How We Push PEDs Without Dying (FULL LAB BREAKDOWN) - OptiCast 20

🎓 ABOUT THIS VIDEO
In this episode of the OptiCast, Nathan and Aubrey delve into the critical distinctions between merely feeling fine and achieving true health. They emphasize the importance of using blood work as a proactive decision-making tool rather than a passive yearly check-up. The conversation explores how many high performers unknowingly settle for a state of survival, the role of medications in masking symptoms while potentially degrading performance, and the risks associated with over-optimizing health too early. They also discuss the necessity of health phases to balance performance and long-term well-being, advocating for a holistic approach to health that considers the entire system rather than isolated symptoms. In this conversation, the speakers delve into the importance of phased training and health management, emphasizing the need for constant monitoring of health markers to optimize performance. They discuss the significance of understanding longevity as preserving adaptability rather than merely avoiding stress. The dialogue also highlights the dangers of ignoring warning signs in pursuit of discipline and the necessity of recognizing patterns in health to maintain resilience. Rapid-fire questions provide practical insights into health management, reinforcing the idea that true control comes from proactive health measures rather than reactive ones.

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health optimization, blood work, performance, recovery, medications, health phases, O5 system, wellness, high performance, lifestyle, health, performance, training, longevity, monitoring, discipline, adaptability, health markers, recovery, lifestyle

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

This podcast right here is just for giving purposes. I'm not a medical doctor, not a nutritionist, or personal trainer. I am very fucking quite dust. As with lane were so wisely said, I don't know shit about fuck. So don't trust me, don't listen to me. We're here just for shits and people. So if you trust me with health advice and that's just natural selection of work. Don't do drugs, always listen to your GP and with that as a way with this. Welcome to another episode of the Opticast with me, Nathan, me Aubrey, where we show you exactly how to optimize every aspect of your life. In today's episode and guys, this episode is fucking juicy because we're tearing apart the gap that exists between feeling fine and actually being healthy, and why so many high performants like yourself are just quietly stuck in their bodies that are just fucking surviving instead of adapting. Like we're gonna break down why blood work is not a once in a year safety ritual, but it's actually a decision-making tool, how often it actually needs to be run depending on your face, why being natural doesn't protect you from slow and invisible decline. We talk about which labs actually matter, and we're not talking like surface level normal, but like functional ratios, like your insulin to glucose, triglycerides to AGL, free T3 to reverse T3, ferritin in context with your CRP, and why lab corp ranges are absolutely designed to catch disease, not to protect your performance. We're gonna go deep into how medications quietly change the way that you interpret your readiness, your recovery, and your output, including some lesser-known examples that make you feel better, but they actually degrade your adaptation underneath. We're gonna explain why discipline often turns into denial, how people normalize fatigue, poor sleep, anxiety, pain, and low drive as just part of adulthood, and how that mindset is fucking cancer and just traps them into this shrinking psychological box that they don't even realize that they're in. We're gonna walk you guys through the O5 system and the MARCH method and explain exactly why sequencing is everything and why over-optimizing too early is gonna backfire, why two people are using the same tools and they're gonna get exactly completely different results. We are gonna talk about phases, when to push, when to pull back, when to protect your long-term health while you're still choosing intensity, how longevity actually works when your lifestyle includes things that are literally not longevity friendly, like high stress or PEDs or even just aggressive training. And by the end of this episode, you're gonna understand exactly how to read your own warning signs earlier, how to stop making symptom relief for real recovery, how to use data instead of your ego to drive your decisions, and how to build a body that can enter and exit extreme phases without collapsing afterwards. This is not about just living forever, it's about actually staying adaptable, dangerous, and functional for decades instead of burning bright and breaking early. If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right, but still you're just slowly losing your ground, this episode is going to make that uncomfortable truth very clear and give you a framework for you to finally do something about it. So without further ado, Aubrey, take us to our first question.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

How often should someone actually get blood work done?

SPEAKER_03 2:50

Very good. So baseline labs, we're gonna pull those before any intervention whatsoever, like before swapping any diet phases, or like sometimes even before training shifts, definitely before any pharmacological intervention. So we need to know what normal actually looks like for you for your own physiology. Now we're gonna break this down depending on like what kind of person are you, right? So every 12 months, I consider that to be a minimum. Uh like stable individuals are like uh like we can use this as a systems audit, not because like something is wrong, but because like these drifts in your metabolism actually happen very quietly. So we need to catch that shit early, and we can start creating this trend by doing it at least once a year. Now, if we're training hard, if we're dying aggressively, or if we have high-level stress, or just running any long-term supplementation stack that's gonna alter your metabolism, your inflammation, or touch on your hormones at all, I want to pull labs every six months that just to play safe, that we're not doing anything you know wrong or anything like that. And I also want to bounce those labs off of our doctor on staff just to make sure that everything is looking smooth. Every three to four months is like when I want to be pulling labs. If we are in like active fat loss phases, if we are in recon phases or when we're pushing volume or intensity, or like when your workload is going up, like any time that your recovery capacity is being tested, we want to shorten the amount of time in between these tests to make sure that everything is actually running smoothly. If you are enhanced, right, like if you're using any exogenous hormones, if you're using peptides, if you're using stimulants, thyroid meds, or if you're using anything that's going to meaningfully interact with your HPG, your HPA uh axises, your uh liver, your lipids, your glucose handle. Like, I want to make sure that I know exactly what's happening to your body every 8 to 12 weeks. That's pretty much non-negotiable. And it's gonna depend based on dose. Someone with TRT doesn't require all of this, someone just running a couple of peptides doesn't require all of this. Sometimes for enhanced people, we want to push up to like 16 weeks, 20 weeks. It's just context dependent. But like there, there are a couple of signs of things that we want to um like catch so that we can deploy blood work at dose times, right? So when you have symptoms, uh like changes in symptoms that happen and uh they're very meaningful, right? So like your energy starts collapsing, your sleep cycles are breaking, um, if your libido is dropping, if your mood is shifting a lot, if your injuries are not healing as fast as they used to, or if your performance is starting to decay, despite your compliance, so that needs to be in place as well. We want to deploy blood work immediately to take a look and know exactly what is actually going on under the hood so that we can deploy the changes that are uh warranted in this case. Now, we actually pull blood work even more frequently when the markers are very unstable or if they're trending in the wrong direction. So this doesn't mean the full lab panel, but it does mean that we're taking a look at a couple a couple of markers here and there. Um, we can do this less frequently once we stabilize your physiology and the patterns are actually predictable. Why? Because labs are never just about reassurance, they are part of the feedback loop in the O5 system that it's going to confirm whether the current phase that you're in is actually sustainable or if it's costing you something upstream. So those are all the considerations that I do and that I think that you should do as well before uh considering when to do blood work based on your context here. Now, um, to you, Aubrey, what what do you think is like the biggest mistake that people make when they only use blood work as like this once-a-year safety check instead of using blood work as a decision-making tool?

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Um, I think the biggest mistake is probably assumptions. So they're acting based off of a bunch of assumptions, and it's impacting the decisions that they make throughout the rest of the year, but you don't know if something's changed in six months since you had your once a year labs.

SPEAKER_03 6:50

Um remember when we were tracking yours, like we even pulled labs every single week for your FSH, for your LH, and your estradiol, uh, your testosterone, just wanted to your progesterone, just needed to see exactly where these things were going for, and then we could map exactly your supplement protocol and your hormone replacement therapy that was literally life-changing for you. You know, we uh we like just talked about like what life would be like if you couldn't have this in place and it's fucking awful. We wouldn't want to have that in place. So, you know, having that control, like knowing exactly what's going on at a specific point in time is going to be very important. And that's what people need to understand is that uh blood work is just a snapshot in time. And for certain things, it's very, very, very, very it fluctuates so much. Like, for instance, your cortisol levels, they're gonna fluctuate. If you take the blood work every 10 minutes, they're gonna show us different values. Same thing for your glucose. So, like in that case, I wouldn't be looking at blood work, I would actually be looking at something like a GI map because uh well, a Dutch test because that's actually gonna measure free cortisol, uh, not a GI map. I would look at a GI map if I want to look at your recycling patterns of estrogen and things like that. So it just also depends on what tool we actually need. Blood work is not the only one, but people normally talk about blood work because that's the only tool that they know about. But we want to make sure that we have enough snapshots and time that we can start painting this picture, sort of like your health is like this very foggy, uh, you know, roadway. And then we can like as we add blood work, it's almost like you start seeing these road signs that start guiding you to where you actually need to go to be able to like actually get to that outcome that you want, you know.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

100%. And I think that the assumption based off of assumptions is really damaging for your mindset as well, especially for like women, because I feel like we settle for feeling like crap or thinking, oh my gosh, I'm just a super stressed person or I'm just super anxious or emotional or whatever it is. Um, and really it's not you, it's your hormones. You know, something's your environment, yeah. And so getting, like you were saying, getting more frequent labs where you can not just see that single day that you happen to be, oh, your hormone levels are normal, which has to do with the analysis of it, not just the act of getting it or the timing, but um getting it throughout the year, getting it throughout the month for a given amount of months or whatever, can really give you uh direction on what to work on first.

SPEAKER_03 9:17

Yeah, yeah. Um that's um related to like how we actually need to think about lab so. Next question.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

What's the difference between feeling fine and actually being healthy?

SPEAKER_03 9:32

Um, you touched on this, but in general, people normalize fatigue, brain fog, low libido, joint pain, anxiety, bloating, uh, mood swings, uh, because nothing is properly diagnosed. So like the body gets a bunch of these warning signs, and those warning signs get just reframed as adulthood. They don't get understood as part of dysfunction. Feeling fine just means that you have adapted to stress by downshifting your output. That's all it means. It means you've adapted to stress by lowering your expectations. It means you've adapted to stress by avoiding situations that actually expose how little reserve you actually have. Your your true health is going to show up as excess capacity, stable energy, fast recovery, very, very strong tolerance against stress, a mood that's very resilient, and also the ability to push without breaking or needing a bunch of compensatory crutches here and there. The trap that people fall into here is symptoms first thinking. And like I mentioned in the previous podcast, symptoms are the last thing to break, right? It starts with a stress signal, the body responds with inflammation, the mitochondria is gonna downshift activity, and then you're gonna get the symptoms from this low energy state. And my job here is not to fix your hormones, it's to actually fix the cellular defense mode that we're in. Like when we're thinking in like these, like symptom-first thinking here, that's when people are just going to wait for pain, they're gonna wait for pathology, they're gonna wait for issues to become chronic, or they're gonna wait for labs to really flag, which takes a lot because the lab ranges are made for sick people. So you need to be really fucking sick for something to show as messed up. And like your physiology is always going to be downgrading upstream, like long before it crosses any of these reference range markers here. The in the O5 system that that I've developed here, like the way that works is we need to actually start at the output and the organism state. Then after that, we can map your operations, your obstacles, and and and your optimization loops, and we do that instead of chasing these like isolated symptoms or single numbers, because every time we do that, we start like fragmenting our own body, and that never allows you to have a holistic approach towards healing. The the system that you have in place, and we've talked about like if you don't think you have a system, if you don't know what your system is, that's your system, that's your system. That it's lack of clarity, that's your system. Your system is going to expose where your energy is being misallocated, it's going to expose where stress is being buffered and at what cost. And it's also going to show like where your adaptations have become liability. So when you correct these constraints upstream, the symptoms actually get resolved as consequence, but they're not the target. People aim at fixing these numbers, and that's why they end up like just re-understanding their own dysfunction as part of adulthood, which is why the O5 system actually produces these durable changes instead of just temporary relief, because that's not the goal. The goal is not the actual target, the goal is to correcting the upstream constraints, and that's gonna allow your body to actually heal itself. Your body is literally just waiting for the right environment to feel safe enough to actually heal itself. Now, if, like you said, most people only feel fine because they've adapted to dysfunction, then how would someone even recognize that they're unhealthy before their body actually forces that issue on them?

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Blood work. No, I'm getting it. I mean, yes, but um, I think that one of the things is seeing what's impossible and using that, mirroring that against how they feel and using it uh as a tool. It's kind of like the grass is always greener mentality, but it sometimes is actually greener, you know, and you don't have to be content with where you're at, or just because oh, most people feel like this doesn't mean that you're that you have to be stuck there. But I think um that in order to identify what what you need to do to do specifically or what things need to be changed specifically, you need to have somebody that isn't inside your dysfunction to look in and like speak into it. Um and this someone acts on your behalf, and I say on your behalf because they're literally like your advocate for yourself that you can't be because you don't possess the skills or the knowledge or whatever it might be. Um, and they are they're working for you on your behalf, kind of like a like an advocate. Yeah. Well, not even like a doctor, I don't know about a doctor, but like maybe an attorney or something.

SPEAKER_03 14:38

Yeah, they're serving you or something.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

Where they're serving you, you don't know the law, and so you're hiring somebody and they're working to get you the best outcome possible, and they're speaking into your messy situation versus you sitting there in the mess trying to analyze the mess, it is not as effective.

SPEAKER_03 14:55

And that that's like if you're working with someone, if you're not working with someone, you literally have to have an understanding of how these things relate upstream. So, like you know, when we look at people talking about hormones and everything, like people know that testosterone converts into estradiol. They know a little bit less on how 5-alpha reductase works, so we just block DHT out the wazoo for guys for some reason. Um, but like you have to be able to understand how these things work all the way from like the very conversion of cholesterol to pregnolone inside of your mitochondrial membrane. Like you you just have to have that type of understanding because that's what's going to allow you to be able to make changes here. So uh just something for you to keep in mind. But uh, good question. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

How do medications change the way you think about performance and recovery?

SPEAKER_03 15:42

So don't think about medications as something that just changes your symptoms. You actually need to change, like, think about how they change signal interpretation. They don't don't just change your symptoms, meaning like the feedback that you use to judge your performance and your recovery can be artificially distorted because of these medications. So, for example, beta blockers, right? They can make you feel calm, they can make you feel controlled. Propranola is used a lot here, uh, Nabivalol to a little bit of a less extent. Um, but like they just make you feel controlled. But what are they actually doing mechanistically? Well, they're actually lowering your peak output, they're they're blunting how responsive your heart rate actually is, and they also mask how under recovery, uh, how under-recovered you are until your performance plateaus without you having like an obvious reason. So, like you can think that it's just, oh, I need a delo, or, or you know, it's my diet, or it's no, it's the beta blocker, you just don't understand how they actually work. Um, SSRIs is a good another good example, right? They can stabilize your mood and they can suppress some density around your REM sleep and your dopamine signaling. So, like motivation, your learning rate, and uh even motor skill acquisition, um, they can all just degrade very, very quickly, even though your ex anxiety feels like it's improved. So you're basically like giving something and like getting something in return. And what you're getting is like losing like your motivation for this, like the issue of not having to live with anxiety. So it's just an exchange here that you have here between your performance and what you're actually getting out of these medications. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory uh drugs, they're gonna reduce uh your pain perception a lot. Uh, for some people, for some people like myself, they don't really do much, but they're gonna interfere with satellite cell signaling and prostaglandin mediation uh like adaptation, so meaning like your training is going to feel easier, but tissue remodeling actually is slower. So your perception is that things are functioning better, but in reality, things are functioning worse. This is why just being guided by your symptoms is not going to solve your problem. Another one that's used a lot in PCOS, it's just it's fucking absurd, it still is, but metformin, right? It's gonna improve your glycemic control. But what metformin actually does, it suppresses your adaptations from training at a mitochondrial level. So like your endurance can like look cleaner on paper, right? Like it looks like your aerobic capacity is pretty good, but actually long term, it's going you're going to see a stall. Similarly, you have like medications like Zopinem or Trazodone that people use a lot. They're gonna increase your total sleep time, but they're going to fragment your sleep architecture, which is going to lead to worse recovery, despite you getting better sleep scores on your sleep tracker. Another reason why these things don't really work. If you're just guiding yourself by these metrics without understanding the system behind it, you're not going to create effective changes here. Thyroid medications are another one. We use a lot of thyroid medications at OptiLab. They raise your energy and they can uh raise your output like quite acutely, but they're also going to increase your turnover demand, right? So if your recovery and nutrition are and stress buffering aren't matched, you're just going to create and dig yourself a bigger hole. The O5 system actually accounts for all of this because it's going to separate your perceived readiness from your true physiological readiness. So the decisions here are forced to be based on your like behavior rather than just how you feel. That's going to be a major, major difference. And if you're coaching yourself, you need to be able to do that as well when you're creating your system for yourself, right? So your performance is only going to improve sustainably when your medications are contextualized as modifiers, but medications cannot be understood as solutions. They are modifiers inside of your operations and your organism layer inside of Optolab and the O5 system. Now, if medications can actually make you feel better while making your performance worse, how many people do you think are just mistaking like their symptom relief for like real recovery right now?

SPEAKER_01 20:04

A lot. Yeah. Um, I think people, I've actually had a lot of conversations with people that recognize that their medications are kind of masking their issues.

SPEAKER_03 20:19

They just don't give a shit.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Yeah, or they're just they don't know what to do. I mean, that's what their doctor told them. Like, take this medication, here you go.

SPEAKER_03 20:26

Yeah. Um, and I and when you spend so much money on that already, and like you tried so many like consults and all this stuff, it it just makes you lose faith that there's even a solution out there, which is why I'm so adamant against speaking against these things, uh, in favor of speaking against these things, because we need to police ourselves because otherwise people just block themselves against the thing that will actually solve their problems for them.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Yeah, and I think um you have to the idea that I've learned from taking certain medications over the years is you pair a medication with strategy, and that's kind of what you were talking about about contextualizing it, using it as a modifier. Um you can't just um you can't always just strip it out completely, um and but you can pair it with strategies, um, contextualize it, solve those um kind of upstream issues, and over time improve and possibly have you not have to rely on the medications to get it. Yeah, that's the goal. That's the goal in the end.

SPEAKER_03 21:29

So yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Very good. Next question.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

What's the risk of over optimizing health too early?

SPEAKER_03 21:38

Um, sounds like there isn't an issue, but there really is. And I talk about sequencing so much because it's important and because people just don't really understand how it works. So, like when you optimize like, what does this mean? It usually means when you're stacking a bunch of interventions before your body has actually earned the capacity to use these things, which means that you're turning all of These tools, all of your peptides and all of these things into stressors. So people are gonna jump onto supplements, onto peptides, hormones, biohacks, like while their foundation, right? Like their sleep timing, their blood sugar control, and their nervous system are all unstable. And this like is going to generate problems. Without sequencing, if we don't have sequencing in place, every new input that you add just adds more noise to all of these signals that you need to sort out. So it just makes it impossible, literally, to tell what's actually helping, what's compensating, and what's actually downgrading your recovery. We work with the MARCH method. The MARCH method gets deployed inside of the optimization loop, and it's gonna work here because like the measurement comes before the adjustment. And your recovery and your control are going to be established before any attempt whatsoever at accelerating this process. Most people are gonna skip the measurement, so they're gonna make blind adjustments based on assumptions. Based on assumptions, they're never gonna recover fully, and then they're gonna try to control this chaos by adding more inputs instead of fewer. That's like if you can't see how that's problematic, you're just not fit to actually do this shit yourself at all. Early optimization is going to create this artificial performance that's going to outpace your tissue integrity, your mitochondria readiness, and your resilience in your endocrine system, which just means shit's gonna break. And then when something breaks, people just blame their genetics, their age, their stress, their job, their spouse, their dog, the government. Like instead of just recognizing that they violated the principle of sequence, the March method enforces order in sequencing so that the adaptations will compound instead of conflict with one another, which is why two people can run the exact same tools and they get wildly different outcomes. And this is why I don't just give people protocols, I help them think through things when they're asking me questions on the DMs. And by the way, fucking hit my DMs up. Let's fucking talk about this shit. Um, you know, like your real optimization actually looks very, very boring early on. Um, and and and and and I get this reaction from people all the time when I'm like they get their protocol, and their protocol is eating two Kiwis before going to bed, two Brazil nuts to a day, and uh getting some light in the beginning of their day early on and using blue light glasses. They're like, what? But like what we're doing is removing friction and stabilizing all of the systems before we're gonna turn up that dial. Your body needs to feel safe and ready for the task that you're about to impose onto it. Now, if most people are failing to um like like they're always going to be accelerating this process before they stabilize their own environment, what signals would you tell like someone that they're like trying to optimize something that their body isn't ready to support yet? What are some of the things that you would like that you think you would see if this was happening?

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Um, I was thinking about this one, and I think um extreme fatigue, yeah, injury, um and honestly, it could lead, like you were you were saying stressors, but I think like stress in general, like mental.

SPEAKER_03 25:18

Yeah, with stress, which is gonna lead to inflammation, which is gonna lead to like gut problems, it could lead to like things like IBS, it could lead to things like cybo or just dysbiosis in general. Um, you know, these things usually come together. So if you have psybo, if you have dysbiosis, probably could also have candida or H. pylori. Uh, if you have those things, you're probably hypothyroid, so your thyroid is also not working well, which is if that's the case, your liver's not converting your thyroid, and neither is your gut, which means like 80% of this shit is just not being converted into the right places. So, like it just creates all this massive fucking mess. And you see you start seeing these things where people are using compounds like SS-31 or MOT C, and they're actually perceiving their performance downgrading. So they're supposed to get energy and they're not getting energy. So if you're getting the opposite effect, like when people are like, hey, I'm taking caffeine and I feel sleepy, you know, like I'm taking methylene blue, but like it's not really clicking anymore. I'm taking nicotine, but it's not really like doing the trick for me. I don't get a buzz anymore. That's because you accelerated the process before you stabilize your system.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

That's what I was thinking about as well. It's like you're taking stuff, but you're not seeing the results that it's supposed to create.

SPEAKER_03 26:22

Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Yeah, that's a big one. How do you balance pushing performance while protecting long-term health?

SPEAKER_03 26:31

So you need to accept that these are not simultaneous goals. They're there are altering priorities and they're going to require very deliberate phase changes. So, performance phases, like when we separate these things into mesocycles, they intentionally borrow from your recovery capacity, from your stress tolerance, from tissue turnover. So we can do that. We can borrow from these things when we actually have a defined exit and we have an exit strategy. People in general just stop taking shit and they think that their body just adapts. That's not true at all. Your health phases are going to exist and they they're they're there in place to repay this debt that we created, right? So, in this health phase, you need to be actively restoring your mitochondrial efficiency. You need to be paying a lot of attention to tissue integrity and connective tissue integrity, to your endocrine sensitivity and to the bandwidth that your nervous system actually gets. Like you're gonna start seeing problems when people are gonna push performance chronically, and they're never gonna declare the phase, like, hey, this is what I'm doing. Like nine out of ten people that I talk to on a daily basis, when I ask them, like, hey, what's the long-term goal for the year? Put on muscle, get shredded. Cool. What's like the what does that look like on day-to-day for you, like week to week, month to month? And how are you making sure that you have enough feedback in place to guide you into making corrective decisions to make sure that you cannot fail to get to your ultimate goal? They don't know because they never named the phases, right? So that's that's going to be a problem. The the the bless you, your your body never gets permission to recover and to rebuild if you don't actually have these phases in place. So these phases, I also think they're very useful psychologically speaking, because they give you permission to pull back without feeling like you're regressing or that you're you're quitting. You know, like I'm looking forward to getting back to training three times a week, four times a week, because like that's the time that I actually get to do that. I get to do that, right? So your training volume, pharmacology, sleep pressure, nutrition, intensity, all of these things should change phase by phase. You shouldn't have these things just running fat flat year-round. So whenever I'm doing check-ins for people, whenever we're like going through changes of phases, I'm sprinkling these things here and there. So it's almost feel like it's just a natural course of action, or in reality, it's like something very, very intentional that I'm doing. And in the um in the O5 system that we have, we're going to define what lever specifically is going to move in each phase. In the March method, we are actually going to use that to determine when the system is ready to progress or when it needs containment. So we basically deploy that in the health phase, make sure that we get enough feedback, and then we can graduate ourselves to be moved back to the feedback loop and just moving over to that phase. Your long-term health can be protected if you have exiting phases, if you have them early, if you have them while like things are still productive, and instead of just letting them ride until the damage forces you to stop. If you are running on that plan, you don't have long-term health planning at all. Your like performance who are sustainably creating progress and just being in a good environment, they're very precise about their fucking timing. They're they're not just doing this thing and not knowing exactly how to change every single one of these variables uh based on their phase. They're not running these things just year-round. Um if it is true, if I'm right, that people actually burn out because they never name the phase that they're in, how would someone know when it's time to exit a performance-based push before their body makes that decision for them? How would they see that coming?

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Um, I think it still goes back to consistent or constant monitoring.

SPEAKER_03 30:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

Um, but then beyond that, you have to know what you're looking for. Like you have to know what health markers you're tracking, you have to know how to analyze your blood work um to catch the things upstream. And um so really, if you don't have that expertise, you need to find someone who does or become an expert yourself. But I think that the constant monitoring is important.

SPEAKER_03 30:51

Um you have to do that constant monitoring in context of what we talked about last week, which is if you're constantly monitoring in order to tweak, you're going to be trapped in a lack of consistency, and you're gonna constantly be tweaking, you're never gonna know what works. So you need to be able to track without taking action every single time you see a change. You need to create, paint that picture that I talked about first.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

Or you have the other option of playing it super safe, like just leaving games on the table altogether. Yep, and you're definitely like the likelihood of you getting to your goal drastically decreases because you're leaving so much on the table.

SPEAKER_03 31:29

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

Um yeah, so those are your two options, I think.

SPEAKER_03 31:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah, good. So let's talk about specifics here.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

What health markers do you personally respect the most now?

SPEAKER_03 31:40

Tough question to answer because it varies person to person, but I'm gonna give some sauce here for you guys on specific ones that I look in general, right? So I first I'm gonna look at your thyroid here because that's the foundation of your metabolism. So your free T3 to your reverse T3 ratio, it's gonna tell me whether your thyroid signaling is actually being used or if it's being blocked under stress. We have a functional target here of free T3. We want that to be high normal, and we want the reverse T3 to be as low as possible. We don't want both of them sitting in the middle range or just, you know, we're just just creating this lie about your metabolic output that just people see their thyroid is normal and they think that that looks good. That's not what we want. We want the upper range of normal for your free T3, and we want reverse T3 to be as low as possible. Um, triglycerides to HDL ratio is another one that's very good because it reflects your hepatic insulin sensitivity, as well as how well your mitochondria is handling uh fuel consumption and uh creation of fuel. So if we have a uh a ratio here of under 1.5, that's functional. Anything creeping over a level of two is going to signal to some energy misallocation here before the glucose is going to show up as a flag. So if you're just looking at your glucose and the glucose is messed up, you're already fucked up with your triglycerides and HDL ratio way before that. So pay attention to those. Your fasting insulin level is going to be paired with your fasting glucose. And in general, people are not going to have this because doctors order one or the other. But glucose alone is useless, and so is insulin. Um, your insulin, like ideally, you want it under a five, and your fasting glucose, like 75 to like 85, 86. Those like normal ranges sort of allow like your insulin resistance to hide for years. Like you're gonna see the like range for insulin being over like what 20 and your glucose over like a hundred. Um, like that just allows you to live with insulin resistance for so long. So we I I keep a close eye on that and make sure that we catch that shit earlier on with like a HOMA IR uh rating. Um, I also want to take a look at your ferritin in context with your CRP. Why? Because when you're just looking at iron without any context whatsoever, that's a very dangerous thing. We want ferritin to be sitting at like a 50 to 100, and you want your CRP to be under one because that's gonna show like usable iron without some inflammation that's trapping it. So if you have those two things in place, you're good to go. Your SHBG should actually not just be interpreted alongside your testosterone here. You should be looking at your SHBG alongside your liver enzymes and your triglycerides because SHBG is hepatic and it is an insulin signal first. It's not a sex hormone marker. Just because it has sex in the name, it doesn't mean it's a sex hormone marker. Low SHBG with normal testosterone actually usually means metabolic dysfunction, not some androgen deficiency. And if you go to a clinic, they're in general just gonna put you on TRT when in reality the issue is elsewhere. This is what we talk about correcting these issues upstream. Also want to look at your sodium and potassium trends, like just over time, because this is going to reflect your adrenal tone, your aldosterone signal, especially when we have things like energy crashes, when we have some dizziness, or just exercise intolerance, um, despite your cortisol levels being in place. So we're looking at all of these four markers uh together. And I order uh aldosterone for people as well, which is not normal. Um, your ALT relative to your AST. Now, this has to be done about three to four days after training. So you can't just measure this, go train and then just measure that because it's gonna be completely off. Uh, but you want to treat these relative to one another rather than these absolute flags, where you're gonna have like mild ALT elevation with normal AST, that's gonna signal some metabolic stress. Now, if you have AST dominance, that's actually going to reflect muscle or systemic load instead of liver pathology. So they're gonna be indicating what correction action that we actually need to take, if any. Also want to look at your albumin and your total protein because that's going to show like your um uh sufficiency of protein long term, your liver output, like your uh inflammatory dilution, and like where we can see these things even when everything looks the same. So we need to look at albumin because it binds so many things, it's so important for so many different bodily processes. And you also have to remember that your lab corp normal ranges are there to protect liability, okay? They're there for liability purposes, they're not there for like your performance. Functional ranges exist for performance, pathology is the end stage of these things, and optimization is going to live where upstream, because that's where we need to make all of these corrections. So if most people are told that they're normal while these ratios are just collapsing, which of these markers do you think would change the fastest if someone actually like fixed their energy allocation instead of chasing their symptoms first? Very tough question.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

Very tough question, and I really can't I feel like I can't speak to too many of these. Yeah. But the one that I have experienced with is the insulin and glucose tracking. Yeah, because we were pre-diabetic. And I mean you can see my like my photos. I'm not like a overweight person or something.

SPEAKER_03 37:14

You were lean.

SPEAKER_01 37:14

I was lean, I've always been lean, um, but active. Active, but I was pre-diabetic. Um I probably wasn't as active as I could have been. Um, but you were still active. Yeah. So that's the only thing that I have a clear image in my mind of how to kind of address it. And I'm thinking you could address that early on. We addressed that very early on. And because nutrition is one of the first things that you'll typically see on a training a new training program or a new um optimization protocol, um, you can correct some of these issues with nutrition and activity.

SPEAKER_03 37:51

Yes. Um we didn't even deploy like medications and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

No, it was just tracking supplements, lifestyle, uh, you know, walks after meals, um, eating, you know, fasting for a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 38:04

Um like the payoff to like all of these things is better nutrient handling, better metabolism output, right? Like there's a very measurable effect on this. Like your energy levels, your mood, brain clarity, huge, huge on this. Yeah. But it's actually a little bit of a trick question because uh that's the way that people think about it. They think about like let's fix one of these things at a time, and they just create these things that like one supplement for this, one supplement for that, one supplement for this, but they don't know how these supplements interact with one another. Yeah, and they don't need they don't know how these labs interact with one another. So that's why I talk about functional ratio so much because they serve as guidelines for things that we would see before these issues take place. So, like, I caught some inflammation happening way before any inflammation markers were ever in place, and this just allows me to be now over 12 weeks over the amount of time that I was running drugs before without any inflammation whatsoever, like without any negative. So you have to correct these things simultaneously, understanding how these supplements, the interventions, and the organism is going to interact with uh with like uh one another. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

When does being disciplined turn into ignoring warning signs?

SPEAKER_03 39:13

Uh, whenever you are a guy and you're 30 years old, um, and uh you live in America. That's just the way that it is. Based on my conversations with people, uh, that's that's what that's what it is, right? People just think you need to power power through things, and uh there's nothing that I hate more than white knuckling through issues because it's uh fucking stupid and it's also ignorant. Now, your discipline is going to turn into denial when your consistency is going to be prioritized over signaling quality. When the plan becomes more important than the organism running the plan, that's when your discipline is gonna turn into just fucking denial. Your early warning signs, they just get reframed, they get repackaged as weakness, laziness, lack of grit. When actually they're just feedback that you're getting from your body about your recovery debt, your stress load, and like these missequenced phases that you created for yourself. So people start overriding their poor sleep, their flat mood, their nagging paints, their declining libido, and and even their like performance that that has like been blunted now for a while because they're showing up wanting to just check boxes, they're not taking into account the actual organism that's checking those boxes. When this is happening, your nervous system adapts very quickly. How it numbs the sensation and it dampens your output, so it feels like discipline, but you're actually protecting the downregulation of your entire metabolism as a whole in 05 terms, so to speak, your output is being forced while the organism capacity is actually shrinking, and your operations continue unchanged, despite mounting obstacles. That's just what it means. If you don't understand what it means, you're not inside of OptiLab, and that's on you. But the March method is actually going to expose this because the measurement, like, once the measurement stops improving, right, once these adjustments they stop working, once your recovery gets skipped, once control becomes rigid, um, like March exposes that immediately. Your true discipline is always going to be like adaptive to your physiology. Fake discipline is going to ignore your physiology to protect your current identity. True discipline is going to adapt your behavior to your physiology. The behavior gets adapted to the constraints of the physiology. Fake discipline is going to ignore your physiology to protect your identity. Long-term performance, the people that do best, they listen to these signs early, they exit these phases sooner, and they adjust before damage forces their compliance. So whenever I'm talking to people and like, oh, I just finished this phase, I'm so beat up, I'm so like their debt is so big that they're now gonna need to spend so much time correcting this, and because they don't know how to correct, it just takes three times as long, and it's not corrected entirely, it's just patched, that you just progressively have worse and worse and worse results as time moves on. People think it's just because, like, oh, I'm training for longer, so that's why it's not working. No, it's because you're proactively putting your body in the own back burner, your burnout is almost always going to look like commitment right up until the body pulls the plug. Once your body pulls the plug, then you realize, oh shit, that wasn't commitment. That was just fucking burnout, and I did it on myself. Now, at what point do you think people confuse this like mental toughness with this physiological self-sabotage? And how do you like how would you help them like to tell them that like this difference in real time?

SPEAKER_01 42:59

I think that you have to pay attention and notice patterns and the pattern changes and then communicate them early if you have a coach.

SPEAKER_03 43:11

Um but I also think that And yo, shout out to my clients because you guys do this so fucking well. I literally get messages like almost every day. And if I tell a client like, hey, like let's uh let's monitor this, send me a message tomorrow morning, I'll wake up, I'll come to my computer first thing in the morning, and the message is there. So good fucking job, guys.

SPEAKER_01 43:29

Nice. Yeah, I think excuse me, um, recognizing patterns um and pattern changes and communicating them early. Um I also think that if you have For example, at the gym you have a history of pushing yourself hard and always going for the extra rep, increasing the weight. Um and then one day you get to a point where you just can't.

SPEAKER_02 43:56

Immediately.

SPEAKER_01 43:57

Like you just try and you just can't. Well, that's an indication that that that it's a um physiology thing and not a discipline thing. Why? Because look at your history.

SPEAKER_03 44:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 44:08

Look at uh what you typically do. Yeah, the trends. Um the if you don't if you come to something and you you encounter a problem and you say, What the heck? Like, what? Why is this happening? That's a physiology problem most of the time because it's not consistent with who with what you typically bring to the table, with the mindset that you bring to the table. So that's what I think I would kind of tell them to think about. That's good. What does longevity actually mean to you now?

SPEAKER_03 44:42

So it no longer means living in a bubble or avoiding stress altogether. It means preserving system integrity so you can express high output repeatedly without progressively causing more and more collapse on your body. That's what it means. So it's about maintaining your mitochondrial efficiency, your endocrine sensitivity, your vascular function, your connective tissue resilience, your cognitive sharpness across fucking decades, not just adding a bunch of years to the end of your life. It's not just about lengthening your telomeres. It's about improving the quality of your life. The mistake that people make is like they treat longevity as abstinence instead of capacity. So like this happens especially when like someone's lifestyle includes taking performance-enhancing drugs or physique-enhancing drugs, taking stimulants, uh, aggressive training, just high stress work. They're just gonna treat longevity as just like trying to abstain from other negative things in their life when actually it's it's not about that. Like when you have PDs in the picture, your longevity protocols they need to shift towards damage control, right? They need to shift towards recovery amplification, they need to um, you know, create like some um exit strategy planning instead of just moralizing all of these inputs that you have. It's not about whether it's good or bad. And you actually need to change the priority here. We need to prioritize uh like what, like cardiac remodeling uh surveillance, right? We need to have some lipid particle management, we need to have control over our hematocrit, we need to have um uh control over our uh filtration trends in our renal system. We need to take a look at where like our inflammation tone is actually at because those are the systems that PEDs are gonna tax first. So, in when longevity is in the forefront of your mind and it is in the forefront of mind, I don't believe in using PEDs to become unhealthy. If that's what you want, that's what I'm gonna give it to you. But we're gonna keep you as healthy for as long as possible. Um, your your phases are going to matter even more here with longevity. So these push phases are going to be very intentionally bounded, and your health phases are going to be designed to restore receptor sensitivity, your mitochondrial density, endothelial function, and your nervous system tone. Your nutrition, your sleep architecture, your circadian alignment, like all these things, they really stop being lifestyle advice, and they become, when you have life longevity in the forefront, they become the mandatory infrastructure to offset the pharmacologic load that you have been imposing onto your system. Your supplements are all and and and adjuncts, they're all going to be selected for organ protection, for redox balance, for bioflow, for glucose handling, rather than just performance optics. So when people are saying, like, oh, supplements don't work, pay attention to the people who are saying that because all that they're saying is, hey, we don't pay attention to this. We just care about your numbers and your stats now because I need another transformation photo to put on my Instagram and make more money. Longevity actually is the art of becoming adaptable and staying adaptable. It's where your body can enter and where your body can exit extremes without accumulating irreversible debts. That just means that you're aging faster, and that happens at a mitochondrial level. The goal, again, is not to live forever, it's to actually avoid becoming fragile while you are choosing intensity. So longevity should allow you to pursue these intense things and taxing things on your body. Now, if longevity really is about preserving your adaptability, how can someone judge whether their current lifestyle is actually building resilience or if it's squalling like narrowing their future options?

SPEAKER_01 48:32

Um, I think you have to look at where you want to be and then look at the steps it takes to get there and then work backwards.

SPEAKER_03 48:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:41

Um and by doing that, you'll notice things about your current life. Um, you need to be observant, um, notice shit. Get somebody and then get somebody that can again look at stuff on your behalf, um, who is more knowledgeable than you, um, that can can identify those quiet uh adaptability killers, if you will. Um and keep your options open. You know, there's there's so many you have your goals and you want to map that out, but then also you don't want to kill all your other options for the rest of your life. Yeah, you know?

SPEAKER_03 49:25

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, don't don't just have short-term goals, aim for longevity, map this shit out.

SPEAKER_01 49:30

Because there's a way to do it.

SPEAKER_03 49:32

There is, there are several ways to do it. Several ways to do it.

SPEAKER_01 49:36

Yep. You don't have to sacrifice one for the other.

SPEAKER_03 49:38

You don't. But speaking of sacrificing one for the other, thank you guys for sending these questions. Let's move on to Instagram questions with our rapid fire. Do I need blood work if I'm natural? Already answered that. Shut the fuck up. No, I'm just kidding. Yes, because being natural just means that your damage is happening slower and it's quieter. So, like, how confident are you that you would actually notice this decline before it costs you years?

SPEAKER_01 50:02

What labs matter most?

SPEAKER_03 50:04

I mean, the the ones that are going to show like energy allocation and system stress. So, like insulin, your triglycerides to HDL ratio, your free T3 to reverse T3, your ferritin with your CRP, not like the feel-good markers that people just cherry pick, like your testosterone and estradiol. So, like, are you actually tracking the drivers? Or when you're looking at your blood work, are you actually just scanning for reassurance here?

SPEAKER_01 50:30

How bad is high cholesterol really?

SPEAKER_03 50:33

So, high cholesterol, this could be a whole entire podcast, but this is a context problem. It's not a morality thing at all. Without insulin, without your thyroid and inflammation data, you're just guessing. So, like, are you reacting to a number on cholesterol, or do you actually have an understanding of the system here?

SPEAKER_00 50:53

Can supplements fix bad labs?

SPEAKER_03 50:56

So, supplements, they're going to support the correction, but they cannot override broken sequencing, poor sleep, stress load, liver dysfunction. Like, so are you just stacking a bunch of pills to avoid changing your behavior? Because if that's the case, supplements are not going to do shit for you.

SPEAKER_01 51:15

Should I worry about inflammation markers?

SPEAKER_03 51:17

Yeah, if your CRP is elevated, that means your body is prioritizing your survival over performance, whether you feel like it or not. So, like, how long do you think you can outwork an immune system on high alert? Not really for long.

SPEAKER_01 51:31

Is resting heart rate actually important?

SPEAKER_03 51:34

So, resting heart rate is a very crude but honest signal of your autonomic load and your recovery debt. So, if yours keeps creeping up, what are you pretending to not see? Change that.

SPEAKER_01 51:48

Can you train hard forever?

SPEAKER_03 51:50

You can train hard for a while, or you can train intelligently for decades, but you can't really do both at the same time. So, which timeline are you actually going to choose now and why?

SPEAKER_01 52:04

When should someone stop pushing?

SPEAKER_03 52:07

You stop pushing when your outputs stall, when your sleep becomes fragmented, when your mood becomes flattened, or when your injuries are lingering longer. Um if your discipline is still high, so that needs to be maintained. We need to have some level of stability here. So are you listening to these signals here, or are you just trying to protect your identity?

SPEAKER_01 52:27

Because you need to be disciplined in relation to your organism. Exactly. Not just your pushing at the gym.

SPEAKER_03 52:32

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 52:33

What made you take health more seriously?

SPEAKER_03 52:36

So I just watch a bunch of high performance crash um after ignoring all of this early data. That just taught me that your confidence uh means fucking nothing if you your feedback is just delayed regret. Um, so like how much evidence do you actually need before you make a change?

SPEAKER_01 52:55

What's one thing you do now for health that younger you ignored?

SPEAKER_03 52:59

I respect recovery. I uh sequence as aggressively as uh I do performance, and uh I bec I do that because I just understand that your future um is always going to come due, it's always going to charge the debt that you've been accumulating. So, what is the actual debt that you've been quietly accumulating? You need to um intervene, and like first you need to identify then intervene debt.

SPEAKER_01 53:25

What do you think people misunderstand about longevity?

SPEAKER_03 53:29

They think longevity is about avoiding intensity instead of actually preserving adaptability that I talked about. So, is is is your lifestyle like making you more resilient or making you more fragile over time? That's the difference between preserving uh adaptability versus just avoiding intensity. Yeah. Good question. And our last question.

SPEAKER_01 53:51

What's one decision you made for health that cost you short-term performance, but you'd make again without hesitation?

SPEAKER_03 53:59

So the biggest decision that I made was actually choosing to pull back when I still could, instead of just letting my body just force me to pull back. So even though it meant temporarily losing some output, some strength, some drive, and like even the identity that comes with like this mentality of always being pushed, uh always pushing it, um, like it means losing that and accepting that. That decision is it cost me short-term performance um every single time because I exited the faces early, but it also reduced my volume, my pharmacological load, it allowed me to prioritize my sleep architecture, my mitochondrial health, and it just let all of my markers normalize before um letting me chase progress again. And at the time, this regression really feels like it feels like shit, right? Because like nothing is broken yet. So what am what am I trying to fix? But the data always shows that like you're like some rising recovery debt, some like the margins started to like narrow, the ceiling starts coming close together, the walls are closing in, and that just made like really obvious that like real control is being able to like stop and have these adaptations before they start turning against me. So the the choice um that I reframe here is like how I see health, performance, blood work. It's like it's it's because real control is being able to stop on your own terms instead of pretending that your discipline will protect you from your own biology because it can't, and you're just doing that to preserve your identity, is just psychology, it's just a defense mechanism, it is not a fucking flex. And everything we talk about today comes back to that moment, like labs over your feelings, your sequencing over your own fucking ego, phases over just permanence and long, and you know, longevity over just short bursts or performance. Understanding that longevity is really about preserving the ability to re-enter a phase of high intensity without collapsing afterwards. And most people they wait until they're broken to respect this. And the uncomfortable truth that I found is that when these options are narrower, recovery is going to be slower. The hard part about this decision is that it never, ever, ever feels heroic in the moment. It feels fucking boring, it feels humbling, and it feels expensive, which is exactly why so many people like avoid that and they never do that voluntarily. They just let their body actually do that for them. Now, if stepping back, like actually before you're forced to feels like a failure, what actually would it cost you to keep pretending that nothing is wrong? Sleep on that one, and we will talk again next week. Thank you so much for sending these questions. Love you guys. If there's anything that I can do to help you, let me know. Talk to you guys soon. Peace out.