The 6 Pillars of Peak Performance Nobody Talks About | Oli Patrick | #78

0:00Oli Patrick, welcome to the podcast. What a delight. What a studio. Thank you for coming in, making the trip. How was it this morning in London? Good morning. London in autumn is more tolerable. You know, it feels like the air pollution is a little bit less, which I do know in summer when it's like you're sort of breathing through a straw. The sun's out this morning. It's a delight to be in here with you. So I'm buzzing. Yeah, I tell you what, I feel like speaking about autumn, like I feel like it is one of the most underrated times of year. like going jogging around the parks like the the leaves are different colors like yeah i don't know it's still kind of like nice but it's crisp getting festive i i think running wise you know i'm i am a recreational runner and i know the company i'm keeping with you and and in other circles i live with great and spend time with great runners i am a recreational runner and i i just love the slightly softer ground i love putting a trail shoe on and i also like going outside when i I probably wouldn't have gone outside anyway.

0:58So, you know, it's so easy to be outside in summer. You know, I will be outside naturally. I'll be outside in the evening, but it might be that that run is the only real block of time I have in the great outdoors. And, and I absolutely love this season and it's generally what I get most into running in the build up to Christmas. Yeah. Which is crazy. You'd think it'd be the opposite way around. Like you'd think it'd be spring, but, um, I found that I found that a lot of people, I don't know whether it's the kind of like the grittiness of the UK weather. Yes. People are like, I'm actually going to go outside and be hardcore and kind of like feel like David Goggins.

1:28Yeah, there's a bit of Goggins in all of us. I love the stash as well. So I give myself, I don't know if you can call them a wind cheater without sounding 210 years old, but I've got a couple of wind cheaters. I've got, you know, various sets of leggings and my sort of autumn winter running stash comes out. And I've got this running top by Y3, which is, I'm not cool enough to wear Y3, but I've got it. And I put it on, I feel like an absolute legend. so i i basically i don't know if i'm running because i've got the gear or i'm enjoying running because i'm not you know i'm temperature acclimated but it's it's pretty cool it's pretty awesome season yeah i find that funny as well like uh with running gear and stuff like that like you buy a new t-shirt yeah it makes you run more massive new pair of shoes or whatever yeah and it's like kind of like motivation um to go out running which is crazy for the people that may not know who you are yeah just be able to kind of give a brief background on who you are what you do?

2:21They'll know I'm not cool enough to wear Y3. They'll know that I have a recreational runner. So I'm a physiologist by background and really spent most of my career in the world of using data to try and understand states of health and wellness. So in the old days, that was working in medical clinics, doing like an annual health check that people would go for. And I would run the stress electrocardiogram. So stick leads on someone's chest, get them running or cycling to exhaustion, measure parameters like blood pressure response, heart rate response, VO2 max, but also then integrate my findings with blood work and other clinicians' opinions.

2:55And I sort of became a mini health assessment expert, became head of physiology at a big national hospital group called Nuffield Health, and tried to redesign health assessments from being doctor-led looking at disease to more physiology-led looking at lifestyle. So how would we measure out of the two of us, and we don't need to, but who's fitter? How would we measure who's more likely to burn out from stress? How would we measure which one of us recovered better yesterday, who slept better, who nourished better? And I got really interested in the power of data around things that people necessarily thought was subjective topics.

3:28And I think there's actually data that contributes to those. Got into more and more advanced health assessments, was involved in setting up a clinic to run the world's most expensive health assessment, which again is a morally questionable product, but was clinically really interesting. So I looked after ultra high net worth individuals for 12 years in London's Harley Street and ran every diagnostic test and every parameter and every expert opinion you could think to look after a small number of people really really well and now I left that business and consult into different sectors I consult to organizations on how they might look after the health of their people what we might call corporate well-being and consult to the fitness sector and how it can put its foot into wellness without discrediting itself and and there's this new desire for wellness but tread carefully as Walter White would say and you know let's enter this space with with a real clear intention and clear execution of ambition so I work with everyone active a national gym group and virgin active uh on a global proposition work with hotel groups like Accor um they're a French hotel group to try and bring wellness into the luxury hospitality space and and have a couple of interests in that space and then i represent brands um big lover of whoop so brand ambassador for whoop um eight sleep the uh temperature regulation software and height supplements technogym sunlight and saunas and oxidized hyper barracks and then i podcast with them the modern wellness podcast and untapped extra mile with spencer matthews which you've been a two-time visitor on and uh and are beloved by the show so that's and that's sort of the the blend of things do you have any free time i do Interestingly, I work a little bit for a lot.

5:05So one of the big things, and I talk about this deliberately, is I genuinely love my kids. They're like the greatest thing I've ever got, twins age 13. And COVID was a really interesting point where I'd always worked in clinic and clinics start early and they finish late. And I built some flexibility around the family. But I loved being at home. I loved taking responsibility to coach my son's football team. I can't tell you whether we're doing well or badly, but I love it. I love it. And so what I do is I do a little bit of work for lots of companies, which gives me actually way more disposable or more control over my disposable time.

5:38So, um, it's, these are things where I add strategic value, I hope, but not huge operational responsibility. So I, I, I've got a good balance that I spend most of my time working from home and I still manage to coach my son's football team, take my daughter to tennis. So you've kind of like optimized the working smarter, smarter not harder kind of situation i think so i think so and and you know i love i just love everybody i work with i'm very blessed that you know all of the dream brands that i've followed i'm now able to to align with um but you know these are things where i there's a cost to that as well if i go all in on one of those businesses there's probably a bigger you know commercial opportunity than being a light touch consultant but it also gives me this great exposure to all these different sectors and and i love wellness so much and i love people so much and i love seeing where wellness solves problems real people have um but i i won't do anything that comes at the cost of a good work-life balance so take me back to the start like why did you get obsessed with human physiology like what drove you to kind of do the research study it and like why was you obsessed with human performance so i think i was obsessed with sport originally so sport science was was my background and i did you did you play anything pretty much everything i played football through university so you know like all footballers who harbored your ambitions of being a footballer and i know you're a very very good footballer um but i you only realize how good or bad you are when you play someone who's really really good and i i've sort of played university football then played men's football for my hometown and then played against some people who are really good and pretty much retired on the spot like genuinely got i remember i played against a retired guy played for for chelsea and he had scored a hat-trick on me by half time i was playing center half and he was a striker he was he was mid-50s relatively immobile but just i couldn't get close to him and it was it was one of a series of events where i was like there are levels to this game and i've tapped out i've achieved all i could ever wish to achieve i I played all racket sports, so tennis at that point.

7:46There was no paddle, but there is paddle now. Table tennis, squash. I was into running and sprint triathlons and just loved anything that was based around physical activity, play, sport, achievement. And then, interestingly, that bizarrely led me into health screening where I wouldn't have said it was my passion, but I'm a people pleaser. And when you sit with someone who's sitting in front of you who goes, I can't work out why I'm tired or I can't work out why I can't lose this weight or I can't work out why my knee is sore I can't work out why I do terrible smelly farts when I eat broccoli then it was really awful not having answers to those questions and I think you know really the first two years when I was just doing hour after hour of health screening I realized there were a huge number of people's real problems that we didn't have either data to or an answer to and my desire to answer those questions better took me into this strange space between it's not exercise physiology nor is it medicine it's sort of lifestyle physiology and over years that that ended up becoming a qualification that I was fortunate to write for a level seven diploma in physiology which is all the things that people probably should know about how their body works but no one took the time to teach them but it was it it didn't start as a passion a lot of people say you know that I was a passionate desire to work in wellness or help people I didn't necessarily have that but I did have a desire to help the person in front of me and that then led to a desire to find out why i couldn't and that led to products and services that were relatively new for the time yeah i feel like a lot of people could potentially start because they're they want to improve things with their self as well especially with like i feel like i'm obsessed with optimizing my performance and things like that yeah whereas you seem to be obsessed with optimizing other people's performance agreed um how does that come about i think i have a i have a sense of contentment i'm i'm i like to set myself challenges but i also like to be happy and i think sometimes that we all there's an access point between how often we're stretching ourselves and how often we're allowing our bodies to recoil i am deeply interested in the well-being of others and i think in the world of wellness there's there's an interesting group of people who have used what we call the n equals one experience or we're hearing this new phrase anic data which is anecdotally i'm now going to translate that to something that is now scientific as in i took magnesium in the evening i slept better therefore everyone should take magnesium or um or i got over my low mood state through journaling so everyone must journal and and what we've got is a lot of people who've been on a journey of self-discovery and have seen the value that a particular behavior or series of behaviors have brought to them and then of course they become impassioned to translate to other people or they come further passionate about going to the next stage of wellness you know i unlocked seven out of ten energy and an eight out of ten performance i want to now unlock eight out of ten energy and a nine out of ten performance so i think that that road is is really valuable i don't know if that person should be a messenger to others you see a lot of nutrition i see personally you know people saying oh you need to be carnivore you need to be vegan you need to be this and i think the answer is like everyone's different and that's that is a great challenge and we were speaking before we started this about you know one person's poison is another person's medicine and vice versa if you if there are people who just haven't had enough experience that their methodology doesn't work and i i ran in parallel my own journey of well-being which is working out how i can sleep best and what diet works best for me and and you know how i would improve my vot max and my strength but i wouldn't then take what i'd learned on me and immediately turn that into a protocol for the client in front of me because that would expect them to want the same things I wanted and to have the same genes I've got in terms of DNA and expect them to adapt to the stimulus in the same way I did and the more time you spend with more people the more you realize that yes we are pretty genetically similar in terms of if you compare us to you know to other species but the bio individuality of people is extraordinary and to say that one thing will work for anybody else is is so bold and i i was on a panel recently at the ideas fest which was called snake oil how do i determine good or bad practice and wellness i said the thing that will determine for me whether someone's good or bad is certainty like if you tell me something is going to affect my performance or affect my well-being i know you probably haven't given that advice to a thousand people because it won't work for 400 of them you know it might not work for 800 of them so anyone who's absolutely certain that their widget their supplement their new training modality their new mindset technique is going to translate to a definable outcome hasn't had enough time for me in in building experience of real people adapting to real stimulus and before i started really talking to people i did i've done the best part of 25 years of clinical practice before i feel confident enough to go i think this might work for you would you say there are any things in life that are certainly going to improve your performance then i would say there are certain domains so we know sleep would definitely improve your performance but we don't know whether you know we were talking earlier about another guest you've had on here um who may not have aired yet who needs three hours more sleep than i do so we know sleep would affect both of our performances but we don't know what the dosage is we don't know whether blue light for me in the morning would be transformative but blue light for them would be innocuous and and whether journaling in the evening meant they fell asleep quickly and journaling for me meant I stayed awake wondering whether my journal was was good enough you know so what we don't know is the dosages we know the principles we know cardio respiratory fitness will be an integral part of all events but you you know you're competing at the very top level um we won't find that the person who wins the high rocks has got the highest vo2 max you know it's not a parameter that will translate perfectly to performance we won't find that that everyone in that did the exact same training regime so we know that having high cardiorespiratory fitness high skeletal muscle mass high you know strength to weight ratio power to weight ratio will be critical but the dosage required to get those things will be variant against each individual so we can we can say that there are things we know that are good for you but we can't determine the exact dosage that would generate what good looks like for that individual sadly and what way to do it or anything like that what would them pillars be then so like you say there you mentioned sleep but there could be so many different factors of that it might be duration it might be sleep quality it might be uh how much like restful sleep how many disturbances you have in the night like they're all things that like sleep isn't just how long you have it's all these things time you go to bed and wake up yeah and like do you keep that the same or are you kind of going to bed really late on the weekends and then getting up all them things like affect kind of like your quality of sleep and but if you was to say sleep is one yep and that is kind of like a non-negotiable we need sleep uh would there be any other pillars that you'd say we need to kind of look at if someone was to kind of like optimize their performance it's a great question i would always say that there will be pillars we always want to define whether it's a performance target or it's a well-being benefit and i say this because i spend time with with strongmen for example and have great times with the stoltman brothers who are on my podcast i've become pals with the way they would train and live isn't particularly healthy but it will enable you to be a world champion so we always have to separate i would say the lenses are pretty similar but the dosages would vary and i always say that when we think about behaviors or areas like sleep these are um lenses through which your physiology meets the world right so your physiology is just calibrating itself to the life it thinks you're asking it to lead so your body doesn't know that you're an extraordinary high rocks athlete it just thinks to survive occasionally it has to you know do lots of burpees to get food and it's got to run between the well to get itself that you know a ball that it has to throw onto you know up and above it so it is adapting to what it believes is its is its normal survival environment it just doesn't understand that that's a profession or a sport.

16:00It only understands that that is the normal it's adapted to. And so your body meets the world through different lenses. One lens is, of course, movement. So the quality, dosage, and type of movement. And you've got three different biological systems, at least, that are adapting to movement. So your skeletal muscle mass, which will be adapting to load and resistance training and strength. You'd have your cardiorespiratory system adapting to how often you're asking your body to deliver energy over longer periods of time. you'd have your if you like proprioceptive neuromuscular system adapting to movement patterns biomechanics and skill so that's kind of like your efficiency efficiency exactly so you know if you if we if we both learn a new skill now we'll be exponentially better at the end of the day than we were at the beginning because not because we've built more muscle or built more you know aerobic capacity more blood more more mitochondria just because we've learned the pathway through which if it's throwing a dart for example we'll get we'll get really good at it so your but movement would be a lens and within movement there'll be different categories nutrition will be a lens and within that we've got whether that's macronutrients like proteins carbohydrates fats or micronutrients vitamins and minerals there'd be hydration within there there'd be dosages and timing so how quickly can my gut empty the carbohydrate into into my bloodstream there'll be fermented foods how do the bacteria in those foods integrate with my gut microbiome But I meet the world today through how I move, what goes in my mouth fundamentally, and how that interfaces my body through sleep.

17:26And that would be, as you say, quality, timing, preparation, exit from sleep. They all matter. I think probably one that crosses into both our worlds and is interesting with quality of recovery. And I was sharing with you that I'm building a recovery cabin at the end of my garden. And you rightfully raised your eyebrows as if to say, what are you recovering from? and you said that i don't think i said that i feel like i'm too polite to say that i think we both know it would be better at the end of your garden than it would at mine but i'm building it for recovery in the sense of recovery is the biological restoration of energy right and that isn't just about sleep so you and i are energetic machines we are combusting energy now cognitively socially physiologically and we must recharge sleep is our biggest biggest opportunity for recovery but not our only if i was being scientific for some of the listeners i'd say it's largely about nervous system regulation so how do i move my body into a state of parasympathetic tone it would be about reducing inflammation and reducing oxidative stress so i won't run into deep physiology but really how do i stop cell damage how do i reduce inflammation how do i move in out of stress into calm and recovery would be would be another pillar so you've got um parasympathetic and sympathetic states yeah if you if you used to dumb it down there's kind of like two ones were kind of like you're working hard you're kind of like breaking down things yes and then the other one's restorative and you're kind of repairing would you say that's kind of that's a very good good description the autonomic nervous system basically is running you now so everyone listening to this they are not consciously controlling heart rate but it goes up and down they're not consciously controlling blood pressure it increases decrease so they're not controlling internal temperature.

19:10But if the room in here is cold, I'll shiver. If the room is hot, I'll sweat. So all of my involuntary biological processes are changing, but not under my conscious control. So we've got a nervous system that's basically doing that. And it's doing that to make sure that the inside of me matches the outside world. If you bring in some delicious snacks, I'll salivate and my tummy will rumble. If you threaten me in any way, I will then have a very clear reaction to that where my heart rate will go up, my pupils will dilate. So my body on the inside is always getting ready for what it thinks is about to happen next in the real world.

19:43And effectively, the sympathetic nervous system is the branch of that system that speeds me up. And the parasympathetic is the branch of that system that slows me down. So we call the sympathetic in layman's terms, the fight or flight system, because it gets me ready for fighting and running away because it's biologically increasing temperature, increasing glucose availability. It's getting me internally ready to get out of here. And then the parasympathetic is the nervous system that biologically gets me ready for resting and digesting. So it moves blood into my stomach, it slows down heart rate, slows down blood pressure.

20:13And straw man theory, and why I can justify a recovery cabin at the top of my garden, is of course, most people are spending too much time in their day, whether an athlete or not, slightly ready for a threat that never comes. So the modern world, we use a phrase called allostatic load which is we're bombarded now not by by training volume but by news volume and um and terrible social media exposure and light exposure and noise exposure and basically there'll be a million things this morning that want my body to be ready in that sympathetic nervous state but be very few things that put me into that parasympathetic state so where we're seeing recovery cabins is really a sort of shelter from the storm it's the chance to allow my internal or physiology to believe there is no threat it must deal with.

20:57And in that moment, it will restore energy. And that energy can translate to me being a better athlete, a better dad, or a better businessman, whatever I want to be. So recovery is really about the biological return of energy through nervous system regulation would be, and I would call that a separate pillar to sleep, because that gives people that clear understanding that just sleeping well isn't enough to manage, if you like, the stress of modern living. so it's kind of like your happy place i think that's a really good yeah it is your happy place but your happy place could be high rocks and that wouldn't be so you you could it's a happy place where you're sensorily underwhelmed you know you've seen the rise of sound baths meditation became mainstream um breath works become mainstream spas have moved from you know a luxury weekend with the girls to you know basically red light hyperbaric you know diffuse centers in hotels it isn't just enough that you are doing something that makes you happy because if that is drinking with your friends or if it's high high intensity performance it is distraction but it won't be the same physiological reset so i would say it does need to be you know physiologically you should see an increase in heart rate variability for those you know whoop wearers or or self-optimizers tracking you should see a decrease in resting heart rate you should see a decrease in respiratory rate.

22:18If we truly want to restore energy, it's a bit like if I come out of a really busy day at work, which I've hated, and then I go into a boxing class, I may feel happier there, but my physiology is still in the same war it was. It's just a different version of the war. So we've got to be careful that our recovery isn't more load. And load is a pathway to recovery. And by load, I mean, if I finished work, did a light run, the recovery from that run would put me into parasympathetic tone but the run itself would be another stressor and that's quite important and that becomes relevant for things like a sauna so a sauna isn't going to relax me until after the sauna the sauna act itself would see an increase in heart rate increase in sweating i would become sympathetic when i'm in the sauna but what i'd see afterwards is not just i would come back to baseline i'd go lower than baseline it's kind of like that euphoric feeling when like um you know after you've come sauna and you just kind of like sit in there like you feel just an element of relaxation that you don't really feel anywhere else so true and that's your body transitioning out of that state plus if you've done the sauna long enough you you start to create something called dynorphins which are like a that's the thing that makes you feel a bit sick when you're in there and they then enhance your body's receptors to endorphins so that a bit similar with runners high when your body's been producing a painkiller to to nullify just how much damage you're doing in that moment when you come back out of that environment you've still got the painkiller but you've got none of the pain so you feel absolutely buzzing um so sort of there's a double whammy to that which is why sauna again is is so um so you know trending as a as a well-being initiative also because it's social well-being also because it's good for cardiovascular health so it's a it's like a it's it's a very strong modality for many different things in one space has there been any studies on how just spending time being bored in a day could affect hrv because i feel like if you're bored i've never been bored and stressed yeah no that that would be very fair and i was getting the mickey taken out of the other day because someone's just written a book called the case for boredom and they wrote to me to do the quote on the cover.

24:33And I was like, I'm sort of the go-to person. If you're bored, go and speak to Ollie Patrick. And I think being bored is a transient state to then being creative, right? And of course, one of the great challenges around being a digital native or someone who's born Gen Z or Gen Alpha, and to a certain extent millennials in terms of generations, is we've filled downtime with uptime. and boredom is is a really strong ability to to get into that parasympathetic state and what people have done is they've created mechanisms of making boredom less boring which might be meditation so if i do vedic meditation or transcendental meditation i've got a two or three syllable sanskrit word which i'm just repeating in my head and that sort of stops me realizing how bored i am what's the word you're never allowed to share it all right okay so it's called your mantra and you are given it if you do proper meditation you're given it by a meditation instructor and then you must never speak it into existence so you hear it whisper to you i had to sacrifice a papaya at the ceremony and this guy whispered it in my ear and i didn't properly hear it i was like sorry what what and uh and then my so for me to meditate against the the sort of the the traditional transcendental meditation i have to basically internally say this word for 20 minutes in the morning 20 minutes in the evening and yours is like a really rogue word it's like it could be two words but i've still don't i still never seen it written down but it doesn't matter what it is it stops you being bored and you know we've seen a business i really love is unplugged which is a series of of cabins i don't know if you've seen this they're like a it was set up by a brilliant guy called hector hughes and it's a three-day minimum stay you lock your phone away there is there you can take a book there are board games but the idea is to induce boredom to then realize out the other side of boredom is creativity peace restoration but the gateway will be you probably have to jar against that uncomfortable feeling but like to get fitter it's going to hurt to be you know get the sauna benefit it's going to hurt to get the the true restorative benefit of recovery it's going to hurt a little bit and what you might think is boredom but what your physiology would say is genuine absence of demand is this beautiful just stay in these cabins on your own or just stay with a partner and have a partner it depends if they stimulate you or not but you know you the idea really is is and we're seen lots of executives do this it's a system reset it's like on your own on your own or what you can have a second person in there but on your own in there in amazing you know places of nature there's a book to journal in and you know my grandparents didn't need that right i i i sort of need it a 22 year old who's emerged into a complicated operating environment in terms of all these things being expected of them all these asks i think it's almost something they should consider doing a version of and it could be camping it could be wild we call it biophilia which is the natural human connection between biology and philia all living things and and getting into nature would be one of the most critical things we can do for recovery i would say just on my on my pillars environment would also be a pillar and that's the spaces i find myself in so um am i spending time in nature when i love it or am i someone who loves nature and I spend my time in urban boxes.

27:46My environment's also, I love people, but I never spend time with people or I hate people and I spend all my time with people. I can go both ways. So the physical environment you spend your time in and that, I mentioned air pollution today. Is there air pollution? Is there light pollution? Is there noise pollution? Is there toxic people around me? And that is another pillar in which your body meets the world and is quite important. I would also add mindset, which would be a big piece that you'll fully understand is the way I view the world will define how my physiology gets ready to meet the world.

28:18So if you and I sat in this room and, you know, I think something terrible is going to happen, my physiology will get ready for that. If you think something wonderful is going to happen, your physiology gets ready for that. We're both sat in the same room doing the same thing. So what we believe is about to happen next will define what I get ready for. What I think about what happened earlier will define whether I positively, you know, reflect on it or negatively. and actually when we come to to the human body there's only three real stresses which is heat noise and load so if we heat the room we both sweat if we make a terrible noise we'll both react to it a similar way if we give ourselves a boulder to hold we'll have a similar physiological reaction if there's a piece of news that then then it is not stressful until we apply our lens to it and and what we think about that news and what we think that means for us moving forwards will define how my physiology reacts to it if i keep ruminating on that news it's got a bigger problem than if i forget about it and it's one of the reasons you see mindfulness as a methodology become mainstream because we call the modern environment you know full of mindlessness just constant bombardment of stuff and mindfulness is being curious and an alert to the situation i'm in with with a sort of open and and and very unguarded approach so mindset you know we can apply to a sporting lens but mindset will be the probably the the sixth lens so movement nutrition sleep recovery environment and mindset are six lenses to which your body is meeting the world today and the aggregate positive impact or negative impact of those six lenses over weeks and months will be the defining feature of both performance but also health and well-being yeah it's really interesting because i think if you optimize the first five you mentioned there and then if you are if you optimize five of them things yeah the sixth one really becomes kind of like a game changer and like really impactful so say for example um at the moment i'm trying to optimize my recovery and sleep because i'm trying to uh you know do my best at high rocks and become the best athlete i can be but i really struggle with the news and say for example you get wound up about something you get annoyed about something and then you go to sleep and you're annoyed my recovery is in the bin the next morning or you're struggling sleeping or you have an argument before bed or any of these things that uh kind of like affect your mood i feel like can have a real impact on your sleep and recovery and i've actually spent some times with uh some time recently with the kind of like athletes that are just super chill yeah and their performance is through the roof because if they get some bad news like ah well it's not the end of the world yes yeah and then there's other people that overthink it and then they actually perform worse it's it's there's a crucial piece to this you're you're a ferrari you are a ferrari you know other other premium cars are available which means you've you know you're you're you've been maximized through some of these domains so if at a formula one car there's a guy whose single job it is to improve the aerodynamics of a particular nut on the car because at that level of performance you've got to find what the limiting factor is you know and i think you're always a much more interesting case study than your average person because someone else is you know as a toyota yaris i don't want to throw any shade on yaris's but it's a mid-level car and if a nut's a bit loose or the tires a bit down you know they're all still moving it's still kind of going through life still moving it's functional and so they also won't see a huge impact when they make a small change so if they do start journaling or they do cut caffeine an hour earlier they won't notice it as obviously because they're not doing track times to observe the impact of that for you you're at the point we're saying well i've maximized my my training i've maximized my nutrition you've lent into recovery and become a student of the science and maximize.

32:10So your limiting factor then might start to become mindset. And then it's a case of then what can I operate within that space? There is no singular mindset that, you know, as you say, you'll be on the start line with someone who's like, ah, you know, whatever it is today, it will be. And someone else is like, everything's on the line here. We can't say who's going to win out of those things. It's understanding how your mindset reacts to those things and then understanding what those triggers are. And even in your sentence there, Jake, you'd say, the first thing you do is you'd stop watching the news because if you are sensitive to absorbing information and catastrophizing it then you need less information entering that system and you'd say while i'm a ferrari that's a single ambition is to go around that track as fast as possible why would i take erroneous unnecessary inputs that destabilize that performance and i've seen some of the best health and well-being outcomes from people who delete social media delete the news and say at this stage i don't have the capacity to absorb it now when i'm not a you know track ferrari i'm cruising around you know kensington high street i don't have to be as finely tuned and i can absorb that input but when we look at mindset there are probably at least 10 individual features in there one of which would be um you know whether i'm doing black and white thinking which is you know whether i'm i'm seeing the world in in very granular that's bad that's good whether i've got gratitude whether i'm compassionate to myself compassionate to others there's a whole series of of things we can start to look at that would affect my performance and it's working out which one of those you're worst at and then what behavior in there you could add in or take away um but mindset the more i've spent time around elite athletes the more i realize it's not a physiological play you're all pretty close to each other in terms of the metrics and the and the powers and the ftps and the and the lactate thresholds you know no one's winning a world championship by by the numbers they're winning it through the the ability of their mind to endure the ability of their mind to to achieve something that is above and beyond their physiology and that's why i think we all love watching elite athletes because it transcends physiology and true you know global elite level sport is something partly innate partly understood partly not understood at all and and that's why i love sitting down to watch something going i don't know who's going to win this and maybe neither does anyone else yeah and especially like say you see it with team sports probably more than anything with you know that they might be getting beaten at halftime they come out they've had like an incredible team talk and they come out and then they batter the other team in the second half and and that's just a mindset shift like nothing else has changed they've not got stronger they've not got fitter um they've not got more skillful they've it's just literally kind of like a mindset thing the same again with like playing at home versus playing away and having the fans interact and stuff like that.

34:55And every single thing has an impact. And it's how you kind of see that as well. Because we could talk about, if we go back to it being autumn time, we could think, oh, the weather is dark, it's cold, it's horrible. Or you can see, actually, no, it's cozy. We can wear warm things and look stylish and do whatever. And we can go out and run. And we can kind of look at it as more of a challenge. But that's two ways of looking at it. It's the same weather, but one of them is going to enjoy it. One of them is going to think, oh, this is crap. Totally agree. It's very important for people listening that when you said it's stylish, you pointed at me.

35:33For anyone watching on video, I was pointed at. I think that is the entire truth. Very few things are real. And that's very difficult to understand when you're in the heat of it. Winston Churchill, who has his critics, but certainly led to less German-speaking Brits than there would have been without him said i know the story of a man who would who would have had a very stressful life were it not for all the terrible things that never happened to him and in that sentence we understand most of the things people worry about are future events that don't happen you know i that that argument worries me because that means that relationships change which means that won't happen or i didn't you know that that thing i didn't deliver to my boss means i won't get the promotion which means i won't get the more cash which means i can't buy the house and we take the the event and we turn it into 5 10 15 future events but my physiology gets ready for all of them now so what i don't do is bank those future catastrophes as future physiology i bank them as today's physiology for events that that never take place and a lot of people say i had a really terrible day today and it's like okay how much of that was truly terrible things versus your perception of things as terrible and that's why in in sport in life our psychology is probably the defining feature you know and can a not you know kind of kind of genuine pessimists turn themselves into an optimist there's a great debate about that it's a really interesting book by a psychologist called um oh i want to say elaine fox maybe elaine fox and she wrote rainy brain sunny brain and it's like how do i change my perception to see things positively we we have a natural bias a good example would be um i was looking for a new car recently so i see car adverts everywhere.

37:16Obviously, the second I mention it, I also get served them on my socials. But the minute you're thinking about getting a new car, you're looking at cars all the time, you see an advert for this brand, this brand, and suddenly cars are everywhere, because my brain is now looking for those cars. And Elaine's sort of logic is, again, if I'm looking for positive reactions, I'm more likely to find them. And she runs this experiment where you see pages and pages of people, and you have to find the person who's smiling as quickly as possible. And the person who can see that page and see the smile in amongst all the frowns, we'll see more positive things.

37:47And this actually was shown as a methodology to change pessimists into optimists. And it's the same way I've just traveled on a London tube this morning. How many people in that carriage look like they're ready to kill me? And how many look like they might be my friend? And if I spot the one every morning who might be my friend, I'll leave that carriage with a different mindset to the world wants to kill me. I was on the same carriage doing the same thing, going to the same place. And so our perception is a driver of our reaction. And I can alter my perception through deliberate practice. And one of the most mainstream skills in this space would be gratitude.

38:21So gratitude, again, would have been a flouncy word 20 years ago, a bit like meditation. If I said we're going to sit here talking about gratitude and meditation and mindfulness would have been booed off. But gratitude is really that ability to say three wonderful things happened to me today and why gratitude has proven beneficial and people who write three things good that happen to them each day or three things that they're grateful for is it then starts to change that perception that tomorrow I'm looking for things to be grateful for so I'm going to be grateful for this conversation I'll be you know grateful that it's a beautiful day in London I'm meeting a friend later I'm grateful for that so tomorrow I'm looking for my next things to be grateful for and why you'll see a million gratitude journals going into Christmas stockings this year is it's one of those few points where experience, which is quite a nice gifty thing, meets the science and the science of gratitude is pretty established.

39:09So it's an athlete saying, I didn't deliver the session I wanted to deliver, but I'm grateful I'm fit and able to do it. I'm grateful that I'm injury free at this stage in the season. I'm grateful that I was able to have my partner come and support me. Those are the things that become a real superpower. And it's not easy when everything around you is telling you the world is your enemy. And so cut off some of the messages you don't need be grateful for the exposures we have but lean into what we call psychological fitness as a modality for sure i definitely recommend that and i i think that's one thing i need to do is like say writing down three grateful things because like you said though you mentioned a simple session like a lot of people like sometimes they might feel like shit in a session and they might call a session short say if they had um 10 intervals to do they do seven intervals and then they call it short and it's like oh i failed that session yeah but you still got the stimulus you still got everything that you needed for that day and it's still a good day you still turned up you still so it's a perfect example grateful i got seven quality sessions in and yeah you know it's it's it is not an easy skill to do but the first thing like anything is is becoming observant you know is noticing noticing the voice i speak to myself in and there's a balance here as well jake you know you are an elite athlete and i'm not you know and the reality of that is sometimes you have to override kindness to achieve greatness right which is a lot of if i i am overtly content so i'm the guy who finished that session on three because i'm like good good boy well done you got yourself out in the dark you ran a couple of sessions you feel pretty good go home and that means i'm not going to win anything right so there is there is a strange tipping point where where the darkness is required because without it contentment is going to be the enemy of true achievement and i think no one quite knows what that tightrope looks like but i'm also very cautious when i'm reverent to great athletes like yourself that you some of these rules don't necessarily apply because you have to go into places others don't go to to achieve things other people can't myself included yeah one thing i use is the prime example was this morning i did some intervals on the treadmill um i did a session and I thought about giving up multiple times within that session.

41:24But the thing that I go to is I've got to tell my coach this after. Nice. And I don't want to let him down. That's nice. When I'm in competition and I feel, oh, I can't do this. I'm pushing through, I can't do it. I think about all the people that have maybe traveled to the event to come and watch. Yeah. They've spent a weekend to come and watch me at a race and I can't be asked, what finishing? It's kind of them things that I go to and that's my kind of like external motivator um i know some other people might actually use anger to kind of like motivate them i'm much more of a kind of like try and smile even this morning i just tried smiling i know it sounds stupid massive difference when you're in pain if you know the subconscious of just smiling and can trick your brain into actually i'm going to enjoy this a little bit more yeah i remember you i think you told the story where you ran your 228 marathon yeah and there was a kid with a sign power tap for a power up tap for a power up and you hit it and you felt good oh yeah it's it's incredible like the the mindset switch that just that's such a great you know that is a living example that that performance is this extraordinary thing between purpose between you know between who we feel connected to you know you've you've built a pathway to your coach you've built a pathway to people who love you enough to travel to come and watch you know that that network is all stuff that goes into this performance part some of it positively some of it negatively but it isn't we can't reduce ourselves to cells and hormones and and blood flow when when all these incredible factors truly define performance yeah is your internal voice kind to yourself you know so you're prone to beat yourself up um i i just know how it feels if i i've give up you know on a couple of sessions i don't know how that feels and i don't want to feel that again nice i think that's how i'll you know i will beat myself up what's the the word like pain is temporary but like regretting something is like it's actually you have more pain throughout the day yeah then the pain the immediate pain that you're going through right there and then so if you give up yeah you're gonna feel that pain for maybe 24 hours 48 hours if it's a training session if it's a competition it might be a year yeah or maybe a lifetime if that's your last opportunity to and you you know that you give up within that period so i always think that like yes you're you're you might be sacrificing like your time now and it might be super painful now but at least you're not going to be in pain later on like just mentally torturing yourself i love that you're trading you're trading this agony for for a bigger agony yeah so you're saying i would rather live in this than endure that and the craziest thing with uh pain is and kind of like the past is uh i think you look at the past in rose tinted glasses like any competition that you've done you don't remember how tough it was or how hard it was you just remember kind of like the experience like i feel like pain and obviously there's different cases but i think feel like within sports like the pain that you actually go through like you you actually quickly forget it afterwards yeah and you look at things and you know that's why they say oh it's the good old times and stuff like that is because you actually forget the bad things yes and you only think about the good things whether that's a relationship whether that's um even even just like a part of your life like it is crazy um i want to move on to uh tiredness i feel like everyone is tired in today's day and age they are they are it's i would say it's almost a secret pandemic i think you gov did a poll that said one in eight people in the uk is tired all the time and one in four is tired most of the time so if you put those together you got a third of people who are tired at least most of the time i remember years probably two years ago i did a survey at an american investment bank had a hundred of their top people and we said what's your energy out of a hundred and hundred is everything you could wish for one is like chronic fatigue couldn't get out of bed and i think the average in the room was below 40 and you're like when did it become normal to be this tired and you know a good time to get into coffee good time to get into stimulants you know we see brands do really well out of providing a source of energy to backfill that that that seemingly missing piece it is a massively complicated there's no magic pill to this undoubtedly the erosion of sleep has been a major cause of if you like the fatigue epidemic people believing that if i can wake up off six hours sleep and then hypercaffeinate myself or use refined carbohydrate or use a really stimulating job or really stimulating friends or really stimulating behaviors so i could go into gambling you know i could go into um adrenalizing you know high stakes uh commercial banking i could go into and going immediately to play paddle i could have done two triple espressos by lunchtime i can do that day running on the buzz of the day and not notice that in that six hour sleep i didn't clear the debris from my brain i didn't restore my immune system i didn't regulate my appetite so we can we can live with enough false energy because there's loads of ways i can i can paper over it well i can often use the analogy it would be odd if I came into Paddington, which is my train station into London, and everybody was taking ibuprofen, I'd be like, why is everyone taking a painkiller?

46:36Why is everyone in pain? And what we've done is we've found loads and loads of different ways of creating energy without addressing some of the centralized root cause of which point number one would be average sleep in the UK is less than six and a half hours. You're a pretty special physiological creature if you can do all the things that sleep does in less than seven. You know, if you've got, I've got the eight sleep you know mattress topper which regulates my temperature and compresses my sleep i can just about get away with seven to get my optimal deep and REM sleep other people again doing six five and a half five hours sleep you're not going to get there so i'd never start with energy without optimizing sleep first because that's its biggest job then you're into energy is multifactorial so how buzzed you and i are now will be a function of our physical energy but also our mental energy also our i feel like our social energy or emotional energy and also our spiritual energy i'll frame that mental is it am i cognitively engaged it's lovely to to spend time with you and talk to you this is this is great if we were just doing a monotonous job which you know didn't require thinking or you didn't have to think of the next killer question you're going to ask me you know we would we wouldn't be as cognitively engaged so am i somewhere where i'm being tested growing am i learning how many people stop learning i love things like duolingo but you know but mental energy is am I learning growing developing being tested or am I stagnating am I you know repeating the brain loves growth and challenge as much as the body does connection or social you know emotional energy would be you know if I'm a massive extrovert am I spending time with people if I'm a massive introvert am I spending time with people I don't want to how am I connecting with people in the planet and we find when people have become isolated we've got a loneliness crisis in the UK with several million people cited as lonely and lonely is a gap between my actual social connections and my desired social connections so loneliness isn't being on your own it's being on your own when you don't want to be on your own and that's a really important piece that allows people who don't enjoy company of others to be totally healthy but i think there you know we saw churches sort of eroded people don't go to church they don't go to community centers i love what high rocks run clubs have done in creating a new community opportunity we're seeing social saunas social bathing but ultimately i also need energy from people um the presence or absence of people the presence or absence of connection to nature so sleep am i am i learning growing developing am i connected to people third one would be spiritual do i matter which is it's easy to be fatigued when you're not sure that you contribute you know and you know i don't do anything i'm a cog in an engine that doesn't contribute and i think not everyone needs to be a philanthropist or work in the NHS, but some sense that my existence contributes to the benefit of others.

49:22And it could be a carpenter who makes a cabinet that puts beautiful clothes in. It could be an engineer who fixes your wiring problem at your house. It could be that you build a road. It could be that you contribute to solving your problem. But I think we need to feel like we contribute and we receive affirmation for that contribution more so than I need to pray to God or believe in a faith we've got to separate spirituality is more of a purpose play and say you know I'm here but does the world know that I'm here and that also contributes to a sense of fatigue particularly in people who've hyper-optimized the other bits I find a lot of people who sleep beautifully train beautifully nourish brilliantly recover madly do have cognitive stimulation do have a social circle but not sure that they they matter or that they contribute and that then like the limiting factor piece earlier the ferrari if everything's great you don't keep making everything greater you you make the one thing the one nut that's out of kilter you you target that with more aggression i would say if i take the physical domain sleep fulcrum number one undernourishment number two you know lack of of you know sort of just ultra processed food devoid of key nutrients making up 65 70 percent of calories in the uk so i'm not going to get optimized circulating you know nutrients i would see subclinical anemia in so many people where they just haven't had enough iron enough vitamin c to convert that iron and so they just aren't able to to trans to move energy around their body as they could if they had an optimized blood supply um i would say in the in the physical domain um you know cardiorespiratory fitness would still probably be number one when i want someone to do cardio it's not so they can compete with you at a higher ox it's that with increasing cardiorespiratory fitness come increasing mitochondrial density right so going back to biology you and i are converting oxygen plus a fuel into energy right now and that is taking place in a cellular structure called a mitochondria in every cell of my body fitter people cardiorespiratory fitter people have got more batteries so mitochondria powerhouse of the cell spot on spot that's gold i remember that from that's all in all so the the physical conversion of energy we we run on a unit of energy called atp that's what humans live on that is that is governed and managed by the mitochondria as you age you get less of them less quality as you get increasing cardio respiratory fitness you get more of them better quality so you can make mitochondria mitochondria the reason red light has become a global popularized modality because red light um these red light panels or red light boots are producing a frequency of light which is absorbed by structures within mitochondria to make more energy so the idea being that would make more collagen in my skin by stimulating the energy into fibroblasts or that would increase my wound healing if it's in my legs or it might increase my endurance capacity you've seen positive like studies within red light i've seen enough to say mechan again nothing was a mechanism doesn't mean an outcome so there is some studies mostly funded by the companies that make the products that show improved collagen or lack of wrinkling so that's led to the face mask being the biggest seller um red light enters the body and it does the job that we expected to do so it actually adds value to it to a particular enzyme in in the process of manufacturing energy i think the challenge is if i gave you more energy in your cells that might mean you get a slightly better hyrox performance because everything else is optimized if you gave it to me i might not notice anything because i'm like i'm the toyota yaris of the of the physiological world and that might be doing myself an extra there might be a car level below the yaris any yaris listeners i like quite like the yaris i'm not throwing shade it's just not a ferrari so if you put a tiny cellular adaptation into someone who's a mid-level engine like if you give me an improved nut on one of my wheels the car isn't you're not going to notice it because the car isn't driving around corners at 150 miles an hour.

53:23So I think it suffers for the fact that its changes would be subtle for most people. And equally, if adding more energy to a cell might for someone be, they didn't get a cold, they weren't going to know they got or didn't get a wound healed a day quicker. But how would we know what it would have healed like without it? I think mechanistically it's safe. And when people do red light, they're probably not doing anything else and that leads us back into it probably induces parasympathetic nervous activity and I could probably put it as a recovery modality because particularly if I put a face mask on I'm not on my phone and I love people wearing a face mask because for 10 minutes probably in the build up to bed you sit thinking and it's a case for boredom which isn't the quote I've put on the book but you know principally red light is probably going to be probably really beneficial to lots of but we couldn't guarantee that it is at the moment but you could add in you know from an energy point of view certainly if someone was tired i wouldn't bang in red light panels everywhere i'd go sleep cardiorespiratory fitness for the mitochondria i'd go nourishment um and then i'd go social connection i'd go learning and development i'd go increasing contribution some of the happiest people i see are park run volunteers and i'll tell you what because they they turn up and because of them the park run goes on and because of the park run they see people happy and it's like that not everyone again has to volunteer or be a philanthropist but if we don't contribute anything in one way or another to our communities to our local groups it is going to be less likely you're as high energy as that person who's a stalwart of the community who generally walks around without great physiological fitness but is buzzing is it true that giving back to people uh or kind of like maybe it's charity maybe like you say it's volunteering at a park run or whatever can it offset burnout because i've seen like a couple of studies on this yeah that's a great question um burnout is is again a bit like fatigue was overused burnout is is a definable occupational health condition so it's it's the it's sort of a a lack of cognitive and and and physical energy as a result of an overwhelming volume of workplace pressures so burnout has got a few different things there is a complete absence of fatigue which might lend itself to like a long covid or what people call an me or a chronic fatigue syndrome which has been rebranded or there's i'm completely apathetic now to my job and it's just i've just been bombarded by so much stuff for so long that i'm i'm now unable to go in and do my job because i i've generally i haven't got the energy b i can't be asked it's like it's like a cellular can't be asked fundamentally so i think if i would say if someone's got really low sustained energy and they're struggling at work or they're struggling to get out of bed rather than use the word burnout say that our person is is sort of regularly knackered would be a less we're better than burnout because it's got this particular condition title then could compassion for others contribute to less likelihood of that massively but partly because you will experience less stress reactions when you are doing that interesting yeah and and so we would see that it would decrease your likelihood of stress you you would receive you know a sort of neurotransmitter benefit we have dopamine this particular neurotransmitter associated with reward so when i help someone else i get a dopamine fix which is different to if i place a bet on a horse or if i access pornography or if i go out and get get sort of hammered on booze so it's a very worthy dopamine source but also oxytocin another neurotransmitter associated with bonding it's called the bonding neurotransmitter.

56:54So I get this really lovely sort of wash of neurochemicals when I contribute to someone else's existence and get the natural return of that. And I think rarely do I see volunteering or anything what we might call as altruistic as altruistic. So altruistic, I'll do something for you where I expect no benefit in return, like at all. I do it because I just believe in that cause. But of course, it can never be truly altruistic because I will get a benefit which is i know you're going to benefit from it and therefore i feel better so they say that only they say no one's like truly selfless no like you're doing it for a selfish reason exactly you will feel better for it so it and you know i think we should discourage people from doing it but it's being aware of that i don't need a commercial return for it to be you know to be selfish and what a wonderful way of propping up and that's the way communities and tribes have always existed that people played a role in their community and tribe and with the rise of sort of nuclear families, nuclear working patterns, we've lost a bit of that.

57:53And I think if I was looking at someone who was drifting towards burnout, would volunteering for others be a good strategy? Maybe, maybe not, right? Because they might need to restore energy elsewhere. And I would say, as a lifelong strategy, we should be looking at how we care for our communities and care for others. But in a burnout, I might tell that person to completely draw up the drawbridge and be the most selfish they've ever been. A lot of people will get almost that carer burnout, which is, I spend so much time absorbing the emotional states of others that I've basically had a thousand stresses today, none of which were mine.

58:30But in the same way as I can live stresses in the future today, I can live your stresses today. If I show true empathy to you and you have a really difficult scenario, I will live and breathe your stress without it being mine. We have another phrase called vicarious trauma a lot of this pulling from the work of dr vanessa moulton who's a great psychologist in this space and vicarious trauma is you expose me to terrible things and and i wasn't there but i've i've relived them and i re you know i ruminate on them and i can go on the news and watch there's been a recently the learjet crash in um in america and everyone is sort of living the last few moments of the people on this plane i can start to ruminate on that i can imagine what it was like to be on that plane i can imagine what it was like to be a parent of one of the kids on that plane and i can truly change my state of physiology my sleep through an event that i would never have known about or or never would have affected me and so that vicarious trauma is another thing where you say how much of the stuff we're absorbing did we did we did we accidentally opt into and if i'm again if i'm low on energy i haven't got the energy spare to deal with with the horrors of others so do you think technically if you was watching say for example a film that or a movie that that makes you sad and makes you feel stressed because like you say it might be say like a war movie or something like that and you're reliving that and you're getting into the movie could that essentially affect your recovery 100 so so you know you could say someone say oh i i watched a film went to bed i had this with with spencer on the untapped podcast he was watching breaking bad in bed or whatever it was and it was one there's there's several seminal episodes of breaking bad and i was like that is a catastrophic thing to watch before bed it's like hey forget the light forget the noise it's all the places that takes you will be physiologically you know taking away from recovery and i think there's a great difference between levity humor and familiarity and horror thriller anticipation you know every key thing i'm watching at the moment has got a cliffhanger you know and then a weak dwelling on what i think is going to happen or a horrible shock moment that I'm sort of forced to replay in my mind.

1:00:42At a time where I've got no capacity spare, I would want to draw up the drawbridge to horror, to thriller, to cliffhangers. And I would want to go back, let's be, you know, reruns of Friends, familiar, jovial, light, doesn't ask anything of me, doesn't take anything from me. If I, if we both track our heart rate response and heart rate variability real time, watching, you know a proper jump scare horror it will be exactly as if we are going through an argument be exactly the same as if you are watching something terrible happening on the news on the other side of the world your body doesn't it can't distinguish the exact reason it's getting ready for something terrible to happen it just knows it's getting ready for something terrible to happen and in that getting ready for something terrible to happen we lose some of the crucial energy but also we lose a window of time that should have been energy restorative so yeah it might be the time for old comedy reruns and and and changing some of the netflix subscriptions or not and this i see there's kind of like two well there's probably more types of people but there's people that uh on the other side of that like adrenaline junkies so especially being with red bull there's uh i've spent a lot of time with the the bmx's the the action sports guys and these guys are loving a thrill and i find it so interesting just being around them because um we we go on like athlete training camps yeah and their athlete training camp is completely different to ours they're well sorry i'm completely kind of like focused locked in what we need from this is maximum sleep maximum recovery and great quality training sessions yes they're going to the pub each night yeah they're probably not worrying about their sleep and then they're getting up ice bath first thing because they want to get that adrenaline shot they want to feel good you know and then they they're smashing like coffees and stuff and they they're always like wanting to feel something yes and i feel like that comes from their sport because they're they get so much adrenaline from you know going down the hard line route and doing loads of jumps and and the risk of injury or whatever it is that kind of like makes them feel good yeah they kind of miss and they need that in their everyday lives and that's what these other things give um so i find it really interesting and to on that note like a scary movie might they'd probably prefer a scary movie or an action movie over watching reruns of friends and stuff like that entirely it's probably based on two things there they their event is probably not as determinable or their capability by having perfectly fine-tuned physiology right so we yeah they would need to execute neuromuscular capability skill-based you know so if i've got a flipper bmx 12 times it It isn't BO2.

1:03:17It isn't skeletal muscle mass. They will need to be extraordinary athletes, but their athleticism won't be the defining feature. It'll be a skill. So there'll be more of a skill-based athlete, which means they don't need to be as dedicated to the maintenance of all systems of biology as you do. So that gives them a bit of a pass for some of the behaviors. A bit like a drug. If I take a drug for six years, I'll need a bigger dose to feel it. And if you need that adrenaline, you know you to a certain extent your body's ability to manage stress has all gone up a level so as you say they might be watching a horror film and that might be for them the same as me watching friends because it's a different baseline i would i'd be interested to measure them over time i don't know you know in terms of things like cortisol what their baseline cortisol levels are whether they are elevated cortisol's a stress hormone we all produce it every day it's perfectly natural but when we see people who've been overwhelmed for a long period of time we sometimes some see them producing too much cortisol um and what would be interesting is to see whether they have low cortisol and therefore they need more stimulus to produce a normal pattern or they have higher cortisol and they're living in this slightly strange risky zone which is i'm i'm hedging that i'll retire before my body burns me out and probably a little bit of both you mentioned before the word purpose yeah now there's been a lot of kind of like debate on retiring and if retiring is actually good for you or if you you need purpose in your life and that's the thing the key to longevity yeah over anything else like you've seen people smoke all their lives drink alcohol their lives you know all these things that people say are bad for us but because they've got purpose they've outlived other people yeah um how important is it i would say retiring is definitely bad for you and purpose is probably the defining feature of longevity because you know when we looked at and the work dan butner did on blue zones which is where do people live longest and and well for longest so you know lifespan is how long i live health span is how many of those years i classified my health as good or very good so was i suffering from debilitating disease or incapacitated because we can extend how long you live but we can't extend how how long you live well without a much more sort of closely holistic lifestyle approach um and being revered or having increasing levels of seniority as you go up in age was a key part of some of those blue zone areas where people got older and they were then telling stories around the campfire or when they got older they were the village elder the longevity there is going to be better than when you are old and you're hidden away in a care home or when you're old no one invites you to speak on a panel and we've actually got a real challenge in this country that you know everyone believes partly through the ai revolution that anyone over the age of 30 is pretty much dead um and that that's really tough where you you accrue wisdom through your life and the point when you're at your most wise your least your least valued has a has a challenge i think the purpose bit is is do I feel like I contribute which doesn't mean I need to do the same thing but I do need to do something and and the data on retirement's pretty clear um it's bad for you it becomes a classified health risk it also becomes a classified increased source of stress but the biggest challenge is who you are I moved out of London a few years ago and met someone on holiday and said where are you from and I was like I've moved to a village in Oxfordshire but I said London because it was my identity.

1:06:45I was a Londoner and I was proud of what being a Londoner represented. It meant I was probably cosmopolitan. I was probably streetwise. I was probably in a professional job. Some of these things might not be true, but it's probably true. And what did South Oxford mean? Village, it didn't mean anything. And if you go to someone and say, oh, I'm a retired lawyer, I'm a retired banker, or I'm a retired teacher, it's about like, then who are you? A, I don't think we should define ourselves by our job. That's not the right definition. But if you attached your identity to your profession and then you leave that profession who are you and i think there's that broader question of how would i still contribute to to my community to my to how would the world know that i'm here and i think that's an important piece for being motivated to adhere to the behaviors that keep you on this planet and i will train so i can still be around for my kids but if they're not there then i'm around for the grandkids if not around if they're not around i'm for the great grandkids i've got to have some reason it could be a family it could be a pet pet gives purpose uh um you know turning up at the village hall to call the bingo gives purpose but i think we we have to a work on how we define ourselves be ensure that there is a meaningful reason why we still need to be here and capable and that will be the greatest juice for the for the sort of behaviors of looking after myself food wise sleep wise nutrition wise because the person who has no reason to do that is less inclined to do so yeah no i find it crazy because like uh i feel like for so long you know people are like oh you need to pay you pay into your pension because then you need to well obviously then you look forward to the day that you retire and then i feel like it's just not as like it's not as i don't know luxurious as people make it out to be like being retired because they say you've you've lacked that purpose unless you've got everything figured out and you're like right i'm going to be this i might be a grandfather i might be uh you know a pro golfer or i might try and you know take up hobbies and stuff like that i mean have you did you ever have you ever taken a meaningful block of time off what's the longest holiday you've ever had since since being an athlete uh week week yeah so i mean i think most people okay we might be yeah you get itchy and i i did a year after between university and going to work i did a year when i was to work at the sydney olympics and oh wow it was great amazing and but i can tell you towards the end of that i was like i can't just wake up and read a book and i was desperate to have a job i was desperate to have some structure some some routine i was desperate to have a working relationship with colleagues i you know i'd fully run out of the ability to just wake up each day and go what do i want to do and i think people think that that retiring or being free from you know responsibility is is paradise it is an absolute yoke around your neck and everyone i know you know lots of my clients back in the old days had exited big businesses they were all then looking for board seats on new startups they were all taking roles in charities or they were trying to learn a new skill golf is a great vehicle now it's paddle you know or learn a new language the minute you know it was henry ford who said i didn't stop learning because because i got old i got old because i stopped learning that there has to be at each stage of life particularly the third age and there's this thing called the university of the third age which is as you move out of your your professional scope maybe at 65 you must then find a new way in which you are tested growing stretched contributing and and the earlier you plan and prepare for that the better and i think athletes have been neglected you know the work that um sporting chance did which was tony adams charity around retiring footballers was critical because an ex-footballer what you know what are they you know and and therefore making sure the person isn't defined by their job but defined by their personality or defined by their values is a really important part of realizing i can then be a restaurateur or i can be a pundit or i could but you know football was a part of me but it wasn't all of me in the same way as your sport is a part of you but you're not defined by being a high rocks athlete high rocks is a chapter in a broader book yeah and i think that's definitely important for kind of like any athletes to actually think about their future as well kind of maybe start teeing things up find an interest that when you actually become to like retirement or whatever or you're not good enough to do it anymore then because we as an athlete i feel like you never actually know how long your career is going to be as well you can't just say oh i'm gonna do this for the next 10 years and then i'll move on to something else because that's when i'll be bad like you could get injured within two years you could um get outworked by someone whatever it is um it so i feel like just like you say having something else outside of it is is super important and then that's um that'll stop the chances of potentially getting depressed and stuff and lacking purpose i think that's the one i think lacking purpose could potentially lead to you know worse mental health it definitely can and i think there's two parts to that that all the skills you accrue here can translate to a thousand things so you don't need a you know a side quest or it's like you know i think you need to be aware that all the skills you're accruing will translate to something else and you know there are evolving patterns of life this chapter will will will be a wonderful chapter the next one will also be a wonderful chapter the one after that will be a wonderful chapter they're just different um but is that case of saying focusing on the the skills that it brings rather than necessarily saying i'm going to then move into um opening a small studio or i'm going to go into online coaching i think building you know because because a singular minded athlete has probably still got a better chance of being an elite performer but all the skills you accrue will just translate to the next thing but the next thing will be an exciting thing not that now this one chapter closes that's sort of the death of me it's just the beginning of a new version of me what's your opinion on biohacking and all the other things like you mentioned you've got a recovery center at the bottom of your garden and you're creating one it's got a hyperbaric chamber in yeah i'd say that's very much along the terms of like biohacking and uh what what's your opinion on it all do you feel like the world's taking it too far or do you think uh do you think everything's good like you say it's person dependent probably i think the word is a is an awful word because it makes it sound like you're a weirdo you know and you're sort of living in a cabin at the end of your garden in a hyperbaric chamber versus just going to the gym and drinking water and going in a bed on time.

1:13:20I think biohacking is the pursuit of two things, of a hyper-optimized schedule. There's three things, but really what that means is hyper-personalized. So I want the Olly Patrick dosage of things. And if there is a passive intervention, I would take it. So if I can sleep in a bed and get more value from that same experience using a technology-enabled approach, I would do that. If I can take a supplement and it's got more nutrients at a better dosage versus is less, I would take that. But equally, what did I need? And what is going to be the particular thing that's going to most shortcut my biology to a hacked outcome?

1:13:55So biohacking is a sort of overarching term for, you know, well being habits that aren't always empirically evidenced to generate a better outcome in 1000 people who did them, but would change a mechanism of my biology that we believe would generate some kind of outcome. I like it. I like the fact that I, what's a good example of biohacking? I know my VO2 max, I know my skeletal muscle mass and I know my movement quality and I will attenuate my training volume to make sure that none of those figures drop. So I'm not interested in being a better athlete. I'm very interested in not being a worse athlete.

1:14:30Okay, so for VO2 max, for example, how and what kind of workouts do you do to not make sure to make sure that's not that number isn't going backwards yeah so probably mostly zone two so there's a there's a i also have a you know run dna analysis of what types of training i i most adapt to but i can run mostly zone two work and then when i see my my vo2 start to drop i would then run um some version of of 400 meter repeats and a 400 meter for me would take you know probably 90 seconds and i'll do 8 to 12 reps of that with with probably two to three minutes recovery in between not quite norwegian protocol norwegian protocol is probably the more established way of doing that which is a four minute intense effort with three minutes recovery repeated four times that would be that would be good i will find that i can move my vo2 max with eight you know sort of 90 second type intervals um run once a week over a period of four or five weeks so i will just go into the darker the sort of zone four or five work which is historically what i would neglect so i've got a tool i can use to quickly get that back up I might also choose to lose a couple of kilograms of weight and that will push my VO2 max back up naturally anyway, because it's, it's a per kilogram value.

1:15:44But, but by measuring it, I can then personalize the dosage. Whereas I'm not continually every week going, I've got to spend 45 minutes in zones four and five, because if my VO2 max isn't dropping, I don't need to be there, you know, and the, the, the, the inflammatory load of that training against the fact that I'm commuting, I'm trying to, you know, do all the things I do in my personal life work across different businesses i haven't got the space for progressive overload at the moment i've got space for resisted you know resisted atrophy of systems that's all i'm interested in so data enables me to hyper personalize the dose that's sort of biohacking my understanding that i've got um you know i did a blood test the other day for and and i've got slightly lower than optimal vitamin d which is odd considering i'm so pale i should have really good vitamin d so i've been double stitched up a i can't tan b i haven't got even the vitamin d damn so you know so i add a vitamin d and that's a biohack you know take a piece of data hyper personalize my dose how often do you think someone should get their blood work done i i have skin in the game so i've got a business which does it annually i think i think there's an argument for six monthly but compliance wise it's pretty poor you know unless you get a really abnormal result you're not that six months goes around pretty quickly you're not that incentivized unless you're asking a specific question which is i'm on a particular medication my liver function you know seems to be struggling with it i need to see if i come off it you know unless i'm trying to say do i go come on or off a particular medication then a year is a nice block of time nothing sort of massive from a disease and pathology point of view is going to going to change in a year and it gives you a chance to say how those behaviors have really bedded in and changed my results over time so i do think a year is is a really good baseline and i do think that that's something everyone should do not because i have a business arc that does that but because the NHS can't take a preventative responsibility over people's health.

1:17:34And if I knew that someone had a super high cholesterol, abnormal glucose, abnormal inflammatory markers in their 20s, there would be some pretty logical changes they could make that stop them having a problem in their 50s. But I wouldn't want that first test to be when they've got the problem in their 50s, and we wish we had met them 30 years earlier. And I spent years with people I'd met, wish I'd met 20, 30 years earlier. I think the sort of more interesting end of the biohacking is the passive well well tech enabled so red light hyperbarics sauna cold etc i think they most of them meet in the middle of this idea they're all trying to suppress unwanted inflammation you need inflammation so you you in particular with your training volume are trying to create structural cellular damage the body goes bloody hell why did you do that to me and it might have been you know what was what be your hardest session that you run what's the what session you most dread um well we could just Don't take today's session.

1:18:26It was 4K at threshold, 3K at threshold, 2K at threshold, 1K at threshold. Terrific. With a kilometer float in between. But the kilometer float was still pretty fast. Yeah. So it was quite tough. Murderous. So that would be the end of me. The medical end of me. So that session, you will have created a significant volume of tissue damage. You will have strained your heart. We might even find a little bit of troponin, which is something we find in people when they have a heart attack. and your body now is going to repair from that and get better and so we don't know what the sweet spot is between killing those mechanisms of inflammation and allowing them and that's one of the reasons that of course ice baths which do potentially suppress inflammation have been shown to suppress muscle hypertrophy so i wouldn't want to do a you know a big set of chest and arms then jump in an ice bath and find that i killed the very mechanism of inflammation that i was trying to create because I want bigger muscles the next 48 hours or more muscle stimulation.

1:19:24I think what I think is real valid is these are mostly mechanisms decreasing inflammation and therefore I can't point at a person and go, that's the benefit you'll get from this inflammation and that's the performance benefit. It has to be nuanced. But I use infrared sauna because I find it less stressful because it's light, not heat. I use hyperbaric because I get 5 000 more oxygen by by being in a pressurized environment and breathing high oxygen that dissolves oxygen into my blood plasma and i do that partly because my dad's got a a neurological condition which is brain centric and i think that gives me an opportunity to be as strategically avoidant of that as possible and i do um what else would be the and i do i mean i do sauna three to four times a week because the data on that is pretty empirical um i use red light as well so red light photobiomodulation as i mentioned earlier i think might make me look a little bit younger and in 10 years i'll be grateful to this version of me um but important as well i think it adds energy to cells and that energy might be the immune cell that killed the cancer cell that stopped a problem before i even knew i had it so i can play some logic with that and i've got a because i'm partnered with some of those brands i can get those products at a price that others might not be able to so i'm very cautious to say anyone should do anything i do i do things because i think mechanistically as in a cell there probably is a benefit but as a toyota yaris i can't always be established what that benefit is yeah i always think that there's all these fancy things and like you say you can pick and choose your weapons of choice but i think for kind of like the average person out there i think the most important thing is to probably just spend anywhere between kind of like 20 minutes to 30 minutes a day just looking after yourself 100 if we take our six pillars we'll you know we said movement nutrition sleep recovery environment mindset there will be big big behaviors in there evidence-based 30 minutes of walking seven hours of sleep you know liter and a half of water you know 30 grams of fiber the idea that i would go to a piece of technology for a passive intervention versus do the behavior is madness i think the first point is of the six pillars the one i'm worst at is the one i should focus on and that's the the foundation that's fun and the first behavior in there that the biggest most evidence one will be the one i try and add in so i'd try and do gratitude before i tried and did advanced visualization i try and do you know hydration before i started doing electrolytes i'll just do the the big thing first and and in the area i'm least competent in and if i wanted to add a biohack as a passive way of of enhancing something i could throw it as a cherry on top but there is a phrase used by lots of the american um biohackers which is stop stepping over pounds to pick up pennies and it is a good phrase which is stop you're avoiding the really big evidence-based things to pick up something glittery and shiny because if we're really trying to move the dial wherever we're athlete or well-being dad um the principle would be we we know most of the things that we need to know and we just need to do the things that we need to do thank you ollie what's next for you oh it's a i don't know i don't know i float full-time dad you're like you say a consultant to all these brands uh you know you're obviously still kind of like big into your research podcaster like you've got so many things are you just kind of like enjoying life at the moment and seeing where it goes yeah i think i i'm very unstrategic i just love people this is the zenith of my career getting on meeting you coming on this pod this is a thoroughly enjoyable i think that's how you become the most successful at like what you actually care about as well yeah i think you know i would do what i'm doing now forever if i could you know i just every brand i work with is purpose driven i feel like i'm contributing i feel like there's a gap in in understanding that i'm trying to help people correct my kids are an age where they still like me if you could freeze this year and just rerun it i would do that honestly for the rest of my life this is the golden ages and someone said the other day no one tells you you're living in the good old days until they're gone and someone messaged me said ollie you're living in the good old days and i said i feel deeply aware of that and i feel actually really nostalgic that i'm trying to capture this period of my life because i will replay much of it in in the later years of my life i hope there'll be a new purpose a new challenge but i i don't i don't want more i think there's a interesting concepts that may or may not be true in in the northern territories with the original indigenous people of australia of australia that was that someone told me this they would count you know one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and the number after 10 was plenty and and any any people who know whether this is true or not can message it and you know they said that because they didn't need anything that had more than 10 11 was plenty like if i've got apples i've got plenty if you've got you know bread you had plenty and at the moment i i have plenty so i'm not looking for for more than i have that's amazing i feel like we could talk all day and i love your your outlook on life like you know how much energy you bring um just your perception like you are you feel like a real optimist as well and i just feel like it's kind of good energy and like you say you're so talented at what you do so thank you for today it's been my pleasure continue following the career total legend it's honestly been an honor to be with you today thanks for having me on it thank you