Recovery Strategies + Motivation | ETP#170

In episode 170, we chat about the connection between recovery and motivation in training. We provide updates on how our training is going, talk about different ways to measure recovery, and share some tips on using recovery tools. We highlight the importance of knowing your own stress triggers, the role of a positive mindset, and using methods like physical therapies and active recovery sessions. We wrap up by talking about how relaxation and how even laughter can play a positive role in keeping you motivated to train.

Timestamps
00:00 Introduction and Updates
15:47 Exploring Recovery Metrics
38:53 Subjective Factors in Recovery
51:02 Physical Therapy and Recovery Tools
51:50 Active Recovery Techniques
58:29 The Role of Relaxation in Recovery
01:04:45 Concluding Thoughts

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Transcript

0:26

What is going on guys? Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode 170. Brian and myself are going to be talking recovery and motivation to train, which is going to be encompassed in some of the more subjective parts of what we touch on with recovery. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of today's episode, as always, Brian, can you kick us off with some updates, please? Done with the second cycle through my full body program. So four weeks in now, given that I'm doing two workouts a week, it takes me two weeks to get through one cycle, which is four workouts. So four weeks in, I'm done with two cycles. It's been awesome. Continuing to love it, continuing to progress week to week, matching and hitting PRs all time on some lifts. fitting in all my cardio without getting beaten down or losing motivation to train, all very apropos for today's episode, which is obviously a huge change from last year where I was overdoing it and losing motivation to train. balance being one of those key factors for me and kind of finding the right dose of each thing. And so all of these factors, things that we're probably touch on today in the episode, the bulk of it. But yeah, really happy with the program so far. Had a lot of really cool feedback from people on Instagram about it too. A number of people coming out of the woodwork that I guess have been following me for a while, but not super vocal, hitting me up in my DMs and saying they're excited to watch me go through this, that they've been doing similar things or contemplating similar things. I put a poll up on my story two days ago asking, you know, what do you guys think is going to happen? I gave four options. So basically going from training proper optimal hypertrophy based on the evidence for a number of years, and then dropping to a two times a week full body program with only 16 total working sets per week. I broke that down in my post and then noted that it's two sets of quads, two sets of hamstrings. between two to four sets each of back, chest, and shoulders, and zero to two sets each for biceps and triceps. So extremely low volume. And I asked, well, what do you guys think is gonna happen? Am I gonna gain muscle? Am I gonna lose muscle? Am I gonna gain strength but maintain or lose muscle? I kind of put that in the same category, because the focus there being that I'm gonna gain strength and the muscle being less important. And then what was the final category? I can't even remember now off the top of my head what the final category was. I had gain muscle, lose muscle, gain strength or maintain across the board. So the final category was maintain across the board and maintain across the board actually won out by a lot. It was close to like 70 % of people thought I was just going to kind of maintain across the board with a decent percentage of people thinking I would gain strength and then lose slash maintain muscle. That's kind of my my thought is I think I'm going to gain strength and maintain muscle. and then I've had a few people ask me like, would you consider that a win? Like if that happened? And I think I absolutely would because at this stage of my training, I could be training optimally and I may not even gain any muscle despite training what I think is optimal. I mean, I may like, it's really tough to say it's like, do you want to go pursue optimal for that chance that maybe there's a little bit left in the tank or are you good with this proxy of strength going up and assuming that because strength is going up that muscle mass is more or less being sustained. So that's kind of where I'm at with that. And just really excited about the training and the journey of going through this for the next six plus months, seeing what happens, continuing to focus on cardio, blah, blah, blah, all that good stuff. so that's that I'll be quick on my next updates here. I leave for London tomorrow, Wednesday, and I don't come back till Tuesday evening. So we'll miss the podcast next week. I, I'm unsure about what working out is going to look like in London. And I actually think it's completely possible that I do almost zero working out. That wouldn't be my ideal plan. Like in a perfect world, I think I'd love to hit one full body weight training session and like two cardio sessions, maybe one like hit sprint thing and one longer steady state with a bunch of walking around the city and stuff like that. so I have no idea how that's going to go. I'm having say, very minor anxiety about it, but also at the same time, kind of not giving a fuck and realizing it's just seven days. But yeah, I mean, for somebody that, you know, lives their life, working out and structuring their day across what exercise is going to be done each day, it certainly throws a small wrench into things. And then beyond that, then the last two updates, Paragon has new cycles starting on 10.7. it's a continuation of hypertrophy cycles. We're going to drop some different repeating movements in. went from good mornings as our hip hinge. We're going to go to barbell RDL RDL one and a half reps. so a few changes, but, but mostly just another kind of six weeks of really solid hypertrophy work before we get into the winter and go into strength cycles. And then, I just dropped a program for an app called boost camp. I was on their podcast, about a month ago discussing hybrid training. And so they asked me to write a program for the app. It's a static program. It's not like an ongoing subscription, like what I do with Evolved and Paragon. So it's an 11 week hybrid program. Really cool opportunity for me because on this app, they have static programs written by Dr. Helms, Alberto Nunez, Dr. Pack, Milo, GVS. Yeah, I'm sure. think... Alex Leonidas has a program on there too. So a lot of really kind of highly respected people in the industry have programs on the app. I'm excited to be part of it, really amped on the program. It's a three times a week lifting, four times a week cardio with one rest day. So one of the cardio days is on a lifting day. And I think it's gonna be a great program. I mean, it's just 11 weeks. You can repeat it obviously, but go check that out if you're interested in something like that. and it's just, different than anything I've offered on Paragon or evolved because it has two days that are strictly upper body and then one lower body day where there's some arm work on there. And so everything I've written for Paragon in the hybrid format has been more evenly split or like even lower body focus because of our female based audience. So I think that having a program that focuses more on the upper body while doing hybrid training is as unique and kind of more fits in line with the way that I personally. prefer to do the hybrid training approach. anyways, those are my updates and I'm very curious about going on what's going on with you. Yeah, so the biggest thing with me, I am on a D-load and we know how uncommon Aaron D-loads. And what that means is things are not good. I'm just beat up, like really, really beat up. And I had this note here, are, know, quote unquote, growing pains, like potentially a real thing. It doesn't really make any sense why I would be so beat up. had... 10 weeks off, you know, I really only got back into training really hard, like maybe the final week in August, potentially the final week in August. And here we are like a month later and like I'm on a deload already. so I don't really know, but I mean, my body's just screaming at me. My forearms inside insides have actually improved a lot since I stopped using my Versa grips, lo and behold, which that was a truth that I really didn't want to be true, but significant. pain improvements by not using them. Outside, forearms. What do you think about it is about the versagrips that's causing that pain? I think potentially something about because I'm not as tightly grabbing things, I'm not putting the proprioception into these tendons from the muscle or something like that. And then they're just getting yanked on because of this loose hook kind of thing. That's the only thing that I could think of. mean, of course, it's purely conjecture, but. What happened is I forgot them one day and I'm like, fuck, I got to train without my grips. Like here we go. And I had like, like my pain was like a nine out of 10, like letting go of things after like a set was like excruciating. And then that training day was like a three out of 10, like a minor amounts of pain. And I was like, whoa, this is like way too, way too obvious for me to not like experiment again. And like the next time I trained with him, like there was minimal to no pain. And I'm like, okay, something's going on. And then I posted about it. I had like five or six people DM me the same exact thing. They had like really bad inner elbow pain and they didn't use their grips and it completely was gone. That's so weird, because I actually would like really, I would think the opposite. I'd be like, you're over gripping. Yeah, yeah. And then therefore you're causing pain versus being able to loosely grip and use it as a hook. It's very, very interesting. I have to keep that in mind for other people experiencing. my knees and like for me, like I never have any issues, you know, and, I put in a pendulum squat back. I only did two sets and my knees were completely blown up. Like it took like five days for them to stop hurting, which I was like, when my knees start bothering me, like that's when I kind of get concerned, you know, other things like elbows and stuff. like, you know, I can work through it, but like, I'm not walking around with like blown up knees and being afraid that in 10 years, I can't like get up and get down and stuff. So That's where I was like, okay, let me just deload and take a day back. Maybe I'm just like really inflamed or something. But listening to my body, which led me into my next thing here that I am starting or I have started officially as today, a mobility program. It's called the moves method. I have no affiliations with them, but it's just something that I bought and I'm starting. Jenny had started it last week and it's. It's more like a more dynamic movement as opposed to like real like static stretching and similar movements to like yoga, but without the. Baggage of yoga, perhaps for someone like me, you know, I respect everyone and stuff, but I don't really care to hear the stories about the universe and shit. I just want to like get into my hips and move, move better. And that's exactly what this is. It's like movement without like a religion attached to it. And I'm like sick. OK, cool. so the thing there is I've just watched my mobility like rapidly deteriorate. And this was something that I was always like really curious about. I think it's just a size thing. Like as muscles get bigger, like you lose space between the joints and like, like I would just go to do things that I would like normally do and be like, fuck, I can't do that anymore. Like four months ago, I could do that. No problem. And like now I just cannot do that. So that has me like, Concerned to the point where I'm like I'm going to do something about it and make sure that I'm not losing this mobility because I don't want to become Someone I never wanted to become I guess I would say so I'm taking action on that and it's I'm happy I'm starting it, but it's been pretty brutal And it's I'm almost like embarrassed about how the lack of mobility and how fast it's disappeared per se Yeah, that's interesting. I feel like the common sentiment is that people that are large and muscled humans have poor mobility. And I feel like there's been a whole... group of people that have tried to demonstrate that that's not true through using like functional movement patterns in their training, if you want to call it that, and almost like doing weighted mobility through different training paradigms. And you know, you would even see this back in the day with like the bodybuilders in the pre-steroid era who would be doing like behind the neck presses where the bar would go like literally to the back rack every single rep. and like rest on your back and then press all the way up and then rest on your back and press all the way up. And not that that's a functional movement pattern, but putting your shoulders in that extremely externally rotated position under load obviously is going to increase some mobility around that upper scapula area. And so, yeah, I find this very interesting and curious to follow along and kind of see where your mobility ends up from from implementing it. What's the time commitment daily or weekly? It's only like 15 minutes, which is really nice. And obviously once like, mean week one, so it's the lowest and like week two and three, comes up a little bit and then like week three and four. But I think the maximum is only like 20 minutes. So my plan is to like do it first thing in the morning, you know, get up, have some, have like, you know, 20 ounces of water and then get into it. And then last question there is, is your mobility more limited in your upper body than your lower body? like, when you go to touch your toes, are you feeling that that's worse than it was months ago as well? That's the one mobility thing that I have. Like if there was one mobility thing that I had, it's like a 10 out of 10. It's that. So that one is hasn't really changed, but that's because it was so good before. Like I could normally put my hands flat on the ground in front of me with my knees locked. Yeah, but yeah. But like if I needed to like sit, you know, whatever is the most appropriate way in 2024 to say. How do you sit on the floor with your legs crossed? You know, whatever. don't know how to, perfect, yeah. Like I couldn't, I don't even think I could sit there without falling over. Like hips are that bad sort of thing. Yeah. I feel that. All right, cool, anything else? No, just I have some coaching roster availability. So people coming out of their summers for the northern hemisphere entering any kind of winter game, holler at me. I'm interested to talk about it. Any of my southern hemisphere people with summer coming looking to get lean, holler at me. You can DM me on Instagram or head directly to my website or even the link below in the podcast show notes will have all those links in there for you as well. All right, so this episode was kind of ironically triggered by an Instagram story I put up last week around how training has been feeling more like a job than something I enjoy lately, which in hindsight, with conversations that Brian has has sparked before, is how I typically know it's time to de-load when I'm psychologically like out of the game. And what's really interesting is you kind of This is the beauty in having like a coach or friends and stuff like Brian is like, you can't really see these things yourself often, but it becomes pretty easy when people can see them for you. So we decided to have the episode talking around recovery and how motivation to train can potentially lead into that. And we're going to break that all down. And Brian has some things categorized out into more objective metrics for recovery and a little bit more of the subjective metrics as well. And we'll parse through them all. Yeah. I thought it was really interesting when you posted that story. And I was I was personally very curious about it for the reasons that you stated in the introduction piece where we were talking about our updates, how you noted that, you know, you literally just took six to 10 weeks off after your hernia coming back. And so being at this place now where you're four or five weeks back into training hard and feeling like your motivation is down and your body is kind of rejecting the level of volume, effort, intensity, whatever framing you want to use for that. I just thought it was really interesting. And so I figured we could compile an episode here using you kind of as the backdrop, but providing some kind of larger lessons and insights into different ways that people can enhance their recovery as well. So I think starting with objective measures is probably a prudent move. And so I listed a bunch of them. I think we can kinda go over them real quick right now and then touch on each one individually. So in objective factors, I put calories, sleep, resting heart rate, HRV, training load, alcohol, supplements. What do you think? Did I miss anything there in objective factors? I think we have stress later down the line, I believe, but that is one that I would also bring in that would be, it's hard to objectively quantify. mean, let's be real, it's not actually. You get a four point saliva cortisol test, it's pretty easy, but it's super accessible like a lot of these other things are. You know what, I'm actually gonna add blood work to objective factors, because that's a really good point. I actually put stress under subjective factors, because, yeah, I I guess it's both. Like, it's a way that you feel, but it also can be quantified. So stress likely belongs in both buckets, and maybe the objective one is using these blood markers to assess your level of stress versus just being like, my workload is so high. I feel so stressed. So is that fair? Should we do it that way? I think that's very fair, Cool. So yeah, why don't you touch on calories as the first thing here as far as objective measures go and we'll just kind of work through them pretty quickly each. Yep. Let's do it. I think this is one that calories followed closely by my preferred way of doing this, which is, be completely up for argument. carbohydrate is criminally underrated, especially in our fitness industry, right? We hear so much about all of these other recovery metrics and people talk about recovery, like the wearing the Norma tech boots or the TheraGun and a lot of these things in there, and these things are not unhelpful, but they are not nearly as helpful as covering the base of the pyramid, which is adequate caloric intake and carbohydrate. And what I find ironic is when people talk about recovery, people say all these down the ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th items down the list. And they're doing these things for recovery. But if you were to ask anyone, how many carbohydrates are you eating? How many calories are you eating? People have a fucking clue. And it's they're putting like the horse before the carriage or the carriage before the horse or whatever that same goes. Yeah. But but I want to really, really stress this one. Like if you're having recovery issues, if you're finding that, know, you're not you're super sore significantly longer, like start with the big rocks. And that one is, are you actually eating? sufficient amounts of calories and carbohydrate to match your training demands and volume. And then what you'll see is that if you're not eating sufficient calories, there's the downstream effects from that. They're going to affect some of these other objective factors that we mentioned like blood work and sleep and things like that. So when we're looking at blood work, as far as determining levels of recovery and or stress on the system, obviously we have a C reactive protein. Would you say that that's a big one that you would look at creatine kinase? Yeah. Creatine kinase, it's a proxy, but it's not super reliable in this context, in my opinion. But C-reactive protein, yes, for sure. So C-reactive protein is a marker of inflammation. Yeah. Primarily. Yeah. And then what else would you look at personally if you're having a client that's experiencing what you're experiencing? What would you look for on a blood test to kind of have an objective assessment of whether they are in fact recovering or not? So one that comes to mind is a serum cortisol, which again is just a snapshot, but we know where it should be. And if I always have clients get blood work in the mornings and if they're fasting serum cortisol, is it like a seven or something like that where we expect it to be at like a 13, 14, we'd be like, okay, they might have a flipped cortisol curve, something like that. If we have like a super robust thyroid panel, a reverse T3, if cortisol is pretty high, will get flopped and the body will divert the conversion of active thyroid hormone to inactive thyroid hormone. So that's another one that we'll look at. then we might see some of the more inflammatory, or sorry, not inflammatory, we might see some of the liver enzyme proxies, ALT and AST, which is also found in muscle tissue, elevated more than we would expect, especially if there's a really quality diet, no use of... There's a type of medication, I can't remember the word for it, where it's harder on the liver. That would be one that we wouldn't expect, so that's another one that I would potentially see elevated as well. And then just to close a bow on the ALT, AST thing. So if someone were to have trained close to their blood test, they would also see those markers elevated. So it's probably important for somebody to take, what do you think, 72 hours off, 48 hours off prior to taking the blood test to get an accurate reading. I do 24. You could do 48 or 72 if you really wanted to. It's rare that I see even at 24 like a considerable elevation. But even so, with the panels that I'm using with clients now, we also order a GGT, which is like gamma galucto transferase or something like that. I don't remember specifically. But that one is liver specific. whereas ALT and ALT are not liver specific. They're also found in other tissues. So it can be influenced. a really good point. Yeah, so the GGT would actually not be influenced by training prior, would it? Yeah, so I need to get that one, because I feel like I'm the guy who, so I read a study when I was looking at this last year that showed that they found elevated ALT or AST, one of the two, I think ALT, even after a week from a heavy leg session that caused like significant soreness, a week later you were still seeing elevated liver markers. So, That tells me that, okay, if I do a moderate heavy weight training session, even 72 hours prior, I could still see some elevated markers. And so I always have my ALT and AST running in like the high twenties. And if you listen to Peter Attia, he's always talking about that number being like below 20 in the teens. And so I always think, mine's high, blah, blah, blah. But when you actually consider that I'm not taking a full week off prior to testing that, I think it changes the perspective. large, large, large bit, I would say. All right. So then we have sleep. I don't know if we need to touch a whole lot on this. I I'll refer out to Matthew Walker, who I've learned the majority of my sleep information from. He's the guy when it comes to sleep science these days. But I would just say that the quality of sleep in my experience and from what I've found is probably just as important as duration, if not more important. Where do you fall on that and what would you consider quality sleep and where is the line where it becomes low quality sleep? It's hard because it's individualized, right? I think you know when your sleep is quality because sleep is like this very positive thing in your life, right? Where you're like, man, I can't wait to get this incredible night of sleep. It's gonna feel so good and then I can't wait to wake up tomorrow. If you're a poor sleeper, sleep isn't something that you're super excited about because you know it's gonna be kind of like a little bit of a battle and you're like, how many times am I gonna wake up tonight? Am I gonna fall asleep fast or am I gonna be laying there thinking about work and shit for? 30 minutes, right? So based on your kind of personal relationship with the thoughts of how going to bed feels is probably a good proxy for if you're sleeping good or not. As someone who only very recently started sleeping like really, really good, sleeping through the night, like when I call it time traveling, right? Like when I go to bed at whatever and then I like go to sleep and then I like. you know that my alarm goes off or something wakes me up and I'm like, holy shit, it's morning. Like literally just traveled through the night, like unimpeded. That is what I would say is like quality sleep. If you're waking up, I was like a habitual wake up about twice each night to pee. Sometimes it would take me a little bit longer, maybe 20, 25 minutes to fall asleep sort of thing. But that's one that you, we all have our pretty much normal baseline of what sleep is like for us. If you notice that you're getting up more often, you're having like work dreams or stress dreams, that's another bit of like a proxy for higher cortisol or higher stress environment, or maybe an under recovered environment, that can be another helpful telltale. That's awesome that you're sleeping through the night now. I know you've always struggled with sleeping stuff. so for me, like my normal is wake up one to two times a night. Like I can't remember the last time that I slept through the night. It must have been like in college or something like literally 20 years ago. So for me, one to two times a night is normal. I fall asleep super easily. Like my head hits the pillow. I have a podcast on the next thing I know. Somehow the podcast is done and I don't remember any of it. So falling asleep is super easy. I wake up one or two times, go pee, fall right back to sleep pretty easily. So pretty much a non-issue there. I do think it would be better if I didn't wake up one or two times a night to pee. A number of things I can do on my end, such as avoiding liquid and food closer to bed, et cetera, et cetera. I even heard Huberman say at one point that we're supposed to stop drinking boluses of water at like 3 p.m. So we're only supposed to have eight hours of the day where we're really consuming water highly. So you think of the time that you wake up and then eight hours later is basically where you cut water down to a much lower supply. My problem with that is that I find myself extremely thirsty between three and 6 p.m. So even if I stopped drinking at six, which is kind of my goal, I have all this residual water still passing through my system from earlier in the day. So something I personally need to attack if that's something I want to do. My question for you is how has your sleep been in the last couple weeks or week as you've kind of realized that your motivation to train is low and you're having all of these kind of things pop up on your body, like your forearms and your knees and things like that. It's been slightly lower volume and that's just because I had been staying up a little bit later. Sometimes like there was one night Jenny didn't come home till like 11 or something like that. So was up a little bit later watching like a show one night a little bit later sort of thing. like volume was lesser but the quality is still top tier. So no, no, no tangible difference really. That's interesting. I would have thought of that as one of the things that would be contributing to this whole milieu of what's going on with you. All right. So resting heart rate and HRV, I'll put into one category. Resting heart rate is something that I think is worth looking at in the morning when you wake up under similar conditions. So I like to get up, do my morning bathroom, and then... go to my couch where I take my HRV, check my resting heart rate, stuff like that. So it's a very consistent pattern there of how I do it and when I do it. And I'm building some thoughts on resting heart rate and I don't want to go too deep into it right now, but oddly I'm finding that sometimes when my resting heart rate is really low, like in the high 30s, like 36, 37, 38, 39, I find my energy is actually lower than when my heart rate is in the low 40s, like 41, 42, 43. And my app thinks that that's bad. Like my app tells me that my HRV is getting worse because my heart rate is higher, which makes sense. Like if heart rate variability is the distance between beats, if you have a lower heart rate, then your heart rate variability is going to be higher. So I'm still kind of wrestling with why it seems like I feel better. when my heart rate is 42 than when it's 37, even though my app tells me that that's worse. So I don't quite know the answer to that, but subjectively, I certainly feel better at the 42 heart rate than the 37. So in general though, I think a good way of looking at this is that whenever your baseline is for your resting heart rate, you pretty much wanna be aware when it jumps more than five beats above what your baseline is. So if my baseline was 42, then when it goes up to 47, I do tend to feel poor. Probably more poor than when it's at 37, if that makes sense. 37 is yeah, worse than 42, but 47 is way worse than 42. And so this is a way that I've seen with clients as well to assess recovery is they'll text me and be like, hey dude, my heart rate is eight beats elevated this morning. I had a drink last night, I've had some stress and... blah, blah. So, so then we're like, okay, you know, your heart rate's elevated. Don't worry about it. If you want to train, train, use motivation as the key, but we'll come back to that and see how your heart rate does over the next few days. So there's definitely this linking of resting heart rate with HRV. Like I was saying, the lower the resting heart rate, the higher the HRV. So you kind of have that balance there. but I think just in general, like I wouldn't overstress what those numbers are telling you. maybe just worth keeping an eye on and watching the trend. over a few days if you feel subjectively that things are starting to slip a little bit. What do think? Yeah, especially like heart rate is a great heart rate and respiratory rate are great proxies for like if you're getting sick and stuff. So if they're drifting a little bit and you don't feel your best, like you very may, you very well may very whatever one of those two comes first. It might just be like getting sick. Your body might be like battling, you know, a small bacterial infection or viral infection or whatever. And you don't really realize it because it's not to a degree that it produces. sufficiently tangible, you know, symptoms for you. But there's a number of reasons that could be Yeah, for sure. I've noticed the same. Like if I'm even fighting something small, like I'm like, my ear is kind of clogged and my throat hurts today or something. Like even though that doesn't affect my general sense of ability to work out and manifest effort into things, it does impact my heart rate a little bit. So it means that I'm operating at like a submaximal level. So worth noting in those types of situations. So in your situation currently, how is your resting heart rate compared to where it was a week or two ago? It's always the same. So I actually take mine when I do my blood pressure, which I do not right when I get up. But like I get up, I have some water, I'll do some of my like, you know, general house duties shit. And then I like sit down and take my blood pressure and it hasn't drifted. It's always three to four beats like in either direction when I take it a couple times. All right, so the last three I have under objective factors is training load, alcohol intake, and supplements. And I don't know that we really need to spend a whole ton of time on too many of these. Alcohol, I think, is a very obvious one that doesn't really need any explanation. If you drink alcohol, your recovery decreases because it affects all the other things down the chain. Training load, I think is an interesting one. Do you want to touch on any of that as it might relate to you? Like has your training load been higher? Do you think it's possible that your training load escalated too quickly after you were in your period of time off and then you went back to feeling good that maybe you could have gone a little slower? What are your thoughts there? I do that. That I think is the most plausible. However, my training load, which I will convey as training volume actually stayed low. My thought was I'm going to keep my training volume lower and then use it as a tool of adding additional stimulus if I need. So I really only doing two sets for everything except biceps and triceps. Cause I would only do one exercise for them. So I was like, if I'm only doing one exercise, I'm at least going to do three sets. but everything else is just two sets. so my, my training volume was considerably less than it was in like may. but I do think the speed at which I returned to loads is likely what caused it. However, in my defense, I was really honest in my progressions. I progressed the way I always normally would. If I top the rep range, I add load like, and that's exactly what I did. but I was just really like next week, I topped the rep range, I add week or I add weight, I top the retro range again, I add weight and I was back to, and in many cases, even at higher loads than I was in May, where things were not nearly as exponential in training load usage. And I think that is likely what did it is just like a pretty heavy ramping of exposure of like my system. to increasingly heavy loads in a pretty short period of time. And that is the most plausible thing that I can think of. Yeah, I agree. And I think that what I see with clients in similar situations is that it's usually either a ramping of volume and or effort too quickly, or it's like a cumulative effect of just, you you've been training for nine to 12 weeks in a row progressively, and it's just your body needs a break. either one of those could certainly be plausible. It's tough to nail it down, but I think that keeping an eye on your motivation is likely a way to preempt ending up at a place where you're too far behind the eight ball than where you want to be. And then supplements would be the last category here. And man, we've done full episodes on supplements before. Do you have anything you want to throw in here? I'm kind of good just leaving it where it is. I will quickly cover your bases. Your creatine monohydrate for our northern hemisphere, Northeastern United States, Northwestern United States, vitamin D this time of year. Magnesium is another one that I've found a lot of utility in myself and with clients. Just a little bit note there. You end up having to dose the magnesium significantly higher than what a lot of labels and stuff find. What I've been using, eight to 10 milligrams per kilogram of elemental magnesium. So that ends up being a little bit more. And then past that, maybe like a zinc, maybe a good multi with like methylated forms of folate B12. But past that, just don't, have, I just, have a, this is my personal opinion, right? Based off with what I see with clients and stuff, I just don't see things being like big needle movers. And I and what I ultimately see on the other end is clients like pissing away money on all these like click baity things that that do effectively fuck all for. I agree. think that's well said. I would focus primarily on those big movers as well as far as cell movements go. Things like you said could enhance your sleep are huge. And then if you're not getting enough sodium, like I know Kim, my wife, has periods of low blood pressure where she'll get up from the couch and be like, whoa, you'll have to stop for a second because her blood pressure is so low. And so I'm constantly reminding her to make sure she's taking element or some sort of sodium supplement so that she can get that in. so depending on where you stand on that spectrum, that could be extremely helpful for you as well. Definitely. That's one where I will admit right now, like I'm cramping a lot. Like it's just, it's biting me in the ass and I'm having a hard time balancing, getting enough in. Yeah, makes sense. All right, so now we'll move on out of objective factors into subjective. And so this is a lot of us just talking about the way that we feel about things, which is I guess what subjective factors are. So I have outside gym stress, which could be work or family, motivation to train, focus and energy. Maybe I'm missing some, but that kind of, think is a big enough bucket for us to explore a little bit. What do you think about? this stress bucket here of subjective factors. Yeah, the only thing I will add outside of that that actually put in the bottom, but it makes a lot more sense to go up at the top is your mindset. I remember seeing research on this. It would have been great to pull it up for this episode that a single, let's call it unit of stress or a stressor presented to multiple different people resulted in different physiological interpretations of the stress based off of the person's mindset, philosophy on life, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So that is one that I will honestly use a lot. And I know I've talked about this on the podcast before. I use a little bit of like anchoring. We're like right now, you know, I'm in a, it's Q4. We have a very, very busy Q4 of things going on, you know, and I'm under a lot, but I tell myself like, in a year and a half, like there's gonna be children and this is gonna be like, fuck all compared to that, right? So like, you can handle this sort of thing. So I will use that anchoring and positioning a little bit to help accept more of what's going on. And I think that plays like a really large role. Cause you can look at it of one of two ways. You can be like, I have this training to do and it's, you know, blah, blah, blah. I don't want to do it. That sort of thing. Or another one that I like to use a lot personally is like, I could have a real job, you know, like. I've had really shitty jobs in my past. Like what I do right now is this is a dream compared to like jobs I've had in the past, you know? So that's one where the subjectivity of just your mindset and framing around it can really help with like the interpretation of that single stressor and how much you let it like scale your, I can't find my words today, how much it impacts you per se. Yeah, no, I think that's a really, really good point. And well said. I was going to talk about framing as well in the context of the same stress can be perceived entirely differently between two different people. And I see that with my wife, like, like on a daily basis, there are things that to me are like, it's just something I have to do. And I put it in this bucket of like, yeah, it's going to take me 10 minutes to do that. And I just have to do it. And then there's the the other framing of somehow it being too much to handle on top of everything else that's going on. And some of that could be that my wife just has a bolus of things on her plate to do anyways. And so when there is that little five to 10 minute thing that to me feels like nothing, it can feel like a more monumental task for her given everything else that she has going on. And so I understand that too. And I think that that also goes into the whole milieu or bolus of different stresses that are coming at you from different directions and kind of how you manage those. so, so yes, perception is important. Framing it is important. Like I love what you said about like even the worst day working this job is still better than like the best day working for someone else at a desk wearing a suit and tie or some shit like that. I mean, I couldn't even imagine like the ability to be like, it's 2 p.m. and I want to work out or it's 10 a.m. and I want to work out and then all. handle that podcast later or this client check in later or whatever it is, it's that freedom and autonomy is insane. definitely framing is important there. But stress is stress. And I think that when we come back to these subjective factors and things that can impact your recovery, it doesn't matter if I tell you that you should be framing your stress differently. If that stress feels like stress to you, then it is stress. And so then you have to factor that in to the way that you program everything else in your life, you your training, your sleep, your personal time, your whatever, whatever. So I think that's important and at some level, like you can do whatever you want to do to try to mitigate that. But if you feel it, then it's real to you. And so I think that that's That's the best way to put it. If you feel it, it's real to you. when, you're trying to compare your kind of management of a training load to someone else or maybe even a training partner, right? And you in that, your family dynamic is different from like your training partner's family dynamic. maybe family and their life is just like this uplifting thing and there's zero stress in a family life. And maybe for you, family life is insanely stressful. That could be reason enough. Like Brian said, all of your stress goes in the same bucket, right? Whether it's physical stress, like training, right? Emotional stress from poor relationships, psychological stress from however you compartmentalize things, right? There's one other one that I can't think of. did physical, psychological, emotional. I think that's the three. It all goes in the same bucket. there's different varying amounts of each one and each person and are all have that individual different response. Yep, yep. And then to finish out subjective factors here, I have motivation, focus, and energy. And these things just seem to be downstream negative impacts of having higher stress. So what I like to do with motivation, focus, and energy is look at them as a way to preempt the stress, almost like, okay, my motivation is low. Why is my motivation low? And work backwards from there. or I'm struggling with mental lethargy and focus today, I feel low energy in general. Why am I feeling this way? What is happening with my sleep, my buckets of stress and my lifestyle in general that are causing these other factors to occur? So it's like, it can work both ways. can be like, I'm experiencing these, why am I experiencing these? Or it can be taken from the other side of I'm experiencing these, maybe I need to make an adjustment. in my training or in my lifestyle so that I don't experience these, this lack of motivation or whatever it is. So like what I mean by that as practically is that I might feel low motivation on a training day and depending on what other factors are going on in my life, I may take that low motivation and say, I am disciplined. I'm going to work out anyways. Or I may look at that lack of motivation and say, yeah, given everything else going on, I probably need to take a chill day today and prioritize myself and not use discipline to do this workout today. Yep, very well said. All right, cool. So now we move into PT style recovery tools. That'd be like physical therapy. I see a PT. I love her, Nicole Fox. She's awesome here in Boulder. And we do some of this stuff. So I wrote down foam rolling, needling, cupping, scraping, stretching, Theragun, massage, basically all of these kinds of tools that you can use to subjectively and objectively increase recovery, I guess. PT is interesting because there is tons and tons of legit data in the research on the effectiveness of a number of these tools. And then there's kind of some less encouraging data on some of them. And so when it comes to these types of things, I like to use the ones that I feel personally provide me the most benefit and also have some science behind them. So of those ones that I listed, what do you think is most effective for you and am I missing any? Yeah, so are you missing any? I don't think so. I mean, we're missing those Normatech boots, but like I would put them pretty. the the the frozen air thing that you go in that they used to have in PB where you would sit in cryo chamber. Yeah yeah. we didn't have like, I don't think as crazy as this. Did we not put sauna ice bath in here? Okay, got it. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Yeah, sorry. Ones that I like, I mean, I'm a big fan of massage. The let and. Foam rolling and massage are the ones that I use most often. However, I have a kind of a different, I would say, definition of these. I don't necessarily say these are as much as recovery tools, but more body management. And I think that's where a lot of some of the less favorable research on it's like, massage shows that it doesn't improve your recovery time from training performance. But if your shoulders all jack the fuck up. and you need to go in and like press and stuff and you're all out of position and like we can have this massage that can help restore some of that function. I think it's pretty effective for that thing but I think it's not just this encompassing thing that's going to increase your recovery per se but if your body is in a position where it needs to be managed because it's pretty beat up I do find it to be quite effective acutely but it's not going to be a magic fix per se. unless you go like twice per week or something like that. Yeah. And I go like once a month. So, so that wouldn't be the case necessarily. But, I actually, I do think of that in recovery. Like if it was that exact situation where I'm like, my shoulder feels a little out of place. Like I need to press overhead. How am I going to recover in time to be able to do my session? Then I'm like, that massage or that needling or that cupping or that adjustment or chiropractor I should have put on there too. All of that stuff could contribute to my ability to recover faster. And then implement that workout. So I get what you're saying and that it's body maintenance, but it's it's also kind of recovery as well. I use all of it, I guess less massage, I used to do a lot more massage when I lived in San Diego, because I had a guy. But now I pretty much go to the PT. And we do cupping, scraping, a little bit of stim, some heat, and some needling. And so I I don't know, man. I love that stuff. I especially love the needles. I don't know what it is, but when the when there's like a tight spot in my back or in my glute med or wherever it is, and then a needle goes in and it's like hits the spot just right. And it gets that little release where everything kind of jumps. It feels so much better in the days to follow that subjectively for me, I'm like a true believer in this. And so I go once a month, like scheduled routinely. But the other day, I was helping this old lady across the street moved these really heavy ass marble desks out of her car. And I was like, like not what I want to do at like 4pm on a Thursday or whatever it was. But but I did it. And then the next day I woke up and my low back was like, like I couldn't even bend over to put my socks on. And I knew like in that moment that I had screwed my ql up because it's that that bring the knee to the chest but you can't put the sock on thing. And I knew like, I was like, I have to go see my PT. And so I called in, I got a special appointment. They found like four spots in my glute med and my TFL that just like completely jumped and readjusted. They went, cupped my QL, all that stuff. And then literally like a day later I was, I was feeling so much better. So, so I'm a believer in that. And I think that when it comes to that sort of stuff, it's just whether you find that it's helpful for you. because some of it's likely psychological. Like I know there are physiological advantages to it I can feel them, but I also think there's like a belief in the fact that it's gonna work. And that certainly must help as well from some perspective. So anything else to add on PT style tools? No, I think that's one where the practitioner is really important. I've had some really poor massages and chiropractors, people who do cupping and stuff, I've had amazing ones. And I will say it's light years between the capacity or capabilities. For sure, I agree with that as well. All right, so now we're in active recovery. And this is, think, it's an interesting one because you have people on both sides of this scientific spectrum that feel like active recovery is absolutely necessary. And you have certain sports where it's done religiously. Like in CrossFit, it is the norm. Like if you have a day off where you're not training, you're doing some sort of quote active recovery. And I think even the way you define active recovery can change as well. So like I wrote down easy exercise, like walking, zone one cardio, light mobility circuits, things like that. And then I added in ice bath and sauna. Those could have gone into PST style recovery tools too. I think it probably fits in both. The science is very much up in the air on an easy exercise. and light mobility circuits. So I'll leave ice bath and sauna separate for right now. But when we're just talking about doing easy exercise and hoping that that's going to in some way improve your recovery, it seems like the research is very torn on that. so initially I looked at a number of different individual studies and it was like, this one seems like it's helpful. This one seems like it's not, like it was all over the board. So then I found a systematic review on don't remember how many studies it was. It was a ton. And the review basically concluded that, I'll just read it. The review resulted in a wide variety of findings indicating the vagueness in active recovery approach and outcomes, making it difficult to draw conclusions. The review demonstrated the active recovery interventions lasting six to 10 minutes revealed consistently positive effects. The appropriate intensity was inconclusive and blood lactate clearance. appeared unreliable. So that I found really interesting because I would have thought that if you're less recovered, your resting blood lactate would probably be higher. So I'm surprised that that seems unreliable. The review suggests that there are positive psychological outcomes from active recovery sessions and need to determine if active recovery should be individualized in its application. Weak evidence regarding the efficacy of post-exercise active recovery. Future research is needed. to determine accurate markers for fatigue, physiological recovery, performance, and markers of intensity and duration. So basically all of that says no one has any freaking clue and maybe psychologically it has some benefits. So that's kind of the way I see it too is like, I'm a fan of active recovery for the sense that it gives me psychologically something to do that day without feeling like it's fatiguing. So I like to do 15,000 steps on a day that I'm not training or something along those lines. And I consider that active recovery. Back in the CrossFit days, I used to do mobility circuits where I would have like barbell mashing for a minute and then I would slowly do the air down for a minute and then I would do some like banded hip stretches for a minute. And like I'd create this circuit of six to 10 different things that I would do for two or three rounds. And that also seemed to subjectively help how much it actually did help versus how much it was just psychological. I don't really know, but personally I enjoy it and I do it. Before we get to sauna and ice bath, what are your thoughts on active recovery in the way that I framed it? I think you framed it well. I think the downsides of active recovery are when people are just calling it active recovery and they're just doing more training. That's less intense than their normal training, but it's still training. Like walking, great, induces the parasympathetic, right? If you're having issues with your recovery capacity, it's highly probable that you are sympathetically dominant. We go on a 20 or 30 minute walk. we will induce more parasympathetic activity, which is wonderful for that response. The light mobility circuits I love. really, I mean, that's effectively when I opened that podcast with my notes, like that's what I'm doing. These mobility circuits is effectively what they are. And that kind of, for me, I'm using a bastardized term, I guess, of body management, but I think it plays a role in it. If you go into your training sessions and like your knees are really like creaky and cranky and they're popping and all these things and you don't feel good, it's not going to leave you feeling really confident going into your working sets, you know? But if you go in, if you're doing these active recovery sessions in this mobility and your tissues are sliding, gliding past each other like they're supposed to, you're able to get into depth without any kind of things feeling like they're pulling and you feel good, it's probably very positive psychologically for your performance. So I do think it plays a role, not so much in that, you know, that light mobility is necessarily clearing lactate or something, but your body is being better taken care of, the soft tissues, and that you're probably going to have longer term output from that because of less things going wrong. Yeah, totally well said. Okay, so ice bath and sauna. Both of these seem to have some really positive research as far as their ability to help in recovery and specifically with the ice bath reducing inflammation, which also seems to be the main problem with the ice bath when it comes to strength and hypertrophy training. So tons and tons of research now basically showing that if you ice bath within what, four to eight hours of a training session that you're likely going to diminish muscle protein synthesis, essentially decreasing muscle gains and strength gains. So the ice bath I am a bit tepid on. I personally don't really do them once in a blue moon when I'm in Vail or something and we have a big day of skiing. They have this thing called the executive cycle, which I love. It has like a a steam shower and a sauna and a hot tub and a cold dunk. And you kind of just go around in this circle and you do all of them and I'll do the cold dunk during that time. Cause it's, pretty awesome. But, but in general, I don't mess with the cold and I love the hot. I know you're a big fan of the sauna as well. It seems like the sauna gives you all of the same hormetic benefits for longevity and systemic inflammation reduction and all of that stuff. that you would get from the ice bath, but without the negative impact on hypertrophy and strength. And so I steam shower and I sauna. We have a steam shower in my house. So that's just more convenient for me, but same idea, increasing the heat shock proteins. And so, yeah, I think the research is extremely positive. We both use them and I know we both don't use the ice bath. So what do you have to kind of thoughts on that and anything to add? Yeah, I love the sauna. You know, increase perspiration rate, right? And sweating is our third detoxification pathway of getting toxins out of our body, right? So that's one that I feel like people don't take advantage of enough. Obviously, you're going number one and number two. So those are typically decently taken care of. I feel like it's the sauna has less potential downsides than the ice bath. Now there are times where I think that the ice bath could be used when you understand the context of your current training, right? Let's say someone's in like a contest prep or something. You're not building muscle because your calories are so low. But maybe you're running into like inflammation related things like you could eat. I could feel it. See it being like is a lesser of evils there because but it's important that you understand the context like I'm not getting a great muscle protein synthesis response because I'm in a reduced caloric environment sort of thing. In terms of recovery, I think it masks negative recovery. I don't think it improves recovery. So from the research that I've seen is like, if you're playing like a for example, a sports tournament and you have like four games over a weekend, the ice bath can blunt that inflammatory response, which will then kind of slow down the negative cascades that would impair your performance for subsequent performance sessions. So that has a pretty good use case there, but because we're generally speaking in terms of like, you know, hypertrophy and stuff, I think it's overused if you were to extrapolate the average person that uses ice bath probably wants more muscle and then they're actively consistently partaking in something that's making that goal harder. So from that context I would be use when contextually appropriate and I would then even further that argument that say the majority of those people are never going through a constrained energy deficit for getting lean and would never really have a proper less detrimental context to warrant their usage of the ice bath. Cool, dig it. All right, final section here, relaxation. I put in here, have TV, movies, reading, dinners out, and then social activities. with social activities, I had to put a bit of context because I think that social activities could in fact be a stress if you're an extremely introverted person or maybe you're social, we act. activity and socially activity. You're doing social activities with people that you don't feel extremely comfortable with. And so I think that's the for me, that's the big factor that determines whether a social activity is relaxing, or a stress is the people that I'm with, and how comfortable I feel with them. And so that one is certainly up in the air is whether you consider that to be relaxing or not. I think I know where Aaron stands on that. But I think things like TV, movies, reading, and dinners out with your significant other and stuff like that are all net positive. Yeah, yeah, just finding time for yourself, I think is a really good way to put this and how you would want to spend that time that's not dedicated to paying the bills or training or something like that. And that's the way I really like to bucket this. I'm a bit on a island here, know, nine out of 10 times, I just want to spend that time by myself, you know. But I have my reasons why, so. Cool. Yeah, we we totally don't need to dig into that. I think this is the least necessary section to really to really dig into. But yeah, doing I love the way you frame that and that doing things for you that you find personally relaxing are going to be positives. And then if those things bleed into feeling like they begin to feel stressful on you, like being around people that you don't feel 100 % comfortable with, then suddenly it's no longer recovery for you. I think one that probably can be added in here is laughter and that laughing is such a recovery tool. mean, there are literally studies showing how laughter over time in acutely as well can actually literally flush all this negative stuff out of your body. And so... Putting yourself into a position where you're around people that make you laugh or watching things that make you laugh, stand up comedy, all that is super duper positive. And there, I mean, you can just feel it. Like when you come away from an hour of being with people that you just crack up around, just, it's a completely freeing feeling. And so I think that that's something you should try to facilitate in your life if you don't already. I am so glad you brought that up. That's been something that it's like a recurring thought I have in my head and then it like drifts away and I always forget about it. If you're having like a shit day or a bad week or whatever, put on the Netflix standup comedy specials. my God, does it change how you feel? Like, especially like there's so many good ones now and so many like just top, you know, people who are at the top of their game and just absolutely hysterical. It will come. it'll turn around your day and just because you're laughing so hard and like you said, it just like floods your body and you feel so, so much better afterwards. And then the last question to close off here is, now that we've gone through this and kind of use you as this avatar in the beginning to kind of frame this episode, what is your plan going forward? You're in a deload week, what happens after that? Yeah. So I like to, I'm a little bit, I guess, different in with my DLOS. I just stopped training, right? I'm just not one. I'm not going to go into the gym and do like 70%. I'm rather just going to take it off. And what I've done is I went in, I did my zone to walk yesterday, 45 minutes. did 30 today. I'm starting this, this, I have started this mobility thing that I'm doing. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I'm taking those days completely off of training. and it also lines up with me changing my training also. And I think I'm going to go with a training program that has a little bit more rest built in to be able to manage a little bit more. And the real thing is I just have to remember that once I start hating it, it means I need a deload. Or once I stop wanting to train, it means I need a deload. But because I have this Framing of this year in this short period of time. I'm really trying to maximize it But fortunately by the time I need a D load again Undefeated should be opening and that'll just be like this huge flood of hopefully positive emotion, you know And I'll be able to like train in this gym that I picked all the equipment out for and stuff and hopefully we have this like incredible training environment So that might just completely flip a switch for me there But yeah, that's the biggest thing. When I start resenting it and it feels like a job and it becomes more of I said I was going to do this and that's the only reason that I'm still here doing this, that it's like, hey, pump the brakes. You probably just need to fucking deload. Do you think that people could be losing motivation to train and feeling like it's a chore and a job without having any deficiency in those areas that we discussed above, such as subjective and objective assessments of recovery, et cetera, et cetera? Like, could people just, for no real reason, just be like, I'm just like so unmotivated to train right now, or is there always something that we can look back and kind of tie it to this or to that? I think if you don't have a goal that could easily bleed into that, you know, cause I mean, that's happened to me before. Like one of the most empty I felt in training and stuff was after I wrapped up that my big, you know, Natty goal at the end of last year at the beginning of this year, like January, like, I mean, a year and a half went into that. I reached it. I was happy with it. But then I remember like one day I was in the sauna and it was like a particularly hard day in the sauna. And I was like, what the fuck am I doing in here still? Like, why am I even doing this? You know, and then that bled into a lot more of like, why am I training so hard? You know, and it was just cause I didn't have any goals to anchor against. So I think that's a really big one. but I typically find if you have a goal and you're feeling that way, there's probably other signs that your body might be beat up. you, there's probably gaps in your recovery. Sleep might be off in those sorts of things. I don't, I mean, I could be wrong, but Yeah. think if everything's all green lights, you know, and you have a great goal and you're just not feeling it, there's probably a hole somewhere. Yeah. You know, I find that psychological fatigue almost always preempts physiological fatigue. So I will feel unmotivated to train before I notice the physiological signs of that that we've discussed. And so it's short. Like, it's not like it's like I have weeks and weeks of just trudging through psychological defeat and still continuing to train. But, you know, The more that you have to use discipline, think cumulatively that can add up and cause an effect that is ultimately negative on your psyche. And so whatever that means for you, whether that's setting a goal that keeps you motivated, don't really know. I don't have like a great conclusive wise statement to make. But when you start feeling that psychological fatigue or that lack of desire to train, I think that that's a point where you don't wanna push through for too long. Like a day or two, a week, like that's fine. But I don't think you need to go multiple weeks of trying to grind and use discipline as a way to continue training. Yeah, unless you're like the only time I can think of is like contest prep in the final weeks outside of that. Yeah, yeah. Outside of that. Yeah. I think you're spot on. Cool. All right, well next week I'll be in London, so we'll skip a week and then we'll come back and have some more updates for you guys. Sounds good, so as always, thank you guys for listening. Brian and I will catch you in two weeks.