The Surprising New Science Of Recovery To Build More Muscle - Dr Mike Israetel

Chris Williamson 0:00 Last time that we spoke, we spoke about fat loss, the time before that, we spoke about muscle building, and today I want to talk about recovery, which I guess is the other side of all of that. We've talked about stimulus, we've talked about what's sort of going out, in terms of an energy flow-

Dr Mike Israetel 0:13 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 0:14 ... uh, now talking about how we can get some of that back. So, how do you come to think about recovery going on? What's going on under the hood of recovery?

Dr Mike Israetel 0:22 Yes. So it's best to understand recovery by analogy to that of maintenance of a machine. But it's not an analogy. I would call it a homology. It's actually the same thing. Humans are machines, period. There's no analogy there. Humans are just machines that are designed by evolution instead of willful conscious agents, as far as we can tell. And human machinery is real deep structurally 'cause it goes all the way down to the nanotech level. We don't actually have quite machines that good yet. The iPhone comes pretty close with its little teeny microchips. But the human machine is, in the context of sport or getting jacked or getting lean, operates under all the same rules that machines do. And as machines do high output performance, they take on wear and tear. And there are various things that you do to machines after the factory closes at night that recover them in a very similar way that you would use with humans that do all sorts of things during the day, including athletic performance, trying to lift to get jacked, so on and so forth. So, the normal state, the uninterrupted state of a high performing athlete or any r- really any human that wants to get jacked and lean, et cetera, is sort of, everything is in one piece and everything is in its right place. So, there are, is a lot of neurotransmitter built up in the vesicles in the neurons and not floating around somewhere degraded at a junction. The vesicles aren't bereft of neurotransmitter, empty, or refilling.

Chris Williamson 2:00 What's a vesicle?

Dr Mike Israetel 2:01 So it's this little kind of ball of, uh, uh, basically a membrane inside of it, so like a little bubble. It has neurotransmitters. So, at the end of your neurons when you want the neuron to talk to something else, the vesicles fuse with the membrane of the neuron. That internal, becomes external. They dump the neurotransmitter and that does whatever it does. Now, that combined with muscles and tendons that are completely intact, unfrayed, combined with a hormonal situation which has a high degree of testosterone, relatively low degree of stress hormones like cortisol. A situation in which the nervous system of the person is, uh, not, um, depleted in such a way that makes it very sympathetic dominant, which is fight or flight. This nervous system is in parasympathetic dominance, which means it is in relaxation mode. Your glycogen in your muscles, the stored sugars that make your muscles do what they do in athletic terms are, are... Those stores are full, and so everything's kind of really good. And then we have to talk about what happens when you run that machine and run it close to its limits.

Chris Williamson 3:10 Yeah, fatigue. What is-

Dr Mike Israetel 3:11 Fatigue.

Chris Williamson 3:11 ... what is fatigue?

Dr Mike Israetel 3:12 Yes. So, fatigue is simply the taking of that everything in its right place very well riding machine and running it through the paces. And those paces will end up altering that machine in some predictable ways. One of the ways that the machine is altered is it takes literal micro-damage. Like, any time you contract your muscles very hard against resistance, parts of the muscle cell literally tear. And at some point they tear more and more and more, and you're gonna have to heal that, right? It's not a tenable situation. If you had someone looking at a machine that lifts cars up and down at a factory and saying, you know, like, the mechanic could say, "We got a little fracturing here," it's not a world in which you're like, "Ah, who cares? My shift ends in an hour." Maybe you would say that. But, uh, it's a concern. It's a thing that has to be remediated. Basically the entropy of the system has increased.

Chris Williamson 4:00 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 4:01 And another thing is your reserves of various things, neurotransmitters that are in the right place, are no longer in the right place. Some of them, a- a exceeding amount of them might have been dumped into the neuromuscular junction or other parts of the nervous system and broken down, and now you don't have a lot of neurotransmitter vesicles ready to get your neurons to fire like they should be firing. When your muscles contract, they not only incur micro-tears but various things like calcium ions, uh, float from one structure to another where they're supposed to go but they don't really get resorbed 100% right away. You actually run down on your creatine phosphate stores. Your glycogen depletes, and from a hormonal level, your cortisol stress hormone tends to start going up and your testosterone tends to start going down. Your sympathetic fight or flight part of your nervous system starts to become more active. Well, 'cause like, you know, it's fight or flight. Imagine like, having to run for your life from zombies that chase you for like two hours. You had better hope you're still in fight or flight towards the end of two hours. You don't wanna be relaxed. You wanna be like, awake, right? And so all of those things tilting your body into that direction basically throw off the hormonal axes and they deplete various things that need to be repleted, nutrients that need to be sort of reintegrated back in, and damage needs to be healed. So, that's under the hood of what recovery and fatigue dynamics actually are. That's what's happening at a physiological level. And, uh, the good news is, the vectors that we have to effect those from our own lived experience of like, "What do I do about that? So, I'm gonna have a little scalpel to get in there, fix my cells." There's just a few of them that work really well and most others so far don't work that well. So it sounds complicated, like, "Holy crap, I gotta work on neurons and stuff like that."

Chris Williamson 5:50 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 5:50 Uh, the body heals and fixes itself tremendously well, but it needs a few key ingredients and we need to not get distracted with other key ingredients, which we'll get to I'm sure later in the discussion.

Chris Williamson 6:01 What... When it comes to thinking about, uh...... how stimulus creates fatigue, or creates stress, or creates this kind of damage. What are the biggest contributing factors to where that fatigue, or where that stress comes from? If you were to make a big pie of all of the things that the normal person that probably listens to this podcast does in a day.

Dr Mike Israetel 6:24 Yeah. So you have the situation where you have recovery, which is the reinstatement of that baseline normal state that's ready to perform. And then you have fatigue, which is the disruption of that state. But where is that disruption coming from? The obvious answer is training. Physical exertion. But it's not the only answer. And this is a real big trip. This was a huge trip to me when I was taught this in school, and then I was like, "Oh, holy crap." The implications of it are very widespread. So the other one, there's at least two more that are of note. First, physical training, which people understand. You don't have to talk to someone on the street who doesn't know anything about physiology long to be like, "When people work out really hard, do you think they get tired?" They're like, "Ugh, is there like a hidden cam somewhere? Is this a joke?" Of course they do. But the other one is all daily physical activity. So a lot of times you'll have athletes on two ends of the spectra. Obviously, it's normally distributed. Most athletes are somewhere in the middle. You'll have athletes that you can barely drag them to practice, and you have to have like a cattle prod to make them do work during practice. But like, they're studs, they do their shit. And then afterwards, they (censored) off and they go into some kind of room that has like a couch, some food delivery service that arrives every several hours, and a PlayStation, and like a bong, and they just, just repeat, repeat, repeat, fall asleep. And the bad news is that you gotta like knock on their door at 6:00 in the morning to get them to football practice. The good news is that they'll never have a problem with recovery.

Chris Williamson 7:52 (laughs) Recovered as fuck, yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 7:52 Because that's all they do, right? But it turns out that daily physical activity contributes substantially to fatigue. And if it doesn't contribute to fatigue as in raising it, it prevents the fatigue from otherwise having been lowered much further by the other things you do in the day that recover you. Eat food, sleep, so on and so forth. We'll get to those details in a bit. So, physical activity has to be integrated, which is why, uh, one of my mentors, probably my biggest mentor in sports science, Dr. Stone. Dr. Mike Stone, who I got my PhD from. He'd see weightlifters and throwers that he was coaching around, like anywhere around the lab, around the gym. If there was a chair, he'd pull it up and ask them to sit down. And whatever Doc said, you kind of did, 'cause he's really scary. Um-

Chris Williamson 8:37 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 8:37 Don't stand around. And Arnold had a version of this, where it's like, "If you're running, walk. If you're walking, sit down. If you're sitting, lie down." Because physical activity absolutely takes a toll. And a lot of athletes on that other end of the spectrum, they're at practice at 5:45 in the morning when it starts at 6:00. But they're busy bees. They're really accomplished at school oftentimes. They're always doing a bunch of stuff. They hike on the weekends. You know, like, not to put too fine a point on it, white people type of shit. And I always get shit for like, "Oh, you're making fun of whites, man." Some kind of alt-right person will put that in the comments. But like, white people seem to take a joke just fine. That's really the only reason. And also, I'm sort of white, so I kind of have the most laughter.

Chris Williamson 9:18 Punching sideways.

Dr Mike Israetel 9:19 Now my jokes at the expense of the Jewish people have a stack so deep, I can't even say most of it. So, people who are in that very conscientious sort of brain, they typically think of things as in their own boxes. I go and I train, and I go hard. And these people go hard in training. They don't need a cattle prod. As a matter of fact, if you have one around, they'll take it and cattle prod themselves. You're like, (laughs) "Jeez, you're doing just fine. Just take it easy." But they'll go and they'll do 18,000 steps a day. They'll go to the library, they'll study, they'll walk around, they'll ride their bike. These are gonna be people that ride their bike to practice and back. And that's not wrong, but you're taking, draining away recovery capacity and potentially even increasing fatigue by doing that stuff. And because these people tend to think in compartments, they oftentimes don't even connect the dots. They're like, "I'm working hard at practice, and I'm eating all my meals. I'm getting eight hours of sleep." But they're on all the time physically. They're out doing stuff. You know people that just can't sit around. To me, especially fast twitch dominated sports, weightlifting, sprinting, high jump, American football. The very best athletes at those sports, on average, tend to be pe- people that prefer to chill out, and will get up and do violent shit for like a couple seconds here and there, and then prefer to sit the hell down. They just don't accumulate fatigue the same way as people who are (imitates punching) .

Chris Williamson 10:40 What would be a sport when you would say, maybe suboptimal in some ways, but the type A personality might lend you more to like an endurance-

Dr Mike Israetel 10:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:49 ... racing type thing?

Dr Mike Israetel 10:50 Yeah. Sports that require a lot of volume and practice. Because they make you so tired, you can't be that person that runs around anymore. Endurance athletes are usually pretty type A type of people. But they, after 20 miles a day for four days straight, you just sit on the couch 'cause you can't move anymore.

Chris Williamson 11:06 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 11:07 And that's really good. That's your body's inner wisdom being like, "Sit down. I'm not even letting you have any more energy." So we have physical training itself. Training, competition, et cetera, that factors into fatigue. We have physical acts of all kinds throughout the day which matter. And then, and it's one of the... The physical acts thing is one of the reasons why coaches at the collegiate level in the United States coming up to big games or big clusters of games, will give their athletes like a heart to heart talk about like, "Ladies or gentlemen, like, I know you're 19. I know going out is really fun. I know staying up 'til 3:00 in the morning doing God knows what is amazing. But like, let's just save that for a month from now. 'Cause that's all we're doing for a month, I don't even care. Don't even, don't put it on social media, it never happened. Go out there and do your damnedest. But for these next three weeks, please, for the love of God, do not go to the club." 'Cause what are you doing at the club? You're at least standing up most of the time. Often, you're dancing. I'm familiar cursorily with dancing. But after I lost that one big international dance competition, Chris, I could never dance again.I lost my rhythm. I believe George Michael said it best, and now I will sing the entire song.

Chris Williamson 12:18 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 12:18 (laughs) So, uh, in any case, it's a big deal. Physical activity around the clock is a big deal. That's why step tracking is a cool tool for recovery, because it can tell you, "Am I doing enough?" And also, "Am I doing too much?" There is such a thing as too much. The third thing is the real big head fuck. Psychological vectors absolutely affect fatigue at the physical level, because the systems in your body, specifically the nervous system, can facilitate you being active and ready and watchful and alert, fight or flight, the sympathetic side of the autonomic nervous system. And then they can also facilitate mega recovery. When the parasympathetic nervous system is at maximum dominance, you're just like blunt mode, like (breathes deeply) . Like that's all you... you don't care. Anything. A bear could smash into your room and you'd be like, "What's up, bear? You trying to hit this train wreck?"

Chris Williamson 13:13 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 13:13 He's like, "Yo." He's talking to you. You're like, "Damn, this is sweet." So that nervous system's ability to flip you into recovery mode is critical. And if you're sitting on the couch, if you're watching TV, if you're eating great food, but you're sympathetic dominant-

Chris Williamson 13:28 Hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 13:29 ... it's not gonna recover you nearly as much, perhaps to some extent kind of not at all.

Chris Williamson 13:34 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 13:34 You need to fall into that parasypaparasympathetic... Uh, ugh, good God. You need to fall into (laughs) that parasympathetic dominance before recovery can really be unveiled and really go do its thing.

Chris Williamson 13:43 I suppose people don't see the activation, the sympathetic activation, if, "Well, I did the thing, I sat on the couch-"

Dr Mike Israetel 13:50 Yes.

Chris Williamson 13:50 "... doing the rest of it." Yeah, but you were obsessing about that play.

Dr Mike Israetel 13:54 Yes. Yes.

Chris Williamson 13:54 You were worrying about school, or-

Dr Mike Israetel 13:55 Yes. You were on- on your phone, on social media getting pissed about comments, clapping back at people.

Chris Williamson 14:00 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 14:00 And so... Which is all in good fun, but the psychological vectors are real big in recovery and actually impact sport performance and body composition. If you're chronically stressed, if you're chronically pissed, if you've got a girlfriend you fight with all the time, it will make you less lean and less jacked, and it will make you worse at your sport than you could have been. The degree of extremity of that scenario is almost linearly correlated with how bad it is. Nobody's like, "Oh man, you know, it's good to see this athlete back on the mats for the first time in NCAA wrestling. I heard he went through a terrible divorce for the last two months. Jim, I feel like he's gonna be really amazing."

Chris Williamson 14:43 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 14:44 There's a reason nobody says that. Now you would think proximately, like, did the divorce make him miss practice? Probably not. Is he missing meals? What kind of world are we living in? Who was he married to? Like, the lady who can't cook-

Chris Williamson 14:54 Maybe he went harder.

Dr Mike Israetel 14:55 ... his own food? He probably went harder with thoughts of, "That bitch ruined my life."

Chris Williamson 15:00 Yeah. Vengeance.

Dr Mike Israetel 15:01 Vengeance. It decreases how much sleep you're getting. The psychological is a huge part of the relaxation process. It affected me personally quite recently, because in my attempts to be as good of an athlete in my own realm as I could be, I was also doing like two full-time jobs at RP and all this other stuff that I do. And I was like, "Why am I not recovering to the extent that I could be?" It's like, "You work 12 hours a day, idiot." I was like, "Well, my work is sitting at a computer in front of a video camera, but I'm on-"

Chris Williamson 15:29 Activated.

Dr Mike Israetel 15:29 "... and I'm thinking and I'm active." Yes. And thus I am not as parasympathetic, relaxation nervous system dominant as I could be.

Chris Williamson 15:37 I had a great conversation yesterday with Laith Al-Shawaf, who wrote the Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Emotions. So it's all emotions through an evolu-

Dr Mike Israetel 15:46 Ooh, that's the only lens they matter from.

Chris Williamson 15:49 Uh, and one- one of the main takeaways that I had from that conversation was, because emotions... The- the most salient part of emotions to us is the affective state that we can feel, like the phenomenological experience of being a person feeling angry or sad or joyful or in awe or-

Dr Mike Israetel 16:07 Or-

Chris Williamson 16:07 ... jealous or-

Dr Mike Israetel 16:08 Is horniness an emotion?

Chris Williamson 16:10 It has to be.

Dr Mike Israetel 16:11 For me, it must.

Chris Williamson 16:12 All the time.

Dr Mike Israetel 16:13 I'm so emotional. You won't see anything, it's not big enough.

Chris Williamson 16:15 Okay. Uh, but what he says is, look, that's all well and good, and that's the thing that has the most valence because it's what you feel. It's front and center of your experience, but all of these different things happen. He taught me that, um, fear, so the cascade of things that happen in your body when fear is activated, so digestion.

Dr Mike Israetel 16:34 Then you're ready physically for violence.

Chris Williamson 16:36 Digestion gets tuned down. Uh, sexual arousal gets tuned down. Uh-

Dr Mike Israetel 16:40 It depends on who you are.

Chris Williamson 16:41 Y- you're just per-

Dr Mike Israetel 16:42 Sort of.

Chris Williamson 16:43 ... permanently sort of micro horny.

Dr Mike Israetel 16:45 He- here's me when I'm not scared. Here's me when I'm scared.

Chris Williamson 16:48 (laughs) Uh, but another thing that was super fucking inter- Like, uh, uh, when you've got... when your disgust response turns on, your basal temperature increases.

Dr Mike Israetel 17:00 Yes.

Chris Williamson 17:01 Ready for the, uh, like-

Dr Mike Israetel 17:03 It warms you up, literally.

Chris Williamson 17:04 Cytokines. Cytokines get released into the bloodstream. So you have... You're just, "Do-do-do, here I am, upstairs in my house looking at all of this stuff." Meanwhile, in the basement, there's all of this bullshit going on that's cascading down from emotions. The best one that I learned, this might be something I could teach you, uh, is when you're fearful of something, your ability to map and remember routes becomes increased. So your local specialization-

Dr Mike Israetel 17:29 That's cool. Like the gazelle where to run away from the lion.

Chris Williamson 17:31 Exactly, yeah. Yeah, you just see routes open up to you in a way that you couldn't before. So-

Dr Mike Israetel 17:37 When I'm at the gay club, it's the routes going to places I need to go. The fear really... The dungeon is where-

Chris Williamson 17:42 Which presumably is always the glory hole.

Dr Mike Israetel 17:44 The bottom.

Chris Williamson 17:44 Yeah. Yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 17:45 Met- Like, um, not the bottom literally, because it depends on the club. The rooms could be anywhere.

Chris Williamson 17:50 No, like power bottom.

Dr Mike Israetel 17:50 Philosophically the bottom.

Chris Williamson 17:52 Power bottom.

Dr Mike Israetel 17:52 The most pathetic thing I can do at the club.

Chris Williamson 17:54 Okay. Um-

Dr Mike Israetel 17:55 There's no power in that, Chris.

Chris Williamson 17:56 It is.

Dr Mike Israetel 17:57 I like to be deflowered.

Chris Williamson 17:58 That's true. Okay, so, uh, so the way that I'm sort of conceptualizing it at the moment is you have output, physically. You have your sort of day-to-day movement, your NEAT, your kind of what you're doing-

Dr Mike Israetel 18:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:12 ... what you're getting up to outside-

Dr Mike Israetel 18:13 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:13 ... of the training session. Then you have your psychological, uh, strain-

Dr Mike Israetel 18:17 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:17 ... uh, which is a real sort of below the surface little sneaker, but then you also have these things which are accumulating stress in one form or another, and also what they do to the activities you do to recover-... as well. So it's not-

Dr Mike Israetel 18:32 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:32 ... just that psychological stress causes you to not recover throughout the day even when you're doing recovery things. It can also limit your sleep, but people know. They're like, "Dude, I was stressed last night and I only got five hours of sleep." It's like, the thing that sneaks in under the radar-

Dr Mike Israetel 18:47 Yes.

Chris Williamson 18:47 ... is the fucking guerrilla behind the lines operative-

Dr Mike Israetel 18:51 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:51 ... that was you being para-

Dr Mike Israetel 18:52 Yes.

Chris Williamson 18:52 ... uh, sympathetically activated throughout the whole thing.

Dr Mike Israetel 18:53 It's worse still, because even if you get a nominal number of hours of sleep, the sleep quality can decline substantially, and that's a good thing. Because if you're in a fight or flight sc- scenario, let's say war or something like that where there's a killer-

Chris Williamson 19:05 You'll go to sleep.

Dr Mike Israetel 19:07 If, you, you should be going to sleep, but it better be light sleep, 'cause there better not be any confusion when you wake up, and you better wake up quick. Like, boom, and I'm doing stuff.

Chris Williamson 19:15 Tons of micro awakenings throughout the night.

Dr Mike Israetel 19:17 Oh, all the time. Right? And that's when you're stressed, you're thinking about something, "What did my boss say at work? What did he mean by that? Is there any way I can use my body to get my position back?" Just shit like that.

Chris Williamson 19:25 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 19:26 Then it's gonna hang in with you, and it affects your recovery every step of the way. And so a big part of what recovery stuff does is it begins to wind this process down, and once it winds the process down and gets you into parasympathetic recovery mode, then you start to collect the gold coins of recovery and actually do the recovery. It's almost a two-phase process. Getting to the place where you can recover, through recovery things, and then the recovery things really start to affect you to actually do that meat and potatoes work of fixing your tendons and your muscles, putting glycogen back in. So on and so forth.

Chris Williamson 20:04 So a lot of what you're doing with recovery modalities is simply stopping putting your foot on the accelerator.

Dr Mike Israetel 20:11 That's the number one thing you have to do. To quote my colleague, uh, Dr. James Hoffman, who in my eyes is, uh, one of the most pre-emptive, pre-eminent practical experts on recovery in the world. We used to be asked a lot when him and I did seminars, um, "What can I add to my recovery program?" And James would say this beautiful thing that I've remembered and then summarily stolen. "Don't ask what you can add. Ask what you can subs- subtract." Recovery is mostly about doing less, not about doing more. Because these same type A, ultra-conscientious athletes, they have this whole routine. You know the morning routine, midday routine, the whole thing, and they have everything planned out. And, and it was, um, they are made known, it is made known to them, that they are insufficiently recovering. They say, "Right, gotcha. I'm a problem solver."

Chris Williamson 21:04 "I'll work harder at my-"

Dr Mike Israetel 21:05 "I'll work harder at recovering, I'm gonna recover."

Chris Williamson 21:06 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 21:06 What do I add to recover more?

Chris Williamson 21:08 Yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 21:08 And the answer almost always is to, is to subtract.

Chris Williamson 21:10 Motherfucker.

Dr Mike Israetel 21:11 Because people say, like, "Can I do some cardio to recover?" And James is like, "Let me re-architect this for you." And usually they're like, "Oh, holy shit." And they kind of walk home slower. They're like, "Holy shit, I really had everything backwards." Because when you want to be ultra-conscientious in most of your life, just because that's the kind of person you are, when you flip into recovery mode, you have to literally turn your conscientiousness back down to like, like, "I don't give a shit. I don't care. Watch something real stupid on TV."

Chris Williamson 21:40 I need to work really hard at caring about not caring.

Dr Mike Israetel 21:42 And that, yeah, j- work, work harder, if you squint, it really helps to relax.

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Chris Williamson 22:48 All right, so how is recovery measured then? Is there, is there such a thing?

Dr Mike Israetel 22:52 Yes, there is.

Chris Williamson 22:53 Right.

Dr Mike Israetel 22:53 So you can measure recovery in a variety of different ways. You can try to estimate through muscle biopsy the degree of muscle glycogen replenishment. You can take blood tests to see what your testosterone and cortisol levels are. There are various highly invasive and some less invasive, FMRI, et cetera, ways to see what degree of preparedness or disruption your nervous system has sustained, and so on and so forth. But the really cool thing about recovery as it regards sport performance, physical training, just getting jacked in the gym, being the best runner you can be, the best tennis player, the best golfer. I just assume everyone who listens to this is by accident rich. Let me get through some more rich people sports. Um, racquetball.

Chris Williamson 23:31 Padel.

Dr Mike Israetel 23:33 Oh, yeah. And then you got, uh...

Chris Williamson 23:35 Falconry.

Dr Mike Israetel 23:36 What the? Oh, that. Ha!

Chris Williamson 23:38 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 23:38 Uh, skeet shooting. Skeeting. No, sorry, that's for everyone.

Chris Williamson 23:41 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 23:42 And then, uh, skiing, which, um, is either a sport you do in Colorado or a sport you do in a nightclub in New York City.

Chris Williamson 23:49 Uh-huh.

Dr Mike Israetel 23:51 Both are fun, and equally dangerous, I might add.

Chris Williamson 23:54 Have you ever done cocaine?

Dr Mike Israetel 23:55 No.

Chris Williamson 23:55 Have you not?

Dr Mike Israetel 23:56 No, I'm a, so I don't do stimulants.

Chris Williamson 23:59 Yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 23:59 I had a-

Chris Williamson 24:00 But you must have done at some point in order to learn not to do stuff.

Dr Mike Israetel 24:02 Oh, I was on Adderall for years, prescribed by the doctor for my severe attention deficit disorder.

Chris Williamson 24:07 Hm.

Dr Mike Israetel 24:08 And it brought in a lot of positive effects, and it brought in a lot of negative effects, and then after a while, the negatives so much outweighed the positives as my brain was maturing, that I had to pull the plug on all Adderall. And still to this day, if I get caffeinated, I, uh, my personality shifts substantially. I also don't have any other proximate needs for stimulants. I have no problem fucking yapping, as everyone clearly knows by now. I'm wide awake no problem in the morning. I don't need anything to get me up and going. And, um-I guess... Oh, sociability. (laughs) Um, I made a joke on the RP Strength channel about what it's like to be on cocaine, and a lot of people were like, "That guy has done cocaine before." 'Cause I was like, you hit it up and you're ready to just meet everyone, ever, all at the same time. So the thing is, that's a default emotion of mine. That's just how I always feel.

Chris Williamson 24:56 Endogenous cocaine.

Dr Mike Israetel 24:57 Take me out right now and be like, "Go meet that person," on the corner of Austin, I'd be like-

Chris Williamson 25:00 Yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 25:00 "Are they cool with it?" You're like, "Yeah, absolutely, they're great." Like, just hello, I could just meet 1,000 people in a row, it'd be great. Um, me on coke would just be like, more of me than anyone's interested in experiencing. You ever in your own head and you're blabbing to people and they're all listening and you're like, "I should just shut the (censored) up." Like, I'm tired of me. There's enough of that going on, so no need for, for cocaine any time soon. But your boy (censored) with weed, like, you feel me?

Chris Williamson 25:23 Why do you use weed?

Dr Mike Israetel 25:26 Uh, two reasons. One, I tend to be a pretty serious thinker in my own head. And I think about work and grand problems of the universe all the time.

Chris Williamson 25:42 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 25:43 Weed makes me sufficiently stupid and interrupts my train of thought enough. And, uh, a lot of the generative nonsense that comes out of the GPT and the, you know, like, the idea bubble machine in your brain?

Chris Williamson 25:55 Right.

Dr Mike Israetel 25:55 It's-

Chris Williamson 25:55 You've seen, you've seen our Slack.

Dr Mike Israetel 25:57 Yeah, sure, sure. (laughs) That's, that's what that is.

Chris Williamson 25:59 Yep.

Dr Mike Israetel 25:59 Um, I'll... That comes up with so much nonsense that I can regress to not taking it so seriously, and I can relax at some kind of deeper level of like, "Ah, the brain's gonna do..." 'Cause the brain's all junk at this point.

Chris Williamson 26:11 Yep.

Dr Mike Israetel 26:12 Which is, uh, interesting. Also, weed makes me see the world in a really quirky way, and it's kind of like being immersed into like a Lord of the Rings universe where I'm like, "Whoa, everything's kind of tripped out," and it's just fun.

Chris Williamson 26:23 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 26:24 And, uh, so that's what I do with weed. I don't understand how people work on weed. Sometimes I'll have really good ideas I quickly write down and later inspect, and they're either nonsense or like, "Oh, fuck, that really was a good idea." But like, when people are like, "Yeah, man," are like, "I work high," I'm like, "What the fuck?"

Chris Williamson 26:38 You're creative and blah, blah.

Dr Mike Israetel 26:39 The way I go about doing weed is also a bit strange. I am absolutely uninterested ever in being a little bit high. I want to either go to the (censored) moon or be stone sober. That's it. So if you ever catch me high and a few people... I got high last weekend and walked around Ann Arbor, Michigan with my wife. I was trying to show her like, "Hey, I went to undergrad here," and here was all the cool stuff. 'Cause the undergrads were back first week.

Chris Williamson 26:59 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 26:59 And I just got like Dr. Mike'd like eight times in a row.

Chris Williamson 27:01 Oh.

Dr Mike Israetel 27:02 And, uh, it was totally cool.

Chris Williamson 27:03 Okay.

Dr Mike Israetel 27:04 But also, like, I was high as fuck. So you're like, people start talking to me and I'm like, "I, I'm Dr. Mike, I'm on the internet for something."

Chris Williamson 27:11 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 27:12 (laughs) People seem friendly, that's nice.

Chris Williamson 27:14 Yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 27:15 And then, at first, when I first started happening to me, like, you know, a year ago, I was like, "Holy shit." Nowadays, I'm like, cool, but it's also like, ooh, a little bit-

Chris Williamson 27:23 On weed, everything can be a little bit scary, especially attention from other people.

Dr Mike Israetel 27:26 Yeah, and, and I love that 'cause normally I'm like, you know, uh, things don't phase me much anymore in my... I'm 40 years old, I've seen a lot of crazy shit. So like, I just don't get that, like, whoa. But on weed I do, so it's fun. I'm not defending marijuana as an ethical practice or something like that. I think, um, the vast majority of media you'll see on marijuana is intentionally sensationalistic and tries to wildly exacerbate its negatives. Um, it's just the nature of media in general. And I always think of like, there's like some New York Times writer that's writing the expose on THC.

Chris Williamson 27:57 At all times.

Dr Mike Israetel 27:58 While having a scotch, and you're like, "All right," 'cause alcohol doesn't cause 50% of people to become violent or anything or the rest high.

Chris Williamson 28:04 It's the person talking about reparations that are needed from an iPhone that was used with slave labor out of China.

Dr Mike Israetel 28:09 Figure that one out.

Chris Williamson 28:10 Um, so an interesting insight that I learned last year about weed in particular, one of the reasons that I think it is quite contentious in a way that alcohol isn't, is that alcohol has very reliable effects across cohorts on how you feel. You drunk, I have a pretty good understanding of what you drunk feels like because of what I've felt like-

Dr Mike Israetel 28:31 Hmm, interesting.

Chris Williamson 28:31 ... when I'm drunk.

Dr Mike Israetel 28:32 Okay.

Chris Williamson 28:32 Weed is not the same.

Dr Mike Israetel 28:34 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 28:34 You speak to 10 people, you'll have 10 different, "Uh, it makes me horny, it makes me tired, I wanna get up-"

Dr Mike Israetel 28:39 Yes, yes.

Chris Williamson 28:39 "... and do whatever." Yeah, you know, all of them.

Dr Mike Israetel 28:40 Makes me all those, really.

Chris Williamson 28:41 All of them. Um, but, you know, for me, I, I just don't really enjoy it. And then every person that loves weed goes, "No, man, you need a sativa hybrid with-"

Dr Mike Israetel 28:54 Oh, no. Fucking hippies.

Chris Williamson 28:54 "... a blah, blah. You've got, you've got to get the thi..." It's because, "Are you doing it, are you trying it with concentrate? Are you doing it..." No, you gotta do shatter. And I'm like, "Bro, look, I just, I'm one of those people for whom, I don't know, maybe I'll try it again at some point in the future and see if it works for me or something." But yeah, it's not reliable across the board, the, the effect it has on people. Whereas I think alcohol, even if people's behavior is very different, some person gets angry, some person gets sad, some person gets whatever, I think the way that they feel-

Dr Mike Israetel 29:19 There's only a few archetypes, really.

Chris Williamson 29:20 Correct. For the most part, is that, whereas for weed, there's like, you know, 1,000.

Dr Mike Israetel 29:23 Sure, sure. And I'm like, people, you know, now, nowadays that I've, uh, largely from your help, have gotten more popular. Um, people, some fraction of people seem to assume that anything you do and talk about is something you espouse and recommend.

Chris Williamson 29:39 Hm.

Dr Mike Israetel 29:39 And like, I am absolutely... I, I do not espouse marijuana consumption. If it's some shit that fits in your life, the, the only thing I have to say about it is take it earlier in the day so it doesn't interfere with your sleep. Most people would be like, "But I use it to sleep," and then it's actually lower quality sleep, which might be a fine trade-off to have sleep, but-

Chris Williamson 29:53 You're not sleeping, you're sedated.

Dr Mike Israetel 29:55 Exa- Exactly, something like that. The Michael Jackson method. I'm kidding. Too soon?

Chris Williamson 29:59 (laughs) Fuck.

Dr Mike Israetel 30:01 Oh, I was referring to his use on himself.

Chris Williamson 30:04 Right (laughs) .

Dr Mike Israetel 30:05 Mixed metaphors. Should I have brought up Bill Cosby? Too soon? Also too much?

Chris Williamson 30:09 (laughs) Fuck's sake, Mike.

Dr Mike Israetel 30:11 I call him William. We're on first, first name basis.

Chris Williamson 30:13 Okay.

Dr Mike Israetel 30:14 Uh, I don't advocate for people to do weed. That's why I say, uh, just don't let it interfere with your sleep. And, um, make sure you finish all your work and be responsible about it. I only ever do weed on times I have off. I'm finished all my work. If I haven't finished my work for the day or for the week, I, oh, I'm not taking any drugs because I still have to finish my work. It is a demon that will haunt me and I will have a real bad time.

Chris Williamson 30:37 That open, that open loop is fucking-

Dr Mike Israetel 30:38 Oh, hell no.

Chris Williamson 30:39 Yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 30:39 So as soon as I put everything away, I finish up.... weed? Totally cool. Enjoy. And, and the other thing I would say is, uh, notice how it's affecting you, and if it's something that turns into something that, like, you don't like, but you still do, stop doing it. Uh, there'll be a few-day period if you do some serious weed where you kinda wanna do it again.

Chris Williamson 30:56 Mm.

Dr Mike Israetel 30:56 Uh, I wouldn't even say it's a... It's like a psychological addiction, it's not physical. It's not even barely an addiction. It's kinda like, "Oh, should I do weed again?" You give it a couple of days, you're gonna feel a little bit more clear-headed, feel right as rain. And the next time you wanna do weed, you can do weed, no problem. Um, I do weed, like, a few times a week. Uh, usually, almost always on the weekend.

Chris Williamson 31:12 What's your delivery mechanism?

Dr Mike Israetel 31:14 Edibles, exclusively.

Chris Williamson 31:16 Okay.

Dr Mike Israetel 31:16 Uh-

Chris Williamson 31:16 And what's your dose?

Dr Mike Israetel 31:18 Uh, so my brain adapts rapidly to weed, so if I do it for two or three days in a row, I need to up the dose to get the same effect, 'cause again, I'm only trying to get super fucked up.

Chris Williamson 31:26 Mm.

Dr Mike Israetel 31:27 Um, anywhere between 20 and 80 milligrams.

Chris Williamson 31:30 Fuck me.

Dr Mike Israetel 31:31 Yeah. Yeah, but remember, you're like, "Oh, my God, how can you still, like, handle yourself?" I can't. That's the whole point.

Chris Williamson 31:39 The whole point.

Dr Mike Israetel 31:39 Yeah. I mean, I can.

Chris Williamson 31:40 The only time I-

Dr Mike Israetel 31:41 Like, I still am not allowed to shit in the street, but barely.

Chris Williamson 31:43 The only time I ever took more than 10 milligrams of edibles was when I was traveling in Hawaii, and I went on a date with some chick. And she was, like, super hot or lovely or whatever, but I just didn't know what was gonna happen when I went to 20 milligrams from 10, and 10 was like-

Dr Mike Israetel 31:57 Did you do before the date?

Chris Williamson 31:58 Yeah, just me.

Dr Mike Israetel 31:59 Chris, you're my man. See, that's fun.

Chris Williamson 32:01 Just me.

Dr Mike Israetel 32:01 Just you? Did she know or no?

Chris Williamson 32:03 No.

Dr Mike Israetel 32:03 Oh, my God.

Chris Williamson 32:04 So-

Dr Mike Israetel 32:05 She was like, "Why are you nervous?" You're like, "W- Why are you in my head talking to me?" She was like, "What?" (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:08 Uh, the opposite happened-

Dr Mike Israetel 32:10 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 32:10 ... which was, uh, about halfway through the meal that we were having, my hearing completely stopped. My hearing just stopped working. And I was like, "She was there." (Babbling)

Dr Mike Israetel 32:22 And that's when I realized, listening to the woman on a date doesn't matter.

Chris Williamson 32:25 Yeah, exactly.

Dr Mike Israetel 32:25 'Cause it went great still. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:26 It was one and the same. Yeah, exactly. It was just like it always is. Uh, so, (babbling) and I was like, "Fuck." Like, "I can't hear," and I couldn't hold onto any thoughts, obviously. Uh-

Dr Mike Israetel 32:35 Oh. Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 32:35 And then I heard, uh, Queen's We Are The Champions playing.

Dr Mike Israetel 32:41 Dope. That'll play in your head.

Chris Williamson 32:42 And I thought-

Dr Mike Israetel 32:43 Full-on schizophrenia.

Chris Williamson 32:44 ... "That's interesting. Queen's We Are The Champions is playing." And then she finished speaking, and I think I said something that presumably wasn't-

Dr Mike Israetel 32:50 But you don't remember what you said.

Chris Williamson 32:51 ... related to what-

Dr Mike Israetel 32:51 'Cause as soon as it left your mouth, you had no idea what you said.

Chris Williamson 32:53 It was gone. Away- go, "Mm."

Dr Mike Israetel 32:53 That's scary.

Chris Williamson 32:55 Then Queen's We Are The Champions played again, and for the next-

Dr Mike Israetel 32:59 Oh.

Chris Williamson 32:59 ... two hours, all I could hear was Queen's We Are The Champions. I couldn't hear anything else.

Dr Mike Israetel 33:02 Gotcha.

Chris Williamson 33:03 So, I exited the date, took myself into bed and laid and listened to Queen's We Are The Champions for another hour and a half. And, uh-

Dr Mike Israetel 33:09 Was it pleasant-

Chris Williamson 33:11 Uh-

Dr Mike Israetel 33:11 ... listening?

Chris Williamson 33:13 Kind of, I guess-

Dr Mike Israetel 33:15 Okay.

Chris Williamson 33:15 ... but also kind of a bit like, "What the fuck is going on? Is my hearing broken?"

Dr Mike Israetel 33:18 Were you at- were you attributing an anxiety emotion to that process of being so-

Chris Williamson 33:22 To a bit, yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 33:22 Okay, I gotcha.

Chris Williamson 33:23 A little.

Dr Mike Israetel 33:24 That's like my superpower, is, uh, I'll be completely fucked up and useless to the world, but I don't give a shit.

Chris Williamson 33:31 Totally chill.

Dr Mike Israetel 33:31 Because, like, all of my work has been done. I can flip off having to be Dr. Mike, and now I'm just, like, Mike, I guess.

Chris Williamson 33:38 Potato.

Dr Mike Israetel 33:38 I mean, if you ever talk to me and you catch me high, almost certainly you'll be like, "His eyes just look more red. He's really kinda the same." But it's not the same on the inside.

Chris Williamson 33:48 Very good. Okay,

Chris Williamson 33:49 so going back to how you measure recovery. FMRI can do some invasive-

Dr Mike Israetel 33:52 All that stuff.

Chris Williamson 33:53 Yeah, it can do a lot of it.

Dr Mike Israetel 33:53 You can do all that stuff, but there's one variable that's profoundly easy to measure that integrates all of those for you automatically. It's like a pyramid, and at the very top you measure, and that's performance. So, if you make a claim, "I'm under-recovered," and let's say you're a high- you're a high jumper, all we gotta do is warm you up and get you to do three jumps with some measurement device at your best effort. If we do that regularly, two times a week on average, through your career, we know your baseline real damn well, and we can do statistical process control that shows us, when are you, like, underdoing it? If you're consistently unable to exhibit your highest performance, and you've been through a higher volume of training recently, because, like... or- or psychological stress, 'cause sometimes you just have a off day. That totally happens. But if you're- can attribute to something lots of incoming fatigue and your performance is low, especially if we can repeat that over several sessions or several days, we know that your fatigue is too high with a high degree of certainty, and you are under-recovered. However, if you feel like shit, if you're sore, if you're anything else, you're like, "Dude, I'm not gonna be able to do it today," you warm up and you hit a PR, it doesn't matter what the fuck is going on under the hood-

Chris Williamson 35:19 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 35:19 ... the grand integrator says you're good, and it's always right. Now, under the hood, you might not be completely everything in line, but you're at a such a high level of performance, your total system capability is no lower than it typically is. And so this ability to have this grand integrator and this one variable that tells us are we under-recovered or are we properly recovered is such a superpower, because it completely washes away any of this crap about, like, "Well, I feel like X, Y, Z," because the brain, the mind, they play tricks on you, expectations, so on and so forth. If you're performing at your high level, go.

Chris Williamson 36:00 The only thing that matters.

Dr Mike Israetel 36:01 That's it, because w- this is... Oh, sorry, real quick, this is really, really important when you're coaching other athletes. Uh, depending on the type of athlete you get, you get lazy asshole athletes that always say they're under-recovered, and they're lying 'cause you put their ego on the line, right? So, you get somebody who's a high jumper, and you know they're lazy as fuck. You're like, "Oh, check this out, Dave, I, uh, I heard Mike talking shit. You was- you was a bitch and you can't jump high." Dave's like, "What the fuck?" Be like, "Dave, why don't you get on this, uh, this jump platform and show us you're a real big pimp?" Boom, all-time PR. "How do you feel?" Dave is like, "I don't know. I don't have..." Shut the-

Chris Williamson 36:36 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 36:37 ... up and get into- get into practice now.

Chris Williamson 36:38 (laughs) .

Dr Mike Israetel 36:39 Showing off, motherfucker. On the other hand, you'll get the very conscientious athletes. Doesn't matter. They can have a-... spike in their head from a zombie battle. You're like, "Emily, how are you?" She's like, "I'm r- I'm great, I'm ready for practice." And you're like, "Okay. I think you're gonna die soon. Do you have anyone to call before you die?" Like, "No, no, no, I'm good. I can still kick a soccer ball." You're like, "Very well." So for those people, you ask them to give a good effort somehow, and sometimes that's just a coaching kind of thing. One of the things that decays early is, uh, coordinated high level motor performance. So if someone looks off, like Butterfingery on a football field, their racquet looks like it doesn't belong to their hand anymore, and they're usually slick. If they keep fucking up and they got bags under their eyes, you pull them out of practice, shut the f- up, hit the showers, go play PlayStation, have two sub- submarine sandwiches and fall asleep for 10 hours. Don't ever come back until you're good to go. So those types of people, just word of mouth, they say, "I'm recovered" or not, "I sore" or not. In those two different cases, most people are honest. Most athletes are like, "Yeah, I'm feeling fine" or "I'm not," whatever. But you get those extremes. Performance is the grand truth teller. Can you perform at your usual level or above? If the answer is yes, you are sufficiently recovered to continue hard training. And that's something you can use in the gym for yourself. If you come to the gym and you're like, "Man, I don't know if I have it today. Like, I think I might be, like, overreached, under recovered." You get your RPA hypertrophy app out. It says, you know, 225 bench for a set of 12 'cause last week you did 11 and that's how the app works. You get in there and you're like, "I'm gonna fucking get my headphones going. I'm gonna do what it takes. Let's see what I got." You get seven reps, full on. Your spotter has to take it off of you. You might as well just do a de-load the rest of the session, take the rest of the week easy training, come back afterwards because you're probably cooked and maybe it's just a one-off, try another set. But if you're like, this ain't it. That's it. But if you hit 13, you were supposed to hit 12. Oh, you might feel a certain way, but you still-

Chris Williamson 38:31 Obscures it.

Dr Mike Israetel 38:31 ... got it, keep going. So there's like a, a, a wisdom from all sides-

Chris Williamson 38:35 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 38:35 ... in all conversations. On the one hand you have like hippie Karen who's like, "You have to treat yourself and listen to your inner child and really shower yourself with love." And that's dope 'cause some people like when you're really frayed and fatigued and exhausted, that's the kind of energy you need. But on the other hand, David Goggins got some points too, because you might feel like shit, but then you're at your best. Shut the fuck up and keep going.

Chris Williamson 38:56 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 38:57 So recovery can and should be measured primarily with performance. Huge deal.

Chris Williamson 39:02 What about people, lots of people who are listening, who do not have a primary sport pursuit that they're doing? They go to the gym because they wanna look a little bit better and they do all the rest of the stuff, but their, uh, output is going to be struggle to be measured, uh, physically in that way. Is there another proxy that you like to use?

Dr Mike Israetel 39:21 If you go to the gym and you track your repetitions and your loads, you have the best possible proxy of them all because every single output of yours in training is measurement at the same time. 18 reps of curls, that's a measurement, very direct. As a matter of fact, occurs in integers, which is amazing. Super easy to measure. Our, our app detects it in fact.

Chris Williamson 39:44 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 39:45 You're not recovered, et cetera. Um, so anyone who goes to the gym really that's listening to this, they already have a metric. Now for some people they might have pre-programmed runs that are never maximal so they can't wait, am I trying too hard? Blah blah blah. There are a couple of other things that are indirect that can start to build a story. But what we like to say, uh, Dr. James Hoffman and I, who's my sort of colleague in recovery world is, you wanna have more than one of these all pointing in the same direction before you start pulling the plug on training or trying to rearchitect things. One is soreness. Are you sore in lots of parts of your body? And that in that doms, like delayed onset muscle soreness. My quads are fucked up. Kind of like a diffuse kind of joint source. You ever had like the flu, it feel like that shit.

Chris Williamson 40:28 Everything hurts.

Dr Mike Israetel 40:28 Everything hurts. You run enough miles through multiple weeks on end, you're just gonna wake up and be like, "Ugh." So that. But that by itself, you can be in totally normal training circumstances and still feel like shit. Sometimes people will be like, they overindex on soreness and physical feel as an indicator of overreaching. But all- those are almost never high performing athletes or coaches of high performing athletes because coaches or the athletes themselves will tell you like, "I'm mostly fucked up most of the time." Right? Like if you get a professional bodybuilder just right randomly and be like, "How does your body feel?" He'd be like, "Where do you want me to start? Half my body is sore." That's the normal state of affairs. So it has to be indexed to like compare to what? Com- more than normal. Okay, we got an issue. Another one is your desire to train. Now this one's tricky. Desire to train is how much do you want to be in here, and how much do you wanna do shit? How much do you wanna push yourself into difficult situations and training? If you are very well recovered and you have low fatigue compared to your baseline desire, you're gonna be like, "Dude, I can't wait." Uh, if people take a week off or a de-load week, dude some folks, man, they come into the gym straight homicidal after that shit. I can't be out of the gym for more than a week 'cause I start looking at old people. I'm like the f- did that guy say something to me?

Chris Williamson 41:43 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 41:43 I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? That guy's 90. He's about to be zero in a second.

Chris Williamson 41:47 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 41:48 Is that how you measure dead people's ages? I don't know.

Chris Williamson 41:50 Yeah, sure.

Dr Mike Israetel 41:50 Um, so desire to train is trippy and the only trippy part about it is, you can't apply an absolute value to everyone. Some people are just psychotic to begin with. But everyone has a relative value. Normally this athlete wants to go this hard and they're like, "I'm ready to kill it." It's less likely that they're overreached even if you don't have direct measures. On the other hand, if someone feels like... You're like, "Hey, do you wanna train?" And they're like, "Ugh." Like, um, there was a South Park episode where like, uh, Russell Crowe took a cancer patient and he like, 'cause he was like, you know, the tugger on the tugboat. "I'm Russell Crowe." It was amazing. The South Park guys are brilliant. And he took a cancer patient like out of the ward and he's like, (laughs) was he, he was supposed to be fighting cancer. He's like, "Well, I haven't found cancer, but I found someone with cancer." And he just punches the guy in the gut. And the guy goes, "Ugh." And he kind of collapses. If that's your emotion when someone's like, "Do you wanna do deadlifts?" You're like, "Ugh. Like they're gonna hurt my body."... there's a high probability, higher than average, that, like, you're overreached and you're under-recovered and the fatigue is too high, and you should do something about it. And everyone knows kind of generally their psychological relationship to training. If you're f- really feeling over a few days like, "Oh, man, I just don't wanna be in the fucking gym," and if you're in the gym, you're choosing, you're using the RPA approach if you replace exercise function to take hardcore barbell movements with a huge displacement, replacing them with machines, with cables, and you know deep down you're babying yourself, that is a bit of a sign that, like, you're pretty overreached, and it's time maybe to wind back, do some recovery days, come back, and really want that blood again.

Chris Williamson 43:28 Is that cumulative fatigue, or is that something different? Like, sh- is there acute fatigue, cumulative fatigue? How do you think about, like, the sort of duration of time under fatigue?

Dr Mike Israetel 43:37 Yes. Yes. So, there are two types of fatigue, really. There's acute fatigue, which is like after you do a hill sprint, you go, "Oh, uh, uh," you're fatigued. Now, that heavy breathing tends to go away. However, the muscle soreness that you accrued, the disruption and damage to your muscles, the depletion of glycogen, it doesn't go away right away. It'll take a day or two to go away, and you're back to totally normal. However, most people, especially folks trying to get their best, and I'll say this a different way, people who are intelligent and understand sports science and are doing the thing that it takes to be the best, those people must train more frequently than total, all-systems recovery can possibly arrange for you between each individual session. So, if it takes you 48 hours to recover completely from a difficult sport session or workout, but you train roughly every 36 to 24, at some point, some of the fatigue that you accrued at the beginning, which was initially acute fatigue, it's still around. That's not cumulative fatigue yet. That's just acute fatigue with a different time course. Acute can mean a minute, it can mean an hour, it can mean a day, it can mean three. You hit your body again, and some of that fatigue that hadn't come down yet now gets more fatigue added to it because the amount of fatigue you're pouring into the system isn't as fast as the system is pouring it out. The recovery can't match. And so fatigue accumulates and becomes greater and greater, a little bit low-key every day, definitely high-key every week, and most hard-training athletes, roughly, very roughly, four to eight weeks of very difficult training later, will have to do something about this fatigue that has accumulated.

Chris Williamson 45:24 Mm.

Dr Mike Israetel 45:25 It follows you everywhere. An example of cumulative fatigue is, you start to get the sensation that like, so you start underperforming. You take one easy session, you come back, you're still underperforming. Like, "Dude, what the f-? I thought I fixed this shit." No, no, no. You accumu- it's accumulating debt. Like, you, you get $10,000 into debt, and you get paid, and you put $500 down to the bank, you're like, "I'm free, baby," and the cashier's like, "Ooh, yeah, sure, there's 9,500 other dollars you have to pay off," and you're gonna feel that burden. So, if you have a high degree of accumulated fatigue, not only will it affect you much more, it also just doesn't disappear. It's gonna take some time to wear down, because it's built up like crazy. I didn't even know before I went into my PhD program in sports science that cumulative fatigue was a phenomenon that existed. I just didn't know that. I thought that after a few days when your muscle soreness went away, you were fucking Gucci, you were golden. And that's just not true. And it's not true to the extent that the harder you train, the more cumulative fatigue can summate. The stronger you are, the more of it that summates. The bigger you are, the more of it that summates. The more you're pushing-

Chris Williamson 46:31 Oh, because your capacity to accumulate fatigue is also greater, even if your body's ability-

Dr Mike Israetel 46:36 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:36 ... to deal with that fatigue

Dr Mike Israetel 46:37 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You gotta l- so like, someone breaks a go-kart, how long does it take you to fix it? It's like, whatever. Someone breaks a tank, how long does it take you to fix that shit? There's a lot that can go wrong.

Chris Williamson 46:45 Interesting.

Dr Mike Israetel 46:46 A piece of steel missing that's three inches thick, fucking Christ. And your body works on a molecular scale, and so you ever see, uh, like videos of cells individually or videos of mice, and see how fast everything goes?

Chris Williamson 46:59 Mm.

Dr Mike Israetel 46:59 Like, a cell can repair itself in fucking microseconds completely. When you have trillions of cells, and they require a resource like blood that only brings in shit so, so quickly and takes shit out so quickly, that shit takes a long time to, to get right, and so cumulative fatigue is a thing that occurs. We have to be aware of it. But it is inevitable, and something we have to deal with. It's like saying to someone, "Hey, here's this awesome, a little off-road vehicle, uh, a little like 4Runner type of shit, right? And like, a quad. And I want you to go and have so much fun with it in the woods. Do not get it dirty." Be like, "What? Do you mean, not get it dirty when I get it back to you after I've hosed it down and washed all the mud and pulled the rocks out of the treads?" They're like, "No, just don't get it dirty at all. I'm sure you can find a way to ride it that doesn't make it dirty." What the fuck? So, to do sport training in a way that doesn't take any excessive fatigue on, totally understandable. So, if your idea of like, riding the four-wheeler is to just take it into a mud pit and just like, leave it, and then get a crane to lift it out, and you're like, "That's it," okay, that's needless dirt. But you're gonna go on trails, you're gonna get some dirt, and you have to in order to have fun. So, in the same way, sport training must expose you to cumulative fatigue. Otherwise, you're taking too many days off.

Chris Williamson 48:17 Mm.

Dr Mike Israetel 48:17 You gotta be on that grind. You gotta be on that shit. If that will catch up to your body, then the only thing you have to do is be aware of that, and periodically bring it back down to workable levels. Sometimes very low. Every six months or so, many kinds of athletes should take an active rest phase, which is two weeks in length. Two weeks of doing hardly shit that has to do with sport. And that'll bring down so much fatigue, it'll give you-... a timeline of six months until you have to do that again.

Chris Williamson 48:46 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 48:47 But every several months, you might have to take an easy week. Every several days, you have to take a day or two easy. The weekend's built that in for us. So at every time course, you let fatigue rise, as it does, by going hard, and you have to let it fall. Now, sometimes you let it fall, let it fall, let it fall, but it's still accumulating.

Chris Williamson 49:03 Yup.

Dr Mike Israetel 49:03 And then you take a de-load, and it falls almost to zero, but not quite. And then every six months, you gotta take it really down to zero by taking-

Chris Williamson 49:10 Fully shake, yeah, just, uh-

Dr Mike Israetel 49:11 ... two or three weeks just the fuck out of here, yeah. You just, like, um, live, like, two weeks like Mike Thurston lives every day, shirtless-

Chris Williamson 49:18 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 49:18 ... in a harbor in Italy with eight unbelievably attractive women around him and all.

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Chris Williamson 50:25 Going back to the fatigue point, we've sort of talked about how you accumulate it. Uh, we've talked about the ways that people get in the way of it. What are the biggest inputs that reduce fatigue?

Dr Mike Israetel 50:38 Yeah, huge. So, you have sleep as critical, critical input. You have food as another absolutely critical input. You can potentially do light training, easier training than you would have. This is a very big distinction. You don't add easy training to your program. You subtract away hard training for, like, half a week, and you replace all the hard training sessions with sessions that are half of the load, half of the sets, half of the reps in lifting terms, for example. Just way easier. That reduction in stimulus, but still getting a stimulus, seems to be to recovery what rehab is to injury. If you break your leg, they don't tell you, "Oh, just stay off of it for six months." They're like, "Put your weight on it, but a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, much less than you would," and then slowly and surely, you get better. So we have sleep, food, light training, and rest and relaxation, which is a big one.

Chris Williamson 51:44 And it's different to sleep.

Dr Mike Israetel 51:45 It's both psychological ... Different to sleep, yeah. So when you're awake, you can do things on a spectrum of you're halfway not there, super, super chill, or, like, fully present, in the moment, super psychotic, that whole thing. So you wanna be on one end of the spectrum to that. A big thing, a little bit of an aside that I've noticed, and something my wife and I have talked about when we're, like, sort of, uh, figuring out what kind of experience to have on a vacation, for example, 'cause we're really pretty dedicated to our athletic pursuits. So for us, vacation isn't just a time to fall off. It's a how does this affect fatigue?

Chris Williamson 52:19 Oh, so you patent this into your recovery per-

Dr Mike Israetel 52:22 Right.

Chris Williamson 52:22 Okay, so when am I go- when do I think my-

Dr Mike Israetel 52:24 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 52:24 Right, okay.

Dr Mike Israetel 52:24 Oh, yeah. So there's two types of experiences that you can have, um, and people conflate the two as both being good for recovery. There are experiences that are pleasant and relaxing, and then there are experiences that are really fun, but require a lot of energy. Going to the club with your friends is so much fucking fun. You go to dinner first, you get loaded up, you go to the club, you throw up in the bathroom, get punched in the face. Everyone's having a time. That's fun, but it's not relaxing, and thus, it doesn't recover you. But there are o- other options. Staying at home and watching Netflix and eating some food, it's still a good time, but very low key. And because it's also relaxing, it actively reduces your fatigue and helps you recover. So, a lot of times, people will observe, culturally, will observe high level athletes that train a lot. And if you have, like, cameras that follow them a- a lot, which has happened more recently, you realize a vast majority of athletes live boring lives. They train hard as shit, and then the rest of the time, they're just kind of like, "Uh," just watching Netflix and eating popcorn, and you're like, "What the hell?" Like, "Why don't you go walk to the park or take a flight to go see Chicago?" And they're like, "I gotta recover." So recovery means you plan in periods of relaxing activity, which is very low on the activity side. That's a big ingredient. And the last, biggest modifier to all of these is time. People like to do this thing where they pretend that they can recover in a shorter time than it really takes. They hope for it. And so if they just-

Chris Williamson 54:10 Trying to speedrun a rec-

Dr Mike Israetel 54:11 Yes, recovery cannot be speedrun. It can't. And they say, "Well, if I get a foam roller and jam it up my ass, and the massage gun, and d- take that to the cock," something's gotta happen faster. And it turns out, it's one of these, uh, I don't wanna say stupid, but one of these drunk driving posters about, well, how sobriety works that I saw back in the day. It was like, "How do you get sober quicker? Do you take a shower? Do you have coffee?" And the answer was, it just takes time for the alcohol to get out of your body. That is the same principle applied to recovery. You need sleep-... food, rest, and easier training than normal. Those are the big rocks, and there's a few more to mention in other contexts, and you have to apply them for enough time until you are sufficiently recovered. Could be you need an afternoon, could be you need a weekend, could be you need it three weeks.

Chris Williamson 55:06 Let's go through each of those, uh, sleep, rest, food, de-load training. What are the biggest, most common errors that people make when it comes to each of those different buckets?

Dr Mike Israetel 55:22 I would say with sleep, there are three that come to mind. Not sleeping enough time-wise. Ideally, you should get somewhere between seven and nine hours. Another one is lower quality sleep, sleeping in an environment that's too hot, for example. Yeah, you slept, but you were tossing and turning and all this other bullshit. You consume caffeine too close to bed. I know a bunch of people that can c- like, they can have an espresso and just go right the fuck to sleep. I watched my wife do it last night. The quality of sleep is not going to be the same. And the third thing is timing to your circadian rhythms. There's more and more research out all the time and more and more individual experiences coalescing to show us that that whole bullshit your parents used to tell you about, "You gotta go to bed earlier or else you'll blah, blah." That shit was true, bro. And I don't want to hear it. Who the hell goes to bed at 9:00 PM? But, uh, that doesn't mean 9:00 PM is when you should go to bed. But it means that you have to find sort of two things. One is when, for me as a human, what time going to sleep promotes my best sleep and best recovery? Because if you go to sleep at 3:00 AM and you wake up at, like, 11:00 AM, nominally that's eight hours of sleep, but you could be groggy and fucked up and all this other shit just does not match your circadian rhythms. Basically, when your body should be sleeping, it's not, and when it shouldn't be sleeping, it's still sleeping. So that's the thing you have to sort out. The next thing you have to sort out is regularity. So under that subcategory of sleep timing is, am I going to bed at the right time for me, ish? And it's always a range. You don't have to get psychotic. "9:31 PM." Uh, right somewhere between 9:00 and 11:00 is totally cool. And then you have to think about regularity. Now, regularity is a double-edged sword because on the one hand, going to bed at a regular time means your weekends are kind of, like, different. Who the fuck goes to bed the same time Saturday night as they do Monday night? Like, some kind of serial killer, no doubt, and myself and my wife. But don't tell the police about us. It's tough and you can't always get it right, and it's no big deal if a night here or there you go to bed super late. But if you're going to sleep at very different times many times through the week, the regularity thing is out the window, and that's not the ideal circumstance.

Chris Williamson 57:40 Find the time for sleep and wake that works best for you. Try and be relatively consistent within a one-hour window eit- oh, d- uh, 30-minute window either side of that?

Dr Mike Israetel 57:50 I mean, if y- uh, even... Uh, g- so there's no concrete thing to say because it's like a normally distributed spectrum. But I'd say, like, the closer, the better. Plus or minus 30 minutes is, like, an insane person's idea of precision. It's overkill. It's great, but, like, you don't need to worry about it. Plus or minus 45 minutes to an hour, I'd say you're still winning at life. Like, really, the problem is you normally go to bed at 10:00 and now you're going to bed at 2:00 AM. That's what's gonna fuck with you. If you normally go to bed at 10:00 but you go to bed at 11:30 'cause Netflix really fucked with you, you're probably not gonna pay some kind of crazy high cost.

Chris Williamson 58:22 Increasingly, I'm seeing m- m- the kiddie version of the same research that you're probably looking at, which is saying, uh, sleep consistency, consistency of the time that you go to bed and time that you wake up, is, uh, becoming ever more important-

Dr Mike Israetel 58:36 Yes.

Chris Williamson 58:36 ... even in comparison with duration.

Dr Mike Israetel 58:38 Yes. Because if the duration is done at the wrong time, the quality concomitantly declines. Seven hours of ultra-high-quality sleep beats nine hours of shit sleep.

Chris Williamson 58:49 Yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 58:49 So that's a thing to think about.

Chris Williamson 58:50 Throughout my 20s, I didn't have a stable sleep and wake pattern from the age of 18 until COVID. I'd never had-

Dr Mike Israetel 58:57 It's your club promotion days.

Chris Williamson 58:58 Correct. So I was awake until 2:00 in the morning or 5:00, 5:30 in the morning, depending on which city I was working in that night, and the final task that I had to do, if it was a domestic event in the city that I was living in, it was cashing the till, which is cognitively quite a fucking rough task, which you're then looking at spreadsheets and you're counting money. It's like, "Where the fuck's that $500, 500 quid gone? Uh, it's over there. It's whatever." Uh, or if I was in a different city, it was cash the till, then drive for two and a half hours-

Dr Mike Israetel 59:27 Oh.

Chris Williamson 59:28 ... to get back home.

Dr Mike Israetel 59:29 Oh-ho.

Chris Williamson 59:29 So just rough. Like, really, really rough. And that was, uh, you know, a lot of things that I thought were baked into my life as a part of my mood or my source code or my genetic predisposition or my whatever the fuck, uh, turned out to just be byproducts of really, really disrupted sleep-

Dr Mike Israetel 59:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:47 ... for, you know, 15 years.

Dr Mike Israetel 59:49 You never quite know how bad your sleep is until you fix it and you watch your life either stay roughly the same, and then you were good.

Chris Williamson 59:56 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 59:56 That does happen.

Chris Williamson 59:57 Yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 59:57 Um, there's genetic variation in everything. Some people are just real gifted in the fact that they can kind of get their sleep whenever and they're golden, man. There's a lot of paranoia with a lot of these, no doubt, this gets broken into reels, and then everyone needs X, Y, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. But the average person absolutely does. And you as a human being listening to this might very well need more regularity in your sleep. When you try it, there's a good chance it's gonna really improve a bunch of shit. Like, you'll get leaner, you'll get more jacked, you will be cognitively sharper. You'll have more of an excitement through the day. You'll have less frustration. If you're low-key sleep deprived and Jim puts a stack of papers on your desk, you're like, "Jim, fuck." But if he does it when you're, like, apt and good and rested, you're like, "Jim, thank you so much. I can't wait to get to work on this project."

Chris Williamson 1:00:44 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:00:45 It's a big difference. So-... fixing your sleep can be solving problems you didn't even know that you had, or problems you knew you had, but like you said, you didn't know where they were coming from.

Chris Williamson 1:00:53 Baked in to your-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:00:54 Maybe this is just who I am.

Chris Williamson 1:00:55 Yeah, your conception of self so much that you'd forgotten that they were even a thing.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:00:58 Totally.

Chris Williamson 1:00:58 Yeah. This is just the- the physics of my system.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:01:01 Totally.

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Chris Williamson 1:02:03 Okay, so that's sleep. Rest. What are the biggest errors that people make when it comes to rest?

Dr Mike Israetel 1:02:09 Rest needs to be of a low grade of physical activity or no activity whatsoever. So-

Chris Williamson 1:02:13 Seven.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:02:13 ... you can take a walk through your neighborhood, uh, you can take a leisurely bike ride, uh, and, or you can be, like, playing board games at home or watching Netflix. And anything above that is anything that makes you, like ... that kind of tired is a fucking non-starter. You're not resting, you're working. Another thing about rest. This is the trippy part. You can't let the old brain run around and do work for you. When I go to work, it's mostly in a windowless office in the basement. I'm not joking. It's my favorite place in the world. But I'm not relaxing there 'cause my mind is occupied. Humans have a big brain that draws a crap load of glucose and all this other shit, and it takes a lot of, technically, damage, uh, in a low-key, like, disruption. That's why when you've worked ... You ever worked hard on a problem for eight hours, and you, like, get to, like, a social setting with your friends? They're like, "How are you?" You're like ...

Chris Williamson 1:03:06 I don't know.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:03:06 You should ask, "Who am I?" to begin with.

Chris Williamson 1:03:07 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:03:07 It's all fucking nonsense in there. So, a lot of people will say, "Oh, no physical stuff. That means I can plug away at emails." That's not a good idea. So, it needs to be something that actually relaxes you. And the other one, to the point of relaxing you, is that thing I said earlier. There's an axis of relax, of- of fun things that are relaxing, which is really the right answer, and then the other axis of fun things that are energetic and require stimulus and stress. If you're watching, like, um ... If you're flipping through reels or going through your phone or engaging in really vibrant discussion on the internet and it's really, like, your mind is going, that is not relaxing. If it's anything you need a break from, that the break isn't-

Chris Williamson 1:03:54 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:03:54 ... from sheer boredom, it's not relaxing.

Chris Williamson 1:03:57 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:03:57 There's a good litmus test.

Chris Williamson 1:03:58 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:03:58 So, if you can, if you're physically comfortable and you can get bored doing it, it's probably relaxing.

Chris Williamson 1:04:04 Ah.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:04:04 If you're, like, get exhausted doing it and you're bored only in the sense that you're like, "I don't want to do this anymore, but uh, I need uh, I need uh," then ... Like, imagine you were on the couch eating snacks, high protein snacks, of course, and, uh, you know, four hours of Netflix. Your significant other comes home and she's like, "How are you feeling?" It is highly unlikely to hear you're like, "Oh, God. Uh, all this Netflix. I'm just so tired." That's not what you're gonna say. You're gonna say, "Oh, my God, I'm glad you're home. Dude, let's do something." I'm, you want ... Here's another way to look about it. You want the end of your relaxation period, in many cases, not all, to end in the sensation of cabin fever. You know that term?

Chris Williamson 1:04:52 Yes, totally.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:04:53 Like, you just need to get out and fucking move your body and do shit.

Chris Williamson 1:04:56 Yep.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:04:57 But if you're sufficiently hard training, you pray to God no one asks you to do shit. Then you do relaxing things. So, relaxing things should be enjoyable, but also very low energy demand physically and low energy demand cognitively. I watch TV with my wife and we don't watch a lot of intellectual TV. That's intellectual-

Chris Williamson 1:05:19 I was gonna say, that's a, that was a point I was about to make. Some people would find, uh, reading both something which could be recovery inducing, but also mind straining. So, you know, if you're trying to read Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:05:33 You gotta.

Chris Williamson 1:05:34 Yeah, exactly. You're switched on.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:05:36 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:36 Right? Or you're reading some manifesto, political thing, diatribe, it's all tribal and blah, blah, blah-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:05:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:41 ... and you're trying to link it into cool other ideas that you've got.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:05:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:43 Or you're reading some relatively sort of trash cool novel where-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:05:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:48 ... who's the killer? I don't really know.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:05:49 Lord of the Rings type of shit, too.

Chris Williamson 1:05:51 Yeah, yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:05:51 Like you're not gonna stress out-

Chris Williamson 1:05:52 Imagining things.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:05:53 ... if Frodo gonna make it.

Chris Williamson 1:05:54 Exactly . Uh, so I, it's interesting that even within the same modality of rest, so to speak-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:01 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:01 ... the type that you're doing, what is it-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:03 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:06:03 ... that you're watching? Are you flicking through YouTube videos that's all about creator drama and, like, who's a-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:08 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:06:08 ... fucking grifter and who's a shill?

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:09 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:06:10 Or are you watching some nice, one of those three-hour-long videos of a guy walking through New York City streets when it's raining?

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:16 We do some of that shit.

Chris Williamson 1:06:18 Awesome. I love-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:19 Tokyo, Tokyo 4K street walk-

Chris Williamson 1:06:21 I love-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:21 ... night walk.

Chris Williamson 1:06:21 I l- uh, during rain.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:23 Oh, yeah. I pass out to shit like that.

Chris Williamson 1:06:25 It's great. It's really good.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:26 Uh, so basically, like, another great relaxation modality is getting together with friends and just talking and relaxing in a comfortable seat-

Chris Williamson 1:06:33 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:33 ... with fluids and- and food around. Like a- a nice dinner with friends. Not like a hype dinner with friends where you're gonna go smash the clubs after, but just a super chill dinner. And the friends have to be people that you're cool around and can be chill around. 'Cause there's friends you have that just get you fucking amped.

Chris Williamson 1:06:49 Yep.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:06:50 You need to switch to the friends that, like, you feel just really, like, just... You can walk out of a restaurant and be like, "Ah." Like, that's how you wanna feel.

Chris Williamson 1:06:58 Uh, one of the best judges for... A- a friend of mine was asked recently, "Who's your best friend?" And he said, "I don't know. That's kind of a, kind of an odd question after age 15-"

Dr Mike Israetel 1:07:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:08 "... or something, like, to have a best friend."

Dr Mike Israetel 1:07:10 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:10 And the person asking him reframed the question and said, "Who can you be around and sit in silence with and not feel like you need to fill it the most?"

Dr Mike Israetel 1:07:20 Oh, trippy.

Chris Williamson 1:07:21 And then his second version was, "Who do you have the least filter when you're around?"

Dr Mike Israetel 1:07:25 That's a, that's a definition I prefer, for sure.

Chris Williamson 1:07:28 But I think both of those, you know, to your point-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:07:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:30 ... about it's people that you don't need to-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:07:32 Tension.

Chris Williamson 1:07:32 ... turn it on for.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:07:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:34 And like, I'm just, I'm... You, you talk. You two talk.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:07:38 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:38 You two, this is lovely. You have a, you have your discussion-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:07:40 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:40 ... about that thing and it's like watching, like, tennis or something.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:07:42 Oh, yeah. Some of my favorite people to hang out with, uh, I'll just name names. My boy Marcos, who's a super top trainer in New York City, and my friend, uh, Jacob, who's actually the COO of RP. I love hanging out with tons and tons of other friends, but these guys have a special place for me because they're as generative or more generative than me. If I'm hanging out in a group of people 'cause I'm me, usually there's, like, a minimum amount of yapping I'm gonna have to do to just bring that... 'Cause if I don't, people are like, "Mike, are you okay?" (laughs) So I gotta be myself.

Chris Williamson 1:08:18 Expectations.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:08:18 And almost always I am. But when I'm trying to chill and just switch me off-

Chris Williamson 1:08:23 Mm-hmm.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:08:23 ... if I'm with Marcos or if I'm with Yasha, his Russian name, bro, these motherfuckers. First of all, they're straight up funnier than me, so I'm just laughing my ass off.

Chris Williamson 1:08:32 Entertain me. Entertain.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:08:32 Laughter, insanely, insanely fatigue reducing. Insanely.

Chris Williamson 1:08:37 Oh, really? Interesting.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:08:38 Huge, huge, huge.

Chris Williamson 1:08:39 Cool.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:08:40 And, um, these guys are... They talk and it's just n- just total stream of just sit down, stand up, riding by, it doesn't matter. Comedy-

Chris Williamson 1:08:50 Yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:08:50 ... the entire time. And I can take a back seat and be like, "Thank God these guys are taking over." So if you have to be the it guy, if there's tension, if you have to feel like you're saying... You have to say something, if you have to have a filter, holy shit.

Chris Williamson 1:09:03 Well, I suppose that's one of the problems with new friends, right? That you-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:09:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:09:06 ... you haven't established-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:09:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:09:08 ... enough of a baseline. Everyone's still trying to impress each other and there's this sort of obligation, this weird sort of social contract that you're gonna tell them about you and what's going on and whatever, whatever. And you're like, "Hey, I'm kind of, like, chill at the moment. Are you chill? Should we just shut up for five minutes and eat this steak?"

Dr Mike Israetel 1:09:24 Yeah. Or talk about things that have nothing to do with presenting ourselves in a best way to the other person. Let's just talk about, like, um, I met, uh, your friend, uh, Zach Telander a while back. And him and I, within about 30 seconds, clicked to just total nonsense.

Chris Williamson 1:09:39 Right.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:09:40 And I was like, "My man."

Chris Williamson 1:09:41 He's the king of nonsense.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:09:41 He's- he's easy, right? And you know-

Chris Williamson 1:09:43 I actually think-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:09:43 ... I was his queen for a day.

Chris Williamson 1:09:44 This is a good... (laughs) I'm sure you were. Uh, this is a good, um, area, I think, of the current sort of status of politics at the moment. Uh, but because I'm not personally invested, I've never got very personally invested in politics.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:09:59 E- everyone in the world is personally invested into the politics of the world's superpower of the United States of America, whether they know it or not.

Chris Williamson 1:10:06 It's the best bit.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:10:06 I don't mean to make you anxious. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:10:08 I... Well, I mean, I-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:10:09 I know what you mean.

Chris Williamson 1:10:10 ... I fe-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:10:10 I know what you mean.

Chris Williamson 1:10:10 My felt sense is that-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:10:11 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:10:11 ... like, this guy gets in or that guy gets in, it's just gonna change what memes come out.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:10:15 Hopefully the CA is actually in control. I pray to God every day that's true.

Chris Williamson 1:10:19 But, uh, James Smith texted me earlier on and he was like, "Dude, this fucking election is the most compelling TV show I've ever watched." He's like, "I'm so..."

Dr Mike Israetel 1:10:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:10:29 "But it's drama." So what I like about the current... I- if you're somebody that isn't fully, you know, like, politics pilled and like, "These, whatever the, are gonna do..."

Dr Mike Israetel 1:10:38 Have a lot of feelings about.

Chris Williamson 1:10:39 Yeah, exactly. If you're not invested emotionally in it, it's... Talk shit about Biden's most recent debate and Kamala's laugh and Trump's getting shot and the bla- Like, just talk shit about it.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:10:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:10:49 Like, it's just a, a permanently generating reality TV show-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:10:54 Definitely.

Chris Williamson 1:10:55 ... where NPR or Fox News or whatever will give you the updates every single day and you can just-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:00 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:11:00 ... chat shit about it.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:01 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:11:01 So I actually think that, uh, politics can be recovery inducing if you use it in the right way.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:06 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:11:06 It's the most bullshit, uh, today's news, tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper type-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:11 100%.

Chris Williamson 1:11:11 It's like-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:11 TMZ type of celebrity gossip fills that void.

Chris Williamson 1:11:14 Right. Correct.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:15 My, uh, my wife got me into watching, like, The Real Housewives of insert city here. Love that shit. It's all nonsense. It's people behaving in, I would say, quite strange ways mostly, but I just... I don't take it seriously and so it's a fun-

Chris Williamson 1:11:29 It's the audiovisu- audiovisual equivalent of your weed to your brain. It's like I- I actually can't think while watching this.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:37 Yes. Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:11:37 There is no amount of intellectual-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:39 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:11:40 ... sort of interrogation going-

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:41 Yes. That's what my wife uses it for. She explicitly said just, just turn her brain off. And I usually come into it with my brain on and I'm like, "Uh, Israetel, you're doing this all wrong. Switch off."

Chris Williamson 1:11:50 Yeah.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:50 And oftentimes, I will watch it while I'm high on weed with her and, uh-

Chris Williamson 1:11:56 Double multiplier.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:11:57 So like, bro. Sometimes I'm so high, I'm like, "Do these people mean to act this way or do they know that they're on camera? They can't possibly be like this kind of human." I watch a shit load of Love Island like that, high as fuck.

Chris Williamson 1:12:10 Good man.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:12:10 And I love Love Island because it introduces, um, that social dynamics, um, attraction, selection, mating, game theory, all that shit. But when I'm high, I'm like, "Are these people really like this?"

Chris Williamson 1:12:24 (laughs)

Dr Mike Israetel 1:12:25 (laughs) You know? And then I can't tell.

Chris Williamson 1:12:26 Lower resolution.

Dr Mike Israetel 1:12:26 So I'm like, "Fuck it, who gives a shit?" Just along for the ride.

Chris Williamson 1:12:29 Anything else to say about rest? Any of the big errors that people make or have we covered most of them?

Dr Mike Israetel 1:12:34 Pick things that give you that (sighs) feeling that you really enjoy, lean into them, and a lot of them are gonna be...The opposite of what, as a diligent person who listens to podcasts about enhancing recovery, are things that you're like, "But don't lazy assholes just do this kind of stuff?" Shit TV, just popping back Cheetos, looking at the sunset, chatting with friends, calling someone you haven't talked to in a while you know is down for a good time. Even scrolling mindlessly through, like, cat and dog videos on, on the 'Gram. That is all super high quality relaxing shit. If you want to do some meditation, if it actually is a practice that relaxes you, which takes some time, so I wouldn't start a meditation practice with the anticipation of relaxing. And don't assume that what relaxes other people relaxes you.