back to indexSupercharge Exercise Performance & Recovery with Cooling | Huberman Lab Podcast #19
link |
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
link |
where we discuss science and science-based tools
link |
for everyday life.
link |
I'm Andrew Huberman,
link |
and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
link |
at Stanford School of Medicine.
link |
This podcast is separate
link |
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
link |
It is, however, part of my desire and effort
link |
to bring you zero cost to consumer information
link |
about science and science-related tools
link |
to the general public.
link |
In keeping with that theme,
link |
I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
link |
Our first sponsor is Inside Tracker.
link |
Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform
link |
that analyzes data from your blood and DNA
link |
to help you better understand your body
link |
and help you reach your health goals.
link |
I've long been a believer in getting regular blood tests,
link |
and the simple reason for that
link |
is that so many of the factors
link |
that impact our immediate and long-term health
link |
and wellbeing can only be analyzed from blood.
link |
And now with the advent of modern DNA tests,
link |
you can get additional layers of information
link |
that can really support your understanding
link |
about what's going on deep under the hood, so to speak,
link |
inside your body and brain and what to do about it.
link |
And I think that's really where Inside Tracker
link |
sets itself apart from other similar tests.
link |
What Inside Tracker offers is,
link |
first of all, they make the tests very easy.
link |
They can come to your home to take your blood and DNA test,
link |
or you can go to a testing center nearby you.
link |
Then you get the information back,
link |
and rather than just getting information
link |
about whether or not the levels of various things
link |
you also get to find out what to do about it.
link |
So it offers directives related to nutrition,
link |
to exercise, and so forth.
link |
It really allow you to be in control of your overall health,
link |
both where you are now and its long-term trajectory.
link |
With Inside Tracker, they also have something
link |
which is it can give you a readout of your inner age.
link |
They have something called the inner age test
link |
that really compares your biological age
link |
to your chronological age,
link |
something that's of extreme importance and interest
link |
because it has to do with lifespan or predicted lifespan.
link |
If you'd like to try Inside Tracker,
link |
you can visit insidetracker.com slash Huberman,
link |
and if you do that, you'll get 25% off
link |
any of Inside Tracker's plans.
link |
Use the code Huberman at checkout.
link |
That's insidetracker.com slash Huberman
link |
to get 25% off any of Inside Tracker's plans
link |
and use the code Huberman at checkout.
link |
Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep.
link |
Helix Sleep is a company that makes mattresses and pillows
link |
ideally suited to your sleep needs.
link |
I've been sleeping on a Helix mattress
link |
for the last six months, and I can honestly say
link |
it's the best sleep that I've ever gotten.
link |
Helix Sleep has a quiz that can match you
link |
to the ideal mattress and pillows for you.
link |
It's a quiz that takes just about two minutes,
link |
asks you questions like, do you tend to sleep on your side
link |
or your back, on your stomach, or maybe you don't know
link |
whether or not you tend to wake up feeling too warm
link |
or too cold, various questions about your sleep habits.
link |
At the end of that quiz, it matches you
link |
to a specific mattress that's perfect for your sleep needs.
link |
For me, it matched me to the DUSK, D-U-S-K,
link |
because I wanted a mattress that wasn't too firm
link |
nor too soft, and I really love the mattress.
link |
As I mentioned, I've been sleeping terrifically well
link |
ever since I got that mattress.
link |
If you're interested in upgrading your mattress,
link |
you can go to helixsleep.com slash Huberman,
link |
take their two-minute sleep quiz,
link |
and they'll match you to a customized mattress,
link |
and then you'll get up to $200 off all mattresses,
link |
and you'll get two free pillows.
link |
They have a 10-year warranty.
link |
You get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free.
link |
If you don't like it, they'll even pick it up for free,
link |
take it away, but I really think you will.
link |
I certainly love mine.
link |
Again, if you're interested, you can go
link |
to helixsleep.com slash Huberman for up to $200 off
link |
and two free pillows.
link |
Today's episode is also brought to us by Theragun.
link |
Theragun is a handheld percussive therapy device
link |
that releases deep muscle tension.
link |
I first learned about Theragun on a lab expedition.
link |
We were actually headed out to Ocean,
link |
where we were doing diving with great white sharks,
link |
filming those for our VR fear experiments in the laboratory,
link |
and it was very long days of carrying Pelican cases.
link |
Those are cases, these hard plastic cases with equipment.
link |
We were all sore and tired all the time,
link |
and someone had brought along a Theragun.
link |
It was the first time I had seen one,
link |
and pretty soon that thing was getting passed along
link |
and became one of the more coveted devices on board.
link |
Everyone wanted time with this thing because it was great.
link |
You could give yourself a really terrific massage
link |
and get deep into the tissue and relieve soreness.
link |
When I got back, I got a Theragun,
link |
and so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.
link |
Whether or not you want to treat your muscles
link |
because they're tense from working out
link |
or whether or not you just want to release stress,
link |
it's a terrific tool.
link |
Many of you are familiar probably
link |
with professional massages, but Theragun is interesting
link |
because you can basically give yourself
link |
a deep tissue massage anytime, anywhere.
link |
It's also very quiet.
link |
If you want to try Theragun, you can try it for 30 days.
link |
They start at only $199.
link |
You can go to theragun.com slash Huberman right now,
link |
and you can get your Gen 4 Theragun today.
link |
That's the one that I use or another one of their models.
link |
That's theragun.com slash Huberman to try Theragun.
link |
This episode marks the beginning of a new topic
link |
for the Huberman Lab Podcast.
link |
As many of you already know,
link |
we go deep into a particular topic over four,
link |
sometimes even five episodes.
link |
We just closed out the episodes on hormones.
link |
Now we are going to talk about
link |
how to optimize physical performance and skill learning.
link |
We're going to look deep at the science behind this
link |
as well as specific practices.
link |
In fact, today, you're going to hear about specific tools
link |
that you can use to improve endurance and strength
link |
by up to, I'm not making this up,
link |
three or four times your current capacity.
link |
This is based on studies that were done at Stanford
link |
and are currently in use by collegiate
link |
and professional teams.
link |
If you're not a professional athlete or a serious athlete,
link |
The topics this month
link |
and all the information we are going to cover
link |
are going to make you a better recreational exerciser
link |
If you're not an exerciser
link |
and you're thinking about getting into that,
link |
or if you live in the Northern hemisphere
link |
and you're just thinking about the beach this summer,
link |
fat loss, muscle building, that sort of thing,
link |
this month, we're going to cover all of that as well.
link |
There's so much confusion out there
link |
about how to optimize fat loss, muscle building,
link |
improvements in flexibility, for instance,
link |
or skill learning.
link |
I know many of you aren't so focused
link |
on the cosmetic aspects of physical exercise,
link |
but are interested in actual skill learning.
link |
We're going to talk about that too.
link |
I want to just take a moment
link |
to reflect on something that came up last episode.
link |
If you didn't see that episode, that's quite all right.
link |
we were talking about the hormones adrenaline and cortisol
link |
and how to leverage those towards attention and learning.
link |
And there was a little bit of confusion
link |
that I want to clarify.
link |
I mentioned an optimal protocol for learning
link |
that involved leveraging adrenaline,
link |
also called epinephrine.
link |
And it involved four steps.
link |
The four steps that I spelled out
link |
were to be calm and focused
link |
while one is trying to acquire or learn the new skill,
link |
cognitive skill or motor skill.
link |
Then to have a spike in adrenaline,
link |
I mentioned ways to do that,
link |
using cold or breathing or other tools.
link |
Immediately after the learning episode,
link |
then to incorporate what I call non-sleep deep rest,
link |
a 20 minute episode of a shallow nap
link |
or some other protocol like NSDR,
link |
non-sleep deep rest protocol,
link |
of which we always provide links in the captions.
link |
And then to try and optimize sleep later that night
link |
and the subsequent night.
link |
Some of you heard this and it sunk in right away
link |
and it was straightforward.
link |
Others said, wait, I thought from a previous episode,
link |
you said you're supposed to do non-sleep deep rest
link |
immediately after learning.
link |
No, we added another step.
link |
The logic still follows
link |
that you want to be calm and focused during learning.
link |
Then you want to spike adrenaline at the end.
link |
Most people get that backward.
link |
They're drinking too much coffee
link |
or even taking nootropics and things,
link |
trying to be really focused while learning.
link |
Some people are taking Adderall recreationally,
link |
something I don't recommend.
link |
That's actually getting the whole process backwards
link |
if you look at the data and the physiology.
link |
You want to spike adrenaline at the end
link |
or immediately after a learning episode
link |
and then non-sleep deep rest and then sleep itself.
link |
Hope that clarifies things for you.
link |
If you have any additional questions,
link |
please put them in the comment section below.
link |
Okay, so let's talk about physical performance.
link |
There are so many variables to physical performance
link |
and we can manage physical performance and skill learning
link |
from a variety of contexts.
link |
I made just a short list of some of the things
link |
that come to mind that can powerfully impact
link |
physical performance and skill learning.
link |
Some of them are what I would consider foundational.
link |
They allow you to show up with your current ability.
link |
And if you were to disrupt those,
link |
you would perform less well.
link |
So things like getting a good night's sleep,
link |
things like being properly hydrated,
link |
things like being well-nourished,
link |
whatever that means to you.
link |
I know some of you like to exercise fasted.
link |
Some of you prefer to have food in your stomach
link |
or have eaten a couple hours before.
link |
There are supplements, there are drugs,
link |
there are different ways to breathe.
link |
There are so many tools related to mindset visualization.
link |
There are machines and devices.
link |
It's just a vast space, but it's not infinite.
link |
And there are a few things in the list of things
link |
that can impact and even optimize physical performance
link |
and skill learning that have an outsized effect
link |
that any of you can use.
link |
Many of them, most of them are low to zero cost.
link |
So today we are going to focus on what I believe
link |
to be one of the most powerful tools
link |
to improve physical performance and skill learning
link |
We'll talk about why that's important.
link |
And that's temperature.
link |
Now, many of you might think, oh, that's kind of boring.
link |
I want to know about the magic pill that I can take
link |
that's going to allow me a dunk of basketball
link |
if I currently can't, or I want to know about the thing
link |
that's going to let me run further and faster,
link |
is going to shed fat.
link |
Believe it or not, temperature is the most powerful variable
link |
for improving physical performance and for recovery.
link |
I would argue it's even more important than sleep
link |
because temperature itself is going to dictate
link |
how well and when you sleep
link |
and the depth of your total recovery.
link |
There are two aspects to temperature, of course.
link |
There's heat and there's cold.
link |
We are mainly going to focus on cold
link |
as a way to buffer heat.
link |
In a previous podcast episode,
link |
I talked all about growth hormone.
link |
You can find that episode about thyroid and growth hormone
link |
and how heat can be a powerful stimulus
link |
for increasing growth hormone,
link |
which is involved in tissue repair and et cetera,
link |
can burn fat and improve metabolism in various ways.
link |
However, cold, I would argue,
link |
is even more powerful than heat as a tool.
link |
And I'm not just talking about putting ice packs
link |
on sore muscles or slightly sprained limbs and ankles
link |
and things of that sort.
link |
We're going to talk about cold
link |
from the standpoint of thermal physiology.
link |
This is a literature that's rich in scientific information
link |
that goes back very deep into the last century
link |
where physiologists and neuroscientists figured out
link |
that there are different compartments in your body
link |
that heat and cool you differently
link |
and that you can leverage those in order to double,
link |
and as I mentioned before,
link |
even triple or quadruple your work output,
link |
both strength, repetitions, and endurance.
link |
So this is not weak sauce, as they say.
link |
This is the stuff that can really shift the needle
link |
And it's not just about performing well once,
link |
it's about being able to perform well
link |
and recover from that performance
link |
so that you do even better
link |
when you're not incorporating these tools.
link |
On days where, for instance, you can't access cold
link |
or an ice pack or an ice bath or things of that sort.
link |
Okay, so we're going to cover cold.
link |
We're going to talk a little bit about
link |
the physiology of cold and heat and how they work,
link |
because as you've probably heard me say before,
link |
if you can understand some mechanism,
link |
if you can just push yourself
link |
through a little bit of new knowledge
link |
into understanding a little bit of mechanism
link |
about how you work,
link |
you will be in a far better position to implement the tools
link |
in the best and most flexible ways for your needs.
link |
This is why at the Huberman Lab Podcast,
link |
I never ever do a just list of the things that you should do.
link |
I don't believe in the just tell me what to do.
link |
First, I tell you why you should do something.
link |
What's the logical framework that it's grounded in?
link |
And then we distill that down to specific protocols.
link |
For those of you that are too impatient for that,
link |
there are millions, if not billions
link |
of other resources out there
link |
that will take you into the cul-de-sac
link |
of one protocol that will work and then stop working
link |
or might work for you indefinitely.
link |
That's not how we work here.
link |
This is about really understanding the mechanism
link |
so that you can tweak things and modify things,
link |
adjust the timing and the dosage of things
link |
and really get the most out of these tools and protocols.
link |
Everything I'm going to talk about
link |
pertains to both endurance exercise
link |
and strength and speed type exercise.
link |
So sprints, weightlifting, endurance work,
link |
and to some extent flexibility,
link |
but we are going to cover flexibility in depth
link |
as well as another feature that's not often talked about
link |
which is suppleness or smoothness of movement
link |
over different ranges of movement in a subsequent episode.
link |
Let's start by talking about temperature.
link |
What is temperature?
link |
How does temperature impact the body
link |
and its ability to perform, including learn new skills?
link |
So everyone probably remembers
link |
or has at least heard of the word homeostasis, right?
link |
That the body wants to remain
link |
in a particular range of temperatures,
link |
that it doesn't like to be too hot or too cold.
link |
And I want to emphasize from the outset
link |
that there are many mechanisms that are installed into us
link |
by way of our evolutionary design and our genome,
link |
meaning we were just born with this stuff ready
link |
to keep our body temperature in a particular narrow range.
link |
Heating up too much is just plain bad.
link |
It's not just bad for physical performance,
link |
it's bad for all tissue health.
link |
If your brain heats up too much,
link |
neurons start dying and those neurons don't come back, okay?
link |
You may have heard about neurogenesis,
link |
the ability for the brain to regenerate itself
link |
or generate new neurons in adulthood.
link |
There's very little neurogenesis, excuse me, in adulthood,
link |
even any time after puberty, really.
link |
And you don't want to lose neurons
link |
in the central nervous system.
link |
If you get too hot, that'll happen.
link |
It's called hyperthermia.
link |
You want to avoid hyperthermia.
link |
And you have many mechanisms that are built into you
link |
to avoid becoming hyperthermic.
link |
The other thing that happens when we get too warm
link |
is that we have in all of our cells what are called enzymes.
link |
You generally know if something's an enzyme
link |
because it ends in the letters A-S-E, right?
link |
So lipase is an enzyme that exists to digest fats.
link |
You have proteases that are there to digest proteins, right?
link |
So anytime you see A-S-E, chances are it's an enzyme.
link |
Enzymes are proteins and they have a particular structure
link |
and their structure becomes modified when heat increases.
link |
And that's not good.
link |
You want their structure to be of a particular type.
link |
Imagine a car with four wheels.
link |
Let's just say the car is the enzyme.
link |
If it gets too hot, it's like two of the wheels fall off
link |
and that thing can't function.
link |
So one of the reasons why the body and nature
link |
goes through so much effort to build in mechanisms
link |
to make sure that we don't become too warm
link |
is because when we get too warm,
link |
these enzymes don't function, cells stop functioning,
link |
they stop being able to generate energy,
link |
they stop being able to digest things,
link |
you stop being able to think
link |
and eventually those cells start dying off entirely.
link |
So keeping temperature in a particular range is really good.
link |
You don't want to get too hot.
link |
We have much more flexibility in terms of getting cold.
link |
Now you don't want to become hypothermic either.
link |
You can die from hypothermia
link |
just like you can die from hyperthermia.
link |
However, that you have a lot more range to be cold
link |
than you do to be too warm, okay?
link |
And in general, the idea is to keep the body and brain
link |
in a particular range, but anytime we do anything,
link |
our body temperature can shift.
link |
So for instance, if you were to stand next to a campfire
link |
or you were outside on a hot day,
link |
various things would happen to dump heat from your body.
link |
If you were outside on a cold day
link |
or you were to get into a cold shower or a cold lake,
link |
various things would happen to insulate heat
link |
This is all pretty straightforward and obvious, I realize.
link |
Now, what are those things?
link |
Well, there are a huge category of them.
link |
When you get into cold water, you secrete adrenaline.
link |
On a hot day, if it's really hot or in a very hot sauna
link |
or in the hot desert,
link |
you will generate what are called heat shock proteins,
link |
which will set off other sets of cascades,
link |
metabolic cascades, biological cascades.
link |
But the simplest way to think about this process
link |
is that when we get cold, we tend to vasoconstrict.
link |
Our blood vessels tend to constrict
link |
and we tend to push energy toward the core of our body
link |
to preserve our core organs, okay?
link |
So our periphery, our hands and our feet and our toes
link |
and our legs become colder and our core,
link |
therefore, can maintain blood to that area
link |
and we are insulating our core.
link |
Conversely, when we heat up, our blood vessels vasodilate.
link |
They expand a bit and more blood flows to our periphery
link |
and more blood can move throughout the body generally
link |
and we will perspire, we will sweat.
link |
Water will actually get pulled out of the blood
link |
to some extent, moved up through sweat glands
link |
and will be brought to the skin surface
link |
so that it can be dumped.
link |
We are dumping heat.
link |
Animals, as you know, vary in their capacity to sweat.
link |
Some animals like camels won't start sweating at first.
link |
If they heat up, what they'll do is they'll spit.
link |
They'll dump heat by spitting, okay?
link |
Dogs pant, Costello is off to my left here.
link |
He pants when he gets too warm.
link |
He can't sweat or dogs can maybe sweat a little bit
link |
but we can sweat and you've probably noticed
link |
that on a humid hot day, you'll feel much warmer
link |
just walking or running than you would
link |
with the equivalent exercise or movement
link |
that you would on a cold day.
link |
And some of you probably know this, but if you don't,
link |
the reason is you sweat on a cold day
link |
but because the air is dry typically,
link |
you will bring that sweat to the surface
link |
and provided you're wearing clothes
link |
that allow some air to get out away from the body.
link |
So you're not wearing really tight spandex type clothing
link |
or something like that
link |
or seal type saran wrap type clothing.
link |
That sweat will evaporate off into the dry atmosphere.
link |
Whereas on a humid day, the reason you see people
link |
in New York and Florida on a humid summer day
link |
and they're like moving their shirts off themselves
link |
and you see people with big sweat stains
link |
and back sweat stains and all this kind of stuff
link |
is because they're sweating as they normally would
link |
but it's humid and so the humidity of the air
link |
doesn't allow transfer of that sweat
link |
into the atmosphere as readily and so you're hot, okay?
link |
So without the evaporation, you're going to be warmer.
link |
So we evaporate off sweat, we sweat
link |
and we vasodilate when we want to dump heat.
link |
When we want to maintain heat,
link |
we vasoconstrict and we tend to not sweat.
link |
The other thing that happens is you'll get goosebumps,
link |
so-called goose pimples they're sometimes called.
link |
Those are a throwback to the time
link |
where we had fur over most, not all of our body.
link |
All mammals in the cold have a process
link |
whereby adrenaline is released at low levels,
link |
typically into the body.
link |
That adrenaline activates what are called sympathetic fibers.
link |
They have nothing to do with sympathy.
link |
Those little fibers, which are neurons,
link |
those fibers that what I'm saying are fibers are neurons,
link |
not clothing fibers, reach up into the skin.
link |
So your whole body is covered with these little tiny neurons
link |
that reach up into the skin and when we are cold,
link |
they actually mechanically take the hair follicle
link |
It's a process called piloerection, P-I-L-O, erection, okay?
link |
So on a hot day, you want to dump heat, okay?
link |
So on a hot day, what would happen is
link |
you'd actually not see those goose pimples
link |
because you want the hairs lying down,
link |
which actually you would think that might insulate you more,
link |
but would actually let more heat dissipate
link |
out through the skin.
link |
On a cold day, you get these goose pimples or goosebumps,
link |
which are really just an ancient carryover
link |
from the body's attempt to make hair stand up on end.
link |
And when hair step stand up on end
link |
and they're very close together,
link |
that traps air in between them
link |
and actually creates a sort of insulated blanket of warm air.
link |
If you've ever seen an animal like a malamute or a husky,
link |
you might think, oh, that poor thing on a hot day,
link |
what does it do with all that hair?
link |
Well, it can be warm, so the animal will typically pant
link |
and its hair will lay down,
link |
which you might think would act as more of a blanket,
link |
but on a cold day, what'll happen is
link |
they'll become very puffy.
link |
Their hair will stand up on end
link |
and that's actually trapping heat between the hairs
link |
and they're actually quite well insulated.
link |
So it's very important that if you want to understand
link |
how you can leverage temperature for physical performance,
link |
you have to understand that you have vasoconstriction
link |
to conserve heat, vasodilation to dump heat,
link |
that you have sweating to dump heat
link |
and you have conservation of fluids
link |
in order to preserve heat.
link |
That's the most important thing
link |
in terms of understanding the mechanisms
link |
of maintaining and dumping heat.
link |
And now the most important thing to understand is that
link |
if you get too hot,
link |
not only do those enzymes stop working,
link |
but your ability to contract your muscles stops, okay?
link |
I'm going to repeat this because it's vitally important.
link |
ATP is involved in the process
link |
of generating muscle contractions.
link |
Doesn't matter if you're running a marathon,
link |
doesn't matter if you're doing a yoga class,
link |
doesn't matter if you're going for a 700 pound squat.
link |
The range of temperatures within which ATP can function
link |
and muscles can contract is very narrow.
link |
Somewhere around 39 or 40 degrees Celsius,
link |
it drops off and you will not be able
link |
to generate more contractions.
link |
Now that's pretty hot,
link |
but that temperature can be generated locally really fast.
link |
Now, if you're too cold, it's true,
link |
it's hard to generate muscle contractions.
link |
I got into doing some cold water swimming a little while ago
link |
and we would joke that you come out of the water,
link |
we do no wetsuits.
link |
I'm not recommending people do this necessarily
link |
unless you're certainly with somebody else
link |
who's skilled at doing it, which I was.
link |
And you come out and you feel like you have claws for hands.
link |
You could never text on a phone for the first few minutes.
link |
I mean, the water was very, very cold
link |
and you can't even move your face.
link |
And so muscles will become rigid,
link |
but heating up muscles causes them to fail
link |
to be able to generate more contractions.
link |
Put simply, if you get too hot, you stop exercising.
link |
You may not even realize it,
link |
but your will to exercise further,
link |
your ability to push harder
link |
is entirely dependent on the heat of the muscle,
link |
both locally and your whole system.
link |
So let's talk about your whole system
link |
because I just described heat dumping and heat maintaining.
link |
I told you that increasing heat
link |
makes it hard for muscles to contract.
link |
It will stop you from being able to run further and faster.
link |
It will stop you from being able to lift more weights,
link |
more sets, more repetitions.
link |
If you can keep temperature in range, however,
link |
in a proper range, you will be able to do more work.
link |
You will be able to create greater output.
link |
You'll be able to lift more weight, more sets, more reps,
link |
and you'll be able to run further.
link |
Now, there are data that I'm going to talk about
link |
in a little bit that are absolutely striking
link |
that underscore that statement.
link |
There are data from my colleague, Craig Heller's lab
link |
in the Department of Biology at Stanford.
link |
And there are data that are now being implemented.
link |
They were first implemented in a grant funded by DARPA,
link |
but now in professional sports teams.
link |
Many, if not all the NFL teams
link |
are now using this technology as well as military uses it.
link |
And not just for sports performance,
link |
but also firefighters, construction workers,
link |
other professions where elevated heat
link |
becomes a barrier to performance.
link |
And you can leverage this to really improve your workouts.
link |
And when I say really improve, it is striking.
link |
I'm going to give away a little hint of this now,
link |
and then I'm going to tell you
link |
a little bit more of the data later
link |
after I tell you the protocols.
link |
Proper cooling of the body,
link |
which has to be done in a very specific way,
link |
has allowed recreational athletes,
link |
so college students and typical adults,
link |
as well as professional athletes
link |
to go from doing their usual output.
link |
In this case, what comes to mind best
link |
would be a particular professional athlete,
link |
he's a member of the 49ers at the time,
link |
was able to do 40 dips on his first set, 30, 20, 20,
link |
basically did 10 sets of dips,
link |
unassisted with anything else.
link |
That's an impressive,
link |
especially since he's a really large guy.
link |
40 dips is respectable.
link |
These are strict, full range dips.
link |
And then by the 10th set, there's a steep drop-off.
link |
Using proper cooling of particular body compartments,
link |
he was able to triple that within less than a week
link |
and maintain that performance
link |
even without the cooling approach.
link |
So it was actually a conditioning effect, all right?
link |
I'll get back to this in a little bit,
link |
but there are other fantastic leaps of effort
link |
and leaps of performance that were demonstrated,
link |
including endurance running.
link |
Before I continue any further,
link |
I just want to underscore again that overheating is terrible.
link |
There's a famous example of this.
link |
This was about 10, 15 years ago
link |
when a number of dietary supplements
link |
that included things like epinephrine,
link |
which is a stimulant.
link |
It's a beta adrenergic stimulant.
link |
Drugs like glenbuterol,
link |
which were then banned from the Olympics,
link |
which are still out there a bit in recreational use,
link |
which were beta adrenergic agonists.
link |
So these are drugs that sort of mimic
link |
epinephrine adrenaline to some extent.
link |
I know I'm oversimplifying this here.
link |
They improve flat loss because of the effects on metabolism,
link |
but they heat up the body.
link |
And what happened was, this hit the press very widely,
link |
is high school football players
link |
and various professional athletes were dropping dead
link |
because they were overheating
link |
during practice or in competition.
link |
So much so that glenbuterol was banned.
link |
Although every once in a while,
link |
somebody gets in trouble for using this.
link |
There was an instance of this recently
link |
in professional boxing,
link |
which was attributed to a bad meat
link |
that contained the glenbuterol.
link |
I don't know what the source was.
link |
I don't have any commentary about that,
link |
but it still is in use.
link |
But these drugs increase body temperature,
link |
increase fat loss,
link |
but carry a severe danger.
link |
And that's the danger of hyperthermia.
link |
In fact, I would argue,
link |
and I think in talking to some folks
link |
at various professional fighting organizations,
link |
it's very clear that a lot of the deaths
link |
that one sees in professional combat sports
link |
may have to do as much with dehydration and overheating
link |
as it does with getting hit in the head,
link |
which is also bad,
link |
but that things can compound,
link |
they can have a synergistic effect.
link |
And just a note about that
link |
and hyperthermia and its dangers as well,
link |
my first project ever in science
link |
was to evaluate the thermogenic effects of MDMA, of ecstasy.
link |
That was my senior thesis in college, actually.
link |
And so what we found was that indeed drugs
link |
that remove your understanding of how warm you are
link |
cause you to not take on the appropriate behaviors
link |
to cool yourself, right?
link |
So your vasoconstriction and your sweating,
link |
those are autonomic.
link |
Those are going to happen no matter what,
link |
unless you happen to take something that blocks that effect.
link |
However, there are a lot of things that we as humans do
link |
to prevent ourselves from overheating.
link |
And the main one is stop.
link |
When we are running in the desert
link |
or when we're running very hard and suddenly we stop,
link |
oftentimes that's because the muscles are overheating.
link |
It's a subconscious thing.
link |
We won't often think, oh, I'm really much too warm.
link |
It's just that we stop
link |
and it's a self-preservation mechanism.
link |
Sometimes it kicks in too early.
link |
Sometimes it kicks in too late.
link |
Kicks in too late, you can die.
link |
There's an instance in the 1984 Olympics
link |
where that was the first year, I believe,
link |
that there was a women's marathon.
link |
I think that's correct.
link |
And one of the front runners or top picks for winning
link |
was heading into the stadium.
link |
And all of a sudden it seemed as if she was lost.
link |
She was kind of wandering around
link |
not knowing where she should go.
link |
And in fact, she was in a position to win
link |
or at least take second place, at least take silver.
link |
Got totally disoriented and did miserably in the race.
link |
And she was hyperthermic.
link |
She was running against that reflex to stop.
link |
So dumping heat is key.
link |
So how do you dump heat
link |
in order to perform longer safely?
link |
Well, in order to understand that,
link |
you have to understand that the body
link |
has three main compartments for regulating temperature.
link |
We don't just have a center and a periphery.
link |
We have three main compartments.
link |
And there's one compartment in particular
link |
that all of you or most all of you, I have to assume have.
link |
And if you can understand how that works,
link |
you can do tremendous things for your performance
link |
and for your recovery.
link |
So what I'm about to tell you will allow you
link |
to perform better in all forms of exercise.
link |
And it is not commonly known, unfortunately.
link |
I'm here to try and change that.
link |
You have three compartments
link |
for increasing or dumping heat in your body.
link |
We already talked about that.
link |
Your core organs, your heart, your lungs,
link |
your pancreas, your liver, the core of your body.
link |
The other is your periphery,
link |
which are obviously your arms and your legs
link |
and your feet and your hands.
link |
But then there's a third component,
link |
which is there are three locations on your body
link |
that are far better at passing heat out of the body
link |
and bringing cool into the body
link |
such that you can heat up or cool your body
link |
everywhere very quickly.
link |
Those three areas are your face,
link |
the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet.
link |
Now the skin on your hands and on the bottoms of your feet
link |
and to some extent on your face are called glaborous skin.
link |
That's G-L-A-B-O-R-O-U-S, glaborous skin.
link |
And what's special about those areas of your body
link |
and the glaborous skin is that the arrangement
link |
of vasculature of blood vessels, capillaries
link |
and arteries that serve those regions
link |
is very different than it is elsewhere in your body.
link |
Now this has ancient roots.
link |
Typically, if you were another mammal
link |
like a bear or some sort of ape,
link |
you would have hair all over your body.
link |
Now we all know some pretty hairy people
link |
or presumably you've heard that there are these hairy people.
link |
I know a few excessively hairy people
link |
and Costello is excessively hairy
link |
but he's not a person obviously.
link |
But all mammals have hair on their bodies.
link |
Just some people have very light hair or very fine hair.
link |
We don't have hair on these glaborous skin regions.
link |
Now, of course you can have beard or facial hair growth
link |
but there are still regions like the cheeks
link |
and other areas that maintain this special vasculature.
link |
So technically the hands and feet are real glabrous skin
link |
and the face is not always quite classified as glabrous
link |
but these three locations,
link |
face, palms of hands, not tops and bottoms of feet
link |
are very good at dumping heat and bringing in cool.
link |
And the reason is there's a rule in vascular biology
link |
that blood moves from arteries to capillaries
link |
and then to veins and then back to the heart.
link |
So arteries, which are the big ones obviously,
link |
capillaries, which are the little fine ones
link |
where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged
link |
and veins, which then bring blood back to the heart
link |
and other tissues of course.
link |
In these three regions of your hands, your face
link |
and the bottoms of your feet,
link |
we have what are called AVAs.
link |
AVAs are a very special pattern of vasculature.
link |
AVAs are described in the medical textbooks.
link |
You can find them in Gray's Anatomy, not the television show
link |
but the actual Gray's Anatomy textbook
link |
which is a real thing that exists
link |
and in all medical textbooks, okay?
link |
So let's talk about AVAs and what they are
link |
and why they allow these three regions of the body
link |
to heat or cool ourselves more readily.
link |
AVAs are arteriovenous osteomoses.
link |
So if you want to look that up, you can just look up AVAs,
link |
veins, capillaries, arteries, if you like
link |
but I'll spell it for you.
link |
A-R-T-E-R-I-O, arteriovenous, V-E-N-O-U-S,
link |
arteriovenous anastomoses, A-N-A-S-T-O-M-O-S-E-S.
link |
Arteriovenous osteomoses, okay?
link |
You want to know about arteriovenous osteomoses, trust me.
link |
And you want to remember that they are in your hands,
link |
the bottoms of your feet and on your face
link |
and in particular on the palms of your hands,
link |
not the tops of your hands.
link |
Now, before I said blood flows typically
link |
from arteries to capillaries to veins
link |
and then back to the heart
link |
but AVAs are direct connections
link |
between the small arteries and the small veins.
link |
They bypass the capillaries to some extent.
link |
They're little short vessel segments.
link |
They have a big large inner diameter
link |
and they have this very thick muscular wall
link |
and they get input from what are called adrenergic neurons.
link |
They get input from neurons that release norepinephrine
link |
and epinephrine, which allows them to contract or dilate.
link |
Now there's some rules of physics that talk
link |
about how the radius of a pipe
link |
and small changes in the radius of a pipe
link |
leads to massive increases in the rate
link |
and amount of stuff that can flow through that pipe, okay?
link |
That's a rule of physics that says essentially
link |
that the radius is proportional
link |
to the amount of stuff that can flow
link |
through something to the fourth power.
link |
We're not going to make this a physics class
link |
but if you want to look that up, you can.
link |
You can just look up how does the radius of a tube
link |
or a pipe relate to how quickly
link |
or how much stuff can flow through it.
link |
What you need to know,
link |
even if you don't want to know any of the underlying physics
link |
is that these AVAs allow more heat to leave the body
link |
more quickly and more cool to enter the body more quickly
link |
than other venous arterial capillary beds
link |
throughout the body.
link |
In other words, you can heat up best at the face,
link |
the palms and the bottoms of the feet
link |
and you can cool down best at the face, the palms
link |
and the bottoms of the feet
link |
than you can anywhere else on your body.
link |
When I say heat up or cool down,
link |
I mean actually heat or cool the core and your brain, okay?
link |
So this is vitally important.
link |
I realize we're getting down into the mechanistic weeds here
link |
but you need to know that these three compartments
link |
of your body, palms, bottoms of feet
link |
and face are your best leverage points
link |
for manipulating temperature
link |
to vastly improve physical performance, okay?
link |
I also want to point out that the work
link |
that I'm going to tell you about
link |
is not work from my laboratory.
link |
It's the work of, as I mentioned,
link |
my colleague Craig Heller's laboratory at Stanford
link |
and we're going to have Craig on as a guest
link |
to talk more about these discoveries.
link |
They are his and his colleagues discoveries
link |
and how you can leverage them.
link |
They're building out some amazing technology.
link |
I had a conversation with Craig yesterday
link |
as a prelude to this episode
link |
and to the future conversation with him.
link |
So you're getting the very latest on this topic.
link |
So what Craig and his colleagues did
link |
really illustrates perfectly
link |
what these body surfaces can do and why.
link |
They were studying overheating in athletes
link |
and in military and in construction workers
link |
and trying to prevent it.
link |
And they did a bunch of experiments.
link |
I won't go into all of them now
link |
but what they essentially found was that cooling the palms,
link |
Palmer cooling allowed people, athletes
link |
and recreational athletes to run much further,
link |
to lift more weight and to do more sets and reps
link |
to a absolutely staggering degree.
link |
Let's talk for a second a bit more about why we stop,
link |
why we shut off effort when we get too hot.
link |
Because in doing so you'll really understand
link |
how and why the best protocols exist
link |
for being able to do more work,
link |
to be able to exercise longer
link |
and actually to feel good doing it.
link |
You actually can make a doubling of your dips
link |
or believe it or not a tripling or quadrupling
link |
or more of your pull-ups fairly straightforward.
link |
I mentioned before that when muscle heats up
link |
enzymes start getting disrupted
link |
and ATP and muscles can't work so well
link |
and those muscles can't contract.
link |
Let's get a little more specific about that.
link |
The enzyme that's involved here
link |
is something called pyruvate kinase.
link |
You don't need to know about pyruvate kinase
link |
but what you do need to know is that it ends ASE
link |
which means it's an enzyme
link |
and pyruvate kinase is essentially a rate limiting step.
link |
It's a critical step that you can't bypass
link |
if you want muscles to contract
link |
and it's very temperature sensitive.
link |
Therefore, if you can keep temperature lower
link |
you can do more work per unit time.
link |
You can do more pull-ups
link |
and that actually was done by Craig and his colleagues.
link |
Excuse me, the pull-ups weren't actually done by Craig.
link |
I don't know how many pull-ups Craig can do.
link |
I'll ask him next time, both cooled and uncooled
link |
how many pull-ups he can do.
link |
But what they essentially did
link |
is they brought someone into their laboratory
link |
who could do 10 pull-ups on the first set
link |
and they were able to get 10 rest two or three minutes,
link |
get another 10 rest two or three minutes
link |
and if you've ever tried this
link |
what you find is that you start dropping
link |
to eight, seven, six, et cetera.
link |
Now the person might not necessarily feel
link |
like they're overheating, but the muscle is heating up.
link |
Then with their knowledge that these AVAs,
link |
that these portals in the palms
link |
are a great way to both heat the body
link |
but also to dump heat from the body,
link |
they used a device
link |
and I'll talk about what you can do at home
link |
but a device where they had people hold on
link |
to what was essentially a cold tube.
link |
Now this is crucial.
link |
The tube can't be so cold that it causes vasoconstriction
link |
because then the cold won't pass from the tube
link |
to the hand and to the core.
link |
But if it's the right temperature,
link |
it's neither too hot nor too cold,
link |
that cool from the cold tube passes into the hand,
link |
these so-called palmar regions and then cools the core
link |
and in theory, by lowering body temperature
link |
would allow the person or the athlete to do more work
link |
and indeed that's what they saw.
link |
The actual data, the specific data showed
link |
that subjects could do,
link |
at least the subjects they worked with
link |
on their first day with no cooling,
link |
about a hundred pull-ups
link |
across the timeframe that they had, okay?
link |
So it might've taken anywhere from 10 to 15
link |
or maybe more sets depending on how skilled that person was
link |
but in a fixed amount of time.
link |
Then they came back and did the cooling.
link |
They did it the very next day,
link |
which if you've ever trained a muscle the very next day,
link |
typically you wouldn't do as well in its training
link |
if it took any damage from the previous session
link |
or you at least do as well
link |
but you probably wouldn't do what they then observed
link |
which was they started cooling after every other set.
link |
The person would just hold the cold tube,
link |
cool down the body after every other set,
link |
rest, everything else was kept the same
link |
and they found that they went to 180 pull-ups
link |
which is incredible, it's a near doubling.
link |
And by doing this repeatedly over several sessions,
link |
over several weeks, they quickly went in the cooling group
link |
from a maximum of somewhere between 180 and 200
link |
as I recall I'm sort of estimating now
link |
to 600 pull-ups in the equivalent amount of time
link |
which is absolutely incredible.
link |
They then repeated this in a study on the bench press
link |
and actually the bench press study was pretty interesting
link |
because they actually had a control group
link |
that was admittedly taking specific amounts
link |
of anabolic steroids.
link |
The anabolic steroid was testosterone sipinate
link |
which is essentially testosterone
link |
and indeed the testosterone sipinate,
link |
the steroid group improved at a rate of about 1% per week.
link |
In other words, there were differences
link |
and the cooling group basically left all other groups
link |
in the dust, it was just remarkable.
link |
So cooling the core, I want to be very clear
link |
that it's not cooling the muscle,
link |
it wasn't about cooling the chest alone
link |
or just cooling the palms.
link |
It was about allowing cold to pass through the palms
link |
because of the unique vasculature that's there,
link |
these AVAs allowed these subjects
link |
to do far more work per unit time.
link |
And the important thing is that if they were to come back
link |
after doing 600 pull-ups or 500 pull-ups,
link |
you might say, well, wow, that's going to create a situation
link |
where recovery is going to be absolutely impossible.
link |
They could come back, not use the cooling
link |
and they still saw a highly significant increase
link |
in the amount or the number of pull-ups or dips
link |
or bench press weight that they could do, okay?
link |
So what that meant is that it was both
link |
an excellent performance and an excellent training stimulus
link |
that they were able to recover from, okay?
link |
I don't know if all of you are following this
link |
but these are the sorts of increases in exercise output
link |
that are absolutely staggering
link |
and that's why professional teams
link |
and the military and others capitalized
link |
on them very quickly and use these, okay?
link |
Now you may be asking, what about endurance, right?
link |
Not everyone wants to be able to bench press a lot
link |
for multiple reps and sets.
link |
And I should just mention for the bench pressing,
link |
it was, I believe they found people
link |
that could bench press 225, so that's two 45 pound plates
link |
on the 45 pound standard Olympic bar
link |
for repetitions of anywhere from six to 10
link |
and then they had them do the same thing.
link |
They did a set, they'd rest two or three minutes,
link |
sometimes up to four minutes, then do another set,
link |
repeat, repeat, repeat, and with cooling,
link |
they were able to increase the amount of work,
link |
the number of reps with the same weight,
link |
sometimes they did have to increase sets
link |
to approximately double, so it's pretty fantastic.
link |
So with endurance, similar increases have been shown
link |
and the way that they would do those tests
link |
are a little bit different and they also point
link |
to a really important mechanism of why we stop doing work
link |
at all when we perceive that we are putting
link |
in too much effort, so it gets right to the heart
link |
of the relationship between temperature and muscle
link |
and your willpower, those are directly related.
link |
Your body heat and your willpower
link |
are linked in a physiological way,
link |
so I'm not talking about the kind of stuff
link |
that you see as kind of like clickbait on the internet
link |
or like increase willpower now or become resilient now
link |
or never do this again if you want to be mentally strong,
link |
I'm talking about a physiological mechanism
link |
that exists in the body and brain that causes you to stop
link |
or that will allow you to continue to go harder
link |
and further than you normally would.
link |
Okay, so let's talk about willpower and heat
link |
and how heat shuts you down, in other words,
link |
if you are cool, if your body temperature
link |
is in a particular range, not only can you go further
link |
but you will go further if you want to.
link |
I said differently, if you heat up too much,
link |
you will stop or you will die, typically people stop.
link |
There are individuals who will push to the point
link |
where they black out and die in the same way that,
link |
and please don't do this experiment,
link |
there are people who can sit down face to face
link |
and say, let's hold our breath
link |
and whoever breathes first loses.
link |
Some people will just go until it's painful
link |
and then they'll gasp and take a big breath.
link |
There are always those individuals
link |
who can override that reflex
link |
and they will go until they pass out, okay?
link |
And if you do that in water, you can very easily die.
link |
So please don't do that experiment.
link |
But there's a reflex that relates the body to the brain
link |
and the brain to the body that shuts off our effort
link |
when we get too hot.
link |
So what Craig and his colleagues and now others have done
link |
is to do a test in the laboratory
link |
where rather than ask people to run outside
link |
until they absolutely don't want to run anymore,
link |
you put them on a treadmill and you set the speed, okay?
link |
So they have to keep up with the treadmill
link |
and at some point they quit.
link |
And you take groups and you do those
link |
in different temperature environments.
link |
So some people are running in a nice chilly laboratory,
link |
they get their heart rate up
link |
so maybe their heart rate goes from 40 or 50
link |
baseline heart rate, maybe it gets up to 80 or 100
link |
and then they keep the rate of the treadmill going the same
link |
and they will just plateau.
link |
So they'll get into a steady state cadence or rhythm
link |
and their heart is beating at more or less a steady state.
link |
Eventually they'll probably stop
link |
because they have something else to do
link |
but people will continue at that temperature
link |
and at that heart rate
link |
unless you start turning up the temperature in the room.
link |
And at some point they will stop
link |
and they'll stop much earlier when it gets hot
link |
because of something called cardiac drift, okay?
link |
So let's say I'm running
link |
and I'm running at a steady cadence on this treadmill
link |
and my heart rate is 85 beats per minute
link |
or 100 beats per minute, doesn't matter.
link |
Let's say 100 just for sake of example.
link |
Well, just making the room hotter
link |
is going to increase my heart rate further
link |
even though I'm at the same output.
link |
And the brain does a computation,
link |
it somehow figures out that there's a heat component
link |
that's increasing heart rate
link |
and there's an effort component from running
link |
that's driving heart rate.
link |
And if the heat component
link |
and the heart rate output from the effort
link |
get to hit a certain threshold, I stop, okay?
link |
And some of you may think, well,
link |
there are people who just run and run and run
link |
and never stop, eventually everyone stops.
link |
Maybe it's because the race ended,
link |
maybe it's because everyone else quit.
link |
I actually saw some stuff online,
link |
there are these races where people just will continuously
link |
do the same loop until everyone else drops out
link |
and then one guy or gal keeps going past everybody.
link |
But typically it stops because the race is over
link |
or because people quit.
link |
Increasing temperature increases the rate of quitting
link |
in part, not entirely,
link |
but in part because of this thing called cardiac drift,
link |
which you've probably experienced
link |
if you've been out on a hot day and you're walking uphill,
link |
you might stop to take a breath.
link |
If you sit in a sauna, your heart rate will increase.
link |
Heat increases heart rate,
link |
effort increases heart rate at a steady effort,
link |
you'll have a steady heart rate if you increase the heat
link |
in the environment that you're engaging
link |
in that steady heart rate,
link |
your heart rate will now go up due to cardiac drift
link |
and you will quit, okay?
link |
So Heller and colleagues have done experiments
link |
where they do Palmer cooling under these environments.
link |
And that's wonderful because not only does it enable people
link |
to go further and faster for much longer,
link |
that's been shown statistically significant every time,
link |
but it also protects the brain and body
link |
against hyperthermia, overheating, coma, nerve injury,
link |
nerve death, and actual death, okay?
link |
So you can see why this is such a valuable tool.
link |
So what are they doing?
link |
Well, in this case too, they're having them cool their hands
link |
and they're cooling the palms.
link |
Cooling the bottoms of the feet is a little trickier,
link |
but cooling the face could actually work as well.
link |
And we're going to talk about cooling the face
link |
and how to incorporate this.
link |
So at this point, I've just really wanted
link |
to impress upon you, not impress you, but impress upon you,
link |
the fact that you have these three surfaces of your body
link |
that are very good at passing cold into the body
link |
such that it cools the core body temperature.
link |
And that's a good thing for health and safety
link |
and in order to maintain work output over longer periods
link |
of time, or actually just do more work.
link |
I mean, to me, the result is just so staggering
link |
is the 100 to 180 pull-ups in the controls
link |
and then 600 pull-ups in the cooled individuals, right?
link |
They actually also feel mentally as if they can do more work.
link |
It's not just that they can, their willpower is adjusted
link |
somehow by these shifts in temperature.
link |
Now, before we continue and get to the exact ways
link |
that any number of us can start to use this information,
link |
I want to talk about the opposite thing, which is heating.
link |
And you have to remember that these surfaces,
link |
the palms and the bottoms of the feet and the face
link |
were not just arranged with these AVAs,
link |
these special ways to pass blood from arteries to veins
link |
in order to cool us for better athletic performance
link |
or to heat us on cold days, but for both of those things.
link |
Now, Heller and colleagues and others have also explored
link |
how these can be used to heat up the core.
link |
There are times when we want to heat up our core.
link |
Typically, we hear that most of the heat escapes
link |
through our head, so we'll put on a hat when we go outside.
link |
That's actually not true.
link |
Most of your heat escapes through your face,
link |
the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet.
link |
Now, you should know why that's the case.
link |
What this means is that for post-surgery patients
link |
or for people that are hypothermic,
link |
indeed, you want to heat the core, right?
link |
But actually, I was on a swim recently
link |
where a friend became hypothermic.
link |
He was kind of slurring his words
link |
and kind of staggering around
link |
when we got him back on the beach.
link |
We brought him over to the lifeguard station.
link |
He turned out to be fine.
link |
Again, this is why cold water swims
link |
are something that you really need to do in groups,
link |
not alone, and you really have to know what you're doing.
link |
There were reasons for why this happened that day,
link |
but basically, people thought we were a little strange
link |
until they realized what was happening.
link |
We were walking down the beach,
link |
basically sandwiching him at our chest
link |
because we were still warmer than the ambient environment,
link |
the environment around us,
link |
and we were pushing our chest against him
link |
to try and warm him up to warm up his core.
link |
In retrospect, that was the wrong thing to do.
link |
In talking with Craig and talking to other colleagues
link |
that work on thermogenesis,
link |
what we should have done was warm the palms of his hands,
link |
the bottoms of his feet, and his face
link |
because that would insulate the heat loss.
link |
Now, he was very cold,
link |
so presumably, there was vasoconstriction
link |
of the veins at these locations,
link |
and so it's not clear
link |
that that would have been the only strategy to use,
link |
but they have explored how to heat up post-surgery patients,
link |
and one of the best ways to do that
link |
is to get warm socks on the bottoms of the feet,
link |
get gloves on the hands,
link |
and if it can be done safely, to warm the face.
link |
Now, of course, you don't want to obstruct respiration
link |
and things of that sort,
link |
but again, the ability to pass heat into the body
link |
or to remove heat to the body
link |
is best done through these three surfaces.
link |
I can't emphasize that enough.
link |
So I mentioned before that you want to cool the palms
link |
or the bottoms of the feet,
link |
although that's a little harder to do, or the face,
link |
but not so much that the blood vessels constrict
link |
because then you won't be able to pass cool into the body
link |
because those pipes got smaller,
link |
and therefore, you can't pass cool into the body.
link |
So how can you start to incorporate this?
link |
Well, Craig and colleagues have a company
link |
that they've spun out through Stanford.
link |
We'll talk about that when we sit down with Craig,
link |
that has made engineered devices that are optimal for this
link |
that are going to keep those passages open,
link |
keep the size of those veins correct
link |
to pass cool into the body quickly
link |
for sake of elite sports performance
link |
and even recreational sports performance,
link |
but you can actually start to incorporate this.
link |
First of all, I always get asked,
link |
how cold should the water be?
link |
Should it be ice water?
link |
Should it be very cold water?
link |
If you want to experience some of this effect
link |
one thing you could do would be, for instance, to do,
link |
I don't know, I'll use the gym or the treadmill
link |
You could do your maximum number of pull-ups,
link |
stop, and then you could actually put your hands into
link |
or on the surface of a sink that is presumably stopped up
link |
So not ice water, not freezing cold, but cool water.
link |
Slightly cooler than body temperature
link |
before you started training would be a good place to start.
link |
You do that for 10 to 30 seconds,
link |
then you could go back and do your next set.
link |
You would repeat the cooling.
link |
You would want to extend the amount of cooling somewhat,
link |
so you might want to do that for 30 seconds to a minute.
link |
This is not going to be perfect.
link |
You're going to have to play with how cold to make it
link |
in order to get the optimal effect,
link |
but you ought to see an effect nonetheless.
link |
The same is true if you're running and you're fatiguing.
link |
Obviously, you don't want to become hyperthermic.
link |
Cooling the hands or the bottoms of your feet or the face
link |
would be the ideal way to dump heat
link |
in order to be able to generate more output.
link |
Now, the face is something that we haven't talked
link |
Everything I've told you up until now also says
link |
that if you are somebody who tends to get cold
link |
when you are outside, say in the winter,
link |
or even in the fall, you tend to run cold,
link |
warming your face is going to be the most important thing
link |
Now, it's kind of hard to do that without looking strange,
link |
like wearing a ski mask or something like that,
link |
but that is going to be more effective
link |
than covering and warming any other part of your body,
link |
although it would be quite strange
link |
if you only had a ski mask on
link |
and you weren't wearing clothes anywhere else on your body.
link |
I don't recommend doing that outside.
link |
That will get you into all sorts of other kinds of trouble.
link |
It wouldn't be good for anybody.
link |
But now you understand the principle and the locations
link |
at which to deliver heat and cold.
link |
So let's say that you are out for a run
link |
and you want to incorporate this cooling mechanism.
link |
I talked to Craig about this.
link |
I said, what would be the kind of poor person's approach
link |
to this before this device is commercially available?
link |
And he said, well, you could take a frozen juice can,
link |
if you have one of those, or a very cold can of soda,
link |
and you would want to pass it back and forth
link |
between your two hands.
link |
The reason the passing back and forth is really important
link |
is because you, again, you don't want it to be so cold
link |
that you constrict those venous portals
link |
that will allow cold to go into the body.
link |
Now, there are certainly people
link |
that are working on bike handles
link |
and that can actually cool the hands.
link |
You can expect with the Olympics coming up,
link |
people are aware of these data
link |
and are starting to incorporate it into a number of things.
link |
Here's what you don't want to do.
link |
And there are sports teams that I won't mention
link |
by name or brand that have made this mistake
link |
and it costs them dearly.
link |
You don't want to cool the core
link |
if you want to cool the body, right?
link |
If it's a very hot day and you're going to train,
link |
getting into an ice bath first,
link |
sure, it will cool you down,
link |
but that's not going to be as effective
link |
as cooling the palms, the bottoms, the feet and the face.
link |
I have a friend who does some important work in this space
link |
with people in various, let's just say cultures
link |
where heat is generated quite a lot
link |
and they need to dump heat.
link |
Ice packs delivered to the face
link |
are something that they actually use
link |
in order to dump heat quickly.
link |
Now, again, you don't want to keep the ice pack on your face.
link |
These are people that are very high work output, right?
link |
Firefighters and similar at very high work output.
link |
And then they'll put this,
link |
essentially it's like a cool face mask on their face.
link |
It'll allow their core body temperature to come down
link |
and then they remove it.
link |
They're not keeping it on there so long
link |
that they're getting the vasoconstriction, okay?
link |
So there are a number of ways that you could do this.
link |
And again, I'm not giving specific temperatures
link |
because it depends on how hot that day
link |
and how hot your body temperature is.
link |
So you can see why there's a need
link |
to create more devices for this,
link |
but you can see a considerable improvement
link |
in endurance, in strength,
link |
and in all kinds of explosive
link |
and sort of explosive power type output in athletics
link |
by using these surfaces of the hands
link |
and bottoms of the feet and face.
link |
The one that I've tried
link |
because in anticipation of this episode
link |
was the dips where then I would cool my hands.
link |
I actually decided to cool the bottoms of my feet as well
link |
because it just feels good
link |
and it's particularly hot out lately.
link |
So no shoes or socks on,
link |
put my feet into the bottoms of my feet
link |
just kind of hovering about a centimeter or two
link |
below the surface of a bucket of water
link |
that was just slightly, it felt cool,
link |
slightly cooler than body temperature or so.
link |
It just basically what came out of the spigot
link |
after I let it run for a little bit.
link |
And indeed I saw a 60% increase in the number of dips
link |
that I can do in a single session.
link |
So it's actually a quite significant effect
link |
and you don't have to be perfectly precise in order to do it.
link |
And of course, if you want to heat up for whatever reason,
link |
like you're in, you're camping
link |
or you're lost in the environment,
link |
remember these three surfaces
link |
are going to be the best way to heat your core as well.
link |
So up until now, we've been talking about
link |
how to use cold during a workout
link |
in order to improve performance.
link |
And indeed cold applied to the appropriate parts of the body
link |
the appropriate times can vastly improve our performance
link |
and endurance and strength.
link |
Now I want to talk about the use of temperature
link |
in particular cold to improve the speed
link |
and the depth of recovery.
link |
Recovery is obviously vital, right?
link |
During a weight training session
link |
or during an endurance session,
link |
that's just the stimulus for getting better the next time.
link |
And if you don't recover,
link |
you not only won't get better, but you'll get worse.
link |
There's a lot of interest in the use of cold
link |
in order to improve recovery in the short term.
link |
We see this and probably the best example of this
link |
would be fighters in combat sports between rounds
link |
or athletes in between quarters or halftime.
link |
That's one form of recovery.
link |
The ability to go back into the sport very soon
link |
on an order of minutes, anywhere from like one minute
link |
in between rounds in typical combat sports
link |
or several minutes at a halftime, et cetera.
link |
Typically, what we see is people cooling their core,
link |
cooling the back of their neck,
link |
cooling the top of their head.
link |
So it might be a sponge with cold water
link |
over the top of the head or an ice pack
link |
on the back of the neck,
link |
or in some cases even wearing cold ice vests.
link |
This has actually been done.
link |
That's going to be a very inefficient way
link |
to improve recovery of that kind.
link |
Far better would be to cool the face,
link |
the palms of the hands or the bottoms of the feet
link |
for the reasons that I described up until now.
link |
Submerging the body in an ice bath or taking a cold shower,
link |
say up to the neck or up to the chest
link |
or getting under cold water
link |
or jumping in a cold lake or something of that sort
link |
or in the locker room, getting under the cold shower
link |
also would be a terrible way to cool off the body quickly
link |
compared to the ways that I described
link |
through the palms of the hands,
link |
the bottoms of the feet or the face for the following reason.
link |
First of all, it's not optimizing those portals
link |
of the face, palms, the hands and the feet.
link |
And in addition, if it's very cold and you submerge
link |
or you cover a lot of the body with that cold,
link |
you're going to cause constriction
link |
of the very vessels and pathways
link |
that allow the body to efficiently dump heat.
link |
So again, the key thing is to cool these one or two
link |
or three of these surfaces,
link |
but not so cold that you cause the vasoconstriction.
link |
So what does this mean for you?
link |
It means that getting in an ice bath or a cold shower
link |
or putting an ice pack on the back of your neck,
link |
in most cases is not going to be as good
link |
as splashing cold water on your face
link |
or even just holding your face with a damp cool cloth
link |
or something of that sort.
link |
It's so kind of counterintuitive.
link |
You think, oh, if I just jump into an ice bath,
link |
I'm going to cool down much faster
link |
than if I just cooled these one or two or three
link |
of these select regions of the body,
link |
but that's actually not the case.
link |
And then of course there's recovery
link |
that occurs from session to session.
link |
So outside of the game or the match
link |
or the exercise session.
link |
And many people are now relying on things like cryotherapy,
link |
which requires a lot of expensive equipment,
link |
big liquid nitrogen driven machine.
link |
Those aren't so common for most people
link |
or accessible for most people,
link |
but a lot of people are using cold baths
link |
or ice baths or cold showers.
link |
And again, that's not going to optimize recovery.
link |
In fact, it's going to have an additional effect
link |
that is going to potentially block the training stimulus.
link |
When you get into an ice bath,
link |
indeed there are provided it's not very, very cold.
link |
If you get into a cold shower
link |
provided it's not very, very cold,
link |
you are indeed blocking some of the inflammation
link |
that occurs because of the training session.
link |
But in doing so, you also are blocking pathways
link |
such as mTOR, mammalian targeted rapamycin,
link |
which are involved in the adaptation
link |
for a muscle to become stronger or bigger.
link |
Put simply, covering the body in cold
link |
or immersing the body in cold after training
link |
can short circuit or prevent the hypertrophy
link |
or muscle growth response.
link |
It has other effects that can be positive, right?
link |
It can induce thermogenesis, et cetera.
link |
It can reduce inflammation,
link |
but it can prevent some of the positive effects of exercise.
link |
Now, it hasn't been examined so much for endurance work,
link |
but let's say you come back from a round of endurance work,
link |
a run or a bike or a swim,
link |
getting into a cool bath or cooling the palms,
link |
the bottoms of the feet or the face,
link |
in my opinion, based on the science,
link |
would be better than completely immersing the body
link |
in the ice bath or the cold shower.
link |
There is a time and a place
link |
for the use of the ice bath or the cold shower
link |
or the cold plunge.
link |
Those tend to be when you want to deliberately increase
link |
brown fat thermogenesis
link |
or when you want to deliberately work on mental resilience.
link |
And in a subsequent episode on fat loss,
link |
I'm going to talk about how to optimize the use of cold
link |
specifically for increasing metabolism and fat loss.
link |
But for now, since we're talking about the use of cold
link |
for improving performance and recovery,
link |
the suggestion that I'm going to provide
link |
is based on the work of Craig Heller and colleagues
link |
that I've been talking about,
link |
as well as a excellent book.
link |
I mainly rely on textbooks and special volume books,
link |
which are collections of papers
link |
from experts in a particular area
link |
that go beyond standard kind of college level textbooks.
link |
The one that I've been relying on
link |
is called thermal regulation and human performance,
link |
physiological and biological aspects by F.E. Marino.
link |
I don't know the publisher, I don't know the author.
link |
I do recognize some of the names
link |
of the particular papers there,
link |
but I just want to be clear
link |
there's no sort of business relationship or deal with them,
link |
but it's an excellent text.
link |
It's called thermal regulation and human performance.
link |
You can find it online
link |
if you want to go really deep into this.
link |
But basically what they show is that
link |
if you can cool the body back to its resting temperature,
link |
and by resting temperature,
link |
I mean within the range that you would see
link |
at any time of waking day, but not in exercise.
link |
So just bringing the body temperature down to baseline.
link |
If you can do that,
link |
the sooner you can do that after a workout,
link |
the sooner that the muscle will recover,
link |
that the tendons will recover,
link |
and that the person, you,
link |
can get back into more endurance training,
link |
more weight training, et cetera.
link |
So cold actually can be a very powerful tool for recovery,
link |
but to maximize return to baseline levels of temperature,
link |
it's my belief based on the studies
link |
that are published in this book,
link |
as well as my discussions with my colleague, Craig Heller,
link |
and in reviewing the literature overall,
link |
that just simply cooling the entire body
link |
by jumping into an ice bath or a cold shower
link |
is not the best way to go.
link |
You really want to rely
link |
on one of these three glabrous skin portals of the palms,
link |
the bottoms of the feet, or the face.
link |
So now you probably know more than you ever wanted to know
link |
about how we regulate body temperature
link |
and how it can be applied to exercise,
link |
both during the exercise session
link |
and afterward to optimize recovery.
link |
Many of us, all of us presumably,
link |
are also eating and drinking things
link |
and taking things at various times
link |
that can impact this process.
link |
And so because of that,
link |
we should ask whether or not those things
link |
are impacting body temperature.
link |
And when we do that,
link |
we find that there are certain things
link |
that many of us are doing
link |
that are actually impairing our performance.
link |
So for instance, if you are taking a pre-workout drink
link |
or you're ingesting a lot of caffeine or other substance
link |
to bring your body temperature up before exercise,
link |
you are limiting the amount of exercise that you can do.
link |
I can recall a time in college
link |
when I would drink a lot of espresso.
link |
Back then, ephedrine was sold over the counter.
link |
I remember taking it.
link |
It will really energize you for workouts.
link |
You can generate a lot of energy
link |
and get extremely focused taking those things.
link |
They do increase heart rate.
link |
They can be quite dangerous.
link |
I don't recommend people take them.
link |
In fact, I think ephedrine is now off the shelves
link |
as a non-prescription compound
link |
because various people died from taking it
link |
who were sensitive to it or exercised in heat.
link |
But looking back at that,
link |
I realized it was a foolish approach.
link |
It was increasing core thermogenesis.
link |
Sure, I might've burned a few more calories,
link |
but actually when I look at the data
link |
that are coming from specific cooling
link |
and how that can so increase in performance
link |
and then I compare that to the effects
link |
of taking some sort of thermogenic compound,
link |
whatever it is, some pre-workout or some pill
link |
or high levels of caffeine,
link |
it's very clear that increasing body temperature
link |
prior to working out is the exact wrong thing
link |
that one would want to do.
link |
You don't want to stay so cold
link |
that you can't generate good muscle contractions.
link |
You don't want to be like I am coming out of the cold ocean
link |
with claws for hands,
link |
but one wants to have your body temperature in a range
link |
that still allows you to work hard and perform well.
link |
Now, in terms of recovery,
link |
things like alcohol, we know are vasodilators.
link |
So those are going to cause people to drop body temperature.
link |
So you might think, oh, well, that sounds great for recovery
link |
and I don't think people should be drinking
link |
who have problems with alcohol intake,
link |
alcoholics or they're not of drinking age, et cetera.
link |
I'm not a drinker,
link |
but I do have a good friend who's a quite accomplished
link |
athlete who basically drinks a beer or two
link |
after his long runs or cycling.
link |
And his argument is, well, I'm dumping body heat
link |
and I like a beer and he's probably right.
link |
It's probably a really good tool
link |
provided you don't have issues with alcohol
link |
that would preclude that as a tool
link |
or you're not of drinking age.
link |
But anything that you ingest after exercise
link |
that would increase body temperature
link |
is going to impede recovery.
link |
Anything that you do that lowers body temperature
link |
provided it's in safe ranges
link |
is going to accelerate recovery.
link |
And that brings us to the whole host of compounds
link |
that people take that can increase body temperature.
link |
And many people are taking these things
link |
in order to increase fat burning and increase metabolism.
link |
But in my opinion,
link |
it's impeding their ability to perform well.
link |
And especially if the performance is something
link |
that you're focused on,
link |
aside from body recomposition, losing fat building muscle.
link |
But even if you're focused on losing fat building muscle,
link |
you have to ask yourself,
link |
is the body temperature increase
link |
that I'm getting from these compounds really worth it?
link |
Given that it can block or prevent my performance
link |
from being as good as it could.
link |
is it worth taking something
link |
that makes you feel very energized to go work out,
link |
but then you now know that you are stopping earlier
link |
and you're performing less well,
link |
fewer reps, fewer steps overall.
link |
If you had not taken that thing,
link |
then you could perform much longer
link |
and at much higher capacity.
link |
Some of you are probably saying,
link |
well, that's ridiculous
link |
because when I drink a quadruple espresso
link |
and I pop a whatever pre-workout or drink a pre-workout,
link |
then I know I can go much further.
link |
Ah, that might be true,
link |
but the increase in temperature
link |
is also costing you on the recovery side.
link |
And unless you're doing other things
link |
to improve your recovery,
link |
and I know many people that are, I don't judge,
link |
but many people who are doing those things
link |
are also augmenting their recovery
link |
through hormone augmentation
link |
and other performance enhancing tools.
link |
Then for the typical person who's not doing that,
link |
it's probably shooting yourself in the foot.
link |
So let's take a look at what some of those compounds are
link |
and just briefly review
link |
whether or not they would be a good or a bad idea to include
link |
if your main goals are performance
link |
or your main goals are body recomposition or both.
link |
So let's just briefly discuss stimulants.
link |
This could be caffeine.
link |
This could be any other kind of stimulant
link |
that are typically in a pre-workout drink
link |
or anything that might get you revved up before exercising.
link |
This could even be very strong tea.
link |
I've mentioned I'm a big consumer of mate.
link |
I like a yerba mate.
link |
I love that stuff.
link |
And I also drink caffeine.
link |
I drink, I love coffee of various kinds,
link |
mushroom coffee, black coffee, espresso, et cetera.
link |
I'm a chronic caffeine user.
link |
I don't think I'm an addict,
link |
but I'm a chronic caffeine user.
link |
Meaning when I drink caffeine,
link |
my heart rate doesn't increase so much
link |
that it feels like a shock to my system.
link |
Some people are not caffeine adapted
link |
or they're very caffeine sensitive.
link |
Here's the straightforward rule.
link |
Caffeine for somebody who doesn't drink caffeine very much
link |
will constrict the blood vessels
link |
and will increase retention of body heat.
link |
And it's probably a bad idea before exercise.
link |
For somebody who's caffeine adapted
link |
and is used to drinking caffeine,
link |
it won't have that vasoconstriction effect.
link |
That's what the data point to because I'm adapted to it.
link |
But it will cause vasodilation
link |
and will allow me to dump body heat.
link |
So for me, I use it before I train
link |
or do any kind of exercise
link |
because I tend to do that early in the day.
link |
It won't prevent me from sleeping
link |
and it causes vasodilation.
link |
And then afterwards,
link |
I'm aware that it causes vasoconstriction
link |
after the caffeine wears off.
link |
So for somebody who drinks two or three or more
link |
cups of coffee a day or mate a day,
link |
so we're talking intake of anywhere
link |
from 100 to 400 milligrams of caffeine,
link |
what you want to do is you want to make sure
link |
that you would do that before exercise
link |
and probably not after exercise.
link |
That just makes logical sense
link |
given what we know about thermal regulation.
link |
And if you're somebody who doesn't drink caffeine,
link |
drinking caffeine before a workout
link |
is going to be about the worst thing
link |
that you could possibly do
link |
because it's going to increase core body temperature
link |
through its thermogenic effects.
link |
And it's going to constrict your blood vessels
link |
and make it even harder to dump heat.
link |
So I don't suggest that people drink caffeine or not.
link |
I just suggest that you think about
link |
whether or not you're caffeine adapted or not
link |
and decide whether or not you want to drink caffeine.
link |
In general, you're going to be better
link |
not drinking any caffeine than you are drinking caffeine
link |
unless you're a heavy caffeine user or abuser,
link |
in which case not drinking caffeine
link |
is going to give you vicious headaches
link |
and is going to make it very hard to get motivated
link |
because you're just not used to it.
link |
It takes about three weeks to get used to no caffeine.
link |
I've done it before.
link |
I've done caffeine fast.
link |
I don't know that I ever want to do it again.
link |
That's how painful it was.
link |
But you get headaches because of the effects
link |
on vasodilation and constriction.
link |
If you like caffeine, use in moderate amounts
link |
and use it before your workout's not after.
link |
If you don't like caffeine or you don't use it very often,
link |
stay away from it anywhere close to exercise
link |
before or after for that matter.
link |
One of the more commonly used compounds
link |
that's sold over the counter
link |
are non-steroid anti-inflammatories.
link |
So things like Tylenol and Advil and other trade names
link |
and the Proxen sodium, things of that sort.
link |
Almost all of those drop body temperature to some extent.
link |
And that's why it's often recommended
link |
that people take them when they have a fever.
link |
Although the whole business of dropping body temperature
link |
artificially when you have a fever
link |
is itself an interesting discussion
link |
whether or not that's the most adaptive or best thing to do.
link |
Certainly you don't want fever to go too high.
link |
It can be very dangerous, can kill you.
link |
But artificially dropping body temperature
link |
with these compounds can be tricky.
link |
Now, a number of athletes, especially endurance athletes,
link |
will rely on these non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs
link |
specifically to keep body temperature lower
link |
during long bouts of exertion.
link |
This is a little bit of a pharmacologic version
link |
of dumping heat instead of using Palmer cooling
link |
or face ice pack cooling.
link |
They're relying on pharmacology
link |
to drop their core body temperature.
link |
That has certain obvious advantages.
link |
Those advantages should be obvious
link |
and the reasons for them should be obvious
link |
based on everything we've talked about up until now.
link |
Lower temperature allows you to go further harder
link |
with more intensity.
link |
However, they do have effects on the liver
link |
and they can also have effects on the kidneys
link |
and during long bouts of exercise
link |
or even short bouts of exercise,
link |
water balance and salt balance
link |
are also going to be vital to maintain
link |
in order to perform well,
link |
generate the best muscle contraction,
link |
stay mentally alert and also to stay alive.
link |
We will do an episode on salt electrolytes
link |
and water and water balance,
link |
but you probably want to think carefully
link |
about whether or not you want to use
link |
non-steroid anti-inflammatories before any training session
link |
just for the performance augmentation effect,
link |
unless you're working carefully with a coach,
link |
whether or not you've done that in practices
link |
and of course, whether or not you are in a situation
link |
where monitoring your body temperature carefully
link |
is going to be important.
link |
You might ask, well, when would that be?
link |
Well, desert races, summer training in races, winter rides,
link |
you certainly don't want to get too cool either.
link |
So alcohol, caffeine and non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs
link |
because of their effects on temperature
link |
will impact performance and recovery,
link |
but you want to be cautious about how you approach them.
link |
I personally am more a fan of using caffeine
link |
in moderate doses for the reasons I described before,
link |
as well to use the cooling of the palms,
link |
cooling of the bottoms of my feet, right?
link |
By placing them into a bucket or into a cool bath
link |
after training or cooling the face after training
link |
or sometimes even during training.
link |
It just seems like there's more of a margin
link |
to play with the variables, to heat up the water
link |
or cool it down a little bit
link |
to include one palm or the other palm.
link |
There's just all sorts of good parameter space
link |
as we call it in science that you can play with
link |
and work with to find what works for you.
link |
Whereas when you pop a pill, sure, you can adjust the dose
link |
and you can adjust it next time,
link |
but once it's in you, it's in you
link |
and there's going to be some period of time
link |
before you can modulate it.
link |
What I've offered today are ways
link |
in which you can use temperature
link |
to powerfully improve performance.
link |
And if you think about it,
link |
you can vary that from set to set.
link |
You could do your pull-ups or your sprints
link |
and then cool your palms
link |
and then try and go with colder water the next round
link |
or warmer water the next round
link |
or do both feet and palms and face.
link |
I mean, you can do all sorts of things moment to moment
link |
and see what works for you.
link |
Again, essentially zero cost or no cost.
link |
Whereas when you pop something, you take a pill,
link |
you're basically in that regimen
link |
for the next hour or two or more.
link |
You can always take more, but you can't really take less.
link |
You can't really extract it from your body in real time.
link |
So it doesn't give you a lot of opportunity
link |
to play scientist, which is what I like to do
link |
because what I'm always trying to do
link |
is trying to dial in the best protocols possible
link |
based on the mechanisms and data.
link |
And if you can do that moment to moment,
link |
that places you in a position of power.
link |
Once again, we've covered a lot of material.
link |
By now, after seeing this episode
link |
or listening to this episode,
link |
you should understand a lot
link |
about how your body heats and cools itself
link |
and the value of that for physical performance.
link |
I hope you'll also appreciate
link |
that you have tools at your disposal
link |
to vastly improve your physical performance.
link |
And should you try those, please let us know how it goes.
link |
If you decide to do Palmer cooling during your runs
link |
or after your runs, during your weight workouts,
link |
during your yoga sessions, whatever it is, let us know.
link |
Please place that in the comments.
link |
I've given you specific protocols and some direction,
link |
but I've also left it slightly vague
link |
because as I mentioned earlier,
link |
I don't know all the environmental conditions.
link |
I don't know how hot your yoga studio is
link |
or how cool your gym happens to be
link |
or your body temperature or time of day.
link |
Remember, your temperature will vary
link |
according to the time of day.
link |
We did a whole episode about that related to sleep.
link |
Typically your body temperature is rising early in the day
link |
and is coming down as you approach the late evening
link |
and late night hours for sleep.
link |
In the middle of the night, your temperature is very low,
link |
at its absolute lowest,
link |
something we call the temperature minimum.
link |
So we don't know exactly where you're at.
link |
You need to take the information that you received today
link |
and should you try and incorporate it,
link |
try and do it intelligently.
link |
Don't cool yourself off so much that you become cryogenic
link |
and please don't warm yourself up.
link |
In fact, we didn't talk at all about warming yourself up
link |
because warming yourself up too much can be quite dangerous.
link |
You never, ever, ever want to be hypothermic.
link |
That's what your body and your brain are trying to avoid.
link |
We talked a little bit about supplements
link |
but not the standard sorts of supplements
link |
I usually list off on these episodes.
link |
Rather, we talked about caffeine,
link |
non-steroid anti-inflammatories
link |
and how those can impact temperature,
link |
how alcohol can impact temperature.
link |
And I should just mention in closing
link |
that every time we eat, we also increase temperature.
link |
There's a eating-induced thermogenic effect
link |
but that's a minor one.
link |
That's a small one.
link |
So you wouldn't worry about eating before training
link |
because of its effects on temperature
link |
because it tends to be really minor.
link |
Going forward, we're going to talk more about temperature
link |
and other ways to improve physical performance
link |
and skill learning.
link |
We're going to talk about specific ways
link |
to accelerate fat loss, to improve muscle growth,
link |
to improve suppleness and flexibility.
link |
These approaches and mechanisms are anchored deeply
link |
in neuroscience and physiology
link |
and the relationship between our peripheral organs
link |
which include our skin and our brain
link |
and all the organs in between.
link |
So it's really a pleasure for me
link |
because I'm able to look to the textbook literature
link |
that exists and really came out
link |
over the last 50 to 100 years.
link |
And unlike a lot of areas of neuroscience
link |
which are still sort of mystical
link |
like consciousness and dreaming
link |
of which we understand a little bit about,
link |
these core mechanisms of temperature and physiology
link |
which are so powerful involve very concrete studies
link |
that as you learned today are very actionable.
link |
If you're enjoying this podcast
link |
and you like the information that you're receiving,
link |
if you're incorporating it into your life in useful ways,
link |
please recommend the podcast to other people
link |
if you think they could benefit from it as well.
link |
Please subscribe to the podcast on YouTube.
link |
So you want to hit the subscribe button.
link |
As well, hit the notifications button.
link |
We come out with new episodes every Monday
link |
but from time to time, we also release shorter content
link |
and we will be releasing additional content
link |
in between episodes from time to time.
link |
If you don't already subscribe on Apple and or Spotify,
link |
Also on Apple, you have the opportunity to leave us
link |
up to a five-star review
link |
if you think that we deserve a five-star review
link |
and to leave us feedback.
link |
They have a comment section there.
link |
It's really a feedback section where you can rate
link |
and describe the podcast as you experience it.
link |
If you'd like to support the podcast
link |
in other ways, please check out our sponsors.
link |
That's a terrific way to support us.
link |
We also have a Patreon.
link |
You can find it at patreon.com slash Andrew Huberman
link |
that allows you to support the podcast
link |
at any level that you like.
link |
Today, we didn't focus so heavily on supplements
link |
but in other episodes I have
link |
and there are certainly supplements that are beneficial
link |
for sleep, for performance, for learning,
link |
immunity and so forth.
link |
We've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E.com
link |
because Thorne supplements, we believe to be
link |
the most stringent in terms of what they put
link |
on the bottle is actually what's in the bottle.
link |
So the amounts are precise
link |
and the quality of the ingredients is very precise.
link |
They partner with the Mayo Clinic,
link |
all the major sports teams.
link |
So we're delighted that we're partnered with Thorne.
link |
If you want to see the supplements that I take,
link |
you can go to thorne.com slash the letter U slash Huberman
link |
and you can see the supplements that I take.
link |
You could get 20% off any of those supplements
link |
should you choose to order them
link |
as well as 20% off any other supplements
link |
that Thorne happens to make.
link |
That's Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E.com slash the letter U
link |
slash Huberman to get 20% off any of the supplements
link |
that Thorne makes.
link |
And last but not least,
link |
I want to thank you for your time and attention.
link |
I realize this is a lot of information.
link |
I hope you'll find some of it to be actionable
link |
and useful for you and for people that you know
link |
and as always, thank you for your interest in science.
link |
I'll see you next time.