The Phys Flex Cert enrollment closes tonight, Monday, Sept 25, 2023, at midnight PST. To enroll, go to https://miket.me/physflex. I explain how this certification can make you more robust, antifragile, and harder to kill. It takes you to the next level of interventions once you're good with nutrition, recovery, and basic sleep. We also discuss the four pillars of homeostatic regulation, including temperature, pH, fuels, and air, and how managing these can make you more resilient and robust. Get ready to change your training approach as I explain why the eustress model, which focuses on applying stress that you can recover from in a shorter period, is more beneficial. I compare the effects of high-intensity training against more frequent but less intense training, suggesting that the latter provides better results.
The Phys Flex Cert enrollment closes tonight, Monday, Sept 25, 2023, at midnight PST. To enroll, go to https://miket.me/physflex.
In today's episode, I explain how this certification can make you more robust, antifragile, and harder to kill. It takes you to the next level of interventions once you're good with nutrition, recovery, and basic sleep. We also discuss the four pillars of homeostatic regulation, including temperature, pH, fuels, and air, and how managing these can make you more resilient and robust.
Get ready to change your training approach as I cover why the eustress model, which focuses on applying stress that you can recover from in a shorter period, is more beneficial. I compare the effects of high-intensity training against more frequent but less intense training, suggesting that the latter provides better results.
Episode notes:
Phys Flex Cert enrollment ends tonight
[00:00:00] Dr Mike T Nelson: Hey, what's going on? It's Dr. Mike T. Nelson here. Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast, where we talk about things to increase your performance, strength, muscle, improve body composition, all without destroying your health within a flexible framework. And today I wanted to let you know that as of today, which is Monday, September 25th, the Phys Flex Certification is closing tonight at midnight Pacific Standard Time 2023.
[00:00:39] So if you're interested in getting into the Phys Flex Cert this year right now, the next plan to open it isn't until 2024. I go to the link below here which is, should be www.PhysiologicFlexibility. com. But I'll have a link below here that has all the information. And then... You'll get taken to the sales page, and it'll have all the information for you.
[00:01:08] So if you're looking for ways to be more robust, anti fragile, increase your recoverability, and just generally be harder to kill this is the certification for you. So the Level 1 will be the Flex Diet Certification, which covers nutrition and recovery, a little bit of exercise and movement. And then the level two is the Physiologic Flexibility Certification.
[00:01:33] Once you're pretty good with your nutrition, recovery, and basic sleep, this would be the next level of interventions that you can do to increase your ability to be more anti fragile and just more resilient. to overall stressors, both in your life and from training. We cover the four pillars of homeostatic regulation, which is number one, temperature.
[00:02:00] Can you be exposed to warmer and colder temperatures and do okay? Two would be pH. Three would be fuels, ketones as fuel sources. And four is air, which is how you manage oxygen and CO2. If you get better at each one of those areas, in my biased opinion, that makes you much more resilient and robust. The good part is, like the biggest complaint about adding additional things to your training, is the factor of time.
[00:02:37] And while it is true that some of these interventions, like we talk a fair amount about Zone 2 Cardio they do add more time. Zone 2 Cardio is probably the biggest one from a time investment. However, most of them are relatively short. If you're doing a true high intensity interval training, you, most people I've worked with, they actually do less work.
[00:02:59] Although the quality has to be higher, and your perceived exertion... Normally is much harder, so you're going to harder, but for shorter periods of time, therefore keeping the quality of work high. Most people I work with, if they start sauna or cold water immersion, they tend to add too much time or intensity too fast.
[00:03:23] I've seen much better results with going slower on that. So less time in the cold or in the heat and changing the parameters, so it's not as bad. Meaning temperature wise for sauna is going to be a little bit lower if you can control the temperature, sometimes you can't. Ditto with cold water immersion.
[00:03:43] With cold water immersion, most people, if you can control temperature and time, if you have somewhere you can do it yourself, or if you're just using cold water in a shower, you may be limited. However, if you can control that, I have people start at around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, for literally just 30 to 60 seconds, which really isn't that much.
[00:04:04] And the progression that I did myself took about two years to get down to 42 to 43 degrees for five minutes. Now again, the model we're using for this is what's called the eustress, E U S T R E S S. So it's stress that you can apply to yourself and your physiology, but you can generally recover from in a relatively shorter period of time.
[00:04:29] So I'm a huge fan of doing more of a eustress model. with increased frequency and not as much on the stress. So if you told me, okay, my options are to do one super hardcore sauna session a week, or I can do a little bit shorter duration, a little bit less temperature, but do it more frequent, i. e. maybe three to four days a week.
[00:04:55] I believe the latter is going to be far superior. This kind of goes back to my training philosophy too. That high quality work done with higher frequency, I feel you're going to get much better results than more infrequent, but high intensity training. I just feel like the adaptations you get are much better.
[00:05:16] This goes all the way down the list from motor learning to nutritional components, support, muscle protein synthesis, etc., etc. The same idea would apply to the interventions. It would do that are covered in the Physiologic Flexibility Cert. So I like doing things that are more the eustress model that are within the ability of your body to recover within 24 to 48 hours.
[00:05:43] Now again, there is a time and a place for distress training. Distress meaning it's going to take you much longer to recover. Typically in the model that I'm covering in the cert, and even in the Flex Diet Cert, I use this exact same model. Distress training is typically going to be a competition day or for people who are not competing, a test day, taking a little bit of a deload and you're checking your performance, or you've got a huge amount of life stress that happens, and sometimes you just end up with distress training due to life events, due to possibly due to travel or other things going on.
[00:06:21] The key is deciding that you are going to do a distress session on purpose. Most people, if I view their training people, these are people who are training at probably intermediate to advanced level already. They're making it to the gym three to four times a week. They're doing mostly intelligent training.
[00:06:40] I feel they get better results by turning down the intensity, doing more high quality work, and then adding frequency first, and then duration. So if they're lifting three days a week, they could maybe go to four days a week. But have the sessions be a little bit paradoxically easier. I think you're going to get much better adaptations.
[00:07:03] So same thing with the interventions here with the Physiologic Flexibility Certification. The good part of that model is that the time that you spend on them is actually going to be less per session. So again, it's the same principles. So I get obsessed with what are the overarching principles that govern this.
[00:07:23] Once we figure those out, It is rather easy to figure out how to apply them. And the nice part is these principles don't really change that much. So I still use the Eustress Distress model in the FlexDiet Cert. Again, I use that for the PhysFlexCert also. And then how the course is set up, a similar idea as in the FlexDiet Cert.
[00:07:45] You have your big picture. What is the concept of homeostasis. or your homeostatic regulations or your regulators and how this applies to all of your physiology. So that's going to be part one is the big picture that's going to iterate and go through the entire certification. As we mentioned, we've got the four pillars.
[00:08:07] There's going to be a detailed, the technical video. What does the research say? What are the mechanisms involved? Again, this is based on human data. There is some fuzzy rat data in there once in a while for mechanistic stuff where we don't have human data yet. Most of it is based on actual human data.
[00:08:24] So you'll learn the intricacies of it. And then part three is the explicit action items. This is so that you can learn how to directly apply it. So all the best information in the world doesn't do anything unless you can apply it. And one of the issues I've seen with other certifications is They're either pretty good on kind of the research side, they get that generally correct, but they are completely miserable on how do you actually apply it.
[00:08:55] And I've seen other things where the application of it is pretty good, but the rationale why is either completely wrong or not even existent at all. My biased belief is that you want to understand the context. If you don't understand the context of how you are applying these things at worst, you're, I'd say at best case, you're not very effective.
[00:09:18] Worst case scenario, you potentially can be dangerous or you could drive people into the wrong adaptations. The example I used on a previous podcast here was, if you have someone where they're overbreathing, they are off gassing or exhaling too much CO2, The last thing you would want them to do is a lot of superventilation methods, i.
[00:09:42] e. kind of Wim Hof type style breathing. Again, that doesn't mean that type of breathing is bad or incorrect. It just depends upon the situation. If you have someone who's already over breathing, they're off gassing, they're exhaling too much CO2, their respiratory rate is elevated at night, the last thing you want to do is push them further down those adaptations.
[00:10:06] You want to go the opposite direction. If anything, you'd want to do CO2 retention methods. We talked about this in the previous podcast. You'd want to do some Zone 2 stuff, some cadence stuff, nasal breathing. Again, this is a lot of from Shift Adapt. So Brian McKenzie his stuff. Dr. Andy Galpin has talked a fair amount about this and other people too.
[00:10:26] Even Patrick McEwen and his book has talked a lot about that too. So again. Neither one of those interventions are necessarily bad. We just want to make sure that you're applying the right intervention at the right circumstance. Which is why you need to understand, one, the overall context of why you're doing this, where it fits in.
[00:10:45] And then you do want to understand the physiologic mechanisms so that you can think your way through. The hard part with a lot of these more complex physiology topics, is there is not a simple, straightforward, easy answer. If there was, I would have written this as an e book, and it would be five pages, and it would just tell you exactly what to do.
[00:11:07] Unfortunately, we're not at that level of understanding physiology yet, and we probably will not get there for any time soon. The good part is, we can understand the physiology, and in the cert, I explain it to you in terms that you can understand. You don't need a thesaurus next to you to try to figure all this out.
[00:11:24] And then you can apply them either to yourself or if you're a coach with your clients and then when you do that, you get the right intervention in the right context and their adaptations and the results are going to be greatly enhanced. The beautiful thing about physiology is that it's always constantly adapting.
[00:11:44] If that is true, the question then is, what is the stimulus that we want it to adapt to? We want to make sure that is going to push your physiology into the right direction. So my biggest pet peeve with a lot of these interventions from, cold water immersion to sauna to breath techniques is that not that they're necessarily bad per se, is that the concept of context isn't talked about.
[00:12:12] It is typically one intervention that is pushed as the be all end all intervention. Just do this and it'll fix all your problems. And for the right context, that can be true for the wrong context. Again, that's going to drive you in the wrong direction. Similarly, again, if I'm picking on Wim Hof breathing, just because it's popular and easy to pick on, I've had some athletes where the heart rate variability, their stress scores were getting completely screwy.
[00:12:42] One athlete in particular, a couple of years ago, we went through all their training and went through their nutrition, went through their sleep. We're looking at it with aura, have all, everything is being monitored. Life and I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. So I asked him, I said, what are you doing different?
[00:12:57] They're like, Oh, I started doing cold water immersion at like 42 degrees for five minutes every day. And I added in 10 minutes of Wim Hof breathing beforehand. What we saw was their stress went absolutely through the roof. Because adding cold water immersion, adding Wim Hof breathing, both of those things can be very beneficial, but they are stressors upon your system.
[00:13:21] And this athlete had never done either one of those, and not used a eustress approach, and this was more of a distress training, again, added on top of their other training that was already on the razor's edge. So that was enough to push them over where the resting heart rate went up, their HRV dropped, They're having a hard time recovering.
[00:13:43] They felt like crap. They felt good after doing cold water immersion and the Wim Hof breathing, but that only lasted a couple hours. And then they would crash afterwards and they started consuming more caffeine to get through their training and they had a hard time sleeping at night. So again, we need to back up and look at what is some of the root cause of this.
[00:14:03] Keep an eye on stress. Go back to what is the model that we are using to evaluate all this. Again, I'm biased to the eustress versus a distress model, and look at each particular intervention. The good part is when we find the right intervention, we can see some positive additive results by incorporating these things in.
[00:14:27] So that's today's very short podcast. I just wanted to provide some context that some of these interventions, again, can be super useful, which is the whole point of the certification. But the other side of that coin is that some of these interventions can actually push you into the wrong direction if they are not one, apply correctly and two, applied to the correct circumstance or context.
[00:14:53] So you need to understand the big picture, you need to understand each intervention, and then you need to know how to correctly apply each one of those. Which again is the framework that I use for both the FlexDyed CERT and the Phys Flex Cert . So the Phys Flex Cert does close tonight if you're listening to this podcast as of Monday, September 25th, 2023.
[00:15:16] It does close at midnight Pacific Standard Time. We will have a link down below within the podcast to get all the information and to still get in if you're listening to this right now. If not, then it'll open again in 2000 24. You can go to mike t nelson.com for all the information to get on the Daily newsletter.
[00:15:39] So thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you to everyone who's enrolled in the Phys Flex Cert already. Super excited for all of you to get going on that. And again, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We will have another podcast coming out this week yet very soon. So stay tuned for that.
[00:15:59] Thank you so much. Talk to all of you very soon.