Join me, Dr. Mike T. Nelson, on this episode of the Flex Diet Podcast as I introduce the Physiologic Flexibility Certification, a comprehensive course designed to enhance recovery and resilience. I summarize the 4 pillars of the course: temperature regulation, pH balance, energy sources and breathing. I also discuss the importance of integrating these systems to improve performance and resilience and address common misconceptions. The course is available from October 14th to October 21st, 2024. Tune in for insights into advanced aspects of nutrition, exercise, and recovery and how these can be applied to improve stress management and overall health. Sponsors: Tecton Life Ketone drink! https://tectonlife.com/ DRMIKE to save 20% Dr. Mike's Fitness Insider Newsletter: Sign up for free at https://miketnelson.com/.
Join me, Dr. Mike T. Nelson, on this episode of the Flex Diet Podcast as I introduce the Physiologic Flexibility Certification, a comprehensive course designed to enhance recovery and resilience. I summarize the 4 pillars of the course: temperature regulation, pH balance, energy sources and breathing.
I also discuss the importance of integrating these systems to improve performance and resilience and address common misconceptions. The course is available from October 14th to October 21st, 2024. Tune in for insights into advanced aspects of nutrition, exercise, and recovery and how these can be applied to improve stress management and overall health.
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[00:00:00] Mike T Nelson: Hey, what's going on? It's Dr. Mike T. Nelson here. Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase performance, muscle, improve your body composition, and do all of it without destroying your health in the process. Today is just a very short solo cast with me. I Physiologic Flexibility Certification.
[00:00:28] If you're listening to this when this podcast came out, it is now open. It is open from today, Monday, October 14th, through midnight, Pacific Standard Time, Monday, October 21st, 2024. You can go to the link below to get all of the information there. And that will take you directly to the sales page that has a ton of information.
[00:01:00] If you have any questions, you can find a way to contact me directly. But I'm super excited about this. And the reason I'm excited about it is if you've ever done larger certifications or education products, I've done course design for many other universities. From a small scale to a bigger scale to a bunch of different courses for the Kehrig Institute, which primarily does a lot of functional neurology clinical neuroscience.
[00:01:31] And, when you start off, you don't really 100 percent know where the data is going to take you. So in this case, I was pretty convinced that these four systems which we'll discuss, are related and do overlap, but if I'm completely 100 percent honest, I had no idea to what extent they would. And this course is primarily designed for if you're getting, I would say, like a B on nutrition, exercise, and recovery, or at least you feel pretty confident that you know what to do in those areas.
[00:02:15] Like everybody can. Everybody can work better on exercise and nutrition and sleep and all that stuff. But if you feel pretty confident, like you know the direction to go, then this would be the next level to add to that. And this will help with your ability to recover and just generally be more resilient, i.
[00:02:34] e. anti fragile, Taleb, great book. It's kind of dense, but I would highly recommend it. So this is the, think of this as like the level two, you flex diet one is a level one, which covers primarily nutrition interventions. We do some exercise, we do some movement, we do some stuff on sleep. And then once you're pretty good with those, as I mentioned, you want to go to the next level.
[00:03:00] This would be the next level. And I've gotten a lot of feedback that, Well, this is mostly not from people taking the course, this is from, we'll say, external marketing gurus. Some of them very well intentioned, some of them, meh, yeah, who knows. Basically saying that I'm kind of an idiot for putting four certifications into one certification.
[00:03:23] Because we're talking about four, what in the surface area look to be completely different interventions. So the theory here is we're going to target these four. homeostatic regulators within your body. And when we do that, we're going to have specific interventions for each one. And if you can increase your bandwidth, your physiologic headroom, it's my biased opinion that you'll be much better as a human being.
[00:03:48] You'll be able to handle more stress and just be more resilient overall. So pillar number one is temperature. We know humans are homeotherms. We like 98. 6. This is how neurotic I am. I didn't even trust that number. It turns out it's probably closer to 97. 7 is our, our temperature, but we know we can also do things like sauna.
[00:04:13] We can do things like cold water immersion. And we know that as you expose yourself in an intelligent manager to these, that you get better. You're able to handle more of those stressors. The second one is pH. You can do things to lower pH or temporarily increase pH. Number three is expanded fuels. It's looking primarily at ketones and lactate.
[00:04:40] Think of ketones as sort of the byproduct of running a bunch of fat through your system. And that lactate is a byproduct of running a bunch of carbohydrates through your system. Last one is carbohydrates. I already talked about that, sorry. Number four is oxygen and CO2. This is just breathing. How do you regulate oxygen and CO2 within your own physiology?
[00:05:08] So those are the four systems, or the pillars of the Physiologic Flexibility CERT, or system. And the reason why systems are so important one is, Well, that's exactly how your body, your athlete's body, your client's bodies function. It is a one entire system doing a task of maybe you're trying to gain muscle, lose fat, increase performance, et cetera.
[00:05:37] However, and I can say this after man taking almost 18 years of college full time, which I do not recommend the one benefit of doing a master's in mechanical engineering is that engineering is much, much better at teaching systems than physiology. And I realized that once I had transferred over to exercise physiology, I did some postgraduate work and biomedical engineering also at the university of Minnesota.
[00:06:06] And I think it's just the way everything has been developed sort of in silos, even exercise physiology, which is much more integrative than a lot of other areas. It's still pretty siloed into, you know, you're the motor control guy or even metabolism. You're looking at this one ATPAs, this one little thing.
[00:06:28] And I think that's, unfortunately, to the detriment. Like, you need to know the details, you definitely need to drill down. And I understand that when you're doing research in one area, you have to pick one niche area and execute in that, because the problem itself is just too way overwhelming and too big to get your arms around.
[00:06:46] However, I think we do a very poor job of zooming out and seeing how is all of this related. And again, I think exercise physiology does this better than most fields. But even within that, it is very siloed. And so some of the pushback I got from other marketers was, I shouldn't try to put four certifications into one, I should break this off and sell them as four separate courses.
[00:07:14] Maybe I'll do that at some point, but for right now, the main reason I'm not doing that is, when I teach this, which is all online, so you can go through it at your own pace, I have a segment called the big picture, and I did this at the FlexDiet cert also. And the big picture is to explain to you why targeting these homeostatic regulators is a benefit, and how each one of these four sort of desperate looking areas overlap, and indeed are related to each other.
[00:07:49] And I think that's the component, at least with training, performance physiology, even health is missing right now. We are not very good at integrating different areas. And so this is my attempt, and I'm pretty stoked with how it turned out, and all the feedback so far has actually been really good, of taking the next level, so level two, and putting together a complete systems view of it.
[00:08:20] So here's an example. If you are having impaired recovery, i. e. you are not able to get back to baseline fast enough to do your next training session, this could be from a myriad of different reasons. It could just be poor fueling, it could be your stress is too high, what type of stress, etc. You can probably list a bunch of things for a couple hours.
[00:08:45] But if you understand a system's point of view, then you can go through, say the level one. So you're at the flex diet cert. You're like, okay, so here's the checklist that I would have for nutrition. Here's the checklist for some basic stuff in exercise, progressive overload movement, walking, neat and sleep.
[00:09:05] Cool. Let's make sure those are all good. If those are all good, Then, that would lead you into the level 2, which is the PhysFlex certification, and those different areas. Is a person competing in temperature? If they are, maybe they're not adapted to it, and that is just crushing their performance. Or, maybe they have to do something in performance that is going to lower their pH.
[00:09:33] And they're not prepared to handle that. It's going to be more acidic. These generally tend to be the more higher intensity type work, because you're spinning off a bunch of lactate and hydrogen ions. Hydrogen ions are literally acid that's being dumped into the muscle. Or, maybe you're doing a very long duration event.
[00:10:00] So, I helped with a guy who was getting ready to cross Antarctica unsupported. He's gonna work to be the first human to ever do that. So that's gonna be a case where maybe ketones and other things long term are gonna be very important. Again, that's an extreme example. Or, looking at oxygen and CO2, if you look at a fair amount of metabolic heart data, you will see that respiration can be uncoordinated at certain levels or zones.
[00:10:36] I've seen this a fair amount or maybe a respiration rate is too high overnight. If you have a Garmin, you have an aura, I think Apple watch will do this also. You can look at your breathing rate, respiration rate overnight. And my biased opinion and my good friends Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner and the guys over at Rapid Health have talked about this and full disclosure, I do work part time with them over at Rapid Health Optimization.
[00:11:04] Brian McKenzie has talked a lot about this, Emily Hightower, even all the way back to Patrick McKeown's book. If your respiratory rate is 15, 16, 17, I've even seen 18 breaths per minute overnight while you're sleeping. I can guarantee you that that is costing you performance, increasing your stress load, and.
[00:11:29] Making you more anti resilient. Is that even a word? But it's basically not pushing you towards being resilient. It's the opposite direction. So these systems are all going to overlap, and the more you know, the more you can then look and see which one of them is going to be the right limiter. Are you kind of driving your high performance vehicle around with the parking brake on?
[00:11:54] And so in the PhysFlex cert, we talk about the big picture. How do all these systems kind of overlap? What is the concept of being more anti fragile, trying to increase that bandwidth, that physiologic headroom? And then we've got detailed lectures on each of the ones. So temperature, pH, expanded fuels, breathing.
[00:12:17] And then there's going to be a higher and a lower side on each one. So temperature, you could obviously go higher temp, hot, looking at hot baths, sauna, things like that. Or you can go lower and look at more things like cold water immersion. Same thing with pH, same thing with lactate, all the way to ketones.
[00:12:40] Same thing with breathing. Are you doing things to get rid of more CO2? Such as a Wim Hof or a super ventilation method where you're breathing in and out very, very fast. You are not hyper oxygenating tissue, you are actually getting rid of more CO2. And again, like all things, this has its pros and its cons.
[00:13:03] So, excuse me here, I promise I will make it through this, I'm losing my voice here a little bit. But, so the Physiologic Flexibility Certification covers all of those areas and how they work together. It is more complicated material, but I did my best to try to explain it in the terms that you understand.
[00:13:22] Thanks again. And then also for this round, if you have any specific questions on it, you will literally get my private email. You can literally email me any question, and I'll do whatever I can to answer it, because I want to make sure that this is useful for you, and I know no matter how much, Material you put out, sometimes people are going to have questions or specific case studies, which is totally fine.
[00:13:47] And you can just email me i'll get back to you and I will answer your questions. So Check it out. The link is down below It is open now as of monday october 14th through Monday, October 21st at midnight Pacific Standard Time. Any questions, you can reach out to me. Happy to answer them. Thank you so much.
[00:14:09] We've got another guest coming up midweek or so too that you won't want to miss and hope to see you in the Physiologic Flexibility Certification. Thank you.
[00:14:19]
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