Fat Loss Scientist: It’s Easy To Lose Weight, But Here’s Why You WON’T Do It! | Dr Andy Galpin

Everything you see on this table has the strong scientific evidence that it will help us sleep. So we're going to dig into all of those in great detail. So the first one is a really good one. Kiwis. Kiwis? Yeah. But there's been good studies on them. So if you have two to three kiwis before bed, you'll see people sleeping better. Next on our list is sleep divorce. People generally don't sleep as well when you're in the same bed as others. Next. What about this? This has more evidence than the rest of these things combined. And it is effective. Another one to think about is sound. And it really matters, sound, when you sleep? Yeah. As much, if not more, of any other factor. There's also screen usage, light, your pillow, and wearables. But the other thing is we're spending more on sleep, and sleep is getting worse. And for the last 20 years, I've been doing science, coaching, and education that enhances human performance. And I've been fortunate to work with the world's most elite athletes, entrepreneurs, leaders, and even 50% of athletes have a clinical sleep disorder. It gets worse. 70% to 80% of people who have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed. And for women, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% to 95%. And it is deleterious to your health because it's highly associated with long-term death risk, cognitive function, mood regulation, performance, recovery, metabolic health. And it happens for a bunch of different reasons. And we can go through them. But we look at the 8 billion person population and need more people to pay attention to their health. And so I just want to get the best possible out of people. So this could be energy. It could be metabolic. It could be cognitive function. It could be muscle growth or fat loss. And so I want to give every person listening to this the opportunity to reach their goals and dreams. I'd love to go through all of those. And you have a. 8, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 method. What is that? Yeah, it's just a little thing I came up with that says, all right, can we help people with fat loss? So the first thing to think about is. Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Dr. Andy Galpin. Before we started recording, you said you want to do scientific research, coaching for your clients, and you said education. You also kind of alluded to the fact that you were less. You were less interested in money and these kinds of things. So the question is, why do you do what you do? And what is it you're doing and who are you doing it for? The most concise way I can say it is, I want to give every person listening to this the opportunity to reach their goals and dreams. You want to look this way or not look this way. And you want to perform this way. How can we get you there? I want to remove those barriers. And if you get there or don't get there, it was because of you. It was not because something was holding you back that was in your way. And so that's why I get equally excited. I'm excited to work with the best linebacker in the NFL and some person who just wants to wake up and not be in back pain tomorrow. So tell me who you've worked with then. Who has been a client of yours? I've been fortunate to work with the world's most elite athletes for 20 years at this point. So this is your number one draft picks in every major sport. Hall of Famers, Cy Young winners, MVPs, Olympic gold medalists in many sports, world champion fighters. We've worked with hemiplegics and periplegics. Individuals we've worked with, you know, the cliche executives, the mom and pops, the person dealing and struggling with perimenopause. Like we've really done most of it. And what kinds of symptoms or goals do they come to you with? So I'll give you broad categories and specifics below that. Broad categories we tend to say is either rebuild or upgrade. Rebuild is there's something wrong, hurt, broken, damaged. I'm overweight. I can't fix it. I'm dying from sleep restriction. I have. I have a clinical sleep disorder. I have some injury. I have some huge clear limitation that needs to be resolved. The second half is what we call upgrade. I don't have any of that. I feel pretty good. I feel okay. Now I just want to get the best possible out of my life. Why I can accomplish that and our folks I work with can is because I'm after the physiology. What does you mean by that physiology? It's your biomolecular signature. Do you have a. A muscle imbalance that's creating neck pain that's making it hard to sleep and that's giving you a hard time regulating your emotions. It could be classic things like inflammation, everything that is inside of your body and both the way that it is running and expressing itself. And what are your credentials? So my Ph.D. is in what's called human bio energetics. I started my lab in 2011. Your lab. So I'm an active scientist. I'm a professor. That's my real job for the most part. So we conduct and disseminate research. There are that enhances human performance. And then I started a number of companies and privately coach people. That's what I've been doing for over 20 years. We talked about the different personas and the types of problems they come to you with if you had to. And this might be quite difficult or to them in terms of the frequency in which people come to you with these issues. What would that sort of top five be? I'll break them from our professional athletes and I'll probably spend more time on non-professional athletes, assuming most your audience is probably not a professional. I wouldn't take that. Pretty close. I wouldn't take that, guys. 50-50? Yes. We'll assume 50-50. Yeah, yeah, right. The athletes typically come to us under two circumstances. Frequent injuries I'm getting or tanked energy, bad sleep. They deal with the same human problems we deal with, right? The other one is what we'll just say is the upgrade, the optimizer. Feel great, feel young. I just want to get ahead of things and I want to catch things before they start. The general public is a similar breakdown because we have a lot of people who are like, I do feel pretty good. I'm great. But I don't want to play the game backwards. I don't want problems to come up and then I got to go scrambling and figure it out. So let's collect baseline data now. Let's get ahead of things. Let's predict problems before they arise. But I've only got a few minutes a day, right? I'm not trying to like take over my whole life with all this stuff. Like probably the most common ones are things like sleep and energy. Performance goals can't seem to get stronger. Can't seem to lose that little bit of weight. Maybe touch a brain fog. I don't feel as sharp. Well, I'd love to go through all of those. Sleep, energy, performance, strength, struggles, weight. But also I've got my blood test results here, which Andy has taken a look at for me. It's not all good. Okay, so that's a pre-warning. It's not all good. But he's going to run me through my blood test results in this episode. Tell me how I improve things. And there was a couple of deficiencies that I had that I had no idea that I had because I thought I was doing everything right. Which have completely changed my supplement, but also my behavior generally. And also you've got this here. Which is a gentleman, I believe, whose blood test results you did, similar age to me. And you took him from not so good to great. And we'll talk about that as well. So hold on for a second while we touch first on the subject of sleep and energy. Which is one of the first thing you talked about. A lot of people listening struggle with sleep. And they also, in their waking life, feel variances in their energy. If we start then with sleep, what are the like. Most people problems of sleep? This is a great question. We'll start off. And in fact, I think this is a nice framing of everything we're going to talk about. We want to be weary of what we call health anxiety. This is over fixation, over concern, worrying too much about little things with your blood work, with your sleep, everything. You're in a really great spot. So we can look for some upgrade, but we want to be careful of pushing that line. And why that also matters is if we look at the 8 billion or so person population. We probably need more people to pay attention to their health than to not pay attention to their health. We're not in an abundance of people caring too much. But if you're listening to this show, you are probably not representative of the general population. And so I want to be really careful of everything I'm about to say for the next couple of hours. I don't want to create health anxiety. I don't want you to be so terrified to touch a receipt that it sends you in a three-day tailspin. Anytime we're talking about a health or performance, we want to run the spectrum of disease to optimization. We should not be playing around with optimization performance if we're in the presence of a medical disease. And why I say that is sleep is probably the biggest place of clinical disease that exists that no one knows about. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 to 80% of people who have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed. Wow. If that existed for a broken bone, right? If that existed for diabetes, you'd be like insane. It gets worse. It gets worse. 50%, depending on which study you look at, of athletes have a clinical sleep disorder. For women, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 95% of women that have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed. Why? If you were to look at me and you would say, if I said, Stephen, you think I have apnea? No. You'd say, no, right? If I were to bring in a whole table of 10 people and I said, pick the person in here least likely to have sleep apnea. You'd find the smallest girl. True. You don't think about apnea as something that can happen unless you're big and fat. Women also are less likely than men to complain. They're less likely to think about it as an anatomical issue. They're going to charge it to hormones, to their menstrual cycle, to their cognitive load, to the demands that it is to be mom. All these are true, by the way. It is also, in the same point, true. True, you could have apnea that has nothing to do with body composition and let's define apnea for a second you stop breathing at night and that wakes you up sometimes it doesn't that's the that's the problem is it won't necessarily wake you up but it is deleterious to your health it's highly associated with consequences from long-term death risk to short-term cognitive function emotion mood regulation performance recovery metabolic health it's really really nasty in fact one of the larger things that can go wrong in your health is is not breathing at night this might be a silly question but does sleep apnea disrupt your sleep it can so it doesn't always doesn't always okay this is why do you think it's so poorly diagnosed so the classic giveaways if you were that person who wakes up four counties because you snore so loud snoring doesn't necessarily mean you have sleep apnea but it's a really strong indicator that's one form of it so apnea happens for a bunch of different reasons more evidence recently has suggested that people with sleep apnea have a lot of sleep apnea and that's why people who have sleep apnea have a lot of sleep apnea and that's why people with sleep apnea have a lot of sleep apnea and that's why people with sleep apnea have a lot of sleep apnea and that's why people with sleep apnea have a lot of sleep apnea and that's why people with sleep apnea have a lot of sleep apnea and that's why people with sleep apnea have a lot of sleep apnea and that's why people with sleep apnea in this chair you're in this vertical position and as you go and lay down anatomy shifts you also have a lot of research showing that the larger the human being the more fluid they have which is pretty normal right so a person is twice your size will have twice the amount of water in their body that you do imagine if you had i mean we'll take this beverage right here why do you have red wine well anyways we'll come back in case you get thirsty so you see the water is sitting vertically right if i were to shift this cup to the other side i would be sitting vertically right right if i were to shift this cup to the other side i would be sitting vertically right if i were to shift if i were to shift this cup to the other side i would be sitting vertically right if i were to shift this cup to the other side if i were to shift this cup horizontally the water would shift and it would it would balance horizontally to where the gap in the air would be on the top right that happens in your body so imagine this top piece start up here that's your neck now when you lay down your neck is over here and i would tip this over but it would spill everywhere that fluid then shifts up into your neck so it's not even necessarily a physical size thing but it's the fluid associated with being a larger human being that the fluid shift can happen what we're now finding is a whole lot of fluid that's not necessarily a physical size thing but it's the fluid associated a whole series of other types of apnea now there are neural causes to it there are environmental causes there are positional causes and so as a classic example to round the story out traditionally if you're told you have apnea you're going to be given one of about three choices medication what's called a c-pap device right so that's the big like respirator breathing machine or potentially what's called an oral appliance it's a mouthpiece that kind of repositions your jaw and neck i'm for all those treatments why they all have such low success rates is because they're given out generically you come in you have apnea you get the same stuff now what the field is moving towards is precision and saying you have this specific type of apnea an oral appliance won't help here you actually need this surgical intervention i was looking at some of the data here and it says that sleep apnea is very common globally much more common than i expected it's a very common disease it's a very common disease it's a very common disease it says men who are middle-aged have a 24 to 34 percent prevalence of apnea women 9 to 17 percent seniors 30 to 60 percent that's right post-menopausal women 25 so you have rough numbers that means that listening now if you're a middle-aged man listening if there's three of you listening right now one of you statistically might have apnea now that's clinical sleep apnea that doesn't even count subclinical and if you're a senior listening now which is 65 years older there's a 30 to 60 percent chance wow depending on some numbers you see steven you'll see a billion people across yeah that's what it says it says a billion a billion people now that's only apnea that's not insomnia that's not all the other sleep disorders that's simply the one variant of it why is this happening because again from an evolutionary perspective sleep apnea couldn't have been a great for survival yeah three primary reasons why this is happening the first is the fact that our environment is physically changing our ancestors never had to deal with this two our current solutions for testing are either insanely outdated or incredibly difficult to get to the third major one is our solutions that we provide people in public communication are wildly generic that's not helpful in fact if you were to pull everyone listening right now sleep comes up and you go oh great they're gonna tell me to sleep in a quiet room that's cold and dark and they're like i've heard it all and you have where we need to get to next is how do we help people find these precision solutions based on their type of sleep issues but that's that's the three-part reason why this stuff is happening i'd like to go into all three of them i also would like to just pause on the diagnosis part because there'll be people listening here that might have a suspicion that they need help but again if you're a senior listening right now you're going to have to go to the doctor and they're going off their feelings yeah how can they know for sure what help they need and what their problem is yeah i always start with subjective how do you feel if you feel good let's now like immediately take a breath you have good energy you wake up you feel good like everyone's gonna be a little bit tired we also don't we've actually had a i've been working with for several years a very close friend of you and i we constantly have to battle because he'll just get like really honestly terrified because he gets sleepy at the end of the day and i'm like bro i'm gonna sleep at the end of the day and i'm like bro i'm gonna sleep at the end of the day and i'm like bro that's the point people that are hard chargers high performers are actually afraid of being tired we have to recognize and realize that is natural and needed you need to feel a little bit sleepy in the early afternoon and you should feel tired unmotivated lack of focus at the end of the day what if i didn't used to because that's what people will they compare it to an old version of themselves sure again we can say natural when you are sub 25 you're not like you're just a powerhouse right when you're past 25 we shouldn't just accept frailty we shouldn't accept a permanent decline but we do have to start to realize we're not going to have the energy of a 20 year old like it's just not typically super realistic and if you do you're probably getting there exogenously right stimulants and other things which have a place but we just want to be a little bit careful of those things we'll talk about stimulants melatonin and all these things but going back to this point of dieting we've got to be careful of those things yeah so jenny who doesn't have much money how does she get okay great so one thing we can do and we can put these in your show notes for you for free there are a ton of completely free short questionnaires that are scientifically validated okay you can do these for rls you can do them for insomnia you can do them for apnea you can do them for circadian disruptions and disorders you can do them for chronotype are you a morning person or tons and i'll put in many of these for free so my answer there would be start with one of those okay if you flag that up and you want to move up the next step then you kind of have a couple of different ways and your two options are what we'll call wearables at home tech these are typically we'll call them 100 to 600 range then past that you have a true medical option which is a sleep hospital this is when you would go into you know the hospital you go into that weird room and you sit there you get all the wires someone looks at you through a window you sleep in for one night you can see from the look on your face or you're just like all right who wants to do that if you're a morning person you have a true disease at this point for the most part the sleep hospital depending on the disease it is where you need to get to now what our group is working on and others is can we bring the sleep hospital into the home it's not super affordable at this point we're going to get it there but that is the clear future if you have insurance take that validated questionnaire i just said go to your doctor and say here's what i scored this saying will you order me that sleep study it's a giant pain i know it but it is it is probably worth it if you want to use the wearable you can do that the problem with the wearables is numerous they are awesome at things like awareness at accountability right they're pretty good for things like total sleep time they're really really bad and a major pitfall for wearables is predicting things like deep sleep and rem sleep do you know what i was thinking about i was thinking about certain times where um i've done certain things behaviorally and then i got in bed woke up feeling terrible and my wearable said to me yeah you had a bad really bad night's sleep and i could kind of put two and two together and kind of establish cause and effect and i could almost i guess test that then going forward and say okay don't do that or maybe get in bed earlier or the heat was was way too high whatever it might be and i could sort of a b test my way to a better outcome yeah so they can give you things like sleep quality score that's the stuff that directionally won't be there but you actually said something interesting a second ago which is you felt worse that's the only directional thing we need to have to pay attention to if you go wow i felt worse today and then you can go backwards and go yeah that's because i did a b and c yesterday or i felt better today that's not the only metric and to be really clear i'm not advocating to ditch all the wearables we use them extensively and i'm not advocating to ditch all the wearables we use them extensively and i'm not advocating to ditch all the wearables we use them extensively and i'm not advocating to ditch all the wearables we use them extensively and i'm not advocating to ditch all the wearables we use them it's just really being careful about what data from those we pay attention to and what we don't. So stuff that we do now is find big themes that they're oftentimes missing. Here's a good example. We had 1,200 days of data from, I think it was an aura ring. And we are actually able to find that in one of our clients, for every one drop in resting heart rate, so his resting heart rate, say, went from 65 beats per minute to 64, he got six more minutes of sleep. And so we were like, okay, great. You want to add an hour to your sleep. Let's continue to work on your cardiovascular fitness. Every time he got more fit, his resting heart rate dropped, he slept more. Additionally, every time you put and you invest in down regulation, you'll lower your resting heart rate going into bed, you will sleep longer. So he was a classic case of like, I try to go to bed, I do all the things, but I just can't stay in bed. So the key there to get him the more sleep is to put his physiology in a position that would allow him to have more sleep. And for him, that was the canary in the coal mine. That's the type of stuff where wearables can be like, you can't replace that. Not only from a data, but from a coaching perspective. It was so easy for me to communicate to him, here's your data. This is our target. And he's an extraordinarily busy person. It's like, great, I got one thing to pay attention to, do whatever it takes to keep that heart rate low going into bed. Copy that. What in his case was making his heart rate high? When it comes to something like sleep, anything that is in your physical environment, that's in your lifestyle. That's in your physiology can impact it. I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons why sleep is getting worse is because these physical changes in our environment, annual spend on sleep is like 600 billion right now. But yet we have seen a 60 minute drop in total sleep time over the last 60 years. So you're seeing an inverse. We're spending more on sleep and sleep is getting worse. I think your team printed out some cards here and we can go through them. The first one is a really good one. The world is physically brighter. In fact, there's data from NASA, satellite data that can look and say the world is physically brighter. Now you're expected to be communicating with Singapore and Australia and the US, which means you're going to be up later. Your business is going to be on, your lights are going to be on. There's also a phenomenon called sky glow, where the light from earth is going up, hitting the clouds and being shot back down. And so it's keeping our world brighter. So when you hear people talk about things like you have these blackout curtains and masks and you're thinking like, I never did that when I was a kid. What's the big? Deal. It's because of this. I mean, there's some graphs that I found here. Yeah. Yeah. Which kind of demonstrate this, which I'll put up on the screen. Yeah. More people are moving into urban environments. And if you look at some of the studies, not to be dramatic, but some of the studies have found things as high as like anxiety and depression are up 20 plus percent when you move into the city. And that's largely attributed to things like light and sound. It's extremely bright and extremely loud in cities. It doesn't mean they're bad or you can't live in them. It just simply means that's why you have to take extra steps. I think a lot of people listening to this will think, well, Andy, my bedroom's very dark. But that's actually not what you're saying, is it? Because the way I was thinking about it is we are here in New York City now. And if I walked to the shop last night at 10 p.m. Yeah. And walk back, I was exposed to so much light outside at a critical time when my body should be not exposed to light so that it's going to impact me even when I get into that dark room. It goes even better than that. There's evidence now that the light exposure you have, both in the morning and throughout the day, dramatically counteracts what you just mentioned. So, yes, you went for that walk, you went for that thing when light was still out, and you had a brighter light exposure in, we'll just call it the three or four hours before bed than you would have had ever in the past. But you can mitigate that damage by seeing light appropriately during the day and in the morning. And this is actually something my friend Andrew Huberman has talked about for years now. And I'm like, oh, he's joking. I joked and laughed at him. But then I'm like, damn, he nailed this. Like, he was way ahead in this one. Light exposure in the morning will impact your sleep at night the next day. He always explains that as setting your circadian rhythm, but it's more than that, actually. That's the part where I was like, yeah, whatever. Like, I'm in the same time zone, why do I care? But now I'm like, oh, because then if you are exposed to a high amounts of light later in the day, that exposure to light earlier will help reduce that damage. There's this whole cascade of things that when it is time to be awake and when it is time to go to sleep. And this is both hormonal-based as well as neurally-based. So your brain will shut down or activate in response to light, in response to exercise, in response to arousal, in response to food, in response to stimulants, and a whole host of other things. That light earlier in the day sets that rhythm. Okay. So it's like starting the. It starts the clock. Okay. It starts the sleep pressure. This is, oh, this is the graph of rural versus urban plot. And so, yeah, I mean, you can see that pretty clearly. The red line here is the noise in a rural environment, and this is the noise here. The typical number you want to see for sound at night is like 35 decibels, right? So if you see the rural environment, you're cruising about that, and you see the urban environment, you're looking in the 60 to 7 as a baseline. Tons. Really? Yeah. The big thing with sound is inconsistency. A lot of people will do things like put a sound machine in the room. Most people put them too loud because of that thing. So you put them. Pretty common default is like 40 to 50 decimals for a sound machine. More of the data suggests sub 40, especially for kids. If you're using a sound machine for your children, most people put them too close and too loud. What's a sound machine? Just a little device that makes a white noise. And what that does is it cancels out a bunch of low-level inconsistent sounds. Oh, okay. So the dog getting up, the window creaking, the car driving by. And so it can kind of cancel that noise level out. How come I can have like a great night's sleep listening to a podcast falling asleep, whereas my partner can't? She needs silence. And I almost feel like I need to listen to something to fall asleep. Most likely you would do better if you didn't do that. Really? Yep. You turn them off before you go to sleep, right? Yeah. Okay. That will never lead to your best sleep. Okay. What happens is you get to bed and something is happening cognitively. And you're like, I need something to switch me off. To distract me. Great. If we took that away from you, you might sleep worse because you're going to sit there and struggle through that moment. If you wanted to go from upgrade, we would say, okay, let's figure out what is actually a way for you to down-regulate cognitively, give you that same thing that won't then disrupt your sleep throughout the night. Have you dealt with people in that situation before? Super common. Podcasts are an incredibly common one with that. TV, books. My philosophy is let's step back and solve causes. Let's solve constraints rather than mask them. You've got a host of different supplements over here. Everything you see in this table has moderate to strong scientific evidence that it will help us sleep. What are those things? So lovely, delicious looking tart cherry juice. And I'll go through why that is there. You've got some chamomile tea. You would see this in the supplement form of apigenin. It's a really common way of that. It's kind of like distilled chamomile. Look at these lovely kiwis. What's funny here is this is actually what happens in research. They will give people two to three kiwis. It will eat them right before bed. And you will very routinely see people sleeping better after ingestion of kiwis. Other things that are high on the evidence-based list are, of course, magnesium and various forms. More of the research now on magnesium for sleep is turning to a particular form called magnesium bisglycinate rather than threonate. That's up there as well. You will also see things like omega 3. This is your common fish oil. Oh, this is actually interesting because this popped up on your labs as something we have to work on. Oh, my test. Yeah. We'll come back to that in a second. Okay. And then, of course, you've got melatonin, right? The issue with all these is the same that you have with your podcast. These are doing the exact same thing. So one thing we could do is say, this is the podcast, and let's go with one or multiple of these options because they're doing the same thing. They're a cognitive turnoff. Apigenin or chamomile specifically, specifically will play that role. It is a reasonable switch that says frontal cortex turnoff. And so you're getting there through the podcast where you could get through there's through food or supplements if you'd like as well. Kiwis. Kiwis have scientific evidence that they improve sleep for some people. It's really common. There's like levels to this. You'd probably like level one, two, and three, level one being things like, actually surprising enough, magnesium, chamomile, melatonin, of course, randomized control trials. Level one being the best, the best of the best, the best, highest quality. And you'd say what, magnesium, kiwis? Yeah. Kiwis would probably be like a level two or level three. Okay. So there's been good studies on them, enough to put them on this table, enough to say there's data there. So you're getting some product below it. In this case, apigenin, in this case, other phytochemicals that either reduce a little bit of cognitive function, they reduce arousal, they put you in some sort of checkout state. And then there's this one over here, melatonin. Yeah. That a lot of people are aware of. Yeah. Strong. What level is melatonin? So melatonin probably has more evidence than the rest of these things combined because it's a medicine. It's a drug. There's a ton of research on it from children to aging, to bone health and tons of other stuff, right? It's a hormone. You're going to be able to move some units with this one. Nobody is going to be super concerned about risk factor profiles with eating two kiwis. But you start getting to the level of something like a melatonin, melatonin. And now you have to have real conversations about risk versus benefits. We typically don't use melatonin at the dosage that's normal. So a common dosage for melatonin is like 5 milligrams, sometimes even up to 10. Wow. We will typically use like 0.3, maybe 0.5, so about a tenth that dose. A lot of times we're trying to find like 1 milligrams, cut them in half, kind of things like that. The only real reason we use melatonin outside of some fringe cases is when we actually legitimately need to reset circadian rhythm. Travel, jet lag, things like that. And it is effective and it is useful there. It is safe in small doses. Where people mistake melatonin is I use it every night to go to sleep and or I wake up in the middle of the night, can't go back to sleep, I go grab a melatonin. Why is that bad? It doesn't work. It doesn't work? No, because the thing that melatonin is supposed to do is realign circadian rhythm. If you're in the middle of the night, you're already in that rhythm. It's not going to do anything. I don't know. I don't want people to do this, but you would actually be better reaching for something like a chamomile perhaps because if you're having a hard time getting back to sleep cognitively, this is not going to do it. The other issue is we've done a lot of morning urine testing. There's enough studies that look at the dosage that's actually in the pill versus those on the label and they can be up to 100x higher. 100x? And we see this in morning urine. We have seen people who are consistently tired. They're sleeping. It doesn't look horrible. They're doing all the right things. It's cold. It's dark. They're meditating. They're doing all this stuff. They're popping in even a moderate dose of melatonin. And the amount of melatonin the next day in their urine is 100x the upper end of the reference range, which means they're spending the rest of their next day in a hyper-dosed melatonin state. So they have to live then on stimulants to get back to normal. How would they feel? Horrible. They would feel sluggish. You wake up the next day and you're like, man. It's weird. It's what we call sleep inertia. You're wildly groggy. You can't get out of bed or you're just getting throughout the day. This is like, don't talk to me until I've had my coffee kind of response, right? This is not a normal waking physiology that you should be going through. Presumably, that's just melatonin from sort of cheap sources that haven't been tested. That's going to knock off a huge part of your problem, right? Only this is why we'll always say no one needs supplements. No essential person needs to have any supplement to live a great, healthy life. If you choose to use supplements, though, just buy them from third-party tested, transparent companies that place their testing on their websites that give you open access to it for these exact reasons. Vitamin D has a similar profile of inaccuracy. The other issue with that then simply, let's say you're buying it from a high-quality source. You're dosing it too much and you're taking it too late. So take it earlier than you think before bed so that your body has a chance to break it down before the next morning. What kind of time? And how quickly acting is it? It's person-to-person dependent, but a lot of times you'll see things like an hour before. Some people will feel a response in 10 to 15 minutes. Some people will feel it closer to an hour, but that's a pretty good window. Hang on, if it's 2 a.m. in the morning and you're getting in bed, don't take it? Don't take it at all. Okay. We're going to use this in very specific situations, and then we're coming off of it. This should not be a part of your nightly routine most of the time. What exactly is going on in my brain when I take melatonin? Because a lot of people take it, and we know that it makes. It makes us feel tired. But understanding the mechanism, I think, will help us understand the application. So it actually doesn't really make you feel tired. That's part of the issue. Oh. The mechanism is a circadian shift. So it's telling your endogenous system that this is nighttime. So it doesn't hit you with like a, oh, my eyes are there. This hits you with a shift in cortisol. This hits you with a shift in a whole cascade of epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin that are moving around and saying, this is the milieu that you need to be in that is consistent with a sleep pattern. Yeah. Okay. So I take it, and then it regulates my other hormones, which would be getting in the way of me feeling tired erratically. That's probably more appropriate to what it does. Okay. Because, yeah, I've taken it a couple of times. Again, always for jet lag issues. And within about 30, 45 minutes, I feel a bit drowsy. And then I find my eyes going shutting, and I'm off. Great. And then you get out of that two- or three-day window, put it back away, and you're off and going. That's a good use case for it. The mistake is when this is like, I can't go to bed without. I'm generally. I'm generally scared of all these things, because honestly, anything that's effective, I'm more scared of. Yeah. And so. Sure. It's really effective, which makes me hesitant to use it frequently. Yeah. It's a good default position to be in, by the way. It's a good strategy. Yeah. Because one of the things you learn from doing a podcast like this is you just learn that everything has a trade-off. Always. And again, this might not be logically sound, but I assume that the bigger the upside, the bigger the trade I'm making on the other side, as a general rule. So do you know the only thing that I've still not been able to, I guess, understand the full trade-off of is coffee? Because the upside is so significant. No one can articulate to me the downside other than they say, if you have it after midday, it's going to impact your sleep. But I'm like, come on, there's got to be. The phrase that I'll say in my class all the time is, there's no free passes in physiology. With coffee specifically, actually, we have a meta-analysis led by my colleague, Dr. Ben House, puts it together. But if you look at the research on caffeine and sleep, it's very interesting because if you go through a coffee, you're going to find that it's not going to affect your sleep. If you go through sleep deprivation, your physical and cognitive performance goes down. No surprise there. Coffee can offset that. Caffeine specifically is the thing. But what it doesn't do, at least the data and the meta-analysis suggests, is it doesn't actually put you back into the augmented spot. Meaning, if you. Did you sleep great last night? I think so, yeah. A full night? Okay. Let's just say you're there. If we took you out and we had you throw that medicine ball and we did a grip strength tester and we did. Some sprints up and down, whatever you want to do, you would perform well. And then if we gave you caffeine, you'd perform better. It's why we call it ergogenic aid. It's a performance enhancer. Caffeine is really effective primarily at endurance-based events, but it is a stimulatory thing that people will use. So let's just say you have normal baseline performance, then caffeine augments that performance. If you go into sleep debt, the sleep itself will reduce your performance. And the coffee can bring you back to normal, but it won't bring you back to that augmented state that you had when you were rested and caffeinated. This is important because a lot of people will be like, ah, I'll throw away the sleep or I won't worry about it as much because I'll just take more stimulants tomorrow. And I feel great. You will feel as good, but you will not perform as well. So what you need to perform at your best, if you're a caffeine user, is to be both well-rested and then caffeinated. Another thing you want to pay attention to in your sleep environment, labeled ergonomics here, is your pillow, your bed, your mattress. This is mostly based on feel. Is there any no-goes in this regard? Not really. Not really? No, unless, let's say you have a sleeping partner and you're sleeping in a bed that is too small and that results in you hitting each other or touching each other, and you don't like that. So other than those, the framework themselves, there's really nothing to be concerned with. What about these like eight sleep beds? Eight sleep is fantastic. So eight sleep is not a bed, it's a cover, which regulates temperature. If you are in a bedding situation where you're getting hot, then that's a problem. So if then an eight sleep will help you regulate that temperature, it's a great solution. If you're not in that situation, then you're going to be just fine. So temperature regulation is a really big deal. And you'll quite often see people that do that, whether that's getting a product like that, or it's getting a sheet that's cooler, or a mattress that is better with ventilation, then you'll oftentimes see them sleep a little bit better. Next on our list is screen usage. Everyone has been told, and you know, perhaps nothing's more destructive to your sleep than your screen. What's more interesting here is the stuff that people generally don't talk about. It's not the fact that necessarily screen usage is shooting your face with a bunch of blue light. What's more dangerous about your screen is the arousal associated with the search for novelty. The search for novelty. What does that mean? You're engaging in a podcast, social media, a game. It is puzzle driven. It is solution. It is. It is interest. It is engagement. It is search for the next. That's the stuff that more likely than not cause sleep disturbances. In the studies that I've looked at things like TV time versus tablet versus phone versus reading, those all can be equally dangerous to sleep. Here is the example. I am a TV before bed guy. A giant TV with a blast of blue light. I sleep great with that. My wife. My wife really struggles with light before bed. She will read. And yet she chooses to read things that I don't think she should be reading before night. And then she'll wake up because of the topics that she's reading. Where I'm watching things on TV that are, you know, documentaries on Ulysses Grant or something. And you're just like, that is the least engaging thing ever. So it's not the fact that the light is there. I use that stuff much like you use your podcast, which is my entire day is so driven by somebody wanting my attention and time. I have to have something that I can do. And that gives me a cognitive switch that says, you get to turn off. I wanted to add something to this, which I've been thinking about this week. So in Meta, Meta own Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp, et cetera. In Meta's earnings call this week, Mark Zuckerberg talked about how they changed the recommendation algorithm on social media apps using AI. And this was something that we've always forecasted would happen. And we've been thinking about the creator economy and how it impacted. But specifically for people listening. What essentially he said is every time you post something on Instagram, whether it's a real or a normal post, they now feed it to a large language model in AI and the AI. effectively and again i'm summarizing here watches it and it can now understand the full context of what it's watching so if it's watching a clip of you and me right now it'll understand that that is andy galpin he's holding a card he's wearing a black t-shirt he's they'll look at the transcript know what you said and this is all pertinent because it then can without in the past needing to look at the caption and the hashtags it can then decide with way more context than ever before who exactly would want to see that and the net impact of that for the user of instagram or these other social media apps or tiktok whatever it is is you're going to be more retained now than ever before and as you were talking about that i thought i wonder if they think about timing of day like i wonder if they think at 11 p.m there's a certain thing that's going to keep andy scrolling versus something at 9 a.m when you're off to work and of course they do because that and you know they were talking about on the earnings call mark was saying how it's increased retention by i think 15 basis points and there's this quote where he said there are already two large sets of content to draw from first from your friends and people you follow and second from creators that you don't follow but now there's going to be a whole new and nearly infinite universe of personalized content which from the iron felt they're saying is with their new large language model called muse is we're actually going to make new content to show up in that no one made no humans made we're going to make stuff that we know andy will like and so i say all this to say that in this sleep conversation that we've been talking about as creators we've been saying basically it's going to get really difficult if you're a creator because now if you have a million followers it doesn't matter no if jenny has zero followers but she makes something that is contextually more interesting than the million follower guy jenny's thing's going to seem be seen to everyone but actually now you're going to be competing with an ai that's going to be churning out super personalized andy galpin content like that just andy would just love it love at 11 p.m i said to my team this week i was like just take care of yourself do you know what i mean like just be aware you know when you open your phone that the ai is doing everything it can to retain you yeah i mean just don't be on your phone we've been making this argument for years but geez um you got every disadvantage possible coming in your way and and look we're all human i i think i remember last time i was here you were talking about how like you wake up in your phones right there but your your fiance like doesn't touch your phone for the first hour of the day or something it's just like on the charger until noon or something you're just like what i'm more like you right where i'm like my phone is in my room it's not three rooms like i'm just not doing any of that stuff right and we started this entire piece by saying the environment you're in is just different than it's ever been before and it's not getting any better and at some point you have to make that decision of do you care about your own health do you care about the thing the next day that you didn't do well and you care more about that than you cared about that next reel what is it that's causing us to understand everything you just said but to ignore it and to pick up our phone anyway you are hard driven the entire biology of our species to search for novelty in fact i i look at this from the lens of sports why do you care about high achievement why do i care about performance there has direct translation when someone breaks a barrier we all benefit from that and i could give you direct examples of this but we have every story you want to go to joseph campbell hero's journey right you want to go back to hercules the story of the marathon like you pull any story from history out and what are you actually looking at you're looking at somebody did something that no one has ever done before you care more about records than you do regular wins and losses why because they're novel why are you more interested in watching messy break that record than you are the other team winning in the exact same shot it's because you saw something you got to be there when someone did something for the first time in human history i get more of a dopamine hit from the novelty from the new thing it's more than the dopamine hit though it's a sense of purpose your life mattered because you got to be involved in something no one else did because you saw something you got to be involved in something no one else has ever seen and even as that bystander on tv 30 000 kilometers away you got to be a part of that and that all comes down to we are so wired to reward novelty so then now that comes back to your life and you have to be thinking how do you walk away from that core drive thinking about a in psychology class in school with pigeons getting variable rewards i'm going to butcher this but bear with me they took a pigeon and they got a little lever for it to press and every time it would press the lever and sometimes it would get a reward and they found from the study that if they made the rewards variable i.e it couldn't predict when it was coming the pigeon was more likely to keep pressing the lever i.e it was more addicted to the behavior if it didn't know when the dopamine hit was coming or the the treat in that case scrolling on social media is kind of like the slot machine of variable rewards i just don't know what i'm gonna get but every fourth you know scroll i get or every 40th yeah it's even better right because the more unpredictable it is the more likely you are to be like one more one more one more one more right like if it actually comes too quickly you care less so you're going to scroll through all the boring stuff boring stuff boring stuff boring stuff boring stuff for the one and every 40 that gets you that's what you're actually there for i mean if i gave most people and i said like you can have ten thousand dollars or you can have ten thousand dollars in equity in a startup i look at your face like i don't know if you're like i know what you're doing you want to like people are it depends on where you're at right but it's just like okay and if i said right now the most likely scenario is that ten thousand dollars zero yeah which is what happens right you're like kind of hedge can i go five and five like you're gonna go you don't you unless you need the 10 grand which a lot of people do but you get the point because you're like man walking away from belief walking away from hope walking away from what if is insanely hard to do i deleted one of these social media apps just completely from my phone and honestly you always think that you're going to have like fomo you're not going to know what's going on or there's going to be some huge loss to your life if you don't have an app on your phone and it's just remarkable when you delete these some of these social media apps how positive of a net impact it has on your life i have a a friend of mine named sean o'malley a famous efc fighter he was sitting at his pool and he had his daughter was like one or two years old and he was like scrolling twitter and was like what am i doing like my daughter's over here in front of me he's two years old like i'm on scrolling like not doing work or not making a post not i'm just scrolling dumped it was just like team you guys handle it not on any social media anymore so that screens that screens my friend another one to think about which we've sort of touched on is called the presence of other beings this is our classic sleep divorce i assume you uh as i do share your sleeping environment with your partner yes tough to make the argument of like get a sleep divorce right yeah i'm not telling you you can tell her it's funny if it was up to my wife we would have a sleep divorce you're joking no she's like get away from me don't touch me she wants to like if we could have separate beds in separate rooms she i don't snore anything but she's just like my fiance is the opposite it's not super realistic but it is true there are data behind it people generally don't sleep as well when you're in the same bed as others the realistic solution try to get your sleep to sleep as well as you can get sheets or a sleeping situation in which when one partner moves it doesn't roll the other person oh like separate sheets separate sheets or simply the type of sheets um my wife loves to be really constricted so she likes the sheets tucked in tight she likes to bed and i hate it like i feel like i'm in shawshank i'm like break me out like rip it all out of there so there's little things like that that don't require you to buy anything and we just change kind of the the setup and the scenario to where their movement doesn't impact you as much um noise would be the same one if you are sleeping with somebody who makes a lot of noise tosses and turns a bunch um you could put a pillow in between so when they roll over and move they don't hit you earplugs things like that so that one's a pretty straightforward one but that said it's pretty impactful it can really make a big difference and if you're really struggling maybe do a partial sleep divorce okay next sleeping a new environment this would oftentimes be called first night effect so your first night whether it's back home whether it's in a hotel or somewhere else you don't feel as comfortable and as safe and your circadian rhythms the things that set your timing aren't there this is sound this is light this is feel this is temperature this is smell what you can do if you travel a lot our athletes travel every three to five days right this is what they do you can try to mimic your sleep environment at home on the road some people will take their pillows other things that are on this similar list are smells like lavender lavender is moderately associated with helping people fall asleep none of those is going to like knock you out what you're looking to do is stack winds next is temperature you want to be cool generally you're looking at 64 to 68 degrees this is personally dependent um some people actually like to be a little bit colder so that they can have a heavier blanket because i like that feeling when this idea got popular about a few years ago people just started raking the acs right and you're just like, get the room as cold as you possibly can. That can become a problem because we're seeing this somewhat consistency where when people's air conditioners kick on, it actually wakes them up. And as we talked about earlier, with noise, it's not necessarily always about the volume, but it's the change in sound. And so you have something kicking on, kicking off, kicking on, kicking off. The other thing we see is because of air quality situations, we've seen quite often when we have environmental sensors and stuff that if your air conditioner is not clean and the fan is not in there, you can actually kick a bunch of dander and particulates and other things into the air. And then you start breathing those things in overnight, and your nose starts to get a little bit stuffed up, you can't breathe through your nose, and then boom, you have this hypopneic or apneic event. The last component that comes up pretty often at absolute rest is fans. This can make your mouth dry. So if you're waking up with that and you're like, ah, I've got to get a drink of water or something, then maybe consider not having the fan blow directly out of your face. An interesting thing I was thinking about there, which is there was the viral experiment done in 2009 by MindLab Sleep Study, where they conducted the sleep experiment at the University of Sussex. Researchers hooked men and women up to an ECG machine to measure their brainwaves and played a variety of ambient sounds while they slept to see which noises triggered an immediate wake response. And the top wake responses from men and women was completely different. Men's top trigger was a car alarm. Women's top trigger was a baby crying. Men's top trigger was wind howling outside. Women's second top trigger, I should say, is a dripping tap. Men's third top is buzzing or flying of a mosquito. Women's was shouting outside. And both of their fourth top trigger was snoring. But it was interesting that the thing that woke most men at their top trigger in that study was an alarm outside, but women's was a baby's crying. Yeah, every mother out there is going, yep. It's in fact one of the largest causes of sleep disorders in women. is having children. What happens after childbirth, and it's a whole interesting field here of postpartum care, is really poor in women. Like, we just sort of, like, start paying attention to baby, stop paying attention to mom as soon as baby comes out. Well, I'm saying that because it is obvious and clear that the last trimester can present a lot of sleep challenges for women. And then especially as soon as the baby's there, like, you're just going to have some known period of sleep deprivation, whether it's delivery or having a newborn, all that stuff. And that can actually cause patterns. This can cause insomnia. This can cause irregular sleep schedules, circadian disorders, natural thing. Totally fine. In some percentage of women, those patterns will persist. And so you'll see women who have sleep disorders, even with adult children, that started because of the childbirth. We are advocating at all times, like, yeah, get through it. I got two kids. You know, I've been there. But then just make sure you're providing care and going back to try to fix those things. And why that is difficult is because the study just mentioned. It's worth saying there is an evolutionary theory behind this that says, you know, men and women are attuned to different things. But there's also a counter argument that says the difference in who actually wakes up and who gets out of bed is often heavily driven by social roles, parenting expectations, and individual sleep depth rather than a biological inability for men to hear the baby. So how do we close off on the subject of sleep? Is there anything that we haven't touched on that we should have touched on as it pertains to how to have incredible sleep? One thing that I think will help everyone, whether you're at any of those stages, free, a little bit of money, or you got to go the full end of the spectrum and use a hospital or a service like ours, is everyone has the ability to run self-experiments. We have a free guide that anyone can go use. And it's just a quick tutorial about how to run your own self-experiment for sleep specifically. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So this is up and available for free on our website. Anyone can check it out. There's a lot of stuff in here we've covered. You can get more into it. If you're interested in learning more about sleep, you can get more into it. But the short answer of it is we don't want to make people think sleep has to be the center of their life. Oftentimes when sleep comes up, people start thinking, I'd love to sleep more, but I'm too busy. Hey, I'm the same boat. I can't afford to have a 12-hour sleep routine. Where we should be paying attention to is sleep resilience. Steve, I want you to be as resilient to bad sleep as possible. I don't want you optimizing your sleep. I want you to be as resilient to bad sleep as possible. Optimization turns into that. Giant routine before bed. I got to take 12 different supplements and four different cocktails. If I have to do that along the way, great. The end game though should be resilient, meaning you had a bad night of sleep. Cool. And you still performed. We had this challenge. Flight got delayed. Great. We still executed. I want you to know how to get a good night of sleep so you can feel as resilient as possible. I want you to know how to get a good This is all energy management. And what you'll see is these people are world-class performers get incredibly good at going 80% of my energy suck comes out of here for 20% ROI. I'm going to switch that out. They're better at choosing what matters and what doesn't matter. Okay. And this is everything from what supplement is working to what type of person that they work with. Where people struggle is in the like, what if I could also be doing this? What if I could also be doing this? What if I add this on top? Okay. So I thought you were talking about, I guess if I try and put this into some sort of analogy or metaphor, the high performers wake up with a hundred energy chips, let's say, and they're really, really good at allocating them against the most important thing. Yes. Whereas maybe Jenny and Dave listening kind of let it seep out. They put 20 on Instagram, 20 over here on this. And they spin their wheels. They spin their wheels. They go, okay, great. I'm going to, I listened to this podcast and I got super excited about zone two. I'm going to go hop into a bunch of zone two. And then I listened to this other podcast and I got super excited about journaling. Let me go add journaling to my mix. And then what ends up happening is you see their daily routine and you're like, okay, your daily routine is 20 hours. And then at some point, like you didn't actually do anything that mattered. What is the one thing that can get you to that goal in the most effective way possible? And then everything else has to actively be stripped away. So the traditional thing we like to do is we give one to two, what we call active movements per week, which is, this is something, you have to actively remember to do. You don't actively remember to brush your teeth. You don't have to actually remember to shower, blah, blah, blah. You might at this point not have to actively think about your gratitude practice or your meditation time. Like you probably have these things you've been doing for years. Great. I don't actually call those additive because you do those, you're going to get those in. But I might ask you to do one thing different. I don't know what that would be, but I would look at this and say, here's your constraint. I'm not going to ask you to do five things now. It's too difficult. Maybe this is something that you're going to do. Maybe you're going to change in what time you eat. Okay. Your training style. Find what's constraining you from your energy. What things could it be? It could be sleep. It could be mismanagement of relationships. It could be you're working too much. It could be you're under fueling. You're not eating enough. It could be that you're overusing stimulants, sleeping poor, and you're in that cycle, right? It could be you're not seeing sunlight. So what you need to do is run a quick analysis and think, what is the single biggest thing in your way? Is it the fact that you're in pain? Great. Maybe the only one thing I want you to go after then is let's go figure out why that knee hurts. Okay. So for me, you've seen my blood results. Yeah. So what things might improve my energy from the blood results that you saw? Okay, great. What are you, mid thirties, early thirties? I'm 33. 33. All right. You're lean. You're active. The first thing that jumps out on your report. Yeah. Can we skip that page, please? Skip the page. You're going to see quickly the performance. Okay. This is medical. So we're looking at cholesterol and cholesterol related markers. You've got, I don't know, a dozen of them or so in there. Not one's good. This is incredibly actionable. Can I ask a question about this? What does it mean? And then I was going to ask a secondary question, which is, I was going to try and self-diagnose why I think this is the case, but. I would love that second question. That'll actually tell us where to go. So when you look at things like blood work, these are secondary measures of physiology. They're trying to predict what we'll call an outcome. Meaning in this case, we are looking at your heart health. Okay. There is an association, and I choose that word carefully, between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Okay. High cholesterol, low cholesterol, good cholesterol, all of the above. Very traditionally, excessively high cholesterol is going to be associated with earlier heart disease, heart attack, could even manifest itself into strokes and things like that. Right. So if we were to just like zoom all the way out and we say, all right, your cholesterol is extremely high. I'm concerned about your heart health. There's way more to the story, but at the top of it, that's where we're at. So the second question I was going to ask is, at the time that I did these blood test results, I was frequently in a ketogenic diet. I know. There's a lot to unpack here, and a lot of people are going to get mad online. Cholesterol has lifestyle, dietary, and familial causes. Oftentimes you might have high cholesterol and all these various markers simply because that's a familial genetic inheritance and there's not a lot of action behind it. When you see these things independent of obesity, now we have a different connotation. If I were to look at all this stuff and go, oh yeah, sure, you're 35% body fat. I know you drink alcohol. Then I'm like, okay, this is true, but let's tackle those things first because those have so many robust implications on your health. That's the starting place. You don't drink alcohol excessively. I don't even know if you drink alcohol at all. You don't drink and have it in years, I assume, right? You don't smoke. So all those things are checked off the list. This means this is actionable. I should give you some context here. My uncle died of a heart attack and my dad had a heart operation last week. Do you remember what kind of heart operation? He had a pacemaker put in, but he's been on statins, I think, for a long time. I think he's been on statins for about 15 years, if I was to guess, about 15, 20 years. So when I look at this tragedy with your familial history, do you remember what advice you got when you got these results of what to do? Do you know, I did two tests. I did this one with Function Health, who I believe are a sponsor, so I should say that. And I did the second one with Nico Health, where I'm a big investor in the company. They both said to me, like, Steve, stop eating steak all the time. Bacon, stop eating bacon all the time. The way that I heard it was, damn, this ketogenic diet you've been on, Steve, you need to just take it easy. And have you done blood work since then? No. All right. First thing that would pop up, and this is the order I would do this in, when you get something like blood work, the value is not in the data. The value is in the interpretation. What they're talking about, why you heard that as steak, butter, bacon, is because those are food items high in saturated fat. Saturated fat is not evil. There are no evil foods. It's only evil context, right? So in your particular case, if we saw those, and we don't have this, but if we had a food item that was high in saturated fat, and we saw those, and we had your baseline before that test, and then we had this, and we went, okay, when you changed your diet and increased your saturated fat intake, and then we saw these numbers increase, most ethical people in this space would look at that and say, that's not a positive thing. That does not mean ketogenic diets are bad or unsafe. Not at all. It only means if we had those theoretical data for you, it's probably not healthy. You stack that on top of the fact that you have your uncle and your dad in there. And I would triple down and go, talk to your doctor. I'm not your medical doctor, but I'd be really concerned about that. Then what I would do would be go to the next step. Let's run the experiment and see. This is an indirect marker. And remember, what is it trying to predict? Your heart health. Have you had your heart scanned? Yes, I have. And? They said that I had like, I had a thick wall. Okay. Exercise-induced cardiac remodeling, especially if it's left ventricular. It's a good thing, right? So if your heart has four chambers, two on top, two on bottom, the two on the top are called atria, ventricles on the bottom. Oh, you've got a great image there as well. Yeah. So you can look at this as a maze. Okay. So we'll use double modeling here. Can you see how the left ventricle is much larger than the right ventricle? There's a reason. The right ventricle only has to kick blood to your lungs, which are physically quite close, a few inches away. The left ventricle has to kick it up, out through your entire body, down to the tip of your toes, all the way back up against gravity, and then back up into your heart. And so what you're seeing here is strength training. This is resistance exercise. Your left ventricle is lifting weights. It has to be bigger. It has to be stronger so that it can contract really hard and shoot all that blood up and down and up and out. If you said you had a thicker wall, either naturally or exercise-induced, just like when you lift with your biceps more, it's larger. The same thing is happening in left ventricle. Incredibly common and healthy adaptation. Okay. What we would be concerned about is if there was any type of blockage or any type of plaque buildup. One of the things that I remember them saying is they, again, I'm going to butcher this, but they told me there's kind of like two types of plaque buildup in my veins or my arteries, whatever. And they said the bad type you haven't got. And they said, but the other type you have got. And I think they were referring to the bad type as being more sticky. And it doesn't go. It'll dislodge. Oh, okay. And that can cause a risk. They said, I didn't have the bad type, but I had this other type that is temporary, but could turn into the bad type or something. Yeah. One thing you want to be really careful of, and this happened to a dear friend of mine, Joel Jameson. Young, super fit, all the things. No stress, doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, much like you, all this stuff. Family history. Didn't think about it. Blood work came back. Totally fine. Still asked to get a CT angiogram scan of his heart. His cardiologist said, no, you don't need it. You're young. You're all the thing got it anyways. And he had a, I think he had a 50% blockage of his, what's called a widow maker. You're flipping the dice, whether you're going to die here, right? So this is a classic case to me where he's doing all the right things, but imaging saved his life. Let's not live in fear. Let's go. Look, you went and had a looked. I'll just trust your physicians. Great. I'm less worried about this because this could be a direct response to your ketogenic diet which it almost certainly was and if it's presenting no risk to the place we actually care about then i'm less concerned about your cholesterol but is if it carries on like this could it create a absolutely could okay because they all do tell me to fix this yeah just keep getting a scan every few years and if you see any aggressive any build-up at all then i would manage it okay now in what you're seeing over here is that client of ours and so as an example i'll give you a specific number his total cholesterol was 347 we got him down to 223 what did you do fiber why fiber stress reduction fiber depending on the type of cholesterol will actually bind the cholesterol and clear it from the system you will physically reduce it that's why they one of the supplements i was told to take is a fiber supplement it's not always going to something i want to be really clear if you have numbers like you had you need to work with a doctor and you need to get screened don't just be like i took fiber i'm fine this guy said on a podcast that's not what i'm saying but it is it can be effective the other thing we did was massive stress reduction guy was a very hard charging ceo for a large company how is stress reduction going to impact my cholesterol things like cholesterol can be what are called acute phase reactants some parts of them not all of them meaning it responds to acute stress and stimuli when you look at things like blood work they aren't static they're responding to the entire system and so if you were to be stressed and we'll not to blame are they on cortisol but cortisol is elevated you are in a heightened alert state this causes short-term inflammation in fact if you look at i think your inflammation was a little bit um not so there oh this guy as well probably like your most classic inflammation marker is called crp his was that too which is really high we got him from 2 to 0.2 so 10x reduction that then allowed cholesterol to normalize the the easiest most technical way to get to say it is it's an acute phase reactant meaning it will change in response acutely to inflammation some markers will go up and some will go down in response to that like like d like vitamin d goes down if what if you in a stressed environment some go up some go down blood glucose goes up so you got your stress down you got his fiber up and that took him from 347 to 223 which is still high went from 223 to 163 now that took a statin oh so you did give him a statin we didn't but his medical team did okay and so this i and why i want to draw this point out is we were able to go a long ways with lifestyle but he wanted to go more he wanted to be green green green green green so that's when medicine came in and i to me this represents a a great marriage of the two some people are very anti-medicine some people are that's not my decision that's up to you and your medical provider but i think it's it's it's unfair to tell people things like all of it can be done and i think it's unfair to tell people things like all of it can be done and i think it's unfair to tell people things like all of it can be done and i think it's unfair to tell people things with lifestyle and there's no need for medicines ever or the opposite i'm just like oh just take the drug don't worry about it he needed all of it he needed stress reduction he needed some changes in his diet and that made a huge change in his biological health so if you were to be like look this is so complicated this guy like how can i make actual advice of all this stuff this guy's saying i don't have a private doctor and all cool just run the experiment try more fiber try to regulate your stress if you want to go the opposite route and jump right onto the the medical side that's fine too but it doesn't need to be super scary or super daunting because these are not like especially if your heart has been scanned i'm not concerned about an acute emergency the two things on here that i thought were were shocking to me are my my vitamin d levels and my omega levels which i was told were deficient yep i thought i was smashing it with those two because i think i was living in la at the time and yeah so your vitamin d was borderline low fairly african heritage are going to be lower in that marker okay you're at 37 kind of lower end that number is 40 that might actually be fine i think i heard you say something about them indeed again i don't want to butcher your words if this wasn't what you said but you kind of make the assumption that most people are deficient yeah it is true why does it matter so vitamin d is a nice microcosm of our health so what i mean by that is you will tend to see people low in vitamin d who are also tending to make poor health choices so it's a little bit like grip strength and all that where it's kind of a one snap shot at saying are you generally healthier not why is it needed specifically it is involved in every reaction from your brain to your gut to your hormones your immune system metabolism and everything in between it's critical to maintaining bone health it's critical to being able to grow skeletal muscle it's also clinically low in a high percentage of the population and even subclinically low in a vast majority of the population so should we be supplementing if we are low the real world will always win whole foods sunlight positive social environments that's always the place to start so do you want a supplement with it that's up to you i would much rather you get sunlight if possible now enter everyone in the chat going i live in the uk there's no sun sort of up here fine if you want to choose a supplement because you live in those situations then that's absolutely fine or i work in an office for 12 hours a day it's interesting because there is a bit of a paradox here in we're all in search of very natural solutions in a very unnatural way of living i had this conversation with my fiance a couple of couple of weeks back about a few things where in one area of our life we're trying to be really really natural yep um but i'm like babe look at the rest of our lives it's so unnatural we get on planes and have these smartphones and and so almost forcing this one part to be natural is yeah arguably going to cause a bit of a problem i mean it happens to me right like i'll put in the entire hours of the day and not even realize i didn't step outside yeah it absolutely happens so what i think you have to do is number one give yourself grace right like you're not going to be perfect i'm especially thinking about like single parents it's just like you're not going to go out spend 30 minutes in the sun night shift workers totally boy that's a really hard thing um we've dealt with a lot of nurses and surgeons and things like that where you're on call you're out and that's when we can lean towards modern medicine modern supplementation it's why those things are not trash they're not garbage they're not fake our strategy typically is that's can we find one actionable thing one thing that you're doing as a focus that is something you got to go out of your way and do and that might be you have to go outside today you have that might be your one thing to pay attention to when you start asking for more than one to two active things per week you start end up failing okay fine so with your omegas so your mega score at five is low you want that to be eight but you probably didn't notice your mercury was right on the line of high as well those things will typically track the more omega-3s you consume the more mercury goes up oh really because most omega-3 sources are going to be filled with mercury but i was low omega and high mercury so what that tells us is if you were to jack your omega-3s up your mercury is going to get into the line that we don't want to be in so solution you need to alter the source of your omega-3s get it from a higher quality place so i'm not sure where you were getting them from there all over the place yeah but you would want to to either choose your supplement more carefully or choose better quality foods what actually moves the needle on this subject of energy which is what we're talking about here is there anything that is more consequential as it relates to these people that are trying to get more energy in their life they feel lethargic we talked about sleep as being a real foundation here if you're looking for more energy i would divide everything into two buckets hidden stressors and visible stressors visible stressors are things like you're not exercising we know from excellent databases physical exercise enhances energy why and how mitochondrial health is one of the many aspects of it you'll have more mitochondria if you exercise more generally not only we have more they'll be larger and they'll be healthier and mitochondria basically process your energy so you get more efficient energy production they're one of the ways you can make it you can make energy a lot of different ways it is the end path of all the energy production and it's the end path of all the energy production and it's the end path of all aerobic exercise so in other words anytime you're using oxygen as a byproduct to make fuel mitochondria have to be there so it is central and core to that but it is more than mitochondria you'll have more total blood if you exercise yes it's one of the primary adaptations to endurance is you'll physically have more blood in your body and that will mean you carry more oxygen oh okay you have more red blood cells so you're able to carry more oxygen to fuel those mitochondria is that a certain type of exercise that gives you more generally anything that demands blood flow will increase blood supply cardiovascular exercise can be can be anything okay stress equals adaptation meaning if you put a demand on your heart to pump more blood it'll get better pumping more blood if you put a demand on bone to resist tension it'll get better at resisting tension you run the whole cascade of connective tissue to cellular health it is simply what's called the said principle s a i d specific adaptation to impose demand and also is it fair to say then if we take the word exercise out of the traditional definition which is like in a gym doing a thing and we broaden it to work or just you know cognitive performance remember exercise is a novel made-up term this is a new thing to us historically humans have carried have sprinted have jumped have climbed have grappled have done all those things putting that into a structured non-daily activity is a last 75 year phenomenon right it wasn't actually until we started to realize that stress reduction to the end of the limit is about thing. And then we had to recreate stress into our lives. One form of that was we call that exercise. So yes, if you think about exercise as either running, cycling, swimming, or lifting weights, you have left a bunch on the table. I don't care how you're challenging yourself, even if that structured exercise in your example is more vocationally based. It's the stress being provided to the system. And so when you start to look at things like what's the best exercise protocol for A, B, and C, one of the things you start to realize is all of them can have equal responses given a few constraints. And if they hit that constraint, they work. So if you have a movement practice, you skateboard, you play pickle, you walk, you garden, fine. All those can have equal clinical outcomes, mortality, joint pain, body composition, because they're getting to the same spot. Does this make sense then? So if I'm, say I'm a podcaster and I want to have more energy to podcast, I should podcast more. Yeah. You'll be more resilient to it, right? Okay. So you could apply that to sort of any vocation or activity. If I want to have more energy to lift my kids up and run with them in the garden, then I should lift things and run with them. Stress inoculation. And then in the future, my body will adapt and it'll give me more energy for that particular activity. So sometimes when people say they don't have energy for a thing, it's because they haven't challenged themselves in that particular activity enough to expand and adapt. It's really difficult, right? Right. So if walking up the stairs is a VO2 max test for you, how likely are you to walk upstairs? Oh, okay. So it's like a downward spiral. Too difficult, right? So then what happens? You don't do it. And you get- Yeah, let's get at it. Able to do it, right? Yeah. So when we started thinking about energy and I started talking about like hidden, visible stressors, right? I'm looking for constraints. Do you have an undiagnosed pathogen in your body? We have a major league baseball player, felt horrific. I'm talking like it through a baseball game. Legs are shot, no energy whatsoever. In his particular case, we were able to confirm in his blood, in his physical bedroom, and with a bunch of other tests for actually you test his eyes and you test a bunch of other stuff. He had a very gnarly exposure to mold. All we had to do in large part was get that cleared and his energy came back. That's an example of a hidden stressor. But one of the things we're always looking for is are you an energy toxicity? Meaning, are you eating too many calories, which is not the same as being obese? Or are you in low energy availability? You're sleeping fine, but you're of low energy? Are you eating enough calories? Oh, you're not. Like we have to go no further on this train. You are under fueled for what you're asking. So there's things that are hidden stressors like that. There are visible stressors, which we just talked about. Like you're not actually doing the thing. Another easy way to explain this is cognitively. If you want to write a book, and you don't currently write, and you sit down to write, it's going to be exhausting. And then you talk to a writer and there's like, oh yeah, like I need 45 minutes so I can crank out a thousand words. It's like not exhausting at all, right? Stress inoculation is exactly what you said before. You can build up endurance in those things by them. This is one of the things I've learned from this podcast and meeting all these exceptional people is this like use it or lose it principle. You know, because I'm getting older and you start to feel the odd pain, you know, and so you start to feel the pain. And then you start to feel the pain. And then you start to feel like not use that part, you know, your back, for example, or bending down. And so you find ways to not bend down properly so you can avoid the pain. And what's happening there is because something is difficult, you do it less, which then means it becomes more difficult. So you do it less. And there's this downward feedback loop to decline. Atrophy leads to atrophy. Yeah. And like, you know, I think the critical idea that got in my head a couple of years ago from someone I was interviewing on the podcast was that aging isn't always the excuse. And I think that's a good point. I think we assume it's just aging. So we accept it and we don't fight back. When I sat here with one of the exceptional PhDs that I interviewed, she showed me, I think it was a DEXA scan of a 70 year old. It was like a pentathlete. And then a DEXA scan of someone that was like 30 years old. And this 70 year old was just phenomenal. Yeah, that sort of bone, their muscle, etc. And she basically proved to me, I'll put up the scan on the screen. It really is a mind blowing scan. I've actually sent it to my best friends because it really did. I couldn't, I couldn't get this idea out of me. that actually don't accept everything as an aging problem, because the minute you do, you go on this downward cycle. And it blew my mind. And that was such an important idea to get in my head at my age at 30 years old. So when I feel like a pain in my back, my, my solution isn't, okay, Steven, you're getting older, stop bending down and protect the pain. It is go to the gym and start squatting and bending, etc. There are some things that will go down with age. Sleep is actually one of them. We typically just see you will sleep a little bit less as you age. Fine. There are some aspects of but I think you can resist and fight as much of that as possible. This is actually, you're seeing a turning of the tide right now that this is starting to emerge with longevity. Longevity is currently being positioned as this anti aging phenomenon. And people are already bored. Like, is your goal to just not age? Or is your goal to dunk a basketball at 70? Do you want to have the four by four truck that has the best off road package ever? And it stays in your garage? Probably not. Right? Like you want to be able to be like, no, you want to live because you want to experience life. And so then you want to be able to take advantage of those capacities and functionality. Yeah, someone said to me, you want to extend your health span, not necessarily your lifespan. It's not health span, though. Oh, really? No, that's what I'm that's what I'm pushing back on. Health span. Cool. I mean, lifespan. Fine. Great. We're all past that. Health span, though, is still like, I don't want to be in pain. I don't want to be I'm saying performance span, I'm saying I want you to be focused on having the most skill, I want you to just be crushing cognitively. I want you to be able to do anything you want physically, for as long as we possibly can. And not just being like, well, that's going to go away. Let's just stay alive and be out of pain. I want you to be thinking about no, like, I'm going to be doing awesome stuff in whatever venue you like to do it in. For as long as you possibly can. I think people want both. Yeah, of course. Yeah. But let's not for, let's just not leave that into the table off and assume the performance has to go away. So on this point of energy, then I think we've covered a lot of it and given me some sort of really actionable principles there for how to have more energy. I do notice I have to say, because I travel quite a lot. And so on occasion, my gym routine will be impacted. And there's quite a clear correlation for me between the amount of times I've gone to the gym in previous weeks. And how I feel in terms of energy today. I was thinking about this this morning. We're in New York. I'm in New York here. And over the last couple of weeks, I've probably been going to the gym like three or four, like three times a week, if I'm being honest. Whereas usually I'd go almost every day. And I have felt a difference in my energy. And I wasn't sure if that was just like psychological or if that was supported by science. Both. If you go and do a moderate to light, lower intensity exercise session, those are generally going to provide energy. If you're like, no, I did a like, to the death training, I pegged it, I went all the way, whatever that is, with your lifting weights, intensity, whether you're, you know, you're doing a lot of weight training, you're doing a lot of weight training, getting your heart rate all the way up, then you might walk out of those and be like, whoa, I'm exhausted. But on aggregate, those will provide more daily energy. If you're traveling, sick, super busy, do the former. Like just get in some motion, you'll feel better, you'll get a sweat in, you'll be there. If you're healthy and looking for long term adaptation, then that's when you can start to push the pace on the training. 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They provide over 160 lab tests for what is equal to a dollar a day and member pricing on advanced imaging. Head to functionhealth.com slash DOAC to join and use code DOAC25 for a $25 credit. Speaking of training, you know what this is, don't you? Sure. This is a grip strength, machine. Yeah. A lot of people told me that grip strength is the single biggest predictor of, I think they said like longevity and stuff like that. I wouldn't call it the number one predictor of mortality. It is a really nice scientific test. Late 1980s, Stephen Blair and his team started looking at giant databases and started to realize that cardiovascular fitness, VO2 max, VO2 peak, things like this, were predicting how long people were going to live. And in fact, they started to realize that they were going to live for a long period of time. And they realized it was out predicting what we call traditional clinical markers, blood pressure, your cholesterol levels, things like that. And this launched an entire 45-year field that we're in now, which is like, wait a minute, these performance-based markers are actually predicting health more than these indirect markers. The unfortunate problem is that got like too, taken too far. And so when you hear things like people, and my colleagues have been on your show and said things like, oh, grip strength is an important predictor. Yeah. mortality. It's good. It's great. It's an important thing. message. But we have to be careful of being lost in what that means. Getting a grip strength device like that, which is probably under $40, is amazing. And what you will see consistently is those people that are really, really, really weak are in worse health on average. Where we become false is saying, okay, therefore you need to alter your lifestyle to maximize grip strength. I did do my grip strength results actually. Do you remember how they were? It was good. It was high. You know what that tells me about your health? Nothing. Okay. Why wouldn't it be high? You're young, you're fit. I have all those other markers. It's not going to tell you anything. You know when these things are really powerful? Somebody who doesn't have blood work or doesn't have a body composition test or doesn't have anything else. It can give us a crude strength or a crude metric and say this person's probably at a health risk. So I've always been quite confused by this because is grip strength. Grip strength a proxy for my overall strength of my entire body and therefore it's just indicating that my overall strength is low or is it actually like my arm? It's both. Oh, okay. It's both. Here's why. You know what you're really testing right there? What's that? Your nervous system. Oh, really? You're testing your brain. So you're not testing your strength as much? You are. But it's both. There's an overlap. That's why your grip strength, does it indicate general poor health? Yes. That's the value. Does it tell you anything? No, it doesn't tell you anything directly about your. It can. And so this is when you see two camps here. So camp one is like, great, I'm going to open up a gym down the street and it's going to test your grip strength and then we're going to focus all of your training on grip strength training. That is, we've exaggerated the point. The other camp is, it doesn't matter. It's all indirect. That's not true either. It is an actionable, useful thing. What you don't need to worry about is optimizing it, maximizing it. Like if you're in the 80th percentile, going to the 90th percentile probably doesn't make you live a day longer. Over the last probably years, I would imagine there's over 20 to 25 studies that have been published on a very specific type of grip strength and that's grip strength asymmetry. Do you know why that matters? I don't, but I know that I'm stronger on my left side than my right. It's not uncommon. Typically, your force-dependent limb is not your neural control limb. So you write right-handed because you have to have fine motor control. Gross strength can be in the opposite side. I'll go like this, keep it in here. Don't touch your arm to the table at all. Yeah, 90 degrees like that. Yep. And then you're just going to squeeze one good effort as hard as you can. All right, don't blow out now. All right, let's see. Gosh, my head nearly exploded. 130. So you're above average. Can I try this side as well? Yeah, go ahead. This is my weaker. All right, here we go. My weaker hand. All right. You got to beat it though now. Gosh, it's a little bit slippery. Okay. You did. Did I beat it? Oh my God. Wow. 160. You're joking. 160. What the? I'm crushing it. Wow. 130. Okay. On that side. And your left side? 110. Crushing, man. That's really good. But what it taught me is that it doesn't correlate to overall strength because Jeff is definitely stronger than me. For sure. For sure. Yeah. I mean, it's a very specific type of strength, right? So the asymmetry actually matters because most of the work in that area is in groups with neurological disease. So you're trying to look at early predictions of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and things like that, which ties into my earlier point is it is not simply an overall proxy of your health. It can tell us direct things like nerve denervation and overall neurological health. So it, to me, it's a great tool, but what we don't want to do then is optimize for that. What is a better monochrome? My overall health. There's not a single marker that will tell you everything. What about muscle power? Muscle power is great as well. What is that? Power is defined as force multiplied by velocity. So like, if I, yeah, if I throw this. Yeah. Do you want to throw it? Go ahead. I can put your hand up there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Great. Is that, is that muscle power? That wasn't much power because you did it slow. Okay. So think about it this way. This is 12 kilos, right? 12 kilos. I don't know. Pounds, kilos. That is mass. Kilos, pounds is a unit of mass. Force, that's what you think when you think of strength. That's force. Force is defined as F equals MA. It's mass times acceleration. It's force. Okay. So it's the mass multiplied by how you can, how well you can accelerate. Power is your force multiplied by your velocity. So here's the difference. If I were to take this 12 pounds of mass or 12 kilos and hand it to you slowly. Okay. That is an expression of 12 pounds of force is how I think about it. Now, if you hand it back to me in the exact same speed, that is the same amount of Newtons of force. How I create power is now I do that same thing with speed. Ready? So there are two ways you can get more powerful, more force, more velocity. You would use an implement like that because you're trying to say, give me a little bit of mass, but you can obviously lift more than 12 kilos. But now I'm going to emphasize the velocity and the spectrum where people make the mistake. And training for power is if you go slow, the mass is too light to do anything. So you don't get stronger and you don't get faster. Why this matters in the current conversation is you see power and what some people will call things like powerpenia. So that the term that we've been using for a long time is sarcopenia. And this is the accelerated loss of muscle and probably muscle strength with aging. You're going to drop some, but sarcopenia is, are you dropping faster? Faster than you should. And now there's a turn of scientific attention to powerpenia, which is, are you losing the power faster than you should be losing power? That matters because it is everything from prevention of fall, catching yourself when you slip to be able to move and accelerate quickly. And so you see that stuff highly associated with breaking of bones, fractures, dislocations, which are incredibly impactful to health, post age 60 or 65. I think a lot of people listening and me too. So I guess one of the questions we have as it relates to the gym and working out is we often think that in order to get better results in the gym, and you can define that however you want to fat loss, muscle gain, whatever strength, we need to go more often. And I was curious, someone who spends so long with athletes, is that a bit of a myth? Because even my, even me, I'm thinking, well, if I want better results in the gym, I'm going to go more often. And I'm going to go more often. And I'm going to go more I probably just need to, I'm currently going three or four days a week. I need to go back to going six or seven days a week to get better results. You could go either way. It is generally true that if you train more, you give yourself more opportunity to create stress, which is more opportunity to create adaptation. But that said, depending on the marker, the answer here could range from yes to no. Let's use muscle growth as an example. As long as you hit the same volume throughout the week, the amount of times you go to the gym doesn't matter that much. In theory, volume, how much load did you lift? How many times does time period matter? I, if I lifted four weights in one hour versus lifting four weights in 20 minutes. Nope. Because now all you've changed is really the rest in between. Yeah. Does that matter? It does in the sense that if you take a short rest interval and that leads to excessive fatigue accumulation, and then that compromises how heavy you can lift or how many reps you can do or how many sets you can do, that will have compromised your volume. Wait. So, because everyone talks about taking shorter rests in the gym to build more muscles. Not consistent with the evidence. Really? Yep. But this is, this is the game you're playing at all times, right? Who has the time to wait two and a half minutes between every set? You're going to be in the gym for an hour and a half. I mean, a lot of people are on their phones. Totally. And then because of that, they're like, I got to get out of here. So they do half the amount of stuff they leave. Because they're out of time. So the battle is in an isolated world. If you were to probably spend 60 to 90 seconds or maybe up to two minutes resting in between each set, generally you recover enough to have a higher quality set the next one. So is that the most important thing to be optimizing for is the high, making sure the next rep you do is high quality? In my world, quality is always number one. So you're saying take a bigger break as long as you can recover and are more, more strong for the next rep. As long as it doesn't put you in a position where you're in the gym so long that you won't do all the stuff you need to do. But in a world where you had unlimited time, really? Generally. Depends on what adaptation we're working for. If we're working on endurance, then we don't necessarily have to do that. Okay. But if we're working on speed or skill or flexibility or balance or muscle growth or fat loss, now we have options. So depending on the outcome you're looking for, you have tools. I think the biggest point we want to make here is, is where the field struggles right now is making a little bit of information get in the way of motivation. If you're going to the gym three days a week, I'm clapping. Done. Like we're winning. I don't want you to hear messages and go, oh, I'm doing it all wrong. I'm not going to get any results. I'm tanking my metabolism. I'm breaking my hormones. That's the shit that drives us nuts. You're motivated. It's hard enough to get to the gym. And when you get there to try really hard, we've gotten over the hill. Now, if you're past, that point, we could start tinkering with some things, but I hate it when people leave conversations like this and go, oh, did you know that if you don't rest more than 60 seconds that you're not getting anything? That's not true. So we can get like upgrades, but in general, I think most people quality should be the biggest thing you pay attention to because this is going to reduce your likelihood of injury. And there's even evidence that whether you're trying to get stronger or grow muscle, the quality of the repetition as defined by your technique, as defined by your range of motion, as defined by your intent, as defined by what we call your mind muscle connection. So like if you're trying to contract your shoulder, are you really contracting your shoulder? Like all these things start to matter. And so what you'll see happen is you can get more results with less work and shorter time because each individual repetition is of a higher quality and a more focused intent. I mean, this might be a good time to just quickly take a, I mean, everyone's talking about creatine at the bloody moment. Do you have your athletes taking it? Yeah, of course. You do? Yeah, everybody. Do you take it? Yeah. What do you take? What's in your supplement stack? My personal supplement stack, same with all of our clients and athletes. There's two things, correct physiology, performance enhancement, totally separate categories. Correct nutritionist are in your case, your vitamin D. What is low? What is high? What is off track based on blood work, right? We try to solve this through food, but what this oftentimes looks like is a high quality multivitamin, oftentimes fish oil. Now you have performance accelerators on the other side of that equation. This is when creatine can come in. If I'm traveling, I'm going to take things like fiber, right? Because it's harder to get vegetables when you travel. You probably know this, but airplanes, airports, restaurants, like vegetables are nowhere to be found. And so I know those are going to be struggle. I'm going to take fiber there, or I'm generally not taking it as much when I'm home because I can control my diet. Performance enhancers are things like creatine, are things like beta alanine, sodium bicarbonate. So depending on what fitness training goal I have at the moment, I'm going to alter those based on if I'm looking for muscle growth or endurance or- What are you taking right now? Zero. Zero. Vitamin D? Like this week? No. No. Summertime. I live in the forest. Omega-3? Nope. Why? I got full control of my diet and we get a lot of fish right now. So we are good there. I also have, I'm fortunate. I get to harvest my own meat. And one of the things you'll see pretty consistently is even in red meat sources, they're higher in a lot of nutrients, wild caught versus animal caught. So we're in a pretty good, plus I have my blood work. I know where my omega-3 numbers are, so I'm going to get there. If I don't have to take those, I don't. A lot of people I imagine come to you for, with weight loss goals, whether they're trying to cut weight for a fight or if it's just mom and pop looking to lose a few pounds. What are the big misconceptions about weight loss? Yeah, it's the magic of it, right? It's the, there's one specific element you can't eat or one way you have to train or can't train. That is the biggest misconception around fat loss. The specificity. It is categorically quite simple to lose weight. It is categorically quite simple to lose fat. It's practically hard. It's difficult human endeavor, but categorically it's incredibly simple. We only have a few things we have to do. And now you have a billion choices of how to get there. So if you are the type of person who struggles with moderation, then I'm not going to give you moderation. Moderation of calories. Could be, or exercise or environment. Do you know the difference between baking and cooking? Uh, yeah. I guess so. Conceptually. Baking is chemistry. Okay. You mix something together and put in the oven. You can't just fake the amounts because it won't rise. It won't set. It won't do the things right. If you're cooking on a stove and you could just be like, okay, what's in the fridge? You can't do that in baking, right? Depending on what you're baking. We will address this fat loss problem with trying to identify, are you a cook or are you a baker personality type? Here's what I mean. If you came to me and we were going to help you lose some fat, you're already pretty lean, but let's say you wanted to just get super leaned. All right, great. I will. First question I would ask you is how do you want this to operate? You get one of two ways. One way is I tell you exactly what to eat. You weigh and measure every single thing. You do not deviate. You check your weight every single day and you follow exactly what I tell you. Another option is I give you concepts. We have one to three rules. You're going to check weight maybe daily. Maybe once a week. And I want you to stay airtight to those concepts. I prefer the concepts. Concepts. Great. Concepts are cooking. Okay. Baking, weigh and measure everything, right? Here's why this matters. You're a concept kind of guy. Why? You do not want to be thinking about all that little stuff because you have other stuff you'd rather be thinking about, right? It's great because it's freeing. You know, the downside is if you don't know exactly what's in your food, and you don't have a really good eye and calibration, someone like you might have a hard time losing fat because you're already at the end. We need to be weighing that olive oil. We need to be measuring that rice cup. We can't just be like, oh, a little bit of rice over there, right? If you're trying to lose a hundred pounds, we can probably eyeball a lot of things and get really, really far. But personality type is what I'm really getting at here. If I gave that concept to some people listening, some people would be going, like, how many meals am I eating? Like, what's the fiber? Like, they want the detail, right? What's the concept? The concept could be something like, I want you eating fresh vegetables at every meal, and I want you to have a dedicated protein source every time you eat. Okay. That might be the only rule I give you. Could it be an eating window? Could be. Sure. I could say, eat whatever you want, but you're only going to eat between these hours. Okay. I could do whatever kind of one to three rules. I want, I could say none of those things. And I'll just say, all right, just cut out all your junk food. Okay. I'm not going to tell you what to eat. I'm just going to give you a list of things not to eat. I could only give you, I prefer to do the opposite, defer to give you things rather than take things away. Cause you're going to take those things away, right? So I could play with your meal timing. I could play with your meal frequency. I could play with your meal composition. So what types of food you're eating, the combinations of them, I can do anything there. And why all those work? Cause those are simply different strategies. Okay. So you're going to take those things away. ketogenic ketosis rather yeah so i would think about it like a budget i'd be like oh i'd spend 23 carb you know grams of carbs on this particular thing but but to do that i had to look at everything research everything yeah um and i'll have an intuitive idea exactly the point is simply your awareness and consciousness of what is actually in the elements you want and then if you want to change and tweak you can do that because you know but if you don't have the knowledge you can't even play the game what are the big misconceptions about exercise's role in weight loss it is valuable forever we've been telling people burn more calories than you ingest right and then it's still true and then we had a bunch of research pop out that was sort of like hey exercise is not playing the role we think it is in fat loss and those data still hold true in the sense that you don't burn as many calories in your workouts as you think most of the time if you hop on a piece of exercise equipment and it tells you you burned x amount of calories you burned most likely significantly less than that it's also true that there's there is a lot of weight loss and weight loss is a lot of weight loss and weight loss is a lot of weight is places where you can get to with adaptive thermogenesis meaning if you burn say 500 calories with exercise if you are lean enough or non-lean enough or fit enough or not fit enough your body will change how many calories it burns throughout the day in response to that 500 calories from exercise meaning you could be in a situation theoretically where you burn 500 calories in your body will change how many calories it burns throughout the day in response to that 500 calories in your regulated your energy expenditure by three or four or even up to 500 calories to make up for it so it was neutral okay when you're lean like that that can happen quite often right and so then what do you do you pull more calories you train harder you get a more of a response this is a like okay calorie counting doesn't matter like it absolutely matters may not be the strategy you want but it matters there so then there was a big push of like exercise is playing no role in your fat loss which was fundamentally also not true because now we have meta-analyses in the recent years as well as more studies showing probably the fairest way to say it is exercise is a fantastic way to burn some calories it is not the only thing that you can do though to lose weight you can handle weight loss entirely through nutrition if you want that said people who exercise during their weight loss journey consistently are better at keeping their fat off over the weeks to years at the end of the diet you have a five four three two one method ah sure five four three two one was just a little thing i came up with this says all right can we help people with fat loss rules five days a week be active now this can be exercise it can be walking it can be your vocation i don't really care but what was has to happen with fat loss is you have to be able to produce caloric expenditure and you got to do a lot of it this is my way of saying be active and also i'm saying it's cool to take a rest day too like it's totally fine to just veg you can do that but be as active as you possibly can then from there i want four days a week of structured exercise one of these days can be a super hard day it can be light one of those days could be a yoga day like not all four days have to be head to the gym volume 11 like train as hard as you can but four days a week where i want you doing structured exercise at least three days a week i want you training hard enough to sweat if you're doing all that you're active five days a week you're doing structured exercise four days a week three of those sessions you're doing it hard enough where you're getting a really good solid sweat you're probably doing enough to burn enough calories to give yourself a chance from the exercise perspective to losing weight if you've done those first three we could even we could even just call it the five four three like you're in a pretty good spot do you mean work granular i would love a couple of days a week of strength training and i would love at least one day where your heart rate's getting really really really high so a lot of people including myself often think you know i'm going to the gym three four days a week but nothing's changing i feel like i've stagnated yeah what is going on there typically typical solutions for this are lack of focus and i don't mean in your training i mean in your programming so if you are looking at your program saying i'm going to the gym four days a week my first question would be okay what type of training program are you on i'm kind of just winging it that's why okay if i said the same thing to you and gave you any business analogy here you would look at me in the face and smile you have a plan why would you expect without a plan to get to any particular direction it's a good point 80 of the time that's the answer now here's the thing and we have literature on this there's good evidence the plan itself isn't the biggest factor it's actually just having a plan interesting because you have the ability to progressively overload what does that mean meaning you were able to increase your number of repetitions than you did last week you can do a few more sets than you did you can increase the load you can increase the range of motion there's all kinds of ways that we can overload the system progressively you can't do all that this is you know i think this is really the heart of it which is most of us go to the gym and we do the same thing totally we do the same thing we did last week we put the the stair master machine on the level eight and we do 10 minutes yeah and we did that for the last seven months whereas we should really just put it up one but in order to do that we kind of need a plan as you say because you can't just go up one every time yeah like how many how many weeks in a row can you add five pounds three four like it's not going to be very long this is the entire reason exercise is a scientific field right we have that so my strong recommendation would be if you're an absolute beginner and you're not going to the gym at all you're not doing anything you can probably use a tool and give you some basic starting program in fact i people send these things all the time to me be like hey i prompted my thing with like all of your content and i have a complete personalized training program from andy galpin i'm like great and i look at them i'm like pretty good like all right that's pretty reasonable and it's good enough to get you started they're going to get you the basics we're going to get you going and then you have something to follow for six eight ten weeks or whatever let me ask ai for andy galpin's put in your constraints tell it how many days a week okay let's do it like so everyone can hear hi um i want to go to the gym four days a week and i want andy galpin's formula for me to gain muscle but what are the principles that i need to apply based on andy galpin's work over the next four months in order to gain this muscle to gain muscle and strength over the next four months you'll want to focus on a few key principles from dr galpin's work first prioritize progressive overload by gradually increasing the weight reps or sets over time second use a variety of repetition ranges incorporating both heavy low rep work for strength and moderate to high rep work for muscle growth finally ensure you're taking adequate rest between sets usually two to five minutes for heavy compound movements to allow for full recovery and maintain high quality effort pretty good that's not there's a little bit of hallucination in there which is ai but that's pretty good and i'm going to give you a little bit of information about a lot of people aren't doing this now aren't they they're using ai is like they're we've sought a huge pendulum in the last five years 2020 almost ended health and fitness gyms went out of business everyone went home everyone bought their exercise equipment and as soon as ai came online online coaching tanked and online companies got crippled because everyone is like why am i going to pay you 100 bucks a month 200 bucks a month 300 bucks a month for that and they were right it's going the exact opposite now it's already swung back in-person training is way more in demand i'm not surprised because everyone's tired of that it's also personal trainers don't just tell you what to do no they make sure you do it you know so how do i do it it's the emotion it's the connection it's the connection it's the like holding me accountable so what you're seeing is people going it was never about the information yeah we always had the information nothing in that yeah i made up yeah that stuff's been around for like it's funny everything's been around for a long time it's been around for a long time every time i talk about like exercise prescription somebody will hit the comments and be like why don't you give credit to blah blah blah they're the one that invented that and i'm like none of us invented this stuff dumbbells barbells like rep ranges it's not the information it's never been so what is it then like why do people keep listening to these conversations when they kind of a lot of them kind of know the stuff i don't know what's happening on your platform but a lot of people are not listening to podcasts anymore because you're going to see this probably in the comments section hey grok tell me the 10 actionable things from this three-hour conversation because they just try and extract the data right and then they don't do anything you know who's going to take action from this the people who listened true yeah yeah because it's not it's it's not the information yeah in part of in part it is the story and i say the story in particular because one of the most compelling things that we see on these podcasts is when you tell me real case studies of real people you talk about what jenny did and you were training jenny and she had this thing and she was like oh my god i'm perimenopausal and she did this thing with this thing and uh yeah and people go ah okay those stay with me you know what i'm willing to pay for you know what the world is willing to pay for have you done it before oh yeah yeah true human experience like lived experience so when you see a story you're able to go okay i believe that person's done it and now i trust that opinion because i could just go grab the program right the other thing is it's saving me time like you could sit there and go okay here's all the prompts or whatever throw it in there and get your own training program i'm not going to do that i'm not going to do that i'm not going to do that i'm not Or you could be like, "Yo, I'm just gonna go pay Andy. he's done it before i trust him and now i'm gonna go spend my time on this other thing that i care about learning about spending my time on are there any commonalities in the catalyst moment that causes behavior change in people who are otherwise stubborn so i think everyone that i sit with and just even myself there's there was a moment in my life where i heard something or something happened where i go fuck yeah yeah and that was the day it was like a before and after moment i call them that was the day that i decided to take this shit seriously yeah and do you see any commonalities and what that is for different people it's such a fabulous question and i don't have a good answer for you because it's always so different it's so hard i would love to say it was the rock bottom moment i mean it can be true it's not always true can i suggest another please maybe like big life changes like kids death friend family life becomes real i've heard that a few times on this show actually you'll see that um my dad had a heart attack and that's crazy the threat of death doesn't motivate anybody right if it would have we wouldn't have a 40 obesity rate yeah who doesn't know obesity tanks everybody knows it's not a information issue you know the risks associated with alcohol smoking social media that does not change behavior you get closer though when it's at home right somebody died in the car accident fuck i'll stop i'm gonna stop looking at my phone when i drive because my neighbor just died my ex like that's the thing that makes you go too close to home that's so true i was saying to my fiance when i was um driving the other day in the car because i'm notorious for asking everybody to put their c-bolts on if we get in a car i'm the guy in a black cab or a i'm like everyone can you put your c-bolts on please my team know this as well like if we going anywhere i look around every single person to make sure they have their c-bolts on yeah when did this begin when i was 10 years old yeah and they came to my school i remember being sat in the front row i almost remember my seat number it was that vivid for me two things i remember from 10 years old they brought a mother who had lost her child in a car accident and then they brought out a police person and he described going to the scene of the accident looking down at the person who'd just been in a car accident's phone realizing that they were deceased and then looking down and seeing their phone ringing and it said mom and i just i've never forgotten it it was somewhat traumatic but it's meant that for the rest of my life for sure i've policed seatbelts yeah and that's what i mean by these catalyst moments where an idea gets in your head and it just completely changes yeah and so i'm wondering what those ideas are for people as it relates to like weight loss and health and so we ticked off some of them someone gets it in your family maybe a diagnosis in the performance perspective this is when we argue for data because we've had this happen earlier in my career with a professional athlete who was not fast enough and was convinced he was fast and then we put him on a force plate and we started collecting objective data and at the same time i had some of my students around and i had them do it kind of like what you did with your grip strength with jeff and it was like you see how they're as fast as you are and he was like oh everything changed like he was totally bought in made every training change that we asked he had to see it in front of his face like he had to see his data so my other answer to that to you would be now that we've democratized health in this sense the ability to see your own data i would be willing to bet had i pulled up a blood panel that had the cholesterol levels that you saw and i said oh this is a client who's got a blood panel and i said oh this is a client who's got a you would be like oh okay great uh-huh but then when i pull up yours and say this is you're like like we're done with that right like there's no question i was looking for some research and there's some evidence here backed by some research that goes to answer the question and i think we actually answered we hit most of them which is an acute health shock or diagnosis which is the primary catalyst um vicarious health events which become wake-up calls which you talked about as well which is someone else a peer a friend a sibling number three you touched on as well which is this quantitative biometric feedback so data yep yep yep it says major like this one we didn't touch on major life transitions i.e yeah um such as becoming a parent turning a landmark age like 30 40 or 50 or reaching retirement you see that a lot yep you know what actually that made me think here's one we've seen the most sold my company oh that one changes everyone's life it's similar to post-covid-19 depression oh you've lost purpose oh fuck what do i do yeah i need to do something now i got now i got money now i have time interesting i'm investing in my health now like i didn't i sacrificed my health the last 20 years ding-a-ding-a-ding now i gotta turn around and i'm like okay but is it also just like i need a new purpose and my body then becomes the the project that's exactly what it is where in the past i had the excuse of sacrificing for the company and i i couldn't focus on myself it was selfish it wasn't fiduciary responsible to do that and i have no more excuse well looking at this list then listen we can't we're going to pray no one in your family sure no one you know gets sick so let's stay away from that one um the the two of them there that can be quite motivating and again we don't want to motivate you if you're completely fine but this actually answers the question is to go and get your health checked yeah that's like a simple solution because maybe you're fine and that's great maybe you're doing everything right but also um just saying i want to lose a bit of weight or i want to do this isn't as solid enough as going and finding out how you're doing one thing also i think is important because i will default to performance and optimization and getting the best and excellence like that's just the language and stuff i do but that's not the opposite of what you just said to be really clear on that point not everyone gravitates the idea of being the best possible ever yeah totally fine but that still doesn't mean it's okay to just check out on your health you can have it both ways you can be like look i'm not an optimizer i'm not a maximizer i'm not that doesn't live with my ethos and cool we can still though say you still want to live that life for as long as possible right all right let's just make sure we're paying enough attention to where nothing catches up and we're not waking up one day and be like oh my gosh now i've got to go invest all these time and resource energy and all those things to go backwards and that so pay attention enough how important is it to get clear on your why you're not gonna love the answer because traditionally when people approach me they already have that figured out they're getting to me they figured out why they're here or they're if they haven't figured out they at least have had the motivation to seek outside counsel like that so now they're getting to the what and how part what about bad goals i look back at my life and i had some bad goals that set me up for failure that's more realistic to what we all do okay and this is a you're aiming at the wrong target i was aiming at my goal when i was 20 i think it was 27 was to go to the gym every day and i failed oh yeah yeah i failed six months later but then once i'd failed it was catastrophic and how are you not going to fail yeah yeah and were you going to go every day the rest of your life it was a terrible goal because the day that i missed one day because some flight my it was like my entire motivation was over yeah sure and then i was like how do i get back on the horse now here's an example you want to lose fat mm-hmm your goal is fat loss cool why aren't you leaner right now and you automatically think i have to exercise more and diet and i'm like great that's the tactic i want to know why you're not there right now like what is the thing that's actually getting in the way because like calorie fight like yeah yeah like you know that though but it's not working what is really in the way do we actually have some hidden stressor a lot of times people will say things like i i gotta lose fat so i can get healthy and we will generally say you need to get healthy first and then the fat loss would be a whole lot easier that's the bad goal and so we'll ask this question like what would success look like what would failure look like and when we hear things like oh success is i lose these 25 pounds all right great let me ask you this if we lost 12 pounds and then your shoulder pain went away you have normal bowel movement and you have a lot of muscle pain and you have a lot of now for the first time in 10 years your energy is way up is that all a failure no that's success so then we didn't just find success properly so it's a huge focus of of how we help people actually make progress in those areas that they've struggled with dr andy galpin we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question left for you is if you were sure to fail what would still be worth doing what a great question yeah fantastic question i am ultra competitive but i really don't mind losing so my answer to that question was it sounds like a cop-out but it's all of it because i actually don't care about failing that much it just doesn't bother me like i just like the competing thing i like the doing thing so my initial reaction that was like god being around my kids right there's you fail anything you fail anything you fail anything you fail anything you fail anything you want there and i'm like winning right and then i went to business things and i'm like i don't even really care about losing those like because you get to do it you get to be active and whatever so kind of a cop-out but my answer would be all of them man like the process is dope the podium is the process yeah man got the process over the podium dr andy galpin thank you so much thank you you're held in such high regard by everybody i think there's two reasons i think it's so you're so deeply obsessed with this subject matter for reasons that we talked a lot about last time but also i think the essence of your motivations is so unbelievably pure. You know, before we started recording, you were saying to me how, like, you're really not that concerned with the business side of things, because what you'd love to do is just be focusing on the research, the education and the coaching. And I think that says a lot about you. And it comes through. People understand that you're just deeply obsessed about this stuff in a way which allows us to benefit tremendously from all the work that you have done. And you're a wonderful synthesizer of very, very complex things. So please carry on doing what you're doing. If people want to go and listen to your show or if they want to go consume more of your stuff, if they want to continue this journey with you, where do they go? Where's the best place to send them? Well, first of all, thank you for those kind words and to be invited back. It's a huge opportunity. I will never be ungrateful for it. My podcast is called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin, available everywhere. And then andygalpin.com and social media, Instagram and all that stuff is probably the easiest way to follow along. I highly recommend you go and subscribe to Andy's channel. We're going to link it down below now. But you're incredibly rigorous with all the work that you do. Having spoken to Andrew, Andrew Huberman, who's a good friend of both of ours, he's also told me just how utterly obsessed you are with truth and also your mission of helping people become who they could be. And that shines through in all of your work. So please go and subscribe to Andy's podcast as well, Perform. And I shall link all of his other resources below, including some of them that we've mentioned today, including the tests and questionnaires that we talked about. Andy, thank you. Thank you.