Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast—I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. In this episode, I’m excited to announce that the Physiologic Flexibility Certification will be open from March 17th to March 24th, 2025. I’ll also be heading to Parker University Talks in Las Vegas, where I’ll be speaking alongside some incredible experts in the field. Today, we’re diving deep into Physiologic Flexibility—the key to upgrading your performance by targeting homeostatic regulators like temperature, pH balance, expanded fuel sources, and oxygen/CO₂ regulation. These elements are critical for adapting to stress and pushing your resilience to the next level. I’ll break down practical applications for exercise, nutrition, and sleep, plus how to strategically apply stress to become more antifragile. Whether you’re into high-tech solutions or prefer simple, low-tech methods, this episode has actionable insights to help you maximize your recovery and performance.
Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. In this episode, I’m excited to announce that the Physiologic Flexibility Certification will be open from March 17th to March 24th, 2025.
I’ll also be heading to Parker University Talks in Las Vegas, where I’ll be speaking alongside some incredible experts in the field.
Today, we’re diving deep into Physiologic Flexibility—the key to upgrading your performance by targeting homeostatic regulators like temperature, pH balance, expanded fuel sources, and oxygen/CO₂ regulation. These elements are critical for adapting to stress and pushing your resilience to the next level.
I’ll discuss practical applications for exercise, nutrition, and sleep and how to strategically apply stress to become more antifragile. Whether you’re into high-tech solutions or prefer simple, low-tech methods, this episode has actionable insights to help you maximize your recovery and performance.
Triphasic 2 book now available!
Episode Chapters:
Get In Touch with Dr Mike:
Dr Mike T Nelson: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Flex the Diet podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase performance, add muscle, improve body composition and do it all without destroying your health within a flexible framework. Today on the podcast, I want to let you know that the Physiologic Flexibility Certification is open now.
Depending on when you're listening to this, it is open now as of March 17th, 2025. It'll be open for exactly one week, until Monday, March 24th, at midnight Pacific Standard Time, 2025. And I've got Some cool details and a concept I wanted to discuss here, but also wanted to let you know that if you are out in Vegas at the Parker University Talks, I will be there hanging out.
There'll be some great [00:01:00] speakers. My good buddy and current client, Dr. Tommy Wood, will be there giving a speech on cognition. Good buddy, Dr. Kelly Sturette will be there. Dan John. The great Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner. I work with a part-time over at Rapid Health Optimization. They'll be there giving you a talk on performance and hypertrophy and training and a bunch of other great speakers.
I think some of the headline key notes Gary Vanerchuk will be doing one, Dr. Andrew Huberman Dr. Angela Duckworth and Dr. Gabriel Lyon. It's a really packed lineup, so. If you're there, look for me. I will be wandering around there in Vegas, and then we'll be at the metal show on Friday night featuring Danzig, Down, and a couple other bands that are escaping my mind right now.
So today I wanted to chat [00:02:00] about a key concept of the Fizz Flex certification. So this is kind of like the level two to the flex diet cert. If you're already pretty good at exercise, nutrition, and sleep, kind of give yourself or your clients a B in that area. To me, this is the next level of interventions.
Now again, you could be looking at crazy supplements blood work. I think blood work is super important. Some supplements can definitely help. Again, you're looking at probably effect size in the single digits, but for some people that can be a game changer. There's all sorts of new biohacking stuff and everything else.
Some of it's useful, some of it's not. But to me, I wanted to come up with a framework of things that you can do to improve your physiology. Once you get a B in, you know, exercise, nutrition, and sleep. And my bias with that is that if you get the stimulation [00:03:00] correct, you can get a lot of other things wrong and still make progress.
So for example, if you have a really well designed program for your goals, and you can execute that with violent consistency, to me That is the foundation. As much as I love talking about nutrition and metabolic flexibility and everything that goes into that, I think it is incredibly important because you still need fuel for all of that for adaptation.
But if you really said push comes to shove and you can only pick one thing, which again, this is a theoretical question because everyone still has to eat and still has to do nutrition, I would actually say the stimulus, the exercise that you do, is probably by far and away the biggest thing. If you can get the stimulus more correct than wrong, you can't really stop adaptation.
Adaptation [00:04:00] is going to happen. So if that's true, then the next question is, what type of stimulus should you be providing to your body? Again, the basics here will never go out of style. Some type of picking up heavy objects, setting them down, putting them over your head, walking around with them, some type of lifting for muscle hypertrophy and strength.
Of course, it's going to be a no brainer. I would add a grip training in there. I've got a great course with Adam Glass on that if you're interested. Again, aerobic training. Super, super beneficial. I have a class on that. Flexible Medi Cardio, if you want to know how to get your aerobic system up to par. I would highly recommend that one.
It's not really open right now, but it'll probably open again at some point in the future. So we've got lifting stuff, we've got grip stuff, and we've got cardio. Awesome. Let's say, again, you're good with exercise. You're giving yourself a B in that category. What would you do next? [00:05:00] Because everybody wants to look for the next level.
Now you could take that B, maybe up to an A. And is there some benefit to that? I think there is. As I mentioned, you could do a deeper dive into aspects of recovery, such as heart rate variability and blood work. Again, I'm biased because I, I have a course on HRV, and blood work is super important. But if we go back to stimulus, what stimulus would you give your body?
And again, this is where the concept of the Physiologic Flexibility Cert is. I believe that if you are stressing the, what's called the homeostatic regulators in your body, that that is going to provide you the next level of ability to recover and become more antifragile. So I'll explain what antifragile is real quick.
So antifragile is sort of the next evolution of resilience. This is a phrase coined by Nassim Taleb. If I have a Tupperware container, [00:06:00] I can drop this Tupperware bowl container on the ground, on the floor, and it'll bounce and not break. If I take a ceramic let's say plate, and drop it, it's definitely going to break.
Now there are some benefits to ceramics. They can have some really cool properties. And when I did my master's in mechanical engineering, I literally did it on biomechanics and the advanced study of how shit breaks. It's called solid mechanics. But it becomes fragile if you hit it with a high impact force that can shatter, which is a downside.
Again, the Tupperware bowl container just bounces around and we're all good there. If something is anti fragile, it is the next step beyond our Tupperware bowl container. It literally will become better as you apply more stress to it. Again, this generally refers to only animate objects. And human physiology is a great example of this.
If I go to the gym and actually start doing bicep curls, my right [00:07:00] bicep, for example, gets a little bit torn down. If I look at it 24, 48 hours later, I see some, what's called Z line streaming, I see it's kind of a mess, especially if I go a little bit too hard, like I might have done on a cruise with my buddy, Dr.
Frediz Garcia, a few years ago, and, yeah, washing my hair for the next three days? Not a good idea. Or it was very difficult. Mental note don't play the game of hey let's do a drop set starting with the five pound dumbbells up to the 45 dumbbells for curls. We'll give you a break and then go backwards down and do that.
Yeah, that was brutal. But in that case, over time, in this case a fair amount of time, if bicep, they got a little bit better. Now again, I would probably be more intelligent about the stress that I apply. That was a little bit too much. That was definitely a distress session. But if I do it in a more intelligent fashion, a eustress model, I could probably come back in and four days later, do some more bicep work [00:08:00] again.
And over time, I'm going to see the bicep gets a little bit bigger and it is better able to handle that set amount of stress. It is more antifragile to bicep curls now. So if I go back to stimulus again, the goal is to make your body overall more antifragile. And I believe that once your nutrition and sleep and exercise are good, the next bang for your buck is targeting these what are called homeostatic regulators.
These are things your body has to 100 percent hold steady or else you're dead. So if you want a higher level of performance, I stole this from Dr. Eric Cobb, you need to teach your body to survive better. So the four pillars then would be temperature regulation, pH regulation, Expanded fuels, right, so you need to regulate fuel.
We go over that carbohydrates and fats in the flex diet cert. So here we're looking at the expanded [00:09:00] fuels, which are lactate and ketones. And number four is oxygen and carbon dioxide regulation. If you get better in each one of those areas, I believe you're going to be more anti fragile and just generally harder to kill.
Your ability to recover will go up. Now the key with this is we're not expecting that baseline value to change. So if we look at temperature, we know because all of these things have to be regulated within a very, very tight range. If we see core body temperature that's too high or too low, then again, you're dead.
So that's not good. However, the body has a ton of mechanisms in place to regulate this. And these processes can be upregulated over time, i. e. they can be trained and we can see positive adaptations within them. There's been a ton of data looking at heat acclimation. We know that if we [00:10:00] slowly expose your physiology to heat, this could be in the form of exercise, this could be changing environments, could be sauna, different ways to do it.
If we do this in an intelligent manner, Your body gets better at regulating temperature again. Now the key here is we're not expecting core temperature to change a whole lot. We are expanding what I call that human dynamic range, this sort of physiologic buffer zone, that now if we expose you to temperature, your body has already seen those stressors, and it is better able to handle them.
Just like my right bicep after doing bicep curls. It is better able to handle that set volume load intensity that's applied to it because it is more anti fragile. It has built up better structure and system to handle that level of stress. So in the Physiologic Flexibility Cert, temperature would have two ends.
It would have a higher temperature and a lower temperature. The lower [00:11:00] temperature could be going for walks in a cooler environment. Setting temperature lower or using things like cryo or cold water immersion. Again, with all of these, we have both what I call high tech and low tech ways of doing this.
So for every intervention, there is something you can do that doesn't really require much expense or technology or equipment. Again, we provide both in the certification. If we look at pH, for example, pillar number two, we can see that we can definitely do things to acutely. Change pH, i. e. lower pH or higher pH.
A lower pH is a more acidic environment. So if we want to create more hydrogen ions, one of the things we can do is super high intensity training. That will create a lot of lactate and hydrogen ions at the same time. This is colloquially called lactic acid. Lactic acid doesn't really exist for very long.
It completely dissociates into lactate, which turns [00:12:00] out is actually a really good fuel source. And those pesky hydrogen ions. More hydrogen ions is literally more acid into the muscle and into the blood. We could go the reverse. We could do things like a Wim Hof breathing technique, which is a superventilation or two mo breathing.
This does temporarily make the body more basic. We are changing the pH in the other direction. Now again, with these, there are pros and cons to each one. There are times you would want to do this, and there are times you would definitely not want to do this. So that is the tricky part. The assumption is that anything you do in these areas is going to be beneficial.
I found that that's not really true. The overall concept, I think, is good, but like all things, how you apply it into the real world is going to matter. An example here is doing too much cold water immersion. I [00:13:00] find not only could you have issues such as an after drop or changes in pressure, hard to re regulate temperature again, these are all stressors.
And I have seen people completely tank their heart rate variability scores by doing too much cold water immersion too soon and too aggressively. So, like all things, right, just like my example where I did way too much bicep work and couldn't scratch my own head for four days, you can definitely apply these two intents.
And again, that's why we spent a lot of time going over the big picture, so you understand the concept. The detailed intervention, so what does the science say for this in terms of research? How should we best apply it? How should we think about it in terms of framework? And then part three for each one is we have five explicit action items.
At this point you'll know exactly how you should best apply, say, cold exposure or hot exposure. And again, there are also no tech [00:14:00] ways you can do this too. And that same framework continues for pH, expanded fuels, and O2 regulation with oxygen and CO2, carbon dioxide. My last little rant here. is that this cert definitely is more on the bleeding edge applied physiology range.
I did as best I could to go through and read as many studies in this area. I started looking at this concept, oh man, probably well over eight years ago now. And I did my best to have it be updated. There'll be a couple more updates probably coming later this year. I know there's some other research that I'm waiting for to be released on that.
But it is definitely in the applied realm, where I want to make sure you can apply this physiology. There is some extensions here with some of the research, because a lot of these interventions, it was very hard to find complete randomized control trials [00:15:00] in humans and not, you know, one eyed ferrets or liver cells or weird stuff like that, that everyone online seems to use as their evidence.
And when we don't have evidence, I clearly state that, you know, here's the best we have. So we do have to make a few extrapolations from that. But I've played with these interventions myself directly for almost eight years now. Some of the things like cold water immersion, I wasn't able to get that set up till 2020.
So that one I've been doing semi daily, at least when I'm home, for over five years now, and having clients do these a lot in the background also. And it seems to be quite beneficial. You know, this is the point where I try to oversell the course. But, again, I do think the future is going this direction.
You are going to see more things in this area. And just be knowledgeable in it. And the reality is, if you're a trainer, clients are going to ask about a lot of these things. Right? We've seen a lot of popularity [00:16:00] now with cold water immersion and sauna. High intensity interval training, breath work all that stuff is included here.
So if you have any questions, you can just email me directly. We will have a link for the course down below also a link to the newsletter. Newsletter is the best place to get all the information. I've got a ton of information going out to the free insider newsletter this week on it. If you have any questions, just hop onto the newsletter, hit reply there.
I will try to get back to you within 24 to 48 hours. And anything else hit me up. So, that's my little bias here with the FizzFlex certification. Yes, full disclosure, I did create the certification, so I do make money off of it. But again, tried to make it a bleeding edge as hard as I can on the actual science here.
I, I don't have the exact reference number in front of me, but I, I want cert itself, there's over, I think, 230 references. I know at one point I, [00:17:00] I added up how many actual studies I read on this and it was over 400. A lot of them didn't necessarily apply, so they didn't really make the course. I didn't want to just keep stuffing references in there for the sake of stuffing references in.
But it is very science based and also very practical based. I've done this stuff with clients now, like I said, for over eight years and myself. And you also learn a lot by doing the applied realm there. So check it out. Any questions hit me up. Stay tuned. We've got another great podcast coming out this week.
If you're interested in the PhysSelect Cert, check out the info down below, and we'll have another interview podcast coming up this week. Thank you so much for listening. The PhysSelect Cert is open now, Monday, March 17th, 2025, until midnight Pacific Standard Time. on March 24th, 2025. Thank you so much.
Greatly appreciate it. Hope to see you in the search and talk to you [00:18:00] soon.
Speaker: This podcast is for informational purposes only. The podcast is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. You should not use the information on the podcast for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease or prescribing any medication or other treatment.
Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider before taking any medication. Or nutritional, supplement, and with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this or any other podcast.
Reliance on the podcast is solely at your own risk. Information provided on the podcast does not create a doctor patient relationship between you and any of the health professionals affiliated with our podcast. Information and statements regarding dietary supplements are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about [00:19:00] guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to therein.
If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.