Ep. #1168: Dr. Andy Galpin on Strength Training for Recreational Athletes

Andy: Okay, whether you’re a sport person like you described or nobody else, or you’re doing a lot of different activities, you can control the environment. You can control the stress load. It can be managed very clearly and can keep you healthy. You’re going to find very few professional athletes at this point who don’t lift weights.

It’s very rare. And it’s not necessarily only to get them bigger, faster, stronger. But it’s the resilience and it’s the coming back from the game. So what I mean by that is you go play the game on that weekend. How long does it take you to get back? Strength training will aid in that.

So you’ll come back after two days instead of four. Now you get to play more. 

Mike: Hello and welcome to a new episode of Muscle for Life. I’m your host, Mike Matthews, thank you for joining me today for an interview with Dr. Andy Galpin on mostly on strength training for recreational athletes. Now, I say mostly because we start the discussion on the topic of sleep.

I share a little My own sleep journey as well as a simple tweak to my diet that I made recently that immediately improved my sleep. So if you are struggling with sleep, particularly if you’re struggling to stay asleep, who knows? It may help you as well. Depends on your circumstances. You’ll have to listen and then we move on to the main topic of this episode, which again is strength training for recreational athletes and why it’s vital for recreational athletes to engage in enough regular strength training.

And it’s not just because strength training makes you stronger or makes you more powerful. There actually are quite a few additional benefits that will improve your ability to play sports that don’t. obviously benefit from maximum strength and maximum power. Pickleball, for example, is a sport that Andy uses as an example because he’s working with the number one pickleball player in the world and is having him do strength training.

He explains why. And so if you play sports recreationally, if you like playing sports more than you like quote unquote working out or more than you like doing strength training. And if you would like a bit of motivation, a bit of persuading as to why you should give more time and more attention to strength training and how that can make you better in your sport, which you may care a lot more about than getting jacked, for example, then I think you’re going to this episode.

And if you are not. familiar with Dr. Andy Galpin. He is a professor of kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton. He’s also the co director of the Center for Sport Performance and one of the leading experts in the world on muscle physiology and human performance. But first, if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast, and if you want to hear my musings on mastering the inner game of getting fit so you can reach your fitness goals faster, Check out my book, The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation.

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And you can find the Little Black Book of Workout Motivation on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Hey Andy, it’s good to see you again. 

Andy: Good to see you again, friend. 

Mike: Yeah, it’s been a while. Too long, man. I know. I’m going to plug your your absolute rest program that I’m looking forward to going through.

You can’t get more detail oriented than this, and even slight to moderate improvements in sleep can make such a big difference in quality of life. Anyway, I’m just, I’m looking forward to going through it. 

Andy: No, I appreciate that, man. There’s the reality is, I don’t want to derail us too much here, but you started it, so I’ll just.

Add one more thing that if you look at the world of sleep, everybody talks about how important it is, sure, there’s the map walkers and then there’s everybody else, right? You just won’t find anyone who won’t give you sleep is. Arguably the top thing you can do for long term health, longevity, for short term health, hormone levels, from performance to athletes, like it’s just ubiquitously the number one thing.

But then when you look at what people do for it, it’s one of the lowest. People spend very little, if any, on sleep relative to their training programs, relative to their equipment, relative to their nutrition and supplementation. So it’s the highest impact, yet it has the lowest amount of benefits. effort people put into it.

So when you look at that and you’re like, okay if I want to do something about it from a sleep perspective, I can either get a wearable, which, you’re paying a couple of 100. You should expect to get a couple of 100 of value. Or I can go to a clinical sleep lab, go sleep in a hospital for a couple of days, pay 7, 8, 10, 000, wait three months, four months and Be told I have apnea or don’t these are not real solutions, and there’s nothing in between.

So for us, it was a pretty easy thing to fill us. It’s wait a minute, the technology that’s being used to sleep studies and clinics literally 40 plus years old, and we have so much better technology and we can actually do this, to do it with much more fidelity and do more than sleep is how you’re sleeping within sleep.

What people care about is fixing it, improving it. So then why are you sleeping that way? And then what specifically do we do about it? And there’s just no other program in the world like Absolute Rest. So I’m stoked to have you go through it, man. 

Mike: And I’ll add one thing and then we’ll we’ll segue onto topic.

Just for people listening, I shared this offline, but I actually, this would be something that I typically would share maybe in a Q and A, the episode that I do or something. So a simple little, Change that I made to my regimen that immediately improve my sleep is something that Andy shared on a podcast that he was doing with Chris Williamson talking about sleep.

And so for people who are regulars here, you’ve probably heard me say at some time or another that. For some time now, years, I’ve just been a lighter sleeper. It was almost like a switch flipped one day and I went from being a deeper sleeper to a lighter sleeper and tending to experience probably anywhere from one to four awakenings per night.

Sometimes it was worse, sometimes it was better. There didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason outside of. General stress levels, if things get too hectic, then I would notice, okay, that’s probably what it is, but that wasn’t the why, so to speak listening to this podcast that Andy, you were doing, and you mentioned you were working with somebody, I think it was a business person or something, endurance athlete guy in good shape, lean.

Exercised a lot same issues awakenings, but what caught my ear was the blood work. So you get blood work done, it elevated SHBG, low fasting insulin, low fasted low fasting blood glucose. And I got blood work done a few months ago. just randomly. I was just curious because I’m 40 and you’re supposed to do that every year and I’ve never used steroids.

I never really cared to do blood work when I was younger and I’m not a professional athlete, so it just wasn’t relevant. And so that’s exactly my blood work. SHBG was about 51. I think insulin was like 1. 9. Blood glucose was like 79. And the guy that you were speaking about, The underlying issue was a low carb, lower calorie diet, just maintained for a long period of time with higher activity levels.

And I was like yeah, that’s me as well, because I want to stay lean. I probably stay somewhere around 10 percent body fat. And that means. That you have to err on the side of under eating rather than over eating. That’s just the way it is. And carbs are the easiest macronutrient to play with. If you need to bring your calories down or up especially if you want to make sure you’re just getting enough high quality fat in your diet, enough protein.

And so when I looked at. My quote unquote meal plan, not that I follow one, but I just have been tending to eat the same types of things for a long time. My carbs would fluctuate on a daily basis, probably between 150 to 200 grams, no higher than 250. And in the context of a higher than average amount of physical activity, a fair amount of weightlifting, endurance training, that’s a low carb diet.

And Hence, the lower insulin, higher SHBG, that relationship didn’t even, I didn’t even remember it until you said it, and I’m like, oh yeah, that’s right, that explains that. And to get to the point, to get to the tip, what I did is, I added a little mixed meal about an hour before bed, about 50 grams of carbs, it’s rolled oats, it’s overnight oats, just because I like squishy oats.

I think it’s tasty, but it’s also, middle-ish in terms of the glycemic index. Glycemic load, or for people that like how your body processes it, especially when you add some fat. So I use almond milk just because calories, right? I can cut out a hundred calories from the whole milk and still get the experience to some degree.

And then I add a little bit of fruit. So make a little mixed meal out of it. And so that immediately. Improve my sleep as in the day I started, I slept better that night, but I initially just chalked it up to, okay, who cares? Maybe I just got lucky, but then the next night now slept better again. So it was fewer awakenings, but also deeper sleep to where the awakenings.

I’m not so concerned about awakenings. Would I like to just sleep through the night? Yes, I would. But if I have to wake up once to go pee or even twice, I don’t really care if I can just fall back asleep very quickly and wake up feeling rested and spend a reasonable amount of time in bed and be good.

And so it’s been several weeks now and I’ve been doing it very consistently. And at this point, there’s no question because nothing else that I’ve tried over the years, and I’ve tried everything aside from any drugs. I don’t want to take sleep drugs. So every little natural thing that you can think of, I’ve tried and nothing reliably improved my sleep for More than a couple of days at a time than just eating some more carbs, eating some more calories.

As I was saying offline, I have to thank you for that. And it’s a good tip for people listening because I know there are a lot of people listening who are into fitness and who want to stay lean and who understand energy balance and understand macronutrient balance and would tend, possibly make the same mistake and wonder what’s going on.

So anyway not exactly related to today’s discussion, but 

Andy: yeah, it is because honestly, this is the value of doing the pyramid of decision making correctly. And what I mean by that is a lot of people will get a little bit of information. And then spend all of their time, energy and resources on lots of different solutions.

It’s way better if you flip that. So spend all your resources, whatever you’ve got, whether you’ve got 200 bucks to spend or 200, 000. Spend that on data collection. Get that process, get that information, because then your solutions become hyper specific and simple. In your particular case, You had done the inverse.

You had tried all the things for years, right? And you probably maybe had done a sleep wearable or something. You spent two, three 

Mike: Even did one of the little at home thing and they said, Oh, yeah, you have mild sleep apnea. It’s not too bad though. Here, get a CPAP. Get a CPAP. 

Andy: Great.

300 bucks, 400 bucks, maybe a thousand bucks. 

Mike: And I did it to try it. I’m like, sure. I don’t care. Whatever. Let’s try it. And it’s too, it’s, I just can’t sleep with it. It’s too much going on. 

Andy: And that led to months, if not years of failed experiments. Okay. If you flip that pyramid and say, instead of spending two and a half years trying to get this figured out, I’ll spend a little bit more money up front.

Get way better analytics and then know exactly what to do. And now your time, it feels like you’re spending more money, but you’re not because all the money you make on sleeping better for those two and a half years would have certainly outpaid the money that you spent to get the proper analysis done.

So our philosophy in general for our sleep company, absent rest for. Our blood work company vitality for our coaching companies. It is enormous amounts of data on the front end. Don’t miss anything so that we can create not complicated programs, really simple, high precision ones. So you’re going to go through that whole thing.

And your answer, Mike, is just, you need to up 50 more carbs. Other people has nothing to do with that. Maybe they need to drop 50 carbs. Maybe they have a mouthpiece. They need to wear it. Maybe it’s who am there’s something in their bedroom, CO2 concentrations or molar. Whatever, right? So the solutions can be all over the place.

But the reason we have the success we have is because the solutions are very precise to the person. So we don’t have people trying 50 different things for months on end with no rhyme or reason because we know exactly what’s happening. Now we might have to try a couple things, but we know what problem we’re trying to solve instead of the problem we’re trying to solve being, I don’t sleep well.

That’s not a thing. Something is causing that. We don’t know why. So now we’re just going to guess with a bunch of random solutions. So we generally don’t like doing that. That’s not the scientific approach and it leads to way more failure. Sometimes you get lucky and you try one thing and it works.

But this example you have worked for you only because you have the data. The blood work date, at least, and I happen to give you the exact thing as an example, and I happen to be lined up with you. So it worked. Most people aren’t that lucky. 

Mike: Yeah. And to your point, I wasted a fair amount of time and energy and money on more just, Random kind of just stuck in the fog of war, launching off their artillery and random directions type of and probably if I look back on that, as to why I did look around and didn’t find anything like what you were offering where I was looking for.

And so some of the programs I did find, and I went through a couple, like I went through a CBTI program and I liked it actually, it was good information. I did notice, interestingly, that. After simply the educational component, it was put together by a Harvard, I think, professor of sleep researcher. I forget his name, but it was good information.

It was some new information that I had actually never read anywhere, which it was a little bit contrarian. His message was not that sleep’s not important. Yes, sleep is very important, but that Don’t get too concerned with not sleeping enough here and there. And don’t think that just one night of bad sleep is going to ruin your day.

And these are things that anybody who’s gone through a decent CPTI program knows, but I just never had. And that a lot of the messaging that I had been hearing was just how vital, absolutely vital it is to get enough sleep. And what’s enough sleep? It is at least 8 hours a night, every night, or at least, 80 percent of your nights.

And if you sleep 6 hours, then that here are all the downstream effects that happen in your physiology and blah, blah, blah. And so the net effect of going through that program was that I wouldn’t say that I had. Developed much in the way of worries or anxieties, but it did shift my perspective a little bit that like, Oh, okay.

So of course sleep is, five and a half, six hours a night. Not that you should go for five and a half or six hours per night, but if you get your core sleep, if you’re generally getting enough sleep and then one night, it’s not enough. And you get your core sleep. Yeah, you probably are going to feel maybe a little bit worse the next day.

Maybe there’s going to be a slight drop in your mood, maybe a little drop in energy levels. That’s all that you should experience. Physiologically, if you’re experiencing negative effects far in excess of those things, it’s probably more psychosomatic than anything else. 

Andy: Number one, there’s a real thing called orthosomnia, and that is sleep tracker induced insomnia.

And this is a, this happens where people will get some sort of wearable or tracker and their sleep actually gets worse and they can clinically develop insomnia because of the anticipation, the worry, the concern what you laid out Mike is a step on that path where you’re like, oh, I wasn’t, Didn’t create develop insomnia, but I was maybe creating additional worry.

So I don’t know whose program you went through. I don’t know if it was Stephen Lockley’s program. Who works with us at Absolute Rest, but nonetheless, so one of the keys that we do at Absolute Rest is not to optimize your sleep. And I want to make this crystal clear. We do not want you to have a 90 minute routine to never have to have a meal after 5 p.

1. To never touch a drop of alcohol, never travel. That’s not the goal. The goal is to become the most resilient sleeper possible. What’s that mean? When you have five and a half hours, can you make that the best five and a half hours? When you have to travel, when your kid wakes up three times in the middle of the night, can you, when you don’t have suboptimal, or when you don’t have optimal sleep, can you still have the best day ever?

Tomorrow possible. So this is a major phase shift with people. Cause they’re like, Oh, I don’t want to go through a program like that because I don’t want to do what I just laid out. I don’t want to have a 60 minute routine. My life is that’s the program isn’t for me. The other thing is we deal with professional athletes, they’re traveling.

Every three to five days depending on the sport they’re in like what I just laid out is not going to be acceptable for Them what we need to do is make you resilient against all of those bad nights so you perform better And your worst days aren’t as bad and your better days can be better. So that’s the second thing I wanted to say 

Mike: And I agree with that philosophically, but I also agree with it Practically as well.

And that, that really is how it should be. I think that is the ideal to strive for. It’s not to use a naturalistic fallacy, but it’s not, it cannot be very quote unquote natural in terms of innate physiology for us to have to do a 60 minute bedtime routine that has seven different elements to it.

And if any of those things are off, then. We’re going to, it’s going to take an extra hour to fall asleep. There’s no way that’s how it’s supposed to be. 

Andy: No, man. What you’ve done in that case is create a hypersensitive person to where if they ever have to go to a hotel, they’re screwed. 

Mike: Yep. Where you know about the first night effect and you’re already just, you’re already calculating in yep.

First night’s terrible. First day, terrible. 

Andy: All that so what we might do is we might put you through a couple of months where you do have this 16 minute routine. We have all these things, but that might be to fix problems and correct patterns. Physiology’s greatest gift is pattern recognition. And this is a good and a bad thing.

If it knows you get into bed, And you roll around for an hour, it’s going to want to tend to when you get into bed, roll around for an hour at the inverse, though, if it knows you get into bed and you fall asleep 5 to 10 minutes later, it will learn that pattern as well. So I have to be very careful with what pattern we’re establishing.

So the pattern we want to, we may need to, we may need to break that pattern. So I may need to do a 90 minute routine every day for a month tour. We can learn the pattern of get into bed. And fall right asleep and have a great night of sleep. Then we pair that back from 90 minutes to 60 to 45 to 15. So that eventually you have the skills and the physiology to sleep well, but we don’t have, but you still, you might have to make that investment initially.

It’s like growing a company. It’s like a training program. It’s like hiring a nutrition coach for the first time. Those first few meetings and first few weeks and months are going to be way longer than meal prep and you don’t know how to do it, weigh it, and then you get to a spot where you’re at right now probably where you’re like, I don’t weigh and measure everything, but I did that for so long.

I pretty much know what I mean. Okay, great. The same kind of idea can extend to sleep. Where we’re going to have to take you through a phase, more likely, where we’re going to have to do a bunch of crap. But the goal is to not do that. That’s not the end. And this is where some people will stop the conversation, the biohacking, healthosphere, podcast of Stan.

And you’re like no, that’s not the end goal. That’s fine to get there. But the end goal should be you get away from that. That’s 

Mike: marketing. That’s what that is. That’s marketing. 

Andy: Let’s get you in the door. Let’s solve the problem, create the right pattern, and then eventually be able to peel that back.

And you mentioned you went through cognitive behavioral therapy. That’s a really great example. That’s a fantastic thing. We use it all the time. We’ve had enormous success for it, but you didn’t need that because that wasn’t your problem. So you didn’t see tremendous benefit. We don’t just give more carbs to all of our people.

That’s not the, so for you. That’s not the secret. That’s not the one weird trick. Yeah, it’s not Oh my God, Dr. Albin saying everybody should have more carbs and fall asleep. No, in that example, I gave that person needed it. Another example, they carbohydrates may have made their situation worse.

People are here a lot about eating before bed can be detrimental. Maybe they needed CBT. So it comes down. This is again, why if you really want to solve, it’s not just sleep, but it’s really global physiology problems. Precision is better. 

Mike: One, one benefit of CBT I and then I’ll segue to talking about athletics and training, just listeners may find this interesting that if they’re dealing with any sleep issues, one benefit, the biggest benefit that I did notice from CBT I, this really only, this was, I read through the material and again, I learned some things that were new and it reframed.

Some aspects of sleep for me and maybe again, I don’t feel like I had anxieties or worries around it, but maybe alleviated concerns to some degree where it was, I realized that it’s not a given that you’re going to feel terrible the next day. If you sleep 6 or 6 and a half hours, that doesn’t have to be that way.

So there were a couple of things like that, where it was just reframes. And so more or less immediately after just going through the educational component, I noticed. That if I didn’t sleep enough, I felt noticeably better the next day. My best explanation of that is there was a psychosomatic component where I was unconsciously exaggerating the problem.

And it wasn’t from specific. Negative thoughts that I was having, that wasn’t particularly an issue. There wasn’t anything exactly that I could pinpoint that got resolved that resulted in that. It was just learning a few things that were interesting to me that reframed and then more or less immediately again.

Don’t sleep enough. I noticed that. Yeah I know I didn’t sleep enough, but I feel a lot better than I did just a week ago before I did the educational stuff, so I thought that was cool. Alright let’s segue. So the primary topic I wanted to talk to you about is the key benefits of resistance training for recreational athletes.

Just have a conversation around that, speaking to people who. They care just as much about their athletics as they do their strength per se, or their physique, or maybe they care more about their athletics. And maybe their resistance training is more in service to athletics. And so I think a good place to start is.

The key benefits for somebody who again is they’re not a high level competitive professional athlete per se. And so they don’t have access to people like you and other professionals who can just lay it all out for them and say, Hey, or just do this. And you’re going to get better. What are the key benefits to adding resistance training for athletics?

And you can take that whatever direction you want, different types of athletics and so forth. 

Andy: Yeah. There’s a lot to say here. You really can’t pick a functional outcome in which resistance exercise won’t contribute to longevity. Okay, great. There is enormous amount of data, observational studies, teleological information, molecular mechanism to intervention studies, randomized control trials that generally people are going to live longer, healthier, better lives.

So if you want to full stop it right there, you can. Okay, of course, muscle mass is the obvious one. Ones that are probably less talked about, it is bone health. Now, this is particularly important for females. It’s important for everyone, but particularly for women. One of the biggest drivers of female lack of physical activity is bone mineral quality postmenopause.

Getting ahead of that curve as much as you possibly can is important. Really important. If you look at endocrine health, immune function, body composition, of course, mobility throughout the world. Remember, if you don’t have muscle, you can’t move. When people stop moving, life quality goes down, which means social interactions tend to drop.

Social interactions are dropping enough as it is with remote work and all those things. And now if you can’t move yourself around in your, that’s going to really decline. So all those things contribute to it. It’s one of the biggest places in which we hold amino acids. Thanks. These are the fundamental building blocks for, again, your immune cells.

This is why it helps regulate your immune system, for your endocrine system, for basal metabolic rate. It’s a regulator of that. So maintaining a leaner physique, even if you don’t care about muscle, if you just want to keep fat low, muscle mass will contribute a small amount, but an important amount over time to the amount of energy you burn just getting through life, which helps you stay, A little bit leaner to everything from it is what we’ll call what is often called an endocrine organ itself.

So it is the largest organ in your body. It’s not skin muscle is by far the largest organ and it secretes hormones. So it communicates to your liver, to your pancreas, to your brain, to your digestive system, to your pulmonary system and your heart. It sends chemical signals out and communicates and tells.

Things what to do and how to operate. So it is a large depot for practical relevance, how you move throughout the world, how you experience life, how you look, if you care about that. As well as it is regulating a great amount of your internal physiology. So strength training vis a vis and keeping your muscle healthier is going to regulate or contribute to all those physiological benefits.

So you can’t really develop that kind of quality muscle, any other form of exercise for the most part. It doesn’t mean other forms of exercise are useless. No, but they won’t have the same benefit. There is nothing that creates a better anabolic response than strength training. And that’s. Very clear at this point.

So I wouldn’t suggest someone is in their optimal health if all they do is lift weights But I would say it’s a very large component that almost everyone is going to look better Feel better perform better in the short term as well as long term 

Mike: and what about short term impact? Athletics. So think of the recreational athlete.

And the reason I’m asking that is just thinking to the many interactions I’ve had over the years, where if somebody is very into a sport, again, even if it’s recreational, but they only have so much time to give to things that aren’t work and family and obligations, and if they try to give as much time as they can to the sport, then that can tend to take away from.

Strength training or really any other type of exercise, especially if the sport has them moving a lot. So it is actually a lot of exercise and maybe it even there, there is a, some sort of muscular component. To it where it’s not the same as strength training, but there’s a lot of dynamic action that’s happening.

And so in my experience with working with people like that over the years, sometimes they’ve not been resistant. Everything you just said, they’d be like, yeah, I know that’s true. But time that I’m in the gym means time that I can’t be playing my sport and then there’s recovery and so forth. And often the selling point.

With a lot of these types of people from my experience has been improvements in the sport. That’s been enough to get them like, all I’ll give that a couple hours per week. If it’s going to make me better and it’s going to, it’s going to reduce risk of injury, if it’s going to help me play my sport longer, I’m into it.

Andy: Yep. So you nailed this. The second part, which is probably more important, what I didn’t even talk about previously is the tissue tolerance, soft tissue, connective tissue, ligaments, joints, tendons. All of those are enhanced or at minimum maintained with strength training. And yeah, you want to stay on that court on that skateboard.

You want to stay on your kayak. More than strength training will dramatically increase that generally because sport tends to be very specific. And so the load placed upon each one of the joints tends to be very similar. So when you’re going out on that kayak, you’re doing the same kind of movements that your elbow joint wrist in that example gets really banged up.

Okay, great. So then what you want to do is try to balance the stressors on the other body parts and systems to keep that joint as healthy and integral as you possibly can. So a lot of our professional athletes, actually, this is the only reason they lift weights. They are as strong as they need to be.

You’re a major league baseball player. You can front squat 375 pounds. I can’t convince them, and I wouldn’t try to, that if we got them up to 400 or 425 that they would throw the baseball any harder or better, because they won’t. But we’re doing it to keep the hip, knee, and back, and ankle healthy because, and just random examples I’m picking out here, in a major league baseball pitch, let’s say you’re right handed pitcher, what people don’t realize is one of the major driving forces is your ability to jam your left foot into the ground really hard.

It’s a big breaking force. It pushes your hips back, which slings your arm forward. If you want to think about it that way. That said, then you see a lot of left patella issues. You see a lot of left hip issues because you’re constantly jamming your femur back into your hip socket. And so we need to make sure that thing is protected.

So a lot of lifting we will do in season especially, or even off season, a lot of guys don’t like to lift really at all, but they just notice they stay healthier, and it’s very clear their joints handle the tolerance much more effectively. That’s true of everybody. Whether you’re a sport person like you described, or nobody else, or you’re doing a lot of different activities, you can control the environment, you can control the stress load, it can be managed very clearly.

I can keep you healthy. You’re going to find very few professional athletes at this point who don’t lift weights. It’s very rare. And it’s not necessarily only to get them bigger, faster, stronger. But it’s the resilience and it’s the coming back from the game. So what I mean by that is you go play the game on the weekend, how long does it take you to get back?

Strength training will aid in that. So you’ll come back after two days instead of four. Now you get to play more. 

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No forms, no return even is necessary, so you can’t lose. Go to buylegion. com slash Pulse, order now, use the coupon code MUSCLE, save 20%, try Pulse risk free. And see what you think, can you explain how that works? Cause that’s, that could sound counterintuitive to people who don’t understand why, because they look at how much physical stress they’re already putting on their body, playing the sport.

And then they hear I’m now going to be adding a couple hours of strength training per week. And it doesn’t just add more stress on top that I have to recover from. And how does that net be positive? 

Andy: Yeah, so it’s adaptation, right? This is what we call a hormetic stressor. So a hormetic stressor is something that has a short term decrement that leads into a long term increase.

So this is exercise in general. If you look at your physiology post exercise, everything is worse. Cortisol is really high, energy is low, protein synthesis is way down. Okay, everything, oh my god! However, it is down for seconds or minutes or hours, if you will, and then it goes rocketing back up the other direction.

And so if you look at, this is one of the reasons why acute exercise will cause a massive cortisol spike. However, it will lower resting cortisol over time. That’s a hormetic stressor. Look at blood pressure. People don’t realize the positive benefits strength training has on reducing resting blood pressure.

So there have been many trials for over 40 years now, looking at everything from isometrics, just the classic ones are a grip strength training. So you’re taking people that have high blood pressure. All they do is squeeze their hand. Basically they do grip strength training and Six weeks, eight weeks, ten weeks later, their resting blood pressure is significantly, statistically significantly lower by just the isometric grip strength training.

That’s been well documented many times. The real easy explanation, why? When you’re squeezing really hard, you’re actually completely occluding blood flow, which means you’re blocking it all. Which is the whole negative consequence of high blood pressure, right? So if you’re walking around with high blood pressure at rest, what that means is your heart has to squeeze really hard to get blood through your system.

So there’s too much resistance in the system. This becomes a problem, right? So what you actually do is counterintuitive. You add more resistance to that problem. You squeeze those vessels down so nothing gets through. But you do it instead of having it a little bit, For 24 hours a day, you have it a lot for 20 seconds and you rest and you have a lot for 20 seconds and you do that a handful of times and then you get that response where the vessels will dilate.

Because they’ll say, all right, we’re currently not getting the blood flow dilate, to respond to that immediate stressor. As a result of that, you’ll get a chronic adaptation of basal dilation, which means your chronic blood pressure is lower because your arteries and veins are more opened up and the blood can pass through easier as there’s less pressure.

That’s exactly what we’re talking about is a short term hormetic stressor. The cortisol is the exact same example. You shoot it up really high. So your body goes, Oh my God, we have to crash this thing back down. And you do that within seconds and minutes, it comes down. Basal cortisol will come down.

This is the same thing for mental health, same thing for energy, the same thing for recovery. There’s a billion reasons why exercise is positive for these things. It does almost the exact opposite effect in the acute sense. That leads to a chronic adaptation in the opposite direction. This is why you get really hot at night.

You take a bath, you sleep better, you take a shower, even though the thing that will kick off falling asleep is when your body temperature goes down. So what you do is you get in the shower, you get really hot, you have a hormetic response there, you get the inverse reaction of your body comes bringing your temperature way down and then all of a sudden you fall asleep.

So that’s exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re like, Oh my God, that how’s it in recovery? This is how your system will say, Oh, great. We’ve got another stressor. We’ve got to kick recovery into hyper gear. And now all of a sudden recovery gets accelerated. 

Mike: Can you speak to a few of the performance related benefits that are not obvious because the sport maybe doesn’t involve explicit demonstrations of Strength or maybe explosive power where I’ve just had these discussions with the air, we’re like I play golf now.

This is not the, this discussion has changed over the last decade or so. 

Andy: Has to with golf. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I just, I, that’s just an example I’m familiar with. Now you have a lot more higher. Higher level golfers who are into strength training and experiencing the benefits. But that’s just an example of a sport.

Or if somebody says they play a lot of pickleball or something, it’s not clear. Why would improving my squat help me perform better at a sport that isn’t American football, for example, where yeah, look at these guys. They’re all super freaks and I get it. 

Andy: Yeah I’ll tell you right now. We actually.

Have coached some high level tennis players and we are currently coaching the number one pickleball player in the world. Okay. I also coach John Rahm, one of the top golfers in the world. John Rahm lifts weights five to six days a week. You’re not going to compete on PGA Tour or on Live Tour that he’s on if you’re not lifting weights.

I, Scotty Shuffler, they all lift weights. They’re not all doing back squats. They’re not doing clean and jerks. They’re not all doing bodybuilding. But they’re lifting weights at some form or fashion. A lot of times the weight can be their own body, they’re moving. It’s, so when the first answer to your question, Mike, is you got to reframe lifting weights.

When people think of that, they often think, Oh my God, again, like football, we’re doing football type of lifting, we’re doing bodybuilding. And that’s the only thing I think lifting weights can be. And that’s I’m really actually glad you said that because I do a really bad job of that. Sometimes I just go there and I forget that assumption.

It’s really important. Lifting weights can be a billion different things for different adaptations. Bodybuilding peak strength development, peak power development for collisions is one. Of the many styles of strength training, and lots of it can be done. So John Rahm is not deadlifting five or six days a week.

He’s not bench pressing. He does those, but he’s not doing them five or six days a week. He’s doing rotational stuff. He’s doing foot strengthening things. He’s doing shoulder isolation stuff. He’s doing neck stuff. He’s doing a connection between your right knee to your left shoulder strengthening things.

So it is making the system move healthier, move better, more effectively. So when you ask why would a pickleball player? I can tell you our pickleball players, number one in the world, this weights, right? Everything from synchronization. So you need to be able to make sure that you see something with your eyes, that’s coded in your brain.

You can make a decision that decision can then be translated into the exact human movement you want. That is enhanced with strength training. There is a ton of research. We actually published a couple of years ago, a paper where we saw that leg strength. Explained 5 percent of cognitive variance in a national database.

What do literally, leg strength explains 5 percent of your IQ in this particular study. Okay, there are direct connections. Between training muscle and brain health, you will see this over and over. 

Mike: It’s the opposite of the stereotype. Is that what you’re saying? The stereotype is the bigger, the muscles, the smaller, the brain, 

Andy: yeah no, it’s quite opposite, right? If you look at, if you think about it, what’s required to move muscle, three big components. There actually has to be something from the nervous system, central nervous system, brain, spinal cord, brain stem, something like that. Then that nervous system has to contract, tell the muscle to contract, that’s part two.

And then the muscle actually doesn’t pull on bone, the muscle pulls on connective tissue, which goes into tendons, and those connect to bone, those pull. Okay. So there’s a nervous system component, there’s a muscle component, then there’s a connective tissue. So when you’re strength training you’re actually, the muscles there, yes, that’s what everyone thinks of, but there’s also connective tissue, which is what we’ve been talking about, injury prevention, health, tissue tolerance, things like that, recovery, less damage, but then there’s the first part too.

It is training the nervous system. The nervous system is a trainable, adaptable thing. Now, muscle responds way faster. It is highly plastic. You’ll see changes in days. In fact, you will see changes in muscle in minutes with swelling. Thank you. Okay, water, fluid retention, but you’ll see muscle growth performance improvements in days to weeks, depending on how, trained or not trained.

You are how novelist. Connective tissue takes a lot longer, much, much, much longer, not a lot of blood supply there, so it doesn’t adapt as fast. But the nervous system adapts really fast, too. In fact, it adapts sometimes faster than the muscle system adapts. So why is it? If you’re literally turning on and activating the neurons in your brain, To do a complicated multi step, multi instruction movement, then those brain, those neurons literally stay alive.

One of the things we see happen really clearly is neurons that are not activated die out. And so there are a subset of neurons that are called high threshold, which means they’re only activated during high force production. So you never activate those high force neurons, they don’t stay around. So you’re losing the fact that there’s actually evidence, direct evidence now.

That strength training preserves physical brain matter, okay? So it’ll, not just the nerve side, but the actual brain tissue itself is preserved with extensive strength training. So it’s not the only thing one would need to do. It’s not mental health. It’s not emotional and psychological. But in terms of neurological and physical brain health, cognitive function.

Look at what Tommy Woods has produced out of Tommy Woods produced out of the University of Washington. He’s shown an enormous amount of information now. They just published actually Tommy Luisa Nicola and I’m forgetting the third author. I apologize, but they just published a pretty interesting paper specifically looking at the associations between strength training and reduced incidences of Alzheimer’s and late onset dementia.

As well as progression of those things. So there is a real strong connection to physical brain health and skeletal muscle. Therefore, when you’re training for those things, keeping the brain alive, we extend that to the young healthy. So if you’re trying to make sure that, again, you can perceive with your eyes, which are a part of your brain.

You can make a decision about where to go, when to go, what strategy I want to do, what technique am I going to implement, and then your muscles actually have to have the ability to get there and do it and execute hand eye coordination. All of this stuff is enhanced by practicing it more, and there’s only so much you can do on your core.

You can only hit so many balls. Now we can work on developing sequencing. Making sure that I give an example of kind of like right knee to left shoulder. There are cross angles in the body that happen with fascia or the connective tissue. You can get better at movement without getting stronger at all, by just moving really correctly and in the right sequence of, glute, then abductor, then hamstring, then knee extender, things like that.

I just, again, just made that up. But that can all be developed in the weight room, independent of the obvious, Hey, if you’re faster. If you’re more explosive, if you can change direction quicker, you’re going to be better at any sport that has those required. I can go on and on, but it really makes very little sense to not have strength training.

Again, I don’t know if I’ve coached the world’s best in probably 15 or more sports. Cy Young winners, Hall of Famers, all pros, number ones in the world, like you name it. I don’t know a single sport who doesn’t do that. So if the best in the world are doing it, you should probably take a cue from that.

Mike: Before I forget, I want to comment on something that you mentioned earlier, which is this point of the optics of weightlifting and how many people perceive that, like you said, that weightlifting is something for bodybuilders, maybe something for high level athletes, and that’s actually one of the reasons why I try to stay away from that term.

I try to talk about strength training. I like strength training the most because it, it sounds more appealing than resistance training. Resistance training is it’s just not as clear and what’s the clear benefit when somebody just hears resistance training, some training on what is, what am I getting out of that?

Whereas strength training, Oh I’m getting strength and. Just about everyone would agree that being stronger is better. And so I just wanted to comment on that in particular because there are a lot of what we do for a living and probably more so me than you, because I produce material, my target market, and from the beginning I’ve just tried to help the gen fit crowd, not that you’re not doing that, but you’re, you spend a lot of your time working with a different type of crowd, and with a lot of people, even little things like that can be the difference when they’re in that moment of deciding if they’re going to, if they’re going to look further into that and decide if this is for them or not, if they hear weightlifting and then they immediately associate that with bodybuilding and whatever they saw growing up and that, that’s for a good reason too, for a long time, that is what weightlifting was and weightlifters, the difference between me.

Weightlifting and immediately having that association. That’s not for me. Maybe it’s also a woman as well. So there’s even a little bit more resistance to this idea of bodybuilding and lifting heavy weights with guys kind of thing versus strength training. That can be the difference of nah, I’m not, that’s not for me or well, maybe there is something here.

I can always get stronger, right? Strength is good, right? So just a quick little aside on the perception of it. But then with the specifics of programming, and I know that there probably aren’t very many one size fits all rules for how someone would train for athletics versus, let’s say, hypertrophy, or just aesthetics, maybe you could talk a bit about that, and you can talk about however you want to go about it with your experiences working with many different types of athletes, but so much for having me.

The reason I asked that question is again, I’m just asking questions. A lot of people have asked me is okay, so I’m sold on including some strength training in my regimen, but I play this sport. And so what should that look like? Should it just be a basic kind of barbell strength program? Okay.

You can’t go wrong with that, but are there some specific optimizations that are personalizations that I should be thinking about because of the sport that I play? 

Andy: What you want to think about is not replicating your sport in the weight room. Now that’s counterintuitive, but you almost always want to do the opposite.

Here’s what I mean. A lot of times we have had endurance athletes and they’re like, oh yeah, I lift twice a week, which is a pretty reasonable number. If it’s the person you described, a lot of sport activity. Probably twice a week is a good time to live, but then they go in the weight room and they do, dumbbells and they’re doing sets of 15 sets of 20.

Cause they’re like I’m an endurance athlete, so I need to do endurance. 

Mike: Yeah. I need muscle endurance. 

Andy: And the reality is you need the opposite. Because you’re already getting endurance training, and we’ve seen this a lot with our boxers, a lot with we’re with a lot of UFC fighters, I actually leave tomorrow to go to Vegas for an event at the UFC Spear for an athlete that I coach out there so it’s okay, I understand that, but when you’re doing jujitsu and you’re wrestling and you’re hitting mitts and you’re boxing, you’re getting a lot of muscular endurance work in your shoulders.

What are you not getting on there? Are you getting peak strength? Are you getting velocity? Are you getting posture? Are you getting correctives? Are we working on imbalances? Are we avoiding asymmetries that are too aggressive, before they get too out of control? That’s the stuff we want to work on.

So in those scenarios, when I’d say go to the weight room and do what you don’t get in your sport. If you are already in an explosive sport, then maybe you do work on a little bit of muscular endurance in the gym. If you’re in a endurance you’re like I do some explosive here, but like anime boxing, those are you’re never really going to go peak speed typically, because you’re going to, you’re going to fly out of a strike.

Because there’s no load that you’re going to put on. Okay, good. So we’re going to get those things and we’re going to correct tissue. We’re going to make things feel better. We’re going to work through joint health stuff. That’s what we’re going to do. So keep the session small. A couple of high quality movements to get the attribute that you need.

And then a couple of individualization stuff. Whether you want to use a machine because you’re not super versed in lifting. Start with the machine. Keep your spine out of the equation. Keep multiple joints out of there. Fine. Get the, get. Basic stuff going on there. Do you like to use dumbbells or kettlebells or barbells?

Fine fine. Those are just different tools. They’re not the exact same. If you get to the kind of next level of understanding here and coaching, but for this conversation, you could use any of those implements. The key is though. What style of training are you doing that is going to fill in the holes that your sport doesn’t give you?

That’s the biggest tip I’d give. 

Mike: And would that also apply to movement patterns? So if a sport, is constantly having you do a few patterns and you just don’t touch several of the other key patterns. 

Andy: Exactly. Yeah. So it’s the movement planes. It’s a movement patterns. It’s the muscle, right? If you are a cyclist.

Okay. Great. We know exactly the movement patterns you’re in and the muscles you’re working on. Now we need to go work the other stuff. MMA guys tend to be the opposite because movement patterns are really versatile. So we tend to be really more, much more stable in training. You’re getting lots of instability, lots of asymmetry, lots of unilateral activation.

I don’t need to put you on only single leg BOSU ball stuff in the weight room. We’re going to go bilateral for the most part, and we’re going to get real high force production because that’s the thing we can’t get in training. We’ll get better at movement. We’ll get better at technique and skill and timing and rhythm on the mat, most likely.

Other sports would be the opposite, right? So take something Like a golfer where it’s okay, you’re pretty much doing the same actually sidedness every time we may need to move in more vertical, more sagittal, more frontal plane movements because you’re getting transverse planes almost exclusively in the sport.

Yeah, it’s the movement patterns. It’s the time type of contractions for example, in grappling. It is a lot of isometrics because you’re grabbing and holding a ton. So they think you’re pretty good at those things Other sports like baseball and football. They’re not really good at isometrics at all because nothing is isometric in those sports So we might do a lot more of those In certain phases of the training.

We also in like football players, for example, we’ll spend way more time on eccentric work They do almost nothing eccentric in sport But there are the demands in the game and practice for eccentric loading are really high If you’re cutting and breaking and changing direction, that’s a big eccentric chain.

So we might spend more time going under control with our lifting. Not explosive, not out of control. I know you can do that, but we need to show you can control and move better for your movement patterns. Develop that tissue tolerance at a big, deep range of motion, and then we’ll get out and move in more dynamic.

Ways. So yes, it’s all of those things. It’s contraction type. It is speed of contraction. It is type of contraction. It is implement. It is movement pattern. It is repetition range. It is restorable. It’s all of those things that you want to factor 

Mike: in. And by programming that way, is that primarily to avoid injury or to improve performance or is it a bit of 

Andy: both?

Both, right? So you want to think about not putting a lot more strain on the exact same joint and tissue that is. On the same strain in a sport. So for a golfer, we’re going to do some rotational stuff But do you don’t want to add any more rotation like a ton more rotation? 

Mike: It’s already so asymmetrical. You must have to balance that.

Andy: Yeah. And asymmetry in sport of golf is a good thing. Most rotational sports actually are oftentimes better with some amount of asymmetry, right? That creates torque. That’s why they’re special if they’re sport. 

Mike: Yeah. It’s probably just not great for your body though. After 10 years, if you’re not addressing it, I would assume after you’ve hit a million balls or some crazy number.

Andy: Oh yeah. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, the only thing you do in the weight room is just more golf swings. Okay that’s not going to be it. You definitely could do some way to golf swings and you should, but it can’t be the only thing that we’re doing over there. Yeah, we want to balance all those things and then the injury prevention is one of them.

But the other one is you’re going to perform not to your best capacity in sports. But you’re going to perform to the lowest constraint you have. And so we want to make sure that lowest constraint is constantly being elevated. So there’s a philosophical difference between if you take an athlete, let’s take football because it just came up.

One of my NFL players played Monday night football for her game, Fred Warner, fantastic game. I actually caused a fumble very first play of the season. So off to a bank start, right? So one of the 49ers decided that they want to run the ball more because they’re really good at that and pass less that’s a skill.

That’s a tactic issue. That has nothing to do with me as their strength coach, right? What I can do is look at it and say hey look if we don’t get Some improved mobility in your thoracic spine here ultimately in the game. Your breathing is going to get limited by that So your endurance is going to come down So I know that you want to get faster or stronger.

None of these is the case with threat. I’m making it up In this case You’re ultimately going to be limited in your game by that thoracic rotation. So that’s the biggest breakthrough and benefit we’re going to see for you, because getting a guy like Fred Warner faster is hard. He’s already really fast.

So you get the idea. So that’s why when I say like shoring up their weaknesses, it’s not a, it’s not a technique or a tactics issue. That’s the skills for that job. But ours is to say, what’s going to fail? What’s going to fail physically from our perspective? And we got to eliminate that. Because ultimately, that’s how you’ll perform is that level of that lowest constraint.

Mike: A very personalized approach, which is, of course, unsurprising, but it makes me think of what you were talking about much earlier about sleep, even approaching it that with getting a lot of data and understanding where you are at. So of course, it would make sense to do the same with athletes. The last topic I wanted to Get your thoughts on before we wrap up is recovery and similar to sleep.

There are many people saying many different things and there are many biohacks and and other gadgets and things that are. Purportedly great essential breakthrough for recovery. What’s your philosophy on maybe we just start broadly on recovery. And if you want to address any immediately address any myths and mistakes or just topical nonsense, go ahead.

Andy: The biggest thing you got to figure out is when you say recovery, what do you say? This is a short and acute all the way to chronic so at the shortest thing when you say like i’m not recovering Are you talking about in between sets you feel like you can’t come back? The burn is staying there longer than it should be You’re talking about laying on the floor for an hour afterwards because you can’t get back to baseline you’re throwing up That’s recovery in some people’s brain.

All right, I can’t recover between the first and second quarter Okay, interesting then there’s a little bit more extended which is I can’t recover. What do you mean all the next day? I’m trash. If I do a hard workout, if I play a game, I’m super, super sore or my legs are really heavy. I’m not recovering.

Okay, interesting. And then there’s a longer one where we see a lot of people are like, I feel normal throughout the day. If I do a hard workout. I’m wrecked for a week. And then there’s the longest one, which is more of a classic where you and I would probably talk about is long term non functional overreaching over training, things like that, where you’re like, I can’t seem to get caught up on sleep.

I’m exhausted every day. My motivation is down. I just feel my mood is off. My sexual function is down. I’m just don’t I feel like trash every day. Not recovered. And what happened? Oh, I did this big event. I did this big race. I went camping. I did this big vendor guy strip, whatever. And I have not recovered since that.

It’s been 2 weeks jet lag, things like that. So when you ask about all the tools and stuff, most of the reason that people are getting confused in this field is because they’re not clarifying what they’re talking about. Let me give you a really easy example. Let’s take ice baths and heat, cold water, hot water.

Mike: I was going to just ask that we, that you address these things particularly because these are supposed to just enhance recovery. That’s the. 

Andy: Sure. It depends on what type of recovery you’re talking about. Sometimes they can be great and sometimes they can actually be both of the equation. Now I can play the same game for supplements.

I could say it for hydration. We could play the same game for Normatec booze, or Theraguns, or Red Light Therapy, or MarkPros. All of these things are good or bad. What type of recovery are you trying to enhance? We have extensive data on professional athletes. If your recovery, in the sense of HRV, is down, you wake up, and your maybe your resting heart rate’s down, your HRV’s in the tank.

If you do cold water immersion, your HRV’s gonna basically double. And it’s not gonna be an acute effect. That will stay around, because we’ve time coursed this out. 30 minutes. 60, 90, 120, 150, all the way up to 180 HRV will basically double for the next three hours. So someone wakes up in the morning and they’re like, Oh, my recovery score, my readiness or HRV is down.

My recovery is not bad. You go do the one minute ice bath and your recovery will be astronomically high. So really, you tell me, was that like, was recovery a problem or wasn’t it? So is ice great for recovery? Oh, Dr. Galpin said ice is the recovery thing. Okay, time out. And you know where I’m going with this one, Mike.

There is tons of data now on if you get into an ice bath immediately post strength training, it’s going to compromise muscle growth. Oh, okay. So I guess ice bath is a myth and this is a biohacker. No. Not that either. Same exact tool. Super beneficial at the same time, massively detrimental.

If you’re post exercise, and by the way, we ice bath post exercise. For some people, and some we do not. If we are trying to maximize muscle growth, we do not. If I am just finished an NFL game, we might ice bath. We have a lot of players who like, man, I, like I’m so beat up after a game, or major league baseball player after they pitch.

And we can kickstart and we’ve collected a ton of data ice in our case, and we’ve done this a lot with a lot of data. I’m talking blood saliva performance, maximal internal rotation, maximal external rotation, sleep metrics, like lots of data in lots of different areas of physiology. In general, the recovery process will go faster if you get into an ice bath post game.

Okay, I’m also not trying to maximize muscle growth in season. I do not care about that. None of our athletes in season are really going to care about maximizing their muscle growth. When you have either the scientist or the person saying Oh my god, ice bathing is such a biohacking bro myth. No, it’s not.

You are only thinking about muscle growth. And you’re also not thinking about athletes that train twice a day. Many of the athletes I work with will train twice a day. In fact, if they’re not there, they’re training the next day, the same body part. So if you were a bodybuilder and you’re doing muscle splits and you’re only doing muscle group at a top, sure.

Maybe don’t get into an ice bath afterwards, but almost every damn other scenario, it’s not a bad idea. It’s really not a bad idea at all. Now I don’t always do it, but that’s the true context of recovery. So is the bro science biohacker right? Yes and no. Is the scientist right? Yes and no. It’s a big clusterfuck, honestly, of miscommunication and arrogance and only thinking that there’s one possible outcome that somebody might have with training.

They’re only doing it for one reason and then assuming you know why they’re doing it. And in general, it’s just best to not go down that road, right? We shouldn’t be making those things. So at the same time. Let’s go to the opposite of the equation. Let’s go to hot water immersion. There is more and more recent data, and I predicted this probably 10 years ago.

I might have this out there on Twitter and Instagram, I guarantee it. Hot water immersion post exercise tends to enhance muscle growth. At minimum, it’s neutral to potential slight benefit. Probably not a huge benefit, but okay. I promise. You get into an ice bath post all your training though, a lot of times your legs feel really heavy.

So it’s not necessarily just Oh my God, I’ll just hot. You do that. And you get, especially if you’re training hard, doing high intensity stuff, multiple times, big volumes, whether you’re an endurance athlete or whatever, your legs is going to get really shocked. Not always.

Some people don’t, but some people do. So I don’t necessarily always have them get in hot afterwards either. Last scenario I’ll give you is what time of day are you training? Are you working out after work? Or are you working on the morning before work? Or you and I, somebody who’s training. Like not with the traditional work schedule The easiest example there.

We learned this really fast with a travis barker. So he’s a drummer. He’s on tour, right? He’s gonna play a rock concert until midnight or something like that If he gets into an ice bath after that, he’s not gonna go sleep for hours So as much as I want to kickstart his recovery, it’s too, it shoots him awake.

Now we run into the same thing sometimes with really late games with pictures where Oh God, and if they have to get up early to catch the flight the next morning, if it’s a travel day, it’s sometimes hard because that thing’s going to keep you awake for a few more hours. So in that case, we actually might go hot or nothing or contrast or something like that, but we got to figure out cause somehow these some individuals rather it’ll shoot you away awake.

Some people won’t. So you have to tinker with a little bit. So in general. To wrap all this up, and obviously that could go on for a while. When it comes to recovery, what are we talking about? Are we talking about, I’ve been in the tanks for weeks or months? Those are different solutions. I’m fatigued right now, I’m sore.

Those are all different solutions. And to wrap the point here, look at muscle soreness. There is actually reasonable evidence to suggest that cold water immersion probably helps with muscle soreness. You don’t get a sore and you’ll your soreness will go away. Not much. It’s not a huge effect But there’s some so if i’m in season in competition phase prior to paris in the olympics, we’re gonna ice bat And if that causes some muscle growth, I don’t give a shit.

You do not want to go into a major competition like that feeling tight. It is a shoo and people who’ve never worked with real athletes do not get this at all. You do not want to go into competition and something’s tight. Something’s sore. It hurts. Especially one where like everything for four years is on a line.

I don’t care what we have to do there. I want that anaglyptic effect. I want the Oh yeah, feel good. Great. And you’ve never dealt with a real athlete. Like you’re either only a scientist or you only deal with physique people. There’s, that is a big ass thing. You can be on stage looking at your physique and being sore, but when you have to perform, it’s just a mind trip that is really hard to get over.

You have to do the right tool for the right job. I guess the way that we started today, and I guess that’s the way we’ll finish. 

Mike: Great information. And again there’s a theme here of attention to detail, specificity, addressing what is right in front of you, as opposed to just vague generalizations and trying every vague generalized thing that you can come across.

And these days with social media, you can come across an unlimited number of vague. Generalization. Again, great discussion. And I want to just wrap up quickly with where people can find you, find your work if there’s anything specifically you’d like them to know about in addition to absolute rest, obviously you have your own podcast, which is doing great.

So let’s definitely plug that. 

Andy: Awesome. Yeah. Absolute rest is absolute rest. com. You can go check that out. Our blood work company. This is blood work for high performance stuff. It’s not to help people get ozempic and TRT. If you want to use those things, great. Totally even thing. 

Mike: There are probably like 19 clinics within a 10, 10 mile radius of you right now.

Andy: And a thousand on your Instagram feed. If you really want blood work done because you’re already pretty healthy and you want to be healthier, you want to think faster, more clearly and have a better recovery and all those things, then that’s what it does. It is going to run high analysis interpretation of it for you.

You don’t have to do that. Mike, you’re obviously, versed enough in some of those metrics. A little bit, but most people don’t and the problem with blood work is what does it all mean for me? Why do I care? Our vitality blueprint. Is the name of that. It’s going to take care of all that for you and then tell you exactly what to do to not just improve the metric because that’s sometimes not what you want to do, but to solve the problem behind that.

So vitality blueprint is that. And then, of course, you mentioned perform is my podcast. Season 1 is out. All 10 episodes are fully available. So you can go binge those. In plenty of time because season two will probably come out early 2025. So that’s all available. And of course Instagram and Twitter are easy places to find.

Mike: Awesome. Thanks again, Andy. This was a great discussion. 

Andy: My pleasure, man. Always good to connect, man. 

Mike: How many calories should you eat to reach your fitness goals faster? What about your macros? What types of food should you eat? And how many meals should you eat every day? I created a free 60 second diet quiz that’ll answer Those questions for you and others, including how much alcohol you should drink, whether you should eat more fatty fish to get enough omega 3 fatty acids, what supplements are worth taking and why, and more.

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