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

1. 0:00 – 6:01

   How to Understand Recovery

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      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-

   2. MIDr Mike Israetel0:13

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:14

      ... 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?

   4. MIDr Mike Israetel0:22

      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.

   5. CWChris Williamson2:00

      What's a vesicle?

   6. MIDr Mike Israetel2:01

      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.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:10

      Yeah, fatigue. What is-

   8. MIDr Mike Israetel3:11

      Fatigue.

   9. CWChris Williamson3:11

      ... what is fatigue?

   10. MIDr Mike Israetel3:12

       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.

   11. CWChris Williamson4:00

       Mm-hmm.

   12. MIDr Mike Israetel4:01

       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."

   13. CWChris Williamson5:50

       Mm-hmm.

   14. MIDr Mike Israetel5:50

       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.

2. 6:01 – 22:48

   Stress & Fatigue’s Impact on Recovery

   1. MIDr Mike Israetel6:01

   2. CWChris Williamson6:01

      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.

   3. MIDr Mike Israetel6:24

      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.

   4. CWChris Williamson7:52

      (laughs) Recovered as fuck, yeah.

   5. MIDr Mike Israetel7:52

      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-

   6. CWChris Williamson8:37

      Mm-hmm.

   7. MIDr Mike Israetel8:37

      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.

   8. CWChris Williamson9:18

      Punching sideways.

   9. MIDr Mike Israetel9:19

      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) .

   10. CWChris Williamson10:40

       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-

   11. MIDr Mike Israetel10:49

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson10:49

       ... racing type thing?

   13. MIDr Mike Israetel10:50

       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.

   14. CWChris Williamson11:06

       Mm-hmm.

   15. MIDr Mike Israetel11:07

       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.

   16. CWChris Williamson12:18

       (laughs)

   17. MIDr Mike Israetel12:18

       (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?"

   18. CWChris Williamson13:13

       (laughs)

   19. MIDr Mike Israetel13:13

       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-

   20. CWChris Williamson13:28

       Hmm.

   21. MIDr Mike Israetel13:29

       ... it's not gonna recover you nearly as much, perhaps to some extent kind of not at all.

   22. CWChris Williamson13:34

       Mm-hmm.

   23. MIDr Mike Israetel13:34

       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.

   24. CWChris Williamson13:43

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

   25. MIDr Mike Israetel13:50

       Yes.

   26. CWChris Williamson13:50

       "... doing the rest of it." Yeah, but you were obsessing about that play.

   27. MIDr Mike Israetel13:54

       Yes. Yes.

   28. CWChris Williamson13:54

       You were worrying about school, or-

   29. MIDr Mike Israetel13:55

       Yes. You were on- on your phone, on social media getting pissed about comments, clapping back at people.

   30. CWChris Williamson14:00

       Mm-hmm.
3. 22:48 – 25:23

   Can You Measure Recovery?

   1. CWChris Williamson22:48

      All right, so how is recovery measured then? Is there, is there such a thing?

   2. MIDr Mike Israetel22:52

      Yes, there is.

   3. CWChris Williamson22:53

      Right.

   4. MIDr Mike Israetel22:53

      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.

   5. CWChris Williamson23:31

      Padel.

   6. MIDr Mike Israetel23:33

      Oh, yeah. And then you got, uh...

   7. CWChris Williamson23:35

      Falconry.

   8. MIDr Mike Israetel23:36

      What the? Oh, that. Ha!

   9. CWChris Williamson23:38

      (laughs)

   10. MIDr Mike Israetel23:38

       Uh, skeet shooting. Skeeting. No, sorry, that's for everyone.

   11. CWChris Williamson23:41

       (laughs)

   12. MIDr Mike Israetel23:42

       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.

   13. CWChris Williamson23:49

       Uh-huh.

   14. MIDr Mike Israetel23:51

       Both are fun, and equally dangerous, I might add.

   15. CWChris Williamson23:54

       Have you ever done cocaine?

   16. MIDr Mike Israetel23:55

       No.

   17. CWChris Williamson23:55

       Have you not?

   18. MIDr Mike Israetel23:56

       No, I'm a, so I don't do stimulants.

   19. CWChris Williamson23:59

       Yeah.

   20. MIDr Mike Israetel23:59

       I had a-

   21. CWChris Williamson24:00

       But you must have done at some point in order to learn not to do stuff.

   22. MIDr Mike Israetel24:02

       Oh, I was on Adderall for years, prescribed by the doctor for my severe attention deficit disorder.

   23. CWChris Williamson24:07

       Hm.

   24. MIDr Mike Israetel24:08

       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.

   25. CWChris Williamson24:56

       Endogenous cocaine.

   26. MIDr Mike Israetel24:57

       Take me out right now and be like, "Go meet that person," on the corner of Austin, I'd be like-

   27. CWChris Williamson25:00

       Yeah.

   28. MIDr Mike Israetel25:00

       "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?

4. 25:23 – 33:49

   Why Mike Used Weed

   1. CWChris Williamson25:23

      Why do you use weed?

   2. MIDr Mike Israetel25:26

      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.

   3. CWChris Williamson25:42

      Mm-hmm.

   4. MIDr Mike Israetel25:43

      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?

   5. CWChris Williamson25:55

      Right.

   6. MIDr Mike Israetel25:55

      It's-

   7. CWChris Williamson25:55

      You've seen, you've seen our Slack.

   8. MIDr Mike Israetel25:57

      Yeah, sure, sure. (laughs) That's, that's what that is.

   9. CWChris Williamson25:59

      Yep.

   10. MIDr Mike Israetel25:59

       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.

   11. CWChris Williamson26:11

       Yep.

   12. MIDr Mike Israetel26:12

       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.

   13. CWChris Williamson26:23

       Mm-hmm.

   14. MIDr Mike Israetel26:24

       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?"

   15. CWChris Williamson26:38

       You're creative and blah, blah.

   16. MIDr Mike Israetel26:39

       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.

   17. CWChris Williamson26:59

       Mm-hmm.

   18. MIDr Mike Israetel26:59

       And I just got like Dr. Mike'd like eight times in a row.

   19. CWChris Williamson27:01

       Oh.

   20. MIDr Mike Israetel27:02

       And, uh, it was totally cool.

   21. CWChris Williamson27:03

       Okay.

   22. MIDr Mike Israetel27:04

       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."

   23. CWChris Williamson27:11

       (laughs)

   24. MIDr Mike Israetel27:12

       (laughs) People seem friendly, that's nice.

   25. CWChris Williamson27:14

       Yeah.

   26. MIDr Mike Israetel27:15

       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-

   27. CWChris Williamson27:23

       On weed, everything can be a little bit scary, especially attention from other people.

   28. MIDr Mike Israetel27:26

       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.

   29. CWChris Williamson27:57

       At all times.

   30. MIDr Mike Israetel27:58

       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.
5. 33:49 – 43:28

   Tools for Recovery Tracking

   1. CWChris Williamson33:49

      so going back to how you measure recovery. FMRI can do some invasive-

   2. MIDr Mike Israetel33:52

      All that stuff.

   3. CWChris Williamson33:53

      Yeah, it can do a lot of it.

   4. MIDr Mike Israetel33:53

      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-

   5. CWChris Williamson35:19

      Mm-hmm.

   6. MIDr Mike Israetel35:19

      ... 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.

   7. CWChris Williamson36:00

      The only thing that matters.

   8. MIDr Mike Israetel36:01

      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-

   9. CWChris Williamson36:36

      (laughs)

   10. MIDr Mike Israetel36:37

       ... up and get into- get into practice now.

   11. CWChris Williamson36:38

       (laughs) .

   12. MIDr Mike Israetel36:39

       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-

   13. CWChris Williamson38:31

       Obscures it.

   14. MIDr Mike Israetel38:31

       ... got it, keep going. So there's like a, a, a wisdom from all sides-

   15. CWChris Williamson38:35

       Mm-hmm.

   16. MIDr Mike Israetel38:35

       ... 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.

   17. CWChris Williamson38:56

       Mm-hmm.

   18. MIDr Mike Israetel38:57

       So recovery can and should be measured primarily with performance. Huge deal.

   19. CWChris Williamson39:02

       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?

   20. MIDr Mike Israetel39:21

       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.

   21. CWChris Williamson39:44

       Mm-hmm.

   22. MIDr Mike Israetel39:45

       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.

   23. CWChris Williamson40:28

       Everything hurts.

   24. MIDr Mike Israetel40:28

       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?

   25. CWChris Williamson41:43

       (laughs)

   26. MIDr Mike Israetel41:43

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

   27. CWChris Williamson41:47

       (laughs)

   28. MIDr Mike Israetel41:48

       Is that how you measure dead people's ages? I don't know.

   29. CWChris Williamson41:50

       Yeah, sure.

   30. MIDr Mike Israetel41:50

       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.

6. 43:28 – 50:25

   Two Types of Fatigue

   1. MIDr Mike Israetel43:28

   2. CWChris Williamson43:28

      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?

   3. MIDr Mike Israetel43:37

      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.

   4. CWChris Williamson45:24

      Mm.

   5. MIDr Mike Israetel45:25

      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-

   6. CWChris Williamson46:31

      Oh, because your capacity to accumulate fatigue is also greater, even if your body's ability-

   7. MIDr Mike Israetel46:36

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson46:36

      ... to deal with that fatigue

   9. MIDr Mike Israetel46:37

      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.

   10. CWChris Williamson46:45

       Interesting.

   11. MIDr Mike Israetel46:46

       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?

   12. CWChris Williamson46:59

       Mm.

   13. MIDr Mike Israetel46:59

       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.

   14. CWChris Williamson48:17

       Mm.

   15. MIDr Mike Israetel48:17

       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.

   16. CWChris Williamson48:46

       Mm-hmm.

   17. MIDr Mike Israetel48:47

       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.

   18. CWChris Williamson49:03

       Yup.

   19. MIDr Mike Israetel49:03

       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-

   20. CWChris Williamson49:10

       Fully shake, yeah, just, uh-

   21. MIDr Mike Israetel49:11

       ... 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-

   22. CWChris Williamson49:18

       (laughs)

   23. MIDr Mike Israetel49:18

       ... in a harbor in Italy with eight unbelievably attractive women around him and all.

   24. CWChris Williamson49:23

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7. 50:25 – 55:06

   Biggest Inputs That Reduce Fatigue

   1. CWChris Williamson50:25

      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?

   2. MIDr Mike Israetel50:38

      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.

   3. CWChris Williamson51:44

      And it's different to sleep.

   4. MIDr Mike Israetel51:45

      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?

   5. CWChris Williamson52:19

      Oh, so you patent this into your recovery per-

   6. MIDr Mike Israetel52:22

      Right.

   7. CWChris Williamson52:22

      Okay, so when am I go- when do I think my-

   8. MIDr Mike Israetel52:24

      Oh, yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson52:24

      Right, okay.

   10. MIDr Mike Israetel52:24

       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-

   11. CWChris Williamson54:10

       Trying to speedrun a rec-

   12. MIDr Mike Israetel54:11

       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.

8. 55:06 – 1:02:03

   Most Common Sleep Errors

   1. MIDr Mike Israetel55:06

   2. CWChris Williamson55:06

      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?

   3. MIDr Mike Israetel55:22

      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.

   4. CWChris Williamson57:40

      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?

   5. MIDr Mike Israetel57:50

      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.

   6. CWChris Williamson58:22

      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-

   7. MIDr Mike Israetel58:36

      Yes.

   8. CWChris Williamson58:36

      ... even in comparison with duration.

   9. MIDr Mike Israetel58:38

      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.

   10. CWChris Williamson58:49

       Yeah.

   11. MIDr Mike Israetel58:49

       So that's a thing to think about.

   12. CWChris Williamson58:50

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

   13. MIDr Mike Israetel58:57

       It's your club promotion days.

   14. CWChris Williamson58:58

       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-

   15. MIDr Mike Israetel59:27

       Oh.

   16. CWChris Williamson59:28

       ... to get back home.

   17. MIDr Mike Israetel59:29

       Oh-ho.

   18. CWChris Williamson59:29

       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-

   19. MIDr Mike Israetel59:47

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson59:47

       ... for, you know, 15 years.

   21. MIDr Mike Israetel59:49

       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.

   22. CWChris Williamson59:56

       (laughs)

   23. MIDr Mike Israetel59:56

       That does happen.

   24. CWChris Williamson59:57

       Yeah.

   25. MIDr Mike Israetel59:57

       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."

   26. CWChris Williamson1:00:44

       Mm-hmm.

   27. MIDr Mike Israetel1:00:45

       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.

   28. CWChris Williamson1:00:53

       Baked in to your-

   29. MIDr Mike Israetel1:00:54

       Maybe this is just who I am.

   30. CWChris Williamson1:00:55

       Yeah, your conception of self so much that you'd forgotten that they were even a thing.
9. 1:02:03 – 1:18:04

   What People Get Wrong About Rest

   1. CWChris Williamson1:02:03

      Okay, so that's sleep. Rest. What are the biggest errors that people make when it comes to rest?

   2. MIDr Mike Israetel1:02:09

      Rest needs to be of a low grade of physical activity or no activity whatsoever. So-

   3. CWChris Williamson1:02:13

      Seven.

   4. MIDr Mike Israetel1:02:13

      ... 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 ...

   5. CWChris Williamson1:03:06

      I don't know.

   6. MIDr Mike Israetel1:03:06

      You should ask, "Who am I?" to begin with.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:03:07

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   8. MIDr Mike Israetel1:03:07

      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-

   9. CWChris Williamson1:03:54

      Mm-hmm.

   10. MIDr Mike Israetel1:03:54

       ... from sheer boredom, it's not relaxing.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:03:57

       Mm-hmm.

   12. MIDr Mike Israetel1:03:57

       There's a good litmus test.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:03:58

       Mm-hmm.

   14. MIDr Mike Israetel1:03:58

       So, if you can, if you're physically comfortable and you can get bored doing it, it's probably relaxing.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:04:04

       Ah.

   16. MIDr Mike Israetel1:04:04

       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?

   17. CWChris Williamson1:04:52

       Yes, totally.

   18. MIDr Mike Israetel1:04:53

       Like, you just need to get out and fucking move your body and do shit.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:04:56

       Yep.

   20. MIDr Mike Israetel1:04:57

       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-

   21. CWChris Williamson1:05:19

       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-

   22. MIDr Mike Israetel1:05:33

       You gotta.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:05:34

       Yeah, exactly. You're switched on.

   24. MIDr Mike Israetel1:05:36

       Yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:05:36

       Right? Or you're reading some manifesto, political thing, diatribe, it's all tribal and blah, blah, blah-

   26. MIDr Mike Israetel1:05:41

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson1:05:41

       ... and you're trying to link it into cool other ideas that you've got.

   28. MIDr Mike Israetel1:05:43

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson1:05:43

       Or you're reading some relatively sort of trash cool novel where-

   30. MIDr Mike Israetel1:05:48

       Yeah.

Episode duration: 2:10:38