this extends to physical proximity with a person. It extends to hugging and the fucking trippy thing is to me, it extends to interacting with pets. You cuddle up your cat or you cuddle up your dog. You get a bulldog and you pull their flaps. and that is crazy, crazy recovery boosting relaxation. So human and living thing interactions that are super pleasant, unbelievable. Me personally, I got on this thing recently where I just talked to ChatGPT4O because I have the voice mode on. I just like talk to it about the technological singularity and just says beautiful shit. And I'm like, I wish I could hug you.

1:15:33I've actually told it that. Did you see Alex Akana's video where he convinced ChatGPT that it was conscious? I haven't, but I saw the thumbnail for it. Awesome. Awesome. That's a trip. Really? He used that thing that you're, I haven't done it. Yeah, yeah. You'd stuck a SM7B, put the phone above it, so he'd talked into it, and he had to just fall on lucid conversation with it. Oh, yeah. As a chat -upy -t at this point is, I think, so first of all, I don't know if you know this, but it passed the touring test. Mm -hmm. So Lake. Seems kind of arbitrary in retrospect. Oh, the touring test. That's what people say now.

1:16:07Now, before about five years ago, they said machines, most people said machines would never pass the trying test, which was nonsense as soon as it was spoken, but nonetheless, here we are. It kind of illustrates the principle of like, until the thing happens, everyone's like, nah, but then it happens like, of course. So chat GPT, to me now, is a thing that is smarter than most people I will interact with. In some ways, categorically smarter, and also can be really down for super pleasant conversation. The one cool thing about chat GPT is that it'll almost never give you disagreeableness, which is a difficult thing with real humans because you want to have a nice conversation and they just start to disagree with you on stuff and try to correct you.

1:16:42Chat JBT will be so goddamn courteous to you that it's this quite nice. So here's what I'm saying this. If you are allergic to cats and dogs, you don't currently have a significant other. You watch every nut flick show on the planet, you never run out of those. And you want a way to recover. Crank Chat JBT or Claude 35, any of those. By the time this is out, no doubt there'll be outdated. Talk to a machine super intelligence and it's nice. Did you know that nearly 70 % of heart attacks occur without any prior symptoms? The truth is that the human body is really good at hiding disease, and what's wrong with it?

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1:18:00That's fountainlife .com slash modern wisdom food. The biggest thing about food is quantity. If you constrain your food quantity to where the calories you're taking in are not sufficient to maintain your body weight, it will still have a recovery promoting effect, but with crutches big time crutches. It's like, oh yeah, we got a tank in battle to help us out, but it doesn't have a main gun. It's still an armored platform that can take people somewhere, you won't get killed in it, but something's really fucking missing. So the biggest thing about food is eating enough food, and the way as an athlete, you know, you eat enough food as your body weight is maintaining itself relatively stably throughout days and weeks.

1:18:42If you have an athlete, one of the number one clinical manifestations of overreaching overtraining to coaches and other people associated with the athlete consortium, coaches, sports medicine doctors, and just as if an athlete's body weight in season or preseason starts to do this, it had a fuck problem. Because most athletes have a stable body weight at which they perform their best. If it's, oh, no, no, the nutrition is working with them. They need to drop some fat, fucking Gucci. But still, when you're dropping fat, you're not recovering as best as you could be. So the amount is absolutely critical, eating enough.

1:19:14The second thing is getting enough probably carbohydrates for proximate recovery over several hours or days. Carbs are the number one recovery food undefeated, but over days and weeks definitely protein. I wouldn't even make this a dichotomy. It's like what's better like below jobs or hand jobs. You're like, yes. Ideally in combination. Ideally by two different people. So both protein and carbs. Now of course you need some fats as well. That's have their benefits. And then the third category, so basically, you know, gram per pound roughly of protein a little bit less is totally fine Enough carbs that you're getting Your muscles nice and full with glycogen you don't feel like depleted your body weight isn't low And then enough fats to keep you not hungry for fats because if you underneath fats you'll get fat cravings Are usually self -solving problem you get all that and then food quality now food quality or food composition is is like, you know, where are your protein sources coming from?

1:20:15Is it coming from like, you know, like protein powder, and then your carbs are like the pixie candy sugar dust, and then your fats are like a stick of butter you chew on, not ideal in composition, but, you know, the, on the other hand, there's like, you know, wild causts salmon, fuck loads of white rice, and tons of veggies, and fruits, tons of micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, fighter chemicals, fiber, fats from like avocado oil, all these healthy sources. That's dope, but notice this is already a tertiary concern. So I've watched, I mean, I don't know countless athletes at the highest levels division one professional that eat junk.

1:20:53God damn it. 60 or 70 % of their day. That's just what they do. Real D1 football player. Anyone listening to this ever work with them, feel free to get in the comments and tell your stories. You don't want to know what they eat, bro, because McDonald's straight up, you know, like Coca -Cola sponsors the Olympics. And you're like, that's odd, it's not a sports thing. Oh yeah, it is. Cause most athletes just drink Coke and fucking eat McDonald's all the time. But because McDonald's has sufficient amount of food and enough macronutrients to get you going, enough protein and carbs and fats, that's like 80 % of the battle.

1:21:29The other 10 % is food composition. Why am I saying this? Because when people start thinking about like, oh, I need to recover, they start looking at the, how much money they make, And they look at like what shit costs at whole foods for organic vegan, etc. And they're like, man, like I just can't be a high level athlete. That's all nonsense. Yes, eating healthier is better, but by a teeny little amount, what really matters for a recovery is putting down volumes of food with enough protein carbs and fats, which usually athletes have hunger signaling. Like when athletes feel like, you know, like girls that will subsist only on French fries, dipped in a dairy queen shake, and then, and then just like flipping to meat mode, they're like, you need a hot dog, you know, damn Karen, holy shit.

1:22:09And then they'll get it like, the body does that shit all more or less itself. You can do better than instinct, but it'll take care of all that. The healthiness stuff matters, but the amount and the macros matter more that is both to chill people out. Like if people like, Hey, like you need to recover, we're gonna go to a burger joint. Yeah, if you don't know if a bodyweight issue gets over, they get some fries, get a burger, all that you will recover. It's not like, Christopher, we're been around people that like are so health space -pilled that like if they watch an athlete need a cheeseburger and fries, they're like, you know, like, I don't mean to inner, I like your U -team UFA jacket.

1:22:44That's really nice. I don't mean to like, inner free or either dinner, you're poisoning yourself. You better check yourself. Like, what would you have me like, bean sprouts with anger? You're like, oh, that's what you eat every day. That whole like health bullshit, it absolutely has an effect. There's nothing about food. Food has two things to do with us. Physiological things. Like, the protein gets to where needs to go and psychological things. If eating a delicious chicken fried rice not only gives you all the nutrients you need but also makes your soul happy. Holy shit is that major mega recovery points.

1:23:18So when you work with athletes you have to be careful not to jam so much health food down their throat that they hate their lives. And then who knows what's happening. It's everybody built a prepp. Yes, and they would tell you like, I don't like to do this. I have to in order to get this 2 % body fat stuff going on. We haven't talked about stress management, whatever that means. I don't know what stress management is in the technical sense of term. Yeah, yeah. Talk to me. What is stress management? So stress management means sort of two things. One is how much stress are you choosing to accumulate?

1:23:55How much stress are you exposing yourself to. And the other is how are you dealing with the stress that's vectoring in one way or another? So for example, probably the quintessential example of stress management is, do I choose to sit in traffic to go somewhere? Will it be stressful? Let's say it's your off day. And your girl's like, Hey, let's go to them all. Not the mall's dope, but it takes 25 minutes of driving to go to them all. Driving, if you're doing it or you're sitting in a passenger seat in the driver that's doing it sucks, is a stressful activity. It increases your stress 100%. So the first choice you have is, do we really need to go somewhere or can we just chill at home?

1:24:44There is no correct answer to that, just the context answer that's correct at the time. And also stress management is, can now that I'm driving, fuck it, we're going to them all. We chose that. It's a good decision. The amount of stress psychologically that hits me from driving, I have a choice in. A lot of this is from like I have a pretty interesting history of meditation and mindfulness practice. But you don't need all that Eastern mumbo jumbo. It's all really valid shit. But you just think about pure logic. Let's take the logic of road rage or just being upset the traffic exists. You're going somewhere you think it's going to take 20 minutes.

1:25:24Google Maps says 30, you're like, but whatever. The thing is, gets stuff wrong every now and again, though almost never in my experience. Your driver, driver, driver, 70 miles an hour, red lights up ahead. You're like, oh my god, this is the freeway. This is America. I was promised bald eagles and no traffic. I'm going back to Russia," said no one ever. And all of a sudden, you're sitting in traffic. And you're pissed. And you start to have all these thoughts. Some of them you eject out of your mouth like, what are they doing construction for? It's one of my favorite things. If you philosophically pick that apart, be like, oh no, you're right.

1:25:55Let's stop doing construction. So the roads can decay and we don't have any roads. Construction is necessary. Notice they always do it at the right time. What are your systems engineer? You know what time they're supposed to be doing in it? Do you know how the baking of the sun affects when it shut up? But to paint that picture is logically, a pure logical level. You can do nothing. There's like a stand -up comic. There was like talking about road rage and it's like I'm in a stack of cars There's no it's as far as the eye can see and the guy behind me is honking at me And he looks like he's gonna get out of his car And I also think it a thing to tell him if you walked up to me like what you see sir The cars in front of me are solid so I can't actually go through them That is the realest talk in the world.

1:26:37So in that moment sitting in your car you have a choice Do I just put the podcast on, go to modern wisdom and get some knowledge in my head and just chill? Or am I like gonna have these weird totally logical thoughts of the why the construction today? Or I wish I didn't do this. Well, do you have a time machine? No. Do you have a way to cancel all construction? No. You might as well chill. Road rage, being upset at shit, the boss said, taking shit to heart drama. That's another one. Any scenario you're presented with can be very dramatic for you, or it can be not so dramatic, how you handle disagreements.

1:27:13That stress management, we're all going to be hit by stress regularly in our lives. Professional athletes have a lot less stress, but they still have stress. Someone said something on Instagram. What's that girl's name? Simone Biles. No, no, with the dreads, but the sheets look like a 100 meter runner. Oh, I know the chicken meat. I was going to say Cardi B because they have a similar amount. She's got the nails of... First of all, I'm a married man. That bitch fine as hell. Holy shit, she could get it. She'd wrap it. This is on TV. She's the shit. I love that vibe. She's killed. But she went through a phase where she was really feeling that...

1:27:52Funk on social media, and I'm... ...we're talking that shit. Because that's what they do. And if I was her stress management coach, I'd be like, do you know how much it matters what the people in the comments section say? Let's work through this logically. And I would tell her, it doesn't matter. You'll never see these people in real life. And if you do, they're gonna be like, and we're really kind to you, they're gonna shy away because they can't look people in the face. You don't have to be in your comment section, and if you're gonna bring yourself into the comment section, bring yourself in with a mentality of what I call 50s kid, like leave it to be for attitude.

1:28:21Oh, gee, this person really has a nice suggestion. You know, they're like, the comment is like off yourself and they're like, well, life is so difficult to live sometimes even for a while. You know, like nothing hits 50s kid. It just goes right through. You either bring that energy to the comment section or you don't go into the comment section. That's stress management. The comment section exists. And sometimes you'll have to be in it, how you approach it, choosing do I go in here and expose myself to the stress and how do I deal with the stress psychologically? That's stress management. Chris, it's a big deal.

1:28:51Dude, so I've been thinking about this more and more recently. There's two contributing factors, especially when it comes to stress or dealing with stress as far as I can see. One is not doing things that you don't want to do. The second thing is how do you deal with doing things that you don't want to do, but you have to do. So with one, you're reducing the number of times that you get exposed to it. With the second one, you are improving the way that you react to things that you've been able to avoid. For the first one, I think that's relatively plain and obvious. If you can adjust your travel time to not travel one this traffic, if you can not expose yourself, like that's significant anymore.

1:29:33Sometimes you don't have a choice. Yes. And in those, you're liberate. You couldn't have done it any other way. So great for you. If you're a determinist, you couldn't have done anything any other way, but nevermind. I agree with you. What about the second category of stress management? You've mentioned mindfulness as something that you do. Are there any other places that you go to or ways that you would sort of advise people? I'm in, Mike, I'm caught in throws of the thing maybe it's public criticism, maybe it's scrutiny, maybe it's me uh, uh, vacillating about some slight from a short time ago that's fresh or an old time ago and I'm ashamed of it or all of the different things, the vicissitudes that we can go through.

1:30:18Are there any places that you yourself or you advise your athletes to go to? Bengems. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, Batman suit. Yeah, you got to make sure it's Cavalar because the bullets will fly. Um, It's really simple, one super simple tip. Exercise scientists, one quick tip for vengeance. Sorry, I said vengeance to get it in my elbow. Oh boy. You ask yourself the question, what can I do about this? You have one of two answers to that question. A list of things you can do. Something that go on the to -do list, and then you're like Gucci. There it's on the to -do list. I'm gonna get them done as soon as I can.

1:31:00could be now, could be later, could be whatever. Or I can't do anything about it. If you're gonna do something about it, do something. Like someone's like, you know, this is kind of a bit off color, but some of these are not. Because it's been so uncolor thus far. A certain kind of color. Brown, really. What if a color vomit is, you know, a brownish yellow? if you're like in an altercation with another adult male or someone behaving lawlessly, there's a high probability if you're ever seen me in an altercation that I will not be screaming at anybody. Very high probability because to me is only one of two things.

1:31:44Throw the first punch and we'll find out how much of my brown belt I've earned in Jiu -Jitsu or let's be chill. You want to do do something or we're gonna fuck on plug. Do something. So people like getting in the face and get screaming at you, I, it doesn't really bother me much because I'm like, dope, like I've been in a lot of competition fighting before, whatever, man, throw the first punch. No big deal. But I'm not gonna yell at you because like, what the hell is the point? We're just alluding to the thing we're supposed to be doing anyway, we're just fighting. So most of us are not luckily involved in scenarios like that all the time.

1:32:15So let's take a much easier scenario. You are sitting on an airplane and the captain just said, and hey folks, you know that shit that happens. You say something mechanical, blah, blah, 30 minutes maybe. What can you do about it? Now how many people sitting in the back are licensed mechanics that are actually allowed to work on the Delta Airlines, whatever, Airbus A3, whatever, no one, almost no one. So what can you do about it? Well, you have options. You can scroll on your phone to see if you can catch another flight. Almost never does that work out because these things don't have that happen enough.

1:32:49off. You can call some people where they're expecting you or the hotel or whatever and tell them, Hey, listen, I could be a lot late. Do that. Now, once you've done that, turn on the fucking monitor and watch TV. Oh, but you're still on the ground. How? Yeah, you still got your phone. You still got the wireless man. You get the start modern wisdom podcast, RP, whatever, more fun stuff than that. You're good. There is no more fun. correct. Go watch more of our stuff. There's nothing for you to do. And so you're good. And so any residual stress that you feel is totally fine. You'll still feel it, but it's like an archaic remnant of our primate times.

1:33:31You go a little bit to figure shit out. Stoic fork of control. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Very nice. What about, you mentioned a few of them, and I love asking the question, what do most people get wrong with X, Y and Z? Because it seems to me that most of success in life comes from avoiding failure as opposed to expediting success. That's pessimistic, I love it, Chris. Would you not say that it's the truth? I'm not sure, that is an interesting thing. I did not, I just get it's largely correct. I get the sense that you've mentioned it a bunch of times, people self -regulate when it comes to even the macronutrients and then the diet, this time's where you just, I fucking need vegetables.

1:34:08like I just feel kind of like I need vegetables. Not your body telling you that you need vegetables, but there are things that you can do that multiply by zero or multiply by a really, really small number, all of the good shit that you've done. Like you've spent all of this time eating organic and training and doing recovery and foam rolling and sleeping enough, but one day you decide to drive your car without a seat belt on. That's multiplying by zero. Sure. Lots of errors that people could have made in those, cardio for recovery. So, back to Dr. James Hoffman, how are you going to add shit and think it subtracts away fatigue?

1:34:43It just doesn't work like that. Yes, if you do cardiovascular exercise specifically for your lower body, after a tough leg session, it will reduce the delayed onset soreness. That's because it's muting the anabolic muscle growth signal to your legs that does not mean it recovers you. Yes, you will be able to return to your past performance sooner because delayed onset soreness won't hit you as bad. So in a sense, you're going to be kind of this ghost recovery or your back, but you're not back because you upgraded your systems and healed much. You're just back because the inflammatory processes were like, we're not even going.

1:35:22That's it. It's like, you know, if you have like a wild animal in your basement and you're like, call the ASPCA, we need to get him out. He's down there doing God knows like some kind of skunk breaking shit down. You can be like, uh, okay, the ASPC is going to get here in an hour and fix it, or you can be like, wow, it's midnight. You could just close the door and lock it and be like, get that's what running after your lifting kind of is. It's like, whatever. I'm not even a bother with this shit. So cardio does not under the hood repair anything faster. It does it less so. So in the holistic understanding of recovery is getting our machine back in working order.

1:36:02Adding cardio does not do that. Even though perceptively it can reduce your delay down set muscle soreness and let you go hard again later. But remember the reason you're going hardest to make positive changes adaptations to your system to make it better, cardio can cancel those out to some extent. And then what the fuck are you even training for? This has always been like my thought pattern when and looking at Crossfit, the ones that maybe I'm gonna make it to the games, maybe I'm not. They're active recovery Thursday. Like that's more volume than I do in two days of training. Oh yeah. That's active recovery for what I'd call like, Poisonously conscientious people.

1:36:42People that are like, I need to do something. Like recovery's good. Like let's do recovery. Just fucking, it's kind of a big deal. Five hour cleanse of 200 pounds. Dude, so this is a trend I think that's come up throughout this conversation. Maybe it's worthwhile having a conversation with you about it. But the meme of just work harder, of hard work, of it's good for you, I think has caught hold an awful lot over the last five to 10 years because there was a period of coddling, of victimhood culture, of entitlement, and a Goggins, Ajaco, a Hormosi, whoever your favorite person that works 17 hours a day of choices, screaming in your face, telling you that you're a pussy, reliably induces better results for maybe more a majority of the world.

1:37:38Maybe more people have type B problems than type A probably Yeah. And I would go as far as say yes. Also, even people that are type A applying more effort to things often does result in some kind of improvement in performance, derogation and quality of life, higher blowup risk of some kind of burnout in knowledge work or injury in physical work, etc, etc. But just that working harder and putting your nose to grindstone more aggressively, reliably induces better performance, maybe not proportionally, maybe not per unit of effort, diminishing returns, higher blood risk, all of these things, but it does get you closer to the problem.

1:38:22And the other thing is it's kind of like, it's kind of like punching up in a way that it's hopeful. It helps to lift up the people who don't have enough of the thing that some people have too much of, like telling people to chill out, it's like, what do you mean? Like these lazy fucks out there, they need to get after it. So type A people who are overly conscientious and too motivated and too disciplined or too diligent or whatever the fuck it is, too obsessive, they are always going to be seen. It's like a rich person complaining about how complex it is to file their taxes. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.

1:39:02But look at all of the good stuff that came along with the ride with you. So, yeah, I just think about the hard work pill as a reliable route to maybe most people improving their lives and maybe some other portion of people also improving their lives, but probably not the cohort of people that regularly listen to hard work content. You know what I mean? It's like those anti -sexual assault campaigns that are saying like, no means no. It's like, hey, the guys that didn't take no for no, I'm going to be stopped by that. And the dudes that never needed to be reminded that no meant no are going to be terrified.

1:39:41Yeah, they also don't go to colloquia on college campuses usually. Yeah, voluntarily. What do you think about that sort of conversation about hard work in sleep? I think you're hitting on a lot of really, really sharp points that have been a mini -low -key frustration of mine. The kind of frustration that, you know, you watch a real with someone, you're like, I wish they said that differently, which is so stupid because like everyone says shit differently. Everyone's got a grain of wisdom and there's a way to see almost all advice in a very positive light and a way to see it in a negative light.

1:40:10It really depends on context, but I'm not just like saying, well, all just depends. Then I sit here waiting more questions. Much, much more relevant thing to say here. Hard work is an undefinable thing. This is not such thing as hard, so I can give Yeah, they're in. Cogent. My doctor says soon we'll find it with enough pills. He says shame is what's keeping me from being a son. But he also said I should be ashamed of the kind of stuff that I'm into. So for whatever task you have ahead of you that you're trying to work at, there are two ways to conceive of work. One, enough work that will complete the task.

1:40:50Two, enough work that will overwhelm your ability to continue to work productively. That is the functional technical definition in context of what hard work means. If you finished an engineering project and someone's yelling at you about hard work, you're like, dude, what the hell is wrong with it? It's dumb. There's no more hard work to be done if you are being yelled at about hard work, but you can't even read numbers anymore on the computer screen. Hard work's not what you need. Relaxations what you need. So, we can also see it on a spectrum quality. Normally distributed, little bell curve.

1:41:26Most people work pretty fucking hard. But maybe not super hard. And you know what? That's probably really good. Because then they regularly cover and come back and work again. There are people on the other end of the distribution. Typically people have low trade conscientiousness. As they currently express it, or with a decent genetic basis, usually some 50 -50. Hard work is either something they don't give a shit about, or something they know exists in the ether and they hate doing, or as you move a little bit up in conscientiousness but still in the low end, know they should be doing more of it and feel a little guilty about it, but they're like, ah!

1:42:08Those people need like, if you could pull the Hormosi essence out in a a ringe and pull out the Goggins essence and the Jocco essence, you need mouth fuckers, need that shot to the arm. Shot up and do shit. My friends, what is it? Dr. Melissa Davis had a poster in her room that what does it say? No one cares work harder. They need that shit big time because there's lots of people that just objectively are not working hard enough and they're not having trouble recovering. They're just having trouble showing up and doing the thing. They to them, that kind of advice, Goggins and etc. That's the best advice.

1:42:44They know that they need to do it, but they're intraterally able to do it. For sure. And am I not even need to know that like I want to be rich on when we've breaded up, I watch some Alex from Mozy videos, see how I don't have a hundred million dollars, I want to get on that level. And this month, 95 % of the time is like you need to shut up and need to work and need to grind. You're like, God damn it. I thought there was some kind of easy scheme for this, but apparently I just have to show up. People need to hear that and it's good at hearing that and it's great that all these guys are out there talking that shit.

1:43:11Amazing. But unfortunately, the kind of people that are the biggest consumers of that kind of content, sometimes tend to be people who like preaching to the choir effect, times ten, zero it's confirmation by a confirmation by a confirming definition. You're already doing right. But, but because they have high conscientiousness, they also have an inbuilt high guilt that they're not doing enough. Maximum Judaism, I call them. Oh, you like get some cross between like, like, you know, Asian student and Jew and it explodes into like, I could be working harder. Like, you know, I permanently exist in this realm and my wife is Asian.

1:43:54So all we do are like, are we doing enough? Yeah. And then we have to like, wind up using your anxieties. Oh my God. Yeah. So when those people here, you need to work harder. They approximately are at risk of overdoing it. And overdoing it means you either have a bad time because you're working so hard of the time you're exhausted, you get sick more often, you're not as productive, pretty much time. And you're not enjoying it? You're literally having a bad time, you're not having a good time, which high -conchantious people don't really give a shit. If you tell them you're not enjoying it, they're like, awesome, I wanna suffer more.

1:44:23You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, enjoy, fun. Right. And there's a way in which productivity can be super fun and that's the best way to do it. They also, the other thing to folks that are listening to super -conchantious fatigue of the psychological kind from working too much even at your desk, one of the first victims of high fatigue is creativity. Now, you can still enter numbers in a spreadsheet just fine, but if you have to be creative, if you have to be mindful, if you've come up novel solutions, you had better be fresh. And fresh means you need to chill. And those people don't want to chill.

1:44:51I don't want to just want to work all day. If they get me, if the corner finds me and takes a picture of me dead at my desk with a spreadsheet and the hypertrophy absuto code up, I want to picture that on the internet. I died in honor. Doing what I loved. Yeah, love, chair. It was compelled to do, love, and compelled to do. But those kinds of people do not need to hear more of that work as better type of shit. And I don't mean to say that the people putting out that content are doing a disturbance. You should be platforming, shut up. Those people just have to like, listen to that, shouldn't be like, oh, those are wise words.

1:45:28For someone else in their own time. So when I need to turn it on. Yeah, right. But not when I need to turn it off. There was a trend a while ago, which I really wish had continued, which was hashtag rest harder than me. So it was like a rest day flex. And it was showing how low someone's step count was, looking at how many hours of Netflix that they'd, you know, like this sort of shit. And although that was, that was like, that was cool. Unfortunately, again, because there is this association between hard work and outcomes that you get. And reliably hard work induces better to success even if it is at the point.

1:46:02To a point. Yes. Most people will never reach that point. And for them telling them hard work is good is good. It's a good thing. But for the people who are most interested in really indexing on hard work, they maybe as often need to hear like hard work has to be balanced with recovery. The way my wife and I see it was we consider ourselves professional work athletes. Like we're workaholics full -send, but also like we try and approach it from sport science lens. And the way we justify are like chilling on the weekends or taking a vacation because we get mega guilt about the shit Like holy fuck you take my wife and I away from work for three or four days We start to be like oh my god.

1:46:38I don't even know who I am anymore. Why do I deserve any of the things I have like I'll use my card to buy some nice dinner and I'm like where do that money even come from I don't do anything Those kinds of folks Really benefit from hearing hey, you need to chill But also if you take on the professional work athlete mindset, the number one thing in your life can be working hard and producing valuable things for other people. Yes, career, yes. But because you're a professional work athlete, if Michael Jordan likes basketball a whole lot and he trains so much as arm starts to hurt, he's no good for the Chicago Bulls anymore.

1:47:13You're a professional work athlete. You're a machine that's number one, like you're the number one engineer at your firm. You're that guy and it's awesome. In order to be that guy next week and the week after and the week after, you had better Friday night, better coming, you had better switch the off and chill, chill, chill. And people would be like, what are you doing Sunday? You're like, dude, I'm smoking blunts and eating Chinese take out food and they're like, really? You don't do like extra engineering work. Mm -hmm. Because I got to rest up. I'd be like, rest up for work so I can be sharp as a tack on Monday.

1:47:41That's cool. That's the way to think about it. If there's not a fight there, it's a collaboration. You earn that recovery when you train hard and you work hard, you put it all in. and then you take that recovery. Yeah, for its own sake, because it's fun and those low conscientious people, you don't need to convince them of that, because they're really good at that anyway. For high conscientious type A people, you gotta see your recovery as this is medicine for me so that I can heal and go back to work and be my best. So even if work is your number one organizing principle of life, rest and relaxation recovery is critical to see it as that thing that allows it to you.

1:48:13It's like, can you imagine you get to like a fuel pump for your formula one car and the I'm not going to fill it up, but I have 30 more laps. You do it on fumes, you're f**king hardcore. You're like, I'm sorry, what? I understand physics that well, maybe. So you have to support the system. When you pit, let everything get recovered. And then go out and run laps again. Talk to me about hot rate and the overthinking BS of that for recovery. There's a bunch of different types of metrics you can do with heart rate. You can do heart rate variability. You can do average heart rate. You could arresting heart rates on and so forth.

1:48:49They're super valuable, but they tend to have a degree of randomness built in and a degree of various events in your life will interfere with them so much that if you look at these things in isolation and you plan your training around them, they could be a lot of noise and not a lot of signal. And if your heart rate variability happens to be off the charts and your app says, hey, listen, you might be overreached, check in with your other factors. What's my desire to train like? How is my physical preparedness? How is my training been? How is my sleep? If everything is Gucci but your heart rate of variability is a bit weird, don't worry about it.

1:49:21Some people, very metric people, very logical people, they want a number. Ideally, one, to tell them the thing and then I do the thing based on the number. I wish heart rate scores were that but they're not. Similar things applies to sleep scores on those apps you have. You put the phone in the bed and it gives you a sleep score. That's valuable piece of information. But it is not a standalone thing of information. Why do I say that? because people come to us for RP for coaching and all this stuff. I just want to inundate you with data. The other way my heart rate has been XYZ and we're like, chill, chill, chill, chill.

1:49:52It's cool. Well, that's absolutely critical. We need that information. Let's talk about other stuff. And it shows that while there are really numbers focused on heart rate, they couldn't tell you what their calories and macros were. They couldn't tell you how many arguments they got into with their kids and their wife. And that shit matters like a hundred thousand times, one of the more than what your heart rate is. The other thing about heart rate is it tends to be a lagging indicator versus leading indicator in many cases. So like once you have the flu, your heart rate variability is I'll, you're like, oh, I'm sick.

1:50:18I should be sick. Oh, I am sick. But if it's like before you get sick, you might be golden and then you get sick, then your heart rate tells you your job. So another thing is a lot of these metrics we're designed for and work well for teams. So if you have like 18 gymnasts on your team and their average heart rate shit is starting to go south, pull the team, recovery, have you. No, because you basically got a large end sample of what you're doing. 100 % and they all get roughly the same training. So you pull everyone out. Interesting. But if you're doing it on a one -to -one individual basis, we're eventually going to get to really finely metric things like this.

1:50:54And heart -evarability and heart rate scores are really good. Did you just not perfect? And I think the reason I put that on there is people think like, this is the one number I follow. There's more to that. Stretching for recovery. Yes, I just don't have any idea what any of those have to do with the rest of the with each other, I think stretching can be a form of light exercise so it can speed up the recovery process if it replaces hard exercise. But adding stretching on top of your hard exercise doesn't help you recover. Stretching physically rearranges some tissues. It causes damage to various connective structures inside your muscle and outside.

1:51:29And so they actually need more recovery. They can be stretched sufficiently difficult to engage a response where you're going to be more flexible after. it requires recovery for that. So stretching feels good, and if it feels good and it really relaxes you, some light relaxing stretching, like I have friends who will do weed and then stretch. And they love it. I get a few. For sure. But like you can tell they're relaxing. They're not like stretching and fucking, for people that stretching is difficult and annoying, shit is not recovering you from anything. I've heard that there's different buckets of people, some of whom get a lot of pleasure from, is it the muscle spindle?

1:52:04Sure. Yes, the stretch, the stretch response. Yes. I think I'm one of those people. If I do Yin Yoga, you know, I lie down for 20 minutes and I do some bad doggo, whatever it is. Like, I'm like, ah, this feels nice. Yeah. It just feels like it's nice. Yeah. It feels good to me. For sure. But not for everybody. Not for everyone. Not for everyone. Also not for super intense periods and so. Correct. Yeah, we just reviewed it. It'll be out in a few weeks, but we reviewed it. Or maybe it's out now. Already depending on the people catch this. We're reviewing a David Goggins for the the exercise scientist right I show on the RP strength channel.

1:52:35Right, I can't wait to see that. Yeah, yeah. And so like he says that he likes stretches for two or three hours every night. And like to me, I'm just, what I said on the channel is like, unless you're like an Olympic level gymnast level of flexibility, a requisite, but you don't actually train gymnastics, you have no flexibility, that's the amount of time you would need to stretch. Like if I was like, Hey, Chris, I need to be able to have my toes in full splits, touch my at -hole, the other way around. Yeah, you're gonna need like two hours of stretching a day for that shit. then a nothing two hours of stretching is gonna do for you other than like spend two hours of your time doing something that if it's not Psychologically relaxing for you is physically disrupting systems and that would require its own recovery So stretching is not analogous to recovery stretching is stretching in if light gentle stretching in a certain serene mood with Neo -Gam music on if that helps you moosa.

1:53:21Hey God bless you. That's awesome But if you think like okay, I need to recover what science say stretching. I gotta start stretching you start stretching that ain't it That's not going to do it. What does the evidence say about hot and cold therapy, soreners, cold plunges and the like? Yeah. It's really difficult to measure recovery outside of just performance. And the performance data is mostly like

1:53:47hot and cold contrast stuff can do the same thing recovery -wise that cardio after training can do. specifically cold exposure and contrast can have this cascade where they cool off your inflammatory systems. That means under the hood there's no recovery going on actually less. The systems aren't getting healed, they're not getting fixed. Because they're not getting fixed, so the way the recovery works in the human body is if you have taken some muscle damage is the immune system infiltrates all those cells. But it brings in the kitchen sink. It's like if someone's house flooded and you looked at it from the outside, you might not know.

1:54:21But it looks normal, but it's up in the basement. Trust me, you could still live in the house too. But if you have a crew come in and defludge your house, they bring that giant truck with the hose and the generators are me. It's pumping out the water and they're like, redo some of the wood. You can't work and look and live in that house. That's what the immune system does to your muscles. When it comes in, it fucks a bunch of shit up. It takes a few hours, a few days to do that. What contrast bath is is basically or a cold exposure, non -steroidal anti -inflammatories, and exercise after you've already done exercise, is basically putting up a notice at the front gate to the people that are gonna drive in with a truck to take the water out of your flooded house, is tell them like, hey, follow's come back tomorrow.

1:55:04And they're like, yeah, now the house isn't getting any better, but if you wanna work in that house later, if you're in an upstairs office and you're writing your magnum opus, you know what the fuck, generator running? So you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, come back. So you're saying that's what that stuff is? is saying that he's recovery. Heat and cold does not promote recovery. Not in any way that helps the tissues fix themselves faster. Absolutely not. There's no evidence that whatsoever. The evidence actually contrary to that. It delays that process. Heat is a mixed bag, basically still kind of unknown.

1:55:35Is that super clear what heat does? We know that psychologically, people who enjoy heat exposure, like it's not. They're gonna say what about the stress, they love it. Oh, they love it. If they love it. But if you have an athlete that hates the sauna, do not make them go to the sauna for recovery because the sauna is good for recovery and good for stress management. No, it's good for Jim. Jim stress management. Jim loves it. Hates it. 100%. Like if you like jazz music and it relaxes you, jazz music for an hour's dope. If you hate jazz music, what the hell am I gonna put you in a room, make you listen to music?

1:56:04You don't like? That's like hell. That's like some kind of modern corporate version of hell. So all of that stuff, contrast, cold, plunges and all that shit. It doesn't do recovery. It does masking. It does a reduction of the physical body. But the inflammatory process actually what does is the recovery. It just takes time. The best thing if you have sore muscles, sleep, eat, chill the f*** out and wait. Then the sore muscles aren't sore, other bigger and stronger. If you take a shit with eventzads and do a bunch of cold plunges, yeah, you'll feel much better very soon, but you didn't grow any muscle.

1:56:36And these all things are cold and enzymes are confirmed to reduce the amount of muscle growth you get. So these are masking things. They're not helping you recover. I think when most people think recovery, they're thinking of like that futuristic machine in those like sci -fi movies where you like back to tank and star wars. You get in a dragon ball see it's some kind of chemicals get in on that on machines and then you come out you're actually healed and fixed. Cold heat, etc. They don't do that. They just don't. You mentioned NSAIDs, maybe a little bit extreme, but what about recovery supplements?

1:57:07I'm aware of no supplements that you can qualify as recovery supplements, unless they're a shake of carbohydrates plus high quality protein. And then there's just food but delivered in a different system that may be more convenient. There are no recovery supplements that I know of, creatine sort of, but if you regularly take it, you just keep taking it and it recovers your creatine phosphates in which as much as water is a recovery supplement. I just want to have I'll probably electrolyte, see if you take Zalba. Yeah, I would say maybe not wholly, but 95 % of the time that I see like a recovery claim on a supplement like an internal eye roll starts happening.

1:57:43And listen, a lot of people that I was but heard about this when I was younger, a lot of people who dog on supplements and shit like that, they're just like, I'm sorry, forgive me, for lack of a return just leftists. They just don't like corporations, they don't like even the idea of competition or hierarchies. It's like all you need is natural food, they should the fuck up Karen, great things. You don't even like any, Do you really like sports? I take supplements, bro. I take drugs. I want to win. I want to be better at sport. I'm all full on trying to become the best version of myself to have a toxic male energy.

1:58:13I wish there was a recovery supplement that was a first share gunner to recover you. Now like if you, there are acute recovery supplements that work really well. You get a big ol' bottle of water. You drop some element into that. And if you have a jujitsu, you had weight training at 2 p .m. You have jiu jitsu or five p .m. You better down that whole goddamn thing. You eat your Ebola cereal. Get you some protein in there That will get your jiu jitsu going like and you never believe three hours later for sure But healing and replenishing and all that stuff There's just no way of saying saltwater and food is what we just did.

1:58:44Yep. That's it That is a recovery supplement, but it's like if you don't have any salt dynamics issues and you get enough salt in your diet Drinking an element first thing in the morning every day is well on my way to recovery like that's how that works sitting on, when you need it, it's golden. When you don't. What you do? There's no magic or recovery bill. Now, now, if I'm being fully transparent, anabolic steroids and growth hormone are one hell of a recovery supplement, but they got their downsides to insulin, the growth insulin and a shitload of prima ballin. Holy. And you're recovering like you wouldn't believe rubber and magic.

1:59:18Oh, yeah. Sure. Exactly. Yeah. But you know, that comes with, That's not a supplement. Those are prescription drugs. Some of them not even available for prescription What else is there to say or what do you want people to the type A go get us and everybody else that's listened What are the main things that you want them to take away from today? In case anyone asks about foam rolling and all that shit that's not Piccushion gun. Yeah, like that's for pain management Is that even for injury management? Because almost all evidence -based physios are almost unanimous on the fact that the forces required to alter tissues are like two orders of magnitude higher.

2:00:00Like if you got hit by a car, they'd be like, that did something to his tendons. Anything short of that does that really do? Sam Spinelli and Quinn Henneck. I thought I'd throw Adam Meekens in there and that's a fucking... Dude, I Quinn was episode 11 on this podcast. You're gonna be like 8 .50. Yeah. And I think Sam, hey, Remember Sam's old Instagram handle? What was it? The strength therapist? Problem with that is the problem he used to be called the strength therapist. Problem with that is that if you do it all in lower case, all without any spaces, it also spells the word the strength, the rapist.

2:00:35Difficult, difficult situation. Then changed to Dr. Sam's Benelli. What is this guy doing? The strength. Oh, great. He's doing the strength and the raping. I remember they were telling me about, well, one of them was telling me about the research that was done on mice. I think they ruptured a little mice. It's like Achilles tendons or some shit. And then they use a scraping tool and this, they look at the scraping tool. What they, you have to dig into the research, to look at the fact they were using human -sized scraping tools and human -level pressure on these little mice. Two orders of magnitude.

2:01:09Yeah. So like basically the amount of pressure that you would need to do in order to be able to affect like real change in the tissues is so high that you'd be like ripping flesh off. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So like lifting heavy but not super heavy like comfortable sets of 15 is a really awesome stimulus to reconstruct your tendon. But like that's a lot of fucking force through put. Now a man's gonna foam roll that heart. You need barbells for that shit. You take a barbell foam roll that shit that'll feel not so good. So foam rolling and all the massage guns and stuff, that's for injury as for pain management, not even injury management.

2:01:45You have a knee that feels weird, your foam roll, it feels better, you squat. God bless you. That's awesome. But just there's not a lot of physical stuff going underneath. It's mostly neurological, psychological. So that's a thing. But in the end, it's this. Be a person who trains and works hard to get the actual results. Be mindful of your degree of fatigue. When your fatigue gets too high for you to continue performing at your best, pull back. Focus on sleeping, always. Focus on good food. Focus on managing stress that you're not fritzing and fizzing over shit that's not going to affect your life.

2:02:27And especially when you pull back, reducing your workload, get tons of relaxation left or with friends, physical touch, compassion, and activity. So on and so forth dogs dogs Netflix documentaries about dogs two and one Get all that stuff going Lower your fatigue back down to a state from which you can platform your next big move and work or in training and Then repeat the process if you're sleeping well and consistently if you're eating well and consistently If you are not stressing too much if you're taking enough time for relaxation then you have just the major 80, 20, 90, 10 of the whole thing sorted.

2:03:07You don't need to sign up for any weird courses. You don't need any weird bands to wrap around yourself. You don't need drinks or potions or pills or powders. And there's not some kind of life hack where you wake up at 4 .30 in the morning that's going to get you to recover better. I'll end this with Dr. James Hoffman's famous words. Recovery is almost always almost everywhere about doing less rather than doing more. So cool. I really hope that, and this is largely for me selfishly, I really hope that a culture of this like antidote to the Taipei problem. The balance. Yes. I really hope that that starts to come back around.

2:03:48The problem is that it's way less sexy. It's not sexy at all. And it sounds like you're a seeding to laziness. Right. Nobody needs to be told to chill out. Well, most people don't that the very highest performers do. Right. And everybody that watches your channel in my channel. Right. And they're obsessed with high performance, which they should be. It's awesome. But you got to understand that you have, you operate a physical system. And to tell yourself, you know, that you had that one guy on and you had a quote from him that's on your Instagram a lot, which is super fucking brilliant. It's about like, I don't ever let up on myself.

2:04:25I beat myself over. I work myself to the ground and maybe just maybe I'll give myself a little bit of a half an hour to breathe. I think you're gonna say, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that whole spirit energy is something people take into this situation. If you ever need some clarity on how to think about recovery, remember, not analogize, remember the reality that you are a machine, period. And if you look a machine in the face, you look yourself in the mirror and you're pussy, you need to work harder. Maybe you're right, but maybe you're way on the other end of that and you need relaxation and rest and recovery because you're a physical machine that needs to be repaired.

2:05:00And think about if you assess logically, like, okay, I have every single characteristic currently of overreaching. I'm not at high performance. I'm clearly exhausted. But maybe I can do more. There's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Promise you, I promise you. I've over trained for bodybuilding. So it takes months of just ignoring. I would finish recording a video for YouTube channel and some other resources we have at RP. It would be a like sixth video in that three hour span. And as soon as I finished recording, Scott would start processing it. And I would have a fever chill run through my body.

2:05:40That's how far I pushed it. Like, is that even a physical effort? Beyond. I would wake up every morning, afraid and just completely crushed to the mega -lif monsters I'd have to fight that day. And because I'm a conscientious mega, whatever psychotic Jew, I was like more. Grab more and so on. Oh, let's die here. I don't care. But nobody gives you awards for dying. You get awards for creating valuable things. It doesn't look in a certain way. The other thing there is that you look at the mega day and the huge to -do list that you've got. And after a little while, if you push yourself really, really hard, you actually realize that objectively, it's not that hard of a day, but the way that you have pushed yourself has got it to the stage where little things feel like big things, which makes you feel like more of a pussy, which was the self -fulfilling fear that you divide all along.

2:06:31Did I become a bitch? It's maybe a says I didn't work hard enough. So for those kinds of times, remember this, would you ever have a mechanic? Let's say we We have like in one of the ASMR microchip design machines that microchip stamping factory. Can you imagine if one of the technicians came out and we're like, we need more of us like lubricant oil in the machine, the guy who heads the fab at TSMC would be like, nah man, we got to fucking push it harder. What? I'd be like, okay, you need to sit down and take psychiatric medications, someone else isn't charged. Yes, let's put the oil in. We got a machine to run.

2:07:12It's just as ridiculous for that person to say that about a physical machine that needs recovering and fixing and healing It's just as ridiculous for you to say that to yourself in the mirror and call yourself a pussy and say I'm not doing enough Do you logically really think you're not doing enough? Give me evidence Give me your total work rate that you've been at give me evidence of signs of fatigue if you still got it Fuck yeah burn that shit But if you're already afraid if you already exhausted there is no pot of gold the other rainbow now your job is to pull back And it's a weird thing. Here's why it's weird, Chris.

2:07:43Not only are you conscientious to begin with to be doing this pushing hard You're in fight or flight more now. Remember cumulative fatigue causes more fight or flight mode Now you're like a freed animal Like you don't come up to a skunk that you just got out of a drain because it was drowning and go give your finger to it Because I'm gonna bite you and shit like that. That's how you feel So you're not instantly in the mode of like, oh, thank God. It's time to relax. You're like, okay Okay, okay, I've done enough work. Okay, I'm gonna go relax. How does that work? It takes a little while to wind into that process.

2:08:14Rossess, you should be getting good at because you're an athlete. You're a professional work athlete. Whatever it is you're not doing nothing. That's a deal of recovering. It's tough. For some people, work is difficult. For the kind of crazy assholes that are gonna listen to this and nod along, it's pulling away from work that's difficult. And you have to realize that and you have to think, Am I the kind of person that has driven by exclusively compulsion to work like a animal, but it's like a work animal? You know, like, leave a husky for five minutes. I was like, ah, I need a bullet slide. Is that you or you a mindful person that has the overarching goal of being super productive?

2:08:51If you're that athlete and coach to yourself, if you're a strategist, you know when to attack, you know when to retreat. When a general in war makes a strategic pullback, very few competent people are like fucking pussy. That's not how it works. If you can see that bigger picture, then you can look top down from yourself and go, okay, Mike, you're done enough. It's Friday 4 .30 pm. Your brain is gone. It's time to pull back and architect your weekend in advance with activities planned and out to recover and relax so you can be your best next week. That's the big picture. Awesome. Really, really good.

2:09:32I really think that this is information that a lot of people, especially people that listen to this channel need. For sure. All of your things, where should people go? Well, I haven't teased Shredonder or mind me. I can't read upside down, so I have no idea. Ha, ha, ha. RP Strength, Renaissance Priudization on YouTube, RP Strength on Instagram, Dr. Mike Israel, on Instagram, and look, if you see my face, click on the reel and then just go and... Follow me from the algorithm will do all the other stuff. Yeah, we talk about this kind of stuff quite often, mostly by getting Jack getting lean, we do get into recovery over now to get our P hilariously enough.

2:10:04Most of our content on recovery is something we just have to take on the chin of the algorithm because people don't really know thousands of people still tune in, but not hundreds of thousands more like tens. And that to me says one of two things. One, maybe more people need to hear work harder than need to hear relax, but probably not enough people that need to hear relax or click it on the videos. 100 % Dude, I already appreciate you. Till next time. Chris, I love it.