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

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-

Mm-hmm.

... 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?

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.

What's a vesicle?

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.