Dr. Mike T Nelson - Season 3 Episode 12

This was a fascinating discussion on Heart Rate Variability, The Nervous System, Breath Work and much more. For the first time in the history of the Jones Boys Scott said more words!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to another episode of Just Us on Justice and
other Things. I am Scott Jones, your co host with
my baby brother Dan Jones, and we are very honored
to have our guest with us today, doctor Mike T.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Nelson.

Speaker 1 (00:12):
So I'm gonna fanboy a little bit because I have
been following his stuff for quite a while. I've listened
to you on your own podcast. I've listened to you, actually,
I've first heard about you on Barbell Shrugged. My friend
Andrew Martin, who's a firefighter in Saint Aubertt, just outside
of our town here, has kind of put me onto you, and,
like we were saying just before the camera started or

(00:33):
the recording start, we're actually not on camera.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
I like how you.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Take broad perspectives and can take a meta analysis and
then put it into a digestible sentence that regular mopes
like me and Danny can understand and then put into practice.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
So I think I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Yeah, thank you guys so much for having me. I
really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Awesome.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
So let's start with I know a little bit about
your background, but if you can kind of take it's
back to wherever you want to go and then meander
to what got you to hear and because I think
it's an interesting and it seems to be a little
bit of a different path that led you to where
you're sitting right now.

Speaker 4 (01:14):
Yeah, it's interesting how later in life you look at
what you did and then you kind of retrospectively look back.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
And go, oh, maybe that stuff is related. So when I.

Speaker 4 (01:29):
Was born nineteen seventy eight, I had an atril septal defect.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
And so when people are when infants.

Speaker 4 (01:37):
Are born, when you're in the womb, there's actually a
hole in the top part of the heart and the
bottom part of the heart in the atrium and the
viticular chambers.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
But you can see the heart.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
Beating on echo, but obviously they're not breathing, so the
heart is a circulating blood around and then when you're born,
those holes usually close up because that's going to allow
better blood flow to go through the lungs, to oxygen,
eate and all those things. In my case, the bottom
hole what's called the VSD, a chictor receptal defect, it

(02:08):
took about two and a half three years to close,
is what they suspect. But the top one, the atrium,
so between the top two chambers of the heart never closed.
So fast forward, you know, about four years my mom
took me in and said, hey, you know, something's you know,
not right. Went too bunch specialists. They're like, ah, we
don't know, he's fine, and she kept insisting that there's

(02:30):
something wrong, and she eventually found a pediatric cardiologist, which
back in nineteen seventy eight was like incredibly rare, and
so he took one look at me, did some X rays.
It turns out my heart was the size of someone
who was eighteen. It's like the size of a freaking
you know, soccer ball, and he's like, oh, yep, you
have an atrial septal defect.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
We need to discoedule you for surgery right away.

Speaker 4 (02:53):
The good part is, like I was, probably only three
centers at the US actually operated on kids that young,
and it turns out University of so of Children's Hospital
where we were, was one of them. And the reason
I mentioned that is, you know, fast forward several years later,
oddly enough, I ended up working for a.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Medical device company in the.

Speaker 4 (03:11):
Cardiovascular space, got enthralled with you know, physiology and everything else,
and at the same time movement stuff wasn't very easy
because your heart becomes very inefficient. So if you think
back to a lot of the stages of development that
people go through, I didn't really go through a lot

(03:32):
of those, just because my output was so limited. Around
the same time, I had a lazy eye. It was
called this your busmus so if you would watch my eyes,
they would not correlate at all. And my parents brought
me in for that, like right around the same time again,
and they had this little dog.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
At the end.

Speaker 4 (03:50):
And the doctor holds up this dog and he asked me,
He's like, well, how many of these do you see?
And I guess I was four years old and told
my parents two, but only.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
One of them's real.

Speaker 4 (04:03):
Because when your eyes are misaligned, what can happen is
your brain can't fuse those images into a three D image,
and for a period of time you actually will see
in double vision. But when you interact with your environment
so pro perceptively, you'll like go to reach for a
water bottle, you'll see two of them. But you'll learn
via interacting with your environment what's the real image and

(04:25):
what's the false image. And the brain solution of this
over time is usually do what's called a heavy visual suppression,
meaning the two images will go from each eye which
are offset in your face a little bit, so you
can fuse them and create a three D image. When
they can't do that and you see double vision, the
brain solution for suppression is just to drop one in

(04:47):
the images. So it says, ah, I fix the problem.
I don't see in three D or double vision anymore,
but I sacrifice three D vision for monovision in order
for that to happen. So as a kid, I wasn't
do a lot of reading because that's a monovision thing.

Speaker 3 (05:04):
You don't need a lot of you know, activity. So
fast forward.

Speaker 4 (05:07):
You know, when I was going to college, I started
doing an ADMIN in physiology.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
I just thought it was fascinating.

Speaker 4 (05:13):
Enrolled in an ATMU physiology at Saint Scholastika and Duluth, Minnesota.
It was one of the rare programs that allowed undergrad
students to actually do kadaver lab and they got new
kidavers like every quarter, which to me was fascinating that
you could actually it was one thing to look at pictures,
but do actually see, you know, all the structures in
front of you.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
So fast forward.

Speaker 4 (05:33):
Ended up my graduated from there. I'm monnto Michigan Tech.
Did two years there, another two and a half years
there and a master's program looking at basically a big
microwave generator and simulated monkey heads, so if you zapp
the monkey heads, what happens? Which was sponsored by Brooks
Air Force Base in Texas. Which later five years after

(05:56):
I graduated, my advisors sent me this little clipping from
a paper that says, oh, yeah, hey, this was your
master's research. He's like, it was so classified, we couldn't
tell you it was classified.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (06:09):
Worked in the medtech companies for a while and started
when I went to college. I was like eighteen, started
lifting because I was the six foot three eel shaped
rate at one hundred and fifty six pounds, and thought, hey,
maybe I should do something about that. Like most people
did everything wrong, but I thought, well, what if you

(06:29):
could go mine like physiology with actual you know practice,
And so I would learn more about physiology, and then
I'd go to the gym and actually, you know, try it,
and then fast forward ended up doing a PhD in
basically exercise science to exercise physiology, and then I've been
training people since two thousand and five to my n

(06:52):
SCA CSCs search and right now, I'm a social professor
at the Karrig Institute, so they do a lot of
clinical functional neurology. The edge of teacher at Rocky Mountain University,
I helped the guys over at rapid Health optimization with
some sleep analysis. I have a couple of certifications, the
flex dietsert and the fiz flex SERTs. And yeah, that's

(07:14):
the semi short version of a long story.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
That's a pretty good fast forward through probably what fifteen
twenty years of life or even a.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
Lot of that. Yeah, yeah, thirty.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
So I'm going to dive right in because so we
have we are both retired first responders. We probably have
a fairly large cadre of people in that realm and
in the broadest sense first responder where the police, fire,
the EMS, corrections, military, et cetera. And in a conversation
I had with Andrew Martin, who's a firefighter in Saint Aubert,

(07:49):
there is research happening at the u of A with
first responders relating chronic stress or acute stress and heart
rate variability. And then it's ongoing. So I don't know
the result. But can you talk about HRV and maybe
kind of tying it into whether it's general stress of
regular average folks or stress that's related to high level

(08:12):
athletes or first or water populations.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 4 (08:16):
How I got an HRV is around probably two thousand
and one. I thought, hey, I'll just start taking you know,
classes on you know, how the nervous systems work, you
know things that you know.

Speaker 3 (08:28):
We're kind of personal trainer.

Speaker 4 (08:30):
I didn't munch of work through doctor rkobb at Zehealth,
and it was through them.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
I had heard about read.

Speaker 4 (08:37):
Around the same time a system called omegawave, which was
this fancy Russian black box system where you hook people
up to electrodes and it tells you all this information.
And it was like this very mysterious thing. It was
like thirty grand to get it, and only a handful
of people had it. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool,

(08:57):
like you could invasively get information from your body. And
so around that time, a guy named Landon Evans was
out in was in Washington, I think, and he had
an omegawave system.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
So I was out there for a conference. I called
him up. You know, this is I don't even know
how I got his number or email. This is like
back before social media.

Speaker 4 (09:18):
And I sent him a note and said, hey, you know, buddy,
I'm gonna be like two and a half hours away
from you. I have questions about a megawave. Can I
do like a paid console or how does that work?
And he was super cool. He's like, hey, just you know,
take me out to a fancy steak dinner and you
just ask any questions you want. It's like, oh, perfect.
So we go to this fancy steakhouse and like ten
thirty at night. He's like, well, I'll just take you

(09:38):
back to my lab and we'll just put you off
to the megawave and see it'll be fine. And so
that was the first time I was introduced to some
you know, kind of heart rate variability technology and so
fast forward. I did In between, I did my biomedical engineering.
I was in the graduate program for that for five years.
Ended up dropping out before I went over to exercise Fizz.

(10:00):
But the reason I left is I got really tired
of doing advanced math. I had a minor in mathematics,
but I just math was not my favorite thing. To
go overt exercise physiology. Literally the first day the first meeting,
my advisor comes in.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
New advisor.

Speaker 4 (10:13):
He's like, all right, I got two projects, but they
both involved math. Ones on our right variability, ones on
metabolic flexibility. There's only like five of us sitting at
the table and he looks over and points at me.
He's like, you, math boy, whatever your name is, these
are your projects now. And so it's like, oh, crap,
more math. But it turns out I got to play
with heart rate variability. And so at that time we

(10:37):
had probably twenty five thousand dollars of used equipment. You
had to come into the lab and you had to
do this measurement in order to run a study, which
we eventually published. And so HRV technology has been around
for quite some time. Cosmonauts used it in the early
Space Program. And simply what it does is it'll look
at an EKG, so the signal of your heart, and

(11:01):
it can then infer what is the status of your
autonomic nervous system. Your autonomic nervous system has two main branches.
One is the parasympathetic and one is the sympathetic. You
think of the parasympathetic as like the brake on your car,
the push down harder on the break. The car is
going to slow down, so is the rest and digest
branch of your nervous system. The breaking there is done

(11:23):
by something called the vagueal nerve. But what you'll see
is that you become more relaxed. Stress goes down, heartbreak
goes down on the other side of the gas pedal,
which is more like the stress. You push harder on
the sympathetic system, just like you push harder on a
gas pedal in a car. You exert more stress on
the engine, but you can get a higher level of
performance out of the car. You can go faster. So

(11:45):
HRV gives us a status of where your system is
on the autonomic nervous system range. Are you more in
the parasympathetic rest and digest, are you more on the
sympathetic side.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
Of the equation.

Speaker 4 (11:59):
And so the nice part is, after I finished some
of my PhD work in that area, a guy named
Simon who runs a company called Athlete. Instead of Athlete,
it's ilete with an eye, he sent me a note
through another body. I think it's through Carl Valley, who said, hey,
you know, I've got this system where I can do
HRV and you just need a heart rage strap and
you can just have an app on your phone. I

(12:21):
was like, what, you're crazy, like, because you know, I'm
thinking of like a megawave system was thirty grand. We
had twenty grand of US equipment and all this stuff
we had to do, how to write a freaking Matt
lab coat and all this crap. And he's like, you're
telling me you can run this off an app and
it's accurate.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
He's like yeah.

Speaker 4 (12:36):
I was like, how interesting. So I'm met up with
another guy of mine, James. Heethers from Australia. So he
runs some validation studies on it and it turns out,
holy crap, you could do an HRV measurement through your phone.
And a beautiful part about that is because HRV has
ton as a status of the nervous system, and just
having a one off measurement of it, it's.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
Not super useful.

Speaker 4 (12:58):
It's like, okay, great, so you're a little more stressed
or you're not, but we really want to see what
are those like you said, the day to day changes,
and then we can try to correlate that to what's
going on. So by having it as an app on
your phone, that only takes two to three minutes. You
can then do it each day at a low cost,
and you can do it at home.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
You don't have to come into a lab to do it.
So I started using.

Speaker 4 (13:20):
That back probably nine years ago now, and so I
just took all my athletes, all my clients and said, hey,
you're just gonna We're just gonna use this app.

Speaker 3 (13:28):
It was a requirement of working with me.

Speaker 4 (13:31):
And initially I thought, well, maybe I'll just want use
it for higher level athletes because at the time it
was using to look at their stressors from training. But
I thought, well, I want to get more exposure and
more practice, so I'll just make.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
Everybody do it. And what I find out, like your question.

Speaker 4 (13:47):
Was asking, is that you can think of it as
two buckets. If you're a high level athlete, you actually
want your training to be your number one stressor, right
would hopefully your lifestyle is pretty good, is good, and
I mean everyone has a real life. This is not
always possible, but your training should be your number one
stressor so you can get the maximum amount of performance.

(14:09):
If you're not a high level athlete, then usually it's
lifestyle stresses that are actually more of your stressor.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
And the nice part about that is now I.

Speaker 4 (14:20):
Had an actual marker to show clients what was actually
going on. So when they would do the hardware variability,
we'll get a status of their autonomic nervous system, and
then in the app they have to self report sleep, training, nutrition,
and energy, et cetera. And previous to this, I would
spend god months argument clients about, Bro, you're sleeping five

(14:41):
hours a night, Like, I know this is an issue.
It's leading to your stress, that's why you're not making progress,
and the question will always be the same, Yeah, I
know that it's not really that bad. It's not really
affecting my stress that much. And so eventually I got
kind of frustrated with clients and I would send them
the graph of the HRV and the graph of their
self reported time in bed and they'd basically be, oh,

(15:03):
when you're a less time in bed, your stress goes up.
And I would just send them a graph with those
two lines, and I'd be like, Hey, what's going on
And they're like, oh, oh my gosh, Like you're telling
me like when I don't sleep as much, like, my
stress is a lot higher.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
I'm like, yes, it's the same conversation we've been having
for like three.

Speaker 4 (15:21):
Months, but there was something about seeing it on paper
and seeing it as a marker that's an actual representation
of their stress and not just a perception that then
they were like, oh, okay, now should I do something
about it. It was kind of like the Peter Drucker
quote like what gets measured gets managed. And so I think,

(15:42):
for you know, like the populations you guys work with,
having a good baseline and having an actual indication all
of an actual physiologic marker of stress allows you to
then one see where you're at, have some level of awareness.
Most people then will look at and go, oh wow,
I'm way more stress than my thought. And then on

(16:03):
the intervention side, it allows you a marker to determine
are you going in the right direction or not because
a lot of times people may start being less overall stressed,
but they may not necessarily feel a lot better right away,
So getting the buy in and getting them to do
these things long term is much more difficult. But if
I can show them like, hey, look, your HRV is

(16:24):
quite different here week one versus week three, even though
you may not feel a huge difference, yet this marker
tells us you're going in the right direction. The interventions
you're doing are actually having to payout. You are feeling better,
and then that gives them kind of more.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
Energy to kind of keep going.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
So is HRV just my very limited understanding is basically
there's variability within the heart rate itself. So like on
an inhale, which is more sympathetic in nature, heart rate
speeds up a bit on then the exal with that
vegas nerve fagle break slows down is that the measurement
is actually taking place is between.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
The speed up and the slowdown during a breath.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
Yeah, it's a good question.

Speaker 4 (17:07):
So you're correct that most people would assume that, Okay,
if we measure here, you're just hanging out.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
At rest, you're not doing anything.

Speaker 4 (17:15):
That your heart rate should be like a metronome, like
it should be sixty five point one beats for a minute,
sixty five point two, sixty five point one, sixty five
point one. And it turns out if that is true,
your heart rate variability is very very tiny, and that's
an indication that you have a massive amount of sympathetic stress.
So when I said I worked for a cardiovascer device

(17:36):
company in the past, we would measure heart rate variability,
and we would see people who had very like like DCM,
dilated cardiac myopathies and just other heart issues. You could
just watch them lose heart rate variability and that was
a marker for ooh, yikes, there they're not doing very good.
In reality, someone who's very healthy. From a beat by

(17:59):
beat measurement, you may see sixty three point seven, sixty
five point two, sixty four point eight, sixty five point seven,
it's going to kind of oscillate a little bit around
let's say sixty five beats per minute, and those tiny oscillations,
that tiny variability, that's actually what you're measuring when we
do heart rate variability. So variability is just another form

(18:22):
of math that it can tell us like how very
many of these little variations are you having into what degree?
And when you have more of these slight variations, your
HRV is going to be a little bit higher. And
when it's higher, that correlates to more parasympathetic tone, so

(18:43):
more that rest and digest. And when you start losing
that fine scale variability, that means you have a less
art rate variability, that means you are more on the
sympathetic stress side. And then to further complicate all of it.
You're correct that when you breathe, the lungs and heart
have to be timed up so that you have good

(19:03):
exchange of oxygen and CO two. And when you do
an inhale, you're correct your heart rate, if you watch,
it will go up a little bit, it will become
a little bit more sympathetic, and when you do an
ex sale, it'll go down and it'll be a little
bit more on the parasympathetic side. This is something called
RSA or respiratory sinus arrhythmia and arrhythmia.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
It's not really a bad thing.

Speaker 4 (19:24):
It's just that when you're breathing, you can then modulate
the stress that's going on.

Speaker 3 (19:30):
Now.

Speaker 4 (19:30):
The prob of that is that's why a lot of
different breath works and different techniques like that. If you
want someone to be more on the parasympathetic side, you
can bias them by doing the longer exhales. They're staying
more on that parasympathetic end of the spectrum. If you
wanted to bias someone more on the sympathetic side, you
would then increase that rate so they're spending a little

(19:53):
bit more time doing more inhales, so like a whim
hof or a superventilation type technique. So with breath, it's
really cool because there's a direct correlation and association via
that mechanism that RSA of controlling the heart and changes
in heart right variability.

Speaker 3 (20:11):
So he kind of.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
Answered my next question. But so if we have first
responder populations who don't get to control when they sleep
because of shift work, so whatever it's days to nights
or nights to days, whatever it ends up being, what
are some strategies for folks who don't I haven't actually
heard a good answer about this. I even sent a
message on Instagram to Andrew Humeman and he just basically

(20:34):
liked my comment. I'm like, hey, any advice on He's
like like, and then I never heard it was heeded
the series with Matt Walker and they didn't answer that question.
So that's cool. He liked it, but he didn't answer me. So,
guys and women who are in it shift worker or
on call, et cetera, they can't control it, So what
are ways to mitigate the effects of that kind of

(20:56):
lifestyle on their HRV on their overall health?

Speaker 4 (21:00):
Yeah, the unfortunate reality is so I've had the pha
amount of clients who you know, rms, military, emergency room docs, nurses.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
Et cetera.

Speaker 4 (21:11):
The reality is, if you're on shift work, it literally
is taking years off your life. You can look at
the nurse's health study, you can look at the fair
amount of studies that.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
Have been done.

Speaker 4 (21:21):
I think in California, shift work is actually classified as
a carcinogen.

Speaker 3 (21:25):
The outcomes are not very good. Now.

Speaker 4 (21:28):
The pro and the con of that is the reality is,
like you were saying, sometimes it's just part of the job.
So my first question is, hey, is this something you
want to do for the rest of your life? Is
this the only option? And sometimes it is right. So
sometimes they're like, hey, this is my job, this is
the profession, this is just.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
The way it goes.

Speaker 4 (21:48):
Okay, cool, as long as you're aware of that, you
know there isn't much you can do. So one of
my other clients, a physician, did like an onboarding with
him a couple of months ago and shift worker, So
that was our first conversation and he's like yep.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
He's like, I'm doing this for two.

Speaker 4 (22:03):
More years and then I'm either quitting or I'm going
to transfer to nights, so or I'm sort of transfer
to days, so he knew that he's basically trying to
mitigate his risk for two more years.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
I would side to that.

Speaker 4 (22:16):
So if you have to do shift work, which unfortunately
is very common, there's a couple of things you can do.
The main one is, whenever you can sleep, try to
get the best sleep you can, so all the great
things you've heard. Try to make it dark, try to
make it cool, make your bedroom like a cave. Maybe
use some white noise. You know, anything you can do

(22:37):
on those ends you don't have to go super crazy,
will make a big difference because when you are able
to get sleep, the higher quality and the deeper sleep you.

Speaker 3 (22:45):
Can get is going to be better.

Speaker 4 (22:48):
A couple other things is if you are flipping back
and forth frequently, that unfortunately is the worst.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
So then you're.

Speaker 4 (22:58):
Looking at, Okay, what things can I use to try
to flip my circadian rhythm back and forth? The number
one thing is going to be light exposure. So we know,
like everyone's talked about my the Buddy Doctor Dan party,
that light exposure is the main thing that's going to
reset the circadian rhythm.

Speaker 3 (23:15):
So if I have someone who, let's.

Speaker 4 (23:17):
Say just got off of three three night shifts, and
now they have to switch back to days.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
So when they get.

Speaker 4 (23:24):
Up for their day shift, now that they're going back
on days, is when I'll really have them try to
get as much sunlight in the morning as they can,
even if you only get five minutes, even if you
only get ten minutes, Like, whatever you can get is
going to be better to try to re anchor that
circadian rhythm because you basically have jet lag.

Speaker 5 (23:41):
Now.

Speaker 4 (23:42):
Outside of that, if you're doing the reverse, you can
try to limit blue light. Using blue blocking glasses can
be helpful with that. So for example, if you get
off in a night shift and you've got to go
sleep during the day, like wearing blue blocking glass is
during the day, trying to minimize that blue light can

(24:03):
be helpful in that area. So working with light's a
big one. I have used melatonin as kind of a
stop gap with people when they're transitioning back and forth
to Melatonin, as you guys know, is the main hormone
that's resetting some of those circadian rhythms.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
I like to start with the lowest amount possible, so.

Speaker 4 (24:20):
Even point three milligrams or point five milligrams only go
up when needed. I don't like it to use it
all the time, but for some people it just might
be a reality of what they're doing to try to
reset that circadian rhythm.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
The last thing that I haven't seen many people talk.

Speaker 4 (24:38):
About is when we look at animal studies and we go, okay,
so if we just goof up all of their light
dark cycles, and mice are very susceptible to this. We
know that they have all sorts of weird metabolic stuff
and they don't do so well. But the backup system
is actually food timing, and it appears that mice are

(24:59):
more sensitive to this than humans. So in the absence
of your light signals being all just completely screwy, which
they're going to be if you're working shift work, you're
going to try to control that as best you can.
I also try to have them have the exact same
meal time, again, you know, as best they can.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
A lot of times professions don't allow this.

Speaker 4 (25:19):
But if you get up in the morning, you have breakfast,
and then three to four hours later you have a meal,
three to four hours later you have another meal, then
maybe you have dinner an hour or two before bed.
Let's just say that hypothetically, that's your schedule. And let's
say hypothetically your job just lets you do whatever you want. Again,
not always the case. If you're working days or working nights.
That schedule that's set from when you get up, So

(25:42):
what your air quote day and night is in a
perfect world would not change that much at all. We
know your light is going to be all messed up,
and it appears in humans are not as sensitive to
this as mice and rodents, but that the food timing
is their backup sort of circadian rhythm. And what I've
noticed over the year is that people can do that,

(26:03):
it's easier for them to switch back and forth between
nights and days. Doesn't completely ameliorate it, there's still some
effort there, but they can do that. That actually makes
a pretty big difference to.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
What I've observed and my experience with shift work. It
was really I was kind of hungry all the time.
It's just like you would go and we'd go to
Red Robin, smash back a burger and fries, and literally
forty five minutes later, like I need to eat again
and I'm ready to kill another one, and it just
kind of MUCKs stuff up. So back to that point,

(26:37):
is there a food quality kind of over I know
that's a broad question, but a broad recommendation about each
of the timings I get, and that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
But what should you be kind.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
Of eating to keep along those lines at each of
those three or four feeding times.

Speaker 4 (26:54):
Yeah, that's the other bugger with When you're sergadian rhythm,
it's all wonkya. Basically, it messes up with leptin and
grellin and some other hormones, and people get very hungry.
They tend not to make the best food selection right
because their brains like, ah, just give me food whatever
it is.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
I don't care.

Speaker 4 (27:12):
So usually with that, I don't do anything specifically different
with nutrition.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
Try to keep protein high.

Speaker 4 (27:18):
I like the flex sites heard at what I call
four by forty. So if you can get say four
meals in have forty grams of protein in each meal,
even if you're a smaller person, Yeah, maybe drop.

Speaker 3 (27:28):
That to thirty. Even if you're a bigger dude.

Speaker 4 (27:30):
Like you could go a little higher, but that's probably
gonna get you pretty close in the ballpark.

Speaker 3 (27:35):
That could be anything.

Speaker 4 (27:36):
From you know, chicken, fish, lean steak, camberger, you know whatever.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
Take er pick after that you know some level of that.

Speaker 4 (27:43):
For most people, I don't add a fair amount of fat,
just sort of an incidental that'll that will happen. And
then carbohydrates un ports are going to vary the most.
We do know that circadian rhythms play a huge role
in insulin sensitivity, and for most people, I will have
like a set amount of carbohydrates usually at every meal

(28:06):
that'll be the same. Now, if they're really trying to
get super lean and we're trying to do something in particular,
that may change, and then I'm simply going to scale
that up and down depending on how they feel, how
their performance is, and how their body comp is. So
the performance is going well, body comp is where they want, yeah,
I may push carbohydrates up a little bit more per meal.
If we feel like performance is doing good, the body

(28:27):
comp isn't as well, I'm gonna kind of pull back
carbohydrates a little more from each meal. And I usually
will start with the meals being all very similar in
kind of a macrore distribution, and then from there we
can kind of.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
Make different tweaks and stuff.

Speaker 4 (28:42):
Because what I normally see is kind of what you
mentioned is very common, is oh my god, my circadian
rhythms like so messed up. I'm just gonna go eat this,
and then I feel super hungry an hour later, so
now I maybe have access to food.

Speaker 3 (28:55):
I may not.

Speaker 4 (28:56):
And then let's say you do have another meal within
a couple hours, then you need a very large meal.
Oh man, but now I'm not hungry for eight hours. Oops,
I went home. Now I went to bed. Okay, now
it's been sixteen hours since. Say hey, now I'm hard,
you know, super starving, want to get up again, and
you get this kind of kind of cycle.

Speaker 5 (29:14):
I think it'd be very interesting to do this study.

Speaker 6 (29:16):
I don't know, maybe it's been done, and I've never
looked into it on incarcerated people because I'm sure yeah,
because like everything you're talking about from a shipworker perspective,
I'm like, I get that, but haven't worked in prisons
and spent lots of time with individuals who have been incarcerated.
It's never dark, that's never fully dark, it's always noisy,

(29:38):
so they don't get good sleep cycles. Their food is
very specific, right, you get, you get three meal times,
and even in the Young Offenders Center, I don't know
if they still do this on Saturday and Sunday.

Speaker 5 (29:49):
They only gave them two meals a day.

Speaker 6 (29:50):
They gave them a brunch and a dinner, so the
food and the sleep wasn't there, Like you, you're not sleeping,
And it'd just be interesting to see how this what
the readings would show of incarcerated people.

Speaker 4 (30:02):
Yeah, it would be super interesting because it's as best
we can do at an actual controlled environment. Because you've
mentioned a good point that, yeah, we can bring people
into these short you know, metabolic wards and metabolic chambers
and look at them. We're talking a couple of days,
you know, to maybe a few more days at best.
And then we have like the free living studies, which

(30:23):
are great because there's more external validity. It's more like
how people live their life. But you've got a ton
of variability you're trying to sort through. So I like,
like what you mentioned, kind of more of the controlled
setting studies first, and then you know, try to transfer
that to my little air quotes like more variability, external variability, more.

(30:44):
I guess I could say real life where people have more,
more freedoms and other things.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
That could change it, and it would be like the
depending on the politics of whatever, well, provinces draws states
for you. It would be interesting to see if a
particular governm would allow that, because you could all do
a control like case, I'd see you with the HRV
of this particular prison population and then okay, it's no
doubt awful, now we put some measures in, and then

(31:10):
you can probably do some measures with Okay, well, the
actual number of violent incidents or confrontations that probably would
start to drop as food quality went up a bit
and sleep quality went up a bit, and all of
a sudden, people's nervous systems are starting to be more
regulated within a jail setting.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
Yeah, that would be my That would be my hypothesis.
I would agree with that.

Speaker 4 (31:33):
Also, I know in the US i'd have to look
to see what IRV stuff is or that. I want
to say, it's generally frowned upon. But I know they've
done other studies. One that brings pops into my brain
is study done in fish oil I think out of
the UK that showed in violent offenders, I don't remember
what the dose was, that the fish oil decreased the

(31:53):
amount of violent outbreaks and things like that.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
So yeah, I mean I think it's.

Speaker 4 (31:58):
A that's a good idea, and I'd be willing to
bet the interventions are probably not as expensive as what
most people think, right, And so you may have a
population is a harder time being regulated, and anything you
can do to try to make them more regulated.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
I think is going to be a positive overall.

Speaker 6 (32:17):
Yeah, and you have one of the other things that
you have in prison is hourly hourly checked. So every hour, yep,
you're getting a flashlightsligned on you in a not very
dark environment already because the haulits are always on.

Speaker 5 (32:29):
And then if they.

Speaker 6 (32:29):
Can't see breathing, they bang on your door to wake
you up so you can make sure that that person's
alive still. And then if you are unfortunate to be
in either protective custody or in the hole, as you
would those those those those checks go fifteen minutes, So
every fifteen minutes you're being looked at and you're being

(32:50):
and making sure that you're breathing. And in certain prisons
you actually have to take it.

Speaker 5 (32:58):
We used to call it the.

Speaker 6 (32:58):
Little black or at used to call it because if
you didn't do it, if you didn't go to the
end of the of the range and swipe it, we'd
get in trouble, so you're actually doing it every fifteen minutes.
There's no there's no straying away from it, and you're
literally taking you know, these guys, And I worked mostly
in men's prisons, and you were you're really just making
them in sleep deprivation constantly, and and it's and then

(33:21):
we then get released and you're supposed to be better.
And I think that there's a lot to be said
for how we treat people well. Dot FSCs did say
in order to the degree of civilization and society, you
must enter its prisons, and I kind of agree that.
And I think people think Canadian prisons are soft. We
hear that all the time. And we were in a
homicide in the prison and that was the first time
you were ever in there and you realized how unsoft

(33:43):
they were.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
Not soft.

Speaker 4 (33:47):
Yeah, it also as bonkers to me that the solution
is to shine a light on someone every fifteen minutes
to see if they're still breathing. Like I mean, we
have how many different forms of technology now all that
could easily solve that question without you know, fracturing their
sleep every fifteen minutes.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah, So I change tops a little bit here and
kind of move into movement. So the broad stroke of
what movement can do, and we can relate it back
to HRVR nutrition if you like. But I know you're
I listened to you on Barble Shrugged and one of
the guys in there, I actually really not Actually I
really liked that podcast because initially I'm listening to it,

(34:26):
I'm like, this is so broie, and then you start
listen to the guys and you're like, holy fuck, they
are so smart and so intelligent.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
But it just it's kind of they're.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
Great, Like it's kind of couched in some browiness, but
you got if you pay attention, they're all wicked smart dudes.
So the one I listened to relatively recently, and that
was an older one, you were taking one of the
guys through and he wanted to run a six minute
mile just because they wanted to run a six minute mile.
So maybe starting out with something specific like that and
then broadening it out to just principles again, tying it

(34:58):
back to more first responder brains and bodies of some
principles of movement that would be most beneficial for people
to increase a resilience.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
For lack of a better or less cliche word.

Speaker 4 (35:11):
Yes, that was with Anders. So we're still working on
He's doing really good with it. If I were to
go back in time, like I'm huge now and like,
what are the principles that apply? Because to me, a
solid principle could apply to movement, to nutrition, to life,
it can across all sorts of different domains, may have

(35:33):
to be reinterpreted a little bit.

Speaker 3 (35:34):
To that context.

Speaker 4 (35:35):
And so one of them that I originally got this
from my buddy, coach Cal Deets here at the University
of Minnesota, and so we've talked a lot over the years.
I'm helping him with the Triphasic two book, and I
remember sitting in it was probably eight years ago now.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
So I'm working on the book. We're sitting in just
me and him.

Speaker 4 (35:54):
He's got this huge whiteboard and he's just drawn all
this stuff out of ideas for like forty five minutes.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
I'm sitting there taking.

Speaker 4 (36:00):
Notes, going, how the hell am I gonna like write
this in a book where it's gonna make sense to
someone who's you know, not in the room here. And
at the end of it, I looked at him and
I'm like, Okay, so in summary, you're saying do high
quality work first and then do more of that. And
then he kind of looks at me and he's like, yeah,
that's right. And so if you can do quality first

(36:27):
and then repeat it, you're gonna make faster progress, especially
for a performance. And this even goes all the way
back to you know, Charlie Francis's stuff where he had
you know, his printers.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
Doing specific things.

Speaker 4 (36:39):
So with enders, we said, okay, his VOTWO max overallways
pretty darn good, maybe like fifty two or something like that.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
So this status of his.

Speaker 4 (36:48):
Aerobic system could be a little bit better, but probably
not his rate limiter. So then we're like, you know, okay,
what about his times and movement efficiency? So we had
him do simply a simulated mile on one day and
then the other day he's doing what I call a
QDR or quality density repeats.

Speaker 3 (37:06):
So we figured out, okay, he wants to run a
six minute a mile. Cool, all right, So if we.

Speaker 4 (37:10):
Cut that in half, can you do a half mile
in three minutes? Can you do a quarter mile in
half of that? So a minute and a half, ah, cool,
you can do a quarter mile a minute and a half. Great,
So we would have him to quarter mile repeats with
complete rest in between. So the thought being, if you
can run at that pace, even if you get complete rest, cool,

(37:31):
Now you're doing.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
The quality of the thing.

Speaker 4 (37:34):
You're training the thing in a small portion of the
big thing that you have to do. And so once
you get good at that, Okay, let's jump up to
a half mile. O. Great, you can do a half
mile in three minutes. Good, Let's give you complete rest
and then let's go again, and then you can play.
You can do density with that, so you can shortened
the amount of time that he has to go before
he repeats that interval, but he's not allowed to do

(37:56):
an interval that's not at that pace. So if he
would come in and doesn't make the pace, it's like
one forty seven or one forty three or something that's
way off the mark.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
You're done for that day. Like you're not doing any.

Speaker 4 (38:08):
More work, no matter how hard it feels, no matter
how good you feel. You're literally like like one of
Charlie Francis is the thing, like you're literally training to
be slower at that point, like you're putting an effort,
you're cutting into recovery and you're going the wrong direction.
So I think that for me in terms of how
I program stuff is probably like one of the top principles. So,
how can you do high quality work? How can you

(38:30):
do high quality sets? Maybe some more volume, maybe some
more frequency, so related to your population. One of the
big things I see is that sometimes forget that movement
is actually paired to stress. So if you're watching an animal
in the wild that gets really really stressed, like maybe
they're running from a predator or whatever, they're usually doing

(38:52):
some movement, or if they get scared, they'll do a
lot of you know, shaking and different things like that.
They're almost always coupling movement to a high stress situation.

Speaker 3 (39:03):
Unfortunately, with humans we do a lot of the reverse,
whether you.

Speaker 4 (39:06):
As people in your case, there are may be some
movement involved, but it's probably not enough movement to match
the stressor at that point. And so now we've got
this mismatch of a high stress event that should be
coupled to a high amount of appropriate movement, but the
amount of movement is not there. So one thing I
would look at is, okay, for on a high intensity side,

(39:28):
or at least movement in general, how much movement are
they getting and then we can use heart rate variability
to determine, Okay, are you going over.

Speaker 3 (39:37):
Your recovery ability.

Speaker 4 (39:39):
So it's going to be a little bit different for everyone,
So we still want to get some you know, some
pretty intense movement in for a lot of people that
may be severely limited.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
Like one guy I work with, like his all.

Speaker 4 (39:50):
Out high intensity, you know, ninety ninety five percent of
his heart rate max.

Speaker 3 (39:55):
We're doing for two minutes a week.

Speaker 4 (39:57):
Literally, he's doing one five hundred meter on the road
as hard as you can.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
That's it.

Speaker 4 (40:02):
That's as high intensity because this stress level is already
super high. However, we're still gonna pair a fair amount
of movement, a fair amount of lifting, some cardiac development stuff,
maybe even some zone two stuff to still try to
offset that balance, because what I see a lot of
times what happens is people get in the high.

Speaker 3 (40:22):
Stress situation and then they get kind of tired.

Speaker 4 (40:25):
They feel like I'm stressed out and recovery is really poor.
And then if you could sleep or do things to
replete it, that's fine. But long term, once you sort
of get out of that debt, in my biased opinion,
you need to try to figure out a movement strategy
to match your stress situation that you can then execute
on a week by week basis, so that way that

(40:47):
it's just like balancing your checkbook. You kind of want
to try that to come out as even as you
can week to week.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
So taking that back to and again, there seems to
be lost right now about there's a resurgence of resistance
training lifting weights, particularly for women, because I think they
were sold to bill of goods like eat a salad,
do the Jane Fonda and then you're good. And listening
to like doctor Stacy Sims, doctor Gabrielle Lyon, they seem

(41:14):
to be blown that out of the water. So can
we pivot and just go just to resistance training and
some I started your Physiologic Flexibility course, which is really good.
I thought this podcast was actually at the end of
September and I was gonna be way further in it.
I was gonna pick your brain more about it some
early on. But I like how you in that have
broke it down to like, here's what the intervention is.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
Let's say cold. We'll talk about that in a minute.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
Here's the ways you can introduce it, and here's the
ways to kind of get your client to buy in.
So with resistance training for let's say women particularly, but
it'll translate to men, what are some principles there over
the course of a week or a month that you
want to do to again increase our overall well being, resilience,
et cetera.

Speaker 3 (41:57):
Yeah, I mean I agree.

Speaker 4 (42:00):
Unfortunately, women got sold that, oh, you don't need to
lift heavy, just do these toning exercises, and which is
crazy because if you've ever been around any high, high
athletic women, they don't do any of that stuff at all,
and they don't look like they're too big or anything
like all these horrible things that women aren't convinced that

(42:20):
happen to them.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
There's a couple of freaks here and there. Maybe that happens.

Speaker 4 (42:24):
I like the Dan John quote of okay, well I
hear you, and if you get too big, we'll cut
you back just before that happens. But in the meantime,
we're going to do this this style of training. Oh,
it's perfect in general. I like lifting two to three
days per week. Obviously you can do more than that,

(42:45):
but a good split I like that I use all
the time is hey, go lift some stuff Monday Wednesday, Friday,
do some cardio Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, pick Sunday off as
a recovery day to get ready for the week. I mean,
obviously that works in populations that work Monday through Friday,
but you can kind of modify that to you an
av split or however you want to do it. I

(43:06):
still like old school some type of compound exercise, even
for women. Again doesn't mean you have to back squat
or things that are painful, but you know, bench bress,
chin ups, bress squat, deadlift. If you find someone to
learn how to do those movements appropriately, it's going to
be super beneficial. After that, you know you want to
do some accessory stuff a little bit higher reps with

(43:27):
whether you want to work on cool that's great, but
I'm still a little bit more on the performance bias.
Even if your goal is to add more muscle, which
is great, the only way you're gonna get there is
by seeing an increase in either volume, density or intensity.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
So intensity is.

Speaker 4 (43:45):
A percentage of win rematch or the amount of weight
you're using. Just old school progressive overload, So if you're
doing that over time, this doesn't mean session is session,
but you know, week to week, month to month, you're
going to make progress, and the easiest way to measure
progress is overall strength and how much you can execute.
And obviously in your population, everything you do then if

(44:08):
you're stronger, is also going to be submes. So let's
say you're I have a female client who dead lists
three fifteen. For her to literally pick up a heavyweight
off of the floor is going to be relatively easier
for her than someone who deadless one twenty five. Right,
So whatever tasks she has to do during the day,

(44:29):
those tasks are going to be more submes, meaning that
she's not exerting herself as much. Those tasks are not
nearly as stressful as it would.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
Be to someone who, say, only deadless one twenty five.

Speaker 4 (44:42):
So as you get stronger in different movement patterns, you
can actually reduce the cost of the things you're doing
day to day. And I think that's something that people
kind of forget about because yes, it is a stress
in order to do it, but there is a benefit
later on that you're actually making those other things less stressful.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
What's worked for me too is kind of always having
a low grade like trying to like whether they're science
behind the ten thousand steps or not, but trying to
kind of have that as a general rule that I
get at least ten thousand per day just two to
three weight workouts I run once, We've run once a
week for like twenty five plus years, and anywhere from
like whatever six kilometers.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
To twelve cameras kind of in that range.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
What I haven't added in which I think I'm going
too soon is that kind of max out, whether it's
on a roller or one of those assault bikes, et cetera,
and just doing that really really intense thirty seconds on,
thirty seconds off. So is that kind of like a
plan as far as that would be most beneficial for
the most amount of people or what are your thoughts?

Speaker 3 (45:50):
Yeah, I agree with that.

Speaker 4 (45:52):
I mean you can split hairs on the ten thousand
steps per day. It was kind of a made up
number from some of the Japanese studies, et cetera. But
if you look at the actual research, it lines up
pretty good, right, eighty five hundred to twelve thousand. You know,
most people are going to be somewhere around there, So
in ten thousand works great. Most people probably don't move

(46:12):
enough and probably don't get enough low level movement.

Speaker 3 (46:15):
So I think that's definitely a benefit.

Speaker 4 (46:18):
I do like people to hit a high heart rate
at least once per week. You know, even if the
recovery isn't the greatest. I think just doing that you
can keep that kind of that high end register for
quite a while. You can do, like you said, a
thirty thirty program. You can do someone who would start
I would have them do thirty seconds of like a

(46:39):
max output and then actually start him with kind.

Speaker 3 (46:41):
Of complete rest.

Speaker 4 (46:42):
So let's say you're on an airdim bike and you
can hit an average of three hundred lots, let's say
over thirty seconds. Cool, Let's rest, and then when you
go again, I want you to hit at least five
percent of that, So you should be pretty darn close
to three hundred.

Speaker 3 (46:56):
Again.

Speaker 4 (46:57):
If it drops to like two twenty, my argument is
you probably would rest longer, and then I want you
to see repeats of that three hundred and once you're
crushing that for maybe five to ten rounds.

Speaker 3 (47:09):
Cool.

Speaker 4 (47:09):
Now, let's try to condense the rest preet a little bit.
Let's chop some time off. Great, can you still hit
three hundred? Awesome? You can, and eventually you may get
down to you know, at the high end, like a
one to one ratio, thirty seconds on thirty seconds off.
One thing I still from a buddy doctor Ken's jay
is on the rower. If you can hit thirty seconds
on and thirty seconds off for ten rounds at a

(47:32):
pretty high output, it's pretty damn bad ass.

Speaker 3 (47:36):
Right.

Speaker 4 (47:37):
Like most people, it'll take them quite a while to
get there. So on the high end that works. This
could be everything out too. Like I said, maybe you're
just doing a five hundred meter on the row once
a week, right, So it can be one to two
minute intervals to something in there.

Speaker 3 (47:53):
Just depends on what are your goals and what you're
trying to do. Yep.

Speaker 1 (47:57):
Something that really helped me with breathing and breast work,
so let's pivot to that is so I've taken. I'm
a yoga teacher, so I took breath work there and
I took a much courses and then I got the
Oxygen Advantage Functional Breathing Certification, which that was a no
joke course too, Like holy shit, that was an exam
that like of all exams and right down to the minutia.
So I'm hoping the flex CIRT course is not that minuitia.

(48:19):
I don't have to use my brain that much. But
we'll see what happens because and it's such a focus
on nose breathing as much as you can, which I
agree in the day to day life. I don't want
to ask that to you. But where you really helped
me was I was training for an ultra event recently
and did a shit ton of stairs and there's times
when nose breathing was actually limiting my ability to do

(48:41):
the work. And I listened to you on either yours
or barble shrug, can't remember, and you're like, yeah, that
was a limiting factor for one of your clients, So
mouth breathe at that point. And then I started like
halfway through training and made all the difference in the
world because then I could actually still do the work, recovered.

Speaker 2 (48:55):
Back to nose breathing as fast as I could.

Speaker 1 (48:58):
But can you speak to kind of those general principles
and breathing as well.

Speaker 4 (49:02):
Yeah, so a lot of you know, Patrick McEwan stuff,
I really like, Like I started using the bolt test
and all that type of thing a long time ago.

Speaker 3 (49:10):
I sugging the cal deats again.

Speaker 4 (49:12):
You know, he's used it for quite a while, and
the nosebreathing stuff is great. Like I had James Nestro
on the podcast awesome Guy.

Speaker 3 (49:20):
Love his book, but it in.

Speaker 4 (49:23):
The fitness world like everyone has to take something to
the extreme, right, whether it was the the barefoot running
for a while. Now it's like nasal breathing, It's oh okay,
oh wow, nasl breathing is great. So we need a
nasal breathe for everything that we do. And I started
getting like literally max vo two tests for metaball card
people a send me their data. I'm looking at it

(49:45):
and I'm like, what the like, this doesn't this doesn't
look like any of the stuff I've seen in the past.
And it took me a while to figure it out.
And I asked one person. I said, okay, it's a
stupid question, but this.

Speaker 3 (49:56):
Is a max test.

Speaker 4 (49:57):
Were you breathing through your nose only the whole time?
And they're like, yeah, how'd you know. I'm like, well,
I can see your ventilation numbers. They look like their
clip like they're they're cut off. And I'm like, just
if it's a max test and max output like breathe
through your mouth. So I like the gear system that
Brian McKenzie has, which is simply, hey, when you start exercise,

(50:19):
can you breathe in and out of your nose?

Speaker 3 (50:21):
Cool?

Speaker 4 (50:21):
The next year, can you breathe in and out of
your nose a little bit faster? Great, as exercise starts
going up, can you breathe in through your nose, out
through your mouth? And then when you get to you know,
all out maximal exercise, you're probably gonna be breathing in
and out of your mouth, right because we don't want
to be limited by ventilation.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
We don't want to be limited by the.

Speaker 4 (50:40):
Amount of air we're physically getting in and out. And
so with a lot of people, like what I did
was some prospit people for a while is they were
not very good at nasal breathing. So I'd stick them
on a rower and be like, bro, they're gonna do
a five K, but you're only gonna breathe in and
out of your nose. And I did this because they
love doing the shit that's hard. It was the only

(51:00):
way to get them to drop their intensity. And then
I look at their average heart rate. You know, for
some of the people who were very trained, very fit,
like they couldn't get above one sixteen.

Speaker 3 (51:09):
You know, it was just they just weren't used to it.
But you know, fast forward to training that.

Speaker 4 (51:14):
You know six weeks, you know, same guy was hitting
the same outputs.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
On the rower, but he was actually getting a higher output.

Speaker 4 (51:21):
Now he could do the same outputs we did before,
but we allowed him to go to a higher output,
a higher heart rate and he was able to naisle
breathe in and out up to like one hundred and
fifty bats per minute.

Speaker 5 (51:32):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (51:32):
So there's a range that can be trained within that.
But again, if he's still going to do an all
out maximum test on the rower a two K, I
would expect that he's going to be mouth breathing in
and out at the end, because at some point for
all out performance, we don't want that to be a limitter,
but we still want to increase the capacity within that,

(51:53):
which I think is what gets lost.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
Yeah, for me knows taking those cars I took. We
have Ian McKenzie on the podcast and I think in
our first season or two. Yeah, and he's the fact
that he even answered, I was like, I can't believe
he's I honestly, I was shocked when you asked it
as well and said you would do it, But when
I sent to Brian McKenzie, he did the same thing, Like,
holy shit, Brian m Kenzie's coming out. We had James
gearing on too, like we've kind of had some actually
really cool dudes. But nose breathing in general life has

(52:20):
made a big difference, I think in me regulating my
nervous system and even doing the Zone two run again,
doing my once a week, I was very intentional to
nose breathe while I was running as much as possible,
so into the like ninety ninety five percent of the time.

Speaker 2 (52:35):
But it was such an.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
Ego check because at the start You're like, this sucks,
and I feel like I'm waterboarding myself, and I had
to go so fucking slow that I'm not really even
running anymore. I'm basically shuffling like I'm ninety two. But
then around like you said, the six week mark, there
was kind of a click and then all of a
sudden like I felt way better. I felt way better,
higher energy. After the run was all done. It just

(52:57):
made a huge difference. So maybe if you can just
kind of touch on why the breathing through your nose
is better, generally speaking than breathing through your mouth until
you get into that super high output.

Speaker 3 (53:10):
Yeah, there's a lot.

Speaker 4 (53:11):
Of i'd say debate on this, but my bias is
I would agree with that one. If you're doing zone two, like,
your limitation is definitely not ventilatory, it's just not. If
it is, you're not doing zone too right.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
So you should be able to breathe in and out
of your nose.

Speaker 4 (53:28):
Again, it's a trained skill overall, So I do like the.

Speaker 3 (53:32):
Nasal breathing for that. And then run me your question again.
Was it about why?

Speaker 1 (53:40):
Yeah, nose breathing versus mouth breathing. Yeah, nose breathing, Yeah,
nose breathing versus mouth breathing, like the generalities of why
from a scientific standpoint.

Speaker 4 (53:50):
Yeah, if we go back to the autoomic nervous system,
there's ways we can up regulate and downregulate the nervous system.

Speaker 3 (53:56):
And especially for.

Speaker 4 (53:58):
People high level athletes, you know, ems, first responders, things
like that. I've realized over time that no one really
teaches them these things, but the people who are really
good at it figured it out, and those are the
people who last longer. So a good buddy of mine,
he's trained a lot of NHL hockey players for years

(54:18):
and years, and he would say that he calls the
guys who would be new to the NHL and have
a very high level performance, but we're just like on
all the time. He called them, like these sympathetic monsters
who last literally about one to two years in the NHL.
They have some injury, they just get burned out, and
he's like, they just can't downregulate at all, Like even

(54:38):
when they're not on the ice. He's like the high
level athletes who play for eight, ten, sometimes twelve years
on the outside. If you watch them in a game,
they're on, they're fast, they're definitely where they need to be.
And then when they're off, because you like, shifts in
the NHL are pretty fast and it can look like
you can take a nap on the side, but it's like,
oh bro, you shifts up like boom, They're ready to
go again. They can go from high level to low

(55:01):
level very very fast. And the way we can regulate
that is by using breathing. So if you breathe more
through your nose, that is more on the parasympathetic.

Speaker 3 (55:11):
Side than if you breathe in through your mouth.

Speaker 4 (55:14):
If you breathe slower just overall speed, slower is more parasympathetic,
more of a longer exil, more parasympathetic.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
You get into.

Speaker 4 (55:24):
Stuff with your eyes if you're trying to see, more panoramic,
like a wide gaze, more parasympathetic, super super focused on
one particular thing, more sympathetic. So we can use these
things to then regulate the nervous system. So I find
that most people need more down regulation. They get stuck
in third gear all the time. They can't quite upregulate.

(55:46):
If they hit a real high stress situation, they can,
but then it's taken them.

Speaker 3 (55:51):
Forever to downregulate on that other side.

Speaker 4 (55:53):
So by getting them to just even nasal breathe during
the day, we're getting them to downregulate little bit more.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
We're building the capacity to do that.

Speaker 4 (56:04):
And then if people want a metric, like if they
have an oar ring or a garment or something like that,
have them double check their respiratory rate at night. And
one way you can really confirm what's going on is
if their respiratory rate is fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen breasts
a minute. I have a client right now, she's at
eighteen point three breast per minute, they are massively sympathetically

(56:28):
stressed while they should be asleep, when they should be downregulated,
so there's no other outputs coming in, there's no conscious
things going on. They're not training, and if they're stuck
at that high respiratory rate, and O'Brien's talked a lot
about this, and Gelpin's talked about this. To me, that's
like a red flag. And if I see that, that's
probably right now. After seeing this for four years, that's

(56:51):
almost always my number one intervention. So what are we
gonna have them do. We're gonna go back to zone too,
and they're gonna do some nasal breathing. We want them
to to get used to a little bit higher level
as CO two so that does better regulation, and then
over time we'll see that respiratory rate start to step down.
At night, almost all of them, you know, will say, Wow,

(57:14):
I feel less stressed during the day. I don't feel
as burnt out, I don't feel as like squirrel brain.

Speaker 3 (57:19):
And all these other things.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
That's my favorite part of this conversation because I've gone
all in with breast stuff and it started with reading, well,
it was actually started with what doesn't kill us? The
whim Hoff book and then reading James Nasser and then
taking the yoga training in all these different courses.

Speaker 2 (57:34):
So I've had the.

Speaker 1 (57:35):
Opportunity now as a civilian with Themton Police to teach
all of patrol and a big chunk of what I
talk about is breathwork and here's a science behind it,
because everybody wants to know the why instead of just
going because we're also cynical, and then just practicing those
prints like nose reading more reducing the number of respirations
we take, tying that into COEO two tolerance, and then

(57:56):
actually having practical starting with awareness, which I probably say
fifty seven times in a presentation, because the problem is,
like you're talking about the NHL guys, they have no
idea that they're basically race horses that are sprinting throughout
their day to day life, cooking their systems until it
just can't keep up with that. I think where it
ties with first responders is it's not a two or

(58:18):
three year thing. It's accumulation of probably around the five
eight year mark. If they haven't done what they need
to look after themselves, the system is going to start
to wear out and some of the bearings are starting
to get blown out.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
Yeah, I mean I.

Speaker 4 (58:32):
Simply explain it to people like I could take my
car and redline it every day to the grocery store.
I wouldn't expect the car to get two hundred thousand miles, right,
There's going to be a tradeoff for it. Now, who
knows when that happens, but I can guarantee that if
you are on that sympathetic side all the time, there
is a cost, and at some point that that cost

(58:55):
is definitely going to come due.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
Yeah, before we let you go, because I know we're
getting close to our our istion, we'll want to keep you.
Is there any other kind of overarching principles that you
would recommend, Like I know we could get into hot
and cold, et cetera, and we count if you want,
But any other principles that you think would be important
or impactful for folks.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
In these kind of spaces that we haven't talked about.

Speaker 3 (59:20):
Yeah, I mean my bias.

Speaker 4 (59:22):
So how I said the certification was the flex site
sert is basic nutrition and recovery.

Speaker 3 (59:27):
Let me cover some basic exercise in there. Nothing or shattering.

Speaker 4 (59:30):
But if I call it like the level one interventions,
like if you're good at exercise, nutrition, and sleep like
those are the basics, like, by all means, please cover those. Yes,
they make a huge difference. However, once you have that
down and that's pretty decent, doesn't need to be perfect. Again,
my bias with the physiologic flexibility is looking at, Okay,

(59:50):
what homeostatic regulators does your body have in place that
basically have to be respected, And so to me, it's
going to be temperature like humans are homeotherms we like
you know ninety eight point six, it actually ninety seven
point seven. But if our core temperature alters either too
high or too low, you're dead. So the body has

(01:00:11):
all these complicated workarounds to make sure that that doesn't happen.
pH would be the second one. Your pH can't go
too high or too low. You're running the issues breathing
like you mentioned two CO two, and then a fuel
systems like everything from fats to carbohydrates to black tate
to keytones. So again my bias is that if you train,

(01:00:33):
once you've got exercise, sleep, and nutrition good, I would
look at those four areas, and then I would look
at not necessarily changing for example, your core temperature, but
expanding the buffer zone and the physiologic headroom on each side.
What temperature can you go into and still operate pretty good?

(01:00:54):
All colds can you go and still operate pretty good?
So for pH because you do, like you mentioned thirty
thirty stuff or some high intensity things where you're gonna
produce black data and hydrogen ions, your body then has
to buffer that. How well can you handle those types
of you know, stressors and insults. And what I think
will happen is once you get pretty good in those areas,

(01:01:16):
that will transfer to your ability to handle stressors and
other aspects of your life. Like you're just so when
I do this out for a client years ago, and
I said, Okay, you're really good at exercise, Nutrition's okay,
your sleep's okay, and all these homeostatic regulators like you
suck really bad at because you just don't have any

(01:01:36):
exposure to them. And I drew it out as a
circle graph. I like, you want to circle, and you
want to expand the capacity of the circle. Right now
you look like a sick amoeba, Like you're really good
in one area and just you're missing this this whole
side of the equation. So I think if people can
just work in those areas. And again, it doesn't take
that much work. You can combine a bunch of these

(01:01:59):
things together. You don't have to do all four areas
at once. But I think what I've seen in people who,
whether they do this knowingly or intrinsically, who tend to
be much more resilient. In most cases, they're kind of
doing all of that. They're exposed to elements either hot
or cold. They're doing some type of high intensity training.
They're doing some type of zone too. They may or

(01:02:19):
may not be doing breath work. They're pairing, you know,
nasal breathing, mouth breathing, all those things to the correct
amount of resistance. They're really good at using fat, they're
really good at using carbohydrates. But the cool part is,
I think all those things can be taught. Again, they
don't take a huge amount of time for the amount
of I believe beneficial payoff to try to pack me

(01:02:40):
be people as resilient as possible to whatever insult stressors
are coming, because you can't really predict those, and yes, acutely,
you're gonna do the best you can to get through them.

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
But if you're more resilient and anti fragile.

Speaker 4 (01:02:53):
Before you go into that situation, you're just gonna be
better off on.

Speaker 1 (01:02:57):
The backside also, And I think important part of that
is your it's controlled, right, Like if I'm going and
I go I cold tub every day and I saw
I do my best song. I actually hate sauning, but
I'm really pushing out of the last couple months. I
made myself do it, so there's a deliberateness to it,
if that's even a word. And then I can sit
in a sauna where I'm deeply uncomfortable at about minute

(01:03:19):
fifteen to twenty. That's that's my sweet spot of where
I know the work is happening. But then when I
go to real life and I don't have control, like whatever,
get their car crash or somebody's an asshole at work
or whatever, my system has already figure out how to
mitigate and deal with that because I've kind of taught
it under a controlled setting. That's what has worked best
for me is trying all these different modalities and then

(01:03:40):
talking as much as I can. And my wife and
I have a yoga company. We run retreats and we
will put through fifteen twenty people who've never been in
cold water before maybe gone to a sauna, but not
for one hundred years, and then just kind of on
purpose getting them outside their comfort zone in a controlled fashion,
and it leads to I think gigantic. The micro's equal
to mackerels.

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
Moving forward, I will have to say this or go ahead.

Speaker 6 (01:04:05):
I was gonna say, as he talked about how nice
and regulated he is, except when he's behind the wheel
of a car, let me tell you that he does
not have regulation.

Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
Ever, I'm a monster behind the wheel. I'm a horrible,
hateful person. I yes, that's still my little safe zone
of I just loathe everything and everyone.

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
Sorry, oh you're good. Yeah, And what you brought up
by one hundred percent agree with.

Speaker 4 (01:04:28):
And I think there's the physiology of doing those things
gives you practice for the mental title.

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):
So at the same time, like you can't like.

Speaker 4 (01:04:40):
One thing I got from Doug Heel is that the
brain is in the mind is in the body, and
the body is in the mind, like they're both connected.

Speaker 3 (01:04:47):
And so by doing those things, by pushing.

Speaker 4 (01:04:49):
Just a little bit more in the heat area, I
like the use stress model, so stress you can generally
recover from relatively fast. Distress is a high amount of
stress is going to take you mu longer to recover from.

Speaker 3 (01:05:01):
So, like you were saying, with a.

Speaker 4 (01:05:02):
Sauna, yeah, you're gonna go to you're just a little
bit uncomfortable. You're gonna kind of surf that wave for
a little while, and then you're gonna get up. And
then next time you're gonna see can you go a
little higher temperature, maybe a little bit longer, right, just
like exercise, just like training, just like everything else. But
it's those edges that give you the practice of can
you control your state in that high stress? Now, so

(01:05:25):
with cold water, like can you get in how fast
can you get.

Speaker 3 (01:05:28):
Control of your breathing due to that stressor?

Speaker 4 (01:05:32):
And what I like about all these areas, like you know,
doing a two k on a rower is freaking horrible, nobody.

Speaker 3 (01:05:37):
Wants to do it.

Speaker 4 (01:05:38):
But how rhythmic and how well can you control your breathing?
How well can you decide? Okay, now I'm gonna go
from nasal inhale, nasl.

Speaker 3 (01:05:46):
Out, nasal in mouth out. Now I'm gonna go to
mouth to mouth.

Speaker 4 (01:05:49):
I'm gonna purposely decide when to do these and do
it and what looks like a controlled area because to me,
it's fascinating, Like I can't remember the Olympic sprinter who
was doing this, but she just destroyed the competition. And
at the end you see her look over to the
person next to her, and I don't know if she
said something or did something. And the crazy thing to

(01:06:10):
me is I think she was nasal breathing the entire time,
completely relaxed, but she was literally beating everyone else on
the planet. Doing it like that, to me is like
the ultimate high level performance of can you do crazy things.

Speaker 3 (01:06:25):
And make them look easy even though that they're they're not.

Speaker 5 (01:06:29):
And she wasn't just this model.

Speaker 4 (01:06:31):
These other things gives us practice at doing that in
a controlled fashion, And she.

Speaker 5 (01:06:35):
Wasn't just beating them a little bit.

Speaker 6 (01:06:38):
She was No, she was like she was like three
body links ahead and looked like and literally she was
because there's a couple different shots of her, and I
get you noticed it too.

Speaker 5 (01:06:46):
I'm like, she's nose breathing while she's spreading.

Speaker 6 (01:06:49):
Yeah, and then she and she does she kind of
glances over and you're like, and she looked like when
she stopped, she wasn't even like there wasn't even the
after her her breathing was fully regulated at the end
of the I think it was.

Speaker 5 (01:07:00):
I think it was one hundred meters. It might have
been two hunred meters.

Speaker 3 (01:07:02):
I can't think it was.

Speaker 5 (01:07:03):
Yeah, but I remember watching it.

Speaker 6 (01:07:05):
I'm like, I'm like, no, way, like that is a
that is the best the most finally two athlete I've
ever seen in any sport ever?

Speaker 3 (01:07:12):
Was that? Oh it was crazy? Yeah, this is at
the freaking Olympics, right, This is.

Speaker 4 (01:07:17):
Not like your race around the park in you know,
East Cupcake, Texas or whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:07:21):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
Before we let you go, we've alluded to a couple
of courses, so I want to make sure and we'll
put that in the show notes here. So where can
people reach you? What podcast are you on? And then
how would people take their your course if they're interested.

Speaker 4 (01:07:36):
Yeah, So the Level one is the flex Diet Certification,
and so that cover is primarily nutrition recovery, but we
do talk a little bit about exercise and neat and
movement and sleep. That's just that Flexdiet dot com. And
then the Level two is the Physiologic Flexibility Certification. This
will open again this coming October and you can just

(01:07:57):
find that a Physiologic flexibilit and The best place is
probably my main website, which is Mike Tanelson dot com.
You can go up to the top there's a little
newsletter button and you can get onto the Insider newsletter
for free, and you just send stuff out most every
day and I'll give you all the updates and everything
else going on and.

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
Send you some cool stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:08:17):
And then also have a podcast which is the Flex
Diet Podcast and you can find me there.

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
Awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:08:24):
We really really appreciate your time. This was a great conversation.
Appreciate your knowledge, and I appreciate the way again you
can kind of distill a meta analysis into a couple
of sentences as digestible for folks like us.

Speaker 6 (01:08:36):
And I also have to say, this is I'm usually
the one that talks the most in the podcast, but
this was.

Speaker 5 (01:08:43):
This is Scott He's real mind, more.

Speaker 6 (01:08:45):
Trauma and stuff, and like I don't I rarely see
him smile, and he really like I can tell this was.
It was a great conversation, but it was it was
actually fun to see Scotty take that version of the
person because you're so.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
Oh, I'm totally into this.

Speaker 1 (01:09:01):
I could sit here for seven more hours and you'd
be like, oh, my god, bro, could you fucking quit
ask me questions?

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
I can, yeah, keep picking at your brain the whole time.

Speaker 3 (01:09:09):
So yeah, this is no.

Speaker 4 (01:09:11):
This is cool because like you guys are actually doing
it and applying all the stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:09:16):
And that's the thing.

Speaker 4 (01:09:17):
When I designed the CERTs is like I just didn't
want yeah, all this research and all this other stuff.
I freaking read, god what to do four hundred and
fifty some references for like the physical exert, like it
was insane, but I wanted it to be practical so
that people like yourself can go, hey, here's the theory.
Oh cool, I couldn't understand that. Oh here's how I
actually practice it. Because having more people like both of yourselves,

(01:09:39):
like in the community doing it part of the community,
educating and teaching, that's where stuff actually gets done in reality.

Speaker 1 (01:09:48):
So kudos to you guys for doing all that. I
really appreciate it. Awesome, Thanks so much. And we'll just
get you he'll do a closing ear we'll get you
to hanged out for two secs.

Speaker 6 (01:09:54):
First of all, I just want to say these are
not the opinions of any place that any of us
have worked at. This is just our opinions. And musings
for today. There wasn't anything controversial. Also, I want to
just say, you know this is we are sponsored by
Scott He's and his wife's yoga company, Twisted Oak Yoga,
and my consulting company, Proximity Consulting.

Speaker 5 (01:10:15):
And I just also I always end with a land acknowledgement.

Speaker 6 (01:10:17):
We are on Treaty six territory where we were recording
this the home of the Soto Dena Maiti people's the
cree On Schnabe. And just a really cool thing happened
in my workplace. I am the chair of a justice
studies program and I had one of my classes is
the Justice Response to Mental Health, and it was my

(01:10:37):
first class of the semester, and the Indigenous students have
We had six Indigenous women and a couple of Indigenous
men in a class of thirty five. And one of
the cool things about where I work at Norquest is
we have the highest Indigenous population that I know of
in a post secular institution, at least in Western Canada.

(01:11:00):
So I just love to see. And one of the
things I wanted to say about that was the individuals
were talking about their desire to be part of the
change of the justice system, which I think is so necessary,
and I just was really proud to see these individuals
standing up and wanting to make their communities better. So
I thought that was really great. All right, love you,
Love you,