Supercharge Exercise Performance & Recovery with Cooling | Huberman Lab Podcast #19.subtitles.txt

welcome to the hubermann lab podcast where we discuss science and
science-based tools for everyday life i'm andrew huberman and i'm a
professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at stanford school of
medicine this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at
stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring you zero
cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to
the general public

whether or not you want to treat your muscles because they're tense from
working out or whether or not you just want to release stress it's a
terrific tool many of you are familiar probably with professional
massages but theragon is interesting because you can basically give
yourself a deep tissue massage anytime anywhere it's also very quiet if
you want to try theragun you can try it for 30 days they start at only
199 dollars you can go to theragun.com huberman right now and you can
get your gen 4 there gun today that's the one that i use or another one
of their models that's theragun.com huberman to try theragun this
episode marks the beginning of a new topic for the hubermann lab podcast
as many of you already know we go deep into a particular topic over four
sometimes even five episodes we just closed out the episodes on hormones
now we are going to talk about how to optimize physical performance and
skill learning we're going to look deep at the science behind this as
well as specific practices in fact today you're going to hear about
specific tools that you can use to improve endurance and strength by up
to i'm not making this up three or four times your current capacity this
is based on studies that were done at stanford and are currently in use
by collegiate and professional teams if you're not a professional
athlete or a serious athlete that's okay the topics this month and all
the information we are going to cover are going to make you a better
recreational exerciser as well if you're not in exercise you're thinking
about getting into that or if you live in the northern hemisphere and
you're just thinking about the beach this summer fat loss muscle
building that sort of thing this month we're going to cover all of that
as well there's so much confusion out there about how to optimize fat
loss muscle building improvements in flexibility for instance or skill
learning i know many of you aren't so focused on the cosmetic aspects of
physical exercise but are interested in actual skill learning we're
going to talk about that too i want to just take a moment to reflect on
something that came up last episode if you didn't see that episode
that's quite all right but last episode we were talking about the
hormones adrenaline and cortisol and how to leverage those towards
attention and learning and there was a little bit of confusion that i
want to clarify i mentioned an optimal protocol for learning that
involved leveraging adrenaline also called epinephrine and it involved
four steps the four steps that i spelled out were to be calm and focused
while one is trying to acquire or learn the new skill cognitive skill or
motor skill then to have a spike in adrenaline i mentioned ways to do
that using cold or breathing or other tools immediately after the
learning episode then to incorporate what i call non-sleep deep rest a
20-minute episode of a shallow nap or some other protocol like nsdr
non-sleep deep breast protocol of which we always provide links in the
captions and then to try and optimize sleep later that night and the
subsequent night some of you heard this and it sunk in right away and it
was straightforward others said wait i thought from a previous episode
even before that you said you're supposed to do non-sleep deep rest
immediately after learning no we added another step the logic still
follows that you want to be calm and focused during learning then you
want to spike adrenaline at the end most people get that backward
they're drinking too much coffee or even taking nootropics and things
trying to be really focused while learning some people are taking
adderall recreationally something i don't recommend that's actually
getting the whole process backwards if you look at the data and the
physiology you want to spike adrenaline at the end or immediately after
a learning episode and then non-sleep deep rest and then sleep itself
okay four steps hope that clarifies things for you if you have any
additional questions please put them in the comments section below okay
so let's talk about physical performance there are so many variables to
physical performance and we can manage physical performance and skill
learning from a variety of contexts i made just a short list of some of
the things that come to mind that can powerfully impact physical
performance and skill learning some of them are what i would consider
foundational they allow you to show up with your current ability and if
you were to disrupt those you would perform less well so things like
getting a good night's sleep things like being properly hydrated things
like being well nourished whatever that means to you i know some of you
like to exercise fasted some of you prefer to have food in your stomach
or have eaten a couple hours before there are supplements there are
drugs there are different ways to breathe there are so many tools
related to mindset visualization there are machines and devices it's
just a vast space but it's not infinite and there are a few things in
the list of things that can impact and even optimize physical
performance and skill learning that have an outsized effect that any of
you can use many of them most of them are low to zero cost so today we
are going to focus on what i believe to be one of the most powerful
tools to improve physical performance and skill learning and recovery
we'll talk about about why that's important and that's temperature now
many of you might think oh well that's kind of boring i want to know
about the magic pill that i can take that's going to allow me to dunk a
basketball if i currently can't or i want to know about the thing that's
going to let me run further and faster is going to shed fat believe it
or not temperature is the most powerful variable for improving physical
performance and for recovery i would argue it's even more important than
sleep because temperature itself is going to dictate how well and when
you sleep and the depth of your total recovery there are two aspects to
temperature of course there's heat and there's cold we are mainly going
to focus on cold as a way to buffer heat in a previous podcast episode i
talked all about growth hormone you can find that episode about thyroid
and growth hormone and how heat can be a powerful stimulus for
increasing growth hormone which is involved in tissue repair and etc can
burn fat and improve metabolism in various ways however cold i would
argue is even more powerful than heat as a tool and i'm not just talking
about putting ice packs on sore muscles or slightly sprained limbs and
ankles and things of that sort we're going to talk about cold from the
standpoint of thermal physiology this is a literature that's rich in
scientific information that goes back very deep into the last century
where physiologists and neuroscientists figured out that there are
different compartments in your body that heat and cool you differently
and that you can leverage those in order to double and as i mentioned
before even triple or quadruple your work output both strength
repetitions and endurance so this is not weak sauce as they say this is
the stuff that can really shift the needle quite a bit and it's not just
about performing well once it's about being able to perform well and
recover from that performance so that you do even better when you're not
incorporating these tools on days where for instance you can't access
cold or an ice pack or an ice bath or things of that sort okay so we're
going to cover cold we're going to talk a little bit about the
physiology of cold and heat and how they work because as you've probably
heard me say before if you can understand some mechanism if you can just
push yourself through a little bit of new knowledge into understanding a
little bit of mechanism about how you work you will be in a far better
position to implement the tools in the best and most flexible ways for
your needs this is why at the hubermann lab podcast i never ever do a
just list of the things that you should do i don't believe in the just
tell me what to do first i tell you why you should do something what's
the logical framework that it's grounded in and then we distill that
down to specific protocols for those of you that are too impatient for
that there are millions if not billions of other resources out there
that will take you into the cul-de-sac of one protocol that will work
and then stop working or might work for you indefinitely that's not how
we work here this is about really understanding the mechanism so that
you can tweak things and modify things adjust the timing and the dosage
of things and really get the most out of these tools and protocols
everything i'm going to talk about pertains to both endurance exercise
and strength and speed type exercise so sprints weight lifting endurance
work and to some extent flexibility but we're going to cover flexibility
in depth as well as another feature that's not often talked about which
is suppleness or smoothness of movement over different ranges of
movement in a subsequent episode let's start by talking about
temperature what is temperature how does temperature impact the body and
its ability to perform including learn new skills so everyone probably
remembers or has at least heard of the word homeostasis right that the
body wants to remain in a particular range of temperatures that it
doesn't like to be too hot or too cold and i want to emphasize from the
outset that there are many mechanisms that are installed into us by way
of our evolutionary design and our genome meaning meaning we were just
born with this stuff ready to keep our body temperature in a particular
narrow range heating up too much is just plain bad it's not just bad for
physical performance it's bad for all tissue health if your brain heats
up too much neurons start dying and those neurons don't come back okay
you may have heard about neurogenesis the ability for the brain to
regenerate itself or generate new neurons in adulthood there's very
little neurogenera neurogenesis excuse me in adulthood even after any
time after puberty really and you don't want to lose neurons in the
central nervous system if you get too hot that'll happen it's called
hyperthermia you want to avoid hyperthermia and you have many mechanisms
that are built into you to avoid becoming hypothermic the other thing
that happens when we get too warm is that we have in all of our cells
what are called enzymes you generally know if something's an enzyme
because it ends in the letters ase right so lipase is an enzyme that
exists to digest fats you have proteases that are there to digest
proteins right so anytime you see ase chances are it's an enzyme enzymes
are proteins and they have a particular structure and their structure
becomes modified when heat increases and that's not good you want their
structure to be of a particular type imagine a car with four wheels
let's just say the car is the enzyme if it gets too hot it's like two of
the wheels fall off and that thing can't function so one of the reasons
why the body and nature goes through so much effort to build in
mechanisms to make sure that we don't become too warm is because when we
get too warm these enzymes don't function cells stop functioning they
stop being able to generate energy they stop being able to digest things
you stop being able to think and eventually those cells start dying off
entirely so keeping temperature in a particular range is really good you
don't want to get too hot we have much more flexibility in terms of
getting cold now you don't want to become hypothermic either you can die
from hypothermia just like you can die from hyperthermia however that
you have a lot more range to be cold than you do to be too warm okay and
in general the idea is to keep the body and brain in a particular range
but anytime we do anything our body temperature can shift so for
instance if you were to stand next to a campfire or you were outside on
a hot day various things would happen to dump heat from your body if you
were outside on a cold day or you would get into a cold shower or a cold
lake various things would happen to insulate heat within your body this
is all pretty straightforward and obvious i realize now what are those
things well there are a huge category of them when you get into cold
water you secrete adrenaline on a hot day if it's really hot or in a
very hot sauna or in the hot desert you will generate what are called
heat shock proteins which will set off other sets of cascades metabolic
cascades biological cascades but the simplest way to think about this
process is that when we get cold we tend to vasoconstrict we tend our
blood vessels tend to constrict and we tend to push energy toward the
core of our body to preserve our core organs okay so our periphery our
hands and our feet and our toes and our legs become colder and our core
therefore can maintain blood to that area and we are insulating our core
conversely when we heat up our blood vessels vasodilate they expand a
bit and more blood flows to our periphery and more blood can move
throughout the body generally and we will perspire we will sweat water
will actually get pulled out of the blood to some extent moved up
through sweat glands and will be brought to the skin surface so that it
can be dumped we are dumping heat animals as you know vary in their
capacity to sweat some animals like camels won't start sweating at first
if they heat up what they'll do is they'll spit they'll dump heat by
spitting okay dogs pant costello is off to my left here he pants when he
gets too warm he can't sweat or if dogs can maybe sweat a little bit but
we can sweat and you've probably noticed that on a humid hot day you'll
feel much warmer just walking or running than you would with the
equivalent exercise or movement that you would on a cold day some of you
probably know this but if you don't the reason is you sweat on a cold
day but because the air is dry typically you will bring that sweat to
the surface and provided you're wearing clothes that allow some air to
get out away from the body so you're not wearing you know really tight
you know spandex type clothing or something like that or you know seal
type saran wrap type clothing that sweat will evaporate off into the dry
atmosphere whereas on a humid day the reason you see people in you know
new york and florida on a humid summer day and they're like moving their
shirts off themselves and you see people with you know big sweat stains
and back sweat stains and all this kind of stuff is because they're
sweating as they normally would but it's humid and so there is the
humidity of the air doesn't allow transfer of that sweat into the
atmosphere as readily and so you're hot okay so without the evaporation
you're going to be warmer so we evaporate off sweat we sweat and we
vasodilate when we want to dump heat when we want to maintain heat we
vasoconstrict and we tend to not sweat the other thing that happens is
you'll get goose bumps so-called goose pimples they're sometimes called
those are a throwback to the time where we had fur over most not all of
our body all mammals in the cold have a process whereby adrenaline is
released at low levels typically into the body that adrenaline activates
what are called sympathetic fibers they have nothing to do with sympathy
those little fibers which are neurons those fibers that what i'm saying
are fibers or neurons not clothing fibers reach up into the skin so your
whole body is covered with these little tiny neurons that reach up into
the skin and when we are cold they actually mechanically take the hair
follicle and bend it up it's a process called pilo erection p-i-l-o
erection okay so on a hot day you want to dump heat okay so on a hot day
what would happen is you'd actually not see those goose pimples because
you want the hairs lying down which actually you would think that might
insulate you more but will actually let more heat dissipate out through
the skin on a cold day you get these goose pimples or goosebumps which
are really just an ancient carryover from the body's attempt to make
hair stand up on end and when hairstep stand up on end and they're very
close together that traps air in between them and actually creates a
sort of insulated blanket of warm air if you've ever seen an animal like
a a malamute or a husky you might think oh that poor thing on a hot day
what does it do you know with all that hair well it can be warm so the
animal will typically pant and its hair will lay down which you might
think would act as more of a blanket but on a cold day what will happen
is they're they'll become very puffy they'll their hair will stand up on
end and that's actually trapping heat between the hairs and they're
actually quite well insulated so it's very important that if you want to
understand how you can leverage temperature for physical performance you
have to understand that you have vasoconstriction to conserve heat
vasodilation to dump heat that you have sweating to dump heat and you
have conservation of fluids in order to preserve heat that's the most
important thing in terms of understanding the mechanisms of maintaining
and dumping heat and now the most important thing to understand is that
if you get too hot not only do those enzymes stop working but your
ability to contract your muscles stops okay i'm going to repeat this
because it's vitally important atp is involved in the process of
generating muscle contractions doesn't matter if you're running a
marathon doesn't matter if you're doing a yoga class doesn't matter if
you're going for a 700 pound squat the range of temperatures within
which atp can function and muscles can contract is very narrow somewhere
around 39 or 40 degrees celsius it drops off and you will not be able to
generate more contractions that's pretty hot but it that temperature can
be generated locally really fast now if you're too cold it's true it's
hard to generate muscle contractions i got into doing some cold water
swimming a little while ago and we would joke that you know you come out
of the water we do no no wetsuits i'm not recommending people do this
necessarily unless you're certainly with somebody else who's skilled at
doing it which i was you come out and you feel like you have claws for
hands you can you know you could never text on a phone for the first few
minutes i mean the water was very very cold and you can't even move your
face and so muscles will become rigid but heating up muscles causes them
to fail to be able to generate more contractions put simply if you get
too hot you stop exercising you may not even realize it but your will to
exercise further your ability to push harder is entirely dependent on
the heat of the muscle both locally and your whole system so let's talk
about your whole system because i just described heat dumping and heat
maintaining i told you that increasing heat makes it hard for muscles to
contract it will stop you from being able to run further and faster it
will stop you from being able to lift more weights more sets more
repetitions if you can keep temperature in range however in a proper
range you will be able to do more work you will be able to create
greater output you'll be able to lift more weight more sets more reps
and you'll be able to run further now there are data that i'm going to
talk about in a little bit that are absolutely striking that underscore
that statement there are data from my colleague craig heller's lab in
the department of biology at stanford and there are data that are now
being implemented they were first implemented in a grant funded by darpa
but now in professional sports teams many if not all the nfl teams are
now using this technology as well as military uses it and not just for
sports performance but also firefighters construction workers other
professions where elevated heat becomes a barrier to performance and you
can leverage this to really improve your workouts and when i say really
improve it is striking i'm going to give away a little hint of this now
and then i'm going to tell you a little bit more of the data later after
i tell you the protocols proper cooling of the body which has to be done
in a very specific way has allowed recreational athletes or college
students and typical adults as well as professional athletes to go from
doing their usual output in this case that what comes to mind best would
be a particular uh professional athletes a member of the 49ers at the
time was able to do 40 dips on his first set 30 20 20. basically did 10
sets of dips unassisted with anything else that's that's an impressive
um impressive especially since he's a really large guy 40 dips is a
respectable these are strict full full range dips and then by the 10th
set there's a steep drop off using proper cooling of particular body
compartments he was able to triple that within less than a week and
maintain that performance even without the cooling approach so it was
actually a conditioning effect all right i'll get back to this in a
little bit but there are other fantastic leaps of of uh effort and leaps
of performance that were demonstrated including endurance running before
i continue any further i just want to underscore again that overheating
is terrible there's a famous example of this this was about 10 15 years
ago when a number of dietary supplements that included things like
epinephrine which is a stimulant it's a beta beta adrenergic stimulant
um drugs like clenbuterol which were then banned from the olympics which
are still out there have been in recreational use which were beta
adrenergic agonists so these are drugs that sort of mimic epinephrine
adrenaline to some extent i know i'm oversimplifying this here they
improve fat loss because the effects on metabolism but they heat up the
body and what happened was this hit the press very widely as is high
school football players and various professional athletes were dropping
dead because they were overheating during practice or in competition so
much so that clenbuterol was banned although every once in a while
somebody gets in trouble for using this uh this there was an instance of
this recently in professional boxing which was attributed to a bad meat
that contained the clenbuterol i don't know what the source was um i
don't have any commentary about that but it still is in use but these
drugs increase body temperature increase fat loss but carry a severe
danger and that's the danger of hyperthermia in fact i would argue and i
think in talking to some folks at various professional fighting
organizations it's very clear that a lot of the deaths that one sees in
professional combat sports may have to do as much with dehydration and
overheating as it does with getting hit in the head which is also bad
but that things can compound they can have a synergistic effect and just
a note about that and hyperthermia and its dangers as well my first
project ever in science was to evaluate the thermogenic effects of mdma
of ecstasy that was my senior thesis in college actually and so thermo
what we found was that indeed drugs that remove your understanding of
how warm you are cause you to not take on the appropriate behaviors to
cool yourself right so your vasoconstriction and your sweating those are
autonomic those are going to happen no matter what unless you happen to
take something that blocks that effect however there are a lot of things
that we as humans do to prevent ourselves from overheating and the main
one is stop when we are running in the desert or when we're running very
hard and suddenly we stop oftentimes that's because the muscles are
overheating it's a subconscious thing we won't often think oh i'm really
much too warm it's just that we stop and it's a self-preservation
mechanism sometimes it kicks in too early sometimes it kicks in too late
kicks in too late you can die there's an instance in the 1984 olympics
where the that was the first year i believe that there were uh there was
a women's marathon i think that's correct and one of the front runners
or top picks for winning was heading into the stadium and all of a
sudden it seemed as if she was lost she was kind of wandering around not
knowing where she should go and in fact she was in a position to win or
at least take second place at least take silver got totally disoriented
and did miserably in the race and she was hypothermic she was running
against that reflex to stop so dumping heat is key so how do you dump
heat in order to perform longer safely well in order to understand that
you have to understand that the body has three main compartments for
regulating temperature okay we don't just have a center and a periphery
we have three main compartments and there's one compartment in
particular that all of you or most all of you i have to assume have and
if you can understand how that works you can do tremendous things for
your performance and for your recovery so what i'm about to tell you
will allow you to perform better in all forms of exercise and it is not
commonly known unfortunately i'm here to try and change that you have
three compartments for increasing or dumping heat in your body one is
your core we already talked about that your core organs your heart your
lungs your pancreas your liver the core of your body the other is your
periphery which are obviously your arms and your legs and your feet and
your hands but then there's a third component which is there are three
locations on your body that are far better at passing heat out of the
body and bringing cool into the body such that you can heat up or cool
your body everywhere very quickly those three areas are your face the
palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet now the skin on your
hands and on the bottoms of your feet and to some extent on your face
are called glaborous skin that's g-l-a-b-o-r-o-u-s glaborous skin and
what's special about those areas of your body and the glabrous skin is
that the arrangement of vasculature of blood vessels capillaries and
arteries that serve those regions is very different than it is elsewhere
in your body now this has ancient roots typically if you were another
mammal like a bear or some sort of ape you would have hair all over your
body now we all know some pretty hairy people or presumably you've heard
that there are these hairy people i know a few excessively hairy people
and costello is excessively hairy but he's not a person obviously but
all mammals have hair on their bodies just some people have very light
hair or very fine hair we don't have hair on these glabrous skin regions
now of course you can have beard or facial hair growth but there are
still regions like the cheeks and other areas that maintain this special
vasculature okay so technically the hands and feet are real glaborous
skin and the face is not always quite classified as glabrous but these
three locations face hand palms of hands not tops and bottoms of feet
are very good at dumping heat and bringing in cool and the reason is
there's a rule in vascular biology that blood moves from arteries to
capillaries and then to veins and then back to the heart okay so
arteries which are the big ones obviously capillaries which are the
little fine ones where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged and veins
which then bring blood back to the heart and other tissues of course in
these three regions of your hands your face and the bottoms of your feet
we have what are called avas avas are a very special pattern of
vasculature ava's are described in the medical textbooks you can find
them in grey's anatomy not the television show but the actual grey's
anatomy textbook which is a real thing that exists and in all medical
textbooks okay so let's talk about avas and what they are and why they
allow these three regions of the body to heat or cool ourselves more
readily so what are avas avas are arteriovenous astomosis so if you want
to look that up you can just look up ava's veins capillaries arteries if
you like but i'll spell it for you a-r-t-e-r-i-o arterio venous
v-e-n-o-u-s arteriovenous anastomosis a-n-a-s-t-o-m-o-s-e-s
arteriovenous astomosis okay you want to know about arteriovenous
astomosies trust me and you want to remember that they are in your hands
the bottom of your feet and on your face and in particular on the palms
of your hands not the tops of your hands now before i said blood flows
typically from arteries to capillaries to veins and then back to the
heart but avas are direct connections between the small arteries and the
small veins they bypass the capillaries to some extent they are little
short vessel segments they have a big large inner diameter and they have
this very thick muscular wall and they get input from what are called
adrenergic neurons they get input from neurons that release
norepinephrine and epinephrine which allows them to contract or dilate
now there's some rules of physics that talk about how the radius of a
pipe and small changes in the radius of a pipe leads to massive
increases in the rate and amount of stuff that can flow through that
pipe okay it's a rule of physics that says essentially that the radius
is uh proportional to the amount of stuff that can flow through
something to the fourth power we're not going to make this a physics
class but if you want to look that up you can you can just look up how
does the radius of a tube or pipe relate to how quickly or how much it
can it stuff can flow through it what you need to know even if you don't
want to know any of the underlying physics is that these avas allow more
heat to leave the body more quickly and more cool to enter the body more
quickly than other venous arterial capillary beds throughout the body in
other words you can heat up best at the face the palms and the bottoms
of the feet and you can cool down best at the face the palms and the
bottoms of the feet than you can anywhere else on your body when i say
heat up or cool down i mean actually heat or cool the core and your
brain okay so this is vitally important i realize we're getting down
into the mechanistic weeds here but you need to know that these three
compartments of your body palms bottoms of feet and face are your best
leverage points for manipulating temperature to vastly improve physical
performance okay i also want to point out that the work that i'm going
to tell you about is not work from my laboratory it's the work of as i
mentioned my colleague craig heller's laboratory at stanford and we're
going to have craig on as a guest to talk more about these discoveries
they are his and his colleagues discoveries and how you can leverage
them they're building out some amazing technology i had a conversation
with craig yesterday as a prelude to this episode and to the future
conversation with him so you're getting the very latest on this topic so
what craig and his colleagues did really illustrates perfectly what
these body surfaces can do and why they were studying overheating in
athletes and in military and in construction workers and trying to
prevent it and they did a bunch of experiments i won't go into all of
them now but what they essentially found was that cooling the palms
palmer cooling allowed people athletes and recreational athletes to run
much further to lift more weight and to do more sets and reps to a
absolutely staggering degree let's talk for a second a bit more about
why we stop why we shut off effort when we get too hot because in doing
so you'll really understand how and why the best protocols exist for
being able to do more work to be able to exercise longer and actually to
feel good doing it you actually can make a doubling of your dips or
believe it or not a tripling or quadrupling or more of your pull-ups
fairly straightforward i mentioned before that when muscle heats up
enzymes start getting disrupted and atp and muscles can't work so well
and those muscles can't contract let's get a little more specific about
that the enzyme that's involved here is something called pyruvate kinase
you don't need to know about pyruvate kinase but what you do need to
know is that it ends ase which means it's an enzyme and pyruvate kinase
is essentially a rate limiting step it's a critical step that you can't
bypass if you want muscles to contract and it's very temperature
sensitive therefore if you can keep temperature lower you can do more
work per unit time you can do more pull-ups and that actually was done
by craig and his colleagues excuse me the pull-ups weren't actually done
by craig i don't know how many pull-ups craig can do i'll ask him next
time both cooled and uncooled how many pull-ups he can do but what they
essentially did is they brought someone into their laboratory who could
do 10 pull-ups on the first set and they were able to get 10 rest two or
three minutes get another ten rest two or three minutes and if you've
ever tried this what you find is that you start dropping to eight seven
six etcetera now the person might not necessarily feel like they're
overheating but the muscle is heating up then with their knowledge that
these avas that these that these portals in the palms are a great way to
both heat the body but also to dump heat from the body they used a
device and i'll talk about what you can do at home but a device where
they had people hold on to what was essentially a cold tube now this is
crucial the tube can't be so cold that it causes vasoconstriction
because then the cold won't pass from the tube to the hand and to the
core but if it's the right temperature it's neither too hot nor too cold
that cool from the cold tube passes into the hand these so-called palmer
regions and then cools the core and in theory by lowering body
temperature would allow the person or the athlete to do more work and
indeed that's what they saw the actual data the specific data showed
that subjects could do at least the subjects they worked with on their
first day with no cooling about a hundred pull-ups across the the very
the time frame that they had okay so it might have taken anywhere from
10 to 15 or maybe more sets depending on how skilled that person was but
in a fixed amount of time then they came back and did the cooling they
did it the very next day which if you've ever trained a muscle the very
next day typically you wouldn't do as well in its training if it took
any damage from the previous session or you at least do as well but you
probably wouldn't do what they then observed which was they started
cooling after every other set the person would just hold the cold tube
cool down the body after every other set rest everything else was kept
the same and they found that they went to 180 pull-ups which is
incredible it's a near-doubling and by doing this repeatedly over
several sessions over several weeks they quickly went in the cooling
group from a maximum of somewhere between 180 and 200 as i recall i'm
sort of estimating now to 600 pull-ups in the equivalent amount of time
which is absolutely incredible they then repeated this in a study on the
bench press and actually the bench press study was pretty interesting
because they actually had a control group that was admittedly taking
specific amounts of anabolic steroids the anabolic steroid was
testosterone cypianate which is essentially testosterone and indeed the
testosterone cypinate the steroid group improved at a rate of about one
percent per week um in other words difference there were differences and
the cooling group basically left all other groups in the dust it was
just remarkable so cooling the core i want to be very clear that it's
not cooling the muscle it about cooling the chest alone or just cooling
the palms it was about allowing coal to pass through the palms because
of the unique vascular vasculature that's there these avas allowed these
subjects to do far more work per unit time and the important thing is
that if they were to come back after doing 600 pull-ups or 500 pull-ups
you might say well wow that's going to create a situation where recovery
is going to be absolutely impossible they could come back not use the
cooling and they still saw a highly significant increase in the amount
or the number of pull-ups or dips or bench press weight that they could
do okay so what that meant is that it was both an excellent performance
and an excellent training stimulus that they were able to recover from
okay i don't know if all of you are following this but these are the
sorts of increases in in exercise output that are absolutely staggering
and that's why professional teams and the military and others
capitalized on them very quickly and use these okay now you may be
asking what about endurance right not everyone wants to be able to bench
press a lot for multiple reps and sets and i should just mention for the
bench pressing it was i believe they were they found people that could
bench press 225 so that's 245 pound plates on the 45 pound standard
olympic bar for repetitions of anywhere from six to ten and then they
had them do the same thing they did a set they'd rest two or three
minutes sometimes up to four minutes then do another set repeat repeat
repeat and with cooling they were able to increase the amount of work
the number of reps with the same weight sometimes they did have to
increase sets to approximately double so it's pretty fantastic so with
endurance similar increases have been shown and the way that they would
do those tests are a little bit different and they also point to a
really important mechanism of why we stop doing work at all when we
perceive that we are putting in too much effort so it gets right to the
heart of the relationship between temperature and muscles and your
willpower those are directly related your body heat and your willpower
are linked in a physiological way so i'm not talking about the kind of
stuff that you see as kind of like click bait on the internet or like
increase willpower now or become resilient now or never do this again if
you want to be mentally strong i'm talking about a physiological
mechanism that exists in the body and brain that causes you to stop or
that will allow you to continue to go harder and further than you
normally would okay so let's talk about willpower and heat and how heat
shuts you down in other words if you are cool if your body temperature
is in a particular range not only can you go further but you will go
further if you want to said differently if you heat up too much you will
stop or you will die typically people stop there are individuals who
will push to the point where they black out and die in the same way that
and please don't do this experiment there are people who can sit down
face to face and say let's hold our breath and whoever breathes first
loses some people will just go until it's painful and then they'll gasp
and take a big breath there are always those individuals who can
override that reflex and they will go until they pass out okay and if
you do that in water you can very easily die so please don't do that
experiment but there's a reflex that relates the body to the brain and
the brain to the body that shuts off our effort when we get too hot so
what craig and his colleagues and now others have done is to do a test
in the laboratory where rather than ask people to run outside until they
absolutely don't want to run anymore you put them on a treadmill and you
set the speed so they have to keep up with the treadmill and at some
point they quit and you take groups and you do those in different
temperature environments so some people are running in a nice chili
laboratory they get their heart rate up so the maybe their heart rate
goes from you know 40 or 50 baseline heart rate maybe it gets up to 80
or 100 and then they keep the rate of the treadmill going the same and
they'll just plateau so they're getting to a steady state cadence or
rhythm and their heart is beating at more or less a steady state
eventually they'll probably stop because they have something else to do
but people will continue at that temperature and at that heart rate
unless you start turning up the temperature in the room and at some
point they will stop and they'll stop much earlier when it gets hot
because of something called cardiac drift okay so let's say i'm running
and i'm running at a steady cadence on this treadmill and my heart rate
is 85 beats per minute or 100 beats per minute doesn't matter let's say
100 just for sake of example well just making the room hotter is going
to increase my heart rate further even though i'm at the same output and
the brain does a computation it somehow figures out that there's a heat
component that's increasing heart rate and there's an effort component
from running that's driving heart rate and if the heat component and the
and the heart rate output from the effort get to hit a certain threshold
i stop okay and some of you may think well there are people who just run
and run and run and never stop eventually everyone stops maybe it's
because the race ended maybe it's because uh you know everyone else quit
i actually saw some stuff online there are these races where people just
will continuously do the same loop until everyone else drops out and
then one guy or gal keeps going and past everybody but typically it
stops because the race is over or because people quit increasing
temperature increases the rate of quitting in part not entirely but in
part because of this thing called cardiac drift which you've probably
experienced if you've been out on a hot day and you're walking uphill
you might stop to take a breath if you sit in a sauna your heart rate
will increase heat increases heart rate effort increases heart rate at a
steady effort you'll have a steady heart rate if you increase the heat
in the environment that you're engaging in that steady heart rate your
heart rate will now go up due to cardiac drift and you will quit okay so
heller and colleagues have done experiments where they do palmer cooling
under these environments and that's wonderful because not only does it
enable people to go further and faster for much longer that's been shown
statistically significant every time but it also protects the brain and
body against hyperthermia overheating coma nerve injury nerve death and
actual death okay so you can see why this is such a valuable tool so
what are they doing well in this case too they're having them cool their
hands and they're cooling the palms cooling the bottoms of the feet is a
little trickier but cooling the face could actually work as well and
we're going to talk about cooling the face and how to incorporate this
so at this point i just want really wanted to impress upon you not
impress you but impress upon you the fact that you have these three
surfaces of your body that are very good at passing cold into the body
such that it cools the core body temperature and that's a good thing for
health and safety and in order to maintain work output over longer
periods of time or actually just do more work i mean to me the result is
just so staggering is the 100 to 180 pull-ups in the controls and then
600 pull-ups in the cooled individuals right they actually also feel
mentally as if they can do more work it's not just that they can their
willpower is adjusted somehow by these shifts in temperature now before
we continue and get to the exact ways that any number of us can start to
use this information i want to talk about the opposite thing which is
heating and you have to remember that these surfaces the palms and the
bottoms of the feet and the face were not just arranged with these ava's
these special ways to pass blood from arteries to veins in order to cool
us for better athletic performance or to heat us for uh on cold days but
for both of those things now heller and colleagues and others have also
explored how they these can be used to heat up the core there are times
when we want to heat up our core typically we hear that most of the heat
escapes through our head so we'll put on a hat when we go outside that's
actually not true most of your heat escapes through your face the palms
of your hands and the bottoms of your feet now you should know why
that's the case what this means is that for post-surgery patients or for
people that are hypothermic indeed you want to heat the core right but
actually i was on a swim recently where a friend became hypothermic he
was kind of slurring his words and kind of staggering around when we got
him back on the beach we brought him over to the lifeguard station he
turned out to be fine again this is why cold water swims are something
that you really need to do in groups not alone and you really have to
know what you're doing there were reasons for why this happened that day
but you know we were basically people thought we were a little strange
until they realized what what was happening we were walking down the
beach basically sandwiching him between uh at our chest because we were
still warmer than the than the ambient environment the environment
around us we were pushing our our chests against him to try and warm him
up to warm up his core in retrospect that was the wrong thing to do in
talking with craig and talking to other colleagues that work on
thermogenesis what we should have done was warm hit the palms of his
hands the bottoms of his feet and his face because that would insulate
the heat loss now he was very cold so presumably there was
vasoconstriction of the veins at these locations and so it's not clear
that that would have been the only strategy to use but they have
explored how to heat up post-surgery patients and one of the best ways
to do that is to get warm socks on the bottoms of the feet get gloves on
the hands and if it can be done safely to warm the face now of course
you don't want to obstruct respiration and things of that sort but again
the ability to pass heat into the body or to remove heat to the body is
best done through these three surfaces i can't emphasize that enough so
i mentioned before that you want to cool the palms or the bottoms of the
feet although that's a little harder to do or the face but not so much
that the blood vessels constrict because then you won't be able to pass
cool into the body because those pipes got smaller and therefore you
can't pass cool into the body so how can you start to incorporate this
well craig and colleagues have a company that they've spun out through
stanford we'll talk about that when we sit down with craig that has
gener has made engineered devices that are optimal for this that are
going to keep those passages open keep the size of the those veins
correct to pass cool into the body quickly for sake of elite sports
performance and even recreational sports performance but you can
actually start to incorporate this first of all i always get asked how
cold should the water be should it be ice water should it be very cold
water the answer is no if you want to experience some of this effect
without a device one thing you could do would be for instance to do i'll
use the the the gym or the treadmill as an example you could do your
maximum number of pull-ups stop and then you could actually put your
hands into or on the surface of a sink that is presumably stopped up
with cool water so not ice water not freezing cold but cool water
slightly cooler than body temperature before you started training would
be a good place to start you do that for 10 to 30 seconds then you could
go back and do your next set you would repeat the cooling you would want
to extend the amount of cooling somewhat so you might want to do that
for 30 seconds to a minute this is not going to be perfect you're going
to have to play with how cold to make it in order to get the optimal
effect but you ought to see an effect nonetheless the same is true if
you're running and you're fatiguing obviously you don't want to become
hypothermic cooling the hands or the bottoms of your feet or the face
would be the ideal way to dump heat in order to be able to generate more
output now the face is something that we haven't talked a lot about
everything i've told you up until now also says that if you are somebody
who tends to get cold when you are outside say in the winter or even in
the fall you tend to run cold warming your face is going to be the most
important thing that you can do now it's kind of hard to do that without
looking strange like wearing a ski mask or something like that but that
is going to be more effective than covering and warming any other part
of your body although it'd be quite strange if you only had a ski mask
on and you weren't wearing clothes anywhere else on your body i don't
recommend doing that outside that will get you into all sorts of other
kinds of trouble it wouldn't be good for anybody but now you understand
the principle and the locations at which to deliver heat and cold so
let's say that you are out for a run and you want to incorporate this
cooling mechanism i talked to craig about this i said what would be the
kind of uh poor person's approach to this before this device is uh
commercially available and he said well you you could take a a frozen uh
juice can if you have one of those or a very cold can of soda and you
would want to pass it back and forth between your two hands the reason
the passing back and forth is really important is because you again you
don't want to be so cold that you constrict those venous portals that
will allow cold to go into the body now there are certainly people that
are working on bike handles and that can actually cool the hands you can
expect with the olympics coming up people are aware of these data and
are starting to incorporate into a number of things here's what you
don't want to do and there are sports teams that i won't mention by name
or brand that have made this mistake and it cost them dearly you don't
want to cool the core if you want to cool the body right if it's a very
hot day and you're going to train getting into an ice bath first sure it
will it will cool you down but that's not going to be as effective as
cooling the palms the bottoms of the feet and the face i have a friend
who does some important work in this space with people in various uh
let's just say cultures where heat is generated quite a lot and they
need to dump heat ice packs delivered to the face are something that
they actually use in order to dump heat quickly now again you don't want
to keep the ice pack on your face these are people that are very high
work output right firefighters and and similar at very high work output
and then they'll put this essentially it's like a cool face mask on
their face it'll allow their core body temperature come down and then
they remove it they're not keeping it on there so long that they're
getting the vasoconstriction okay so there are a number of ways that you
could do this and again i'm not giving specific temperatures because it
depends on how hot that day and how hot your body temperature is so you
can see why there's a need to create more devices for this but you can
see a considerable improvement in endurance in strength and in all kinds
of explosive and sort of you know explosive power type output in
athletics by using these surfaces of the hands and and bottoms of the
feet and face the one that i've tried because in anticipation of this
episode was the dips where then i would cool my hands i actually decided
to cool the bottoms of my feet as well because it just feels good and
it's particularly hot out lately so no shoes or socks on put my feet
into uh the bottoms of my feet just kind of hovering about a centimeter
or two below the surface of a bucket of water that was just slightly it
felt cool slightly cooler than body temperature or so it just basically
what came out of the spigot after i let it run for a little bit and
indeed i saw a 60 increase in the number of dips i can do in a single
session so it's actually a quite significant effect and you don't have
to be perfectly precise in order to do it and of course if you want to
heat up for whatever reason like you're in you're camping or you're lost
in the environment remember these three surfaces are going to be the
best way to heat your core as well so up until now we've been talking
about how to use cold during a workout in order to improve performance
and indeed cold applied to the appropriate parts of the body the
appropriate times can vastly improve our performance and endurance and
strength now i want to talk about the use of temperature in particular
cold to improve the speed and the depth of recovery recovery is
obviously vital right during a weight training session or during an
endurance session that's just the stimulus for getting better the next
time and if you don't recover you not only won't get better but you'll
get worse there's a lot of interest in the use of cold in order to
improve recovery in the short term we see this and probably the best
example of this would be fighters in combat sports between rounds or
athletes during uh in between quarters or half time that's one form of
recovery the ability to go back into the sport very soon on an order of
minutes anywhere from like one minute in between rounds in typical
combat sports or several minutes and a half time etc typically what we
see is people cooling their core cooling the back of their neck cooling
the top of their head so it might be you know a sponge with cold water
over the top of the head or an ice pack on the back of the neck or in
some case even wearing cold ice vests this has actually been done that's
going to be a very inefficient way to improve recovery of that kind far
better would be to cool the face the palms of the hands or the bombs the
feet for the reasons that i described up until now submerging the body
in an ice bath or taking a cold shower say up to the neck or up to the
chest or getting under cold water or jumping in a cold lake or something
of that sort or in the locker room getting it under the cold shower also
would be a terrible way to cool off the body quickly compared to the
ways that i described through the palms of the hands the bottoms of the
feet or the face for the following reason first of all it's not
optimizing those portals of the face palms the hands and the feet and in
addition if it's very cold and you submerge or you cover a lot of the
body with that cold you're going to cause constriction of the very
vessels and pathways that allow the body to efficiently dump heat so
again the key thing is to cool these one or two or three of these
surfaces but not so cold that you cause the the vasoconstriction so what
does this mean for you it means that getting in an ice bath or a cold
shower or putting an ice pack on the back of your neck in most cases is
not going to be as good as splashing cold water on your face or even
just holding your face with a damp cool cloth or something of that sort
it sounds kind of counter intuitive you you'd think oh if i just jump
into an ice bath i'm going to cool down much faster than if i just
cooled these you know one or two or three of these select regions of the
body but that's actually not the case and then of course there's
recovery that occurs from session to session so outside of the game or
the match or the or the exercise session and many people are now relying
on things like cryotherapy which requires a lot of expensive equipment
big you know liquid nitrogen driven machine that those aren't so common
for most people are accessible for most people but a lot of people are
using cold baths or ice baths or cold showers and again that's not going
to optimize recovery in fact it's going to have an additional effect
that is going to potentially block the training stimulus when you get
into an ice bath indeed there are provides not very very cold if you get
into a cold shower provided it's not very very cold you are indeed
blocking some of the inflammation that occurs because of the training
session but in doing so you also are blocking pathways such as mtor
mammalian target arapamyasin which are involved in the adaptation for a
muscle to become stronger or bigger put simply covering the body in cold
or immersing the body in cold after training can short-circuit or
prevent the hypertrophy or muscle growth response it has other effects
that can be positive right it can induce thermogenesis etc it can reduce
inflammation but it can prevent some of the positive effects of exercise
now it hasn't been examined so much for endurance work but let's say you
come back from a round of endurance work a run or a bike or a swim
getting into a cool bath or cooling that the palms the bottoms of the
feet or the face in my opinion based on the science would be better than
completely immersing the body in the ice bath or the cold shower there
is a time and a place for the use of the ice bath or the cold shower or
the cold plunge those tend to be when you want to deliberately increase
brown fat thermogenesis or when you want to deliberately work on mental
resilience and in a subsequent episode on fat loss i'm going to talk
about how to optimize the use of cold specifically for increasing
metabolism and fat loss but for now since we're talking about the use of
cold for improving performance and recovery the suggestion that i'm
going to provide is based on the work of craig heller and colleagues
that i've been talking about as well as a excellent book i mainly rely
on textbooks and special volume books which are collections of papers
from experts in a particular area that go beyond standard kind of
college level textbooks the one that i've been relying on is called
thermal regulation in human performance physiological and biological
aspects by fe moreno i don't know the publisher i don't know the author
i do recognize some of the names of the particular papers there but i
just want to be clear there's no sort of business relationship or deal
with them but it's an excellent text it's called thermoregulation and
human performance you can find it online if you want to go really deep
into this but basically what they show is that if you can cool the body
back to its resting temperature for a and by resting temperature i mean
within the range that you would see at any time of waking day but not in
exercise so just bringing that the body temperature down to baseline if
you can do that the sooner you can do that after a workout the sooner
that the muscle will recover that the tendons will recover and that the
person you can get back into more endurance training more weight
training etc so cold actually can be a very powerful tool for recovery
but to maximize return to baseline levels of temperature it's my belief
based on the studies that are published in this book as well as my
discussions with my colleague craig heller and in reviewing the the
literature overall that just simply cooling the entire body by jumping
into an ice bath or a cold shower is not the best way to go you really
want to rely on one of these three glabrous skin portals of the palms
the bottoms of the feet or the face so now you probably know more than
you ever wanted to know about how we regulate body temperature and how
it can be applied to exercise both during the exercise session and
afterward to optimize recovery many of us all of us presumably are also
eating and drinking things and taking things at various times that can
impact this process and so because of that we should ask whether or not
those things are impacting body temperature and when we do that we find
that there are certain things that many of us are doing that are
actually impairing our performance so for instance if you are taking a
pre-workout drink or you're ingesting a lot of caffeine or other
substance to bring your body temperature up before exercise you are
limiting the amount of exercise that you can do i can recall a time in
college when i would drink a lot of espresso back then ephedrine was
sold over the counter i remember taking it it will really energize you
for workouts you can generate a lot of energy and get extremely focused
taking those things they do increase heart rate they can be quite
dangerous i don't recommend people take them in fact i think ephedrine
is now off the shelves as a non-prescription compound because various
people died from taking it who are sensitive to it or exercised in heat
but looking back at that i realized it was a foolish approach it was
increasing core thermogenesis sure i might have burned a few more
calories but actually when i look at the data that are coming from
specific cooling and how that can so increase in performance if done
properly and then i compare that to the effects of taking some sort of
thermogenic compound whatever it is some pre-workout or some pill or
high levels of caffeine it's very clear that increasing body temperature
prior to working out is the exact wrong thing that one would want to do
you don't want to stay so cold that you can't generate good muscle
contractions you don't want to you know be like like i am coming out of
the cold ocean you know with claws for hands but one wants to have your
body temperature in a range that still allows you to work hard and
perform well now in terms of recovery things like alcohol we know are
vasodilators so those are going to cause people to drop body temperature
so you might think oh well that sounds great for recovery and i don't
think people should be drinking who are you know have problems with
alcohol intake you know alcoholics or they're not of drinking age etc
i'm not a drinker but i do have a good friend who's a quite accomplished
athlete who basically drinks a beer or two after his long runs or
cycling for and you know his argument is well i'm dumping body heat and
i like a beer and he's probably right it's probably a really good tool
provided you don't have issues with alcohol that would preclude that as
a tool or you're not of drinking age but anything that you ingest after
exercise that would increase body temperature is going to impede
recovery anything that you do that lowers body temperature provided in
safe ranges is going to accelerate recovery and that brings us to the
whole host of compounds that people take that can increase body
temperature and many people are taking these things in order to increase
fat burning and increase metabolism but in my opinion it's impeding
their ability to perform well and especially if the performance is
something that you're focused on aside from body recomposition losing
fat building muscle but even if you're focused on losing fat building
muscle you have to ask yourself is the body temperature increase that
i'm getting from these compounds really worth it given that it can block
or prevent my performance from being as good as it could in other words
is it worth taking something that makes you feel very energized to go
work out but then you now know that you are stopping earlier and you're
performing less well fewer reps fewer steps overall is it worth it if
you had not taken that thing then you could perform much longer and at
much higher capacity some of you are probably saying well that's
ridiculous because when i drink a quadruple espresso and i pop a
whatever pre-workout or drink a pre-workout then i know i can go much
further ah that might be true but the increase in temperature is also
costing you on the recovery side and unless you're doing other things to
improve your recovery and i know many people that are i don't judge but
many people who are doing those things are also augmenting their
recovery through hormone augmentation and other performance enhancing
tools then for the typical person who's not doing that it's probably
shooting yourself in the foot so let's take a look at what some of those
compounds are and what they do and just briefly review whether or not
they would be a good or a bad idea to include if your main goals are
performance or your main goals are body recomposition or both so let's
just briefly discuss stimulants this could be caffeine this could be any
other kind of stimulant that are typically in a pre-workout drink or
anything that might get you revved up before exercising this could even
be very strong tea i've mentioned i'm a big consumer of mate i like
yerba mate i love that stuff and i also drink caffeine i drink i love
coffee of various kinds mushroom coffee black coffee espresso etc i'm a
chronic caffeine user i don't think i'm an addict but i'm a chronic
caffeine user meaning when i drink caffeine my heart rate doesn't
increase so much that it feels like a shock to my system some people are
not caffeine adapted or they're very caffeine sensitive here's the
straightforward rule caffeine for somebody who doesn't drink caffeine
very much will constrict the blood vessels and will increase retention
of body heat and is probably a bad idea before exercise for somebody
who's caffeine adapted and is used to drinking caffeine it won't have
that vasoconstriction effect that's what the data point to because i'm
adapted to it and but it will cause vasodilation and will allow me to
dump body heat so for me i use it before i train or do any kind of
exercise because i tend to do that early in the day won't prevent me
from sleeping and it causes vasodilation and then afterwards i'm aware
that it causes vasoconstriction after the caffeine wears off so for
somebody who drinks two or three or more cups of coffee a day or mate a
day so we're talking intake of anywhere from 100 to 400 milligrams of
caffeine what you want to do is you want to make sure that you would do
that before exercise and probably not after exercise that just makes
logical sense given what we know about thermal regulation and if you're
somebody who doesn't drink caffeine drinking caffeine before a workout
is going to be about the worst thing you could possibly do because it's
going to increase core body temperature through its thermogenic effects
and it's going to constrict your blood vessels and make it even harder
to dump heat so i don't suggest that people drink caffeine or not i just
suggest that you think about whether or not your caffeine adapted or not
and decide whether or not you want to drink caffeine in general you're
going to be better not drinking any caffeine than you are drinking
caffeine unless you're a heavy caffeine user or abuser in which case not
drinking caffeine is going to give you vicious headaches and is going to
make it very hard to get motivated because you're just not used to it it
takes about three weeks to get used to no caffeine it's brutal i've done
it before i've done caffeine fast i don't know that i ever want to do it
again that's how painful it was but you get headaches because of the
effects on vasodilation and constriction if you like caffeine use in
moderate amounts and use it before your workout's not after if you don't
like caffeine or you don't use it very often stay away from it anywhere
close to exercise before or after for that matter one of the more
commonly used compounds that's sold over the counter are non-steroid
anti-inflammatories so things like tylenol and advil and other trade
names and naproxen sodium things of that sort almost all of those drop
body temperature to some extent and that's why it's often recommended
that people take them when they have a fever although the whole business
of dropping body temperature artificially when you have a fever is
itself an interesting discussion whether or not that's the most adaptive
or best thing to do certainly you don't want fever to go too high it can
be very dangerous can kill you but artificially dropping body
temperature with these compounds can be tricky now a number of athletes
especially endurance athletes will rely on these non-steroid
anti-inflammatory drugs specifically to keep body temperature lower
during long bouts of exertion this is a little bit of a pharmacologic
version of dumping heat instead of using palmer cooling or you know face
face ice pack cooling they're relying on pharmacology to drop their core
body temperature that has certain obvious advantages those advantages
should be obvious and the reasons for them should be obvious based on
everything we've talked about up until now lower temperature allows you
to go further harder with more intensity however they do have effects on
the liver and they can also have effects on the kidneys and during long
bouts of exercise or even short balance of exercise water balance and
salt balance are also going to be vital to maintain in order to perform
well generate the best muscle contractions stay mentally alert and also
to stay alive we will do an episode on salt electrolytes and water and
water balance but you probably want to think carefully about whether or
not you want to use non-steroid anti-inflammatories before any training
session just for the performance augmentation effect unless you're
working carefully with a coach whether or not you've done that in
practices and of course whether or not you are in a situation where
monitoring your body temperature carefully is going to be important you
might ask when would that be well desert races summer training and races
winter rides you certainly don't want to get too cool either so alcohol
caffeine and non-steroid inflam anti-inflammatory drugs because of their
effects on temperature will impact performance and recovery but you want
to be cautious about how you approach them i personally am more a fan of
using caffeine in moderate doses for the reason i described before as
well to use the cooling of the palms cooling of the of the bottoms of my
feet right by placing them into a bucket or uh into a cool bath after
after training or cooling the face after training or sometimes even
during training it just seems like there's more of a margin to play with
the variables to heat up the water or cool it down a little bit um to
include one palm or the other palm there's just all sorts of uh good
parameter space as we call it in science that you can play with and work
with to find what works for you as whereas when you pop a pill sure you
can adjust the dose and you can adjust it next time but once it's in you
it's in you and there's going to be some period of time before you can
modulate it what i've offered today are ways in which you can use
temperature to powerfully improve performance and if you think about it
you can vary that from set to set you could do your pull-ups or your
sprints and then cool your palms and then try and go with colder water
the next round or warmer water the next round or do both feet and palms
and face i mean you can do all sorts of things moment to moment and see
what works for you again essentially zero cost or no cost whereas when
you pop something you take a pill you're basically in that regimen for
the next hour or two or more you can always take more but you can't
really take less you can't really extract it from your body in real time
so it doesn't give you a lot of opportunity to play scientist which is
what i like to do because what i'm always trying to do is trying to dial
in the best protocols possible based on the mechanisms and data and if
you can do that moment to moment that places you in a position of power
once again we've covered a lot of material by now after seeing this
episode or listening to this episode you should understand a lot about
how your body heats and cools itself and the value of that for physical
performance i hope you also appreciate that you have tools at your
disposal to vastly improve your physical performance and should you try
those please let us know how it goes if you decide to do palmer cooling
during your runs or after your runs during your weight workouts during
your yoga sessions whatever it is let us know please place that in the
comments i've given you specific protocols and some direction but i've
also left it slightly vague because as i mentioned earlier i don't know
all the environmental conditions i don't know how hot your yoga studio
is or how cool your gym happens to be or your body temperature time of
day remember your temperature will vary according to the time of day we
did a whole episode about that related to sleep typically your body
temperature is rising early in the day and is coming down as you
approach the late evening and late night hours for sleep in the middle
of the night your temperature is very low at its absolute lowest
something we call the temperature minimum so we don't know exactly where
you're at you need to take the information that you receive today and
should you try and incorporate it try and do it intelligently don't cool
yourself off so much that you you know become cryogenic and please don't
warm yourself up in fact we didn't talk at all about warming yourself up
uh because warming yourself up too much can be quite dangerous you never
ever ever want to be hypothermic that's what your body and your brain
are trying to avoid we talked a little bit about supplements but not the
standard sorts of supplements i usually list off on these episodes
rather we talked about caffeine non-steroid anti-inflammatories and how
those can impact temperature how alcohol can impact temperature and i
should just mention in closing that every time we eat we also increase
temperature there's a eating induced thermogenic effect but that's a
minor one that's a small one so you wouldn't worry about eating before
training because of its effects on temperature because it tends to be
really minor going forward we're going to talk more about temperature
and other ways to improve physical performance and skill learning we're
going to talk about specific ways to accelerate fat loss to improve
muscle growth to improve suppleness and flexibility these approaches and
mechanisms are anchored deeply in neuroscience and physiology and the
relationship between our peripheral organs which include our skin and
our brain and all the organs in between so it's really a pleasure for me
because i'm able to look to the textbook literature that exists and
really came out over the last 50 to 100 years and unlike a lot of areas
of neuroscience which are still sort of mystical like consciousness and
dreaming of which we understand a little bit about these core mechanisms
of temperature and physiology which are so powerful involve very
concrete studies that as you learned today are very actionable if you're
enjoying this podcast and you like the information that you're receiving
if you're incorporating into your life in useful ways please recommend
the podcast to other people if you think they could benefit from it as
well please subscribe to the podcast on youtube so you want to hit the
subscribe button as well hit the notifications button we come out with
new episodes every monday but from time to time we also release shorter
content and we will be releasing additional content in between episodes
from time to time if you don't already subscribe on apple and or spotify
please do so also on apple you have the opportunity to leave us up to a
five star review if you think that we deserve a five star review and to
leave us feedback they have a comment section there it's really a
feedback section where you can rate and describe the podcast as you
experience it if you'd like to support the podcast in other ways please
check out our sponsors that's a terrific way to support us we also have
a patreon you can find it at patreon.com andrew huberman that allows you
to support the podcast at any level that you like today we didn't focus
so heavily on supplements but in other episodes i have and there are
certainly supplements that are beneficial for sleep for performance for
learning immunity and so forth we've partnered with thorn t-h-o-r-n-e
dot com because thorn supplements we believe to be the most stringent in
terms of what they put on the bottle is actually what's in the bottle so
the amounts are precise and the quality of the ingredients is very
precise they partner with the mayo clinic all the major sports teams so
we're delighted that we're partnered with thorn if you want to see the
supplements that i take you can go to thorn.com the letter u slash
huberman and you can see the supplements that i take you could get 20
off any of those supplements should you choose to order them as well as
twenty percent off any other supplements that thorn happens to make
that's thorne t-h-o-r-n-e dot com slash the letter u slash huberman to
get 20 off any of the supplements that thorn makes and last but not
least i want to thank you for your time and attention i realize this is
a lot of information i hope you'll find some of it to be actionable and
useful for you and for people that you know and as always thank you for
your interest in science