Episode 6 - Biohacking is Killing Your Gains: Why 1970s Recovery Still Wins in 2026

 2026 research is clear: timing is everything. If you're freezing your muscles right after a heavy session, you're blunting the very signal that tells them to grow. We're diving deep into the "Hypertrophy Gap" and the myth of high-volume training in the new episode of The Natural Edge. 

Transcript

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In the 70s, recovery meant a steak, an apple, and eight hours of sleep. If you were lucky, you had a whirlpool and a bottle of aspirin. Now let's fast forward to 2026, and the recovery room looks more like a NASA lab. Infrared blankets, cold plunges, rings, watches that tell you if you're allowed to train before you even open up your eyes. Here's the million-dollar question. Are we actually recovering better or are we just buying more gadgets? This weekend I was at a show and I saw athletes obsessed with the recovery scores and gadgets, and they didn't pay a single attention to how they actually felt between workouts or if they were even recovered. So today I'm going to be bridging the gap between the golden era of grit and the 2026 biohacks. We're comparing the tools of yesterday with the tech of today to try to find the natural edge in recovery. So let's dive in. Hey, welcome back to the Natural Edge. I'm Sully, your host. And before we begin today and discuss the billion-dollar question, is the industry improving your gains as much as you might think? I want to do a quick thank you. Thank you to the listeners that we're now bringing to the Natural Edge podcast. Now, our YouTube station, it's always been doing well. But a suggestion was made to me by a couple of people to start adding it as a podcast. And as of right now, our podcast is getting four to one the number of listeners till we have viewers on Natural Edge. So I want to thank you out there listening, as well as the people who like watching our podcasts. So I just wanted to let everybody know right up front, we appreciate you. So let's talk about it. This past weekend, I was at a show and I'm backstage and I'm talking to the competitors, and I saw people wearing five different variables on their wrists and their fingers. I saw people with portable infrared straps, and I even heard people debating their recovery scores and how they look at the recovery scores before they even step on the stage. Some of this stuff I actually had to go back and Google and look up because a little of it, it was new to me. But when I talked to them and I'd inquire about training volume and how many recovery days they had and their sleep patterns, I kind of got some blank stares. There was even one competitor that was lamenting over how much she was going to have to spend now before her next show so she can improve upon her placements once she heard how expensive these infrared blankets and all this other stuff was. And it got me thinking, is it necessary and is it any better than what we had back in the day? Now, I don't want this to be one of those old school versus new school things. What I want this to focus in on is what are the variables you're looking at? Do they work? And if appropriate, can you get away with a simple old school approach over having to buy a gadget? So that's what today's topic is going to focus on. Not whether as old timers were better than the newfangled gadgets, but are they necessary and what overlaps? So let's begin. What I see in some of the gyms I travel to and on a lot of these social media posts is about the gadgets and about the cool new things that are out there. I don't see much the same level of conversation about their warm-up practices or data tracking or some of the more simpler processes that are involved. A lot of it is the high-tech gadgetry that's out there. And when I say gadgetry, again, I'm not mocking the new innovations. I think a lot of them are pretty cool. As a matter of fact, if I had the money and I felt like doing it, I might add some of these myself. But do we need to? See, back in the old day, we had a steak, a glass of milk, a thermometer, and two fingers. And somehow, those guys back then built some of the most iconic and dense physiques in history. Now, were they the envy of modern day bodybuilders? I'm talking natural, not enhanced. Probably not. But they were developing at a good rate, and the recovery was on point. So today we're bridging that 50-year gap. Is that $5,000 coal plunge, IV drops, tourniquets actually helping you? Or is it just draining your wallet? So let's take back that step back to the 70s. Back when I first started training, recovery wasn't a product you bought, it was just a state of being. We knew that growth happened in the quiet hours. We didn't have an app to tell us that our nervous system was fried. We had to learn the language of our bodies. In fact, the first barbell set I ever bought was a weeder, plastic, and plaster kit. Don't even make manufacture them these days, so you're gonna have to look up to know exactly what that was. That was bought at Asears and Roebuck. Again, I'm a dinosaur. It had a workout card, and at the top of it, there were big bold letters that I remember to this day. Recovery is the key to progress. Do no more than outline below. And it gave one exercise body part, and it recommended three sets for each exercise, training every other day. Again, going back to recovery. I trained that way for about a year before I joined my first commercial gym. And when I joined that first commercial gym, which was the Columbus, Ohio YMCA, yeah, it was a state-of-the-art gym back in the day. The senior lifters talked a lot about recovery. They warned me not to go crazy following all these routines that I saw, and they saw that I neatly had tucked underneath my arm Arnold's education of a bodybuilder, and they warned me against six day per week workouts and all the craziness that happened with that. They wanted to give me the tools to track how I recover. So, what were those tools? Well, the most powerful tool we had back then was taking your morning heart rate. Before you even swung your legs out of bed, you put two fingers on your neck, and if your baseline was, say, 55 and you woke up and you were suddenly 65, you didn't need a PhD to tell you that your leg workout the day before cost you a little bit more than you could afford. So you kind of took the day off. You didn't push through for the sake of closing a ring on a watch. You just listened to your body and you listened to the pump. Very simple process. You'd track that day by day and you'd look for trends. So for me, I used 55 as an example. That was my resting heart rate back in the day. Anytime I got up to 65, 68, even if it was for two or three days in a row, I took time off. That was your recovery pattern. Simple heart rate. By the time I started competing in dieting, I had the good fortune of being stationed in Camp Pendleton. That's in California. So I was able to go to the old Gold's Gym, the Old World's Gym, and to the iconic Vince's Gym. If you've listened to the podcast, you know I have an affinity for Vince's gym. That's where I learned about another neat little trick to let you know if you were over dieting, and that was your base temperature. All you'd do was get a glass thermometer and take your temperature. If your temperature was dropping day after day, it was a sign that your thyroid was downregulating and your body was literally telling you, I'm cold because I don't have enough fuel to burn. Now, back then, that was the state of the art. And it worked wonderfully for me. It kept me out of a lot of dieting spirals. All I would do was eat back up, get my temperature back to a base rate, and bang. It worked great. It may have taken a little bit longer, but it worked wonderfully. Now in 2026, people just call that same thing brain fog, and they keep pushing. In the 80s, we called it a warning sign for a cheap meal and backing off on the intensity. Get a reset and restart the fire. Now the philosophy was simple. You trained hard, you ate, you slept, and it was instinctive. It was reactive. And it worked because it forced you to be in tune with your psychology. It was no time at all before I knew when waking up, if my heart rate was elevated, my temperature was down. I got to know my body. Now let's look at today. Some of the new tools I've had competitors bring up are these infrared saunas, P E M F mats. I had to look that up. The recovery rings, the watches, vitamin IV drops, and of course the holy grail of 2026 is now the cold plunge. In researching these items, got a little information about all of them. Some of them exciting. Now, I'm not so much of a dinosaur. I didn't know about the rings and watches, but some of the other stuff was interesting. So don't get me wrong, I love the science of hormonic stress. But here's where the natural edge gets dulled. There's a massive conflict between recovery and adaptation, between learning your body and relying on crisis that may or may not be giving you the right data. When you lift heavy, you create inflammation. The inflammation is a signal. It tells your body, hey, we weren't strong enough for that load, build more muscle. If you jump into a 40-degree tub immediately after workout, you're killing that signal. You're using vacto constriction to blunt the very mTOR, that is a small M and a capital TOR for those who want to look it up. And that's a pathway that when you blunt it, it can diminish hypertrophy. The pathway is just the central signaling network that acts as a nutrient sensor regarding cell growth, proliferation, protein synthesis, and metabolism. Yeah, that was the textbook answer because it was something I had to Google as well when I was looking for this information, which is why I'm presenting it to you. The research in 2024 and 2025 has confirmed that immediate post-workout therapy actually results in less muscle growth over 12-week block. You're recovering faster so you can get back into the gym, but you're bringing fewer gains with you. So there is a divergent line between recovery and muscle growth. Could you be training a pro card for a three-minute shiver at the cost of $3,000 per year? Possibly. Then there's HRV. That's heart rate variability. It's the buzz of 2026 fitness world, and it measures the variance between your heartbeats to see if your auto nervous system is in flight or fright or rest and digest. Everybody should have heard of flight or fright. That's when you have a shock, the adrenal glands produce, you can either fight a bear off or run from it. I suggest running. It's a great metric, but it's created a generation of data-dependent athletes. If the watch says red, they don't train, even if they feel like a lion and they feel ready. So we've outsourced our intuition to an algorithm. And the algorithm can be right or be wrong on a lot of other variables other than how you feel as a human being. So this leads us to the biggest myth in modern bodybuilding that gadgets allow for more volume and therefore create more growth in a championship physique. So those NASA-equipped gyms with doing 25 and 30 sets for legs, they do three different types of leg presses and five different types of extensions and an isolated this and whatever. They spend two and a half hours in a gym and then they spend another hour recovering in boots with lasers and all this other stuff, all in an effort to increase their muscle gains. Look, in my prime, for the most part, the great competitors did four sets of heavy squats and maybe four sets of stiff-legged deadlifts. Might have thrown one other exercise in there. And we realized that there was no magic between a leg press, a squat, or a hack squat. They all basically did the same thing. So why do all three? Now, the caveat here, I'm talking about natural competitors of the 80s and 90s and the early 2000s, not the enhanced athletes. All the stuff we discuss on edge goes out the window as soon as PEDs are used. Now, that's for a variety of reasons, and then we're not going to delve into it here. So, what did the naturals really do? Well, we trained three or four times a week. We were done in 45 minutes. Why? Because there was a direct correlation between high intensity and central nervous system. And you didn't want your CNS to hit a wall. It was also because we focused on the mind-muscle connection and we made sure that the movement was stimulating growth and not just moving away through space. Now, in 2026, here's the reality: gadgets don't buy you more sets or bigger muscles. Protein synthesis has a cap. Once you've signaled the muscles to grow, every set after that is just junk volume, creating systemic fatigue that a cold plunge or an IR, this, that, or the other thing is not going to be able to fix. You need to be patient and you can't rush recovery. I don't want this to sound like in us old timers, we're better, okay? We're just putting 100 plus years of lifting knowledge into practice. Back then we paid attention to the people who went before us and we followed their lead. We were no better or smarter than today's athletes. And body for body, a current athlete is way better than my generation, hands down. Even if you took my best physique in 2005 and you propelled it to the 2026 Jordan Cup, I would never win my class again. Bodies are better now, but not because of the gadget. It's because the human drive to improve over the last champion is a continuous process. This is why Will Powell, our first Jordan Cup champion in 2025, was better than Clarence Ross, the 1948 Mr. America, even though they did almost the exact same things. Sure, the nutrition, the equipment were a little bit better, and they're even better now. But most of the rise is the drive in the internal champion, the mindset believing that you can get better. And those improvements have nothing to do with gadgetry supplements or gimmicks and has more to do with the human mind. But there is a limit on how far you can drive yourself physically before diminishing returns, hence recovery. Now, I'm not saying not to use your app or your iWatch or look at your data and your ring. And I'm not saying to avoid any of the emergent tools for recovery. What I am saying is, are they necessary? Do you really need to buy an extensive gadget to progress? Or all you need is a thermometer and at most a watch that'll give you your morning heart rate. It's all about smart training, smart nutrition, and a program focused on recovery and muscle building to achieve the physique of your dreams, not going up and above what a human body can tolerate and relying on gadget. The research is clear. Sleep and rest account for 60% of your gains. Nutrition is 30% of your gains. Active recovery things like walking and stretching are about 7% of your gains. Now the gadgets, when they're employed, are about 3% of your gains. This is through information that I've broken down through a lot of different scientific research studies and trying to extrapolate things out. So if 3% additional gains is worth the additional $2,000 you're going to spend on an infrared wrap, well, then go for it. But you're majoring in the miners and kind of missing the big pictures. So do you want to invest in your rings and your watches and your wraps and your cold plunges? Fine. Absolutely do so. But for most people, they're not necessary. And some things, as the cold plunge, can actually curtail progress. So research before you invest. Only purchase what you want to use and only if you can afford it. The cornerstones will always remain the old school triad, hard training, adequate rest, and good nutrition. So be patient and allow time for the appropriate growth and recovery. That is your natural edge. Now, before we wrap up today, I want to take this lesson of recovery out of the gym and put it right into your desk at work or into your relationship at home. Now, in bodybuilding, we've talked about the volume trap. The idea if we just do more and use more gadgets, we can force growth to happen faster, but we know it's a lie. Growth is a physiological process that requires the wisdom to wait. Now, I have a great example of how impatience in life can derail something great. Back in the 80s, I was out with some friends in the club. One of our group, well, she was a model and she was a wannabe actress, and I think she would be considered gorgeous in any era of the day. So we were sitting there, she looked across the bar and noticed a young man that was kind of looking at her, and she said out loud, There's something about that guy, and I'm gonna ask him to dance. Now, another friend of ours started a conversation. We were in the middle of the story when that man approached her and asked her to dance, and she politely said, Not right now, perhaps in a few minutes. Now the guy started turning red, got a scowl on his face, and told her to F off and didn't think she was good looking enough to dance with anyway, and stalked away. Here's the moral of the story. If he had waited five minutes, his social life could have improved dramatically. There's also a professional trap to impatience. In your career, you're going to hit plateaus, just like you do in a bench press. You'll be at work, you'll stay late, you'll be hitting the metrics, and nothing. No promotion, no raise, no recognition. And this is where most people fail because they get impatient. They get angry. They begin to take things out on their colleagues, and before you know it, you're sending an 11 p.m. email to your boss that you wish you could get back, and there's no retracting it. We overtrain our professional lives until we burn out, or worse, we alienate the very people that were supposed to help us grow. I was up for a promotion for first sergeant, and we had the interview process. I did not get the position. As a matter of fact, out of the group, I was considered number three. Now, the people that were either one ahead of me or run behind me got impatient and never went for it again. I took what I needed to do, continued to develop, and waited professionally. And when the waiting was over, I got the next position, which led to another promotion, which led to another promotion. Long story short, when I retired out of the military about a decade later, I was in the highest position that you could possibly hold within the state. And the two people that had failed along the way never made it to the next rank. They became impatient and they burnt out. Now they had good careers and they were great airmen, but they just lost their patience for it. They didn't wait professionally. So whether it's a muscle fiber relationship or even a business deal, you can't subvert the timeline for development. It will happen in its due time if it's meant to happen. If you pull a plant out of the ground every day to check to see if its roots are growing, it's gonna die. If you consistently tinker with a winning strategy because you aren't seeing results in 24 hours, you're going to fail. If you don't let the lady finish her story, you're gonna end up in a cold shower at the end of the night. The natural edge isn't just about being drug-free in your sport. It's about being distortion free in your life. It's about having the character to say, I've done my work, I've planted the seed, now I'm going to have the discipline to let it grow. So don't let the oligarchy of urgency tell you that you're falling behind. Don't let a fitness app or a social media feed tell you you need a shortcut. And don't let yourself feel less than because you weren't selected for the promotion. Go back to work, get the reps in, and grow. Trust your prep, trust your character, and most importantly, trust the weight. Now thank you for listening, and I hope you've enjoyed the new format that we have and had a chance to check out our sister show, Tri-Sets. If you like what you're seeing, please leave a comment below and hit the like or subscribe button, or stop by OCB Natural Edge IG page and leave us a comment. And you can also check us out on YouTube if you are following us on Spotify and iTunes. And if you're on YouTube and you prefer to listen, hey, we're on Spotify and iTunes. So until next time, stay hungry, stay humble, stay natural. Sell it out.