Optimizing Women's Fitness for Health and Longevity with Dr Andy Galpin

9:37AM May 23, 2023

Speakers:

Angela Foster

Andy Galpin

Keywords:

hrv

people

sleep

training

great

tonne

max heart rate

number

good

talking

fasted

minutes

rhodiola

change

years

reason

research

menstrual cycle

benefit

totally

in physiology, you're always playing a game, right? You're playing a game of adaptation versus optimization. And those things are always countered to each other. So the thing that causes the most adaptation is not the thing that causes the most optimization in the moment, right? Whether your inflammation is an easy example of this, if you minimise inflammation, you would die. If you maximise inflammation, you will die.

My friends, in today's podcast episode, we're going to be diving deep into the world of exercise for longevity, and how women's hormones can affect that. So you're gonna be discovering all the things you should be doing to enhance not just your strength and power, but also your VO two Max and an often neglected aspect, which is balance. So to kind of find out everything you need to know about optimising your fitness for longevity, tune in, I'm sitting down with Dr. Andy Galpin, who is a tenured full professor at California State University Fullerton. He's the co director of the Centre for sport performance and the founder of the Biochemistry and Molecular exercise physiology laboratory. He's also a human performance scientist with a PhD in human bio energetics, and over 100, peer reviewed publications and presentations. He's on a mission to enhance the human condition by providing the world with free and entertaining health, human performance, and nutrition education. So without further delay, let's dive in.

So I'm here today with Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm very excited to have you on the show. Andy, I've been looking forward to this after listening to your episodes with Dr. Peter tear and Andrew Huberman, which go into a lot of detail on the science of longevity and improving fitness. A very warm welcome to the show. Yeah,

great to be here. Happy to finally connect here.

Awesome. Let's kick off with the key areas that you would say for women to focus on when they're looking at increasing their healthspan alongside their longevity?

Sure, well, I'd say initially, you want to hit the big markers, right? So people have talked quite extensively about managing sleep, managing stress, nutrition and physical activity, right. So if you jump out the gate, and handle some for things like that, you're only going to going to be in a good spot, I think we can probably dive a little bit deeper than that. And we could go into any one of those categories in more detail that you would like. But that's the big jump past that women have particular needs to manage bone mineral density, very specifically, and then a handful of other items. So those are the big areas, so on. So I'm happy to jump into any one in more detail if you'd like.

Awesome. Let's look at fitness, first of all, in terms of women and an exercise, because I think this is kind of becoming a little bit more nuanced recently looking at the menstrual cycle and how that impacts things. And then obviously getting into perimenopause, it has its own unique set of challenges and then moving through into menopause. When we're looking first of all, at women optimising their fitness routines, for example, around the menstrual cycle. My understanding from looking at the limited resources available is that women have a greater resilience in the first few weeks of the month, we're in the follicular phase right up to ovulation. And that seems to be a good time to take advantage of rising oestrogen to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And that after that, as we move into the luteal phase and get closer towards menstruation, it seems better to kind of pull back a little bit on things like the hip workouts. And I'm just curious as to what your view and what the research you found says about this.

Sure. So a lot of things to say on that topic, or a couple of them would be one, I would recommend checking out. We actually just had a podcast come out with Abby Smith Ryan, who's a fantastic scientist at the University of North Carolina. And she is doing a tonne of research on perimenopause, menopause training, specifically looking at high intensity interval training, and a bunch of stuff a long, storied career, any of her stuff is great. And we just again had that podcast come out on Barbell Shrug and she goes into this stuff in detail. Secondly, I would recommend checking out a couple of recent papers by my former student Lauren Cullen so simple. And she's not finishing her PhD in protein metabolism. And she just came out with literature review on this topic specifically. And then she actually has completed a couple of new studies that are in review right now. And so those are not out yet. And the reason I'm saying that is if you really want to deep dive into the state of the research and literature, those are the best places to go into. I'll try to give you the more practitioner friendly version of those but if you want to know more about you know the details of the methodologies, see those that review papers specifically by Lauren when we when you start this conversation I You have to understand and recognise the difference between science and application. And the reason I'm saying it is this, if we can find something to be true or not true, as close as possible in science, there's still a leap, you have to make there into application. And so you can have a couple of different philosophies, and they're both correct. This specific example i given this topic refers to. Alright, you went out, you've kind of started the question with a pretty detailed explanation of exercise training variations throughout the menstrual cycle. Well, a lot to tease it, some people can make the argument of, there's potential benefit. There is enough indirect evidence. So the evidence, in my opinion is not particularly strong. But there's some indirect evidence that everything you said there is true. And so therefore, you can make the argument on average, many women would benefit to training rather midcycle. Okay. Um, the same exact token, same exact data, you could say, well, yes. But also, how practically challenging is that? Now I have to rearrange my work schedule, I have to rearrange my kids schedule, and I have to, and I'm gonna train differently based on all these things. That's complicated, right? There's no correct answer that because some people say, Well, I don't really care how complicated is to the one that's better. And that's great. Some people so like, yo, it's so complicated, it actually drives adherence down too far. And so it's overly complicated and not justified by the by the level of the clients. Both of those answers are 100%, correct. 100%, I can tell you right now, in the coaching programmes I have for all of our females, we do not train around their menstrual cycle at all. We don't do anything like that. And that's because the population we're with, it's not worth the change, at least again, the strength, the evidence that I have gone over, it's not strong enough of an impact to justify the other practical world losses we would get, and trying to programme them like that. Other people may feel differently, they might say, what the clients I have the situation I have the time I have, it's totally justified. And if it is potentially better, why not? Because the reality of it is in my coaching practice, I make that choice sometimes to where I say, look, it's either positive or neutral. But the people I work with, I don't care, I'll take that chance. I'm gonna go do it. In this particular instance, I don't because the females we work with, but I can actually understand when people say, yeah, there's an initial limited evidence there. And if it's potentially gonna help my clients better than I'm going to do it. So I think, right off the gate, I sort of jumped into the practical application. And I went, like, I gave you the answer my final answer first without running through the research. But that's why I think a lot of the argument in this particular question, it's nonsensical, because you're setting up a false dichotomy, that it's either you train around the menstrual cycle, you don't? Well, then the reality of it is like both of these are very viable options. And they're for different reasons. And either way, as a practitioner or a person, you can make that choice and go, Okay, now dialling back a little bit. If you're training around your menstrual cycle, that's assuming a couple of things. One, you have an extremely regular ovulation cycle. Now notice, I didn't say menstrual cycle. That's an ovulation cycle. That's not the same damn thing. So it some some women obviously are extremely regular with their menstrual cycle, every 28 days, right? Some are hyper irregular. So now you're talking about the practicality of adjusting your training and based on your menstrual cycle, and you don't even have a regular cycle. So now what do you what do you how you really actually applying this? That becomes really, really challenging. Secondly, even if you have a regular cycle, how do you know you're actually ovulating on day 14? One of the things we know clearly, clearly from research is that's not actually true. It's not true woman a woman it's not true within a single woman in your ovulation cycle. So now what do you like testing ovulation every single day vegging out when you're flipping cycles now like chaining and so one could argue like, Yo, there's a lot of assumptions here. a tonne of assumptions going on that we actually know. Again, scientifically, those assumptions are false. And you're using that to make a more complicated trading system. For what potential benefit we don't really have a tonne of evidence to suggest it's actually going to be do that much different. So that's why in general for our clients, the ones I work with, I don't do it. Now having said that, there's a lot of cool research coming out on this stuff. We're gonna learn a lot more in the next five years and I have changed my tune many times in the past I have been watching this on topics and more and more of this came out and I'm going okay, like switching so I'm not hard on this one. I'm not super fast to go you know, this is it's not quackery, it's not even close to quackery. That's not that's, that's very wrong to say that way. But for me jumping in and going yell and tell like I know, a woman's cycle better until we know their their hormone profile better and whether we've done like a 30 day mapping or something. All the other ones I don't I don't really we don't venture into it a lot. If you're super into this stuff, though, especially when new personally I fully support it. And if someone did that and then came back. And so you're only getting better results when I'm doing it this way, I would believe him. Like, yeah, totally. That's really that's really awesome. So it comes down to what are you talking about broad application? You know, should women in general be doing this versus you and your individual clients? And and those can be different questions. So that's sort of my initial launch. And your question, I'm not sure what follow ups you want to take from there. But that's the thing. Ya know, it's

interesting, is it when you say that you haven't done it with the athletes that you work with? Because you talked, you mentioned, obviously, adherence there, but also like in terms of the gains that you might make? Have you seen that by slowing things down? For example, actually, you may not see the same improvements in in, in fitness if you're having that level of disruption. Because if you look at the work of kind of Dr. Stacey Sims, for example, who's been on the show a couple of times, and her research suggested that actually, by training around the menstrual cycle, the results are more optimal. So what do you mean by slowing down things, as in well, not so much slowing down things, but by not doing so much high intensity work, for example, in the luteal phase, and focusing more on kind of high intensity strength training and more workouts sort of closer together in that early follicular phase. I'm just curious as to what you found, your experience has been and why you've chosen not to optimise around it.

Yeah, I don't I don't think there's any data on that. You said there's research on that. Not that I'm more

I think it deserves by some sports teams, like my instance of the US Soccer team have have used it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure.

Plenty of coaches have used it. But there's no, I don't know, if there's any peer reviewed data to support that, which doesn't mean it's useless. By the way. I am not at all one of the scientists who says nor believes like it was not peer reviewed. I mean, it's garbage. Absolutely not. So if tonnes of practitioners are reporting that, like, that is equally important, to me, that's very valuable information. So yeah, um, again, we just haven't used it, because it's not. I don't say there. Now I will I can comment on is, there is there is clear performance decrement with excessive high intensity training. So if that's what you meant, when you sort of say, like, slow people down at certain spots? Yeah, I believe that. And one thing that's that is also clear from the research, is, people who spend too much time at max heart rate or close to that are going to have issues. So if you can pull somebody back from some of those things, replace it with other types of training. And you see, like the athletes report benefit I, I would believe all those things. So that really comes down to you know, again, individualising, the training for the individual person and getting better outcomes, I believe all that stuff, no question

that comes down more around the recovery and the strain of the individual as opposed to changing things around their hormonal profile, for example.

Yeah, totally. I mean, you should be coaching the person right? Are you getting the results you should be getting or not and what else is going on? So one of the things that we spend a lot of time with, with all the people whether they're in they're in the rapid health and performance programme, which is like our our executive, non athlete one, as well as our athletes. It is the entire allostatic load should be accounted for. Meaning we're paying attention to sleep, we're paying attention to psychological stressors, we're paying attention to nutrition, we're paying attention to hydration, we're doing tonnes of biomarkers like 500 Plus biomarkers, stool, urine, saliva, blood, etc. And so we're getting an extremely comprehensive picture. We're not just picking one thing. So I'm not just looking at your HRV score. I'm not just looking at your sleep score, I'm not looking at one oestrogen or anything like that, we're looking at everything to understand what's happening. And so I guess is one of the reasons why, like, I'm not overly concerned with things like that, because I get a huge comprehensive picture what the hell's going on, we will often do, if we're having suboptimal results, I'm gonna see it's coming from somewhere. And when I don't see it come from somewhere, I'm gonna see it resulting in somewhere. And so now I realised that I'll grant you our approach is not totally feasible, or not even close to feasible for many people. So you might want to do something simpler, like pick one or two things, but I guess maybe that's probably what explains a little bit of my approaches is because we're looking at monitoring so many things. The AICPA, it pops up, right? If you're not responding if you're getting drugged the things if it gets skipped on HRV it's fine. I'm gonna pick it up somewhere else. Like, if it comes on some one part of sleep, I want to pick it up somewhere else, and we're gonna see everything because we are paying attention that entire allostatic load.

Detoxification is so important now more than ever, with the number of toxins we are exposed to daily in our food, water, personal care products and environment. No matter how careful we are. It's impossible to totally get away from the chemicals. And we also have to think about detoxifying the toxins we produced through cellular respiration and clearing excess hormones like oestrogen our skin is one of the key ways we detoxify. And that's why I love to include sauna as part of my weekly routine. But going to a facility with a sauna can be time consuming, and investing in one yourself has been expensive in the past. That's why I love bond charges sauna blanket. It has so many benefits from raising your heart rate to that a physical exercise, so you burn calories whilst you relax, you can burn up to 600 calories in just one session. The sweating helps flush out heavy metals and other toxins and the infrared light which heats the body directly rather than the air around you mean you get the same benefits at a lower heat. On charges sauna blanket is easy to set up taking less than a minute. It heats up rapidly and you can enjoy a session for 30 to 40 minutes whilst relaxing, reading watching TV or even meditating. So you can truly stack your hacks on charges sauna blanket is also low EMF compared to other brands on the market. And it's the quickest on the market to heat up. So it's an easy thing to fit in. When I'm not working out in the morning, you'll find me meditating and my bond charges on a blanket with a red light therapy mask on my face boosting collagen while I relax and bond charger giving listeners of this podcast 20% off their sauna blankets, red light therapy devices and other wellness products on charge ship worldwide in rapid time with free shipping on every solar blanket and 12 months warranty. Simply go to bond charge.com forward slash Angela and enter code Angela 20 at checkout, that's BONCH A R g.com. Forward slash a n g e l a and use code Angela 20 to save yourself 20%. So for someone listening to this who's training pretty hard, if there were kind of five or 10 things that you would recommend as being the top things that they could track easily, without going into hundreds of different biomarkers, what would be the key things that you would draw out for them to understand that allostatic load and whether their training is optimised?

Yeah, there's a tonne of ways you can go here, you can actually go to it's funny, there's a tonne of scientifically validated questionnaires for this question. And so you can actually pull up any of them. And some of them are as simple as a 10. Question, love. And in fact, one of the things that you can see, and I have seen probably close to 10 million data points on HRV. And you compare those against a straight up questionnaire of mood. And you will see the mood will track as well often or better than HRV. And so you can use a very simple, you know, 123 mood. So a warrior. Now, this is also like this is where people are blinded. So in the aggregate, it'll line up pretty well. The reason I said that is you can tailor this and you should tailor the suit I use a lot of times with our athletes an app called for app. This is an American baseball app for baseball players, but it's the reason I bring it up is it's a hyper simple interface. And you go on there and you can log like how's your nutrition? And nutrition is like brown face that like okay, man, like happy face? And you just scroll it like it's as simple as as that, right? And it's like, what was your nutrition like yesterday? What's your mood? Like? How was your sleep? Are you happy? like simple things like that? can do it. And you should probably tailor this list of five to 10, by the way, and I think probably the number is like six at the most is what I would generally recommend to the people you're working with. So pick a variable that makes more sense. So in other words, like, one of the questions we'll ask our athletes a lot is like, How'd you play yesterday? Right? That's, that's not something you are if you're not an athlete, they take that question off your list. Put another one on, I'm like, Hey, how was work yesterday? You know, it means like, change it up a little bit. But basically, if you ask, how's your sleep, Mind Body hunger, soul, these kinds of questions. I don't think there's any particular magic, there's no like specific recipe, because there are so many validated questionnaires that leave some of these questions off and land and the ones on there that are going to show you it's going to predict it. You can do that. So subjective ratings are strong. There's a very strong argument for adding an objective ones as well. And so what we typically do and I'll teach all of our students is have at least two objective and have at least two subjective. And so your objective measures can be something like HRV which great has a tonne of research on it. It can be something like bodyweight. It can be something like how many times did you poop yesterday? Okay, great. Just getting a rough sense of what's going on. So objective data are good. And then subjective ones are the tonne of stuff that that I mentioned. How do you feel how recovered you feel? What's your you know how much you want to train today? What's your mood? How well did you sleep? In this case? It's actually subjective indicator. One of the things that we know is people's subjective understanding of their sleep is awful people have have no idea how well they actually sleep or not. But you're so it's actually more of a reflection that actually reflecting how well they slept. But it's generally more reflective of overall recovery.

It's quite interesting, actually, when you say that, because when you look at people's or data, for example, or weak data, they'll be like, I slept terribly, but then they look at it. And actually, I started to get in it can it can change, I have a sometimes right, I look at it. And I think I sound terribly, but it's telling me my readiness score is amazing. And I'm primed for high strain. And then psychologically, you kind of start to change your view a little bit.

No, we, I wrote a book like six years ago called unplugged, all about fitness technologies. And so I can give me a quick summary here. But when we do our sleep analysis, we're running full piece to full clinical grade sleep studies on people and their house in their bedrooms. So we're not using a wearable, we're have full sleep studies on on them. And one of the things that we can see with that is their actual sleep. And then we compare that against your sleep perception. And I can't even tell you, and I can't even tell you how bad people sleep perception is. Whether it's like, oh, it took me forever to fall asleep last night, you're like, No, you were asleep in four minutes. Right? I was up 100 times I sleep now great like

that with my husband? Totally. Like they're

so far off in their sleep perception. So because people comment that all the time. And like, yes, you're correct. That still doesn't mean it's not a good idea to ask them how bad theirs or how their sleep was because you're going to actually get a better indicator of overall recovery from that than you will it's just don't don't worry about what the question is, there seems so yeah, that's not the best way to monitor. And then lastly, on this, one thing I do want to flag is be very, very, very careful, changing what you do based on what any of those apps tell you. And so, don't if the apps pop up and say, hey, you know, you should take a day off today, do not ask your coach, if your coach is taking off, take down. But but don't. If you're getting your own ship here, do what you want in there. Because the perception of what's happening in those tacks is not like they're not nearly as good as you may think they are. So do not do not listen to those things. Some of the variables are great, like aura is particular actually, I think aura is probably going to be able to diagnose clinical sleep disorders in a number of years, I think they probably my opinion is probably three to five years off from being that good. So these tests are getting way, way, way better at some things, but they're still truly terrible at other things. So they are fantastic at and they get a tonne of details here. But the order specifically is fantastic in a number of things. But they're still not at the level of telling you what to do with your training for 100 reasons I can explain if you want but that's the quick answer is, don't do that, like you. This is why you need a coach, they will tell you and this is why you need other metrics behind that. So use them for what they're good at, like your sleep patterns, you know, progressions over times, not your sleep staging, don't worry about that stuff. But just you know where you sleep, what time what time you wake up. When it comes to the overall recovery and strain. And all those things, just just ignore that stuff. For the most part. I'll give you a good example. My family has the flu right now my typical HRV. And aura is like 100 or so now that's only one way to measure HRV. And or actually we'll measure HRV as a rolling average overnight, most HRV research and most practitioners of HRV are going to look at it or HRV in a single time point in the morning. So we're already looking at completely different numbers, which is not to say that their numbers is wrong or bad. But it's a rolling average overnight rather than an instantaneous time point. So it's now it's apples to oranges. It doesn't relate to anything. There's stuff going on there. So Oh great. The way that they measure it the way they calculated it is also different than other, like literally the math is different. And so you're just you're just looking at totally different numbers. So don't don't judge your health or anything else by your HRV score on something like an aura, you go to a whoop or something else, like you have other equally bad problems or worse one. So just though as the example runs, my HRV is typically around 100 or so on or overnight. It's different on other ways to track it. Got the flu this weekend. And I think Sunday I woke up and it was nine. Right? So it was like 10% of normal is down there. My readiness score was like 72% Like, oh, oh, okay, so like, I'm still sitting like no chance, like absolutely no chance. So it just, there's there's so many assumptions that go into those scores on assumptions and assumptions that assumptions on a subject. So don't look at that. I knew that I didn't I shouldn't train. Like, I felt terrible. It clearly had the flu. That wasn't gonna train anyways, but like my attribute was 10% of normal. I got throttled down there. Okay, great. Today I wake up my HRV is back to 75. And my readiness is up like 77 Okay, great. I'm gonna try to

curiously small there Friends in terms of the readiness score versus the HRV.

And that's because readiness HRV not the same thing. Right? And so what's the reason? Well, the previous night before I had, like four hours of total accumulated sleep. Last night, I got like eight plus hours so that the enhanced sleep and move the readiness score up that counteracted that drop in HRV. But

so what are the things when you're looking at those wearable devices, then I know, I think I don't know if they still do. But I thought whoop, took it at a single point in time. And yet, if I compare whoop, and aura, they're almost the same. They're like, pretty much every night they feed back the same score or within two of each other. For me, I'm curious as to what you think, are the metrics that we can observe sensibly from these devices? That might be helpful?

Yeah, sure. Well, that's actually lucky that it does that. It's not always the case. In fact, if, and I have done this, I do this almost every night. Right now. I'll wear both of those devices. And two of them, so two Orings. Okay. Right. Overnight, and you don't

so interesting.

Really, the clothes? Yeah, the clothes. Okay. But but they're not the same thing. I'm close enough for most people. Yeah. Close enough for science now. Like, whatever, you know, like, you're looking at like a 20 minute or so plus or minus margin on total amount of sleep time. This is one variable, right? So some people are like, Oh, someone's talking 20 minutes? I don't know, I don't care. And that may be me. Other people may get tighter scores, you maybe it just depends. Because again, remember that all they can, they can't really measure sleep. None of them can, right, because all they can measure is they have infrared that they're shooting your finger. That's gonna bounce back. And then everything we're going to take is going to have to be a measurement on that. And so then they're going to say, Okay, well, we know people that have this amount of actigraphy, which is like movement, at this heart rate with OSU set, like, and then they're going to calculate that on top of that, like, that's what I say when I say assumption, on top of assumption, on top of assumption, now that their algorithms have so many data points, they'd like to get better and better and better. But you may have noticed that, um, Aura just updated there. I'll pull it up. I don't want to talk. As an example. I

haven't. I like it. Because mostly, it never looks as good as it used to when I toggle it on.

What is it? Yeah, no. Okay. So you notice they change the beta, right?

Yeah. But closer to weep now, because I used to think was really harsh on me with sleep. And now when I toggle the beta on with aura, it seems closer.

Okay, yeah. So, Wolf cannot even come close to doing sleep play does correctly.

Name is that because it's a risk measurement? Or for what reason? Is the technology

number of reasons? Yeah, number reasons. And I'll maybe I'll say this more plainly, do not use any of these apps or tech to measure your sleep sages. The closest the newest version of aura just came out and their newest paper came out. And that is 86% accurate to PSG. Right? Previously, versions, you're talking 70% or so. So 86%, okay, like, again, depends on how pedantic you want to be. So for me, that's not accurate enough. If you just want to get like a rough idea. Okay, that's probably close enough. But the question is, okay, what's a safe saving thing? Great. It depends on what your HRV looks like, to that will explain in, in my opinion, what happened to your sleep stages, as you change over to the new order algorithm such that high HRV people tend to get massively overinflated deep sleep on aura previously. Right. And so you might have been told you're getting three hours of deep sleep, or somehow you switched over to beta and all sudden, you're getting told you have an hour and 10 minutes. Yeah, right. People have low HRV had other problems. And so people that are unemployed, you've even got the same amount or didn't change them. And that's because they they changed the algorithm to determine it's more supposedly, it's more accurate now at light sleep. All right. But nonetheless, your sleep, your sleep architecture, which is kind of like the phases you have and the timing is completely universally different. Just the new algorithm so that what that tells you is what are you been using the last five years? Yeah. Is it all garbage just like and what's gonna happen when they go the next version? So yeah, like you're so mean. So you should just stop that assumption, you know, that it's at best 86% accurate at sleep stages. And so like doing using that much action as coach or a person based on sleep stages, now, where is the best? That's the one we use for a number of reasons, but you're still at best 86% And so what can you get from them, you still have a tonne of benefit. So the sounds like I've been complaining about or not I have a great relationship nor by the way, I don't have any financial ties to them. But I love the people there have a great relationship with them. It is fantastic at a number of things. It is fantastic at knowing when you're Sleep is pretty darn good at that. And so if you want to just figure out total sleep time, if you want to be able to check out accountability between did your client go to sleep and wake up at a time? That is huge if you want to check calibration, right, roughly understanding like I'm not calibrated, a good night's sleep or a bad night's sleep, if you want to see changes over time, because they are fairly reliable, all good. I mean, there's 100 good reasons to

you know, to be fair, I've had clients who've been watching television, and it's like, Aura says, I was asleep, and I was watching a movie. And I never remember the whole film.

Yeah, that happens a tonne to you, that happens to me almost every night, if you if you stay in bed, inactive, whether you're reading or talking to a spouse, or doing breathwork, or meditating or something like that, it'll think you're asleep, you can actually just go to the bottom and change detail really quickly. So if you know, like ya'll said, it was a, you know, asleep at 10. But I didn't go to bed till 1030 you'll see a whole big line of awake there and you just pull it over?

Yeah, he's just slightly concerning, though. If it thinks you're asleep when you're not. Do you know what I mean? Because that begs the question,

based on blood flow, and actigraphy. So if it notices your hand and move at all, for 15, straight minutes, it's gonna assume you're asleep, which most of the time is true. In this particular case, because you were just doing breath work or something like that gets off there. So yeah, I mean, there's, again, like any of these technologies, there is there are benefits, and there are consequences. So are there are limitations, I should say, rather than the consequences. Where you need to, you know, as an individual person, use these things is understanding those limitations, and still not outsourcing these technologies to your own physiology. And what I mean by that is use them to better understand yourself, do not use them to control you, and make your decisions for you. That's a really, really bad place to be and they're not at that level yet. They are at the level of getting you insights that you previously did not have, but they're not at the level of determining what you do every single day. So that I think is still it's still worth the purchase price in my opinion for that, but you gotta be careful there. There are also Are you familiar with ortho Samia?

Ortho somnio, where people worry about sleeping and then they look at their data and they get even more anxious kind of about like orthorexia. orthorexia, were you worried about eating healthy food all the time?

Yeah. So similar, this is a rising problem. That is people are becoming more and more worried about is the fact that people are actually causing themselves sleep disorders because of sleep trackers, right. And so a couple things happen, you get too obsessive the number. And now you actually start you, for example, you're laying in bed wanting to get a higher score tomorrow. And so you're just like, Come on, go to sleep, come on, go to sleep, so I can get a higher score tomorrow. What do you think happened

isn't competitive, you're never gonna sleep.

Another thing that happens is people get so excited to wake up and check their score in the morning. Sleep is very interesting sleep, there's an anticipatory response to most things in physiology. And this is actually one of the best things that your body can do is to start, it understands patterns. And it'll start to anticipate, hey, you know, I ate lunch at one o'clock. So whether you're hungry or not at 1242, or 45, we'll start sending you signals or hunger, right? Despite it no matter what you've done, even if you're full of start sending them, this just anticipating the response, right? If it knows you have a bad encounter with somebody, every time you see them, and you know that you see them every Thursday at three o'clock, to 230, you're gonna start getting a raise and adrenaline, etc. Like, it's gonna know this thing happens, right? And it's gonna give you anticipatory response, you got this white coat syndrome, when you go to the doctor's office, all these things, right? Well, waking up as the same thing. So if you wake up in the morning and check your phone, first thing, whether this is you check an email, whether you're checking your aura score, it'll start back calculated at 15 to 30 minutes prior to, so it'll start waking you up earlier. And anticipation for your score. Less interest. So yeah, it sounds like it is one of the reasons why people say like, do not check your phone first thing in the morning, is because if you have a big uptick in any of these things, right? You're supposed to have a giant rise in cortisol in the morning. That's the point, right? So you should have a huge cortisol spike. But if you're having anything else happening, or anything that's disrupting this normal hormonal milieu that's supposed to move and wake you up, then it'll start happening, making that happen 1015 20 to 30 minutes prior to, and you'll notice a super, super commonly when people do that. They're just like, oh, I wake up before my alarm every day, and I just can't get back to sleep. Or what do you do? Grab your phone immediately? This is exactly why, yeah, that's doing that you'll start sleeping longer.

That's very interesting. Thinking about waking up in the morning and that cortisol spike that comes on, I heard you talking about one of the podcasts I was listening to you around the fact that first of all, I know you're not a huge fan of just taking supplements and things for the sake of it. You need to be very targeted with what you're taking. But you also mentioned I believe that you don't want to take anything That interferes with the cortisol response adaptations in training. I'm curious as to what you think about things like ashwaganda, which is commonly taken by many people at night for sleep I've seen I've seen, like different research some that says hours improved performance in terms of fitness. But that seems to modulate cortisol in some way. It's also very common in sort of Peri menopausal women, because it can help with things like hot flashes. Can you give us the lowdown on ashwaganda? And how it might impact performance? If you're if you're going for that early morning workout?

Yeah, so Ashwagandha is really cool. Actually. I say the same thing about Rhodiola. I'm a big fan of us Rhodiola for a very long time. That's, that's we've just actually got momentous to just come up with their own third party certified Rhodiola. Finally, because I'm like, Dude, you guys got to start getting this stuff out here. So you have to in physiology, you're always playing a game, right? You're playing a game of adaptation versus optimization. And those things are always countered to each other. So the thing that causes the most adaptation is not the thing that causes the most optimization in the moment, right? Whether you're inflammation is an easy example of this, if you minimise inflammation, you would die. If you maximise inflammation, you will die. So what you want to do is have these big spikes of inflammation and have them come crashing back down very quickly. Same thing with cortisol generally, most hormones. If you extend that, or you minimise that, you're going to have problems. And so you need inflammation. That's the primary signalling mechanism for adaptation. So whether you're talking about taking a cortisone modulator, whether you're talking about an anti inflammatory, we're talking about an antioxidant when you're talking about something like a cold bath, you do any of these things, immediately post training, where you have tried to stimulate oxidative stress, you've tried to induce inflammation. And you did that to signal all the mechanisms that kick off the signalling cascade, to kick off the gene expression to induce physiological change. Okay, that's what has to happen. You go and blunt those things. And the research is very clear, again, from the supplementation perspective, whether you're talking about the trials on like, actually, like, the anti inflammatories, to vitamin C, vitamin E combinations to Coldwater immersion, they all show the same thing. Massively blunted training, massively blunted responses to physical training. So hypertrophy is the most obvious and recognised example, you see you a blunt the hypertrophic response, you will attenuate it at worst, or at best, and not see the same results. Now, having said that, I'm not necessarily aware of one that's been done ashwagandha nor Rhodiola. I haven't seen those direct evidence. So theoretically, yeah, be concerned with that. However, I just told you, I've been using Rhodiola with athletes for a long time. It's effective. I've been using, I've used Asana plenty of times, it's super effective. Especially the example you gave, which was symptom mitigation. Now we're talking about optimising for something totally different. So if you're like, I don't care about growing muscle. I feel awful right now. Just absolutely. Who cares? You can definitely take it 100% Take it because you're also thinking I feel so bad. I'm not training anyway. So if I feel like this, well, then obviously, take it. Now there's more and more research coming out and ashwagandha. In general, I prefer Rhodiola ashwagandha. For a number of reasons. But this is an area that needs more scientific evidence. In fact, the reason I'm saying that is I'm also aware of data suggesting ashwagandha, disrupted sleep quality. More shows it helps, though. So I don't know if that was just like a weird study or what was happening there. Exactly. So I don't use it as much, but in I absolutely believe it. People were highly symptomatic. And they take it you're like I feel better that system. I mean, yeah, that's a win there. So just maybe tease dosages or or play with different providers of it, or play with different timing of it. You don't want to walk around smashing anything that's going to modulate cortisol all the time. And so you don't want to be just guzzling down Rhodiola all day. That's not a it's been a great phase. But if you want to use it for like a contract of four weeks or something like that, during certain phases, maybe a good idea. You want to take around with a little bit. I fully support those things. I guess I'm actually interested excited for more research to come out and we're gonna specifically any these herbals or roots, like, there's a lot here. These were all sort of woowoo science just a number of years ago, like you know, only you were practitioners and functional med people or whatever using them, and now there's more and more data coming out of them. The last thing I want to caution you on here though, is some of trepidation in the scientific community to use things like ashwagandha and Rhodiola is warranted because the providers of them have traditionally been terrible. So there is some conflicting evidence on the how tainted those supplements are on how lack of actual active ingredients are in them. And so this is the classic saying of like, in theory, there's, there's no difference between theory and practice, when in practice, there is meaning to say, yes, there is good evidence on X amount of milligrammes of zinc, but can you actually get that at home? Now, we've made jumps um, the same thing happens for vitamin D, by the way, the same thing happens for melatonin. There are have been a number of studies coming out on a handful of years, looking at the actual active dosages are five to 1,000x. What's actually the so in the bottle

and vitamin D, and vitamin D, Okay, interesting

vitamins. The melatonin was nasty, because now you're taking like this is this magnitude.

And actually, you can't get here without a prescription. So in the UK, over the count, no, you can't. And similarly, like, I think the other one you can go and get over the counter in the US is DHEA. You can't you can't do that here. So we have really strict. Yeah, restrict guidelines.

That one that one always drives me nuts here. Like it doesn't even have to like it blows me away. I know why I actually know the technical reason. But you're like, alright, you can take this prohormone it's banned in all sports. Here. It is clearly performance that you're taking one step in front of endorsing Donald like, you could just go buy this anywhere. You Amazon, any drug like any store, and athletes get in trouble for it constantly, because we're like, I bought this a Walmart. Yeah, constantly.

Yeah, especially if you can get it that easily, then you can understand why. Yeah, but we've

also like been saying this for 100 years now. Like for years now we're like, don't, there's not third party certified don't take it, we actually I actually have a review paper coming out somewhat soon on tainted supplements and cross contamination of supplements. So you have to look out for that in the next two or three months or something like that coming. Yeah, but yeah, any of these things, I guess maybe to reiterate all those things. I'm a major fan of, of any supplement that works, if used appropriately, but just buy them from highly reputable. And the thing you want to look for their what's called third party certified. So in the States, that's either NSF or informed choice or something like that. But you want to make sure that you're a third party certified and this certified them again, contaminants as well as sometimes that the active ingredient is in there in the the the listed dosage. So pay more. Yeah, they're gonna be more expensive. Yeah. You're literally getting nothing. Are you getting 10x or 100x? Or 500x? What you think you're taking?

Yeah. Which is even more concerning? Potentially. Would you like a snapshot of where you are on your health journey right now with personalised advice from me on how to improve, go to your total health chat.com and take my 62nd biohacking quiz, and I will send you your free health score and personalised report with recommendations on each area of my shift protocol for health optimization. Shift contains the five key pillars you need to focus on for optimal health, sleep, hormones, insights to track how to fuel your body with the right nutrition, light hydration and breath work and training for your body and mind. Go to your total health check.com To find out your score in each area and get personalised recommendations from me on how to improve it takes less than 60 seconds. And you can take the quiz as many times as you want to and track your improvement by following my guidance. Simply go to your total health check.com To get started. With training going back to training, so faster training, right? This is something I'm interested to talk to you about particularly in the context of women. I personally love to train fasted in the morning. I have heard you talk about the fact that protein is very helpful post training to to help with muscle protein synthesis, but also actually to facilitate recovery. Can you kind of clarify I've heard other practitioners talking about the fact that actually faster training isn't good for women, and that that isn't great for hormones and then there's some research that actually obviously exercise being a hormetic stress and inducing autophagy that this can help faster training kind of amplifies the effects of things like the NAD salvage pathway. I personally do it because I enjoy it and then I will try to get some protein and some carbs post training as quickly as possible. One thing I have observed myself and with clients and my age in their in their 40s is that if you push that envelope too far and you do foster training, and then seek a comeback or have a shower, I want the dog so do The school run I give my kids breakfast to do the school run and then I have breakfast actually, that seems to have an impact on my menstrual cycle and shorten it a bit, baby because the stress is too high. What is the what have you found? What does the science say? What should we be thinking about in terms of foster training and what we need to do for recovery and optimization.

In general, it is a viable option. That is just another variable. But it shouldn't be treated as anything more than that. And the reason I say it is, there is no special benefit to it, you listed a couple of the best benefits. I like it better, my stomach feels better, it fits my schedule better, great. It's totally viable, it is equally effective as training you do not need to have, especially for the clients that you listed. There's no reason that you have to be fed or have to eat something prior to or during training. None. And there's clear enough evidence on that. It's also clear enough evidence that he's not going to do anything special for a toffee G or fat loss or anything like that, that those studies have been run enough.

Sizing faster. So actually, you get the same benefit. And autophagy if you've eaten versus when you fasted.

Yeah, totally. Okay, 100%. And again, no matter at all, in terms of general global health, it's not going to improve, it's not going to mitigate cancer, we have no evidence to suggest it's going to do anything for like enhancing longevity or anything like that. Not in the cellular health, it's not going to do anything. If that mate helps. Now, the practical such switch is, hey, I train better when I'm fasted. Well, great, you'll get better results for your training. But yeah, if that means you're more likely to do it, or, like all those things are awesome. And so the way that I want to express people with faster training again, is like if it makes your life easier, awesome, great. If you hate it, don't do it. It's not that big a deal either way, and you don't have to go out of your way to do it by any stretch. Nor should you. You also don't have to worry about like forcing that banana down and in your stomach before you work out. If you're just like, Oh my God, I feel tired. If you like it and you feel better, amazing. That ain't gonna be just fine. Weather, same thing token of like eating postexercise. Even if you train fasted. You don't have to worry about smashing that protein and carbohydrate. And immediately afterwards, if it takes you 15 or 20 minutes or 30 or an hour, it's probably still even fine. Now, I probably wouldn't wait many more hours than that. But if you're just like, oh my gosh, I did this crazy session in the garage and like, I can't hear it. Okay, great. Give yourself that it's gonna be just fine. Like your body is pretty resilient. You're gonna be totally fine. Just don't let it lead into exactly what you mentioned. Yeah. No, no, no, stop there. Like, we gotta get some fuel in here first. But yeah, totally viable option. Um, this is actually a good example of something I changed my tune on, he would ask me the question five years ago, I probably would have gone on a tirade about how it's gonna reduce performance and etc. That doesn't research tonnes of tonnes of studies to come out. It just doesn't. It's equally effective for fat loss. It's equally effective for everything else. If you feel like it feels better than then totally do it. Like we don't go out of our way to ask people to do it very often. But if it's something that they like doing then I don't go out of my way to change very often either anymore. But very, very rarely often. So generally, people know Yeah, some some of the folks I work with closely who are like still in like a five or six meals a day kind of people. They some of them even train in the morning fasted because you're just like, I just I'm not hungry in the morning and whatever. And I Okay, great. So an entirely up to you. But I would say don't worry about feeling like you're leaving anything on the table, physiologically, by eating before during your session, either. You're fine either way.

Either way, it's good to know. Thank you for clearing that up. And then finally then looking at in terms of longevity, let's say someone they're not an athlete, okay. But they want to perform at the highest level. They're busy. So you can take most women that fall into my category that have kids run businesses, things like that. They're going to have a reasonably high allostatic load but you want to optimise for longevity, or would that programme look like in terms of optimising for strength, muscle mass, cardiovascular health, anaerobic capacity, all of those things? What would how much time should we be spending and things like zone to training? How much time lifting and what rep ranges? Would you say?

Sure. So I'd say in general, for women, this answer changes a little bit. Because again, one of the things we started the conversation with is you do need to account for bone mineral density. And so most men is there. But like, if all the people we've run through like he says, it's very rarely a problem and men, and if it is, it's kind of minor. With women, it's either not a problem, problem or very large problem. So at least a huge chunk of them, like we got to account for it. If you look at the things that are going to predict mortality overall, as well as you just take a look at physiology say, Well, what are the tasks that my body needs to do to maximise longevity? I'm going to end up with a list that looks something like this, in my opinion, I think you should be able to perform continuous exercise with no break whatsoever, for 45 minutes plus, right call this

level. Yeah, I don't care. So but that could be just going for a walk, that would be particularly challenging. Totally.

Okay. Yep. I think you should be able to. And the reason I'm saying this is, you're probably like, well, that's, of course, that's easy. Yeah. But you'll find a lot of seven year olds who can't do that.

Okay. Okay. But what about so if you are optimising looking ahead, you're in your 40s, and you're thinking, I want to be really fat 8590 year old, then what level of activity? Should you be able to sustain that exercise for 45 minutes? I'm gonna get there. Okay, okay, you're gonna get there?

Great. Again, we're looking at here is, so here's what I'm doing. And I'm taking you to the end, and saying, What do I want them? 90? And then I'll tell you how to get there. Okay, cool, right. So you need you're gonna want to be able to move for 45 minutes straight with no breaks. Yeah, right. Whether this is your walk around at Disneyland with your kid, whether this is you know, gardening, whatever, whether you're, whether you're going to exercise classes at the gym, so who cares, right, you're 90, you're out there train 45 minutes that takes tissue tolerance, which means your body has to be able to handle in your joints have to be able to handle the movement nonstop for 45 minutes, okay? I don't care what particular intensity that is. But you should be able to do that without having to stop and go home, and even take a break here. Like we're walking around the flowers, looking at flowers with your granddaughter and just like I gotta sit down why we're walking in a slow pace. What? Okay, great. So 45 minutes consecutive, to, you need to be able to get your heart rate very, very, very high. This is the max capacity here, and then handle that, and then be able to bring that back down. And then probably repeat that again.

Even at 90. Yes. 100%. Okay, okay, that's interesting.

Yeah, 100%, right, or what are you doing, isn't it you're, you might be alive, but you're not gonna able to do more, you're not gonna be the most you said optimised. Right? What's an optimised?

Do you want to run up a flight of stairs?

Totally. Or whatever, right? Like you want to? You know, you have to walk up the stairs? Did you just walking up there? But now you're 90. So that's gonna take you to max harvick? Who cares, right? We need to be able to lift things up overhead, you want to put your luggage in the aeroplane over your head by yourself and not be that person. So in the whole train down and everybody's there, right, you want to be able to do other functional things like that. That's going to require strength and require strength, particularly in your lower body as well as grip strength. And by the way, if you look at the research, all these things I'm mentioning, stand out very clearly, as independent predictors of mortality. So leg strength is extremely predictive of overall mortality, grip strength is predictive, VO to max is predictive of mortality as well. And in fact, if you look at all the data, the data on this, in fact, I have right here. I haven't even taken out the box yet. But my friend Peter ta just came out with the

Kool Aid. Yes, brilliant. Yeah, really good.

Does yours have a cool thing, and then

the same thing, nice shirt off,

sorry. Um, he goes through a tonne of this stuff, you can see a lot of stuff in there. But you're gonna want to build to do that. And then lastly, you want to make sure that you don't hurt yourself. And one of the biggest issues that older individuals deal with is breaking a hip. I can't remember the exact numbers but it's something like once you break a hip life expectancy is like six months or something absurd like that. That's not true. It's something

crazy. Isn't it? Like something nice at least 30% You're more likely to die in the next 12 months, wasn't it? It's quite scary that you would go on like that. It's Carol thicker. Yeah, it is.

Yeah, it's awful. Like breaking your hip at 75 is a really scary problem. Why is how you stop yourself from that is you have to have strength in your legs, but in the you also have to have power. And the reason is, if you grip or you're going to fall you have to have the foot speed, the balance all these things like similar, right? So it's a balance issue. You lost your balance, yes, then to you have to have the speed and power to get your foot out in front of you to be in the right position to stop that fall. And you have to have the Essentrics strength to brace it and thought from it. So balance is there. Coordination, speed, and power, and then strength are all there. And so now like these are the things you have to do. So when you back calculate the training programme to get there. You have to make sure that you're in a position where your joints are not extremely compromised. Right Okay, so you don't want to lose balance, the way that we want to work on balance is, in fact, if you look at jumping, I'm gonna go a little bit sideways, we're going to go right back. My friend Tommy wood, had a favourite come out really recently looking at delayed onset Parkinson's. And they're late onset Alzheimer's and dementia. And one of the things he found is like, there's six independent factors that are best at preventing those things. And they're including things like physical exercise, of course, social connection, brain games, and then when the other things he found was proprioception. And the biggest connection he had that was nature. And people are sort of said all the time, and you're like, Well, why isn't being out in nature so important? Well, the one of the reasons is, because in order for your body to continue to maintain optimal balance over time, it needs to be challenged proprioceptive ly. And typically, when you walk out in nature, you're not on flat concrete anymore. And so you're looking up, you're looking down, you're looking out in front of you, that landscape is moving and changing inside. And so you're you're continuing to maintain your your proprioception, and your understanding of changing environments, there's a smell, right, the smell is out there, there's a light, there's a sound, all these are changing, and you're typically in your office all day, every single day, you have very few stimuli, like getting out in the natural world. Now all those are changing. And so my biggest recommendation for maintaining balance over time, is that out in nature when you can and or pick a sport or activity that is not controlled and linear. In other words, like the treadmill and lifting weights is not enough. And it can be a good thing. Sure, whether you're reacting to something else like tennis is fantastic. Or pickleball or surfing or jujitsu, or any number of other things where you have to react to an external stimuli. Right? That is a fantastic way. So when we're looking through like a global health programme, I'm looking for something that checks that box of am I responding to the world somehow and then adjusting my body as quickly as I can? Do you think there's any benefit

Peter tear talks about rucking so he'll put something on his back like sometimes I'll go out with a weighted vest you think we'll get there next? We'll get that okay.

Yeah, cuz that's your I'm gonna start reacting a tonne to the world. There you are a little bit walking up and down. But you're not really adjusting to anybody coming in like you would in tennis, that ball is coming quickly, you have to sprint two steps and hit rucking you're walking. So I'm not doing it there. So check number 1am I interacting with the world in some form or fashion. There. Check number two, we have to be able to maintain energy output over a long period of time. Enter your rucking, you want to rock fine. I don't worry about zones. I'm like not nearly as concerned about Zone Two is Peter, like not even in the same stratosphere disconcerted him. My general rule of thumb is can you do this thing nasal all my breathing. So if you can close your mouth and breathe into your nose, then I don't care what heart rate you're from.

That's really interesting. You say that? Because I was gonna ask you about that. Just while we pause that nasal only breathing. I seem to to maintain that and my heart rate go up quite significantly. And yeah, I've heard people say actually, nasal only breathing is going to keep you in zone two. It doesn't.

No, no, no. I know. So people who can do nasal only at 95%. Alright. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's typically if you're doing a smaller activity, and you're getting an extremely high heart rate with that, you're probably very inefficient with your nose. And so I would say continue to do that. And what you'll notice is your heart rate will go way down over that, and you'll notice that so you probably have a difficult time actually getting an air through your nose. And that's why your body is going.

So the heart rate is going up. Interesting. Yeah, it's probably allergies, maybe.

Yeah, or you're just not particularly good at it.

I'm just not good at nasal breathing. Today, but we'll get there. But I enjoy AC because if I go out for a nasal only breathing run, I come back in that kind of Zen like meditation state. Yeah, it's very chilled. Yeah.

Yeah. It could be a co2 tolerance issue too. So you'd have to you'd have to sort of Tinker but yeah, that's that's fine. A rock is fine. I know. He's super into it. Andrew super into it. Like, whatever. That's great. Like, I'm never gonna complain with people getting outside moving around. So and with

the zone two, you mentioned there before we move on that you're not as concerned. I have to say like three hours of zone two a week. feels quite boring to me. You don't feel that's that necessary? Because I rather do things at high intensity and kind of have fun and move on.

Yeah. No, I don't think it is. I think we have under appreciated the need. to move at a low intensity very much. So I'm totally fine with this big push to get people to move at a lower intensity for longer, absolutely fine. But I don't think you need three hours of zone two. I think that's actually in exchange for a lot of things that you should be getting in your life anyways. So

well, what concerned me around it is I will walk at below the target where he's talking about with my dogs for an hour a day. So I'm getting seven hours, but I'm not pushing it to the edge of where he's seeing. And so then I'm like, right, well, then I have to do that I have to create an incline to actually get there. I mean, spending three hours like on a treadmill or something, which I don't have time for

now. So that's why I think in your case, you're being a little bit too literal, with the numbers, right? The concept is like, Hey, yo, you should be moving at submaximal. That's more than rest. And you need to be doing it just go back a little bit and think well, why? Why don't you listen to? What why, like physiology, or millions years of evolution. Do I need zone two?

We used to walk right for endurance for miles for camps? Sure. Release a move. Yeah, we used to that's the

thing, right? It's all you all you're doing is trying to replace. And why does it have to be between 133 beats? 100? That's total nonsense, right? Like, it's just a, it's just a rough number. They're gonna give you like a somewhat calibration, right?

That's what I was really looking at is is it scientifically driven? Or is it just to get people to me?

It's, well, it's both right. But here's the deal. Do you know what your max heart rate is?

Roughly? Oh, I do actually I've got it because I have my via to done reasonably.

Okay, great. Well, then, your zone two is based on that. It's nothing else. So you go back and calculate your own zone until you might be in your own zone two. Yeah. You so unless you know your max heart rate, then there are no zones for you yet. Those are just like super, super, super rough ideas of basically trying to be like, Yeah, this is like, more than just doing nothing, but not, not high intensity stuff. One thing I will say is, I do think it's important for people to do things besides just high intensity training for your overall health ages. And I think it's very important to do submaximal longer duration. So just don't get too caught up in those specific numbers. It is what it is. If you're walking an hour a day, every day that you're fine. Like I'm not I'm that box is checked, in my opinion, especially if you're doing most of the nasal only. I'm totally fine. Like you're, you're I'm off the board there, you clearly can produce 45 minutes of consecutive work at a lower intensity. your cardiovascular system is gonna be fine there. You want to double check it go for a super light jog for 30 minutes, and check your heart rate. My guess is it's gonna be pretty chill. You're gonna be just fine. Alright, so I don't get like nearly as caught up in those things. I know the data are coming from I totally get it. But here's what I can say is I'm going to show science. I'm actually scientists, this is my world. We need to move more at a lower intensity. And it's not just like standing standing. It's not going to get you there. Like you're standing this is cool. But like, that's not going to be a

yes, no, you're gonna get although I think for mums, you are getting it because you're running around all day. Right? I might stand. Have you

ever done an activity tracker on a mom? Yeah, it's

mine. Mine is crazy. Yeah, exactly. And I only to be honest, because I get back pain. If I say,

oh, no, I like it. My angles up. I go up and down. I'm not against them at all. Yeah, I'm just trying to be like, Oh, I stand so I don't need to shoot. No, no, no, you're not gonna get it. No, like, my wife doesn't do a telephone to every challenge done. You're like I have a three and a five row. And then she prior to that she spent 16 years as a preschool special ed teacher. So like, she ate her caloric intake, despite the fact she's 45 pounds smaller than me, she's 20 kilos smaller than easily or more on her caloric intake is always higher than when because her like her, or she's probably 1000s of calories a day in basal activity, and I'm not right, I'm generally like training or I'm right here. So I have to go out of my way to like, move around the world.

She didn't have to make sense. So it's about flexibility is better as well. Like when I was doing a lot of the metrics, you know, when you look at like the toddler squat, and I could still like you know, just go straight down touch like my like bomb to heels, because in reality, like how much time I spend years like playing on the floor with the kids. Do you know what I mean? Getting up and down. I think women have a bit of an advantage in many ways. But if you're the carer right, it might be that the dads doing it. Right. Do you think there's a lot of benefits to young children?

Oh, yeah. You can call it that. Yeah, so you want to get that stuff in you to kind of rehab you want some balance stuff and you want some sustained effort all day. Now the one thing I will say is just to cap this one, the thing about like, moving physically around like with the kid example, you're gonna get a lot of movement in but that's still not continuous on stop movement, and that's still a thing you need to get in. Right? So even if that's one day a week where you do your, you know, 45 minute hike or something like that or whatever. Like, that's, that's totally good. Um, you need to do max ra stuff at least once, preferably two to three times a week, we're getting up to a max heart rate, don't really care what that is, do whatever you want there, get it up to there two, three times a week. By the way, you need both of those to maximise your view to max, that continuous steady state stuff, as well as your interval things. So if you want to do it more than three days a week, okay, I'll allow it. But I'm gonna I'm gonna start paying attention to some things more to make sure that you're really handling it. Well. Obviously, our pro athletes do it with no issues whatsoever. Especially our UFC fighters, like no issue with that whatsoever. Getting it there. But that's that's a unique example. Those are more of the

outcome. How many intervals? Are they doing that when you talk about getting the max heart rate up? Are you talking about doing this for three to six intervals? And coming back down?

Yeah, doesn't matter. It could be one.

It's just a case of reaching it.

Totally. So you're gonna go out and you're gonna do a five minute you know, sprint on a on an assault bike? Amazing. That's great. You want to do like a spin class? Oh, great, you're gonna probably get reach car Max. All right, they're couple of times, if not more, you want to do any number of like circuit training or kettlebell like, great, great. It doesn't really matter. Get it up once, get it up twice gonna rob a bunch. It's got to touch that, though. At least once. And that's why this is what allows you by the way to do it like four to five times a week, or whether it's more like yo one is good. Yeah. So if it was a long, hard one, one is maybe good. But if it's just a little like one time touch, you could do that multiple times, you

could do it multiple times. And what about when you look at like some of the research and it talks about enhancing via to max by doing this, like four minutes on four minutes off, because then you're not getting to as well, I suppose you are getting to as higher heart rate because you're doing it for longer, right? So it's going to push the heart rate up. Whereas when you're going really, really intense for a short period. So both of those are going to optimise for vo two Max coupled with zone two.

Yeah, yeah. And this is like, we typically say one to one ratio. So you want to go four minutes max effort for a minute off. That's one one refresh ratio. Those are the old days, you just call those one mile repeats or 800 metre repeats? Right? Like in track? That's fine. You know, so like, great, you want to do 30 on 30? Off? Awesome. You want to do 30 On 90 seconds off, right? Like it doesn't really matter doesn't matter? No, you can, there's enough evidence to show all those are viable options, all of them. So you can do combinations, that's typically what we do, by the way is like combinations on these different ones, one minute on one minute off, like absolutely fine. The key with all that stuff is you got to like when you're on. But the longer the break, the harder you have to work during the set. The shorter the break, the harder it is sometimes to get to max heart rate, because you're just hanging on there. There's a lot of nuance to these things, they are trading slightly different things. But all of them are viable options. For the average person, I generally recommend having a variety. So you don't get to you know, quote unquote, bored of each one of them, you can even do 20 seconds prints. Where do you want to be? It depends on if you're running, if you're on a bike, if you're cycling on a bike, it's not as hard. If you're sprinting in the real world, you're gonna reach a higher max heart rate much higher if you're sprinting the real world. And if you are sitting there spinning a bike, and then you go to something like an assault bike, and that's gonna be a little bit closer because your arms are there and there's resistance so hard to reach max heart rate and 22nd sprint on a bike with light resistance, you're gonna have to put the resistance up pretty high, which is totally fine. Yeah, so you want to go light on the pedal, then you got to go probably three or four minutes, or whatever, depending what you're doing, it's so hard to get there. And the last thing to sort of round it out, you need to do something that addresses some muscle, muscle gain, muscle hypertrophy, and then muscle strength. So for the average person, this is, you know, two to four times a week, lifting weights, you need that for your bone mineral density. Ideally, there is some sort of impact and landing occasionally, remote mineral density, but it's axial loading primarily, and your your reps and sets. You know, you get to play between sets of, you know, one rep at a time to up to 2025. And I would generally recommend some spending some time in the one to eight reps per set range, and then spending some time in the eight plus range and you could do this. You could split those up, you know, in the day, you could split those up different days per week. You could split this up in like different months or phases of training. You can really do this in a number of different combinations, but do something in the lower rep range to challenge strength and tension. This is also what's going to be important for connective tissue and joint integrity and how What do you need for bone mineral density, and then the higher rep range is going to change, that's gonna eventually start getting into mitochondrial benefits, it's going to start getting into muscular endurance, also very good for joint health, and will also drive muscle hypertrophy, not very much strength, but you'll get a lot of hypertrophy. So that's how you're going to give yourself a nice well rounded impact. It's important lastly, to do some of those things at the lower rep range, because that's the only way you're going to get close to power. So you got to move fast and powerfully to get that power stuff in your foot. So I'm

just going to go right. If you look at how fast you can like move and sprint compared to when you're at school, very speeds,

speed for sure. Yes, speed is what drops offers them something as a function as a proxy, that power goes straight and holds on a lot longer. For sure, but speed is going to go quickly as you age.

And for women as well. Like I've heard some practitioners talk about the fact that she needs to focus more on strength as oestrogen is dropping, and, you know, doing these more endurance straps have reps have less of an effect. But it sounds from what you're saying, Actually, you want to be doing everything you want to be doing some strength and periodized training doing some muscular endurance time hypertrophy.

Yeah, but you could do them at different times of the month, if you want. That define. If you want to in a different again, you could you could periodized those sorts of things. So you focus on one thing for six weeks, and then switch your strategy for the next six week block. That's great. You also do the day by day. So different phases on Monday, different phase on Wednesday, different emphasis on Friday. Those are first one's more of a classic linear periodization. The second one's more of a classic undulating, daily undulating periodization.

And you can do like that, do you not see any difference? Like say, for example, people just get bored, right? So they're like, one day I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna do string sets. And the next day, a few days later, I'm going to go and I'm going to do 10 to 12 reps, for example, you don't notice any difference in results between somebody who says, Actually, I'm gonna go and do a block of eight weeks of strength versus that other modality?

Yeah, there's a decent amount of evidence on this. And they're both very effective. Interesting. Yeah, the more you focus on one particular thing, the more focus you get on the detrimental, you're not doing anything else.

Yeah, you lose them. And muscle mass and size, right is important for glucose metabolism. So you don't just want to focus on strength.

Yeah, but you focus on strength, you're still gonna be fine. There, because it's gonna be enough to drive enough muscle mass and most people, and the biggest thing is you're causing a whole bunch of contraction of skeletal muscle, which is going to then demand a whole bunch of glucose, so you're going to be totally fine. Unless you're gonna be differentiating. I wouldn't worry about that too much. Your training muscle, you're gonna be fine. Unless you're really under muscled. Yeah, but you should be just fine. The

benefit. Cool. And I know that Peter talks in the book about the fact that you really want to be optimising in your 40s and 50s. For an elite vo to max, he seems he has this off the table in there than I've seen on the internet. If you really want to go in fit, because you're fighting right there. You're fighting against the clock. It's going the other way. Just curious for your thoughts on that. Do you think someone who's maybe listening to this and they're looking at the via to max in their 40s and they're thinking shit, I should have done something a bit quicker? Can they make those gains if they really pay attention at that, to make enough of an improvement?

Yeah, super trainable. If you have to Max's is very, very trainable. We've done a number of studies in this. One of them in particular. Peter, me to put this in his book, I'm not sure. But I'm like we did a study in Stockholm, Sweden with a bunch of 90 year old cross country skiers. So these were world champions in the 1940s and 50s. And they were continuing to race in their 80s and 90s. And their VLT maxes were in the mid 30s. In some cases, even crossing into the 40s. Yeah, and that's millilitres per kilogramme per minute right. Now, those were obviously a combination of nature nurture, right, so you're talking about probably Doran genetically elite, and also trained for in this case, literally 60 years of continuous training, right. But nonetheless, it's not crazy. And we see this happen. We have hundreds of studies showing improvements in vo to max with 60 year olds, seven year olds, like this is not particularly difficult to continue to see improvements there. But yeah, you definitely want to start pushing there. What Peter's referring to is the fact that once you drop, once you cross that 40 ish range, you do start to see drops in vo two Max every single year in general, but more recent data have actually come out to show the vast majority of performance drops with ageing are directly tied to reductions in training. Such just just to say that, like if you continue to train, then the drops and physical performance. They're still going to go you're never gonna see a 75 rule list. Long as a 25 year old, like, on average, right, it's not gonna happen. But you can greatly blunt the detriment in loss of physical ability. With training.

It's awesome to know. And a great note to finish on. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Are there any last points you want to share? Before we link to where people can find you more about your work? How can people keep up with the science that you're publishing as well?

Yep, sure. Instagram and Twitter at Dr. Anna. Gov. The best places and of course, I don't do much active work on there. But my website is kind of a link to all things hubs. Any of the companies that I sort of talked about are of interest, they're all on there somewhere. So this is a website I manage myself about once a year. So it's

amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been it's been fun. And you've given me a lot of food for thought. And I'm sure you've inspired many of the listeners too. So thank you very much, Andy. All right, my pleasure. Thank you for listening to today's show and for your interest in health optimization for high performance. If you're new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that you can get a free health score and report complete with personalised recommendations on how to optimise your sleep, nutrition, fitness and resilience in the top link in the show notes below. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Links to everything we talked about are also in the show notes and if you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe for more