Prioritizing Sleep and Aerobic Health

I'll tell you the top three things that I look at first. And the most important thing is sleep. Um, the fastest way to get your heart rate and blood pressure down is to prioritize your sleep and stop making excuses on why you can't sleep and that it doesn't cost you anything. You just need to go to bed earlier and get off of Netflix. If you can take a nap in the afternoon, take a nap, do what you have to do to go to sleep. And a lot of people say, well, I have a hard time sleeping. Great. Start practicing sleeping, practice taking naps. Um, if you just keep, if you keep self manifesting this and saying, well, I don't sleep well, well, guess what? Your perception is a reality. That's going to be your reality. We need to come up with strategies on helping you sleep. I'll tell you one thing that helps me and is actually helping Zoe doesn't need any help sleeping. She can fall asleep. There could be bombs going off in a war zone. I have minds a little bit different where I'm always amped up. So I can take specific supplements to help calm my brain down. But the one thing that that I like to do now is I'll put on an audio book and I'm out within five minutes. So I'll put it on audible. I'll set it for 30 minutes. I'll put it on, you know, whatever book. And then that's like somebody reading a bedtime story. And I find that's a really good strategy, as weird as that sounds. But sleep is the main one. The second one is take an assessment of your anaerobic to aerobic fitness level. A lot of people are massively anaerobic because, again, they think aerobics are bad and they think that

We're trying to make you a marathon runner and blah, blah, blah, but that's not the key concept. The key concept is we are aerobic animals. We make most of our energy through an aerobic pathway. If we constantly focus on the anaerobic things, our bioenergetic flux gets screwed up, and we become metabolically inflexible, and then all kinds of crazy metabolic mishap can happen, and that can create large stressors. If you think about things from an evolutionary perspective, we're designed to basically walk all day and find food we're not really designed to run really fast unless we're in danger we're not um built to to have a lot of high strength like resistance strength output unless we're fighting off an animal or another human so your brain doesn't understand if i'm going in the gym to squat it doesn't know that you're trying to build nice outside sweep on your quads or you're trying to trying to improve your front squat your brain thinks, oh my God, I'm in danger. I must be fighting off a bear. Shit. Increase sympathetic drive. Then when you go get on the echo bike and you do aerodyne sprints, your body just assumes you're running away from something. So if you're already really stressed out with your job, your partner, your kids, bills, Corona, whatever, and then you go into the gym, you're just layering on more stress, which is going to increase your allostatic load, which is all the sum of your stressors combined and there's only so much your body can take. So what we tell people is in order to build strength, stress resilience, the first thing we need to do is we need to take an assessment. Are you overly anaerobic? And if you are, let's build up your aerobic fitness and let's get it not doesn't have to be to a high level, but it needs to be a sufficient level. So for gen pop, I don't think they can get to aerobic. Like I think, you know, if we build a really good aerobic base, they feel better, they poop better, they think better, they have more energy. They eat, they can oxidize more food better. Um, and then we say, well, okay, here, your VO two max is estimated to be here. Do you want to carry that higher or do you want to work on strength or what's next? And most of them will almost always say, I just want to get more conditioned. And that's kind of what happened to you too. We got you really conditioned and we try to take out your cardio and you went, Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. I actually enjoy doing that now because it makes, it makes me feel better. Like, okay, cool. Are you still getting stronger? Yes. great we'll keep the cardio in there as long as it's not impairing some of the other strength qualities that you're looking for you know with an athlete it's a little bit different because having too high of a vo2 max or being too aerobic will take away from power production so we have to weigh how how fit does this guy need to be to play a sport and to stay healthy and not get injured and to be able to eat more food um how how how sufficient does that level need to be as long as it's not taking away from the qualities of their sport. Yeah. I have a few, like my, my male clients, they'll either think they have to do all the cardio and that's it for fat loss. Whereas some of them are like, Oh, I'm going to lose my gains. And then I, I tell them what you guys did with me. My, my heart rate overnight was like 68. And now if it's above 56, it's because some stress event or whatever. And the fact that I can deadlift like 200 pounds for reps and then just go out and run a 5k in under half an hour to me is like, that's pretty fucking cool without dying and feeling like shit the next day. You don't find that quite often. And, and people don't realize how that can help them. Can you elaborate to like, Like the reason why that'll allow you to recover easier and then eat more food and all that. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is how much energy can I make? Okay. And so in order to make energy, you need mitochondria. So we know that slight caloric deficits, slightly lower carbs, more aerobic activity, more high reps, you know, increasing type one fiber increases and type two A increases mitochondrial content. The more mitochondrial volume I have, the more energy I can make faster without creating bottlenecks at the mitochondria. So that's kind of one of the main things we focus on. So when we tell people to do aerobic work, whether that's steady-state aerobics, whether that's steady-state cardiovascular conditioning, whether that's reverse Tabata, Tabata, aerobic intervals, we're not using that to burn fat directly. We're doing that to burn it indirectly depending on where your diet is. So some people will have them do a massive amount of aerobics initially because their blood pressure is high, but we won't actually put them in a massive deficit. We'll keep them somewhere around maintenance because we're not trying to chase calories. We're trying to create aerobic adaptations globally and locally so it builds your work capacity and builds your ability to tolerate more and more food, helps you sleep, helps you relax, helps you get in a parasympathetic state, which is where you should be at rest. later we might use some of that to create a caloric deficit so you don have to diet as hard but the chasing calories comes later not at the start At the start it should be about what adaptations am I looking for that's going to carry over to the next training blocks, and how is that going to affect my lifting, and how is that going to affect my recoverability?