Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Andy Galpin (@DrAndyGalpin). Dr. Galpin is a tenured, full professor at California State University, Fullerton, where he is also co-director of the Center for Sport Performance and founder/director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Laboratory. He is a human performance scientist with a PhD in human bioenergetics and more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations.
This year, Andy is teaming up with Huberman Lab to launch a podcast of his own, called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin.
Dr. Galpin has worked with elite athletes (including All-Stars, All-Pros, and MVPs; Cy Young and Major winners; Olympic Gold medalists; and World titlists and contenders) across the UFC, MLB, NBA, PGA, NFL, Olympics, boxing, military/special forces, and more.
He is also a co-founder of BioMolecular Athlete, Vitality Blueprint, Absolute Rest, and RAPID Health & Performance.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:
Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.
WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.
WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.
Tim Ferriss: Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different disciplines. In this case, exercise science, and it is very self-interested.
I wanted to talk to this guest, Andy Galpin, about a reboot in the new year. What should I do to train for very specific things? What should I do to improve sleep, et cetera, and so on and so on and so forth. So Andy Galpin, who is Andy? Andy Galpin is a tenured, full professor at California State University, Fullerton, where he is also co-director of the Center for Sport Performance and founder/director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Laboratory. He is a human performance scientist with a PhD in human bioenergetics and more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations. It turns out he has done research, his team has done research on many things that have been on this show. I didn’t realize some of it in advance.
Dr. Galpin has worked with elite athletes including all-stars, all pros, and MVPs; Cy Young and Major winners; Olympic gold medalists and world titleists and contenders across many, many different sports that include MMA. So for instance, UFC, MLB, NBA, PGA, NFL, all the acronyms, Olympics, boxing, military special forces, and much more. He’s also a co-founder of Biomolecular Athlete, Vitality Blueprint, Absolute Rest, and Rapid Health and Performance. You can find all things Andy Galpin at andygalpin.com and you can find him on Twitter and Instagram at Dr. Andy Galpin, spelled G-A-L-P-I-N.
Just a few additional notes on this episode. I asked Andy if he would be willing to provide a number of bonuses, a number of resources, that we could put in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast and he very generously agreed. Those include some synopses, overviews of the various training protocols that were mentioned in this episode specifically related to the prep for my skiing but that applies to a lot more than just skiing. It could apply to any number of different endurance sports or maintaining strength over a period of training and just about anything. That’s my interpretation, not his.
He also agreed to include a number of different resources related to micronutrient testing and a number of different supplements that he feels pull their weight from a scientific credibility perspective with respect to endurance training and in my particular case, training at altitude, including skiing.
We cover a hell of a lot in this episode. We cover sleep banking. We talk about basketball tweets and how they tie into sports betting. Believe it or not, testing sweat. Talk about using respiratory rates, overnight respiratory rate which you can figure out pretty easily as a proxy, an indicator of many other things.
And last but not least, I asked Andy if he would be willing to provide a few snippets, anecdotes and explanations for a number of bullets that I didn’t get to cover, and he recorded those separately, and I added those to this episode for you to enjoy and here are those bullets: Number one, doubling a client’s testosterone by just changing what path he took for his morning walk. Number two, curing a lifelong sleep disorder in five minutes for $22. And now, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and very practical conversation with Dr. Andy Galpin.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The honest reality is, as I’ve mentioned several times now, our approach is to have as comprehensive as testing as possible so that we can get the most precise and specific solutions that we can. But the reality is the vast majority of people will respond best through a multifactorial approach. Addressing all of the big rocks at once is almost always going to be required for people to get their best results.
That said, having done this now, really hundreds of times, there have been some fun cases in which people had this remarkable results with extraordinarily simple, and sometimes even cheap, and really, one-change approaches, and so I do want to really reiterate that those are the exceptions to the rule, and I think that’s important to state here, because that stuff can be intoxicating. It can really drive confusion. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh, maybe all my problems are really just this one thing.” And that can happen, of course. I’m about to share you some stories, but really, really, really, I don’t want you to fall prey to any thoughts sometimes, that really this one particular thing I’m going to share is the cause of all human suffering. It’s clearly not the case.
So the very first one is from a colleague of mine, Dan Garner. Dan is a world-renowned specialist in blood lab interpretations, and really, human performance. And so Dan was working with the client in the Dallas, Texas area. The client had done many of the right things and had a lot of success, but was particularly interested in elevating his testosterone. And so, despite the fact that things were going well, that number wasn’t moving as high as that individual wanted. And remind you, this is medication, TRTs, hormones, things like that, are off of the table. We’re not medical doctors. This is not what we do, and that’s not what this individual wanted to do.
So the quest was: can we do this without those options? And so Dan had run him through many of the normal steps, and we’re still struggling to figure it out. And so we went to the next level with some of the biomarkers we looked at, and Dan was able to identify there was actually an allergic response happening to something in his environment. And you can actually differentiate if it’s coming from environmental factors or other factors, based on a handful of different blood markers. And so something was going on there and we didn’t know what it was. Dan didn’t, rather. But we knew something was there.
And so long story short, what ended up happening was it was actually a response to some of the trees that were in this man’s neighborhood, and he was basically allergic to those and didn’t know it because it wasn’t creating a sufficient enough of a response for him to figure it out. And it turns out that those trees were basically on one side of his neighborhood and not the other one. And so the individual would basically start his day going outside and going for a walk and would walk right through these trees, and it’s just exacerbating that response, and there’s a known pathway there that’ll lead to many things, including compromising sleep quality, et cetera, et cetera, that eventually was compromising his testosterone.
And so really, the ultimate change that was made was still continue to take those daily walks, but instead of walking out of the house and going right and walking around the block that way, that he went out of his house, turned left, and walked the block in a different area that was no longer exposing him to those trees.
So you did that, waited six or eight weeks or something, I can’t remember the exact time domain, and then testosterone was checked again and it was almost doubled by that point. So again, fun little story there. Atypical, but absolutely possible and a thing that we’ve seen a number of times over the years.
Another really fun story I like is from the sleep. Now, this is actually in a professional athlete that we’ve worked with, and has happened more than one time. This exact thing has happened more than one time. And so really, I’m getting kind of combinable multiple stories here, but when we do our sleep analysis, we’re not just looking at your sleep staging and architecture. We actually are able to identify what physical positions you are in, so on your right side, left side, back, et cetera. And one thing that stands out routinely is how sleep quality drastically differs in people, depending on their position. So some people really struggle on their right side or their left side of their back side, and it’s very common for us to see people will have large percentages of their sleep problems in a single place.
And so, again, seen this multiple times where people would struggle, in this example, with sleeping on their back. And what we’re able to do for a very cheap price is to go onto Amazon and buy what effectively looks like a fanny pack in reverse. So you can imagine a standard, not over-the-shoulder, chest fanny pack, but the more traditional ones that just go around your waist, like a belt, and instead of having the pouch in front, you flip it around and put it on your low back, and that stops you from sleeping on your low back, and forces the individual to sleep on their right side or left side. It’s uncomfortable, and it is weird for a few days or weeks, but really it’s pretty quick for the people to adjust to that.
Now in this story I’m referring to, we were able to see over 90 percent reduction in sleep waking events in the very first night by simply putting that backpack on. And that was not a fluke. That has been sustained for weeks and months after that. Now the individual, because it’s been so long, again, many individuals here actually, they can really easily sleep without the pack entirely or it certainly no longer affects their sleep at all. They really don’t notice it. And those reductions in sleep waking events have persisted for months and months and months, if not years, at this point. And so, we would collectively say we have basically fixed that person’s sleep disorder that had been going on for years, if not decades, and certainly decades, actually, in about five minutes for, I think the backpack costs like $22 on Amazon, or something like that.
[Begin interview.]
Tim Ferriss: Dr. Galpin, Andy, nice to see you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Nice to see you.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m so happy to have this opportunity to do a podcast, which is really a self-interested, self-directed session with you in the guise of a podcast.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Any time you can do something for yourself and only yourself, it’s a win.
Tim Ferriss: You have a history of competition, been a competitive athlete. You have an extensive history of injuries, which have forced you to become creative. Well, you could have not been creative, but you had the capacity to think creatively about your own training, and training, and then you also have deeply technical foundations. That combination of competitive experience, creativity, and then technical capability, I think, produces a lot of what you’ve been able to do, which is why in part I’m excited to have you here today.
For a lot of folks who are listening to this, who have listened to many other podcasts, perhaps read many books, they think to themselves, “For fuck’s sake, there are a million different things I could be doing,” and it’s helpful, even if it’s imperfect, to sometimes rank order things. I’ll give you an example. I’ve known Pavel Tsatsouline for a long time — perhaps best-known as popularizing the kettlebell in the United States by and large. His position would be strength first like, “Focus on strength first. That is the mother quality.” And then, also important as we age for a host of reasons that I’m sure we can get into, and then you can add in other things below that. Let’s just say top of the pyramid or bottom of the pyramid, depending on how you look at it. How do you think about the cultivation of attributes, training, and how to prioritize those things?
Dr. Andy Galpin: I will acknowledge my bias at this point. I played college football. I got into the sport of weightlifting. Olympic weightlifting as you may know it, but technically called weightlifting. I enjoy that side of the spectrum much more than I enjoy anything else, so I’m a sport kind of guy. I don’t really have as much love for physique, bodybuilding, stuff like this. It’s always impressive, but it hasn’t gripped me because I’m always more interested in sport. So I value being able to hit a golf ball 350 yards, being able to dunk a basketball, to being able to play skate and ice. I like it when people can do a whole bunch of things in a well-rounded area, so that’s my just personal preference. At the same time, I acknowledge when other folks have a preference towards endurance or, in that case, physique.
That’s important to understand because the way that I answer this question is built fundamentally upon my own bias. As we’ll probably talk about through the entire conversation, we all have that filter and so we’re all aiming it at a lens and it’s just personal preference. I will do my best as the conversation evolves to when I feel like that’s a fair representation of the science versus just my personal preference. That’s not always the same thing, though sometimes it is. So technically, personally to me, you outlined my injury history. I know you have just a touch yourself.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Just a touch.
Tim Ferriss: Quite a collection.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I actually prefer the very first quality is you need to move well. What’s that mean? Well, there’s different definitions depending on what you’re asking your body to do, but there are some colloquial standards. You had Eric Cressey on recently.
Just the foundation of the field in large part, so you guys covered a lot of that there, but really, you have to move well. Your joints, for the most part, have a fairly standard operating mechanism. So your shoulder is supposed to go through that certain range of motion. Your neck is supposed to be in a certain place, your knee and your toes, and all that stuff. So you guys can refer back to that conversation, but you have to move well.
Secondarily, on top of that, after moving well, you have to be able to ask yourself, “Well, if I’m not moving well, why not?” And someone like Pavel’s going to come back and say, “Well, in large part it’s because of a lack of strength. If you’re strong enough, you move well.” I actually agree with him on many, many, many things and that’s one of them. That said though, I think there’s a little bit more nuance there that I like to approach. And so whenever I’m watching movement, whatever that is to you, whether you’re surfing or you’re jogging, or you’re doing jiu-jitsu, whatever it is, I’m going joint by joint and I’m asking a handful of things, almost four specific things, per joint.
Number one, does it have appropriate stability? You can call this stability. You can call this strength. It is the same thing. Your ability to control the joint to make sure it moves when you want it to move and when it doesn’t move when you don’t. Those things have to both be there. It’s not okay to just move it when you want and then not control it when you don’t want.
Tim Ferriss: Drive a car without brakes?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally. You have to understand that position. You can put whatever phrase on it. I call it strength. Others call it stability, but it’s just control. So is that joint under control? Is it stable?
Number two, and this is even prior to that first one, are you even aware? You’d be stunned how many movement dysfunctions and mobility restrictions and things that I’ve seen on people, and none of those are the case. They just don’t even know that their foot’s pointed to the right or that their shoulder’s in the wrong spot. They have no idea not only where they’re supposed to be, but they don’t even have the awareness of where they actually are. So just letting you know, “Hey, did you realize that your left foot is planted forward and your right foot is pointed 90 degrees?”
Tim Ferriss: Which, just as a side note, can be very surprising because I like to think — I do think I have a reasonably high degree of spatial kinesthetic awareness, but I remember having some issue with my right big toe. I was doing a split squat type of exercise and this woman who was supervising at the time said, “Are you aware that your toe is pointing basically to…” here was my right foot, “…10 o’clock on a dial if you’re facing 12?” And I was like, “What are you are talking about?” She took a photograph and I said —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, you were internally?
Tim Ferriss: I was internally rotating —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, that’s [inaudible].
Tim Ferriss: — heel way out because I didn’t have the mobility in the big toe and so I was dodging that by kicking my heel way out to the outside.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s interesting. Almost always the case would be the opposite.
Tim Ferriss: No kidding.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, you’d flare out so that you can actually get more into motion and your knee forward.
Tim Ferriss: Yes. I was doing the drop the hip and throw the straight right kind of position.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: So not to interrupt, but even for someone who thinks they know where their body is in space, you would be surprised.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We don’t need to go off course here too much, but the reality of it is you don’t need to be perfect. Some level of asymmetry is absolutely fine and, in large cases with almost all of our professional athletes, you actually probably want some asymmetries. This allows you to create torque and to move in specific ways where if you’re a major league baseball pitcher, you need to be able to throw 100 miles an hour. We have to have some asymmetry as a golfer. All of our folks on the PGA Tour and stuff, you need those things. So when I say that, I just mean roughly symmetrical like just give me a ballpark. What’s a ballpark? I don’t know. There’s no hard-cut line there, but you’ll probably know when you see really bad is the point.
And so, number one was, again, are you stable? Number two was, are you even aware of where you’re at? Number three is, do you have some sort of rough balance between front, back, left, right on the left side of your body to the right side of your body, to the front side of your body, to the back side of your body?
What’s that mean? Let’s just say we’re going with our knee. Let’s just say it’s my right knee. There you go. Let’s use that as an example. If I’m doing some hinging activity and my right knee is doing something different than my left knee, now I’m concerned. Is my right knee doing something normal to my foot? Is my right [inaudible] doing something normal to my right hip? And so I’m looking not just at the movement pattern, but how is it relative to my life? If I see the same pattern on the right knee and the left knee, then that’s a different problem and there are different solution than if that pattern is exclusive to my right knee. That’s what I care about.
So if there’s some level of movement in your knee, maybe that’s normal if it’s in both knees. If it’s aggressive in one side versus the other, you almost always have some sort of compensation happening. Now you’ve got to run a long algorithm there to figure out what’s happening, but that’s what I’m after. And then, the final step is, can you go through a full range of motion?
Now that range of motion is different for every joint. The shoulder does different things than the low back, and the neck, and fingers, et cetera, but you should be able to access full range of motion. We want to be able to produce strength and have control in those end ranges of motion without significantly compromising any other joint. And that’s really as complicated as it needs to be.
And so yeah, can your knee fully flex? Great. Can it do it with any load whatsoever? It doesn’t have to be 600 pounds, just a reasonable load. And then can it do it without significantly compromising your ankle or hip or neck, or something else? So really it’s those four things. If you have all that checked off, then really your joints can access any movement that you want under reasonable control. So as long as you have that, that is checkbox number one, which is do you move well?
After that, now we’re going to play a game of okay, great, if you do it on bilaterally — let’s just keep using the lower body. So your knees are fantastic when I give you support, so assisted. Your hands are on a table or I’m holding your hands when you’re squatting or something like that. So if I take load off the scenario, do you check all four boxes? Yes, you do. Phenomenal. We’re going to the next one now. What happens when it’s body weight only? You still move well? Great. Now we’re going to the next one. What happens when we add speed? Now you ask that joint to move fast. Does it change its behaviors or patterns?
Tim Ferriss: So you do speed before load? Or I mean you could say it’s adding load in its own way.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’ll just say additional external load, which could be gravity depending on how you shore this up. That one, I’m fine switching out. If you want to go load first before speed, absolutely fine. It’s really 1A, 1B in that particular way, but you need to understand what’s happening. The point is you want to do all that before you get to the last one, which is now fatigue. You don’t want to load a system repetitively if it can’t handle —
Let’s just say it’s the knee and we’re going to go for a jog, we know that even a moderate jog when you’re in a single-leg stance is going to put four or five, six times body weight on that load on the leg. So even a slow jog puts a lot of load on your right knee in this particular case when it’s on that single-foot stance. So it’s a pretty high amount and now you’re going to repeat that over five miles, or two miles, or one mile. It doesn’t really matter. If it can’t do it well when you have your body weight in a unilateral stance, then we have a problem.
Tim Ferriss: And just for definition, unilateral meaning here, what, for people listening?
Dr. Andy Galpin: One at a time.
Tim Ferriss: One at —
Dr. Andy Galpin: So what I skipped over was, in that initial assessment, we’re going to go through bilateral stuff first and then we’re going to go through unilateral, the second one. Which is a way to say, all right, if you put your hands on a table, can you do a squat and your knees and ankles move correctly? And now, what if I take your hands off the table? Now it’s body weight. And now what if I add load? Great. Now what if I add speed?
Now we’re going to repeat that whole thing basically by saying, “Now let’s do it one leg at a time.” That would be unilateral. So maybe you move well bilaterally, but all of a sudden when we get that unilateral again, one foot at a time, now things collapse with speed or they collapse with load or they collapse with something else. If I have failure points there, then what the heck do you think is going to happen when I put that thing under stress and fatigue? You know the result.
Now again, under fatigue, you’re going to have some tactical breakdowns. That’s a part of it, but we’re looking for red flags. We’re looking for egregious. We’re looking for, am I really putting myself in a situation where you’re just asking for injury? It is any time you’re talking injury prevention risk, and you can go in a million different directions of this, it’s never about, can you stop injuries from happening? That is not a real thing. It’s all about, can you just reduce the likelihood and reduce the risk as much as possible?
So to circle back to your initial question, where does that pyramid of me land? That’s initially how I’m thinking about it. If you’re moving well, and you can do this unilaterally, you can do this under load, you can do it fast, and you can do it over fatigue, then you can really do whatever you want. The only thing you have to pay attention to is how you’re defining fatigue.
So candidly, this is not very practical. This is ideal. But one of the things we use a lot in training is determining fatigue by technical breakdown rather than an actual, “You’re going to run this many miles,” or, “You’re going to run this much time,” or, “You’re going to complete this much work.” It is, “How much can you do until we see a significant break in posture and technique?” Until you’re on the Air Assault bike and you’re all of a sudden hunching over, and now your chest is on the paddles in the front. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We stopped at that point because, what are we doing? We’re potentially reinforcing a bad pattern. We’re reinforcing an idea of, “When you get tired, just go ahead and break posture.” We don’t want those things. That never is going to be a win in our book. Occasionally, you’re probably not talking under 10 percent of the time. I’ll let it fly. Great. That can’t be the pattern.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s take this to the personal on my side. We’re going to talk about Tim 4.0.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I like it. Not even 2.0 or 3.0.
Tim Ferriss: Not even 2.0.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s like the shoulder?
Tim Ferriss: 2.0 was a while ago, 4.0, which will hopefully involve fewer MRIs, fewer emergency room visits. I’ll lay out some of the basic specs and mysteries maybe, and then we can go from there.
So the first, I think, will be time-bound in a way that will resonate with a lot of people listening. That is we’re recording this in late December and in early January, I’m going to be looking to reengage with all sorts of training.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You and the whole rest of the world.
Tim Ferriss: Me and the entire world. In this particular case, I do have two months blocked out for skiing and ski training. I’ve got lessons already booked with a technical coach, so I have the technical side, let’s just say it, organized. I will be at altitude. I’ll be doing ski touring in addition to downhill, which I find very meditative; I also find very challenging cardiovascularly, and so far so good.
That is the same as last year. I made a ton of progress technically last year; physically as well, lots of great adaptations. The big difference is that, as we were talking about a bit before we started recording, I’ve had effectively nine months of deconditioning. I’ve had this persistent, sometimes crippling, constellation of low back issues, which thankfully are seemingly on the mend, although I do have some questions for you about it. So I’ll give you a laundry list of things that are going on.
But before I get to that, I wanted to say that for a lot of folks, they’re going to go through cycles, if they’re not consistently competitive athletes, of de-training, retraining. At least for me, as someone who used to be very competitive in various sports, there’s a higher risk of believing that I’m 15 or 20 or 25 again, attempting to do things I used to do and getting myself into trouble.
So, I suppose the broad question is, if you were coaching me, how would you have a conversation about training, maybe program. A couple of wrinkles. So the first is that I know my low back, as an example, and probably a lot of the posterior chain is weak because I’ve avoided anything that would potentially lead to inflammation. I’ve had 1,000,001 different diagnoses of this low back compression sensitivity, which I do think is a thing: some stenosis at L4-L5 on the right side, et cetera, et cetera.
However, I’ve been told by a number of folks inflammation is not the issue. However, when I address inflammation, symptoms by and large vanish. I was on meloxicam and all sorts of anti-inflammatories for a period of time. Ended up doing an extended fast, a few — let’s just call it two months ago, so a week-long water fast and, in combination with a few other things, complete remission of symptoms for weeks.
That raised a lot of interesting questions. When I am training for two months, unlikely I’m going to take a week to water fast — I could, but it would present some challenges. So I’m trying to figure out how to approach things, recognizing in my older years, which I did not perhaps recognize in my younger years, that there’s a high potential for injury here if I approach it the wrong way.
A few other notes: last season when I was skiing, I noticed that I got more chatter on my right leg. So if I took a carving turn to the left, I would get more chatter on the right leg and I was like, “Oh, that’s very interesting.” In my left leg, I have a noticeably larger, say, calf on the left leg, but I did a DEXA scan recently and overall I’ve more muscle mass on the right side. I was like, “That’s interesting.”
I know. I know. So I was like, “It seems like I have more muscle mass on the right side, but I’m having a lot more chatter…” meaning stuttering on the slope that the curves aren’t as smooth. My priority is skiing, so if that means it’s to my benefit for relative strength and skiing to lose some upper body mass, that’s fine with me. I don’t care. Where would you start, in this particular case?
Dr. Andy Galpin: If you’re just listening, I can’t explain to you how big of a smile I have on my face during that whole thing. This is what we live for. This is exactly what I like to do.
Now you can take a couple of approaches here, small to big or big to small. I think you know where I’m going to go. Here’s how all of our coaching goes. This is exactly what I do for anyone that comes through any of our programs, in our coaching programs. I want everything. I want to collect everything on you and that’s going to allow me to stop messing around.
Tim Ferriss: I would love to do a full battery and gather everything from my cuticles to my chest hair, and do the 100 percent analysis. And the reality is, you’re here for a day, you’re taking off, and then I had to — the undisclosed high altitude location in, let’s just call it 10 days. So chances are I won’t have an opportunity to do all of that. So I’d be curious to know, given that constraint, I realize I should do it. But given the constraint, what you might recommend in the interim?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Where are those places you want to start?
Tim Ferriss: Let’s start with —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Maybe you want me to just cover a couple of really specific, short ones that —
Tim Ferriss: Let’s do that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — folks could try. Okay. A very easy one that almost everybody has access — no, that’s not everybody. Many people have access to, if you have any reasonable tracker of any kind, respiratory rate is a phenomenal insight into everything that’s happening in your body. I would make the argument that blood work would be the most important thing that one can do here, if done appropriately. But even cheaper and easier than that, respiratory rate will tell you a ton of stuff.
So, what we’re talking about is how many times you breathe per minute and specifically overnight. So, if you can measure your respiratory rate overnight, you’ll have a great insight of what’s happening. A lot of stuff can be explained, here’s roughly why. When you take a breath in, you’re bringing in oxygen. When you exhale, that releases CO2. At all times you’re playing this oxygen-to-CO2 game. Oxygen is primarily responsible for regulating cellular metabolism. Energy. CO2 is meant to regulate pH. It does a lot of different things, but that’s the primary mechanism.
CO2 then has a bidirectional relationship between psychology and physiology. Meaning, a psychological stressor, got really excited, got really happy, got upset, can cause alterations in the physical body, specifically through CO2. Exercise movement, any physical stressor increases CO2 concentrations, but that will then be registered psychologically as, be more alert, be more focused, be more anxious, all those things.
And so when you see an increase in CO2 concentrations that are developed from any tissue, let’s just say muscle, that increases CO2 concentrations in the blood. That is then registered as energy’s going out physically, so let’s be prepared psychologically. Again, more focused, all those things. And so, your body’s constantly measuring CO2 and paying attention to what’s happening. And this is good. This is one of the main mechanisms in which our body switches us up and down through the autonomic nervous system.
And so, on one end of the spectrum, you’ve got sympathetic drive. This is fight or flight, this is freeze, this is awake, alert, anxious, all those things. It’s important to understand that’s not good or bad. That is just a thing that happens. So, as you and I are sitting in this conversation, we should be a little anxious, we should be a little — I want to be hyper-focused. My eyes need to be narrowed on you. I shouldn’t be having a panoramic view. Adrenaline should be up. I guarantee our cortisol levels are a little bit — that’s the point, right?
Tim Ferriss: It’s a tool in the toolkit. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Parasympathetic is the other side. That’s rest, digest that is lethargic, that is depressed, that is all those things. So right now, we want to be alert like this, and when we’re done tonight and go to sleep, we want to be very parasympathetic and lethargic. Amazing. Well, CO2 concentrations are driving. It’s not the only thing, but it’s one of the main things driving where we’re at at that spectrum. And this is why things like CO2 tolerance, which we’ve studied in my lab, are connected to state and trait anxiety. They are connected to a lot of different things, and so this is Brian MacKenzie. Brian, he’s done this for probably a decade.
We’ve really spent a lot of time on CO2 for a long time. It’ll tell you a ton of what’s going on. That then drives respiration, because the primary thing, remember, CO2 is regulating pH, and so when your body senses CO2 concentrations are getting a little bit higher, it’s going to tell you ventilate, breathe. Now, if we were to have you hold your breath, and to say take a breath and then hold it. Eventually, you would start feeling that air hunger and that panic to breathe, that desire to breathe and eventually if you hold it, panic, panic, panic. Unless we’re at altitude or something weird, that sensation is not being driven by running out of oxygen. It’s driven by increasing CO2.
Tim Ferriss: Increasing CO2.
Dr. Andy Galpin: CO2 concentrations, this is why you have to have carbon monoxide sensors.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Also, why you need to be careful about shallow water blackouts if you’re doing a bunch of crazy breathing exercises.
Dr. Andy Galpin: This is why you don’t want to hyperventilate for those. which is what we’re about to get to. You’re supposed to be saying, all right, CO2 concentrations are elevated in my system, therefore I’m becoming acidic, so therefore I need to start ventilating more. So then I breathe more, I dump out more CO2 that lowers my CO2 concentrations in my body, and I’m back to normal. Hyperventilation is specifically exhalation, so additional breathing where it no longer meets metabolic demand. So I’m breathing more than I need to be breathing.
If you and I were to sit here and hyperventilate, which we’ve done plenty of times, that’s putting you in a state of hypocapnia. So capnia is the science word for CO2, hypo meaning low. So you’ve lowered your CO2 below normal. This causes what’s called respiratory alkalosis. You’ve removed CO2. You’ve removed acid, you become more alkalotic. So acid on one side base or alkalosis on the other side. Great.
Now in response to that, one of the major things that can happen is, your kidneys will then start altering bicarbonate, which is the way you regulate pH as well, causing potentially, at least even temporarily, metabolic acidosis, because the entire system is supposed to be balanced. So now, you’ve already altered pH in a number of different areas. You’ve altered what’s happening through albumin, you’ve altered bicarbonate, you’ve altered all of these things. Now, if you were doing that in the short term, that gets too low. We have all kinds of issues with blackout. You do that in water, we’re going to have huge problems. People have died.
Tim Ferriss: Be careful. Yeah, people die all the time doing this.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep. Not good.
Tim Ferriss: You want the urge to breathe if you are getting to the point where you need to breathe.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. For sure, it’s a good idea. Okay, great. If I’m underbreathing, then we get hypercapnic. And so what’s supposed to happen is you increase CO2 concentrations, you get a little bit of hypercapnic, this sends signals that say, “Hey, chemoreflexors, jump off.” And they say, “Breathe more.” So you breathe more and you dump your CO2. That’s awesome. So that rate of respiration or how often you’re breathing is supposed to be driven by a number of things, but in this particular case, let’s call it CO2. If your respiratory rate gets high, we are now putting ourselves in hyperventilation. It’s not clinical hyperventilation, and this is a story that will unfold so many times. Just because you don’t hit clinical markers for disease does not mean you are in optimal physiology.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. Those reference ranges change a lot too.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Man, I could spend hours on — this is effectively what we do, with all of our stuff. We don’t use reference ranges for anything. We have our own high-performance standards. I’m not an MD, I don’t do anything medical or disease-related. Everything from our perspective is from the perspective of enhancing human performance. So going from good to great. Going from where’s your risk factor disease. I don’t care about — that’s like, go see Peter Attia, like — I can’t help you there. Again, we take hundreds of biomarkers, and I don’t think I’ve ever measured ApoB in my life. Never will.
Tim Ferriss: So it’s not your game?
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s not my game. I don’t do medicine. We do high-performance. So you want to go from good to great, I’ve got you. The risk of 20-year disease, I don’t know, just exercise. Don’t come to me. Point is, I’m watching that respiratory rate. If that thing starts to exceed 15 breaths per minute or so overnight, I have a pretty good indication that you’re over-breathing. Now, is this again, clinical hyperventilation? Probably not. I don’t know. Not for me to even call, but I can certainly tell you’re over-breathing, because at that point for most people, you’re breathing more than your metabolic need.
Tim Ferriss: Do you have a preferred tracking device for that?
Dr. Andy Galpin: A little bit of inside house, here we use our own. So like my company, Absolute Rest, our sleep company, we have a very high quality one that — not to pitch on this, but the reality of it is most —
Tim Ferriss: No, you should pitch it, if it’s good. Just give a second option for the second-place finisher.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Well, the reality of it is ours is — well, by the time this comes out, ours will probably be available. It’s a couple of hundred dollars. It’s not a tracker. It is a clinical sleep lab, set up in your house with wireless. Our technologies, you’ve probably seen people with the polysomnography sleep stuff all over the place. Ours is entirely wireless. You don’t have to do any of those things. So, for a couple hundred bucks you can put that on. And we actually are able to —
Tim Ferriss: And that’s Absolute Rest?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Absolute Rest, that company, yeah. We are able to run 150 Hz, which means we’re measuring 150 times per second. Most wearables are going to measure once every five minutes, something like that. So our fidelity is just a touch higher, which means we are catching a whole bunch of things. This is, by the way, an FDA-approved device. I actually said a second ago, we don’t do any medical. That was a bit of a lie. What this company does —
Tim Ferriss: What is it approved for?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Diagnosing sleep disorders.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So the indication is sleep disorders?
Dr. Andy Galpin: We can clinically diagnose sleep disorders in your own home, in your own bedroom for a few hundred bucks at this point. So that can be done. With that, we have tremendous insights because we’re getting every single breath. We’re not missing any breath. And HRV, heart rate variability, is also the highest standard possible. And we’re getting overnights of that. So, you can pick other trackers. Those are all going to be in the same price range, so there’s really no difference. Anything you have is probably fine. Almost everyone has something, watches, rings, bands —
Tim Ferriss: Whatever.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — of different scenarios. You can get any of those. I’m trying in my head, is there a zero-cost option for respiratory rate? You could certainly measure it. You would get close. Actually, you’d probably overestimate it. If you just literally use a stopwatch and just measure how often you’re breathing during the day, at a calm resting state, my guess is you’d be a little bit aroused, so you’d probably be over-breathing a touch. So that might give you a little bit of a false sense, but you could try it that way. That would get you close.
Tim Ferriss: Do the rings and watches, etc, do a comparable job to a chest strap of some type?
Dr. Andy Galpin: It depends on what you’re measuring. The beauty and benefit of having something directly on your chest, is not only do I get to measure respiratory rate directly, but I get to measure respiratory depth, which is an entirely underutilized tool because we’re —
Tim Ferriss: And by depth you mean chest expansion?
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s correct. And that’s going to tell us a lot about what’s going on. We do that too. That’s put on there. Not at that insanely low price point, but at our full immersion part that that’s going to get measured as well. We don’t miss anything for the most part. Yeah, so do they — no, the honest reality is no.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, got it. Okay. So you could use both. Just for people listening, there are folks out there, and we could probably spend a lot of time just on respiratory muscles —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, for sure.
Tim Ferriss: — and so on. But you were saying, just to lead back after I interrupted, things that people can potentially do, outside of the full monty.
Dr. Andy Galpin: My hope was, you have something where you can get a rough sense of respiratory rate, because this factor alone — and just numbers-wise to throw it out there, again, I always look at 15. There is actually excellent research on 16. There’s actually a recent study that came out that was quite interesting on college freshmen, I believe. And they looked at respiratory rate, and they found that for every increase in one breath per minute, so you went from 14 breaths per minute to 15 to 16, there’s a 25 percent increase in likelihood of experiencing moderate to high stress. That was independent of a number of sleep markers. Sleep latency, sleep quality, sleep timing, duration, things like that.
And so, if you’re using a sleep tracker of some sort and that’s not changing, but you still feel like you’re experiencing stress or some of these other downstream things, you will note it in respiratory rate. You will see that move generally before — it is more sensitive. It’s like if you’ve ever used resting heart rate as a metric for if you’re overdoing things or where to go, it’s okay, but that is a lagging indicator. HRV is more of an immediate indicator, so HRV would be superior. The fidelity and change of HRV is much higher. Blood is even higher than that. It’s faster. It’s going to tell you what’s happening before HRV response, typically. But you would have HRV, heart rate — resting heart rate would be another rough way to do that. Respiratory rate would be seen even faster. Respiratory rate happens really quickly. You’re going to have a change overnight for the most part.
If you get a cold, if you have a few drinks tonight, things like that, you will see a change in respiration almost immediately. If you cross that 15 to 16, and you continue to go up, you see dramatic increases in risks of all kinds of disease states. In fact the line, again, on the research — and I’m summarizing the entire field, really. It starts to break around 15. You will see reference ranges that say 12 to 20 is normal. Again, I could pound that one as much as you want.
Tim Ferriss: No, that’s all right. We could replace normal with common maybe, but —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. I want to see 10 or 11.
Tim Ferriss: 10 or 11.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s the number to beat. Now, there is genetic components to it and some other things, but if anytime I see above 13, I’m probably taking action.
Tim Ferriss: So let me ask you a question, and the action is where I’m going next. And before we get there, I’m curious if the arrow of causality here is bidirectional or unidirectional, in a sense that when you exceed a certain sum total of allostatic load, respiratory rate goes up, presumably. That’s what I’m gathering. Can you reduce your overall allostatic load by targeting the respiratory rate directly, or do you need to address some components? I suspect it’s both ends, but I’m curious if by addressing the respiratory rate directly, for instance, through meditation breathing practices, does that help to reduce the sum total of that allostatic load, or do you have to go back to the puzzle pieces? Is it just an indicator?
Dr. Andy Galpin: No. So, here’s where it’s fun. Excellent research on this for a long time, 20 plus years of data on this. Physiology recognizes patterns. The same thing happens with sleep. And I could give a ton of examples here, happens with anything else. But if your respiratory rate is elevated, it could be an acute or chronic response, and it could be independent of the original causality. Which means, let’s say you had a really traumatic event, could even be not traumatic. Say you won a big game, you got excited, you got a great — it doesn’t matter, positive or negative, some sort of big event. In the state of that, you went into sympathetic drive. That then elevated respiratory rate. If that pattern is sustained, that continues to hold place even when you remove that initial stressor. So childhood trauma, sure. A period of extensive work, completing a dissertation, having a child, any of these things. Again, it’s not negative. It could be good or bad. That pattern can absolutely stay independent of the stressor being removed.
Tim Ferriss: It sounds a lot like pain signaling, or — anyway.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Everything is everything, my man. This is why I love physiology. It’s going to tell you the story. And so we can run a little bit of a triage here. I look at your stuff and I see your respiratory rate, 17 breaths per minute. I say, all right, I’m going to look back through the rest of your physiology. Do I see any other indicators of acute stress? I’m going to look at blood. That’s going to tell me a lot what’s going on. I can differentiate whether that stress is acute or chronic, based on various markers. I’m going to ask you. We’re going to have conversations. When did you start noticing any signs and symptoms? Oh, back pain kicked up. Okay, did anything happen around them? What’s going on? We’re going to figure this stuff out.
It’s very important when you measure physiology, you always need to understand symptomology. You’re working with humans, you’re not working with blood markers, and this is always the case. And so, if you have historical data, and this is one of the benefits of tracking over time, we can look back and say, okay, there’s an uptick here in this particular — your respiratory, it used to be 12 and now it’s up here. Now, it’s 16. When’s the breaking point? If you don’t have any of those things, fine, it doesn’t particularly matter because we have two clear action steps we can take in either of those cases. Whether we have an acute specific thing we’re doing right now that’s causing it, or whether this is some pattern from 10 days ago to 10 years, to — it doesn’t really matter. Number one — by the way, you know what? Here’s a free version. You can generally get a good sense if somebody’s respiratory rate is high if they tend to feel very good during light or low-intensity exercise. You know why?
Tim Ferriss: Why?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because their metabolic rate now starts to match their respiratory rate. So if you’re breathing at 16 breaths per minute, and that’s about four four-second ratio, if you go, how many — you take 15 breaths in a 60-second window, it’s about every four seconds. Two-second inhale, two-second exhale. Run the math there. So, if you are now going for a light jog, doing zone two, zone one, low activity, maybe just walking, these people are not always, but oftentimes can’t stand going a day without exercise. They’ve got to do some movement. They’ve got to get a sweat in some day. A lot of the times those people’s respiration rate’s high, and they feel they can’t go a day without it because they feel tremendous when they’re doing a low-level activity, because now they’re finally at a heart rate —
Tim Ferriss: That’s matching their respiratory.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — that’s matching respiratory rate. And so what happens, CO2 concentrations are normalized and you feel normal. When you don’t do that, you go back into — this is again, it’s never perfect. There’s no panacea here. There’s no magic recipe with physiology ever. So, I don’t oversell it, but it’s very common in our rapid health and performance program to have people like this who are just like, I can’t not work out, or I get too much anxiety, too much — and then you look and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t need to see your labs. I can predict your respiratory rate. I can predict your HRV. I can predict these other things.” And they feel great there.
And so what is the solution? In any of these cases, number one, we have to reduce arousal, which means you no longer get headphones when we exercise. You no longer get headphones when you’re walking. You’re not going to put in a podcast when you’re going out to take the dog for a walk. We have to reduce input and you have to — and there’s great work here from Emily Hightower. She has a course called Skill of Stress. It is fantastic. She’s actually Brian MacKenzie’s partner. Phenomenal. Emily’s a great resource. She’s on our team as well now, at least in part, but she will talk about, “Hey, we need to read and regulate,” which means you need to read your physiological state. You need to be aware that you’re over-breathing. You should be able to read that state and then you need to be able to regulate it. So what we’re doing is reducing input. And so whatever it is, any physical activity, not as a hard and fast rule but for the most part, we need you to be bringing senses out and paying attention to what’s happening to your respiratory rate in this particular case.
So reducing arousal is step number one. This could be, hey, no more work at night. This could be a lot of the very classic stuff. You’re doing too many things that bring up arousal at night or throughout the day. We could insert some specific downregulation in the middle of the day. Any number of ways we can go about this.
But we want to have some point, particularly after the place where we have the highest sympathetic drive throughout the day, your most focused and intense work session, your most physical session. And we’re going to match that on the back end with an intentional downregulation piece.
Tim Ferriss: What are your favorite levers to pull on the — and I’m sure it’s customized, but just broad strokes with your high-performing athletes and so on for —
Dr. Andy Galpin: For a regulation post?
Tim Ferriss: That’s right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. The easiest by far is, give me two to seven minutes of just quiet dark. So we typically ask them to do some breath work, post-exercise which is as simple as, turn the lights off, lay on your back, put a towel over your eyes, turn the music off, and just breathe for five minutes. If you want to swallow, follow a specific cadence and do something like box breathing, fine. If you want to do a double exhale, which means say a four-second inhale, eight-second exhale. So you’re going to extend an exhale, which is down regulatory three, typically. Fine, if you’re super into that stuff. If not, just quiet and calm.
Tim Ferriss: Chill the fuck out and breathe.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Chill out, dude. Just bring it down. There’s actually some initial data on, that can accelerate adaptations to exercise, is post-exercise downregulation. It’s not an extremely strong area of science, it’s just a few papers. But nonetheless, it’s enough for us to say, okay, what we want to do is take that high sympathetic drive and then we want to basically expand your boundaries. So right now your boundaries of up and down are narrow and we want to bring it way up with exercise in terms of sympathetic drive really high. And then I want to match it with the downside, and so it’s equal and opposite reaction.
If you got to a seven out of 10 sympathetically, I want you to seven out of 10, parasympathetically. That’s going to increase your ability to go up and down. Not always the case, some people have the opposite problem. This is far more complicated, but broad strokes-wise, it’s more common for us to ask that than it is the opposite.
By doing that, you are contributing to retraining breath rate, and so that is the second step. So first step was reduce arousal when you can. Second one is retraining breath work. If you want to do something like that, just do very light-level exercise, but instead of doing just the movement, we’re intentionally keeping a breath cadence. And so we’re regulating, we’re saying, “You need to learn to breathe at three-second inhale, three-second exhale.” And so we’re going to do whatever exercise you want, I don’t care. Go as hard as you want, I don’t care, but we are capping your inhalation and exhalation.
Tim Ferriss: Right. So that would be the three seconds in, three seconds out would be in that, let’s just call it 10 to 11 target range, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Breath per minute.
Dr. Andy Galpin: There you go. That’s the idea. And you can do that. So you take a combination of approaches there to figure out what’s really happening. And that solution can be very quick, it can be a little bit longer. But certainly, and to be really clear, not boiling down any or all mental health things into, “Just fix your breath rate, you’ll be fine.” I guess it’s not even close to that simple, but it is something from our physiology side that we’re really paying attention to.
Tim Ferriss: So hopping back to Tim 4.0.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah, we got a little far off.
Tim Ferriss: No, we didn’t get off track. I mean these are all interrelated. But if I’m going to be headed to altitude in let’s just call it seven to 10 days, I’ve already made a couple of what I would consider risk-reducing decisions such as giving myself a week before intensive training to acclimate a bit to altitude because it always will affect my sleep for the first handful of days.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What rough ballpark M altitude you’re talking here, 10,000?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s call it 10,000.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: And so I’ll typically have elevated heart rate for lots of straightforward reasons, sleep is compromised, dry, blah, blah, blah. Priority number one would be reducing any risk of injury for me and then — because I’m not a professional skier. But even if I were, I suppose that would be number one.
But given what I’ve mentioned, and I’ll just say a few more things because in case they’re helpful. I realize this is a little bit of, it’s not as comprehensive as I would like, but what I’ve observed pattern-wise, there are two things at once.
One is minimizing likelihood of the back becoming a major problem, which it was last season, right. I’d have to stop mid-slope and pick up one leg to try to relieve pain and it was bad. And there were days when I just couldn’t even ski because I hadn’t slept the night before because I’ve been tossing and turning with back pain.
So a few things that have helped, some of which are easier to implement than others. So the first thing I’ve noticed, very clear over the last nine months, more time spent sitting, the more back issues. And when I did some testing with Eric Cressey, just basic stuff. But if I’m in a flexed position and I do compressions and a chair or extended, doesn’t really bother me. If it’s straight up and down, for lack of a better way to describe it, compression sensitivity. So heel drop test, fucking hate it. I’m very sensitive.
And other things that may or may not be helpful. Certainly if I’m working and this is a layperson speaking, just keep that in mind folks, but the antagonistic muscles. If I’m doing core work of any type, Pilates, et cetera, that tends to significantly alleviate the lower back issues. Stuart McGill style —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Big Four.
Tim Ferriss: The fundamentals, Big Four, exactly. Especially the side planks, seem to alleviate a lot of the, what I would tend to describe as just overall QL spinal erector tightness. On the inflammation side, interestingly, I can gobble anti-inflammatories like Tic Tacs, it does not seem to help much. Ice and ketones really help. Ketones only in a fasted state, but ketones and ice tremendously helpful, with some durability. I mean the ice, that effect lasts for longer than I would’ve guessed.
So anyway, those are a few things, but I’m going to be at altitude in 10 days. At some point certainly, I definitely will talk about this after we stop recording, but would love to test the Absolute Rest. I mean, at some point —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah, we can get that done in a night.
Tim Ferriss: I’d be very, very interested in that. Because also the polysomnography stuff, it’s like your first night’s going to be dog shit, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: With all that stuff hooked to you. And then it corrupts, it’s easy to corrupt the data.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How much do you want me to shit on polysomnography? Because I can.
Tim Ferriss: No, no, no. Let’s save that for —
Dr. Andy Galpin: It is an absolute disaster and borderline useless.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s save it. We’ll give people that. But 10 days I’m at altitude. How would you, in lieu of, since we won’t have time to do all of this testing first? I am going to pay much more attention to the respiratory rate. I suspect mine is elevated. My resting heart rate also chronically, I mean, or I shouldn’t say chronically, but for as long as I’ve ever paid attention to it, higher than desirable.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Well, you’re a data guy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’ve got to have data that we can use right now.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean I have certainly, I’m sure I have a fair amount of stuff.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We can’t collect all of our special preferred markers and all that, but I bet we could get a really strong sense of what’s happening based on what you have all on your phone. You certainly do some sort of tracking at this point in your sleep?
Tim Ferriss: I have not used, say, Oura Ring, et cetera in a while just because the main takeaway is we’re like, “Yeah, don’t drink before bed.” Maybe don’t drink at all. I mean there were a few things that I took away from it and I was like, “Okay.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: This is the problem, right? There’s a significant difference between you don’t have a clinical sleep disorder and you’re sleeping great. Are you familiar with, at all, any of the research on sleep extension?
Tim Ferriss: Sleep extension?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t think so.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, my God, it’s so insane. Okay, if you want to understand your risk of disease 30, 40, 50 years, okay yeah, don’t sleep four hours a night, that’s great. If you want to look at what happens with disease markers between seven hours to sleep at night and eight hours, okay, there’s not a convincing argument there. So the take home message there is don’t have horrific sleep, but that is not nearly the same as optimizing your performance.
The data on what goes from good to great sleep on optimizing performance are strong. There is a ton of research on specifically high-performing athletes in a number of areas. There’s at least four studies I’m aware of in the areas of what we’ll call sleep banking or sleep extension. Sleep banking is such that before going into exposure of either restricted sleep, high-intensity or high-duration training or both. What happens when you bank sleep ahead of time?
Tim Ferriss: Get more than —
Dr. Andy Galpin: More than —
Tim Ferriss: — normal periods of sleep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right. And so a lot of these data are looking at things like going into fight camp, going into training camps. We know that we have a combination of increased training, and so by that fact alone, our injury risk has gone up. Injuries and training camps are higher. You’re coming in somewhat deconditioned, just playing a part of it. You’re doing a high-intensity, a higher volume at the same time. Now, we also know on the side, sleep goes down significantly during those phases of intensified training. So what you’re about to go do, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So we’re 10 days away. We know that this is happening. And we know your injury risk is going to quadruple during this phase, so that’s roughly what is going to happen.
Now, a bad night of sleep is irrelevant. That’s not going to increase your injury risk that much. However, if you look at, and the research again is not insanely strong here, but there is an association with risk and sleep. And so the number one thing I’m thinking is, okay, you already mentioned and you said this a couple of times, your sleep isn’t great when you’re in altitude for obvious reasons.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for the first week or two.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We need to bank ahead of time. Starting tonight, we need to maximize sleep, as much sleep as humanly possible. The number here is 10 hours. We need to get to 10 hours of sleep. We need to get ahead of that curve. We know what’s going to happen, and we know that for altitude, we have first night effect. You never sleep particularly well the first night in a new place, you have all those things. And we know altitude’s going to have those physiological issues, so we need to bank that. That sleep banking can get ahead.
Sleep extension is taking good and going to great sleep. There’s a handful of studies again, there’re probably five. Ranging from 45 minutes of extra sleep per night for three days, all the way up to two plus hours a night of additional sleep for five to seven weeks. Data on rugby players, high level endurance cyclists, division one basketball players, division one swimmers, potentially missing another one. But enough here, four or five, six studies from different laboratories looking at different metrics.
You’re going to see improvements in particularly one — this is actually classic Cheri Mah’s study — You’re talking about two hours of additional sleep per night and people already sleeping well. So the caveat with all this is, we’re not looking at sleep deprivation, which is you went 24 hours straight without sleep, or what we call extreme sleep restriction. So you slept for four hours or three hours. You’re talking about people already sleeping reasonable amounts of time, and now you’re adding this 45 minutes to up to two hours a night.
Now in doing that, you’re seeing in Cheri’s initial study, nine percent improvement in free throw shooting accuracy. This is in division one basketball players. Same thing with three point shooting accuracy, improvements in reaction time. Now, these are actually not done in a single time, so what they’re looking at is like, I think they shot free throws in practice every day. They tracked that number over the course of the season, so not just one particular good day of shooting or bad.
With any of this stuff, and all science has limitations. These are not perfect studies. In this particular case, they didn’t have a control group. You’d also assume people get better in season.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That happens. But a nine percent improvement in elite athletes of a skill. Let’s say it was 50 percent high. Let’s say it was 75 percent high, you’re still talking at three percent, four percent, five percent improvement, which is really, really impressive, right? There are data on NBA players and their tweeting activity, so how much they tweet post-game, as a defunct measure of who’s asleep and who’s not. And that can predict almost two percent of shooting accuracy the next day.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just imagining all of the quants are going to go out and start betting on games now based on analyzing tweet volume and timing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No, Cheri actually, I think —
Tim Ferriss: It’s actually clever.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I don’t know her at all, but I’ve seen her stuff. I think she worked for ESPN for three years, and she did this thing where she would predict NFL games, who would win or lose based strictly on circadian rhythms. And I think she was like 70 to 80 percent accurate for a three-year span.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s wild.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Steven Lockley, who actually works [inaudible]. He’s done a ton of this work, so there’s things to pay — we’re so off track here, but this is too fun. I’m coming back to a point to your ski thing here in a second, I promise. I don’t promise, I loosely promise.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll hold you to it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: All right. So what you want to pay attention to with sleep is sleep duration of course, and all that stuff is great. Sleep quality, this is where polysomnography becomes really problematic. Defining sleep quality is really challenging. It’s not the same thing.
Tim Ferriss: So let me ask you a question related to sleep and maybe we’ll dive even further into this, but a few things. So with sleep banking, I would imagine there are people out there and this would include me, who would say, “I kind of wake up when I wake up and I might feel tired, but I’m not sure how I would be physiologically capable of extending my actual sleep. I could extend my time in bed, but I’m not sure of how to extend it.” Let’s just make that part A.
Part B is very specific which is, I’d be curious to know your thoughts on caffeine and best ways to reduce or get off caffeine. Because what I noticed recently, I did 30 days with no caffeine, zero. This is the first time I’ve probably done that since I was 16. And I mean zero caffeine, no tea, no nothing for 30 days. All of my sleep issues went away, resolved, magically.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: And what was fascinating to me is that prior to that I would often try to fix my sleep issues by attempting to sleep more, more time in bed.
I was, hopefully this is smart enough, if I were tossing and turning I’d just get up, as opposed to just suffering for an hour or two in bed. What I noticed when I got off the caffeine is that I, in many cases, was, quote unquote, “sleeping less,” but I was going to bed earlier, much earlier. I was going to bed in this case 9, 9:30, 10 o’clock, waking up a lot earlier, but waking up wide awake, no fatigue, no dragging ass, no, “I need a cup of coffee.”
So the two questions are, for people who are listening and are doubtful they would be able to extend their sleep, what are some options? That includes me right now because I’m back on the sauce. And we could dissect that. It’s been a fucking nutty last 10 days. I’ll spare you the drama, but a lot of things have happened in life that were unexpected. So my soothing mechanism has been, I’ve been drinking caffeine. I’m willing to get off of it, but now I have to do it when I’m in real life. Whereas before I had four weeks off the grid and it was easier.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Of course. Oh, I see. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So for people who are unsure of how they would bank sleep because they are doubtful that they could extend their sleep, some options. And then thoughts on caffeine, or getting off of caffeine.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. This is why an appropriate measure of sleep quality matters and this is why —
Tim Ferriss: To figure out just what you’re working with. Is that what you mean?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I mean you have to, right? So depending on what wearable or tracker you’re using that is defined differently by everybody, I would caution you against two major things here. One, worrying about a sleep score. Do not pay attention to that. That is, in part, almost all those are calibrated against polysomnography and that is somewhat arbitrary.
Even in 2007 they actually changed, I think it’s the American Sleep Society or something, changed their definition of what deep sleep is.
Tim Ferriss: Moving target. And polysomnography for people who don’t know, I mean this is what we were referring to earlier, like the sleep lab, bunch of stuff stuck on your scalp.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s the, quote unquote, “gold standard.” But what people don’t know about that is, number one, those things change. And then two, even in a sleep lab, those are based on 30-second epochs, so what happens every 30 seconds. And then somebody goes there and manually grades and decides this was a cutoff line, this was not a cutoff line. And so you’re being still subjectively scored, even on, you went in the lab, you went into the sleep clinic, you did the whole thing. It is a little bit nasty.
Tim Ferriss: So what should you pay attention to?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Different ways to go about that. You certainly want to pay attention to —
Tim Ferriss: And I do have an Oura Ring. I could wear one prior — I mean, I could put one on tonight or tomorrow.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But see, again, we use Oura, for the record, with almost everybody for many reasons, have used it historically. So this is nothing against them whatsoever, but even Oura is matched against polysomnography. So when they say they’re 99 percent accurate or 80 percent accurate, it’s against PSG, which I don’t think is telling you the story.
The second part about that is problematic is, think about it this way. If I asked you and we had this entire conversation about training and you said, “Hey, I want to train for my ski thing. How would I — would I train the same way for this two months of skiing, physically train, as I would if that was now a marathon?” If that was just, I want to feel better, my joints hurt, if that was, “I want to gain some more muscle.” And the obvious answer is clearly no. And I asked this, and we had the same conversation about nutrition. But yet when we think about sleep, it’s just “Yeah, yeah, sleep more.”
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? If you want to get better sleep, if you want to get better nutrition, in your particular case, you would hire probably somebody who’s done performance nutrition for skiing. You would hire a high-performance person for your physical training and sleep, or in this type of skiing and something like that. But when it comes to sleep, it’s like go to a sleep lab and get a doctor. But that’s all we have here.
And so we don’t think about sleep as a high-performance tool. And I’m saying that to say, why do you think your sleep stages should be the same every night? It doesn’t make any sense. Would I expect your muscles to perform the same way? No. Would I expect your nutrition to be the same? Absolutely not. So not only should you be really cautious with the sleep score, but even worrying about how much time you spend in each one of those sleep stages based on a tracker is highly problematic. It shouldn’t be the same. When you go ski for six hours a day, I promise you your sleep architecture is going to be different than it is tonight.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, totally. And if I was cramming for studying Chinese, it would be something else, most likely, right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No question, right. And so we need to go a better way about thinking of overall our sleep quality. This is where things like, okay, what’s your HRV look like? What is your respiratory rate? How do you feel? Did you have a hard time sleeping at night? Did you wake up a bunch? How do you feel right now when you wake up? Those are free ways to assess your sleep. There’s actually strong data on two things here. One, I promise I’m coming back to the point. I warned you before we started.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no, you did. This is why I’m alert. I’m sympathetically activated to keep track.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. All right, excellent data. If somebody sleeps for eight hours a night versus five hours a night and you tell them the opposite, you will see a physiological response. So that corresponds what you told them rather than what actually happened. And so in other words, if I told you, “Man, we did this whole sleep study on you last night, Tim, you slept for two hours.” And you’re like, “Really?” Your reaction time, your memory, your focus, your attention that next day will reflect poor sleep. If you slept for two hours and the actual study here was five hours and I told you eight, I said, “Hey, man, your Oura Ring’s super wrong. Actually, our technology is better and you sleep phenomenal.” That’s not true, but I made it up, right? You would actually respond that way.
There’s a thing that’s growing in the field called orthosomnia, right, which is actually sleep tracker-induced insomnia. And so those scores matter to you. They matter more than you think. There’s also an anticipatory response that can happen such that, this is why you don’t check your phone first thing in the morning.
So when you know that a certain thing happens, in this particular case checking your sleep score first thing in the morning, you will then back calculate and start adjusting your sleep to wake up in that aroused state, which then compromises your sleep quality because you know that thing is happening in a certain amount of time.
Tim Ferriss: Meaning you’re anticipating waking up, looking at your sleep score.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Getting a positive or negative feedback and now it’s disrupting, and this is why we’re typically waking up all of a sudden earlier, don’t know why, right? Things like that. So all that stuff, you need to be really, really careful with understanding, how am I using any of these technologies if I overall am? All right. So sleep quality, we’ll leave it to that for now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Sleep banking, how to, and caffeine.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Back to our original point here now. When you are thinking about sleeping more, we’re paying attention to those other ones first. Duration is the one you keep saying, sleep banking. But really, I’ve tried to make the argument sleep quality matters and then timing. So if you are in the same timing and have a higher quality, you have de facto increased duration.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Even if your duration didn’t actually increase. So the number one and two things I’d say there is, okay, number one, let’s make sure you’re timing your activity today, in the right time of your physical day that’s going to make you feel like you’ve slept more. Your performance will go up. And so without actually increasing a minute of sleep, you performed like you’ve — it’s like a pseudo sleep making. It’s like pseudo sleep extension. Getting a higher quality of sleep and all those things is the same thing. So that’s step number one.
And two, independent of a single extra minute of sleep. If you still need that, then this is where things like napping can come in. Now, be careful with napping. I personally don’t like it at all. But in these particular cases I’m okay going with it, as long as it’s not reducing sleep pressure, which is this desire — is it harming your sleep latency? Are you waking up more, having a harder time going to sleep at night and you’re losing total duration? A lot of people can get away with a lot of napping and it doesn’t harm them.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it doesn’t work very well for me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, okay. So in your particular case, I would say just take what we have, get as much sleep as absolutely possible and then build in what are non-sleep equivalents. So what can we do throughout the day to encourage extreme downregulation? And really banking that. It’s not the same as banking sleep, but is it having the same potential? Well, we’ve taken a couple of steps of logic away, but it’s close. So this is pick breath work, pick low-intensity exercise, pick non-sleep deep rest stuff, like pick yoga nidra.
There are all kinds of things we can do that are going to again, simulate some aspect of sleep and that’s what we’re going to go after. And then really doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on all of your personal known best sleep practices. And just really making sure that is our top priority for the day, or the things I have to get done, check in for my flight pack, things like that. And then the rest of the time I’m really making sleep my — so I’m starting my downregulation practice now at three o’clock p.m. or something or whatever you do, so that by the time eight o’clock hits, you’re just the various end out.
Tim Ferriss: So for me, I would say these days, not just reducing but eliminating caffeine. And then, ensuring I am not exceeding a certain duration of sitting, which is fucked for this week because I’m recording podcasts, but that’s okay. Those two things, if I attend to those two things, everything else is a rounding error. So those are the two.
Putting aside the lower back stuff for now, we can come back to it, but it’s such a gnarled tangled mess of different theories and diagnoses. But the caffeine is, I suppose, a little simpler, not always easy. But what is your position here?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Great. I personally don’t love caffeine much. Not as a scientist, not as a coach, as a human. I don’t like it that much. I’ll have some, but a half-caf espresso is perfect. Just tiny background down there.
Your physiology will tell you that answer. And what I mean by that is, I have plenty of people that do fine on caffeine and their sleep is fantastic, and others it really is detrimental. If you were to look just across in the landscape of the research, what you’re globally going to see is caffeine is problematic for sleep. It just doesn’t, and I’m not even talking about like, “Hey, you don’t have caffeine past 2:00 p.m.,” or things like that. I’m done talking about literally any caffeine ingestion whatsoever just seems to take sleep the wrong direction.
Tim Ferriss: And I think I misevaluated this for a long time because I can consume stupid amounts of caffeine and fall asleep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And fall asleep, of course.
Tim Ferriss: But the sleep architecture is a disaster, right. It’s like one of those spider webs that is created by the spider on methamphetamine, where you’re like, “Oh, that doesn’t look right.” That’s my sleep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep. Okay. So one thing you can pay attention to is your physical output.
Now, there are not any data that I’m aware of that suggests that sleep duration is linearly tied to energy expenditure. So it’s that if you burn more calories, you don’t sleep more. But there’s clearly some association here. I mean, just based on basic physiology. When we understand how caffeine works and how sleep works, then there’s clearly an association.
Let me give you a very simple example. Most people are aware at this point of a molecule called ATP. This is the energy currency of all biology. It’s the only way we can use cellular energy. Now that stands for adenosine triphosphate. So it’s an adenosine monocle with tri three phosphates, one, two, three. The way that energy is created from ATP is, you take one of those phosphates at the end and you break that off. In our biology that is exergonic, meaning it gives off net energy and we can use that.
What that leaves is a molecule called endergonic phosphate. So one of those peas is floating around. And then now instead of having a triphosphate, you have a diphosphate, so there’s two of them. If you were to do that one more time, and this becomes challenging, but that adenosine diphosphate goes to adenosine monophosphate. You do that one more time, and now you just have adenosine. Those phosphates are now recycled and gone back.
That adenosine molecule is what drives most of sleep pressure. And the way caffeine works, is that will competitively bind to the same receptors, so they’re binding up to that receptor which means adenosine can’t, which means you don’t feel the pressure for sleep. Great. This is why it causes so many sleep issues. Therefore, it makes some intuitive sense to say, if I burn a bunch more ATP, this should then, if I have a bunch of caffeine in the system, allow me to generate more overall pressure because creating more total adenosine in the system, better ability to bind. Now, that’s not [inaudible] to it. That’s why there’s not a linear relationship there, but you’re going to have some stuff there. What I say that to mean is our people that engage in the most physical activity, even when they consume decent amounts of caffeine, tend to on average still be okay with their sleep architecture.
And so one of the ways to do that, of course, genetics, and we’ve probably talked about this, but how fast you metabolize caffeine or don’t and stuff like that, that all matters. But the reality of it is if you are in that situation, having a high energy expenditure, and the other one I’ll say is having a high cognitive expenditure. So making sure both those demands are really high are going to get you in a position where if you have to be on the sauce, as you say, that you’re giving yourself the best chance to sleep the highest amount. So when you asked me that second question of how do we think about caffeine, we typically deal with high-performing folks. So whether this is our athletes or our non-athletes, they’re all in this game for high-performance, which means caffeine comes along for the ride almost all the time.
Caffeine is an incredibly powerful ergogenic aid. Tons of research on it affecting and enhancing human performance in a lot of ways, and so we use it a lot for athletes. You’re going to perform better. That’s great, but you have to play the game of sleep. So when you cross over of, “Yeah, you had better numbers in the gym or on the court or on the course or where we’re at, but now we’ve lost sleep,” there’s no right answer here. At what point do we say, “Okay, I’d rather you be a little bit fatigued and not train as hard, but then sleep tonight?” And I can’t answer that.
One of the easiest examples is with our PGA golfers, and so here’s a good example. You’re going to be on a course for four to six hours in the PGA Tour. Energy is a big deal, so we’ve got to keep these folks, especially when it’s hot. And we’re playing in Augusta, and we’re playing in all these really difficult places. So we’ve got to keep people hydrated and performing. At the same time, golfers don’t typically love caffeine because any amount of loss of neuromuscular control is — one percent loss there is catastrophic. So in golf what happens is — so golf is played in, well, in the PGA Tour, four days. So you play Thursday and Friday, and then the top half of the group gets to play the weekend, and the bottom half goes home. So you’re cut, if you will.
But to make things even, because circadian rhythms matter so much, you play one of those first two days in the morning, and you play the other day in the afternoon, so half the golfers, and then you need to switch. And so sometimes it’s an advantage to play early depending on the weather. So they just try to make it even and say, “All right. Thursday, you have 6:00 a.m. tee time and then Fridays to noon or 1:00,” or whatever the case is. Well, that is really hard because if you are a West Coast player, say, in Phoenix, and you’re going to go play at tournament in Georgia, Augusta, and you get a 7:00 a.m. tee time, this is a 4:00 a.m. tee time, which means you’re up at 1:30 and practice, warm-up, all those things.
And so you may want to go to caffeine to say, “Hey, I need a little bit of a turn-on here to get going because my neuromuscular skill is significantly compromised, so it’s going to be really hard to get going.” The downside of that though is now what have we done to sleep? Because if we’re in the wrong situation, if we have early tee time, Thursday, and late tee time Friday, we’re fine. But if you’re doing well and you have the opposite, then you have a late start Thursday, and then you have a super early start Friday. So you have short number of hours between when you finish and then play the next day. The caffeine on the first day, if that compromises sleep at all, then you’re really doubling down on how hard that next day is going to be.
And so you have to really be careful about how much caffeine you use because at some point, and this is just a coaching decision, how much do you want to perform better right now versus sacrifice tomorrow, and what are you doing? The same can be said for any sport, and this is really hard for our football players. So when are we practicing in the NFL? If we’re playing a night game, do we use a bunch of caffeine before that Sunday night football game or that Monday night football game? And now, baseball players [are] the worst playing typically at 7:00, 7:05, 7:10 p.m. If they’re pitching, whatever, they’re going to be done at 10:00 at the earliest. And now, you’ve got to come back off that train and try to get to sleep before 4:00 a.m., which is really, really a never-changing time zone. So there’s no one answer for that, I guess, is my point. So how do you use it? Judiciously and carefully.
Tim Ferriss: So in terms of getting off of it, I mean, it seems to be — and maybe I’m simplifying here, but I recall being in Korea not too long ago, and I didn’t use any caffeine when I was adjusting to Korea, which was challenging. But a friend of mine was explaining sleep deprivation with young kids. And if you asked him how you contend with that, his answer was effectively, “Don’t be weak.” He’s like, “You contend with it. There is no magic trick,” which might be the answer for getting off caffeine. It’s like, “Yeah, you’re going to have to just bite the bullet and have a week probably of some degree of withdrawal symptoms,” which I might just have to contend with.
So let’s just say if I grab a device, whatever device I happen to have, I use that prior to getting to altitude. I land at altitude. I can try to do some sleep banking up to that point, which would include non-sleep augmentation in the form of non-sleep deep rest, yoga nidra meditation, whatever it might be. Any other thoughts in terms of what happens after I hit the ground?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. So the other thing that would be a very easy win would be making sure hydration is really on point. When people get in cold, they tend to forget because when you go and do something when it’s hot, you have the visual tactical feel of your sweat. You lose that in the cold. I know you’ve done a bit of hunting, so this is where it comes in for me all the time. This is one of my primary areas of passion. And you get out and you spend days, and you’re working all day, running up and down mountains, and it’s really cold outside. You just forget to drink water, and then you start seeing and feeling signs and symptoms of exhaustion and altitude and all those things. And you realize, “All right, there’s nothing I can do about the altitude, but I can correct hydration.” And that’s going to be really, really important. Having viscous blood is not going to help anything of your performance.
Tim Ferriss: Ketchup blood doesn’t help.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Ketchup’s not a good thing to be pumping through your veins, so hydration would be another easy win. You also are probably aware of what happens with hydration, just being on a plane, assuming you’re on a plane to go out there, but the altitude will get it. You already said the dryness. It’s going to be dry up there. This is part and parcel. So that would be the next big one I would go after is maintaining great hydration now, and then certainly optimizing it or at least maintaining it once you get there. Another super easy win.
Tim Ferriss: Any guidelines around that? When to hydrate? How to hydrate?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. So easy example here, half your body weight in ounces per day is a very rough number. So if you weigh 200 pounds, it’s 100 ounces a day. Gets you close, ballpark. Within that, you want to make sure that you’re not reducing sleep. And so some of the biggest wins we’ve had and from a coaching perspective is actually reducing water intake.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’d love for you to say more about that. A friend of mine just a few days ago, he’s like, “Yeah, are you familiar with the 3-2-1 rule?” And I was like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” And he said, “No food three hours before sleep, no water two hours before sleep, and then no devices one hour before sleep.” I was like, “Oh, that’s clever. Okay.” I mean, it’s not a bad heuristic to use, but how do you think about reducing liquid intake?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as a global answer, yeah. But I probably wouldn’t use that approach personally much. You do want to taper down fluids at night. I’m laughing because we’ve had a number of people, and they come in, and they are sure they have a sleep disorder or something or else. And we look, and we’re like, “All right, you’re peeing three times a night.” And it’s like, “Okay, well why is that happening?” Well, it can actually happen because of low quality sleep. There are a number of things that happen that are common and people think are benign that are not, and then one of them is that. So it is somewhat normal to wake up once throughout the night to have to pee. Okay, great. More than that, something is probably happening.
Either it’s one of a couple of main areas, you’re drinking way too much pure water too late at night, or two, you do legitimately have some sleep quality issues, and that can actually contribute to nocturia, overnight urination. But just, the easy solution there is pay attention to a couple of things. Number one, how much water you’re actually drinking at night in the two hours, three hours before and then, two, when you wake up to pee, pay attention to it. Is it a really large volume? Is it really clear, or is it a smaller or medium amount, and/or is it of a more tinted color? And then pay attention to how much — we actually weigh and measure all this stuff, but you can just use these rough rules, how much you pee the next morning, same thing.
So if you’re getting up and you pee once throughout the night and it’s a medium amount, and then you pee the next morning and it’s very small and it’s very yellow, then you can say this is probably not over hydration. This is probably being induced by low sleep quality. If it’s the opposite, it’s like, “Yeah, I woke up, and I went pee, and I was there for a while, and then I woke up the next morning, and I did it again, and I had this half a pound or a pound and a half of urine,” then you have a pretty good idea of you’re simply drinking way too much water at night. You can in that case, try to add things like salt, but the better idea is just not drinking so much water.
Tim Ferriss: So any guidelines on that? Any suggestions specifically? I mean, in the sense that people need to remember something to act upon it. So I’d be curious to know why the 3 — I mean, look, I just heard about this two days ago, and it’s just a heuristic. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but the 3-2-1, it’s like, “Oh, it’s easy to remember.” He mentioned it once. I was able to remember it. I happen to pee quite a lot at night. But guess what? When I was off of caffeine, didn’t pee at night. And so if you’re intaking diuretics and then compensating by drinking tons of water, or in my case I’m just a compulsive water drinker. If I sit at a lunch with someone, I’ll drink one or two bottles of water. I drink a lot of fucking water, and I’m not saying — you’re making amazing faces. We’ll have to get that on the video.
Dr. Andy Galpin: There’s so much opportunity with you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. So let’s get into the juicy bits.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. So I would love to know — I didn’t intend, and I’m not intending to always come back to sleep here. I don’t even think we intended to get here at all really today, but we’re here again.
Tim Ferriss: Here we are.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You can differentiate between acute and chronic dehydration in blood really quickly.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. What do you look for?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Albumin is the big ticker there. And so acute dehydration markers take a look at hemoglobin, hematocrit, and sodium. That’s going to give you an indicator. If you stack albumin on top of that, if those three things start to tend high, hematocrit, hemoglobin, sodium, you’ve got a good indication of dehydration. If they go the opposite direction, we’re worried about hyperhydration, right.
Tim Ferriss: hyperhydration. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: If you check in albumin on top of that, then you’re going to get an indication that this has been around for a very long time. So we can calculate osmolality. We can do it independent of a urinalysis and things like that. Okay. Now why this stuff matters, think about it, all of those metrics, hematocrit is the percentage of your blood that is red blood cells, so it is a percentage. It’s not an actual unit. Sodium and hemoglobin come in such low concentrations. We tend to give them relative to total blood volume, which means it’s how many milligrams per deciliter of blood. If you were dehydrated, your total blood volume goes down so much such that those numbers, even if they’re the actual same absolute value, get reduced.
Now albumin is an acute phase reactant, which means it responds acutely to inflammation, so it’ll change. And so here you go. Here’s some fun. This is going to frustrate everybody. Okay. If you’ve ever had blood work done and someone’s been like, “Oh, your labs look fine,” but you’re like, “I don’t feel fine,” it could be a lot of things happening here. But albumin is one of the easiest examples here. It is an acute phase reactant. It is also sensitive to hydrate — albumin — let me back up real fast. We’re like Inception right now. I’m four points into four points behind, so setting up those, so we can come up here.
But albumin is responsible for 50 to 60 percent of the osmotic pressure in your vessels, so it’s the protein that carries around any number of things. 10 to 15 or so percent of your cortisol is being carried on albumin, a bunch of other things, so it’s a main protein. It’s made in your liver, and it’s got a 20-or-so-day turnover rate. So every 20-or-so days, you’ll recycle that albumin, so that in response to dehydration will change. It will change in response to inflammation too. So here’s what happens. Imagine a scenario when somebody is slightly inflamed and slightly dehydrated. Pretty common, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. Albumin got tugged up and tugged down, which means where’s albumin going to be on your blood? Dead in the middle. You’ll have a normal albumin.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Your snapshot’s going to look just fine.
Dr. Andy Galpin: This is an X-ray. “Knee’s not broken. Your knee must be fine.” Not at all, right? So now if I can look at albumin and say, “Hey, wait a minute. Okay. Albumin as well as other markers are trending high.” Now, I’ve got an idea of what’s happening. If they’re not, now I can look at albumin and go, “Oh, okay, this is an inflammation issue. That’s our marker.” And so I can really pay attention to that and say, “Tim, you’re hyperhydrating. You’re drinking way too much water. Do you know what the signs and symptoms of hyperhydration are? Well, waking up and peeing three times a night is one. Headaches, brain fog.” Do you know how many people in our program whose brain fog we’ve solved in day one because they’re just drinking way too much water?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I believe it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Headache’s gone away. All kinds of issues. Almost the exact same symptoms are associated with dehydration as hyperhydration. You don’t need to do a single lab if you don’t want to be a dork like us and get all that stuff figured out. But if you are peeing consistently throughout the day like that, and if it carries over into night at the rate that you’re talking about, almost surely you are hyperhydrating. This becomes a huge problem because it can induce what’s called hyponatremia.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Dangerous.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You can die. People die consistently.
Tim Ferriss: People have heard stories of radio jockeys having water-drinking competitions. People die on —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Fraternity parties.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Dangerous.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Tons of stuff. I —
Tim Ferriss: Marathons too. I mean, people are hyperhydrating.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Marathons, Ironmans, things like that happens. It can cause hyponatremia. Natremia is sodium. It’s a science word for sodium, so it’s hypo, so that gets too low. It’s not actually an issue of sodium getting too low. It’s an issue of excessive water intake. And so the electrical gradient between your muscles and your blood becomes neutral, so the gradient gets lost. And so muscle, and in this particular case, the heart muscle, fails to contract. This is muscle fatigue. This is lack of performance. It’s like, “I’m just not feeling as strong, as powerful, as twitchy as I used to be.” All the way up to, in severe cases, death because cardiac tissue stops. So I would be interested to look at more of your metrics and just paying attention to, “All right, how many times are you really peeing at night?” And if you are, I would stop that immediately, and you will typically see very big changes in sleep, but overall function by not excessively hydrating.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I think this is a behavioral modification thing and not a knowledge thing for me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: I would bet right here on the spot without looking at my labs. I’d be like, “Oh, I could bet half my net worth that I’m hyperhydrating.” I know I’m hyperhydrating just looking at my behavior over the last couple of weeks. And so it’s really a question of how do I modify behavior in this case? Because if I sit down at a lunch or a business meeting, my inclination is just to keep drinking whatever is in front of me. That could be coffee. It could be water. I mean, rarely alcohol, but if it’s alcohol, it’s whatever’s in front of me, I will drink because I like the motor movement. I have no idea. It’s gratifying in some way. And then if I layer diuretics on top of the liquid intake, then we have a hell of a lot going on.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Alcohol does the same thing at night, right?
Tim Ferriss: Alcohol does, for sure.
Dr. Andy Galpin: 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: Because it’s inhibiting vasopressin. I think that’s what’s going on anyway.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Antidiuretic hormone.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Dr. Andy Galpin: ADH is the real problem, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you’re going to downregulate that, and that’s good. When you drink alcohol, you should be given the physiology symptoms to pee more clearly, right? But that’ll happen.
Tim Ferriss: So all right. All right. So that’s —
Dr. Andy Galpin: So here’s what I would say. I would say actually two last things on that. One, as a behavioral coaching tool, then we would have some sort of mechanism for you. There’d be something in your day that triggers water stopping. This could be, “Okay. When you shower at night, we just don’t drink water afterwards.” When we have —
Tim Ferriss: Decide what the trigger is.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What is the trigger?
Tim Ferriss: What flips the switch? What other behavior?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right. So at that point, if you need a sip of water, you can, but we’re no longer having water in a visual or immediately achievable position. So no more water bottles, no more water on the table.
Tim Ferriss: Take the camel back off, you mean?
Dr. Andy Galpin: No. You can leave it on for fun. Yeah. Physiologically, I would come back and say, “Of course it’s behavior, right? But is there something actually happening that’s causing sensation of thirst?” And I want to look at that side of your physiology.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. That’s a great question. That’s a great question.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So back to the labs.
Tim Ferriss: It’s wild how — and this isn’t a surprise, but it’s just a consistent reminder when these conversations get unpacked. I can’t remember who it was, maybe Emerson. I’ll give him credit. Why not? When you try to tease out any one thing, you find it hitched to the rest of the universe in the sense that if I look at these behaviors, I also look at the very high, let’s just call it, allostatic load over the last week. A bunch of unanticipated events such as life have caused a tremendous amount of workload very unexpectedly right before the holidays —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. That happened to me too.
Tim Ferriss: — when everybody’s on their auto-response, and you’re like, “Okay. Interesting. Home alone.” You know what I mean? And one of my coping mechanisms is — this is brief. We don’t have to spend a lot of time unpacking this, but is hot-cold sauna. Typically, I would do that earlier in the day. I would do that, let’s say, 5:00, 6:00 p.m., but because of the nature of the schedule this past week, I’ve been doing it late at night. So what does that lead me to do? It leads me to hydrate around that, and then boom, here we are.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. So funny enough you say that. You may or may not have heard, but some people actually sleep better when they do a sauna.
Tim Ferriss: I do if I do it earlier.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. A lot of people have success with sauna at night, right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Many reasons why. One of them, though, is any hyperhydration that has occurred —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, you bleed it out.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — you bleed it out.
Tim Ferriss: Hmm. Okay. All right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So it’s not the worst thing ever to be there. The only other thing I’d come back to is I would be willing to bet probably not half my net worth, but some smaller margin, maybe $100.
Tim Ferriss: You’re smarter. I’m just a terrible gambler.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I love gambling.
Tim Ferriss: All right. We might come back to that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I love it. There are two things in this world I love more than anything, and that’s trash talking and gambling.
Tim Ferriss: Often go together. Okay. So you’d bet $100?
Dr. Andy Galpin: That your hydration habit is better when you have better downregulation practices.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. I wouldn’t bet against that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. And so now it’s coming back to the same point, which is, “Okay, great, we can give you a mechanism that just says no more water bottles after 6:00 p.m. or whatever. That’s great, but have we really solved the core issue?” It’s the same thing of going back to saying, “Okay. Great. We took a look at that sodium-potassium ratio. We identified that that got really high or that got really low really, and that caused signs and symptoms of fatigue, et cetera. Cortisol is playing here.” And so these people tend to feel really good when you give them salt, but did we solve the problem?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No. We didn’t because as soon as, “Yeah. You took your LMNT packs, and you did all these great things,” that felt way better, amazing. Was your sodium truly low, or was it being pulled down?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. As a ratio, was it just being thrown?
Dr. Andy Galpin: No. Even the absolute number. Even the absolute number being pulled down as a response, right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So we’ve now had alterations in kidney function that changed how much sodium that we’re holding onto. We haven’t solved the issue.
Tim Ferriss: This is also a case for me where drinking water is basically a socially acceptable, minimally disruptive, compulsive habit that is a coping response for me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: This is why I went to your HRV. It’s what you use for downregulation. 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a worry stone, me drinking water. And I think this is also a guess. I’m just thinking out loud here because it’s helpful for me, where I’ve spent so much of my life worrying about hydration because I have hyperhidrosis. I always was good at cutting weight for wrestling. I mean, I would cut 20, 30 pounds. I mean absurd amounts that I would never recommend, terrible for you. However, I could do it because I sweat so easily. That also meant that when I sweat a lot, my power output would just go into the garbage. So for my entire life, my preoccupation has been hydrating, and this is a case where it’s like, “Okay, maybe that has served you at points, but in this case, why don’t we try the opposite for 48 hours?”
“And do this on it, but don’t guzzle a gallon water afterwards. Going to bed a little bit…” When I did tennis training a long time ago and I was withing the ball into the net over and over again, and this pro said, “Look, for the next 10 minutes of practice, you’re allowed to hit the ball anywhere except into the net.” He’s like, “If you want to hit a home run, knock yourself out.” He’s like, “The one place you cannot hit it is into the net.” Maybe this is the case where it’s like, “All right, Tim, you can do anything except for drink a ton of water at night. And if you go to bed a little dehydrated for two days, your ‘dehydrated’…”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: “…may not be dehydrated.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: You will feel signs and symptoms of dehydration though. You’ll feel cotton mouth, I’m sure. You’ll feel different things. Have you ever had your sweat tested?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s a super easy start. Why don’t we test how much you’re actually sweating, and then what’s the content of that sweat? And that’s going to tell us the opposite side. This is something that can be done for a few dollars at this point. So there are a number of different methods that people can purchase these things. I think as low as probably 15 bucks all the way up to a couple of hundred dollars.
Tim Ferriss: If people just wanted to learn about this, what would they Google?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. There’s a number of companies. Gatorade makes a sweat patch. It’s $12, I think, something like that. You can go all the way up to something like a Nix, N-I-X. I think you buy that patch for $150 or something like that, and you could get different things. But you can actually, in that, get real-time feedback. I’m not associated with any at all.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, interesting. So it’s like a CGM. It’s like a continuous glucose monitor for your sweat.
Dr. Andy Galpin: 100 percent. Now there’s some issues. You don’t get full electrolyte breakdown, but you’ll know how much total fluid you’re losing as well as sodium content. And we will actually use that because one of the real tricks to maintaining optimal hydration status, whether you’re talking about throughout the day or during exercise performance, is you have to make sure you’re putting back in what you’re sweating, which is to say it is not just about water. We’ve talked about hyponatremia. We need to know that we’re putting in a hypotonic solution. So that’s a way of saying the total pressure with all the different solutes and solvents in the cocktail needs to be the same as your blood. Glucose, sodium, chloride, potassium, all this stuff needs to be balanced. It doesn’t have to be, but you’re going to get better results.
If you drink excessively dilute fluids, let’s just say pure water, then what’s going to happen is it’ll go immediately into your gut. That’ll get immediately in the blood. It’s very quick to get that across that barrier, and then your total blood volume will expand. You’re running constant checks of total blood volume. You’ll actually expand more than you think, and so you’ll actually send signals that say “Excrete the fluid,” and so this is why if you’re really, really dehydrated, say, after the sauna, say you did a crazy session — when you do a sauna, how much time do you do? 20 minutes? 30 minutes?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not doing super long. And this is where it gets a little tricky because it’s like, “All right, what’s the humidity in the sauna?” So generally, what I’ll do I’ll get to, let’s just call it 195 in the sauna, maybe between 195 and 210.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Plenty hot.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Plenty hot. So 195, 210, get in there, and I will immediately start dumping water onto the stones.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, I see. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I’m also jacking up the humidity. I would say generally the way that I’ll run it in — because I do this almost every day, right? Who knows? Four to seven times a week. I’ll do, let’s just call it, 20 to 30 minutes, and that will be threshold for most people, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: They’ll be like, “I need to cool off.” Then I’ll do cold plunge for three-to-five minutes. Then I’ll go back in for a shorter session and —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Five minutes. Warm back up.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. 10 minutes and then also cold plunge on the opposite side. At which point, I won’t need as much, so I’ll probably do three minutes of cold, and that’s a typical night.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. So in that first session overall as well, how much weight are you losing? Do you know?
Tim Ferriss: This is just a straight guess. I mean, I think it’s a few pounds. I mean, I would say over the two heat sessions, two pounds or at least a few pounds. I don’t know how much I am reabsorbing in the cold plunge. For anyone who has never experienced extreme weight cutting, we couldn’t shower after cutting for wrestling. You’d absorb multiple pounds of water back just by showering. But I don’t know if that’s true in this much more mild form.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No. I doubt it.
Tim Ferriss: Probably not. But I mean, I’m dumping sweat. There is a huge pool of sweat under me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How long does it take you from initiation, the second you walk in your sauna, till you start sweating?
Tim Ferriss: I would say if I’m throwing water on the rocks, two to three minutes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Two minutes is the number. We always pay attention to that. If it’s taking longer than that, we start to have concerns of dehydration. So when we handle this with our —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s it, two minutes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — UFC fighters and stuff, two minutes is a good number to pay attention to. My guess is you are sweating out far more than that amount. It would be not uncommon for someone — you’re plus or minus 160, 70 pounds?
Tim Ferriss: 170, 170-something. Yeah. Low 70s.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. I would imagine a 30-minute sauna session, three pounds would be reasonable. If you’re a hyper sweater, maybe more.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think it’s basically the equivalent of a soda stream full of water. Would be my guess.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now this number differs significantly from people to people. I can just give you two direct examples. Tatiana Suarez, a UFC Fighter I’ve worked with for many years, she’s a very good sweater, so she competes at 115 pounds. It is not particularly hard for her to sweat out four to five pounds at that low of a body weight, not really hard. Now there’s a lot of work that goes into preparation before that, but it’s not particularly hard. Brian Ortega, another USC fighter who competes at 145 pounds, and as a male, we generally have to work to get four or five pounds out. So there is this spectrum of —
Tim Ferriss: To give you a crazy reference point, my senior year in high school when I was competing seriously, I cut from — never do this, people. Never ever do this. But I got to a lean body weight. I was very lean then. It’s sad to think how much more muscle mass I had then, believe it or not, at whatever age it was, 16, 17. But I was 178, super lean, and I cut to 152 twice a week. I was doing that over 24 hours.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. So you’re definitely a sweater.
Tim Ferriss: That was water. That was water.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And a few other things. But yeah, for the most, that’s a lot of water.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. A few other things, but a lot of water.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. I would imagine —
Tim Ferriss: I sweat. To use your language, I’m a top-tier sweater.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Top. Elite.
Tim Ferriss: Elite sweater.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Elite sweater. Okay. That’s great. We would come back, and the reason I’m asking that is it’s the easy way to figure out your sweat rate. So just weigh naked, go in the sauna, come back out, completely dried off. I would recommend, in fact, if we’re going to do this test, don’t put any water on it. Keep it dry so that we don’t have anything on there, and then just measure. Do it for 30 minutes. Come out and measure yourself. How much did you weigh, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ll do it tonight.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. Now, that’s going to tell us about your sweat rate in good sense. We don’t have a sensor, so we don’t have actually what’s coming out of your sweat, which would be nice because we’re paying attention to, again, sweat content and sweat amount. But that’s going to be a good insight. Now, that changes on your day as well. So if you were to do a day where we podcast for five hours and you drink one glass of water and then you go and do the sauna, you’re going to have a way lower sweat rate than if you were —
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — drinking three gallons. This is water loading. In weight management sports, we do it that way. So we want to pay attention to all those things. You said you’ve been a sweater like that your entire life. Okay, great. Natural. People are different. We sweat differently. But is something coming back to that? Probably something in your physiology to which is explaining why that is happening, right?
Tim Ferriss: I’ve always had — so I was born premature. Had a ton of issues as a preemie. Was in the NICU, lots of thermoregulation issues since day zero, so tons of thermal regulation issues. Body temperature tends to run low, and I can give you my take on this, but I would say I tend to run in the 97.1 to 97.4 degrees in terms of normal body temperature. My subjective experience is much like when people have, say, a really high fever, they feel cold, I feel hot a lot of the time. The ambient air temperature seems warmer to me than it does to I think most folks.
But thermoregulatory issues from the get-go. I’ve been hospitalized for heat stroke a couple of times, whether that was a proper diagnosis or not, but basically in hot conditions where other people are challenged, very challenged, like training in judo in Tokyo in the summer with a gi on indoors with poor ventilation, collapsed, taken to the hospital. I’ve had that kind of stuff happen a few times.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I see. That may or may not have anything to do with heat regulation there. It could be a sensation so you don’t get the signals.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, could be. For sure.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And/or because of hyper sweating.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot of sweat going on.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. The point is you kind of come back to that whole story of unpacking what is actually happening, internally, why are you doing it, and then so your cocktail for hydration would probably be abnormal, but it’s something that needs to be dialed in, so we can say, “Okay, great.”
Because if you drink too much water, that’s diluted, for you, remember, not for me, not for anybody else, for your physiology. If it’s too diluted, then you have that excess of urination. But here’s the kicker, you’re urinating because that blood volume got that short-term — this is especially what happens when you drink water really quickly. You get a short-term expansion of total blood volume, which causes you to then urinate it back and you’re not actually cellularly hydrated yet. That stuff hasn’t had time to cross into tissue where you’re actually properly dehydrated. Right?
You’ve got three main areas. You have intracellular, you have in the vessels themself, and then you have interstitial. It’s the space between. You’re drinking it in your stomach, it’s going into your vessels. That’s trying to get it across into tissue. If that goes too quickly through there, it doesn’t have time to get into. So here’s the kicker, you’re chugging water, you’re peeing clear constantly, and you’re still cellularly dehydrated.
Tim Ferriss: Dehydrated. Yeah. What I’ve experientially found to be the case is that if I do really hard sauna sessions, I can be wiped out the next day. I can feel really fatigued. To avoid that, I can’t hydrate in the sauna, I can’t hydrate right after the sauna. I can’t even hydrate within 20 minutes of going into the sauna. It has to be an hour to an hour and a half before the sauna with electrolytes, in which case, I have greater resilience and feel less fatigued the next day. I haven’t split tested everything, but that’s been my experience.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Then the final piece would be what is exactly in that electrolyte cocktail and getting that dialed in, so that we are putting back in the same thing that you’re losing so we’re not excessively bringing in —
Tim Ferriss: Which I guess comes back to the sweat test. Right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Knowing what the hell you are excreting.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. You have to have that, and that’s going to tell you electrolytes. You have to have that in combination. Again, ideally, with what your standard metrics are throughout your system and then making sure that, in addition, do we need to add glucose to the situation? That’s going to transport things into the cells really effectively. Sodium comes along for the ride, water comes along with the ride with it. Does it not need to be in there?
Tim Ferriss: You’re the perfect person to ask and I haven’t had a chance to ask someone, is it glucose? Is it the insulin anemic response to glucose? Do other things work better than glucose? Artificial sweetener versus dextrose versus fructose versus fill in the blank. In terms of hydration.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Glucose.
Tim Ferriss: Glucose. Just straight glucose.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s your answer.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Got it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Now, it doesn’t mean it’s your only thing that could be in there. It depends on what — if we’re only concerned about just hydration or if we have other things we’re trying to do at once, so it’s typically less common to only be caring about water.
In the case of you may need to be trying to increase or restore muscle glycogen, are you trying to recover faster? Is there any tissue consideration there? That is a slightly different answer. Are we trying to maintain acute performance? Are we taking this in the middle of a session that we’re trying to keep going and perform better? Are we doing it to try to recover faster the next day or are we only concerned about just pure hydration at a steady resting state?
Tim Ferriss: In this case, it would be, if I had to weight it, I’d say it’s like 70 percent hydration, 30 percent help with recovery. I like to sauna after weight training.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Okay. In that particular case, if you’re trying to maximize recovery, then glucose is going to be super, super effective. Fructose comes in the equation when we’re trying to maximize carbohydrate intake in acute performance, especially, because glucose and fructose get through the gut barrier and they have different transporters. When the glucose gets full, we can use fructose and get it through separately. Our ability to bring in without GI distress is much higher if we have a combo between glucose and fructose.
Tim Ferriss: You have diversified transporters.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Bingo. Right? You have two freeways, one of them’s full —
Tim Ferriss: Two different types of ferries. Yeah. Exactly.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Now in terms of getting into the actual cell itself, there’s two basic ways that you can get glucose transporters. These are the transporters on muscle cells that allow glucose to go inside the cell. There’s insulin-dependent, insulin-independent, and so muscle contraction, itself, is insulin-independent, and then you would directly have insulin-independent, which is in this case bring in glucose, insulin will then drive it in there.
But if you’re doing exercise, you’re going to get that other contraction as well, and so you have both mechanisms to bring it in play. In that particular case, glucose at a roughly five percent concentration or so, somewhere between five to nine is typically the sweet spot. It doesn’t have to be part of your equation, but it is going to help the process.
Post weight cut, if you were to drink electrolytes only, you would be limiting how quickly you can rehydrate. That’s in extreme situations. If you’re the average person hanging out, just like did a sauna session, you don’t need to put a whole bunch of glucose into your drink. You’re probably fine.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I’m going to weigh myself before and after sauna tonight. No water on the rocks and just to get an idea of what that actual number is because I’m super curious. I’ll also be doing a sauna tonight with a guy who used to be a BJJ competitor, so I think he’d be equally interested just to see what the hell happens with him.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Do you track how much water you drink throughout the day total? Do you know what that number is?
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t. I haven done it at points far in the past. I haven’t done it recently, which would be pretty easy because I could —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Super easy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean I could just — well, what is the easiest way to keep track of that?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Probably what you’re about to say. Just fill one container.
Tim Ferriss: And multiply it out.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Bingo. Just fill up a gallon. How far do you get down? Or if it’s multiple, then you get over there.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll do that tonight. 10 days from now, let’s just say I make an attempt, which I will, to bank some sleep or sleep-adjacent activities, meditation, et cetera, sleep timing, TBD, I’m going to work on that. Although frankly the 15-car pile-up may make that somewhat challenging, but I’ll work on it. We do the best we can with what we have.
I land at altitude, I will then be confronted with training decisions and my concerns are mostly around avoiding injury.
***
Moderator: Tim and Andy got into the weeds of Tim’s fitness training, and it got very detailed, so we moved it to the end. It is super, super interesting from a training perspective, so stick around to the end of the interview to hear that section.
***
Tim Ferriss: And then from a nutrition perspective.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yup. So, okay. This is why full analysis is better because now we can nail you exactly not only macronutrients, right? Calories, protein, carbohydrate, that’s great. What we tend to say is people care globally about three things regarding their body. They want to look a certain way, they want to feel a certain way, and they want to perform a certain way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. In this particular season, I care most about two and three.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to be in four layers anyway. I don’t give a shit what really —
Dr. Andy Galpin: You already laid the foundation.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The physique part doesn’t matter and your physique’s fine as it is, right? So it’s not like it detrimenting your performance, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you care about feeling and performing a certain way?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Awesome. That’s going to give us some heads towards macronutrients. Micronutrients though are the true game behind how you feel and perform. That’s the key here. Macronutrients are fine, energy intake. This regulates how you look. Micronutrients are how you feel and perform. And so we want to be very clear on exactly what you’re eating if we can. Let’s say we don’t have any access to that and so we just have to give you rough suggestions based on nothing. I want to know what you’re consuming prior to. I want to know what you’re consuming during while you’re on the slopes and what you’re consuming afterwards. So give me a rough idea there and then I’ll come back with a far shorter answer than we took us to get to the training.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, if I’m giving you my lazy day of skiing, and I know this is going to make people shudder, but I’ll —
Dr. Andy Galpin: One of the reasons why I think you’ve had such an tremendous career is you’re so honest about these things. You don’t protect your ego of like you know what’s best, but this is what you’re doing. You’re waking up and eating cake in the morning. I get it.
Tim Ferriss: So first I just do a couple of lines of cake mix and then the Pixy Stix come out. No, I would say often wake up, and this last season I had a tough time with my low back, so I was having really most nights very compromised sleep. I was tossing and turning, waking up a lot, turning from side to side, pillow between the knees because my lower back is all jacked. Wake up, huge cup of coffee. And then these are usually pretty early mornings, right, and I’m getting up with about 30 minutes to be out the door.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, okay.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m waking up having a huge cup of coffee and then I’m having oatmeal mixing in some almond butter and kind of swirling that around, downing that. Maybe if they’re available, one or two eggs, then I’m out the door. And for on the slopes generally, we can make pit stops for water. So I’m generally not carrying water unless I’m doing backcountry and then I have a backpack, so I’ll carry water.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, I know. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But I might have some UCAN bars, some kind of —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, okay. Yup.
Tim Ferriss: Right. And a handful of those, which I have found helpful. It’s kind of like nibble on. And then typically I’m doing a half day, but if we’re going to do a three-quarter day or full day, then we’ll stop for lunch and I’ll probably have some type of stew, like meat, beans, et cetera, and maybe some additional coffee. If I’ve really been pushing it hard, I might have some hot chocolate and then right back out. And then at night I would say it’s more of a real meal per se, right? Then I’m sitting down and I can kind of choose whatever I want to have at that point.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You have a combination of fats and starches and —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — the whole thing.
Tim Ferriss: But certainly I have flexibility. Well, I have found, and this is not going to be a shocker for anyone who’s done a lot of intense skiing, if I try to follow keto super low carb, I feel like shit. I generally feel —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Stunner!
Tim Ferriss: — terrible, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Normal life, not having that —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: — kind of output, fine, but for that type of activity, no, it doesn’t really work so well.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Friends. There’s a difference between not being sick —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — not dying, and performing at your best.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, very different. So that’s, I’d say, not every day, but that would be a busy day, shitty night sleep, woke up, “Fuck, just want to get out on the slopes.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: One last, really quick — last year/this year, do you have a plan for supplementation?
Tim Ferriss: Let’s see. So last year I would say — now I would add in what I have done over the last, say, nine months, which has — and this is going to sound like a shameless plug because I’m involved with these guys. But probably what I would do this ski season is I would have a never ending supply of Maui Nui venison sticks, like the unsweetened, like no additional sugar. And that has proven for me to be just about the easiest way to get nutrient dense, 30 grams of protein in the morning. I can just throw those in my ski jacket too.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So that will probably take the place of eggs, also, just for convenience. In terms of supplementation, I would say last year kept it pretty simple. I would say I was taking magnesium, some electrolytes, generally magnesium in the morning and then some type — I went back and forth on creatine. I know that there are so many different benefits to creatine. I was cognizant of not wanting to carry too much weight, like additional water weight if I was going to retain a lot more water.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yep.
Tim Ferriss: So use that intermittently. I would often use that around cross-training. So if I was kind of going to the gym.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Athletic Greens, again, it’s going to sound like a plug, but I’ve been using that stuff since 2000, whatever, ’09, ’10.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And not a whole lot beyond that. I’d say where last season I was taking the most was related to sleep because I was so desperate to get a good night sleep. I was taking just an entire laundry list of stuff before sleep, including some prescription stuff, which I’ve tried to really titrate off of —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — but at the time, helpful, trazodone, things like that, which you should not take without doctor supervision. So I would say not a really comprehensive supplemental plan at this point. I would also though not want to leave behind the nutrition piece because right now if you were to ask me how many grams of what does your macro breakdown look like, I’d be like, “I have no fucking idea, honestly,” if I’m being truthful about it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Look, the reality of it is supplements are called supplements for a reason —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — and we absolutely approach them in the same vein.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’re going to spend as much time as we can on whole food.
Tim Ferriss: Yup. After coming back from training, almost always taking supplemental protein of some type.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Okay, great. Okay. I just want a little bit of a context of foundation of what I was working with here.
Tim Ferriss: And actually, I’ll modify one thing I said, which was last season I would often — and again, this is what I did. I’m not saying it’s the best, but I would often have Athletic Greens plus some type of whey protein isolate or something immediately before heading out.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So I’ve had the oatmeal plus the almond butter, and then I would throw that in —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — and that happened quite a bit, I would say.
Dr. Andy Galpin: When you think about recovery, three classic Rs come into place, repair, replenish, and rehydrate.
Tim Ferriss: Yup.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s what we’re going after, right? So repair is protein, replenish is carbohydrate and obviously rehydrate is a combination of fluids plus electrolytes and glucose. So as you’re running that, I’m running through that entire thing. Okay. Now can we alter what we’re doing to maximize performance on the slopes? Yeah, but that’s not really what you’re asking. You don’t want to feel terrible on the slopes, but you’re also really hedging because we know your recovery capacity is already compromised. So I’m going to push towards that. What’s that mean? Do we have enough total calories? Maybe. Do we have enough protein? Unlikely.
Tim Ferriss: Unlikely, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: In fact, we’re starting off the day with no protein sources, not a good thing.
Tim Ferriss: Or very little, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Maui Nui is fantastic. I feel like I eat it almost every day at this point. I eat almost exclusively wild game. That’s what I do.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Since being a part of Maui Nui as well, that’s what I’m after. I’ve yet to have anybody that we’ve sent it to come back and be like, “What the hell is this stuff? This is incredible.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s such a high-positive response.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: All right, conflicts of interest noted. You got the note. So that is great. You can start there. It’s awesome. I don’t really particularly care where the sources — I would make sure that we’re getting some source immediately in the morning of protein. That would be my first stop. Now the other thing is I would probably take your caloric intake higher in the morning than it currently is because we know it’s unpredictable throughout the rest of the day and we know that you don’t have to have a lot of calories in the morning. So now people often say things like, “You can only absorb 25 or 30 grams of protein at once,” and that’s — obviously, by the way, I opened up that question. That’s clearly not the case.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. However, there is serious scientific evidence to suggest you can only maximize muscle protein synthesis up to 25 to 30 grams. Okay, great. That’s been around. So the question is for you, despite the fact that all the evidence in science will say that, are you ever concerned that if you ate a little bit more protein that you would somehow not use it?
Tim Ferriss: No. I spend zero time worrying about that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Great. Okay. I know this is a tough question, right? This never made sense to me.
Tim Ferriss: If my urine ends up a little more expensive, I don’t care.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Who cares, right? This is one of the things that I have — look, when you go to apply things into science and life, what we’ve been trying to do all day, the science of sleep and nutrition and supplementation, you have to take some leaps of faith. That is actually the scientific process, right? This is why I think it’s best to think about science as a verb, not a noun, is an action, it is not a thing, right? What is the science of recovery? That’s not how it works, right? It’s like this is an action. So I’m taking a real life action on you, which means I’m going to take steps past science such that it never made sense to me that muscle protein synthesis is maximized at 25 or 30 grams. I work with NFL players, so Vita Vea, defensive tackle, 300 and many plus pounds on top of 300, right? We really think his muscle protein synthesis is locked up and just maximized at 30 grams.
Tim Ferriss: Right. The same as you or I.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Correct, who are just about less than half his size.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Actually, way less than half. So there’s actually a paper that just came out, really interesting, suggests even up to a hundred grams of protein it continues to increase.
Tim Ferriss: I might be making this up, but I don’t think I am. I want to say that the older you get, there’s some literature to suggest that it was better to have a larger bolus, meaning more grams of protein at a single feeding.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. This is what you’re talking about is called anabolic resistance. So you become more resistant to anabolic stimuli training or protein as age, but this is totally preventable. Extremely preventable by just having bigger boluses. So my point with all that is you can’t stop that train. Yes, some of that protein will be oxidized. Who cares?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It doesn’t matter. You can’t have too much protein in your particular case. Why I’m going back to that in your case, in your scenario is because now we’ve continually had conversations about you just recover slower, you were sore longer, et cetera, et cetera. We need to make sure we are never limited in our recovery by protein. That needs to be higher. And so we need you at a minimum of, I don’t know, 200 grams of protein a day.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. I’m going to need to change some things.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I’ll survive at 150. I’ll take 150, but I want you to go over, like 50 grams more.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s just say copy-paste, now you’re in my place doing the exact same training.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What might your breakfast look like?
Dr. Andy Galpin: I’m fine with everything you had there, but now I just want 50 grams of protein.
Tim Ferriss: What form? I know you said you’re agnostic, but for you?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Fine, eggs. Yeah, no problem eating eggs.
Tim Ferriss: But to get to 200 grams, I mean, if we’re yanking out the yolk —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, you do that.
Tim Ferriss: — as a factor. Well, I’m just thinking about what this actually nets out to. I mean, how many eggs would that mean that’s be, well, five, six.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, you’re not going to get — I will put it this way. I wouldn’t go exclusively from eggs. That would be the point. If you want to have a protein shake as well. You already said you basically did that, right?
Tim Ferriss: That’s what I did, yep, this last season.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So if you have, let’s say, three eggs, maybe half a cup of egg whites, something like that, maybe two eggs, half a cup of egg whites, okay, great. We’re now 40 or so and 20 minutes later or something by the — I don’t know. Were you having that shake on the way?
Tim Ferriss: Right before I stepped out.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay, great.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Let’s just stop right there then. 40 grams, great. I said 50. We’re splitting hairs, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re close enough there. If you want it and that’s a day where you woke up late, great. Just do the double shake.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Just two scoops, right? So you’re 40 to 50 depending on what protein source you’re using, whoever you’re getting it from. Pretty high quality, pretty fast absorbing.
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re great. Now when we’re at lunch, that’s fine. We’re just going to make sure that we haven’t had any — if we’ve had a couple of Maui Nui sticks throughout the day, those are what, 10 grams each?
Tim Ferriss: 10 grams each. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you’ve got 20 right there. It’s easy to put down like four or five of those more candidly, but let’s just say you’re at one, 10 more grams. All right, we’re up to 50, 60, maybe another one. At lunch, any reasonable serving of meat in your stew is going to get you another 30 to 40, 50 depending on how much you’re eating there. You don’t want to eat until you feel terrible, but that’s fine. We’re already well over a hundred. Okay, awesome. If you can get another shake in, a protein shake, double shake when you’re on the slopes, that’s great. Some of those snacks, like you’ve been at 30 or 40, which brings you back to dinner with another 30 or 40. I wouldn’t track them, I wouldn’t weigh them, I wouldn’t do any of those things. Some days you’re at 150, fine. Some days you’re 175.
Tim Ferriss: Just do what I don’t, which I don’t really do, which is like when in doubt, just eat a little bit more. It’s fine.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, eat a little bit more, right? From there, I would be primarily concerned with making sure your carbohydrate intake is sufficient. You’re probably going to get enough fat along the way so you have some —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ll get enough fat along the way. I think that I’ve trained myself historically to reduce carbohydrate intake for a lot of different reasons.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: And so I consume too little carbohydrate when I get into training mode for something like skiing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Look, I said I’m tool-agnostic. It’s the same thing with food. Carbohydrates and fats have different properties and that gives us a lot of opportunity. One is not better than the other in any situation. So in this context, clearly additional carbohydrate is highly beneficial. You can go more fat. That’s great too, just to get more calories. It’s also easier, more condensed, you can get it in faster. You’re getting in a decent amount for breakfast, so you’re good there. I would make sure we have some starch as well for lunch. The bread with that soup. Whoever complained about that, right?
Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t need to be fancy.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Whoever complained about dipping bread in —
Tim Ferriss: In soup.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, that’s amazing. Or whatever, any number of — me and you are well aware of high quality carbohydrate sources, that’s great. Fruit would be fantastic at that feeding as well. So now we get all the other additional benefits that come along with fruit in this context, and then backing up at night. One of the other things that’s really clear, while you don’t want to have a large meal right before bed, carbohydrates at night are highly beneficial for sleep quality.
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Dr. Andy Galpin: There’s tons of links there. In fact, we actually had this happen fairly recently. So labs came back. Individual sex hormone-binding globulin’s high, free testosterone is low. All the signs and symptoms of wanting to go on testosterone. That’s not a conversation I have. That’s, “Go to your doctor. You want to go on hormones.” Awesome. Sleep is terrible.
Tim Ferriss: You must get asked about it a lot.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, my gosh. You can tell how sensitive I am. When I go in public, I’m like, “I don’t do medications. Go ask your people.” Understand. And insulin was low, super low. There’s a known inverse association between insulin and sex hormone-binding globulin. So when insulin gets too low, sex hormone-binding globulin goes up, because then what happens to free testosterone? It goes down. So you can do that if you want. However, in this individual, we took a look at total carbohydrate intake and it was something 125 grams a day, which I actually feel great personally. I would imagine you probably feel fine at that level too. Even with training.
I train most days. I feel fine at 125, 150, no issues. Almost no carbohydrate at night, very low 20. Less grams of carbohydrate at night. All we had to do was put another 40 or so gram of carbohydrate at night, everything corrected itself and sleep took off. So super, super simple solution like that.
Tim Ferriss: So sex hormone-binding globulin came down because the insulin was going up.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally, and testosterone then took off. And then what happened to sleep? And what happened to recoverability?
Tim Ferriss: Sleep doesn’t hurt testosterone either.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, my God. Well, it’s a classic case of —
Tim Ferriss: So you said it’s 40 grams. So what we’re talking about there, it’s not that much.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No.
Tim Ferriss: I mean it’s what? I’m flubbing the math here, but it’s 4.5 —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Four-ish.
Tim Ferriss: — calories per gram. Four-ish, so it’s not that much.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No. You’re talking about well, let’s just say a banana, 25 grams. Bingo. 100 calories. An apple. A piece of fruit is typically 15 to 20, 25 grams. A small side of sweet potatoes, a cup of rice, you’ve already hit 25 to 40 grams pretty easily. We had this guy pig out on pasta, but very small changes here. Miracle workers.
Tim Ferriss: Boom.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So point is I’m making sure that we have substantial increase or an appropriate amount of carbohydrate in your last feeding would be appropriate. We’ve gotten ourselves a nice infusion throughout the day. This will help with your rehydration, since we’re probably having fairly limited water intake because you’re on the slopes. So we’re making sure there —
Tim Ferriss: And it’s dry and it’s so easy for people to forget. You mentioned this earlier, but it’s high altitude, cold. You go to Antarctica, it’s a desert. It’s easy for people to forget. Those are dry environments.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I did a mule deer hunt in the Tetons this year. 10,000-ish feet, I think our base camp was 7,500. And we would ride horses for a couple hours in the morning to get up to our hunting spot. Holy cow. Cold, so dry, and 10,000, which for me —
Tim Ferriss: That’s up there.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — I live in southern California, so I’m at zero, literally.
Tim Ferriss: 10,000 is no joke.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No. Man, and those mountain boys, holy cow, they’re mountain tough at a great time. So point is you get super dehydrated super fast and not realize it. So those carbohydrates and all that are going to help maintain, replenish a muscle glycogen that you’ve burned throughout your entire body. We don’t care if we’re having an excess of calories because if we lose a little bit of body composition —
Tim Ferriss: I don’t care at all.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — you won’t, because you’re burning so many calories.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to be there with a close friend and we can consume absolutely mind-boggling amounts of food and it does —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Ravenous.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah — and it just does not matter. You’re going to work it off.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I like you mentioned some resistance starches earlier. If you can take them out there, that’s great too. That’s probably going to feel better than just a Maui Nui stick when you’re six hours in.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure. I mean, I need to restock, but the UCAN bars that I used last season were super helpful.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I would just make sure on top of all that, rounding out these points, making sure that you are adequately salting your food because we know that that’s going to go down and we know you’re a heavy sweater. I don’t know what your sweat rate is for your salt intake, but if you’re sweating out three or four pounds a day, you’re going to lose a gram plus, many grams of salt. So making sure that comes back in in the form of supplementation, if you’d like to use electrolyte packs or something like that.
Or if you just want to strictly go salting your food heavily to taste there, you’ll probably need some supplemental electrolytes would be my guess at this point. Making sure it’s there. That’s nutritionally going to put you in a really, really good spot.
Just be really careful making sure we’re still getting colors in your food because micronutrients typically don’t have a huge response. You’re not going to feel a difference in vitamin A or C in a day, but it will over the course of two months start to add up. So making sure we’re not just eating all brown and then having an outlet of greens.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve generally used color as a proxy, so I try hard. It is one of the challenges in a lot of these mountain towns.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Of course it is.
Tim Ferriss: They’re importing everything.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Fresh fruits and vegetables.
Tim Ferriss: But yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But use frozen if you have to. So frozen fruits and vegetables. It’s not the same, but it’s still really, really high quality.
***
Then supplementation, I could be brief here if you’d like, but absolutely making sure magnesium is there. Magnesium is released in sweat at very low quantities, but it’s still enough when you sweat the amount that you’re potentially going and sweating.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Also with skiing, I’m going to sweat my ass off. I’ll be working.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you want to make sure that that stuff is high. Creatine is great. If you’re going to use it, I wouldn’t use it the way you did. I would use it or don’t. So having it on certain days or not is —
Tim Ferriss: Just make it daily or not.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, because it takes a chronic effect for it to really start to matter unless you’re going a really high dosage. So I wouldn’t be super concerned about the water retention aspect of it because —
Tim Ferriss: It might even be a plus.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. I was going to say we’re having a problem with that anyways, so I would go there. That said, any recommendation if you try and it doesn’t work, you don’t like it, just don’t do it.
Tim Ferriss: And what are we talking about? Five grams a day? Or what are we —
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s the number, that’s the standard. That’s what everyone throws out. But I would say the same thing of —
Tim Ferriss: The protein?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Why? Candidly, for guys our size, it’s fine. I’m probably going higher. I’m also never measuring creatine to be totally honest. I’m just taking big scoops and throwing it in there, seeing what happens. There’s actually really interesting data on the more recent stuff, the more interesting stuff on creatine is around bone health, brain health, and overall even mood. More research has been done on that.
Tim Ferriss: Brain health is no joke.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But that’s been 10 to 20 grams a day. Things like that.
Tim Ferriss: I have experimented with that chronically and just looking at verbal —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Recall.
Tim Ferriss: And also just verbal acuity and stuff in podcasts. I mean, I’ve looked at this somewhat and it’s N-of-1 and it’s just self-reporting, but for me it’s pretty noticeable.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You don’t have to do N-of-1, there’s data. There’s tons of it out there. Nothing’s perfect. But there’s actually another review article just this week came out also on creatine and brain health. So whether you’re looking at dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, stuff like that, there’s no perfect answer there, but you can see the data.
Tim Ferriss: Anything else you’d add to the list?
Dr. Andy Galpin: The rest of it would be dependent upon your labs and your physiology. What we knew there. You could throw in, you’re never going to be hurt for the most part, adding vitamin D. That’s a very common one, but you’re going to be out in the sun all day.
Tim Ferriss: Well, half of my face will be out in the sun all day.
Dr. Andy Galpin: There’ll be significant sun blockage, I hope.
Tim Ferriss: I did supplement with D last year.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And fish oil?
Tim Ferriss: I also supplemented with fish oil. Could be a placebo, who knows? There’s probably literature out there on this, but I found it to seemingly help with sleep quite a bit.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep. No, you can. Those would be the standard, without knowing anything about you, you throw in that cocktail. You’re talking about things that are fairly cheap. Again, relatively. They have very little cross reaction. Unlike minerals, unlike even high dose of vitamins. You’re playing a game there that you may want to be a bit careful of. But things like vitamin D and things like omega-3 —
Tim Ferriss: Meaning just unintended side effects.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Unintended, yeah. You don’t know what problem you’re solving really, and so you’re just throwing stuff in there. That can technically happen with anything, even vitamin D and heavy metals, can be concern there but it’s a very rare thing. So most of the time you’re fine. I feel comfortable saying most people can jump on that train for all those and be totally fine. Outside of that, it would be precision and intent. What are we trying to move? What are we trying to do?
If you wanted to go next level of less science but some science, potentially beneficial, then you would get into the realm of herbals. And this is when ashwagandha, rhodiola, things like that start to kick in.
Tim Ferriss: What do you find rhodiola most helpful for? So I actually do use ashwagandha in the same way that say Peter Attia might use phosphatidylserine just to blunt a bit of cortisol release at night, for instance. Inhale. So maybe I’m off base, but I mean talk to me about ashwagandha and rhodiola.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. No, we actually just published a review paper on rhodiola. I think it’s open access. Should be able to go read it for free. Way more data on ashwagandha, been around for a long time. The issue we’ve always dealt with with both of those are all of our athletes have to have third-party certified things and even they have to have NSF or informed choice. So those are hard to get to. If you’re not concerned about that then disregard that. But you really do need —
Tim Ferriss: This is to avoid doping issues, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Correct. We actually have another paper we published on the frequency of adulterated supplements.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, it’s got to be a complete disaster.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Whatever number you’re thinking, it’s higher.
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Dr. Andy Galpin: In America with big brands, you’re fine, but you leave America and things get squirrely pretty quickly on supplements. Plenty of squirreliness here too. Actually, both those papers are open access, so if anybody wants to dive in. We’ll start with ashwagandha. There’s much more data on ashwagandha. Good, effective, but it is very difficult to make sure you’re getting concentrations at what is labeled on the bottle, and that’s actually from a labeling issue as well as a harvesting issue. So the people that are behind the scenes that make these things will tell you not every plant has the same —
Tim Ferriss: Lo and behold, nature doesn’t standardize.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No. People say things like, “It’s not FDA-regulated.” That’s not true. There’s tons of regulations on supplements, it’s just they can’t standardize it against things like that. It’s really hard. You’re growing herbals and you’re just hoping that that dose is as potent as the previous one.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think from an effect standpoint, for what can a credible argument be made? I know less science, but with ashwagandha, why would someone take it that is plausibly defensible, and what should you take in that case? Are there certain brands that are more reliable for dosing for any particular reason?
Dr. Andy Galpin: So with ashwagandha, I think the only third-party pure ashwagandha company that I know is Klean with a K, K-L-E-A-N. I’m pretty sure you’ll see it in combinations in a bunch of other stuff, but that’s I think the only one that sells it as designed for health and designed for sport. Might make one as well. I’m not 100 percent sure on that one. Decent data on exactly what you mentioned taking it as, the colloquial term we’ll say here is any adaptogen.
Tim Ferriss: Adaptogen.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What it means is it’s, we’re skipping, it’s a cortisol modulator. What that means is cortisol is not supposed to be low. It’s not a good thing. That is lethargy. That is a classic sign of excessive training as well. You can go back to sodium potassium ratio, that’ll tell you exactly what’s happening with cortisol as well. That’s Addison’s disease. Super low, down there. You don’t want it to be high either. Now the general thing that is optimal with cortisol is you have giant spikes throughout the day and then giant recovery, this is exercise, this is focused work, et cetera. And then we have this normal curve throughout the day such that we have high cortisol in the morning, so we’re awake and alert, and then we have low cortisol at night so that we can actually fall asleep. And then there’s a curve.
So adaptogens are supposed to be modulating that curve. Not such that it’s going high or low, but such that it’s getting back to an appropriate diurnal curve. That’s the idea. ashwagandha and rhodiola and specifically ashwagandha, there’s reasonable evidence that it helps with that. And so a lot of folks, probably the most typical utilization of ashwagandha is helping get to sleep, helping calm down nerves. It’s resetting that entire axis. Because of that, whenever you manipulate cortisol, you have a very good chance of manipulating testosterone because that relationship is antagonistic for the most part. And so the smaller level science and then also large amount of anecdote is it can be helpful and beneficial with testosterone.
I would say in my experience, it’s reasonable. It is a very reasonable thing to think about with that. I wish that more companies would make pure ashwagandha that is NSF-certified. That’d be great. I could use it more directly. That is there. Now rhodiola is another one we have had. Now this is not science, this is just my practice coaching experience. I’ve had a lot of benefit of elevating testosterone with rhodiola.
Tim Ferriss: Really?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. It is also a cortisol modulator that has a lot of other effects. The paper we published had nothing to do with hormones. It had everything to do with performance and so there is enough data now on muscular endurance and physical performance that it seems to be pretty beneficial. It’s not perfect. Not every study showed benefit. I’ve been using it for, I don’t know, probably a decade or more personally as well as in a coaching practice. And I feel like it does really effective work on that. That was pitching it so hard, we got Jeff from Momentous to make it. So we use that —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, they have rhodiola?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I didn’t know that. All right, that’s good to know.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We got them to make it because I was like, “You guys, there’s just so much work here.” So we use them because it is certified as third party tested as well. So that’s pretty much where we got a rhodiola from. But a lot of benefits there.
Tim Ferriss: Are there — for acclimating to altitudes? Because I know you’ve gone from flat-lander to altitude a couple of times. Anything that you have found particularly helpful for accelerating acclimation to altitude? Because you hear all sorts of stuff. Some people take beetroot extract, some people take rhodiola anecdotally.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: I’m curious if you have thoughts here.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Rhodiola would be on my shortlist. I would listen to you either way if you said it didn’t work at all or if you said it did. I would listen either way, but it would be a low-risk potential small reward. Why not? Any arginine or precursory, beetroot you mentioned, nasal dilation is going to give you every opportunity possible to give splenic contraction, to get more red blood cells into your blood to let you acclimatize to it. Other stuff you can pay attention to. So one of the major —
Tim Ferriss: Couple of weeks at EPO.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That would be my first stop.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a joke, guys. Anyway, it’ll work.
Dr. Andy Galpin: At this point in the same realm, you can consider any global alkaline agent. And so one of the issues that you’re going to see happen with altitude is predictable increases in respiratory rate, predictable increases in carbohydrate metabolism, predictable increases in respiratory quotient, respiratory ratio, things like that. This is just part of what happens. Lactate is a big player. This is insanely beneficial for you. I don’t know if this will actually work, I don’t even know the literature to be candid here on this one. But a lactate supplement could be potentially beneficial there.
Lactate is incredibly powerful through actually bicarbonate at buffering acid. So this may sound counterintuitive, but you heard that right. Lactate very specifically will reduce metabolic acidosis. Lactate doesn’t do what people think it does. It is certainly not the cause of muscle fatigue and absolutely, definitely not the cause of muscle soreness. It is highly beneficial. It is directly used in the brain as a preferred fuel source of the brain and the heart in numerous situations, including altitude. Right now, a handful of trials being used as an acute response to traumatic brain injury.
Tim Ferriss: No shit. How’s that administered?
Dr. Andy Galpin: You can do it any number of ways. IV, supplement, lactate gels, any of those things done. George Brooks at Cal Berkeley, the lactate king, him and Bruce Gladden at Auburn. But George has done a number of those trials in TBI. It is similar to, so you may or may not realize, but there’s an entire lactate shuttling that happens from muscle into other muscle to the kidney cori cycle, all that stuff. There’s also an astrocyte lactate shuttle. Astrocytes are the cells in your central nervous system. They need energy too. So we know that the brain, the heart, and astrocytes prefer almost exclusively aerobic or anaerobic metabolism, which means they love glucose. When you enter into areas of problem, whether you’re talking about long-term brain health reductions or even short-term concussions and injury, ischemia, heart attacks, things like that. One of the major issues is we lose metabolic fuel. We have problems.
Enter ketones. Enter lactate. This is why these things are so interesting. It is still a lot to learn here. Some of the trials are great, but then they don’t work for ketones and they do for lactate and stuff like that. But there’s clearly something happening and this is also why, to come back to a point, creatine is so powerful for brain health. It’s the same thing. It’s the most direct and fast fuel source. It’s one-to-one stoichiometry, so it doesn’t give you a ton. One molecule of creatine, one ATP. Others ketones are far higher, but it’s super fast and effective. So lactate would be one I would go to.
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t ever sought it out. Presumably you can just find that as an oral supplement. You’re taking capsules of this stuff?
Dr. Andy Galpin: You can. Again, the gel would probably be —
Tim Ferriss: Gel.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah — better place. But they go even easier —
Tim Ferriss: Where would you apply the gel?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Any of your tissue. Just rub it on.
Tim Ferriss: Anywhere?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. On your legs, all that stuff. Probably where I would actually start because I could go look at the research and I might be like, “Oh, my God, that was really stupid. Don’t do that.” I don’t know. That was me working through thoughts on there. But a similar idea that is much more founded would be any sodium bicarbonate solution. It’s same exact idea where you’re going to put yourself in a little more alkaline situation. My guess is that would help you feel a little bit better.
Since you asked direct application, sodium bicarbonate can come in a lot of forms in fashion. It’s baking soda, literally. Just be careful though. I could tell you many stories in the lab of doing research with baking soda or sodium bicarbonate.
Tim Ferriss: There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Fluid in your intestines matters.
Tim Ferriss: Also, be careful with creatine and double espressos. Just pro tip, if you’re about to head out skiing, it’s too much of those two.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Creatine and caffeine have this weird relationship.
Tim Ferriss: Increased likelihood of disaster pants. Not to get too technical.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s super technical theoretically, we’ll see the data on that. So you can do that. The other way is gels. So this is PR lotion, this is what they make. So you can just rub a bit on sodium bicarbonate if you want to go around it there. So anyone that has any GI issues with it, the lotion will go as well. Far, far, far more research on oral applications than lotions, but nonetheless.
Tim Ferriss: On the sodium bicarb.
Dr. Andy Galpin: For sure, and there’s lots of research on that. So those would be potential ways. Outside of that, we would have to really start getting into things that are actually specific to mitochondria to go down those ranges. The issue with all that is I don’t know if you’re going to have a one-to-five day effect. And so really getting into, and this is everything from CoQ10 and things like that. So the going back up to arginine and beetroot juice, that’s going to have an instantaneous effect. Sodium bicarbonate will instantaneously change things. The other stuff, a mito or a PQQ or something like that. It’s going to take probably weeks to do stuff.
Tim Ferriss: It’s going to take a while.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So by that time, you probably, hopefully have acclimatized.
Tim Ferriss: Well, there are levels then there are levels. So if I’m operating at 10k, but then I’m doing some —
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re skiing at 16 or —
Tim Ferriss: Wow. If I’m skiing at 16, I’ll pass out.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’d be high. 14. You could do it.
Tim Ferriss: But if I’m going up a few thousand feet —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Even 12.
Tim Ferriss: — for backcountry stuff or heli skiing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’ll notice that extra thousand feet for sure. My point I was getting there at the end was I would probably let physiology just do what it wants to do. That would be my normal thing. Take your baseline stuff there and then let it go because you’re going to be there for eight weeks and we’re going to walk ourselves into these first two or three weeks anyways. If you were there, for example, we have Brian Ortega is fighting in, I think I can say this — by the time this comes out, it’ll be open, is fighting in Mexico City for his next fight. That’s 7,500 feet in elevation. Brian lives in Torrance, so he lives below elevation. We are doing things specifically now, starting today to prepare for that. But that’s because we have to get there for one event, one night. You’ll have two months to live there.
Tim Ferriss: I have some time.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I would let your body do what it wants to do. The last thing I’ll really say here is I think that’s an important note. Your physiology and your brain are still way smarter than anything we have, any AI program, any machine learning stuff we’ve got. Your own physiology has a far better sense of what you’re doing. So whenever possible, don’t hold it back. We call these performance anchors. So anything you’re doing that’s an anchor, it’s dragging you down. So this is alcohol, this is any number of suboptimal visible stressors, hidden stressors, that’s going to hold you back. But once you’ve removed those things, just get out of the way.
Tim Ferriss: Your body will figure it out.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Your body really knows where it wants to go, for the most part. Don’t sabotage it, but then don’t have too much control of the wheel, either.
Tim Ferriss: Super important. Then I mean, maybe another way to put this I guess would be, it’s human nature to think about how we can accelerate things, accelerate, accelerate. But in this case, I mean we have millions of years of evolution at hand and if you can just remove, make sure that you don’t have any emergency brakes on.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yes, that’s exactly right.
Tim Ferriss: You’ll make a lot of progress. Andy, we’ve talked about a lot today. People can find you on Twitter, Instagram @drandygalpin, and they can find all things Andy Galpin at andygalpin.com. You have a number of different initiatives, projects, companies that are in motion. Absolute Rest we’ve already mentioned. Any others that you would like to mention or point people to?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. I appreciate that opportunity. Absolute Rest, of course, is our sleep company. My education company is called BioMolecular Athlete, and that is actually something that we just released Thanksgiving. So this is just new to the world. I have always and will continue to put out as much free content on YouTube as I can. So what I do is I have this series of five, 25, and 55-minute physiology videos. And if you’ve been paying attention, and when I say 25 minutes, it’s ish, and when I say 55 minutes, it’s ish. I get burned on that one.
I’m always going to do that and that is always going to be free out there. But I had such a demand for it. I was like, “I just need to make a full proper education company.” So we released our very first course on Thanksgiving and I think we had people from over 90 countries get into it. I was like, “All right, it’ll do well.” But holy cow, I was so stunned. So that is out there. We’re going to come out with our second and third course this year. One of them will be on performance blood work and then another will be on managing an algorithm if you will, step by step process on fatigue, how to stop it from happening correctly. What to do, all this stuff. So that’ll be coming at biomolecularathlete.com. I think it’s forward strength, but if you get to BioMolecular Athlete, it’s going to get you close enough.
The other one we’re launching in January is called Vitality Blueprint, and that is high level performance blood work. And so this is not medical stuff. This is, if you want to really understand how to not only analyze blood, but then go through some of the stuff we talked about of how do you interpret it. Once you get it, what’s it mean? All that is done for you. So it’s completely interpreted, all the patterns and calculations that go into high-performance are done for you. And then as a result of that, you get spit out very high precision supplementation, nutrition and exercise protocols on the back of that. So it’s not just like, “Hey, here are your labs. You go figure it out.” So that is coming out. That’s Vitality Blueprint. And then our coaching program is at RAPID. RAPID Health and Performance is if you want to come in and get full immersion coaching like I started with the beginning, that’s at that program.
Tim Ferriss: Where can people find that?
Dr. Andy Galpin: I think that is rapidhealthreport.com.
Tim Ferriss: We’ll link to it in the show notes as well.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I think it’s all is or will potentially be on my website. I realize again, business and savvy forte is not my thing. So probably shouldn’t have all these brands and companies going, but they’re all out there. So education, blood work, rest, sleep and coaching are there. And then all the social medias for me is, it’s all science communication. That’s pretty much all I do. So if you want to know more about the science in performance, that’s pretty much. If you don’t want it, get out of there.
Tim Ferriss: If that’s not what you want —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Don’t follow me.
Tim Ferriss: — don’t go to andygalpin.com. But if that is of interest, then certainly what we mentioned, andygalpin.com, on social, @drandygalpin. And we’ll link to everything in the show notes. So if people miss anything on andygalpin.com, people go to tim.blog/podcast. We’ll link to everything we discussed in this conversation, which is going to be a lot, which is great.
Dr. Andy Galpin: For the record, I made that website myself on Squarespace seven or eight years ago, so not a lot of standards.
Tim Ferriss: All right, well I might be able to help you with an upgrade. So TBD on that. Is there anything else, Andy, that you’d like to mention or closing comments you’d like to add before we land the plane?
Dr. Andy Galpin: I think I’ve had plenty of comments at this point.
Tim Ferriss: All right, perfect. And as mentioned, everybody, we’ll have links to everything in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, train smart, keep it green lights, don’t get injured. And best of luck in the new year. Thanks for tuning in.
***
Moderator: And now Tim and Andy discuss Tim’s training regimen
***
Tim Ferriss: I land at altitude, I will then be confronted with training decisions and my concerns are mostly around avoiding injury
I’m not worried about hitting the most complex double black diamond, blah, blah, blah, two weeks out. I don’t have a competition. I’m doing this for fun, also to get into shape, which is fine. Touring, I find pretty self-regulating, in a way, although you have avalanche risk, but let’s put that aside.
How would you think about training, this is going to be a lazy question, but the lower body? The reason I ask is two seasons ago, I’ve been very lucky, knock on wood, I’ve had very few knee issues. I’ve had issues with a lot of other stuff. Shoulder surgeries, elbow surgeries, all sorts of issues, but ankles, broken every which way from Sunday, from all sorts of terrible combat sports decisions.
Knees have been pretty good except for two years ago I had to get medevaced out with a very impressive Tomahawk accident after hitting an ice ridge at high speed heli-skiing. I got medevaced out for a bunch of — my leg was twisted around like a GI Joe figure is bad, and I felt a pop in the hip, and the knee because one ski ejected, the other one didn’t.
As I tomahawked, the tip got caught and rotated my leg around, and landed and I was like, “Fuck. I’m going to wait for the tail guide to check this out.” The knee felt a little loose, ended up, ultimately, getting ER, MRI, the whole nine, and had a couple of minor injuries, but they were like, “Your knee is surprisingly okay. You might have a mild tear.” I think it was meniscus. They were like, “But nothing really of note.” I was like, “Huh, okay.”
But there have been points, for instance, as my back has started to feel better, I’ve slowly moved into conservative, mostly isolateral leg training, because part of what precipitated this, I’ve had back issues for decades. I have a transitional segment, but my brother has the same thing. Lots of kind of chronic back tightness.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You have a tail?
Tim Ferriss: I have a tail. Exactly. That’s what I’m going to say now, but what really —
Dr. Andy Galpin: I have one too.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. What really precipitated the acute phase was back squats, and I’m sure I could dissect biomechanically why I think I fucked that up, but I’ve been very moderately moving into split squat type stuff and feeling really good, feeling very good about it.
But a few weeks ago felt like a little ping, like a little weirdness in the right knee, a little tension after that with terminal knee extension or let’s just say terminal extension, like when I’m walking, if I try to keep my heel down, I’m like, “Huh, weird.” At the very end, it’s a little tight on the back of the knee.
Priority number one for me is injury prevention. How might you think about getting back into skiing but doing it in a responsible way? What type of training to augment with just the time on the slopes?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. Great. I will actually directly answer your question finally.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, we’ll go straight —
Tim Ferriss: Christmas comes early.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Hey, let’s talk about sleep. Let’s talk about it. When you’re going into a novel situation like that, your hydration, your sleep, we’ve already talked about, those are going to be huge, and then, overall, stress of all that stuff. That is by far the best place to start.
We’ve done ad nauseam there. We’re going to go on to what you’re talking about here. You’ve got two months. What’s the rough skiing plan? Because what we want to do first, and this is the same thing when we get in-season for any of our athletes or in fight camp, sport is first. You’ve got to get better at fighting, you’ve got to get better at hitting golf balls, you’ve got to get better at hitting tennis balls, et cetera. Tell me what that looks like and I’ll reverse engineer the training backwards.
Tim Ferriss: Great. Okay, so what that looks like is, first week, I’m actually not scheduling any formal training sessions with a coach, because I want to have some time simply to remember what I did last season.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No point of even getting tips on technique when you’re inconsistent.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me get in a bit of mileage. Also, let me acclimate to altitudes that I’m not tempted to push with a coach who is also a very high level skier because I’m competitive and there’s just — if I’m protecting myself from my lesser self, week one is going to be acclimating, let’s just call it.
Then beginning week two, probably, minimum, three days a week of training with a coach, and then depending on recovery and other factors, an additional two to three days of skiing.
Most likely, then after, let’s call it week three, I will add in ski touring where I’m doing side or backcountry using skins where I’m basically shuffling my way up a mountain, and then skiing down in more backcountry powder conditions. I would say also around that time, if I do well with these types of conditions, I would like to, I’m not attached to it, but I think it would be very interesting to do some adult race training and just working with gates and getting very good at carving, and there are other, obviously, aspects to that.
At this point, I have not decided on what adjunct training, to supplement. What I found helpful, in the past, at least, last season was, let’s just call it, one or two — it’s not quite yoga nidra, but pretty low-key, let’s just call it down-regulating yoga classes a week. Also for just hip stuff, and then some type of core training. There are a couple of great Pilates instructors, I find that very, very helpful for seemingly mitigating some of the lower back issues. And that’s about it as far as it stands right now.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay, so let me see if I can spit that back to you. First week, just getting on the slopes. Moving.
Tim Ferriss: Yup.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Moving around.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and acclimating to altitude.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yup. Getting there.
Tim Ferriss: Dryness, all that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Weeks two to three, we start actually getting moving. We’re doing a variety of different types of skiing and styles of skiing in different areas. Weeks three to eight is training where we’re going to have somewhat of a specific plan about different styles of training on different days, and —
Tim Ferriss: Depending on conditions. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Depending on —
Tim Ferriss: It’s like if we’re training for powder where we don’t have the chance, might train on moguls for a host of reasons, and yada, yada yada.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What you just outlined is fight camp. That’s exactly what it is. You move week one, you do these things, and then you get into a specific plan for five to eight weeks of different things.
On each of the days, we have different emphasis, so we’re boxing one day, we’re wrestling another day, et cetera. You’re doing, it’s the same thing.
Tim Ferriss: It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing. Right? Because we might do one day it’s a real carving emphasis, we might do another day that is powder emphasis, another day, it’s more conditioning with the touring.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Great. Here’s what I’d do, a couple of structured things. Number one, you actually made a comment earlier that I banked that I want to come back to, and you sort of said you don’t care about your upper body losing weight. You’d be willing to let it go.
Tim Ferriss: I’d be willing to sacrifice, if it helps sort of looking at, say, Lance Armstrong post-cancer when his relative strength went through the roof. I’m willing to compromise that for the sport if that —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Understood. Don’t want to let it go away for no reason.
Tim Ferriss: No, no, no. But if it’s beneficial —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Power-to-weight ratio matters.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I don’t know a ton about skiing, so I didn’t catch all that terminology exactly, but from my understanding, you’re going to be doing some stuff that is high speed, high change of direction, high impact on joints. My assumption is that’s shorter duration.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The runs are going to be shorter duration.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Ballpark me, time? Like 12 minutes? Two minutes? Like 15?
Tim Ferriss: I would say with the coach, let’s just say, it’s two to five minutes before stopping to review technique.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And then some back up the mountain and then multiple runs of that a day?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How many runs roughly?
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to be doing on the order of, at least, I would think, minimum, 10 to 15 total runs.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The other days are more when you’re doing the touring stuff?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. You might spend an hour or two going up, and then you get 10 turns in deeper powder. Ideally, you get more than 10 turns, but the ratio of, let’s just call it, uphill to downhill, is heavily tilted to uphill where you’re doing a lot of conditioning.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And very fatiguing. More like steady state, though, more like many hours of you’re going up —
Tim Ferriss: This would be a steady state.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Great.
Tim Ferriss: This would be in the sort of go heavy, go long, go hard, this would be like the go long day.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. How many days a week total? Seven? Six? Five?
Tim Ferriss: I would say I will likely increase the volume each week, because my recovery will just be compromised in the beginning, as I’m acclimating to altitude, et cetera. I would say my goal would be by week three that I’m at minimum four days a week. It would not be seven days a week. I will have at least one full day of recovery because I’ve just found that I need that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. You have to. Absolutely. Okay. Great. The reason I ask about upper body is when you’re moving on skis like that, and again, I know minimally about it, you’re having poles —
Tim Ferriss: You will get some upper body. You are using your upper body.
Dr. Andy Galpin: There’s actually classic data going back to the very beginning or talk here, out of Scandinavia —
Tim Ferriss: Sweden?
Dr. Andy Galpin: — for the most part, looking at cross-country skiers, our study was in that, but if you actually — the biopsy data that had been done in the deltoid, so shoulder muscle, you can get a 95 percent reduction in muscle glycogen content. If you were to look at something like glycogen depletion in the quads, if you get to 50 percent, 60 percent, we call that depleted so you can torch your shoulders.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure, and also triceps. You can smoke your triceps.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The reason I’m saying that is going back to your back and knee, because if we are now either compromised strength or endurance in our shoulders, and now we’re getting up or downhill or controlled via other mechanisms, and we’re probably putting undue stress in those positions.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me add something to that because what you just brought up raised this and that is you’re 100 percent right. Cross-country skiing, Nordic skiing, is insane. It’s just torture personified.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The cardiovascular capacity is so outrageous.
Tim Ferriss: Absurd. Absurd. I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that. There is cardiac — there are cardio respiratory demands placed on me in touring, but I won’t get into all the details, but it’s far less than cross-country. But to your point, yes, I’m using the upper body, and one of the question marks that has existed in my mind since last season is how much to work on various types of rotation, because where I’ve found my back can get quite grumpy is when you’re skiing at, say, steeper inclines. Sorry, everybody. It’s getting very personalized.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re not sorry at all.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m not sorry. Sorry I’m not sorry. Your skis might be facing across the slope, but you often want your body, your chest to be facing down the slope.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, I see. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of rotation, there’s disassociation of the torso almost, and that is something I think that a lot of skiers underestimate in terms of the toll and the attacks that can take, especially if you have mobility issues or any type of orthopedic issues.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Big picture-wise, what I would do is set up your week, and we need to make sure that we’re doing this in a way where we understand our higher impact days, and our higher fatigue days.
What you want to avoid is doing something in both of those categories on all or most days, and so I personally, generally, like to stack red on red. What I mean by that is if you’re going to have a really challenging session, say it’s the touring when you guys really get going, and you’re cutting, you’re sharp, you’re moving. This is torsion on the back. Right? It is impact. It is also probably more focused because there’s that crash and burn, faster speeds, all that stuff. Okay?
This is high physiological demand. This is high energy demand. This is high neurological demand. It’s also high stress.
Tim Ferriss: Yup.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. That’s a red. Right? We’re going to stack that red. When it comes to your training now, I’m thinking this is a good day to go hard. Counterintuitive, but I want to go hard on hard. Right? I want red on red, because the next day we’re going to come back and probably do green, whatever that means. That could be your Pilates, it could be your total off day, or this could be one of the other ski sessions that is a very low technical, recovery movements, something like that. This is something other.
Then we can come back and stack probably like an orange, yellow, whatever you want to call it, kind of in the mid. This is where you’re accumulating volume. We’re building up, this is maybe the longer state —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The red might be the steeper and gnarlier stuff with some of the higher speed carving, and then green is actually maybe a touring day. It’s going to be slow and steady but not red lining.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. You don’t even want to yellow line.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, then maybe something else. Maybe it’s some drilling —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: Drilling, like single-leg practice, stuff like that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s high technical feedback stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Exactly. High technical feedback stuff. Then maybe the orange is moderate touring, something like that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It is exactly what you want to do. Right? We’re going to take all that, and the first thing I want to say is let’s lay out, specifically, when we’re doing, if we can, the skiing components. Right? Over the course of a week, and then we’re going to build in some sort of intentional downregulation work to supplement that stuff. When we go red on red, then we are paying that back.
Tim Ferriss: When you say red on red, that’s in a single day?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Single day.
Tim Ferriss: Yup.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I assume you’re going to do a training session and a skiing session in a day or something. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Got it. Yup.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re going to do your hard red skiing session, and then we’re going to come back and either do some Pilates to unwind, we’re going to do maybe a lift that day, we’re going to do something else, depending on where we’re at. We’re typically doing some multiple physical exposures in one day, in some form or fashion. That’s what I mean when I say if it’s a single session, that’s fine. Single session red is fine. It’s going to carry over to the next day. There’s residual fatigue there. There’s some other changes that we want to pay attention to.
Either way, we’re going to finish that day with strong downregulation, really going to batch recovery into that. The next day then we get pay that toll back. Now this is, again, technical work.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m saying this is much for myself, I am saying it for myself, but the slow restorative yoga was fantastic for downregulation. That’s where the day ends.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yup. Love that stuff. I would actually like to also make sure that that session is maybe not a full 90 minutes, if it’s long, or even maybe 60 minutes is maybe enough. We just want restoration.
Tim Ferriss: Keep it short.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Fine. If you’re like, “No, I leave there and I feel more energetic,” or, “I feel unwound,” then —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I basically feel like I’m almost asleep. It’s also a really dark studio.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Perfect.
Tim Ferriss: Perfect.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Amazing on that. Okay. We would lay out the entire week on the skills there, and this would progress over time, so the reds get a little bit harder. The greens stay green. This is a major mistake people make. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Drift. Green drift.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Everybody drifts. Right? You end up just having a bunch of medium stuff, which is great. You got to accumulate volume there, but the way that I want you to reframe this is when you’re thinking of red, we’re thinking about maximal capacity. Can I perform under these maximal conditions? You are holding on, you are getting after it.
When we get into the other session, we’re not working on conditioning at this point. We are working on technical capacity. It’s practice. The general rule of thumb is probably something like 20 percent of the time can be red, and almost everything else needs to be practice or recovery. Much more than that depends on your unique physiology, but with all you’ve got going on, new to the altitude, injury history, I’m going to hedge way more conservatively.
Tim Ferriss: I would also say my recovery capacity, just broadly speaking, pretty low. I would just say I’m slower to recover than a lot of my friends who are competitive athletes, who I trained with. Same workload, kind of same diet, same habits, and I’m slower to recover.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, that’s another metric we always bucket. I want to see your total recovery capacity, and then it goes back to earlier, it’s that non-specific stressors. Get those out of your life and watch your recovery capacity just take off. We will want to work on that 100 percent, but nonetheless, this is the end part. Right?
The recovery capacity is, “Give me my other stuff and I’ll get that up higher,” but since we don’t have time for that, let’s just make sure the input, the stressors going in from what we can control, are not out-kicking our capacity to recover. This is where the problems start to exist. We want to out-kick them a little bit. Got to stress the system. Physiology doesn’t change without stress, but we can’t exponentially increase our injury or overuse risk. You will see the back lock up 100 percent during this time, not because of injury there, but because global stress got high, central nervous system said, “I don’t like what’s going on here. I’m going to stop him. I’m throttling him back.” Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, tight, tight, tight.
That’s effectively what’s happening. No real actual change there, but it is a global regulator. It’s a governor saying, “Lock up.” That’s what’s happening. We’re going to stretch that week out that way. I want a full layout of the seven days. We want to put in all those other practices around that. We’re going to build a schedule.
Then from there, we’re going to work our training backwards around that, so when we look at that, we need unwinding. Sounds like you’re getting that from yoga and Pilates.
Tim Ferriss: Meditation also. Generally, when I am my better self, I’m meditating twice a day, 20 minutes, basic TM stuff, transformative meditation stuff.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Breath work on top of that or that is just the intentional —
Tim Ferriss: Breath work, I’m not doing much independent breath work. What I do find helpful, and I can make time for this is using something like — there’s a device called the O2 Trainer. I’m not even sure what the general term would be. It’s a mouthpiece with —
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s a respiratory training —
Tim Ferriss: It’s respiratory training, and I do find those extremely helpful on a number of levels.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Funny you mentioned the O2 Trainer. That research came from my lab.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: No shit. Okay. There we go.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s Bas Rutten’s.
Tim Ferriss: That’s Bas Rutten. Yeah. Had him on the podcast, and that’s when I started using it in preparation for high altitude hunt, and found it tremendously helpful.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, since it came from your lab. It’s just 60 seconds.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: Just a brief overview on what we’re talking about.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We touched a lot on respiratory rate. Now the reason respiratory rate can be either dysfunctional or even just suboptimal, which are different is because of a number of things I talked to you about, it could be pattern recognition, it could be psychophysiological.
What I never even got to was it could be biochemical. That would be CO2, that would be pH levels. Right? You’re trying to restore there.
The third one is it can simply be mechanical, and so this is intercostal muscles, so these are the little muscles that are in-between your ribs as well as your diaphragm. When you contract those that open up the cavity of the lungs, which allows to change pressure.
When that matters is the real issue at altitude, and people say this all the time, but there is not less oxygen at altitude. There’s the same amount of oxygen at 10,000 feet as there is at sea level, but the partial pressure in the air is different. It’s much lower.
When you open your mouth, the gradient, the difference between the pressure in your lungs and the outside environment is less. It’s almost the same, so air doesn’t go anywhere, and so what you need to do is be able to create a huge amount of increase in volume as — you’re maybe aware of the relationship between pressure and volume. You open that up and then allow air to come in.
What the O2 Trainer does is it restricts airflow in and so you actually have to actively pull, it’s like strength training your intercostals, and your diaphragm, so you can do that to give yourself more ability. While that also matters through fatigue is those muscles are like any other muscle, they fatigue.
When you lose that ability, you lose the ability to bring in air during acute exercise and so that becomes a problem. Another free way to do it is this is when nasal breathing can work. Nasal breathing alone, as in closing your mouth, is a fantastic way to force intercostals and diaphragm to really get onboard because you’re restricting total air.
You’re effectively doing altitude without doing it. Not something you want to necessarily do. You shouldn’t be doing nasal-only breathing when you’re at maximum heart rate. Doesn’t really make any sense to do that. You have a mouth for a reason, but if you have significant problems breathing at moderate to medium intensities, O2 Trainer, great, or nasal breathing or any other tools, but it’s effectively getting at respiration training.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that came in because you’re asking if I do separate breath work, and I would say outside of — I often wonder how much of — we don’t need to diverge here, but how much of the benefit of meditation is from just measured slow breathing versus good posture versus others —
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s a big Venn diagram there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let’s leave that alone. But I would say right now, no, I’m not doing separate breath work.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. May or may not need it. Again, let’s take a look at CO2 tolerance. Let’s take a look at mechanics, how you’re moving, how you’re breathing potentially — I don’t know if you guys covered this in your convo with Eric or not, but where are your ribs at? Are you have excessive rib flaring?
Tim Ferriss: It’s something that I’ve been working on a lot in the last, let’s call it six to 12 months, just having my awareness brought to it, but generally, yes, quite a bit of flare.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Yeah. It’s pretty easy. That’ll kick off the diaphragm pretty quickly, inhibits it and so it becomes a problem. We would look biomechanically, we would look at it chemically, and then we would look at a pattern, psychophysiological, something like that, but that would be the places to start to figure out you may or may not need breath work. That doesn’t necessarily need to happen. It also, again, can be detrimental.
Meditation is the same thing. As an aggregate, it’s generally very, very, very positive to extremely positive. There’s also subsets of folks where breath work is maybe not a great option. It’s not necessarily just this panacea of, “Everyone go do downregulation breath work,” particularly if your HRV is extremely high, so you’re very parasympathetic, and this has actually happened — again, this is rare, more common is what we’ve been describing, but it has happened.
We have had folks that have very high HRVs. If you’re using a device like an Oura that’s getting you this once every five minute mark, you’re talking about people’s overnight HRV averages of 150 milliseconds, 170 milliseconds, really, really high, which may or may not be a problem at all, could be totally normal for you, easy, no problem.
At the same time they have a respiratory rate of nine breaths per minute. Okay, again, maybe totally normal, especially if you’re super fit. Any time we’re running through physiology, we’re never taking action on one metric. There’s way too many things that could be explained what’s going on there, but if you couple that with lethargy, can’t get out of bed, performance numbers are down, no motivation drive, things like that, if you think that person is burnt out and you give them a bunch of downregulation work? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Going to be a problem, going to be a real —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re pushing the slider in the wrong direction.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re pushing the slider in the wrong direction for sure. Then, again, more typical is upregulation. We need to bring you back down, but I just feel like it’s important to say that, because some people go out there and just have everyone downregulate and you’re like, “Whoa, whoa, time out here.” You may or may not need breath work at all.
Tim Ferriss: That’s like the baseline —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Tool.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. For sure.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I want something in there to — after those sessions hit and we’ve got that big fear to go, “Okay, let’s bring it back down,” That could be very, very low-volume strength work. If we feel like we have a little bit of an issue with underregulation —
Tim Ferriss: This is where I was going to go next. I’m curious to hear more about this.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I want to make sure that you’re strong in strong positions. Everything you outlined is going to be steady state endurance or a somewhat limited range of motion. You’ve also outlined, and again, I’m making assumptions here, but when you’re doing a lot of those fast turns, it’s a greater range of motion through your knees and hips because cutting at a faster angle —
Tim Ferriss: And you’re doing stuff that scares the shit out of me that is helpful for skiing like kind of, this is not the right term, but buckling the knees laterally to get higher edge angle.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, it makes sense. Super clean. Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Okay. Side of the tire. I get it. All right, great. So that’s actually high-velocity eccentric control.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: All right. We want to make sure that we come back in and reestablish a proper pattern over those same ranges of motion and fast. And we will walk through exact examples here in one second, but we’re walking from the top down. I want to know what your week looked like, what’s the skiing. Now that we understood that, now we’re back filling in all of our needs. Okay. So we needed the downregulation so that we don’t just get the entire system to lock up on us. We needed now to look at our physical attributes. Okay, can we come back and reestablish proper movement patterns? What I’m meaning by that is, when you’re on those slopes, you’re going to default to your movement and breathing patterns that are the lowest common recipe.
Hedging against that, and that’s when we come back and we do our pelvic floor stuff, we do whatever stuff that you’re doing that says, “Hey, no, this is the way that we want to sequence.” So you’re just continually reminding it that how much transfer that has over to your skis, I don’t care. Hopefully a lot, but even one percent is better than zero.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Any percent carryover we can get from there. Okay. At this point we probably don’t need to spend a lot of time on maximal speed and power. That’s not a rate-limiting factor. We would’ve done this in the off season or some other issue. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Day late and a dollar short.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally. But we need to make sure your hips, in particular, and feet are functioning appropriately as well as your shoulders. And those are the areas I’m going to go after and making sure we have proper stability and then we have strength in them. You’re going to get a lot of muscular endurance on the slopes. I’m not super concerned about that. I want low-volume, high-quality strength. I don’t really need maximal strength at this point, but I kind of want to touch the envelope a little bit here. I want to get up to, Tim, give me a heavy double, give me a heavy triple, heavy. No smelling salts. I don’t need that, but we want to touch more than you probably want to do.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So maybe this isn’t the right way to reference it, but what percentage of one rep max are we talking for those doubles and triples?
Dr. Andy Galpin: 85.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right, so it’s up there.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No, you’re going, you’re more than you want to do for sure.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But we don’t need you 95.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I don’t need you at a two rep max. I want you feeling, again, heavier than you want to feel.
Tim Ferriss: So you’re doing a two with what you might be able to do for four? I don’t know if my math is panning out here.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Six.
Tim Ferriss: Six, okay. All right, got it. Got it. Right, just to sort of make it concrete for my Long Island knuckle dragging.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Something where you’ve got to be paying attention.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so the double could be with a weight where you would tap out at six to eight.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Six to eight, yeah, something like that. Actually, I’m not super concerned about the exact numbers here. What I’m concerned about is, is it at a level where you sufficiently have to be paying attention? You have to be ready to go, right? We’re not sending a work text in the middle of a set, right?
Tim Ferriss: Right. I’m not listening to a dense podcast while I’m doing this.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally. I also don’t want it at such an intensity or volume that it’s now escalating recovery in a negative fashion.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve got it. Right. You’re not digging the hole deeper.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yes, that’s right. Don’t want to dig the hole any deeper. Fatigue is really interesting whether you’re looking at endurance or strength, however you want to do it. This is basic physiology stuff. It doesn’t go linearly. There’s a little bit of an asymptote here and there’s a little bit of an exponential growth such that going from a 10 percent increase in intensity, so 50 to 60 percent, is almost identical in terms of recoverable volume. So the amount of volume you could do, let’s say skiing at 50 percent of your max heart rate is pretty much the same as what you could do at 60 percent. There’ll be very little changes. But if you go from 80 percent to 90 percent, there’ll be dramatic increases in time it takes to recover.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you already, we know just based on what you’ve told me earlier, probably struggle higher on the higher end of that spectrum and so getting into the real high —
Tim Ferriss: In terms of recovery you mean?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Recovery.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So your maximum recoverable volume is MRV is kind of how we talk about it a lot, is low for higher-intensity stuff. Now I’d be interested to see what your muscle physiology looks like. Would you generally consider yourself more fast twitch or slow twitch, just off the cuff?
Tim Ferriss: I’d say more fast twitch.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, that’s always the answer, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s me. My fatigue, my soreness from power heavy strength stuff is really, really high from those things because I’m particularly good at that stuff relative for my own self.
Tim Ferriss: And look, you’re much more sophisticated with this stuff, but in my own primitive way when I’ve been in my absolute strongest, I’m generally taking seven to nine days between the same workout and super long rest intervals.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Of course. Right. Because if not, it’s not necessarily that you potentially respond better to that training, it’s the fact that the hole gets dug so deep if you do more than that. Your maximum recover volumes is super low.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, low.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So we can get out there. Okay. So we want to pay attention to that. That’s basically where I’m looking at. So we’re going to do some stuff for global torso. Think of this as trap bar deadlift. So we want to make sure that shoulder position is appropriate, hip position, and we’re putting strength in the posterior side and we’re just remembering strength.
Tim Ferriss: If I’ve had a history specifically with trap bar deadlift, I’m not sure why. For decades I was totally fine with trap bar deadlift.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You’re going to love this. And then I did a going from zero tennis to spending, I don’t know, seven to 10 days with a pro in Florida doing eight hours a day of tennis.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Smart, real smart.
Tim Ferriss: Technically, made tons of progress.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: And then I came back and I was doing a trap bar deadlift and my right SI was like clunk. And ever since I’ve actually had, I’ve gone through periods of it improving, getting worse, who knows if it’s exactly the SI, but have had issues with both trap bar and, say, back squatting type movements where I worry about the low back and the hip. So I’m wondering if —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Throw it off.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Pick a different exercise. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’re almost always tool agnostic, right? It is, what’s the thing we’re trying to get to and we’ll pick a bunch of tools based on that. Right?
Tim Ferriss: So I could do some split stance or whatever.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, split stance tends to be better for you. Single-leg or split stance entirely or both?
Tim Ferriss: Single-leg, I would say, just seems to be safer. I don’t run into the same back issues.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. Do a single-leg leg press for all I care. Who cares? Right? It’s different. Now we’ve got to do something for the back later, but fine.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Totally.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We can make that work. We can do hip thrusting. Lots of ways we can go about this.
Tim Ferriss: And single-leg leg press is how I’ve been edging back into the leg training, which has overall gone very well with that one strange piano wire, not snap, but twing that I felt a couple of weeks ago.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So this is just recent?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that was two or three weeks ago.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Great. We could do sled drags, right? We could push and pull things that are really heavy for a few steps. All of these things are going to be fine. So my guess is if you were to do something like that, you’d probably be fine. It’s that particular position. It is being stuck in a position under load that really gives you problems. So I would look and see when we get out to the place, what equipment do we have, and then we’ll work around that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s the approach. Could be split stance, even potentially elevated one foot overhead pressing for your shoulders, things like that. Let’s get your back out of the equation, but I don’t want it gone. That’s the real big key. You said a second ago terminal extension of your right leg when it’s trailing. Okay, great. So let’s put it in terminal extension.
I want your right leg behind. I want your right heel on the ground. I want you terminally locking out your knee and then we’re going to do overhead movement. And so what we’re doing is in that case, we’re not training the leg per se. We’ve got that in other stuff. But we’re connecting it to the rest of the movement group which is to say you never get the time off. You are always practicing that movement when distracted. That’s going to tell us, do you own that position? Do you really have that? Is that going to transfer onto the slopes? That’s what we’re after.
Learning movement, and this is a general problem with physiology. I think we’ve done a huge disservice teaching systems as if they’re separate. Everyone makes and says, “Oh, yes, they’re not.” But then we go right back to treating it system by system.
If we want to improve movement, that means that foot-heel connection needs to be worked on in all of our practices. We just don’t let it go. That’s just the new ingrained system. So I would do that. I would say the same thing for a rotational work. It’s really weird. People get to rotation and they all of a sudden just forget to strength train. And they get to rotation, they’re like, “I’ll just do sets of 10.” Why? Well, why is that the only answer? You want to be strong this way and this way, right?
Great. So we’re going to have the same movement patterns that we’re going to get there.
Tim Ferriss: When you’re doing, let’s just say two rep sets, three rep sets, it doesn’t have to be right now, but I’d love to know what we’re talking about in terms of total volume, number of sets.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. That’s exactly where I was going. You can use a very easy rule of thumb, three-to-five method. Now, every time I say this, the entire internet comes after me. Yes. I didn’t invent it.
No. It’s been around for a very long time.
Three-to-five, which just means it’s three-to-five days per week. Pick three-to-five exercises, do three-to-five sets, three-to-five reps per set, three-to-five minutes rest. So what that means, that could be on the high end, five days a week, five sets of five exercises.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a long workout. If you start adding up the rest intervals.
Dr. Andy Galpin: If you start adding up the rest intervals and even if you cheat the rest intervals and you do that at the appropriate load, five by fives, anyone who’s truly strength-trained, that is a beast. It’s another word I was wanting to say, but I’ll pass on saying it. Starts with an M and an F. It’s a load. Right? It can be as little as three days a week, three exercises, three sets of three. That’s probably what I would hedge more to you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So that I’m not digging any deeper with my already limited recovery ability.
Dr. Andy Galpin: 100 percent. So if I were to give you this one example of an actual full training program for you, I’m missing a bunch of information here, but just as a sample here, I would probably say if you’re skiing initially five days a week as a way of call it, I probably want roughly Wednesday, I want almost as a pure recovery day. We are going to potentially do some sort of movement. So your PT or your actual movement coach, respiratory muscle, hip adductors, whatever that little thing is we need to get activated. So any hygiene we have from whoever’s coaching you there, we want to get done.
We’re doing our hot-cold sauna thing. You want to do that outside, great. You want to go do your breath work outside just to get hot. Any of those things you’d like to do for recovery. Wednesdays as an example is that day, that’s it, right? Catch up on work maybe for a few hours. We’re going to keep that thing. We’re resetting, we’re checking hydration, we’re sleep extension, we’re napping, we’re getting PT, massage, soft tissue. All that stuff is Wednesday and that’s Wednesday. This is also the day where you do something that is obnoxiously selfish. You want to play three hours of video games, great. What is the thing you love to do that you don’t let yourself do?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, World of Warcraft while I’m getting a mani-pedi or pedi probably, I need my hands.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, there you go. That’s fantastic. All right. That is that day. We may or may not incorporate a low-intensity walk. This is potentially getting out and — yeah, you’re going to have a lot of nature exposure, so we’re fine there.
Tim Ferriss: I will likely also do a lot of walking in place of sitting, right? So in place of Zoom calls in place of that type of thing, I’ll do a low-intensity walking.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. If not, we would say walk outside for some chunks, two walks, two 10-minute walks a day, morning, noon, something like that. Any other adjunct therapies and tools and technologies we’re using is going to be that day. Right? So that’s amazing. Let’s just say, I’m just going to make an example here. I’m just going to run the whole thing. Let’s just say Monday is that really hard red day. You go on that really hard session on the scope. We’re going to come back after that final session and we might go straight to the gym, get really warmed up and we’re going to do three by three. Okay, we’re going to probably do that rear foot elevated or not rear, but rear stance, other foot elevated.
Tim Ferriss: Front foot elevated.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Front foot elevated. Overhead press, something like that. Now in this particular case, I’m probably not doing three sets of three, I might ask you to go to fives. The upper body doesn’t tend to respond to lower rep ranges as well as the lower body.
Tim Ferriss: Interesting.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You won’t see too many guys who are really, really excellent at bench press who only do singles or doubles. They tend to do probably closer to three, to four to fives. Lower body is generally opposite. So doing an overhead press double, by the time you get it up and get the first rep up, it doesn’t work as well.
Tim Ferriss: It also might behoove me to use slightly lighter loads for anything overhead, which I’ve avoided completely for probably half a year because of the compression sensitivity.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So I’ve done very little spinal loading.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Angle it. So let’s just do incline.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Same thing.
Tim Ferriss: Got it, okay, got it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Hammer, jammer press like 45 degree if you’ve got a landmine.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, great. Perfect.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We need to just be at an angle here. It doesn’t have to be perfectly overhead. Something like that. Okay. So I’m probably doing that. I want some sort of lower body similar vein. This could be threes. I love, again, if you have a heavy sled that you can push for three steps each leg, that would be great. If you’ve got some sort of potentially front squat, goblet squat, zercher squat, something like that, that is not aggravating of any of your things.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: When we’re saying three by three, two at 80 percent, this is still week one, so I don’t care if this is 60 percent. It doesn’t matter. We’re just going through the motions here.
Tim Ferriss: Any favorite split stance or ice lateral leg movements? Just in my particular case. The sled is interesting. I’ve responded well to sleds in the past, so I’ll look for that and maybe my equipment options might be limited. What would be an alternative?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Step-ups.
Tim Ferriss: Great.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Super basic step-up.
Tim Ferriss: Just like hold on to dumbbells or kettlebells or something.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Just be really careful. A lot of people will like to progress this by going to a higher step, which is great, but we have to be really careful of how much hip flexion and how much load we put on hip flexion for you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Now, at the same time, if we go at a low, say, 12-inch box or something, we’re really not getting much movement here other than a basic knee extension. And so we want to think and kind of play to this.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And my low back responds very well to the type of glute activation that I experienced through step-ups.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. High angle or low angle? High box or low box?
Tim Ferriss: I have only done lower box. Even at low box assuming that I’m kind of, and this is getting into the weeds, but when I sort of do the Verstegen pick the knee up and really get that support leg glute contraction, my low back responds very well to that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. Let me ask you one quick question. This is super technical here. When you’re on that box, let’s just say you’re doing a step-up with your left foot, to make it easy. You have the left foot over there. Where is your body at relative to your left foot and where’s your knee at?
Tim Ferriss: Well, the way I’ve been doing these step-ups is actually a sort of cross lateral step.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, sure. Like a curtsy squat?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’ve been doing that, but I’m open to whatever you would suggest that has the lowest injury potential.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, so you’re doing that and feeling a great glute contraction because you’re crossing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay, that’s great. The only reason I ask that is because depending on where your foot position is, this can dramatically change hamstringing glute activation. And so are you stepping up with a knee related activity or are you stepping up with a hamstringing or glute activity?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure to be honest.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So if your foot is way in front of you, so you can imagine as you go to step-up, you’re rocking forward and then coming up. Or if it’s behind you.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Or same with you as behind you. None of these things are right or wrong. Should your knees go past your toes? Well, what are we trying to do here? The more our knee goes past our toes, the more it’s going to be knee-related, the more it stays behind and the more it’s going to be posterior typically as a general rule. So what are we trying to get response to? Potentially your quads are weak.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? Now when you’re feeling great response from single-leg pressing, depends on how your setup is, you might be in a situation where you feel better when your quads — quads got —
Tim Ferriss: I can tell you how I’m setting up. For the single-leg leg press, I’m actually placing the foot very high on the platform because I’m —
Dr. Andy Galpin: What kind of platform is this?
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s just say on a leg press, we’ve got this rectangle in front of us.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I am putting the foot quite high on that platform so that it would be, I guess, maybe the equivalent of rocking forward in this step-up.
Dr. Andy Galpin: This is a very high-hip flexion.
Tim Ferriss: Very high-hip flexion and because the more I feel it in the glute, the better the low back feels.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Okay. So what you’re getting is contraction over stretch, which is great. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So contracting over — this is why full range of motion stuff is such a good idea. It needs to be strong over those long positions. Right? Charlie Weingroff all day, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Long, strong and then work hard. Okay. So we want to be in that position. I’m not going to suggest that the standard step-up position is any better. If you’re having success, with how complicated things like low back are, if you’re having success with that modified curtsy step-up, then I would stay probably right there.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Which is great. The only thing we might want to do is potentially load it more.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I don’t know how you’re doing now.
Tim Ferriss: Honestly, as far as step-ups go, I’ve been doing it unloaded. This is body weight only. And then I’ve moved into loading with the leg press because there are just fewer variables at play and I’m like, all right, let me see how I progress with this.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, I would do the same thing, by the way. The record. If we started loading curtsy, I would start very low.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I would like to get up, but right now, let’s not go the wrong direction.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Let’s take our wins. We’re at the blackjack table. We won one hand —
Tim Ferriss: And step-ups, you were saying sort of below or 12 inches or below, you’re not really getting A, B, and C if you’re trying to win a world record and you’re trying to do a four-foot step-up, you’ve got your own set of problems. How do you think about elevation?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Well, it’s because of hip flexion. It’s the same thing. You already answered the question. I was coming at it this way, which is if it’s at a very low position, then you’re basically getting most drive from your knee extension initially to get you moving. This is generally what’s going to happen. But if you put it at a really high position, you’re automatically putting your hip in really high flexion so your thigh gets really close to your rib cage.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Now, we have to work the glute and it doesn’t mean you’re not working your knee as well. Could be very knee heavy driven, still doesn’t matter. But you’ve now forced your glute to work over a higher range of motion, which is what we’re after.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: People tend to avoid range of motion when they have things like back injuries, but that’s oftentimes the wrong direction. You want to make sure without exacerbating pain, of course, but it probably wants to be opened up a little bit and the hip needs to be. So I would keep it there. I also may ditch that and go to straight hip extension. Let’s just go with a hip thrust. Have you done those before?
Tim Ferriss: I have done hip thrust. We talking about barbell across the waist type stuff?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I have —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Blue bridge hip thrust.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. For whatever reason, especially if it’s single-leg, if I keep the elevation pretty low, in other words, if I’m not getting to max terminal —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Hip extension.
Tim Ferriss: Hip extension, I’m usually okay. It can cause my spinal erectors to fire.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And that sometimes gets me into a spasmed situation where it’s problematic.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep, a hundred percent. So you’re getting extension from lumbar spine instead of from the glutes.
Tim Ferriss: But for instance, if I keep my hips somewhat low, let’s just say I’m using a Swiss ball or something like that and I’m doing heel rollouts where I’m really getting the hamstringing, then I’m fine. But higher weight, if I’m really making the effort to go full range, my spinal erectors can really get over activated and stay over activated.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, so you just want to stay out of those situations.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: This is why it would be impossible. I’m glad you’re letting us do this by the way, because typically on podcasts they kind of just like, what’s the —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, what’s the cookie cutter?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Ah, you can’t. You really can’t.
Tim Ferriss: And I know this is really self-indulgent, everybody, so I appreciate you bearing with, but what I would’ve said, because I record the intros after these conversations, but you get to the universal through the personal in the sense that if you’ve had any degree of injuries, if you’ve just lived life aggressively, it’s never going to be a cookie cutter, one size fits all. You’re going to have to zig and zag like we’re doing right now. So I appreciate you being game to do it also because you’re going to have to zig and zag with this stuff. So yeah, with the hip bridging, if I keep my hips kind of low and, let’s say, targeting the hamstrings that it works. But otherwise, what I’ve realized with this low back stuff is if it gets super, what’s the right word, hypertonic, if my spinal rectus just turn on and they refuse to turn off, that can last two days.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Or more.
Tim Ferriss: Or three days and it fucks up my sleep so badly.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And everything else.
Tim Ferriss: And everything.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Digestion, all of it, mood, work. I don’t want to do anything. Given the fact you’ve had some success with what you’re currently doing and those other ones are marginally helpful, then just ditch them.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Just ditch them.
Dr. Andy Galpin: At this point it’s like, green only.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, green.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yellow, orange is out. That’s what we’re doing. The only other thing I’d say is, okay, let’s change the positions entirely, which is, okay, how about, you said you had success in areas where you make the hamstrings work really hard. So let’s do a hamstringing curl on a machine. Take the back entirely out of the equation.
Tim Ferriss: Take it out.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Retrain, glutes contract, hamstrings contract. When we don’t give the spinal rectors even an option to come because it sounds like once they come into the party, when you’re front squatting, when you’re back squatting, when you’re doing hip thrust or glute bridges, they haven’t learned to play their position yet.
Tim Ferriss: No. It’s like that one friend everybody has who shows up at the party, drinks too much, starts yelling and screaming. You’re just like, “Oh, God.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Just don’t invite him to the party.
Tim Ferriss: “This guy, again.” Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. You don’t get to come to the party for a while, you’re just gone. Right? We can do some other stuff there. What you’re going to eventually want to build to is integration, which is, okay, now we need to learn to go glute, hamstringing, low back, firing sequence, right? Glute, hamstring, low back. But right now for a while to make sure that your quads, hamstrings, and glutes are truly conditioned, we’re isolating. And until we get out of pain, that’s where — I don’t even care, Tim, I would do leg extension on the leg extension machine, leg curl in your situation where you’re at and limited resources, probably not a full-time PT. Remember, folks, this is this situation here. And then we’re going to slowly, in our warmups and cooldowns, do sequence movement patterns that go glute, hamstringing, low back. And just to start like, hey, remember, this is the pattern we want to be in.
Okay, now we’re not going to expose you to load and fatigue. We’re going to do that in our isolation work. But then we’re going to come back and in our cool downs, we’re going to go through that. I would also then build you out a specific warmup that you do every day prior to skiing, that is the same sequencing. It could be a thousand different little things we do, but we’re going to do a couple of drills. And I’m literally talking four minutes of work where we’re just remembering proper glute sequencing, and this is a combination to last around this last point out, because we haven’t got to Tuesday yet.
Tim Ferriss: I still have more questions about Monday, but yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Well, folks. I’m having a ton of fun, so I hope they are too. In getting to that is we need to make sure a part of that equation is your chest and your thoracic spine and your ribcage, because we can’t then rebuild the lower sequence without, and then just let the ribs do it, that natural thing. And so we don’t want to be in a situation where we’re locked down where we can’t breathe and everything’s so tight where we’re just like — no, this needs to be a moved functional position. You actually would be sort of surprised how much that will carry over if you give it time. You’re not going to see significant changes in your posture, low back pain in three days by doing a four minute warmup, but a year later, this can have substantial impact.
Tim Ferriss: What might that warmup look like?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, okay, so one of the things I’d probably start you with is a basic diaphragm warmup. So this could be as simple as, let’s lay on your back. Let’s go in a heels-to-your-butt position. So knees are up in the air, your feet are flat on the floor and your heels are right up against your butt.
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. Now you’re going to take your hands and put them around your stomach, so just below your rib cage, and we’re just going to use your breath to expand your hands. So pushing it out there, right? Okay, great. Three or four breaths, probably nasal only. Okay, awesome. Now we’re going to do a glute bridge. Okay? We’re getting in that same position and we’re going to make sure we’re high as you can go, six inches, two inches, an inch off the ground, I don’t care. Only as high as you can go. And we’re probably going to tuck our chin. This is almost automatically going to keep your position out of extension in your low back. So we’re going to tuck your chin just a little bit there, and we’re going to breathe three breaths, four breaths.
Tim Ferriss: While you’re bridged?
Dr. Andy Galpin: While we’re bridged, and watch what happens. Reset yourself, come back up and watch. You’ve gained eight inches in your hip extension, guaranteed. Because not you’ve actually stretched anything but you’ve turned signals off. I’m totally projecting here, but I’m pretty confident, right now you’re in a position to where anytime you get any perception through your low back, it just goes lock.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The governor’s just like —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Bingo. Turn it off.
Tim Ferriss: Shut off the, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You have to turn it off, right?
Tim Ferriss: Throw the switch.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you throw the switch and all of a sudden, boom, you get hip extension and now it’s not coming from your lumbar spine. Right? And we’re doing this still in a tucked position, and we’re going two inches lower than you want to go.
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So go up as high as you want to go, come back down two inches.
Tim Ferriss: Stay green.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally, stay green. We’re going to do some breath work there and by breath work, again.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, breathe through your nose.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Three.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Three of them, four, five, whatever you want. It doesn’t matter. Okay. Then come back down. Reset. Come back up one more time. You’ll be up four more inches. If you’re doing this at home, you’re going to be like, oh, my God, it works perfectly. I might have you go into one leg position. So you’re going to hold that position on one leg, say, kick your right leg out. Keep your knees identical to each other and kick the right leg out. And now we have ipsilateral control. So now we have torsal rotation and we also have that terminal hip extension. And now can you still breathe? What happened to your ribs? Bingo. Right? You’re going to see, I guarantee you, as soon as you do that, you look down, you’ll have arched. Right? Ribs have gone up. This is not a locked-in hard contraction.
This is a chill position. Right? It has to be. All right, I’m relaxed here. I’m breathing. There’s going to be a little bit of shaking because you’re in a single-leg position, but not much. Three, four, five, eight breaths. Switch. Do the next one. Take a break in between. Those details aren’t what matter here. You’re just trying to slowly let the system know these are okay positions, you can relax, we’re safe here. So I would probably go into that. Then I’d come back down. That’s this simple sequence. We are 45 seconds in at this point and I guarantee you stand up and your posture will be better. You’ll be out of that little bit of a curve. From there, I would probably then take that exact same thing and go into a split stance. So, you could do this walking lunges. I would probably do this with a slight rotation, but I still want your hands around your stomach.
So we’re still watching the distance between your rib and anterior superior iliac spine, that ASIS, that front point of your hip. You’re going to pay attention to that. If you want to put your thumb and your pinky, put your thumb below your rib, put your pinky on your ASIS while you’re doing these lunges and make sure that distance isn’t changing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And just breathe. Do a step all the way down. If you want to play here, that’s fine. Let’s go a little bit, rock your knee over your ankle, rock backwards a little bit. Give me a little bit of a rotation. If you want to do a little bit of an arch, like if your right knee is forward in this lunge position and you want to take your left arm and reach it over top of your head, you want to rotate it, you want to twist it. Any of those things are fine, but the key is here, we’re not doing these because we have a checkbox that says, “This is my warmup.” Intention is everything here. As soon as you lose intention, just stop. Because we’re trying to make sure we have a specific action, not just “Coach said I have to warm up.”
Tim Ferriss: And specific action in this case is making sure you’re not flaring, making sure that that torso position —
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s correct.
Tim Ferriss: In terms of distance from rib cage to the ASIS, like bony protrusion on the front of the hip, folks. If you see someone wearing low jeans and you see the ridges in the front.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, it’s the arrow that points.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right, exactly. Okay, so that is the intention then.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not just like, “Oh, I’m doing my eight steps.” It’s like, no, you’re doing your eight steps, but the purpose is to maintain while breathing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Not even necessarily the other classic things that are associated with a physical warmup, like actual temperature increases, being metabolically efficient in the muscle, having more strength and power production. That’s coming too. But we’ve slid that in. We’ve also slid in breath work because you’re actually now altering O2 and CO2 on purpose. And you’ve done that on top of correcting movement patterns. And now you’re reestablishing that. So I would argue and love you to do this barefoot if possible. So your toes are all the way up, are engaging. I want, in this particular case, that heel connection to be strong. I don’t want you driving only through your heel. You’re going to be driving and using your whole foot, but let’s make sure we’re not forgetting our toes and our feet.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, super important for skiing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Very important, right?
Tim Ferriss: Your foot awareness and control is super, super important.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Everything. Right? If you want to do a little more ski specific here, or a little more fun, you could take a little slide pad, so it’s like the size of a shoe, if you will. If you can put it on a surface that slides and put that on your back foot and let that slide back and forth so you lose some stability, that back leg, which is then just going to further exacerbate neurological control and it’s going to remind you at all times, do you know where everything is moving? Right?
So we’re talking, your adductors are now moving. You’re talking your hip extensors and knee flexors. They’re all working on both sides and we’re getting, am I controlling my breath? Am I controlling my ribs? So, I would probably add a few of those in. Again, give me one set, six to 12 per leg. I don’t really care. There’s no magic thing we’re trying to get here. We’re three minutes in at maximum here. You’ve now gotten the entire lower body, the hips have been moved, and isolated or activated. We would do something like that.
If you have any specific things, and this is why I don’t have insight, but if you had any, hey, yeah, my right adductor is weaker than my left or it’s overused or [inaudible] something like that, then we would add in specificity here. So let’s get your left glute med on. So we’ll do some standing clamshells, we’ll do some lateral walks, whatever the case is that we need to get going there and we’re in a pretty good position. Last thing we would do is then go to your upper body and make sure that we’re having a connection between our upper body to our toe all the way up and down. So this could be throw in some Stu McGill, right, so throw in hand leg opposite here. We could do that.
Tim Ferriss: And leg opposite meaning like bird dog, something like that?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. So you’re on quadruped, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So your hands are on the ground, you’re on your knees and you would say lift your left hand all the way out in front of you. So it would be over your head, but you’re on your knees. And then at the same time your right leg is extending back.
Tim Ferriss: Yup.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And so you’re getting a very strong right glute contraction that’s crossing that fascial line to your left shoulder and now that entire thing is in the sequence. At the same time, your core is working on rotation while remember what happened to your rib cage.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right.
Tim Ferriss: And we’ll link to all this in the show notes, guys, so you’ll be able to find these things.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Something simple like that would be probably what I do. The very, very last thing I would do then would be some sort of extremely low level of what some folks call aerobic plyometrics. This is Altis, this is Dan and Stu stuff. This is rudimentary hops. So something like stiff legged and you’re going to do 20 hops and land intentionally on your heel.
Tim Ferriss: Ooh, that’s going to be hard for me with the heel drop stuff.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, right. Again, you don’t want to do it to a level of pain. You could do a little bit of your toe, you could do something. But if you’re going to be landing and absorbing load on the skis —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — we have to get some sort of activation and tissue tolerance here. Remember, if we really have a sensitivity issue in your low back with pain, we have to desensitize it somehow. The way that we do that is we walk right up to that line of sensitivity, go back two steps, and we do a little bit of volume there and then ideally try to push that line back up. Tangible quick example. Let’s just say you’re having an issue with drop bar deadlifts. Okay, great. And let’s just say we did a thing where I said, okay, put it on the bar and we’re just going to work up to a load until it starts to hurt. Let’s say that that is 300 pounds for you, right? You probably have a pretty decent drop bar deadlift, I assume. Okay, great. So when the pain started hurting at 300 pounds. Okay, great.
Let’s go to 200. Let’s do three sets of six. Go home, come back the next day. No, no, no issue. Okay, great. Next session. Slowly working our way up until — where’s that line? Okay, seems like I can train at 280 and I have no pain. Okay, great. Let’s now get to five sets of six. Let’s get to five sets of six and then some accessory exercises, some other stuff. No pain, no pain, no pain. Okay, great. Now let’s slowly go up to 280 and then we’re going to slow the — you’re going to desensitize that system by doing it. I’m doing the same thing with your landing and compression. I had to get to that somehow. I don’t want to exacerbate your pain —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — but I want to do 10 lands. I want to do something. It could be maybe on a little bit of a softer ground. We could do some other way around it, but we want to slowly desensitize the tissue that landing and loading is okay. So that’s how I would build Monday.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So a few follow-ups on Monday. My most important remaining question is related to, let’s just say in this case, the three exercises and three-to-five minutes in between. I’ve benefited in the past from three-to-five minutes or more in between exercises, but in the interest of time, one might be inclined, myself included to say, “Well, rather than doing, say, exercise A and doing the three sets of that exercise with five minutes in between, maybe I could just sequence it so that I do exercise A, I take a minute rest, exercise B, take a minute, rest C, take a minute rest, and then go back to A.” Is that something that is acceptable/advisable or do you really want more of a break for your central nervous system or otherwise?
Dr. Andy Galpin: In your particular case in this situation what you laid out, that supersetting is totally fine.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, great.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No issue there. We’re not trying to maximize your strength.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: If we were trying to do that for any number of reasons where we really are trying to peak at what you’re really trying to do in this case, I don’t even care if you get stronger. In fact, if we lose some strength over the course of this, it’s okay. What we’re trying to do is continue to have health throughout the system, so it needs to be strong enough to hold positions while you’re on the slopes.
Tim Ferriss: Right. So we’re trying to avoid a slope of degradation over the course —
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: — of fight camp.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So if you wanted to do that, no problem. You want to superset them is what we’d call that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What we’d probably have you do is set the whole circuit up before. It’s part of your kind of warmup and you do one, catch your breath for a second, you slowly walk over, set up, do the next one. I don’t care that it’s three minutes or two minutes —
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — or less. What we want to make sure we’re doing is not getting a ton of fatigue. If your breath rate is 150 breaths per minute or your heart rate rather, if you’re sweating a lot, if you’re really getting it, then, oh —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, pause.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — calm down. I actually want you to leave these sessions feeling like I didn’t do anything.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? Great. But if you can do that in a superset fashion, no problem. These things should not be 30 minutes.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Really. Remember, you skied hard.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s part of the reason I’m asking. It’s like I’m going to be — I’ll probably be pretty fatigued walking in.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. So that’s great. We’re going to get a high-quality warmup and we’re going to do a couple of exercises at a reasonable quality, but we’re also not going to 90, 95 percent.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’re getting a good strong contraction, probably finish it potentially with one exercise to a pump. And this would be, let’s take one area that is undersized, that is understrength, that is dysfunctional, and we’ll do one set.
Tim Ferriss: So many options.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. And we’d probably rotate it, to be honest. So maybe it’s glutes. Maybe we put a band on and we just do a set of 30 glute pumps.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s it. We’re out of there, right?
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Maybe something for your shoulder. Yeah, you’ve had this thing going on. Maybe something like that going on. Maybe it’s a hand leg opposite, 30 reps each, something like that.
Tim Ferriss: I just did this yesterday to kind of shoulders using rear delt stuff.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally feels great, right?
Tim Ferriss: Felt great. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. So something like that. Maybe bent row on a machine, like what any number of things we can do and you do one or so sets of 20. You get a nice big pump, you feel jacked, it’s great, and then you’re out of there. That’s probably what I would do. One to two of those, one set, maybe two and then we’re done.
Tim Ferriss: What else would you like to add? And then another critical question, which is one where I do think I tend to lose the plot. I don’t think I eat enough actually, and I’ve done so much fasting. I’m like, eh, if I’m not hungry, I’ve developed the habit of not eating very much and I can see that in my lean body mass right now in terms of just totals, right? I’m like, “Hmm, okay.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: As in undermuscled or overfat?
Tim Ferriss: Both. The overfat is I’ve been a piglet over the holidays and I think I’ve been doing less strength training in being in a protective mode for the back stuff.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yup.
Tim Ferriss: And I think just not consuming enough protein and other things. So we’ve talked about Monday. I guess if there are any sort of crux pieces that you’d like to discuss for the rest of the week, which you already laid out top level, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yup.
Tim Ferriss: And then I would love to get your thoughts on tracking nutrition because part of what I’ve seen is like, all right, I’m not going to weigh out my chicken breasts on the jewelry scale and practically speaking, I’m probably not going to do that. Maybe I should. But much like tracking hydration by having a container with a set volume and you just multiply it out, that’s straightforward, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: How you might approach nutrition with a similar —
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Okay, great. This is fun. Regarding training, we kind of said we’re probably — just a very quick recap. Monday’s that red day, Wednesday is that green day, which that means Saturday, which is kind of like the reason I’m doing this is Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, right, is generally going to be if we can single session, and this is technical work. So this is let’s review Monday through Friday. And, Tim, what do we need to work on? What are your coach’s — this is you and your coach going back and say, “We really want to work on this. We need more reps at this.” In other words, what do you need more volume in? And that’s Saturday. It is practice. It is, yep, we missed this, we missed this, we missed this. Here’s this drills I’m going to do. It is not high fatigue. It’s also not nothing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s not green day. You’ve got all Sunday. Sunday’s off, whatever. It doesn’t matter what days a week you are, but this is the point. So it is a little bit of work, but it is really getting that last bit of volume. We just need more practice. Practice takes reps. Awesome. That then leaves us with Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. That lift, you could do another lift on Saturday afterwards, do real technical stuff and do the same thing. I would do the exact same thing I did on Monday but switch the exercises. So it’s a little bit different. So let’s say we decided to do step-ups on Monday, switch that out for rear foot elevated split squat, if those are great. Switch that out for some other lower body extension exercise, whatever. Same exact concept though. Same thing. Switch out your upper body movement, switch out your rotation movement, give you a little bit more variety.
Make sure we’re doing something pulling, something pressing, something [inaudible]. Make sure we’re doing something in what we would technically call frontal and sagittal plane. So maybe this is a lateral bunch. Okay. So not only are we now switching out the exercise, we’re going laterally this way, something like that. Same thing with our upper body. Maybe it’s the horizontal pole, a row instead of a vertical pole. Okay. I would set that up on Saturday. Your technical work, a really quick lift and then you’re out of there, done for the day. You want to add in your recovery stuff from Wednesday, great. If not, go have your fun, do what you do, enjoy your weekend.
Okay. Tuesday and then probably Thursday are going to be generally yellow, medium days. On the slopes may or may not lift but you’re going to do a lot of volume on those days. This is probably your longer duration stuff. Going to feel fine on Thursday because you came off Wednesday. Friday, if we want to come back and do one red, not a double red but one, then I’m good, right? Hard, hard ski is probably what I’d say. Okay. So we’re lifting on that Monday, we’re going to lift again. In this case, I know this got a little confusing, but I’ll probably lift on Thursday —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: — right, just to split it up a little bit. Thursday, it’s a yellow orange ski, hard ski, not a lot. We’re going to lift. It’s going to be kind of hard. So we’re stacking hard on hard and then Friday might be one really hard ski, but now we’re good because Saturday is pretty much green and then we’re definitely green on Sunday. That’s how I would sack that whole week up and I would keep the exact same theme lifting-wise.
Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That's how we're gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you're rude, we'll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)