PRO HYDRATION STRATEGIES for PEAK PERFORMANCE - Dr James DiNicolantonio

Gastro, basically gastric emptying, so emptying of fluids from the stomach to the intestine dramatically goes down when you're vigorously exercising. So if you start pushing too much water into an athlete, especially during vigorous exercise, you're going to expand their stomach and lead to bloating, abdominal pain, and actually decrease performance by consuming too much water. Welcome to the Seamlund Podcast. I'm your host, Seamlund, and our guest today is Dr. James DeNicolantonio. Dr. James and I co-authored another book called Win, Achieve Peak Performance, Optimize Recovery, and Become a Champion. You can get Win from Amazon. This episode is brought to you by the world's most recognized probiotic supplement, Seed. Seed's daily symbiotic is a pre- and probiotic 2-in-1 capsule that supports your gut health, skin, digestion, and so much more. Seed isn't a cocktail of random strains of bacteria that do nothing. It contains 24 clinically and scientifically studied strains, which makes Seed the first of its kind. Seed's daily symbiotic is the only probiotic supplement I'm taking regularly because of how much it's backed by research. I noticed the benefits it has on my digestion and overall energy. You can get a 15% discount off Seed's daily symbiotic by using the code SEAM15 at seed.com forward slash SEAM15. That's S-I-I-M 15 at seed.com forward slash SEAM15. Seam, good to be here. Yeah, it's another podcast with you and I because we co-authored another book, a third one with us, and this one is going to be about Win and like mostly optimizing physical performance and fitness and that kind of thing. So maybe let's start with, because it's somewhat of a different turn from our previous books. So what, let's say, what was the main motivation for you to, let's say, propose the idea of writing this kind of a book? Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of it stems from my first book, The Salt Vex, and how do you translate sort of like the benefits of salt into athletic performance? Because I don't know of a single book that's ever really gone into how to actually improve performance using salt and fluids, like, you know, actually like citing the clinical literature, being specific on how to dose it, how much, when to take it, how slowly to take it. And so I think, really, The Salt Vex sort of was a key to kind of launching this book on athletic performance, because I've used that knowledge to help a lot of athletes out to improve their performance, whether it be in the octagon, in the UFC, or NFL players. By far and away, getting the salt dosing correct has been the best thing for athletes in regards to improving their performance. Yeah, it's kind of true that it's very underrated for hydration side and minerals and electrolytes. So you do need them, like, quite crucially for physical performance. And the book has, I think, yeah, one of the first chapters has like an amazing overview about all the different reasons, you know, why to hydrate and different ways to do it the most optimal way, as well, and not just, you know, not only with salt, but also like different kinds of electrolytes and minerals. Yeah, exactly. And there's, we actually cover several different strategies in regards to hydration. So it's not just about, like, acutely boosting performance, which salt solutions will do that. But we also talk about certain things, how to hydrate to improve performance later on, essentially becoming dehydrated, acclimated, and how to do that appropriately and how to dehydrate appropriately. And the adaptations to constant dehydration can actually expand baseline plasma volume and just basically give you a larger basically tank of fuel to cool yourself off, which is really what salt loading does is it acutely boosts blood volume. And that gives you we need to understand we lose water from our blood volume to dissipate heat by cooling off. So your tank, your blood volume drops dramatically within just five to 10 minutes of vigorous exercise, not just from the loss of fluids from sweat, but there's a competition between blood volume, between the heart, the skeletal, the working skeletal muscle and the skin. So, you know, when you and I are resting here, the blood volume is fine feeding the heart. As we start moving and as blood is now being pushed towards skeletal muscle and towards the skin to dissipate heat, you're pulling blood volume away from the heart. And that's the main thing that decreases performance. And we know that because if you actually give IV solutions to athletes and you hold their blood volume normally, you don't see decreases in performance. So we know that blood volume is really controlling a lot of this because it also controls increases in core body temperature through keeping core body temperature low, much lower if you preload with salt. Yeah, I think a lot of people may think that, yeah, that just salt will just help with maybe hydration and like muscle contraction and you're not going to get cramps. That's what they usually associate salt with. But like you said already, that it boosts blood volume and plasma volume and even helps to like lower the body temperature that increases during the exercise. And that is like a very crucial part in maintaining the performance, doing whatever you're doing in terms of physical performance. And a lot of times people gas off or they hit the plateau in the performances because of their body temperature rises to a certain limit too high and that the body pushes the brakes on. Whereas with salt loading, you're postponing that effect and the threshold where it happens. So it's not just only like muscle cramps and muscle contractions. It's quite a very widespread effect that salt has. Yeah, I mean, I mean, bringing up muscle cramps, what's interesting, a lot of people just take plain water before performance. But that's actually been shown to increase the susceptibility to basically electrically induced muscle cramps because it's depleting your electrolytes when you just take plain water. So you've got to be actually careful with plain water, particularly with vigorous exercise. And the reason is, is because gastro basically gastric emptying. So emptying of fluids from the stomach to the intestine dramatically goes down when you're vigorously exercising. So if you start pushing too much water into an athlete, especially during vigorous exercise, you're going to expand their stomach and lead to bloating, abdominal pain and actually decrease performance by consuming too much water. And what do what do I mean by too much water? If you consume between five and 10 ounces of water every 15 minutes during vigorous exercise, that's been shown to decrease athletic performance by two to three percent. So interestingly enough, though, it increases performance at moderate exercise. That's like one to two hours long. So when you're moderately exercising, consuming water seems to be beneficial when you're vigorously exercising. Basically, just small sips of water when you're thirsty is probably the way to go. You don't want to be consuming even just five ounces of fluid every 15 minutes, which really isn't that much when you think about it, that will decrease vigorous exercise performance. But how much salt, let's say, would you require to have the optimal effects before exercise? Well, so I guess if you're talking about acutely boosting performance, I would say really anywhere from three to forty three hundred milligrams of sodium in about twenty six to thirty three point eight ounces of fluid. Now, thirty three point eight ounces of fluid is a liter. So you're talking about massive amounts of salt and fluid, but you're slowly consuming that over 30 to 60 minutes and you start about an hour and a half before performance. So it's this slow infusion that reduces the risk of diarrhea, that improves its absorption, that allows basically the blood volume to expand and then really adding glycine, which is an amino acid, has been shown to improve the absorption of salt and fluids. Not only that, glycine reduces core body temperature fairly quickly. So if you take glycine an hour and a half before performance, your core body temp is also going to be down, which which probably will help with performance as well. And because it's an inhibitory neurotransmitter, it may have additional benefits for actually reducing muscle cramps. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And in the book, we also call it is findings and studies that show that higher, much higher salt solutions are better than even the lower ones. So like like you said, the thirty seven hundred to forty three hundred milligrams per liter is going to give you more results and better performance than like less than that, like two thousand milligrams per liter or even if you have a very little salt, like five hundred milligrams per liter, then that isn't enough to improve performance. So you do you will see some improvements when you get like, you know, fifteen hundred, eighteen hundred milligrams. But the most optimal performance or the better performance will come if you get like thirty seven hundred milligrams, four thousand milligrams. Right. And it really depends on are you able to boost blood volume with the solution? So typically if you're you can get benefits at around eighteen hundred milligrams of sodium with maybe, let's say, 20 ounces of fluid, but you're really only going to boost blood volume by about maybe four percent. So you're not you're not getting the eight to 10 percent that you really want. So if you want to hit higher blood volume expansion, you really need to get to the three to forty three hundred milligrams of sodium. And I've had UFC fighters test this. They do see they do see benefits at two thousand milligrams with like 20 ounces of fluid. But there's better benefits once you start hitting the three thousand milligram mark or higher. So three thousand milligrams. That's like how much is that? Like two tables, like one and a half, like one and a half teaspoons. So, yeah, yeah. So regular sea salt or what kind of salt? Yeah. Redmond real salt is great. They have a product called Relight, which includes magnesium and potassium in it. Plus you can get it on flavor or you can get it flavored if you don't want the flavoring, then you can simply, I mean, adding glycine, glycine has a sweet taste to it. So that can improve the flavor as well. Gotcha. Yeah. And what about like glucose? Like a lot of athletes basically carb load with glucose before that. So would the salt help with the or would the glucose help with the absorption of the sodium? All right. Yeah, this is a key thing that we addressed in the book, too. And this is interesting. So it's true. Glucose can improve the absorption of salt, of sodium in particular. The problem is, is that when you spike glucose levels, it then increases diuresis. So you start losing blood volume to the urine after an hour. So, in fact. Adding simply just like 10 grams of glucose to a liter of fluid has been shown to reduce plasma volume compared to just salt in solution after an hour. So, in other words, since you're doing these salt loadings an hour and a half before, you're actually not getting any of the benefits of the glucose because they start actually going away after an hour because of the enhanced diuresis. So you actually don't need glucose at all in a solution is actually probably going to inhibit performance. You how you carb load is you want to use complex carbs about an hour prior. So whether that's from whole foods or whether that's from there are certain things like glycofuse is one. Vitargo is another product that has been shown to actually improve performance compared to like gastrointestinal resistant dextrin and things like that. So things that like I mean, there's like different tiers of carbs. So a lot of athletes simply just use things like dextrose, which is terrible for your gut microbiota. And it's actually going to drop glucose levels really quickly. So it's not good for performance. And then some some athletes will use like a more resistant dextrin. And then your third, your best year is things like vitargo glycofuse or just like whole complex carbs an hour before performance. And really, you want to probably get around somewhere between 50 and 75 grams of those complex carbs before vigorous performance. It's going to last like, let's say, 10 minutes or longer. Gotcha. So that's going to be one hour before the exercise, you consume about 3000 to 4000 milligrams of sodium in one liter of water. How much glycine would you need in that solution? Yeah, you want to try to probably hit at least three to four grams glycine for the 3000. And then as you get to the 4000, you want to try to push it more towards five to six grams. This has been studied, like they've they've done tests on this. And it's really seems to be about like, you know, one and a half to two ratio of glycine to sodium. So if you're doing 2000 milligrams of sodium, you want to try to hit around four grams of glycine 4000. You want to hit around six grams. It's like one and a half ratios is pretty good of glycine to sodium. Gotcha. And no glucose in that solution. Yeah. Get the carbs from Whole Foods. But what what what kind of, let's say, performance would it benefit the most like cardio or weights or like it doesn't it doesn't matter any kind of physical performance? This is what's interesting is actually you're going to get benefits regardless. If you're talking about straight salt solutions before performance, this will dramatically improve lifting weights as well, because when you start lifting weights, there is a huge push of blood to the skeletal muscle. So if you're lifting weights, your max bench press is definitely going to go up. You're going to have a much better pump. You're going to actually be able to remove waste out of the muscle much better, too. So even though the book primarily covers like vigorous exercise, explosive performance endurance, it also applies, definitely applies to heavy weightlifting as well. Gotcha. Yeah, it's a very good chapter about all the ways to use hydration and electrolytes. And we talked about preloading, but what do you do like when you are actually doing the exercise? Is there something any benefit to consuming any salt and electrolytes during the exercise? And how do you like post hydrate or how to hydrate yourself afterwards? Right. That's a great question. During competition, if you've done the preload, you don't need essentially anything except maybe small sips of water for the first hour because you've already consumed three to four thousand milligrams of sodium. You're not going to lose that much typically in the first hour. So after if you're performing longer than an hour and you've done the salt preload, then the studies show that about twenty three hundred milligrams of sodium, which is one teaspoon of salt per liter of fluid consumed, is going to improve hydration status. And Dr. Tim Noakes and his colleagues actually published a paper on that, that that concentration of fluid is going to basically improve total body water by three quarters of a liter when you do that in endurance training versus like lower sodium solutions or just drinking plain water. So I think that that rule, if you preload after an hour, twenty three milligrams of sodium per liter is probably going to give you more benefits than anything else. If you are, let's say now this is that's acutely boosting performance. If you're like in a training camp early on and you're feeling good, you're coming in fully hydrated. You want to probably do dehydration acclimation. In other words, you just basically drink small sips of water, which is going to mildly dehydrate you, basically dropping your total body weight by one and a half to two and a half percent. And you can see you basically weigh yourself before you start training. You weigh yourself afterwards. You want to drop weight by about one and a half to two and a half percent. That will be if you continuously do that, that will lead to dehydration acclimation. You'll get all the benefits of expanding plasma volume at baseline and all these other adaptations similar to heat acclimation. If you do that, the key is to rehydrate after you become dehydrated, acclimated. Right. So you just basically consume. If if you've lost, let's say a liter of fluid, you want to get all that liter of fluid back. Plus, typically you lose about twelve hundred milligrams of sodium per liter of fluid loss. So you basically just rehydrate by taking that equation. If you twelve hundred milligrams of sodium per liter of fluid loss and you can measure this because one liter of fluid weighs a kilogram. So if you lost a kilogram, you've lost a liter of fluid. You make sure that replace and rehydrate with twelve hundred milligrams of sodium per liter to get it all back. Yeah, that's I think a new concept for a lot of people of dehydration, accumulate acclimation that you train yourself to be as a competent in performing in dehydrated scenarios so that your body would basically get adapted to it. And it does have this hermetic effect that you're able to do it much better. And yeah, that's a really kind of, I think, a new concept for a lot of people because, yeah, we've been taught to just basically drink a lot of water all the time and avoid dehydration. But there's like periodic episodic dehydration can actually just make your body more adapt to it. And actually it has a performance enhancing benefit as well after you, as long as you are basically rehydrating after the fact. Right. And even adding sauna sessions after a mildly dehydrating event has been shown to increase performance, vigorous exercise performance by about four minutes. In other words, these athletes, when they did sauna session, like a 30 minute sauna session and it became heat acclimated. So they basically did that for two weeks. If you do that after a mildly dehydrating event in particular, you're basically they were able to run 14 minutes before doing this. And then at basically a vigorous pace, they were able to increase that by four minutes. So they were able to basically run 18 minutes longer. So dehydration, acclimation, heat acclimation, that can all improve performance by anywhere from typically 7 to 20 percent. Salt solutions can increase endurance by 25 to 52 percent. So nothing really touches preloading with salt and fluids, but you can still get additive benefits by adding all these things that we're talking about. Yeah. So, yeah, like let's say in an average person who is not an athlete for them, let's say maybe like an easy way to improve that or achieve that the hydration acclimation would be to just not always basically hydrate and not always hyperhydrate beforehand and actually train a little bit in sometimes like easier sessions, easier training sessions to train a bit dehydrated a little bit so that your body would develop this acclimation. Yeah, the key. So really what our book also talks about is like sort of bouncing back and forth with these regimens. And that includes bouncing back and forth between exercising the fasted state and exercising the carb loaded state, because it's going to make you metabolically flexible. Same thing with salt solutions. You don't always want to like perform. You always come in typically fully hydrated, especially if you're going to be doing like a hard training session. You always want to be fully hydrated. That doesn't mean you preload with salt with those high amounts. But like you may want to take like a thousand milligrams of sodium and 12 ounces of fluid 60 minutes before performance. That's not going to really boost your blood volume that much. But that way you're coming in fully hydrated. And yes, you do the hydration acclimation. But if you're if you're coming into training camp and you feel fatigued, you probably want to hit 2000 milligrams of sodium and 20 ounces of fluid. That way you'll still induce dehydration, but you still want to have a good workout. So it's like this balance of like, how do I feel if I feel OK? OK, let's let's do a nice dehydrating event. Or if you don't feel that good coming into training, you really probably want to throw on some sodium and fluids. Yeah. What about the heat? You mentioned that as well. So how can we how can heat acclimation benefit to performance? So the studies basically show daily heat acclimation is better than, let's say, every other day or every third day. But you can still if you get it, if you average four and a half sessions of sauna every week, if you do that for three weeks and you get about 13 total sessions, then you're heat acclimated. That's that's what a lot of the regimens do. The key with heat acclimation is you want to hit a certain internal temperature. Usually you want to hit about 101 and typically you want to try to hit a max heart rate of about 140. And that's going to be harder and harder to do as you become more heat acclimated. So like week one, you don't have to do as long or as high as heat. But week three, in order to hit those acclimation benefits, you're going to have to go in longer. You're going to have to go and start starting temperature higher to hit those certain goals. So you actually become heat acclimated and, you know, you can start hydrating during the session because you're not going to really absorb the fluids and things like that until later on, especially if you if you're doing this post exercise, it's OK to start hydrating during the sauna session because it's really you're still going to induce the dehydration and then the fluids and stuff will come on board probably 30 minutes after that. But from a performance side directly, then if you're, let's say you're used to taking a sauna, then this acclimation towards that heat, towards this higher level of heat will also reduce your core temperature during exercise again. So because you're adapted to the heat, that will be basically another way of keeping your body core temperature lower during exercise because your body is used to kind of the higher amounts of heat. So can you maybe talk a little about that as well? Sure. When you become heat acclimated, essentially there are many adaptations that occur. One of the best ones is that you do you do get an increase in baseline plasma volume if you you are rehydrating afterwards. So if you if if you're not rehydrating well, you can actually mess up your plasma and reduce plasma volume with sauna. So you got to be careful. You got to know what you're doing. But if you're if you're becoming heat acclimated and you're making sure to rehydrate afterwards, it can expand plasma volume. It reduces baseline core body temperature. So this is almost like pre-cooling the body, but using heat acclimation in the in the adaptations from that to actually have a have you have a lower baseline core body temperature. Essentially, you have a larger storage capacity for heat before you hit a critical core temperature. So this is key because once you hit a critical core temperature, you start shutting down enzymes like phosphofructokinase, pyruvate kinase. You don't produce as much ATP. You get basically muscle shutdown. You also when you're heat acclimated, your sweat is more dilute. You stop losing as much electrolytes as an adaptive mechanism, which makes sense. Like your body doesn't want to lose so many electrolytes because it's already lost a lot. So when the sweat becomes more dilute, you it actually evaporates faster. So you become a become a better cooling off machine when you're adapted. Your sweat rates also increase. So that also improves how fast you cool off and the threshold for which you start sweating is reduced. In other words, you start sweating faster, earlier onset when you're heat acclimated. So all those benefits add up to performance gains. If you make sure your hydration status is good afterwards. Gotcha. Is it yeah, like if you were to, let's say, just take a sauna and not necessarily for performance or not, you're trying to not necessarily trying to become heat acclimated, but you're just doing it for, let's say, recovery or just health purposes. How would the rehydration process differ from that of if you're trying to fully optimize your hydration for competition and that kind of thing? I think it remains the same in regards to if you lose a liter of fluid, on average, you're going to lose about 1200 milligrams of sodium per liter. So you just want to replace that back. And so essentially, you can weigh yourself before sauna after see how much water you've lost and then use the 1200 milligrams sodium per liter rule that we have in the book. And that's going to rehydrate. Gotcha. Cooling off the body then, like we've mentioned that salt solutions and the sauna keep your body temperature lower during exercise and postpone the critical threshold after which you stop performing. So obviously, we talk about that in the book as well, that cooling down the body before exercise a little bit with salt solutions or glycine, for example, or being heat acclimated, that's a way of performing better. So what about directly cooling off the body with cold exposure before exercise? Yeah, so you can do pre-cooling and you can also do cooling during competition if your sport allows that, which most do. Typically, in basketball and football, you're on the sidelines. It kind of blows my mind that athletes and their trainers and staff, they're not actively trying to cool their athletes down. They're just sitting there drinking water, waiting to come back into play. Shouldn't be doing that. You should be actively cooling down your athletes. It's going to dramatically improve their performance. It's funny, maybe after reading this book, you're going to see NFL teams basically trying to cool clabber skin on their players, which would be cool, that they really should be doing that. So the pre-cooling strategies, you got to be careful. You don't want to use cold water, which is 59 degrees Fahrenheit or less, because in many studies, it actually has been shown to inhibit performance because you're basically cooling the body too much. So you want to kind of use, it's called basically cool water immersion. So there's different ways to cool the body, but cool water immersion works the best. Even if you can be neck down or if you're a sprinter, just like on the water up to your hip level. But essentially, you know, it's good to keep the water between 64 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit. That way you're not cooling off the body too quick. The goal is to drop core body temperature by 0.3 degrees Celsius, which is about 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit. And typically that takes anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, about 30 minutes if you're in like a 64 degree Fahrenheit cool bath, probably an hour if you're in an 84. Reason also why you don't want to use cold, it can actually close the ABAs, the blood vessels that are bringing in cold and actually increase your core body temperature if you jump into too cold, if it shuts down the ABAs. So using those strategies, pre-cooling, we do have a chapter on that and that has been shown to dramatically improve performance. The one thing that I kind of weigh with athletes in doing this is the studies that I've looked at have never shown any issues. But like if you're dealing with a fighter who needs to have good blood flow, you know, is that going to potentially increase an injury? Maybe. So that's why with like, let's say like a UFC fighter, it might be best to just use glabrous skin cooling, which is the face, the palms of the hands, the bottoms of the feet. That way you're simply cooling core temp and you're not cooling, let's say the Achilles tendon and, you know, potentially increasing a risk of injury in those scenarios. Although what's interesting is the cool water immersion for sprinters, where they're basically, they're in water up to hip level. So they're cooling their Achilles tendons. There wasn't any increase in any injuries, but you always do like a 10 minute warm up after pre-cooling strategies. So that might prevent any potential issues. Yeah. And I think that the increase in that performance can be quite dramatic. So like, I don't recall the specifics, but in one study, like if they cool down the athlete's hands before doing a biceps curl, then they were able to do a lot more if they were cooled down compared to not cooling it down. So yeah, like one of the biggest cutoffs of the performance will be the rise in the body temperature. And if you cool it down beforehand, pre-cooling, then again, it's going to be postponed. Right. And that's sort of like, this was unique about our book is we're trying to get ahead of the problem. Like very few, I don't know a single book that really tries to get ahead of the problem by pre-hydrating the salt and fluids pre-cooling the body. And then in the next chapter, we talk about getting peak alkalosis to get ahead of the acidosis. And so really it's, it's, it's almost like you're, you've got this 90 minute window before athletic performance that if you get right, you're going to have a tremendous advantage over, over your opponent. And people are just starting to realize this. Yeah. Before we talk about the alkalosis. So with the cold, it's instead of doing like an ice bath or a very cold cryotherapy, you would want to do like, yeah, just cool off the forehead, cool off the palms of the hands, palms of the feet, that kind of thing. Right. Yeah. And you can do this many different ways. Like some studies actually will basically wrap the quads with ice packs. They'll have like a little, um, cotton material over the, over the muscle. So it's not directly in contact, but you can pre-cool the body using like simply ice packs. You can use cool, um, water immersion, um, or you can use the glabrous skin, like you said, which is probably the safest way. It just might take a little bit longer than basically going into a cool bath because, uh, water basically conducts cold slash heat two to four times better than air. Mm-hmm. Gotcha. I think we should also, yeah, just cover the, um, that, uh, that when not to do the cold exposure and that kind of thing. So, uh, after a workout is not the best idea to, to take like a ice bath or a cold shower. And if your goal is specifically muscle hypertrophy or strength, because you can shut down some adaptations, um, whereas like either cardio, it can be fine. But let's say if you're just trying to build muscle and strength, then you don't want to be exposing yourself to cold after the training. Yeah. I think there's, there's definitely some evidence that for muscle hypertrophy, potential muscle strength that you will, I don't know exactly what the actual, like decrease in strength and hypertrophy really is like, are we talking about a clinically significant difference or not? Um, I don't know, maybe I think it is important to keep that in mind. I think it's not going to like decrease. You're not going to get weaker, but you're just going to maybe slow down some of the, uh, adaptations, uh, to a certain extent. Uh, yeah. Like you're not, maybe your progress will be a bit slower compared to someone who doesn't do any cold exposure at all after, but obviously, I mean, the training and the diet itself will be the first thing that matters. But if every other variable is equal, then maybe I probably the person who wouldn't do the ice exposure after the training, their, their process would be a bit faster in terms of muscle hypertrophy at least, because the inflammation, you need some of the inflammation for, uh, the muscle growth and muscle swelling. So. Right. Which is almost like why, um, adding sauna after, after that is going to probably improve gains. And then if you're in like a training camp, that then cold water immersion is, is great because it dramatically brings back your power output, um, out to 96 hours. So essentially you're able to produce more power one, two, three, four days after a hard training session. If you jump into like, let's say a cold bath for three to five minutes, um, because it's shutting down all that inflammation, which is going to lead to, um, delayed onset muscle soreness. If you don't shut it down fairly quickly. So for, for people in intense training camps, like cold water immersion is great. But I personally think cool water immersion would be better because you're, you're, you're basically risking less of what you just talked about. Essentially, if you're using cool water, you're probably not going to shut down the gains as much as cold, but you're probably also going to recoup the body, um, better than not doing anything. So it's like, it's probably like the best middle ground for a lot of people. Yeah. I think I would agree that, yeah, that too extreme, too much cold will be probably bad. But, um, if it's just cool, then like a regular cold shower probably won't like, you know, shut off the gains either. Like, uh, maybe like a one minute, one minute cold shower is not going to do anything, but like a five minute ice bath in, uh, uh, five degrees Celsius water probably would. Right. And I mean, what's interesting too, is like, there's other, other ways to reduce delayed onset muscle soreness, whether it's, um, basically massage like third guns, things like that, foam rollers, um, you know, consuming beetroot juice prior to performance. Um, even, even the salt solutions will help reduce delayed onset muscle soreness. Um, high doses of omega threes can help do that as well. I'm trying to think of what else can potentially, besides having to shut down, like all the inflammation with cold water, um, that can improve or reduce delayed onset muscle sore. Oh, the alkalosis too, which leads up to this as well. Um, a lot of the, um, muscle soreness, it's not due to the lactate, right? It's due to the actual hydrogen ion release and the acidosis that occurs in the cell when you vigorously exercise. Gotcha. So can you talk about that then the alkalinity and alkalosis? Yeah. So there's been, we, we cover several studies on how basically very quickly during rigorous exercise, not just in the interstitial fluid that surrounds tissues, but actually within the muscle cell itself, um, there's a dramatic increase in acid, which is not shown in the blood because the blood has much better buffering systems in regards to keeping the acidity at a normal level. Whereas the interstitial fluid and inside the cell, that's going to, um, it doesn't have the buffering systems like hemoglobin and albumin and things like that that can help offer the acid load. So, um, that is what decreases performance and leads to delayed onset muscle soreness is not the lactate that's being produced. It's the acid or the hydrogen ions. And the lactate is there to help the lactate helps pull the acid out of the cell and lactate gets reutilized as fuel. So lactate is actually a good thing. We, you know, we call it lactic acidosis because it associates with the acid that's being produced, but lactate is actually an important substance, um, for those two reasons. And, uh, basically the key here is that you want to get ahead of the problem, which is you want to hit peak alkalosis before competition, which is essentially a serum bicarbonate of around 35 milli equivalents. Most people sit at around maybe 26. Um, that's carnivores are typically less than that. Most carnivores are probably around 23 milli equivalents per liter of bicarbonate where all the benefits you're going to see really is around 35 milli equivalents of bicarbonate. And so studies have shown that if you like drink bicarbonate mineral waters for like three weeks, it dramatically improves combat sport performance, power output endurance. Um, or if you load with sodium citrate or sodium bicarbonate, which you have to do that appropriately, it's a little complex that can also improve performance and recovery. Gotcha. How, how big of a effect would the diet then have? Like if you're eating like a very alkaline diet versus this acidic diet, like this kind of, um, folklore about those things. Right. So, um, a typical carnivore diet will basically lead to, um, a net acid production of around 150 milli equivalents, which, um, that will lead to acid retention. The kidneys can essentially only get rid of about maybe up to 70 milli equivalents of acid before it starts retaining one milli equivalent for every two and a half milli equivalents over that threshold. And then you have to start breathing out the acid, but in order to do that, you drop your bicarbonate levels. So the key here is that, um, yes, you can breathe out acid, but you do deplete your bicarbonate levels. And the key here is that yes, what you eat does determine your acid based status in the bodies, just from a physiological perspective that the kidneys have a limited capacity for how much acid they can excrete before retention. And from the fact that in order to breathe out any retained acid, you have to deplete bicarbonate in order to do so. In other words, if you're consuming an animal based diet, which I do, you want to have some type of bicarbonate forming substances to offset the acid load. Otherwise your performance and recovery will probably suffer. Um, how much, like, uh, how much would, uh, let's say something, is there any specific amount of, uh, yeah. Would you have to measure? Yeah. So, I mean, we have tables on the potential renal acid load of foods and we have things that can offset it. So, so five grams of sodium citrate can offset 60 milli equivalents of acid. So essentially if you, if you take our tables, you add up your diet, um, all the dietary factors and the acid they provide for three and a half ounces, we have tables on that. You can see how much, um, of the, of acid load your diet is producing. And then you can take X amount of sodium citrate to inhibit that acid. You, you definitely want to be at a zero acid excreting diet. So you don't want to be excreting any acid that's, that's optimal. And then going even alkaline would be better. Um, but that's sort of how you can figure out how to at least eliminate all the acid from your diet. Yeah. So as for reference, then, um, like very, uh, more, more acidic foods are like cheese and, uh, meats and animal foods. And, uh, there's the, uh, our alkaline will bicarbonate richer foods would be vegetables and, um, fruits and lemon juice and, um, those kinds of things. Right. That's why steak and potatoes is actually an amazing, uh, combination because it's basically protein carb, right? You, you keep the fat down and you can have good amounts of carbs, um, with protein and you're not going to gain a lot of fat if you keep the added fats down and the potatoes help offset the acid of the steak. Yeah. And, uh, are there any mineral water brands that have higher amounts of bicarbonate? Gerald Steiner will inhibit one liter of Gerald Steiner will inhibit about 30 million equivalents of acid. And then there's other waters too. You just got to look at the label and see how much bicarbonate is in there. So Gerald Steiner has 1800 milligrams of bicarb per liter. Um, magnesia is another water that's got about a thousand milligrams per liter. But essentially if you're not consuming sodium citrates, which are supplements that can boost bicarbonate and you're only drinking mineral waters, you've got to probably have at least a thousand milligrams of bicarb per liter. And you got to consume about at least three liters for you to really inhibit, you know, acid load of a base diet. Yeah. So, uh, are there like any other ways to, uh, reduce the acidity besides diet and water? Like, I don't know any activities just out of curiosity. Um, not that I'm aware of, uh, like a, like a cold, like a cold bath or a sauna. They don't affect those things. Not to my knowledge because the acid is coming from the food and the hydrogens that are being released from the breakdown as well as negatively charged, um, sulfate molecules too, which require negative charge molecules, um, in the, in the plant foods, uh, to, to eliminate it. So not to my knowledge, is there any way to inhibit acid in the body through anything, but like some type of dietary bicarbonate forming substance, uh, consumption essentially. Yeah. Gotcha. Uh, so diet, nutrition, you mentioned the steak and potatoes, which are a pretty good, um, combo for, I think the performance and, uh, especially like muscle growth. Um, so what are maybe like some key overarching principles and, um, main points of when it comes to nutrition for, uh, optimal performance? Yeah. I mean, one, one key that we just talked about is balancing acid load. So that's one. Um, you don't want another key is you don't necessarily have to have a plant food like a potato or a banana to inhibit the acid. You can utilize bicarbonate supplements or sodium citrate, um, to do that if you're like totally against plants. So, or bicarbonate mineral waters. Um, but I do think that having maybe 20% of the diet from calories, at least standpoint from some type of plants, potatoes, bananas is probably going to improve performance and recovery in an athlete, um, simply from capping off muscle glycogen to reducing the acidosis. So I think an 80, 20 balance is pretty good. In my opinion, um, you can go off that a little bit. I would say probably wouldn't want to be here more than 50, 50 though. And an athlete, I don't think you should really have more than 50% of your calories coming from plant foods. I think that's probably the max I would ever do. And I really don't think, um, having yeah. So 50% What would be like the reasons or what would be the, let's say negative effects of getting more than 50% as fans? It's just not enough from a caloric perspective in regards to bioavailable iron zinc, um, B12, um, protein, it's going to be hard to get for an athlete. There are their goals for protein. If 50% of their calories or more is coming from plant foods, then you're starting to consume a ton of calories in order to hit that protein, um, of about, of about one gram per pound is another good goal to head when it comes to, um, muscle protein synthesis. And of course, you know, using lean body mass, you, you know, basing it more on how muscular you are is, is more evidence-based let's say, but like for the general person, they're not going to know how much lean their lean body masses. So simply one gram of protein per pound of, uh, body weight is a good target to head for maximizing muscle protein synthesis. Another goal is to really consume 30 grams of protein, about four times a day, 30 to 40 grams four times a day is, is helps optimize muscle protein synthesis from an athletic performance, like muscle building perspective. Gotcha. Yeah. And, uh, carbs and fats, like, uh, what's the, maybe a rational guidelines for those like are the low carb, how many, how many carbs? Yeah. As a post exercise, you want to hit like 1.2 grams per kilogram for carbs. So essentially like if you're a 70 kilogram, um, adults, you want to hit around 85 grams of carbs, like within that two hour anabolic window, um, with probably, it depends, uh, if it's a whole body workout, then you definitely want to go probably more 40 grams of protein. If it's, if you're doing a whole body workout, um, within two hours of exercise. Yeah. Um, this is the moment we can talk about no carb loading before that with food. So I think that's, that's very common among athletes to carb load before a competition at least, or before harder, harder training sessions. So how do you go about, you know, saying, uh, or, uh, how big of an effect would carb loading be for, uh, an important event and, uh, how to do it the proper way. Yeah. So essentially 50 to 75 grams of complex carbs an hour before vigorous, um, performance is going to probably help improve endurance, uh, by about 8%, which is a pretty significant gain. You can do this in many ways. Um, you can take things like maple syrup or orange juice. Um, you can do fruits, um, you can do the glycofuse or, um, vitargo, which is, um, basically your top tier sort of like supplemental complex carb. And essentially taking that an hour prior to performance is going to allow it to get out of the stomach. So it doesn't inhibit performance and it's going to help recap your muscle glycogen stores, which you can basically burn through about a third of your muscle glycogen within just like three minutes of vigorous exercise. Gotcha. Um, but what about like, uh, carb loading in terms of the, like the night before, like eating a bunch of pasta or something like that, uh, to top off your glycogen stores, um, is it rational to do it? Like, would it be smart to eat like a lot massive carb meal the night before, uh, or, um, would it be better to just wait until the other, the, uh, an hour and a half before the workout and then start to introduce the carbs? Right. Um, I think between five to eight grams per kilogram of total carbs for the day is a good target for athletes. Um, and when you're talking about vigorous exercise performance, so you're going to go anaerobic, you're going to burn through muscle glycogen. So in those instances, um, having more glycogen stores in the liver and the muscle caps is going to give you better performance. And you can do that by hitting about five to eight grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight. So pretty much around 500 to 800 grams of carbs for the whole day is tip for most athletes that weigh like 160 pounds is going to fully cap your muscle glycogen stores. Now, if you're someone who had to lose weight, a significant amount of weight for competition, you potentially could get benefits up to a thousand grams of carbs, because that's about the maximum glycogen storage for both the liver and the muscle, um, for the, for the 24 hours. Yeah. And what do you, what are the kind of best car foods like potatoes, rice to do that? Yeah. I mean, it doesn't have to be like, um, like an undercooked pool potato. It can be, um, you know, a fully cooked potato or, um, banana. Um, you know, but essentially you also want some fructose too. You don't want a ton, but like you do fructose plus glucose is better than just straight glucose. So, you know, combining those foods, which typically have both fructose and glucose like fruits, um, is, is a good way to help cap muscle glycogen and the protein does that as well. So adding protein plus the glucose and fructose sources of foods is going to, um, help replete glycogen and help, um, basically replete protein to muscle. Gotcha. Yeah. Um, fats though. So, um, a lot of people use like low, low carb diets, um, and a high fat intake to compensate for that. So what do you think is like, how does it compare to a high carb intake for at least athletes and, um, yeah. Like what, what are the situations where it would be beneficial or when would you use it? I think you can probably use, um, like sort of ketosis and higher fat, lower carb diets for endurance performance, but for anaerobic explosive vigorous performance, you should be consuming, um, you shouldn't be in ketosis. Let's put it like that. Yeah. I mean, like just the, the data should be clear that at least for the higher, highest level athletes, the, uh, high carb intakes, uh, generally outperform the keto. Um, uh, diets, um, maybe like in some ultra endurance, uh, sports, it can be a bit, um, more equal. Um, right. But at least like the keto groups or keto athletes don't tend to outperform the high carb athletes either. So, yeah. And especially in like bodybuilding or muscle muscle, let's say resistance training type of sports, uh, the carb carb, high carb intakes generally, uh, do, uh, do better at least at the highest level. Yeah. I mean, exactly. Like if you're, you got to understand that like vigorous exercise is already putting you in like a low carb state. So like then adding low carb on top of that is it's too much. It's not needed. It's going to like you said, it's going to inhibit performance compared to actually consuming carbs in those scenarios. Yeah, that's true. Um, well, I think that we do cover the, did cover quite all the, one of the biggest, let's say epiphanies or one of the biggest, uh, paradigm shifts, uh, for a lot of people, I think when it comes to just the hydration and preloading and, uh, pre cooling and those kinds of things, I think most people never have heard about those things. Um, and I do think that the book itself will have a ton more, uh, that people will learn besides those things. And it kind of barely scratches the surface when it comes to just, yeah, improving everything with, uh, pre exercise strategies and, uh, as well as like, uh, post exercise strategies for recovery. So yeah, everyone, both let's say professional athletes and recreational fitness enthusiasts, anywhere, like whatever your level of fitness is, uh, you can still find a lot of valuable information from that. And, uh, you can definitely apply it and you will see your improvements in, um, your performance and just overall fitness. Right. And like you said, like we cover sleep, which is a huge driver performance and we used to optimize sleep. So, and we used to optimize, there's a whole chapter on even function and what supplements can help. Um, because as you, as you're an elite athlete that increases your risk of upper respiratory infections. So you have a strategy and a protocol on things to take the potentially reduce the increased risk of, of basically getting the common cold or upper respiratory tract infections. So that's important too. Um, but just from a general immune health as well, that chapter is really nice in regards to that. We have recipes, we have dietary plans, which you've never, never had, um, in our previous two books, which is nice too, which applies to not to the athletes, but to the average person as well. For sure. Yeah. Well, yeah, they can check it out. And our, our third coauthor is also Tristan Kennedy, um, who we don't have on podcast today, but, uh, yeah. He's also like a wealth of knowledge and definitely contributed to basically putting the book together or giving it the final stamp as, um, as, as like a person who is working with a lot of professional athletes as well in the highest level. Yep. Tristan helped with the, the recipes, which is another thing that, uh, we hadn't had in our previous two books. So, uh, you know, it's great to have meal plans, but to have the recipes and how to make it and how much it's really nice too. Yeah, for sure. Uh, well, yeah, people can get the book on Amazon and, uh, yeah, I mean, that's, that's, it was a good talk with you. It's good to talk with you again and, uh, yeah, looking forward to working with you again in the future. Absolutely. Same. Nice talking to you too.