Ep 386 - Sleep, Hypertrophy, and Creatine

What's up everybody, welcome back to Iron Culture presented by the Mass Research Review. It is me Eric Chester, joined as always by the Dr. Eric Helms, how are we doing tonight? I'm doing fantabulous, how are you? I'm doing great, we had a little extra lead in music, had some technical difficulties leading in here but folks in the live chat are saying that they are thrilled for the opportunity to hear more of that sweet, sweet, jazzy music that precedes our live episode. So I hope everyone enjoyed the extra long countdown and we are here and we're ready to roll homes. We got a lot to talk about in this episode. Of course, before we get into that stuff, a little bit of chit chat, a little bit of commercial opportunities. We're going to exploit but let's start with the chit chat. What's new with you? Well, let's see, writing or actually just finished my drafts of the article for Mass this month, it was fun, it was a relevant to what we're talking about but it was kind of cool to read a little bit of a pre-print on what we're not going to talk about, potential heat exposure or post-workout to aid hypertrophy. Many days but there is a pre-printed actual meta-analysis on this of six studies so it's kind of like barely in the realm of what we should be maybe looking at as far as a consensus as it stands but pretty variable. And yeah, also looking forward to discussing a bit related to mitigating sleep deprivation which we'll talk about. But anyway, that's going well and then also just into the meat of the year if you will as far as all my various things that I'm doing, directing sprins, PhD in master students and yeah, got some travel coming up in the latter part of the year but home base for the rest of August before things get a little hectic so that's me, man. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I'm going to give myself a big pat on the back, a round of applause for me if you're listening at home. I was way ahead of this curve. You mentioned that meta-analysis on heat exposure, post-exercise to support hypertrophy or augment hypertrophy. You say that the research is in its infancy and we should be cautious and wait. I say nonsense because I've always loved heat like I love getting in the sauna, I love getting in the hot tub. I used to go to a very fancy gym that had a sauna and a hot tub in the locker room and I was always making very liberal use of those generally after a workout so I did it because it felt nice and was very relaxing but apparently I was also engaging in evidence-based practice. Who knew? Maybe. Like I said, meta-analysis is six studies, one they couldn't extract the data. Most of the studies were null and there's one conference abstract with actually indicates some negative impact. Have you ever seen the hierarchy of evidence that pyramid structure that tells us which studies matter? Some would even argue that that pyramid structure if you want to call it that is something that I own. So yes. Yeah. Well, according to that, once a meta-analysis is published, the science is settled so I am again patting myself on the back and I'm not taking questions pertaining to that. That's not published. Well, okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Fair enough. Once it's been pre-printed and I just need to find, so peer review these days, you're lucky to get two peers to actually review a paper because there's such a huge flood of papers. So all I need to do is find one peer to join me and we will peer review it and give it the seal of approval. How does that sound? I'm good with that, the system is flawless, so if you go through the hoops, I will give you the tick of approval of air accounts, which means just as much the tick of approval as anybody else. Perfect. All right. Well, Helms, let's engage in commerce here. Folks, if you like the show and you'd like to support it, which would be intuitive. If you like it, supporting it would be a very nice thing to do. There's many ways to do that. You can like, rate, subscribe, review, tell a friend, share the show with people, spread the word. If you do leave a review, generally people leave five star reviews unless you're on some kind of platform that allows you to leave more than five. Usually you start with the highest number of stars possible and that's where you finish as well. There's no reason to work down from there. Of course you could support our friends who support the show, an indirect level of support and direct actually, our good friends at EliteFTS, EliteFTS.com sell extremely good merchandise and apparel related to everything you do in the gym. So if you need new t-shirts and apparel or if you need new wraps or straps or whatever you need in the gym, the first stop is EliteFTS.com. They probably have you covered with very high quality. I didn't even plant these here. I just got done in the gym, my trusted straps that I've been using for well over a decade. That's the new ones that I lost and then re-found. That's why they are literally unblemished. In any case, yeah. What did you do in the gym with these straps? We got to get some understanding of the exercise you applied them to. Deadlifts, man. Deadlifts. What else are you going to do with straps? Trucks. Here's the interest of full transparency. Here is the wear and tear that you see from like 12 years of powerlifting on the same straps. Literally fully intact, no structural damage. These things are workhorses. And I also have right here. Peak of your powerlifting career too. Like you were deadlifts and oh, oh, wrist wraps. These are EliteFTS wrist wraps as well. These stay in my desk out of the office here. So I've literally been repping this stuff in the gym and trying to beat the hell out of it for 15 years and I can't tear any of it or break it. Any estimation of how many reps with 400 pounds plus on deadlifts, you have done with those straps in those 15 years. There's no telling because when I was in college, oh, my God, I would go to the gym and just deadlift for 90 minutes. I would just do triples for 90 minutes like it was the best. I really wanted to close in on, I think I was really gunning for three times bodyweight for a while there in college and yeah, it was all I did. But in any case, yes, so I use them. I love them. You also should use them and love them. If you want to check them out, EliteFTS.com, make sure you use discount code MRR10 that stands for Mass Research Review 10. That'll give you a 10% discount on your order. And then of course, if you want to be a gold star platinum level supporter of the show, best way to do that is become a member of the mass community. The mass research review is what makes this whole thing happen. If you like fitness, you like health, you like science, you're going to love the mass research review and you can learn more at massresearchreview.com Helm's what happens. Not a damn thing, except for the fact that a shoot, you can also do lap pull downs and roast with straps. Yeah, I feel like there's all one good time. I'm starting, as you know, I've been getting all sorts of surgeries and whatnot and breaking my body over and over. I'm starting simple, getting back in there, a lot of deadlifts, a lot of pushing and pulling with an upper body. We'll see if I ease my way back into squats. It may just be that squats aren't in the cards for me anymore. I'm not a huge fan of shooting nerve pain in the middle of the night and that's usually what squats give me. But I'm testing out my new body, you know, now that I'm a double surgery, surgery recovered and easing back into things. But hey, it's a new school year, new me and that's why I'm diving back into it. I actually just met, generally, that one can use straps for rows and lap pull downs. You know, just for the listener, in case they thought, because you're so regarded, when you say something like deadlifts, what else, I want to let people know that, hey, no, no, I know that Trexler is the tippy top authority, but you are allowed and can, and I would even encourage you to use straps, especially if you have bodybuilding related goals on your back work. Yeah, but absolutely. I've even, I've seen people use them for bench press and I'm not lying. That don't do. And I've seen people do a lot of things. I don't think how do you see that though? I have seen many, many, many, many dumb things, Trex, no offense. That is definitely among them. And I don't think you should be that committed to making sure that any consequences from not completing a rep are, are, are fully, like not only do I not have a spotter. It's on my chest and I could dump the plates off, but I can't move my hands. I can't even do one of these things and then roll it down. We're stuck. You know, what if I miss this? I deserve whatever happens. Yeah. It's what, when you're really committed to hitting the rep, what you're doing is a spotless guillotine press repetition with your wrist wraps fully locked in or your wrist straps, I should say fully locked in. That is the ultimate sign of commitment. But there's only two ways for that rep to end. One of them is good and one is, is really the end. That's right. Yeah. PR or baby. Exactly. So, Helms, we got stuff to talk about in this episode. We're talking a little bit about sleep, but a pretty novel look at sleep, I think. And I'm going to set the stage here because we're going to talk about where sleep intersects with everybody's favorite supplement later. And for now, I think, initially. It's interesting to talk about sleep in the lifting space because it's weird. There is research showing that sleeping is good, okay? Number one for your health. If you don't sleep eventually, you will die. You can die of lack of sleep. That is my understanding. I don't encourage that. And of course, we can find plenty of research showing that certain conditions of sleep deprivation can negatively impact performance. And of course, if you're in the gym, why not perform your best and feel better? Like, there's a lot of reasons to sleep well. But when it comes to the direct impact of sleep on body composition, I think people have taken those very strong areas of research and said, well, then clearly any disruption in sleep is going to be bad for your body composition. And we know that to be true with a high level of confidence. And this is actually an area where we really need some more research. So a lot of people will tell you that it's a done deal. It's very straightforward. If you're not sleeping eight hours a night, you're not making your best gains. And most of the time, they'll even have a pub med link to throw around. And it's usually the same one, okay? So there's a study published in 2010. And there's different levels of being evidence-based homes. If we take a very broad view of that term, some people read the full text, some people read the abstract, some people only read the title. And so if you're a title reader, if that's your level of commitment to the game of evidence-based inquiry, the title of the paper is insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. Case closed, right? Very simple, what more do you need? But this is one of the studies where even the abstract is actually, it's a very good abstract. It's written with a high level of clarity and provides a lot of good information. But this is the particular paper where everyone says, "If you don't sleep enough, your body composition is going to rapidly deteriorate." So it's important to understand. This was a study with 10 individuals. It was a crossover study. And the actual study period where they observed body composition changes was only 14 days long. It's also worth noting that these individuals did not engage in any form of exercise, no structured exercise, and certainly no resistance training during this study. So what they did was at 14 days where they either slept, they had a sleep opportunity because you can't actually randomly assign sleep. You can only assign the opportunity to sleep. But they either got eight and a half hours a night or five and a half hours a night for these two 14-day periods with a washout period in between. And what they found was what you often hear, Helms, is that sleep curtailment decreased the proportion of weight loss to his fat by 55%. And increased the loss of fat-free body mass or fat-free mass by 60%. So increases your loss of fat-free mass by 60% reduces the proportion of weight loss as fat by 55%. These sound like huge changes. And so that's why people say, I can look past the short duration. I can look past the lack of exercise. Clearly, this is a big deal and therefore it should apply and generalize to lifters over longer time scales. But here's the deal, Helms. They used DEXA for their body composition assessments. I'm pretty certain of that. And when they say that sleep curtailment decreased the proportion of weight loss to his fat by 55%, what they're actually talking about there is the group that slept a lot, lost 1.4 kilograms of fat mass and the group that had pretty substantial sleep restriction lost 0.6. So it was 1.4 kilograms versus 0.6 kilograms over a 14-day period measured via DEXA. And of course with DEXA, we have to kind of bake in some error buffer for that error margin. When it comes to the fat free mass losses, we're looking at 1.5 kilograms versus 2.4 kilograms. Now Helms, just to make a point and not get way into the weeds on margins of error and test-retest reliability and all that crap. Very easy to say Helms, if we really wanted to, if you and I had the inclination and access to a DEXA for a week, we could easily, day after day, do little things and just have you get on the DEXA every single morning and we would easily be able to replicate these types of changes with 24 hour interventions, correct? - Yes, 100%. I mean, I do have access to DEXA. We've done multiple scans to the degree where we're comfortable getting a little bit of irradiation. - Yeah, but you know, so these, if I were to get on a DEXA and do, you know, one of the reasons, even when I had unlimited access to a DEXA, one of the reasons I didn't do one every two weeks is because if I get on a DEXA and it says, "Hey, dude, you gained a kilogram of lean mass and you lost a kilogram of fat mass." I would say, as far as I can tell, nothing has changed. I can't tell with any level of certainty that anything has changed. So these 55% and 60% numbers that people throw around with this sleep study, these are really getting swept into the range of error that we expect with DEXA with these 14 day trials. So all of that is to say, a lot of people hang their hat on that study and it's really not all that, it's very tightly done, but with magnitudes like that, there's not a whole lot that we can do with interpretation. Again, very well controlled study, but just doesn't really apply super well with a high level of confidence to your typical lifter who's forecasting changes in body composition over a six month period. Now, I will say, people who have been reading mass for many years, first of all, tip of the cap. Thank you very much, appreciate your support. But I've covered some other stuff in mass about sleep and how it might impact your body composition changes. There was a study by Jebek and colleagues in 2020 where they looked at not the amount of sleep, but a sleep education intervention, basically like a sleep hygiene intervention, seeing how that would impact body composition changes in response to 10 weeks of resistance training. And basically what they found was both groups increased lean mass to a relatively similar degree over 10 weeks of lifting, but the exercise plus sleep group lost significantly more fat mass specifically. And in reviewing that, I don't think sleep is doing anything magical to shed body fat metabolically, but a lot of times what we find is when people are under slept or if they're sleeping very poorly, they tend to have greater appetite and also tend to be a little bit more prone to stress eating as well. There's this kind of web of kind of directional arrows between stress, sleep, and eating behavior where lack of sleep does make you more susceptible to heightened stress responses. You may eat more in response to that, but then there's also a direct arrow from sleep to appetite. That doesn't even need stress to be involved in that kind of causal chain. So definitely when people tell me like, hey, I really prioritize sleep when dieting because otherwise my appetite gets way out of control, I have lived and seen enough of that to actually have a high level of confidence that that's a pretty robust observation. And Helms, the last one I want to mention here is a study by Borba and colleagues from 2024. And it was called could a habitual sleep restriction of one to two hours be detrimental to the benefits of resistance training? What was interesting about this one though is that they did not randomize people and actually mess with their sleep. What they did was they compared adaptations to a resistance training intervention among people who habitually got fewer than seven hours of sleep per night and compared that to people who got at least seven hours per night. So it was basically, let's find people who are falling short of this kind of generic target of seven hours a night and let's find people who habitually are at or exceeding that level on a nightly basis. And in this study, they generally failed to identify a meaningful effect of sleep duration. However, huge caveat there is there's some really interesting research which does match a lot of kind of anecdotal claims which is that it seems like some people just don't need as much sleep as others, okay? And so if you're a person who you keep reading that if you're not sleeping eight hours a night, you're gonna be a shit bodybuilder no matter what and you're not serious about your gains. There, I think there's too many people out there, Helms, who are staring at the ceiling for an extra hour in the morning who frankly you should probably just go start your day. Like you may be one of those people who feels totally fine with six and a half hours of sleep, that's not at all outside the range of possibility. And frankly, at this point, it's well within the range of scientific evidence. We would expect that there are plenty of people walking this earth who six and a half hours of sleep a night is absolutely plenty for you. And so this is another really interesting look but I think what I'm getting at is when we try to look at these effects of sleep on body composition or resistance training adaptations, a lot of people are looking at it from very different angles but there's not a lot of evidence of just saying we are gonna total. probably mess up people's sleep for eight weeks in a way that seems plausible. So group A, sleep normally, you're gonna do five, seven, seven and a half hours a night. Group B, we're just gonna like force you to sleep five and a half hours a night, which I think is reasonable for a period of like crappy sleep. But we're gonna actually do it for like 10 weeks and have you do a pretty standard bodybuilding type training program. We just don't have a lot of research like that. And as an extension of that, we actually don't have a lot of research to say like, if you truly are sleeping 60, 90, 120 minutes, less than you need at an individual level, but you're still training and you're still actually adhering to your diet. You're not letting that sleep disruption in the appetite elevation actually derail you from your diet. Frankly, Helms, we don't have a lot of good evidence to say how much that's really screwing you up. And I think that's kind of the first point to address a, is there anything I missed out in terms of the evidence there or what are your reflections on this kind of blind spot in the literature? - Yeah, I think there's actually a bit of other, there's some short term data that I think is worth talking about. There's enough of that I can speak kind of broadly about it and we've covered it in mass a bit. And then there's also some interesting observational data. And then I think you'll probably even wanna maybe share your two cents of the observational data in non-athlete populations, but that are really interesting from evolution or biology lens. And you probably know how I'm gonna tee you up there. But they're- - I actually have no idea. So I'm gonna be as surprised as anyone. - Well, hunter gatherer societies, like, you know, - Oh yeah, this sleep terribly. - And yes, and you could even argue like that's kind of the natural state of any animal in a hunter gatherer subsistence, maybe not subsistence farming. But if you are needing to be responsive and if you look especially at prey animals, like they, and even predators, many of them have these biological adaptations where sleep is balanced as a recovery process as well as a I need to not get my ass killed process or miss an opportunity to get some food, right? - Yeah. - You see this in aquatic animals and you also see it and how light-sleeping some animals are. The fact they nap, you know, multiple times throughout the day. And I don't think humans are quote unquote built for that to the same degree. But if you had maybe a halo effect around, oh, you know, the hunter gatherers who aren't stressed by their phones or staying up late or answering emails or getting notifications or watching TV late or, you know, not getting sun exposure, they probably get way better sleep than the modern fools that we are. That is not born out in the data. So anyway, I'll let you expand on that. But I think the two things I want to say is one, the acute data on correcting as well as implementing short-term sleep restriction on performance. Lifting performance is consistently shows a decrease in performance. But it's important to describe how. And in fact, it is more so expressions of power and skilled performance and less so if you were trying to be able to like express strength or moderate rep range hypertrophy work. There is some data to indicate however like pain perception is a little bit higher. So things like time to exhaustion are, they occur a little bit earlier and you can offset this with caffeine and there's even, there's even data showing like ibuprofen, and other analgesic aids can allow someone to push a little bit closer to where they're, you know, pain perception or their central governor, quote unquote, might hit the brakes. So I don't have good data on, are you gonna have messed up RPE or RIR perception on lifting? But I would, based on my anecdotal experiences and understanding the mechanisms, I would postulate that perhaps that's the case, especially if you tap into higher reps. And there's a bit of a catch 22 there, I will say, like I've done many on four, I don't have great sleep all the time and I've prepped, you know, so even when I do get my sleep as best as it can, be I go into states where it must, at least for my physiology, be negatively impacted. And there are times, sometimes it's like Sophie's choice, it's like I can tell I'm not strong right now. But if I go lighter and then do high reps, I'm gonna think I'm actually closer to failure than I really am. So I don't want to do this all the time. But I am always surprised at how well some of, at least the first night of sleep restriction training goes. It ain't that bad. And how much I can rescue it with certain strategies that we'll talk about later. So I will say that is one piece of evidence. Yes, there is a notable but not huge impact on certain types of performance. Probably will affect someone who is doing decision making and actual athlete in combat sports or someone who needs to be powerful, explosive or do endurance. But I think for actually the iron culture listener, your performance will be less negatively affected if you're your standard power lifter or body builder, especially if it's not a max day type of thing than you might otherwise anticipate. And there are data suggesting that if you do it say before the mid afternoon or later, even getting a 20 to 30 minute nap opportunity, regardless of how well the nap goes, just chilling out, closing your eyes and trying to take a nap. Actually has a notable mitigation of that. So it's not, you know, it isn't all over and there's the decision making tree there as to whether you're like, you know what, it might even be better to sleep than train if I have a really, really hard session coming up or whatever or the context of where I am related to my competition, yada, yada, yada. And then the other thing I would say is that athletes generally but actually specifically strengthened power athletes in observational data, even in an elite level, on average, get less sleep than the typical person and report that they don't get fantastic sleep yet they've made it to the elite level. So I think any, like I said, I think we've said this before, anecdotes can only tell you what hasn't prevented success, not what causes it. And there could be some selection bias to where maybe elite level athletes not only get less sleep but need less sleep and aren't harmed as much by negative sleep or they wouldn't be elite in the first place. That's possible. But I think it's not super likely that that is, that sleep is actually for most people that super gains killer and if you don't get your sleep in order, you have no chance of hitting your potential while almost all elite athletes don't get great sleep and they're just self-selecting for that. I think this at least tells us that perhaps sleep is maybe not as catastrophic a negative thing if we observe that in the observational data. And I will say that last thing, when you look at data on sleep generally, the most reliable way to improve sleep efficiency markedly is get poor sleep the night prior or sleep less. There's an inverse relationship between sleep efficiency and sleep duration and sleep restriction. So the shorter you sleep, the better that quality sleep will be if you go into sleep deprived. Like if you expect to get eight hours, you get welcome the little night and you can't go back sleep then you're kind of, that's kind of the worst case scenario. But if you were to stay up later and then go to bed in a position of a lot of sleep pressure, you will get into REM and deep sleep more quickly and you'll have less light sleep as a proportion of your sleep time. And if you had a poor night sleep last night, the sleep quality will be higher than next night. And obviously this is limits to this. You know, this is an adaptive response to something that's not ideal. So obviously the best sleep strategy for improving sleep quality is not to sleep only every other night. I'm not suggesting that, but it's just important to know there is adaptation of the system. - Yeah, yeah, there's a little bit of wiggle room, right? Where when quantity goes down, efficiency can kind of tight trade up a little bit and try to cover the gap. Of course there's a limit to it like you said. But also I like the fact that you use the term catastrophic. So you said it's maybe not so catastrophic to be a little bit light on your sleep. And that's a very good use of terminology 'cause you alluded to some of the sleep research in like contra-gatherer communities 'cause there is this kind of broad expectation I think. Everyone says, oh, the ancestral way of living is in always better and in always more health promoting and very idyllic in the way we kind of like think about it. And so they eat better food and they exercise more. And by the way, I'm sure that as soon as the sun goes down, they're fast asleep and they wake up just as it's rising and they got this really restful sleep for however long the sun was down. Probably seven or eight hours. And the research just doesn't bear that out. I've actually talked to people who do field-based research where they use accelerometers to measure sleep in some subsistence populations. And sometimes they will have to like go back and check with the group of individuals in the study and be like, you guys swear that you were wearing these because we can't even see, it's hard to tell where the sleep happened. You know what I mean? Because basically like, think about it at home. You're sleeping on a not comfortable bed and you're living near the equator and it's the same. summer and it's hot and there's bugs and I mean you fill in the number of things that would cause you to have very fitful bouts of sleep that are often very fragmented. A lot of times average sleep in some of these populations is no more than five, five and a half hours per night. Of course, napping is more common at various times in the day. But the interesting thing about it Helms, the reason I highlighted your use of the term catastrophic, if you ask them how they slept, they'll say first of all, I don't really, this concept of sleeping well or poorly is not really important to me. I don't really get it, but I feel fine. There is absolutely no catastrophizing about like, I got a bad night asleep yesterday, so I'm going to be grumpy as hell today about it, or I'm going to like act as though I'm like Superman carrying around like a block of kryptonite in my pocket all day because I didn't sleep that well last night. They just say like, well whatever, if I get sleepy later, I'll take a nap and then like I'll feel better. Like it's really not a huge deal. And so a lot of it like when you actually ask them to rate their sleep, you'll look at their, in many, I'm painting with a broad brush, but I've talked to sleep researchers who have said like some of my participants, I will look at their data and say like, dude, you barely had any segments of sleep where you were actually asleep for more than like 90 minutes or two hours, you got up three times throughout the night. And they'll be like, yeah, I slept fine. And it's so it's a lot of it does have to do with the way that we've built up sleep and the way that we really catastrophize, even minor threats to our typical level or accustomed level of sleep quality and sleep quantity. So Helms, my big takeaway from this literature broadly is number one, we actually don't have a lot of research to tell us that if you are still hitting the gym and training for strength or hypertrophy and you're still sticking to your diet, even though it may be a little harder when you're a little bit sleep deprived, we don't have a lot of good evidence to say that because it's a tough semester and you're sleeping 60 minutes less than normal, we don't have a lot of research to say that that's really going to backfire immensely or even make a measurable or detectable impact on your gains moving forward. The strongest evidence we have is saying your workouts are probably going to feel worse, but that doesn't mean you can't go through and check everything off the list. And your diet is especially if you're on a low calorie diet, it's going to feel worse, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you cannot adhere to it. So I think the biggest threats when it comes to sleep are the kind of second and third order downstream effects of when you don't sleep well, what else are you likely to mess up because of that sleep deprivation? And so that's why I just recently, one or two issues ago in mass reviewed a study that was looking at health and it was looking at a huge group of people really cool data and they were kind of doing this big analysis looking at sleep, exercise and diet and trying to figure out which ones really seem to move the needle the most when it comes to health span or lifespan. And really what they found was when they actually do like adjusted models that say we're going to look at exercise after controlling for the other two. And when you're doing these covariate adjustments, they found that exercise or physical activity was by far the most important thing for health span and lifespan. And the results on the surface really downplayed the importance of sleep for health span and lifespan. And part of that is because there's not like a massive causal direct impact. But another part is when you start to I was going to use the term partial out, but when you start to adjust the models and say we're going to look at the effect of poor sleep after adjusting for nutrition and physical activity, I would argue you just adjusted out the most interesting things about poor sleep chronically, which is the fact that if you are sleeping poorly, it's more likely, especially in the general population, you're going to be less active and you're probably going to have frankly a crappier diet. So I think people worry way too much about the direct impact of sleep and really what we ought to be doing is just moving forward with the knowledge of those secondary effects of how our poor sleep is impacting our our likelihood to get a great workout or our likelihood to really crush our diet and stick to it to the extent we would expect. Now, Helms, that is just a jumping off point of talking about sleep. Quite a long wind up as we get into the other topic we want to discuss. But as people have gotten more interested in sleep, but really fascinating thing we talked about the fact, you know, some people may not need as much sleep as others. There are studies going many years back that kind of point into these weird findings in creatine where they're like, it seems like creatine may be actually reducing the amount of sleep that people need. And then an inverse of that is newer research saying, well, let's flip that and let's say we're going to induce poor sleep and then see if creatine can perhaps rescue or kind of restore the functionality that we would expect in an under slept state. So it kind of goes both ways. I've seen some studies back in the day where it was kind of like an unexpected finding where they're like, yeah, we supplemented people with creatine and they started sleeping a little bit less. But lately, the big push with creatine research has been, if you have been sleeping poorly, can creatine offset some of the negative cognitive or even physical effects of poor sleep. So Helms, take it away. What have you been finding in this area? Yeah, no, this is, it's interesting. Like this did start a little bit further back than I think the current awareness and interest in the cognitive effects of creatine would indicate. Even in the 90s, there was some investigation into potential effects on brain cognitive function and some awareness like you stated, hey, gave this creatine study. We were interested in looking at sleep and we found that people were sleeping a little bit less when we gave them creatine and some of the mechanistic understanding we have is it's probably because it's improving sleep efficiency. And then there has been work in animals, rats and some mechanistic work broadly. And that is newer. I'm kind of talking now across a 30 year, maybe 40 year span. But the overall understanding that we have is that there's a negative impact on energy in the brain. It's actually asymmetric. It happens in one hemisphere more than the other. And essentially, there's a down regulation of creatine in the brain and responsibly restriction. And there is a slight increase in brain creatine if you just give people a loading dose, which would make you also think that perhaps long term quote unquote maintenance dosing would get you a similar boost. But it is a lot less than you would see in muscle. So depending upon baseline status, are you eating a how much protein should your diet, where is it coming from? And then probably just some individual genetic factors related to how well you process creatine and where it tends to go. People will get like a 20 to 40% increase in their muscle creatine levels after reaching the peak that they're going to get to from supplementing. We're talking 5 to 10% for the brain. So a lot less. But it's not nothing. So that's probably why we're seeing that very slight impact. So what this meant was that I don't think people in our world cared very much when this data came out because they got to a point where it's like, well, any athlete or person interested in lifting is probably taking creatine regularly. And the loading phase happened in them way back in the day and now they're getting the benefits. So this slight, hey, your sleep might be a little bit better. It's kind of like, okay, well, then I'm already experiencing whatever benefit I would get from that, right? It's kind of like your client who you asked them to start doing cardio and then you go in by the way that can include walking like, oh, well, I already have like walking my dog. And it's like, yeah, but you're already doing that. This is in count. We don't get to retrospectively pretend that our day to day activities make us fitter than we already are because or why did you walk into my office, right? So always a fun conversation with that one. Oh, great. Well, I'm already getting that cardio done. That's okay. Not what I meant, but anyway, as back on track. So I think probably the the two most interesting studies on this topic were done in 2006 and seven by Mac Morrison colleagues and they intentionally sleep deprived people after a creatine loading phase and then found that cognitive performance was better. So it was a basically a prophylactic and this is kind of like, oh, cool. But again, what does it matter to us as as people who have already taken creatine? I guess my sleep deprivation won't negatively affect me as much if and when it does occur good to know, but I still feel the way I felt and I look up the study doesn't change anything. I'm already walking my dog, right? But then a really interesting thing happened and this went really out of the radar. There's a research group cook and colleagues who actually did their work here in New Zealand with professional rugby player. So pretty damn high level athletes and they had this really cool crossover trial with I think like 11 professional rugby athletes. So small sample size. But it was within subject and I think the design was actually quite elegant They had like two familial sessions and then ten sessions over ten weeks where they Had people who they established were normally sleeping seven to nine hours and if they And though any time in this this crossover if they're able to get that regular amount of sleep cool That's a normal trial and then they would sleep restrict them to three to five hours So very ecologically valid in the other five and then they had four conditions So an hour and a half Prior to a skilled rugby to passing test right so in rugby you pass it Sideways and to behind you you can't pass from front of you or it's not legal and it's kind of a spinning sideways motion And they had like an accuracy target and they did their dominant and non-dominant side and they looked at How many times out of ten could they hit the target and their professional rugby player? So their baseline scores like dominant side is nine to ten and it's like eight to nine on their non-dominant side, right? And then they looked at okay What is their performance during these different conditions and sleep states? So in a well-slept and a sleep deprived state on dominant and non-dominant side they had these accuracy scores for Uplicibo, so just taking a pill or pills an hour and a half before or Teaking either caffeine or creatine and I I want to know like what was going through their head and why they even decided to try the creatine If they saw some of the sleep literature on there. Yeah, let's give it shot, right? We got some creatine lying around or if they actually thought this would work because the It wasn't for 15 years later jumping ahead in the story until we really understood maybe some of the theoretical Partially proven and some data and like rats and like 2017 that would indicate that there is a potential for an acute dose of Creatine to have any impact in certain states on the brain and then subsequently cognitive performance But then going all the way back to 2011, so I would love to have been in that room and they're planning that study caffeine makes a ton of sense The research going back even decades before this showing that it can offset that morning deficit or having a positive impact on your sleep deprived It's a stimulant, right? And that's literally the mechanism of action. You know, I'm gonna say. Yeah the research going back Decades tradition going back millennia. Yeah, you're gonna get a little. Yeah, when you're sleepy You get a little pop out of it right. It's pretty straightforward. Yeah Yeah, and there is some Hibituation that happens to this stimulating effect of caffeine, but what actually does not go away When they look at habituation to caffeine is the reduction in the sense of tiredness and those are separate And then there are different actual hormones and Neurofactors that actually lead to that. So anyway Totally makes sense for the creatine in the cat totally makes sense to caffeine creatine a little bit more of a Hail Mary In my opinion mechanistically, but they had two different doses as well So they had one that was One gram per kilogram of creatine so that's reasonably high and these are rugby players of big so we're talking close to about 10 grams And then half that so more of like your typical maintenance dose, right? And then the caffeine was either one milligram per kilogram So like the very bottom of the the effect of dosing range, but maybe not enough to increase your strength But certainly enough to give you a little boost and remove tiredness. That's what that's honestly I don't even know if I would call that the bottom to the honest That's true caffeine. Yeah, that's that's pushing it big time Usually it's the standard ranges three to six and then there's been some papers that get away with two But one is put yeah, it's low. It's low Yeah, one is low and there have been some papers uh or I would say there's been some review papers that would suggest One even one to nine if you actually look at some studies You have been shown to have some degree of originacity, right? Yeah, um far more consistent when you get to the Upper two-thirds of that range But not the very very very time maybe maybe the like the fourth the third quartile is probably where You're at least likely to have a negative impact But also dosing high enough to get a positive impact on like lifting performance, right? Yeah, so anyway, they've got one very very effective dose that's been well established five milligrams per kilogram and one bottom end of potentially beneficial Effect for performance, but remember this is not a power or strength test. It's an accuracy test Yeah, right. So just simply removing the negative effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance might be enough And that's actually what they observed so the the most notable finding is that there was an interaction between condition as well as sleep state and time Um, well my time actually there was also a time effect They got better at passing over time practicing the thing, but that's good They uh, they did a randomized order they had two females and after the fifth out of 12 sessions These guys were very very consistently passing on both sides Um, also very clear effect. They were actually better on their dominant versus non-dominant side Um, and then the really unsurprising thing is that when they took the placebo and they were in a sleep deprived state They got worse at passing pretty pretty notably. It was a big drop off, right and When they took anything else it went away statistically there were slight differences Um, and a minor aside is that the best passing scores actually occurred in the high creatine dose sleep Private non sleep deprived Wasn't significant But I just find that really interesting it wasn't the caffeine that was the best performer which is surprising And I never saw any one really talk about this study until the more recent era of oh interest and cognitive effects of creatine kind of just happened people went huh Maybe dismissed it as Sampling error which I don't think is unreasonable you with only one study um could even be in publication by i think other people tried this didn't work Which again probably sampling variants and this is the one that did pop and got accepted And it went relatively quiet in this space for More than like a decade, right? Yeah, there's a 20 if I study Yeah, I was gonna say if I may chime in I think this is a great example where I know we have to keep ourselves on our toes as we you know Every month with mass we review new research I'm more inclined to cover some of the supplement work historically than others But every now and then you'll see a supplement study that comes out and you're like This supplement shouldn't improve that outcome, right? And so Your your first inclination is yeah sampling error If you're being charitable if you're being uncharitable you might look at the data and suspect some funny business going on or some kind of ulterior motive conflict of interest Whatever like there's this whole spectrum of reasons for you to disregard this isolated finding of a beneficial effect But It's very different from saying we've seen this not work a hundred times and now it worked once It's a lot easier to say okay something fluke might have happened here Statistical or otherwise, but when you're looking at a topic that just hasn't been looked at much and you get this positive finding We really have to remind ourselves even if I can't explain why this worked Sometimes we do uncover the empirical evidence before the mechanistic rationale now of course Like you said, you're like, I don't know why they even tried this like it's really interesting that they did But sometimes this does happen and we have to stay on our toes and kind of remind ourselves not to disregard every Finding that may appear to be fluke just because Sometimes we go we work in reverse the intuitive way to do it is We understand how a thing affects the body and then we say you know what? I have an interesting application of that. I'm going to go try an experiment And then we produce the empirical evidence that this does actually apply to that that use case But there are these inverted processes where sometimes we try a thing for whatever reason We find this outcome and then like you said Years or even decades later. We say oh now we're piecing together why that actually worked Well said yeah, and just to be clear. This is not one of those cases where you'd be like oh, this is a funded study They they they it was set up to succeed in a certain way But it because it was actually in professional athletes and I know the researchers They're very very interested in ways of improving importance specifically in like a real-world applied conditioning setting That could be useful on the road traveling so Very well done design as well and pretty Pretty low degree of variance within participants But it again might not be representative, you know, so it's just like like you said It's it's not that hard to flip a coin heads in a row five times if you flip it enough and that that could have been the thing And so relatively unexplored fast forward Starting to understand some of the unique mechanisms of brain creatine uptake And then a theoretical basis is starting to be formed and we start to understand hey We actually have ways to look at this not just in an animal model with a brain biopsy Or more invasive measures, but with the appropriate use of magnetic MRI magnetic resonance imaging specifically magnetic resonance spectroscopy with the right kind of coil Or actually the right kind of technique with two different types of coils you can Start to look at phosphates which you can infer brain creatine levels and see how they actually change the high energy substrates and how it's impacted by sleep deprivation, and then also how the actual process of uptake and bioavailability to the brain occurs over time. Because what is relatively well established over the next, say, 12, 13 years sense cook is that it takes a very high dose to move the needle on brain creatine levels, and then the needle doesn't move that much. It's that 5% to 10% value. However, in states where you deprive creatine, whether that is due to, and these are all actual studies, you put someone in a low oxygen environment, you take people who had brain injuries, there's actually some studies in children on this, or sleep deprivation as Mick Morris showed in 2006 and 2007, and these are all creating loading studies, so this is still kind of going, hey, then you can get a larger effect on cognition, but I think where we were up until recently was, well, sure, you know, like if normally you can only bump brain creatine 5% to 10%, minor effect on performance, and there's very inconsistent, mostly neutral with hints of very small positive effects, and none, I would say metabolically chain challenge states where the brain is not in a bioenergetic deficit, very inconsistent minor positive effects of creatine, but when you actually bring it down, okay, now we're not increasing brain creatine 5% to 10%, we are correcting it going from, you know, down 20% up to 100%, or something like that. But the physiology of the brain is distinct from muscle, so muscle doesn't produce creatine locally, it is a great sponge from your diet, but it gets produced and converted in your liver and then is sent to muscle, and our bodies are pretty happy walking around it, you know, 20, 30, 40% depleted, that's okay, we got enough reserves. The brain ain't like that, so the brain can produce its own endogenous creatine stores and values it, and it will protect it and regulate a tight range, and there's a relative, I wouldn't say resistance, because it's probably giving a connotation or almost a willpower to the blood brain barrier that it doesn't have, but it doesn't need a lot of creatine to cross the blood brain barrier, and the blood brain barrier is generally a, let's just say it's a much more strict border control than other places in the world if we were going to use an analogy, right? It generally is not a good thing if anything and everything you consume would get directly into your brain, and that also includes creatine, and that's fine as far as the brain is concerned, because it can make its own, it keeps it tight regulation, I need to think well all this good stuff, right? But that actually changes, so there's changes in the expression of the creatine transporter on the blood brain barrier, as well as a change in the gradient that occurs once there's metabolic stress in the brain, and creatine is depleted, that basically says, hey, you know what, we're changing immigration rules, we're taking a whole lot of people, you know, just so long as you haven't actually murdered anybody, come on in to our borders, right? So recent work, specifically by gorging the job as well as some work in animals and a few other researchers have established that when brain creatine is depleted, whether that's due to a disease state, injury, oxygen deprivation, or simply not getting a good night's sleep or being sleep deprived, you're actually opening the ability for the brain to take up creatine much more rapidly, and it's also depleting pretty specifically in a pattern that negatively impacts certain types of cognitive function that we're still exploring. But gorging the job did a really cool secondary analysis of a study they did in 2024, which is the first time that we've had mechanistic insight in humans using MRI of an acute dose of creatine on cognitive performance during sleep deprivation, where they found that there's actually a asymmetric brain hemisphere reduction in brain creatine when you have a sleep deprivation challenge. So what they did was a placebo controlled trial, relatively small sample size, but then they replicated it two years later. So the 2024 trial, they used a pretty damn high dose, 0.35 grams per kilogram. So we're talking like 30 grams of creatine on average in these participants or a placebo and taken at like 9 pm, and then they just kept them up the whole night and did a whole bunch of cognitive testing, and they found that when you average across points in enough time had passed several hours, remember that cook waited 1.5 hours for the passing test. They found that a decent amount of cognitive performance was rescued in this small sample size, and they did a great job with their statistics and they had a very high threshold for what they considered significant, and even then they were seeing cognitive performance boost across multiple domains and a reduction in the perception of fatigue as well as sleepiness. To the tune of like 10 to 15% better than the placebo group, which did drop from baseline. So I'm not saying you won't feel nothing, but you are better than if you had not done it. And then very cool, but then they did it again, 2026. So they replicated what they found this year, published it, I want to say back in April or May, and they used the lower dose and they said, hey, you know what, our mechanistic work indicates that there's much higher uptake. Maybe we don't need this massive dose like prior studies indicated, and we thought because of that blood-brain barrier, quote unquote, resistance, if they're in this deprived state and low and behold, this time they only use point, well, I should say only relative to the last one, 0.2 grams per kilogram, so now we're in the range of something like 15 to 20 grams for most people. But not a, it's less than a typical loading dose, but still a pretty big dose, right? And remember, cook, 0.1 grams per kilogram, so high-ish, but not, not full loading dose. And they also observed a positive cognitive effect. Now not literally not actually doing this quantitatively or making a statistical claim, because they were two different studies, so the variance won't be the same different participants. But the, it appears to be somewhat of a dose response. The magnitudes of difference were lower in terms of the cognitive rescuing effect. And the number of cognitive domains that were significantly different than placebo were a fewer, I think there's only one, and there was not a reduction that reached significance into the perception of fatigue or sleepiness with this lower dose that was just published. But when you see these two things, and you also see the animal work and the mechanistic work, and you look back at cook, you're like, oh, maybe they were onto something. And I think this is really interesting, so this is helpful, because if you are a lifter and you're regularly taking your maintenance dose of creatine, say like five grams, there's two things, one, you might actually have the ability to do an acute dose of creatine and get a benefit in an instance like this, because yeah, you might be five or 10% higher than everyone else, but you're going to be acutely a lot lower than that. You may not need to take as large of a dose, and that might open up the door to you just doing a two or three scoop, you know, so like 10, 15 grams if you had a really rough night's sleep. And I, creatine, I mean, sorry, sorry, Trexler, I've actually been experimenting with this. Sorry, did you just call me creatine? I called you 13, and then I was going to say that I actually ingested you, which would be pretty confusing. Different show, yeah. Different show, yeah, that one is subscribers only, you can DM us for the specific cost links and topics, and also make a request. But yes, I've actually done this for maybe a couple months, and the good news is I only run into an off-season sleep deprivation situation, maybe once every couple weeks where I get like four or five hours of sleep for whatever reason. And I've tried it, and I've done somewhere in the range of 10 to 15 grams. And of course, there's going to be a potential placebo effect here, expectancy, even desire and hope that it'll help me. But I have, I think that I have noticed that I do perform and feel better. And I don't necessarily, like the next, I have a tough time catching up on sleep. I would have to actually go to bed earlier because I just kind of wake up at the same time, and my body doesn't let me sleep longer. So that has been still enough to get back into a good state after a night or two. And I travel, and I get behind on sleep because of jet lag, even to the best of my ability on everything. I normally do, actually, it's the only time my body will sleep longer than say seven or eight hours, or I'll wake up, and it'll, I'll get like two nights of eight or nine hours, and then I'm good to go again. That does not seem to need to happen when I am taking the creatine kind of in response to a night of a sleep-resleep restriction. So I find that really interesting. Obviously, I'm not like measuring cognitive performance. I'm just doing my work, which is cognitively demanding, and also training. And not getting the typical, it doesn't feel as hard. to overcome whatever sleep deficit is impacting my performance or my work. And I'm able to focus a little bit better. And I just like, oh, like, that wasn't too bad. So anyway, all that is to say, I actually think there's a strong possibility that cook did not observe sampling variance. And I think gorging the job, replicating their own data is really cool to see, especially with the lower dose. It's all predictable. One thing I will say is that replicating your own data is great, but it would be wonderful to see another lab group do this just to make sure that some aspect of how they do things is not potentially influencing the results. Very high quality work from everything that I can see and mechanistic things that back it alignment with the animal data and alignment with our understanding of the physiology, prior work showing something similar to it with cook. And also data showing that loading, at least by other groups, does McMorris impact cognitive performance after sleep deprivation prophylactically. So all that is to say that I'm pretty damn confident tracks that creatine is a useful supplement for combating sleep deprivation, which is a common thing. And especially if you're training in the morning or the afternoon, this is a potentially useful strategy if you give yourself an hour or two, which you don't really what if it's a chuck it in your pre workout or something like that. And I would be very surprised if that was not the case. I will admit that it's possible that the acute effects could be a little overblown or that might be something that is maybe less less firm just because we don't have the multiple trials to back it with loading. But I am still leaning like at least 80% on on, you know, maintenance dose long term or loading and I'm, you know, maybe 70% on any acute dose having a positive effect. Yeah, it's really interesting. I want to throw it. I don't want to derail us too much, but I want to throw a different use case at you and ask if you think there's any potential or problems here. So neither of us are certified keto diet zealots. And yet I think we're both rational people in kidding knowledge. There are many scenarios where a ketogenic diet is not necessarily a terrible choice. There's applications where it may make sense or be equivalent or almost equivalent to other diets. But when people transition to a ketogenic diet, one of the things they mention in the initial really like first day or a few days is something that is colloquially called the keto flu. And my understanding is a lot of it has to do with just brain energetics, which is that your brain is accustomed to being very glucose dependent. And as a result, it builds up all that metabolic machinery to utilize glucose and metabolize glucose and take it in. Once you start getting in this chronic low glucose state, your brain is limping along energetically speaking. And it doesn't yet have the ability to really do very large scale ketone metabolism in the brain. It needs to build up some of that metabolic machinery. And that's exactly what we see when we see people get accustomed to high carb diets or low carb diets. It's just adjusting your metabolic enzymes and machinery to to suit the substrate that's available. Do you think that when someone is doing this transition to a ketogenic diet and there's this kind of mini, I don't want to overstate it, but a little, a mini energy crunch in the brain. Do you think that maybe some creatine supplementation might alleviate some of that in the brain? Because we know that creatine obviously is a very useful substrate in the brain as well. I actually don't know. And it would be I would have to actually work my way through some of the papers that outline exactly what happens, like if anyone has ever done MRI work or MRS work, like cataloging the transition when you move from glucose to ketones. And like I would imagine there's probably as one is becoming less available and the efficiency of use of the other is increasing. Is there also a commisurate decrease in say, you know, other sources of a brain energy that that would maybe help smooth along that transition. I think it's very plausible at a high level, but I don't understand the physiology at a more granular level enough, but similar things have been done. You know, people talk about the water weight loss from ketogenic diets a lot and they normally just kind of hand wavy talk about glycogen depletion. There's not actually fantastic data that there is wide ranging glycogen depletion, at least that lasts when you just simply go to a ketogenic diet. A lot of that water weight loss is actually due to changes in sodium and potassium handling. And sometimes supplementing your diet or increasing the I think the sodium content can make some of the headaches, water weight loss and negative effects of like getting light headed, get smooth over a little bit and maintain a more regular. Yeah, like homeostasis of blood pressure and not getting that kind of orthostatic orthostatic drop when you stand up quickly. And if you talk to a lot of practitioners who either in the clinical realm or just in people who prefer to use a low carbohydrate diet, they have great success with that. They don't necessarily need to maintain a long term after the quote unquote adaptation. So this could be like that, but I honestly don't know and I would have to dig into the mechanism is to even speculate. I don't think it's been studied, but I could be wrong. And while we're on the topic, I do want to give a shout out if you are interested in lower carb approaches, but justifiably a little wary of venturing into that atmosphere of content are our friend and colleague Cliff Harvey does really good really good guy when it comes to legit evidence based looks at low carb diets and when they might apply and then of course how you might actually put one to use and actually transition into a lower carb approach. So I think sometimes with you know the diet wars are so so intense that if you're not a keto zealot, a lot of people assume that you are staunchly anti keto, but I don't think either you or I follow that in that camp. But we just don't make a lot of content about it, but I think cliff does a really nice job. So I want to give him a shout out there. He does and there's also a robust amount of clinical evidence and research evidence for instances and there's a couple where a ketogenic diet can be considered a potential intervention. Yeah, very beautiful fact. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So those clinicians and the research in that area have pretty well established what the common side effects adherence issues are and like you'll run into dieticians who work in those hospital settings. Who you know they have the standard kind of anti keto perspective and maybe in their diet takes training, but they go in this case here's the best way to do it and they have that clinicians kind of lens. So yeah, there's there's good data on this for sure. Yeah, now one other thing I want to mention Helms and this is kind of coming full circle. So I think you did a great job laying out, you know where this evidence started, you know the kind of how it developed over the years. And like I mentioned previously, some of the earliest findings relate saying that creatine has anything to do a sleep is these kind of you know somewhat unexpected findings where they're like people are saying they're sleeping less. But they're not reporting that they're like super tired or groggy or it seems and then there's rodent work showing like a genuine physiological reduction in sleep requirement. It's not huge, but it's detectable. And so this is something I wanted to reiterate because now that we've kind of covered the whole gamut of of creatine and sleep research. We've talked about one common thing, which is that if you are, you know, relatively short on sleep. Number one, I think borrowing lessons from our subsistence culture friends, not catastrophizing about it can actually go a long way. But creatine supplementation can actually, you know, be a very legit way to try to actually be proactive about dealing with this. But a common thing I hear in terms of practical application is people will tell me, Eric, I really want to get the performance benefits of creatine, but when I take it, it messes up my sleep. And I'm always really interested to hear that because I respond with instead of a direct, you know, giving them direction on what to do, I respond with a question. And that is when you tell me that creatine is messing with your sleep, are you telling me that you sleep fewer hours per night or are you telling me that you have sleepiness throughout the day? Because those are two very different things and this research helps bridge the gap where I got to be honest, I've had a lot of people come to me over the years saying creatine messes with my sleep. We have an exchange of just two or three statements back and forth and they walk away with the conclusion, oh my God, creatine makes my sleep better. And here I've been, you know, debating about whether or not I can tolerate the sleep disruption. When in reality, I feel great, I just sleep 30, 45, 60 minutes less every night. night. So that's just one particular kind of wrinkle of practical application that I think is worth considering if you're someone who has been noticing that creatine causes you to sleep fewer hours per night. I think you have to take a really close look at that and say, is it making your sleep worse or is it improving your sleep efficiency? And if it's improving your sleep efficiency, that's awesome. If there was some supplement I could take where I actually get all the benefits of a full night of sleep, but I just only need four hours a night, I would throw so much money at that supplement you can't even begin to imagine. I would bankrupt myself for that supplement. So it's actually kind of a cool thing about creatine. Yeah. And I think there's probably more people potentially observing. I don't know if this is true. But if you are someone who struggles with sleep regularly, you're going in and out of these higher demand phases for creatine and increased bioavailability into the brain. And there's a lot of people right now because of the cognitive effects indicating you need a higher dose, who are actually taking, not full blown maintenance doses regularly, but I know a lot of people are taking 10, 15 grams a day as they're new default and they've upped it from five and creatine's not that expensive. And I think there's probably more opportunities for this anecdote to, you know, bubble up. And I think there's also a lot of potential, just like we're seeing in the experimental peptide world of this being the placebo effect, right? That's the whole reason why we have placebo control trial. So I'm not saying that these anecdotes are valid, but I will say that in the case you're talking about where they're not expecting it. So the expectancy portion is gone. And what we're actually seeing is quantitatively minded optimizers who are tracking their hours of sleep and then trying to figure out what's going on. I've gone from eight to seven on average in my little spreadsheet. Oh, this is what I implemented. Creatine, hey, tracks coach, we've got an issue here. It's the opposite of that. And I think that's probably a more powerful anecdote that you're experiencing. And I was just thinking back, these surveys of strengthened power athletes that show them sleeping more like six, seven hours a night. You know who's a great cohort who you can guarantee 90% of them are taking creatine and maybe overdoing it sometimes and just taking high doses. That would be them. And I am really curious now how much of that is influenced by the fact that they are probably athletes who are much more consistently consuming creatine than anyone else in those surveys. Yeah, and I don't want to overstate it. But yeah, I mean, if you're talking about something where you're like, yeah, I just really consistently, you know, 30, 45 minutes a night when I'm on creatine, like that's definitely within the realm of possibility. It's not going to shave several hours off your night of sleep, but that could be a real thing. And like, you know, you mentioned the placebo effect. I'm not going to counter that, but I will just elaborate upon it by saying, I kind of reiterating a lot of people when they are in a slightly sleep-reduced state, we're talking about I got 45 minutes less than normal and hour less than normal even 90 minutes for short periods of time. I am not disputing the real physiological effects that has, they're tangible, they're measurable. But I do believe that the emotional response to not getting the amount of sleep you like to get also plays a role. And so what we're seeing is a combination of real physiological impact plus a little bit of like no-cebo impact, you know, negative expectancy. And so I'm always very pragmatic in saying if you can throw a placebo in to offset your no-cebo, go for it. That's a hell of a use for a placebo. So obviously that's not what we're looking for as scientists, but in terms of practical application, I think it's another feather in the cap where we can say, hey, if taken 10 grams of creatine when you're sleep deprived, gives you the confidence to say, hey, I might be okay today and maybe I can stick to my diet and maybe I will be more resilient to stress and maybe I will do everything on today's workout rather than cutting the last two exercises. That's a really nice placebo. Yeah. Totally. And the last thing I will say is that the result that also limits to how and to the magnitude of the placebo or no-cebo effect can present itself and it does differ between individuals. It's impacted by personality, but I'm much more sensitive to someone, I'm sorry. I am much more likely to consider the placebo or no-cebo effect that someone is just talking about their perceptive experience of cognitive function from taking creatine, but if you actually are finding that your sleep tracker and your spreadsheet and you weren't expecting it is showing you sleeping less on a regular basis, I would more likely think that that's not placebo or no-cebo because you can't keep doing that with a pot like how long can you deny that getting 45 minutes less sleep is making you feel the same or better, you know. Right. But if your sleep has not changed at all and you're like, but no, I feel great every time I take this pill, it's like, yeah, well, maybe, you know, so. Exactly. Now, I think that that probably wraps it up for today. Is there anything else you want to say on the topic before we close out? No, just that I plan to just not sleep at all because I got too much work to do, you relate, and maybe just take, I'm going to say 10 grams per hour missed. So 80 grams a day, no sleep, let's see how I perform next week on iron culture. Well, along those lines, you can in fact sleep when you're dead. I've been led to believe that and that's my operating posture moving forward. So I've got actually Helms, got my creatine on the table right here. It's really a weird day. I just have all these things sitting on my desk that were not planted there as props. But so I'll do more creatine less sleep and we'll see how it goes. Now, Helms, I do want to do yet another prop focused bit. I feel like carrot is going to go today on the show. But someone, what a throw remember when carrots hop actually got super jacked and was clearly getting trained by an IVB pro and taking a ridiculous amounts of steroids. Yeah, I mean, I would say the most jacked prop comic on the face of the planet at one time. Yes. But someone actually commented right at the beginning of the live stream, they said, wow, what a novel hat. Now Helms, there's two possibilities with this. And this is a visual gag for everyone on YouTube right now. One or two possibilities. The most likely possibility is this person's being sarcastic because I happen to wear this particular type of hat pretty much every episode. There is a small possibility Helms, which makes me very concerned that this person is the most astute and observant person on the planet because I'm actually going to let you in on a secret Helms. This is not the hat I usually wear. If you can believe it. So what I'm going to do is the visual bit. This is the hat that I only wear when I'm training because he gets sweaty. This is the real hat that actually gets worn when recording episodes. So I am terrified at the one percent less than one percent possibility that this person actually did notice the slight difference in smudges on two versions of the exact same hat. But in any case, that is what we expect from the cult. The iron culture audience is observant, brilliant, and possibly frighteningly observant. So I want to thank everyone in the live chat for joining us tonight. And I'm hoping that that poster will let me know whether or not I should be terrified at exactly how detailed oriented their observations are. Or there a first time listener/watcher or a bot, which are both possible. Yeah. All right. Well, anyway, Helms, I think that does it for tonight. Once again, I want to thank everyone in the live chat for joining us. I also want to thank people who listen after the fact I don't expect everyone to restructure their entire life just to join these live chats 5.30 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday nights. I realize some people have other responsibilities and that's okay. So if you listen to the show later, that's cool too. We do it on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast, wherever you get the show. So everyone, whenever you listen on whatever platform you listen, we appreciate you. And we will be back in seven days with yet another episode.