← The Revive Stronger Podcast
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- [00:01]
Greg Potter
So good, so good, so good. New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom rack stores now.
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Steve
Get ready to save big with up
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Greg Potter
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Steve
your favorite rack store for free.
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Greg Potter
Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.
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Steve
The last time we spoke, Greg, I believe was 10 months ago. least that's when the episode came out. It was episode 470. Talking about longevity, which we'll probably talk about some of those things today. It's been quite a long time. You've been traveling a lot. You've been up to a lot of different things. And a question that always comes to my mind is, because it's something that I don't do is traveling a ton and going to all these different locations. Actually, I think a lot of people don't get that opportunity. So I always think it's interesting to know some of the things that someone like yourself learns from those experiences because you experience, I guess, different cultures and putting your body through different things. So, yeah, I'd love to dive into that, but also just know how you are.
- [01:11]
Greg Potter
I'm well, thanks, mate. Nice to see you. And yeah, it has been a while. I think it was last April that we recorded because I think I was in Mexico and I'm currently on the other side of the planet in Thailand. So that's very pertinent to the question that you just asked. Some people cheating in might think we're supposed to be talking about muscles and nutrition. Why are you talking about travel? But just to answer your question, I think there are lots of things to learn from traveling and I'd maybe disagree with something that you said, which is that a lot of people don't get the opportunity to travel. My impression, and this might be completely wrong, this is just intuition, is that the COVID pandemic ignited a desire to travel in a lot of people. Because there are places where I go and have been going since my late teens, where once upon a time, very few people went there. And it seems as if nowadays everyone wants to go to those places. I think part of the influence at play is, is from social media too, because people get fed things by the algorithms and it's these shots of beautiful vistas, seaside destinations, whatever. And so if people have the means, I think they now get further afield than they used to. I know for me, growing up, family holidays were in the south of France and That was true every year. And part of that obviously is relates to resources, but. But I just think that people are a little bit more exploratory now than they used to be. But at the same time, a lot of people tend to gravitate to the same destinations. In the uk, for example, it feels like everyone wants to go to Vietnam, Peru and Japan for some reason. A lot of people have become really, really intrigued by those cultures in recent times, and for good reason. They're all amazing places. But to get to your question, I was thinking about this earlier today and it's a really good question. I think one obvious point is that travel in the long term could be really hard on your body. And even though that's the case, it's often worth it. My lifestyle is far from optimized for health and performance, but those are my priorities right now. And I think a lot of people save things for late in life. Thinking early in my adulthood, I'm going to work hard on my career, I'm going to earn plenty, retire as early as possible. And I can do a lot of that stuff later in life. But I think actually doing some of that earlier in life makes a lot more sense. And I think people are approaching that a bit differently now than they used to because a lot of things that are really enriching of quite challenging physically. So take the example of hiking or something like that, or maybe you want to learn some sort of water sport. Doing that in your 20s and 30s is much more likely to work out well than trying that later in life. So I almost think about this as like a series of many retirements where you're taking extended breaks throughout your life as opposed to just saving it all for the end. And that way you can take advantage of being young and healthy and more physically able. But it depends how you travel. Some people, they'll go to a country and they'll just stay in the same place for three months at a time or longer. And I think that can be a great approach and you'll learn a lot more about the culture and the people that way. Frankly, my travel is pretty high intensity though, because I'm still in the mode where I feel I want to see everything yesterday. And because it's high intensity like that, it is challenging. But doing the basics well gets you a long way in terms of things like training and nutrition. And the good news is that in much of the world, even quite remote locations nowadays, you can find a half decent gym, for example. It used to be really hard, but with things like Google Maps. They're so much more accessible than they once were. And same thing with nutrition. Nutrition is definitely easier than it used to be because I think food hygiene, for example, has got better around the world. But what I've realized over time is that for me at Eastern, this is going to differ for everyone. I used to find it very easy to lose weight traveling, and I arrived at a handful of different items I can get almost anywhere, they're relatively healthy that are consistent with what I need. And those include things like oats, uht, milk, bananas, peanut butter, and they're tasty. I can get them anywhere, get some good protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, that type of thing, and also pack in loads of extra calories and thereby maintain my weight. I think travel can teach you a lot about what you need. So people differ, for example, a lot with respect to the amount of human contact they need. Some people, they're very extroverted, some people are very introverted, and everyone needs people. So you could be quite introverted, but traveling in the long term can be very lonely, depending on the circumstances. I think that's especially true if you're not feeling very well physically because then suddenly you're far from home and you can't do the things that you're actually there to do and you've got no one around to help you out if you feel terrible. And at that point it just really, really sucks. So I think it can teach you a lot about yourself. And for a lot of people, I think the highs are going to be very high and the lows are going to be deeply low. So it's almost like the amplitude of things that you go through each day is a bit bigger than it might be back at home. I think related to that, it can make you more resilient, less resilient, or both at the same time. And what I mean by that is because you are exposed to so many stressors regularly, like new pathogens like jet lag, sleep loss, because you're always sleepy in your environments, that takes its toll. That is going to weigh you down physically, although that's going to interact with how you think about the degree to which it will do so. But at the same time, I think psychologically you can become a lot more resilient, which is quite interesting. So in some ways it's beneficial, in other ways it's not. And also you're always being stimulated. So I think in many ways it's actually probably very good for the brain because you might have to pick up new languages, for example, if you want to. The reality as an English speaking person is that most people speak English, we're spoiled and therefore us Brits are rubbish at speaking foreign languages. And we find it amazing if someone reads a book in German or something, it's their second language, when in most of the world people read books in English and it's just a non deal. And then I think there's a huge amount to learn from the places that you go to. And sometimes it's unexpected. You might go somewhere and not anticipate much, but you find something about it really moving. I had that last year in Taiwan. It just felt like it was. It's this little bastion of peace and the people there are so lovely. And then alongside that you've got this big bully China that at some point in the next couple of years will probably try and steal it. And it's so sad to think about that because it's such a lovely place. And with many countries around the world like the US becoming more and more selfish, Taiwan doesn't necessarily have some of the support from others that it once did. So it just felt very representative of a lot of things that are going wrong in the world at the moment. And I think I found it powerful for that reason. And then other places you go and they might not be very economically developed, for instance, but the people there are incredibly content. And I think there's a huge amount to learn from that and other things. Much of the world is changing incredibly quickly and the rates at which places are changing differs hugely between countries. So a good example is Bali, Steve, where have you just been there recently or are you going there shortly?
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Steve
It'll be July. I'll be there hopefully as long as the world maintains some sense of normality.
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Greg Potter
I've got. Bali is a good example of that. Bali has changed so much in recent years. And the south of Bali, up to a bird now, is pretty laden and concrete and packed with tourist parts of Bali. Still Bali as It was probably 30 years or so ago. But then other parts of Indonesia are relatively untouched by development. Like some of the small islands, it being an island nation, there are so many places and some of them just aren't really on the tourist map. So they're probably much as they were 50 years ago. But I think you see those changes in different ecosystems more like you see them more underwater. For example, you can go to the same place, the same reef two years in a row, second year, it could be completely different. It can just be decimated versus the first year. Same thing with rainforests and then two more things. I think many places can feel like home, depending on what you're like as a person. So for some people, they will feel like they have one home, and then there'll be others like me, who naturally are more gypsy like. And then it feels as if multiple places have that. For example, I feel somewhat at home in everywhere from Sardinia to Indonesia to the uk. There's something about those places that carries that for me. But also people can feel like home. There might be an individual anywhere in the world who feels like you're home. And when you don't have that, that can be very hard. And then finally, I'd say for whatever is cool to you, I think cool people go to cool places and do cool stuff. So if you want to find your tribe, if there's something that you love and you go somewhere that is the Mecca for that thing, you'll probably really get on with the people. And I find that with scuba diving, for example, like, I go to these very, very remote places because I love diving. And the reality is the best dive sites in the world are very remote because they just don't have as many people going there. And you get all sorts of incredibly interesting people that go there, but to me, they're interesting. And that's why I'm saying cool for you, because what's cool for you might not be cool for me. So that was a long answer, but it's a. It's a good question. And even just thinking about it for like 10 minutes or so, a lot of things surfaced.
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Steve
Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, I think some really good lessons and takeaways there. Lots of things had me thinking. One of them was you mentioned kind of taking the opportunity to do things now whilst you're fit and healthy. And that's something I battle with now. And then it's the same. It comes from. And I don't know if you've read it, but it aligns with Bill Perkins Die with Zero book. Yeah. You'd probably really resonate with it. But essentially his message is like, there's no point taking money to your grave. Like, spend it earlier on things that you can currently do, like he said. Exactly. Like you said, when you're retired, you're kind of older, you might have the money, but then you don't have the health and the means to go and do these amazing hikes and trips and things. And also. And he just kind of emphasizes spending money on experiences versus items, because those experiences pay what he calls, like a memory dividend. So you have memories, Greg, of all these travels that when you're 70, 80 years old and you can't do it, you're like, you can reflect on it. And that's something I battle with because it's something I'm not good at. I don't know if the listeners will be able to resonate. I think it's a bodybuilder trait where obviously like you said, you're not quote unquote optimal for maximizing muscle growth, traveling and being in different gyms, different environments, not have your sleep, nutrition, all of that kind of locked in or for any like a kind of physical endeavor really. But so it's easy to then reinforce that in my own environment where I'm like very structured day to day looks the same. And so yeah, it's confronting to me when I talk to someone like yourself or I have friends who travel quite a bit more and I'm like, oh, I desire that flexibility. And not only does bodybuilding lock people in, but I think some careers do as well. So even with what I do, whilst I could use my laptop and travel a little bit more, it's not as efficient and effective and I can't be as productive as if I'm at my desk. So if I did less work I could make it more free and flexible. Apart from the fact that I have a little dog that also anchors me to the home as well. So yeah, that, that just brought loads of thoughts in surrounding that book and I just think it's a good takeaway for people in regards to, I love the way you put it, like mini retirements almost like where you just like travel for a bit and then come back. But I guess practically that might be challenging, at least in my head it sounds challenging.
- [15:22]
Greg Potter
Yeah. And I'm in a very unusual position having always been self employed. You're in that position too. Has your attitude to that resulted in how you act changing? Are you actively trying to travel a bit more? For example?
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Steve
I was, well we were told as you know, Ada, my dog, for those that don't know, she, she was, we were told she had terminal cancer and yeah, she, yeah, very cut, very, very not looking like she has terminal cancer. And we actually had our third follow up scan now and she's like in clinical remission. So I had expected that we wouldn't have her this year and then I was like, oh, I bought a new laptop, I was like I'm going to travel more because like that's something I want to be doing and like obviously I'm going to Bali for like a bodybuilding camp I was invited to, which I'm very excited for and I'm definitely still doing that. And I think I have to just get comfortable with the fact that I can leave her. I don't have to be here. It's just an expense. It's an extra expense of traveling where you have a carer that looks after the dog or you don't know, you send them to kennels or whatever. But that's not something you could imagine. It's not something Ada would do very well with. I also don't have family that could look after her. But anyway, I'm making excuses. Jimmy Carr said something really like a great quote recently. It was something along the lines of, you don't have a. If you have money, you don't have a problem. If money can solve your problem, you don't have a problem because money solves it. In that sense, he was referring to a hair transplant. So it was just like it wasn't a problem losing my hair because I had money and I got a hair transplant. But similarly with Ada, like really, if I work as hard as I work and I have the income for it, similar to paying for her chemotherapy treatment, cancer then wasn't a problem. Like I can get care to look for her. So I think sometimes I, and I think it can be easy for people. At least I hope I'm not the only one to make excuses because it's, as you said, it's a bit uncomfortable to get out of routine. You get very comfortable with things. And like you said, also people travel to the same places similar to picking the same item on the menu, like food wise or going to the same restaurant because you know, you trust it, it's familiar. But sometimes you need to push the boat out and you might learn that you don't like it, but at least you learned that and it's a new experience. Whereas I think for some personality types it's easy to get set in your ways.
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Greg Potter
Yeah, definitely.
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Steve
So that's me anyway. But yeah, I love the flexibility. And also it's just within our little niche within the evidence based space. It made me think of this where fatigue has become this, like, oh, be careful of fatigue, don't push too hard, you get fatigued. Don't do too much volume, you get fatigued, you have to manage fatigue. And it made me think of, sorry, say that again.
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Greg Potter
You build that reserve.
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Steve
Yeah, exactly.
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Greg Potter
Tolerate fatigue by inducing fatigue.
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Steve
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And also I think people who just end up having Like a fragility mindset. They're like, oh, I didn't sleep well, so I'm gonna skip training today because it won't be, quote unquote, the best session ever. It's like, actually quite often how you feel isn't representative of what your body can do. And so this traveling aspect and where you're like, actually it's surprising how good I can still perform or my body composition is holding if I get some of the. Just nail the basics here, here and there. Yeah.
- [18:36]
Greg Potter
And it really doesn't take much to hold, as you know. I think that's well recognized in sports science and has been for at least two decades. But I noticed that myself. One of the things that's curious about training while traveling, I used to do a bunch of body weight stuff. If I didn't have access to a gym, like when I first went away outside of Europe when I was 19, I'd always end up doing sprints in random places and single leg hip thrusts in random places and close grip push ups and body rows and pull ups off trees and all sorts of random stuff. And I could get better at doing those exercises, but they just didn't transfer to any of the gym stuff. And I've realized over time if I don't do any of that and maintain my weight, I don't think that in those two parallel conditions, there'll be a difference in my subsequent gym performance several weeks later. And actually you can really train quite infrequently and maintain where you are. So right now, for example, like, my shoulder's a bit beaten up, so that's not ideal. But my physical fitness is just about as good as it's ever been, despite a really random schedule in recent weeks. And that's just getting back to what I was saying earlier, but obviously that interacts with how fit you are. And for someone like you, Steve, who is in exceptionally good condition, the amount that you need to maintain you are where you are might be quite different from someone who isn't nearly as physically fit. So it depends on the person, but it's definitely something that I've appreciated over time. And also last year, for the first time in my life, my adult life, I took four weeks off training entirely because I was staying on an island. I was doing my dive master, so diving every day. And my day was 5:30am until 8:00pm, many days. So I wouldn't have time for it regardless, unless I wanted to eat into my sleep. And I look back and think, actually that was really good for My body because I had a couple of niggles and they cleared. I went back to the gym and my strength was probably 15% down, 10% down, but it bounced back very quickly and I never really had those periods off. Even though working as a coach, I'd worked with athletes for some of my adult life who would do that every off season for a bit. I think the attitude to that has changed a bit over time. People used to just take the off season completely off and then they'd turn up at preseason training really quite out of shape. So there's less of that now than there used to be. But I think a few weeks totally off here and there can actually be quite restorative, especially psychologically. If you return to training and you're just itching to go and your niggles have subsided and you're in slightly worse shape than you were, you could probably quickly bounce back to at least where you were previously and hopefully without the niggles this time around.
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Steve
Yeah, very well said. I normally have to be forced to be taken out of the gym. So similar to you with that, like forced me out. And then I very often love training, Steve. Yeah, yeah. And then the first few days it's uncomfortable and then you're like, oh, actually this isn't so bad. And then you get back into things and you're like, oh, that actually probably did me more good than harm that I was thinking it would. Especially for the person that is on top of it. Like 90% of the time. Like often those things are actually more positive than negative for them. It's the people, it's negative for the people who aren't on it the rest of the time and there's just extra not being on it. So yeah, I think that that's a good lesson too. So I need to travel more. Maybe some of the listeners do as well. A question that I had for you, Greg, that has been tickling me a little bit because I've often talked about how natural bodybuilding, the great thing about it is a lot of the things that we do to kind of maximize our muscle growth is also really good for health. And so a question that I wanted to like almost test myself or test that claim that hey, natural bodybuilding is super healthy. Is. Is there anything that is on conflict with our long term health when we're trying to maximize our muscle growth?
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Greg Potter
Well, I think the short answer is it depends how you do it. Right. And I haven't looked to see if there's much research looking at natural bodybuilders later. In life. I think natural bodybuilding is something that has largely gained traction in the last decade or so. So be really interesting to see in a few decades time how natural bodybuilders fare relative to their peers of the same age and biological sex. Then we'll be able to make some inferences about that. So this really is just speculation, but is natural bodybuilding a way of life that is optimized for healthy lifespan? No, but loads of things natural body be able to do are conducive to that. And exercise is a good example. The acute responses to exercise are in many ways beneficial in terms of things like blood sugar control and so on. The adaptations that you get to training are also really beneficial for longevity. High levels of muscle mass are gonna help with things like blood sugar control. But if you are doing lots of resistance training, your bones are gonna be more dense and stronger than other people. That's gonna protect against frailty. You're gonna have more muscle strength and power as well. That's gonna help stop you falling. And if you do fall, you can catch yourself better, so you're less likely to break one of those stronger bones as well. And there's a vicious cycle of frailty late in life where if you, for example, fracture a hip and you end up in bed, then that unloading leads to rapid atrophy of the relevant tissues and you quickly become very frail indeed. And life expectancy for that reason after fracturing hip is really quite short once you're past say the age of 60. So obviously the training in many ways can be beneficial. I think the general regimented lifestyle is in many ways conducive to longevity. Your body thrives on regularity. And if you are consistently eating and training at the same times, going to bed at similar times each day and so on, all of that is supporting your ability to stay well in the long term. But other attributes of natural bodybuilding could be detrimental, of course. So if you go back to training, then injuries I think really take their toll in the long term. I think that's something that people don't speak about enough. And I know I've had a bunch of injuries, muscle strains, couple of fractures and so on. And you know what it's like where it's never quite the same after. Like I remember dislocating my thumb playing rugby when I was 17. Since then it's always been unstable and random little things will just pull out of place or my right shoulder, I've probably just irritated through a bunch of overuse type injuries over the years. Often Doing things like dumbbell flies. Once upon a time it was things like dips would really irritate it and I just push through that and just ultimately probably make it worse. And then as the years go by, those joints are just more likely to become arthritic and so on. And maybe at one point you're going to need some sort of replacement. And that of course is going to affect your activity and your metabolic health, your strength, the list goes on. But lots of things ripple from that. And I think going back to the regimented lifestyle that can be very isolated socially, doesn't have to be, but I think it can be. Obviously you can find your tribe within natural bodybuilding and I'm sure you've met loads of people that you really, really like through your work and that can give you a massive sense of purpose and so on. But I think for some people, maybe people who frankly are less successful than you are by common metrics of success, might not have those upsides, but they might have all the downsides. And so that is not going to be good because there seems to be quite strong relationships between social isolation and loneliness, which is slightly separate constructs, but relate to each other and long term health. And then I think some of the lifestyle strategies that are used by bodybuilders could be better tuned to support longevity. So if you think about nutrition, for example, I don't know what right now people are doing and talking about in that world, to be honest, in terms of this kind of thing, I mostly follow the research that's coming out as opposed to what people are posting about online, with few exceptions, you being one of those exceptions. Steve, I hope you're flattered, Appreciate it, but I am. Many people, for example, are going to use something like an if it fits your macros approach to nutrition and focus on nutrients. So in that instance, macronutrients, while barely considering other nutritional factors that might not be essential but are important to optimizing various processes. So I think I've probably previously spoken briefly about taurine, for example. There are loads of these. You could point to Coenzyme Q10, the list goes on. I also think going back to the idea it depends on how you do it, the kind of huge weight cycling that some bodybuilders go through is probably not good. I think staying within a range that's appropriate for you is probably going to be quite important. And I know that you stay very lean in your off season relative to most people. I don't know how true that is of you relative to natural bodybuilders but I suspect your range is smaller than the average. And I think in terms of long term health that is probably a good thing because I think there are probably a few factors that are going to be relevant to longevity like your, your energy balance, but your metabolic rate and how that can be affected by weight cycling and the implications that might have for your body composition down the line. Obviously caloric restriction is something that's been studied for a long time by geroscientists as a means to extend lifespan. Whether that's true of humans isn't so clear though. I think the ability to translate that research from non human animals to humans is probably going to be quite limited in many instances. But I do think that in general it's going to be better for your health to not gain too much fat tissue in the off season and then in season to use an approach that better considers the long term and maybe a slightly less aggressive approach to fat loss, which you wouldn't need anyway if you haven't gained so much fat in the off season. And then in terms of training, I think very high intensity in terms of percentage 1 rep max. Resistance training probably isn't necessarily good for the heart itself. I think the net effect of resistance training on the cardiovascular system is certainly positive on average. But when you start getting to extremes, like doing really heavy singles, triples, that type of work, and doing large amounts of those over time, I think you're going to increasingly see some adaptations in the heart that would broadly be considered as being detrimental, like a stiffer aorta, for example, and that there is some evidence that points in that direction. And so I think you can probably modify things accordingly. And then some exercises can be really hard on joints, like I mentioned earlier, and I've spoken with you briefly about this previously, but I think lengthened partials for some exercises would potentially fall into that category that probably interacts with the load that you use in the exercise. So if you take the example of a squat, if you're doing a lengthened partial in a squat, which nobody is doing, then you're not going to be able to use much load. But if you're doing a lengthened partial in an overhead pulley extension for your triceps, you can probably use a lot of load, but then that's a large load that's going through pretty small joint. And if you're prone to elbow overuse injuries, that can really piss off your elbows over time. So I think it depends on the context there. So the question is, how do you then Tweak things to support longevity. And I think there are probably a bunch of simple things that you can do. So like with your exercise, in terms of longevity, the goal is probably to try and seek the most orthopedically safe exercises to achieve the target outcome and to target the muscles in question with the lowest intensities in terms of percentage of 1 rep max and volumes needed to get the adaptations that you're after, Recognizing that those are already gonna be quite high in the first place relative to most people. And that definitely doesn't mean training like a pussy. Like volume and intensity are still gonna be important, and you're still gonna have to push most of your sets quite close to failure. It just means maybe favoring higher reps for certain exercises when they're gonna get you the same result. In terms of hypertrophy. I think bodybuilders specifically maybe need to think a bit more about cardiovascular health, which I also think they're doing relative to even a few years ago. People nowadays are much more interested in testing their health in general and whether that's the form of blood tests or blood pressure and so on. All of that can be insightful. But as I alluded to, some things about training can acutely and chronically be detrimental. Acutely. A good example is just blood pressure. If you're using the Valtal maneuver during heavy squats or deadlifts, for instance, your blood pressure can go through the roof and it can get high enough that you could potentially do some damage in the cardiovascular system in the short term. So I think depending on marks of cardiovascular health and your family history and so on, I consider tweaking your nutrition and possibly some other types of training. The target, the heart. So endurance training to support your cardiorespiratory health without compromising your resistance training performance, I think it's possible to do both. And then you can just consider adding things to support general health to your training. So with respect to your brain, for example, it's quite clear that resistance training is brilliant for brain health. It really is. Especially the white matter of the central nervous system that's really important to rapidly communicating signals within it. And endurance training, by contrast, seems to be particularly important for the health of the gray matter. And that is very important to things like processing information. And that obviously encapsulates your cognition too. But you can challenge that central nervous system through resistance training, then complement that with other forms of exercise to challenge the brain in different ways. So including a little bit of coordination based exercise, balance training as well, which you can Plug into your warmup or you might be learning a skill on the side that challenges those capacities and doesn't interfere with your resistance training. That way you are supporting your longevity without taking away from anything apart from maybe a little bit of time that's needed to engage in that additional training and then decide for flexibility training. Stretching by itself, for example, can be good for reducing blood pressure. So just ensuring that your training is relatively well rounded I think is a good idea and obviously a focus on training there. But we could be saying many similar things about nutrition, like speaking about the importance of dietary variety, trying to consume the largest array of different types of animal and plant foods to meet your nutrition needs. To ensure that your nutrition is quite well balanced, you're not consuming toxic quantities of one thing because your diet is so rich in that particular item. But also you're getting many different beneficial non nutritive substances too. Lots of different phenolic compounds from a big variety of fruits and vegetables, for example, in herbs and spices. So I'll pause there, but those are my initial reflections.
- [36:42]
Steve
Yeah, I think I like it because I don't think anything you mentioned meant that natural bodybuilding is inherently conflicting with long term health. It's just about your approach to it. And I think a lot of what you mentioned, there are things that the listeners. We spoke about it last time actually in terms of like training, things you could do for long term health and nutritional aspects. And so I think if it fits your macros, thankfully I think it's fallen a little bit out of favor. Aware people will understand that. But then understand there's a layer below macros, the micros are important. So having a nice variety within the diet. So I think a lot of people,
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Greg Potter
it goes past micronutrients too because I'll speak about nutrients. Yeah, exactly. Like probiotics and the list goes on and on. But you know, I'm getting really some of the harder to assess proxies of dietary quality.
- [37:33]
Steve
Yeah, because I think honestly bodybuilders now at least are better at that. Especially I think natural bodybuilders tend to be a bit better at those sort of things. And then I mentioned the fatigue and managing it and made a joke about it. But definitely people are aware of that. And I think you've actually not loved this term because one is like to get stimulus you have to have fatigue, but the stimulus to fatigue ratio and I like to say the stimulus to like unwanted fatigue. So that's like joint connective tissue fatigue. You're trying to pick exercises, rep ranges or approaches that maximize the stimulus with limited unwanted fatigue.
- [38:08]
Greg Potter
I think the word fatigue is not really getting at what it intends to get at there. So it's really getting at damage that's hard to repair and that accumulates over time. And there are various damage related theories of aging which I think is how you tie that to the question in hand. Yeah, so yeah, I don't love this stimulus to fatigue word use. But obviously we all understand what it's getting at, which is the most important thing.
- [38:36]
Steve
Yeah, cool. And the only final thought was specifically anything to do with the competition prepping for itself, as in getting to essential levels of body fat hanging out there for a period of time. Does that have longer term consequences if managed appropriately? And I'd say specifically maybe for women, if they lose menstrual cycle function for a period of time, if they can regain that and be be healthy post, is there anything they've lost by actually just even going dipping their toes into that place that the body's not happy to be in?
- [39:10]
Greg Potter
That's a really interesting question and it's not one that I've got a satisfactory answer to, but I think you could consider that in relation to lots of different health outcomes. So obviously the one that comes to mind is reproductive function. And it could be that if you've got those regular spells of very low energy availability and then the reproductive system is starting to shut down, someone maybe has oligomenorrhea or amenorrhea, then when you've recovered from that, I don't think your reproductive system is necessarily in the same state had you always had that cycle intact. So it could be that there's some sort of cumulative effect on reproductive function. I can imagine a situation where it becomes harder and harder for someone to regain their cycle post competition because they're going through those bouts of very low energy availability over time. But those reproductive hormones are relevant to lots of different processes. So an interesting example that is being quite widely discussed at the moment is brain health and how that might relate to dementia. So we're starting to see lots of epidemiological research that's looking at the relationship between exogenous hormone use, like hormone replacement therapy in the menopause, but also use of the contraceptive pill and how those relate to risk of dementia. And I don't think the data are very clear yet. Was just looking the other day at some work that came out on the pill and it suggested that for whatever reasons, use of the pill within a certain range was associated with a reduced risk of Dementia later in life. But is that the hormone exposure? I doubt it. Honestly. I think that is going to have some effect. I don't know if it would be positive or negative. It might depend on the person. But I suspect that if there is that relationship, then it's because people having more sex and it's really good for you, provided you don't get infection. So. So it's hard to work out how you get rid of or account of account for these confounders that are at play. But I do think that your brain being exposed to different levels of relevant hormones, whatever those are, estrogen and so on, is going to affect your biology in many ways over time. Do I think there's likely difference between sexes? Quite possibly. I think another important consideration is frailty. So if you think about the fact that the absolute amount of muscle and bone that women have on average is lower than men, then they're more prone to things like osteoporosis and sarcopenia and dynapaenia and so later in life that can really catch up with them. And if you're going through these cycles of very low energy availability, then maybe that's going to be compromised differently between the sexes. That's hypothetical, but it is an example of sex differences that do matter for longevity. But obviously resistance training that's so important to physique competitors, natural bodybuilders and so on, is going to be good for those organ systems regardless. But yeah, I think reproductive system, there's probably a difference between males and females. I think the reproductive system of females is probably a little bit more sensitive, but it's also tricky because maybe it's a little bit more obvious in how it responds. So, for example, in the sports science world, people used to speak about the female athlete triad, which then became relative energy deficiency in sport. Red square. And the focus was on the female athlete triad initially because the symptoms of low energy availability in the long term are more obvious in females. I think they were getting more fractures, maybe in part because their bone mineral density was lower at baseline and they lose their reproductive cycle. Whereas guys might just be less interested in sex and less able to perform. But it's not so obvious. It's not as easy to measure, it's not a discrete variable. So it's a good question and I don't know, but I think again, over time, hopefully we'll have research that starts to identify what's going on. Yeah, people always say that it's just something you've thrown at the end.
- [44:13]
Steve
More research. Yeah, that's really helpful but it's almost always. Well I mean it's always true really. So no, I appreciate the answer and I think it confirms again what a lot of intelligent natural bodybuilders are doing where they aren't competing every year, especially females taking extended breaks between competitive seasons and focusing on regaining menstrual cycle function if that's something they lost during their competition season and not maintaining like the trap a lot of competitors can get into and trying to maintain too lean of a physique and continuing to hold on to those red S type symptoms and never being kind of fully healthy. So those outside of competitive bodybuilding can do like maximize their health really quite well if they want to and so on as they're intelligent about their approach. Those competitors not competing too frequently, especially if you're cycling between body weights really high and low, doing that, that will not be great. Yo yo dieting essentially but on a larger SC or not smart. But yeah, I think that was really interesting and I think confirmed a lot of the things I thought about it too, which is nice because again it's something I'm happy to say the natural bodybuilding done well can be a really fundamentally healthy thing for you long term. So very happy about that. Next question for you Greg, was something we talked about last time actually and wanted to dive into it a bit deeper was kind of escalating density training but also maybe using that as like a comparison versus other time saving techniques or like advanced body building techniques. I had Adam Gonzalez on the podcast where they did like a review of all the like advanced body building techniques which almost became summarized as like nothing special between them. Mostly just time saving, my reps being one of them.
- [45:59]
Greg Potter
But reps and drop sets and that type of thing.
- [46:03]
Steve
Yeah, exactly. But escalating density training wasn't in there as far as aware which is interesting because you've also said it's whatever reason it's by the way, I favor yeah. So love to hear a little bit more on yeah. Why you think it shouldn't have.
- [46:20]
Greg Potter
Yeah, I'm not saying that I think it's necessarily better than something like my reps which I think would be the natural comparator because they're both ways of potentially saving time and also maximizing the proportion of your reps that are effective reps to use terminology that is somewhat disputed but I think has some merit and I don't know what approach most people are taking to myoreps now. What's, what's the typical strategy that people are using Steve, There's a variety of
- [46:53]
Steve
means, but essentially it's a activation set where you take it close to failure and then you have short rest periods where you're still fatigued. So then when you get into that same load for repetitions, you're right into those, like you said, effective reps close to failure again. And you might be getting somewhere between three to six repetitions on those clusters where you then take another short rest period, go again. And normally it has like a cutoff point of like once you get below three repetitions or you've hit three, you like stop there. So it's almost autoregulated in that way.
- [47:26]
Greg Potter
Yeah. So the approach that I've arrived at over time, because I do use my reps and I've used on and off for. Since I don't know how you pronounce his name, is it. Borhe was first speaking about it and I don't know what he would recommend either right now. I just haven't kept pace with what people are saying. But obviously the strategy that you use is going to depend on the amount of training stress that you are looking for at that point in time, which relates to things like volume and intensity and so on. So I think for this type of work, people are primarily going to be using single joint exercises and they're probably going to be using training loads between say a 10 and 30 rep max. Somewhere in that range going to work pretty well. And you're going to obviously choose how close you want to get to failure as well. And I think for all the MYOREP sets, you're probably gonna want one or two reps in reserve at the end of each of the sets. You could go to failure. I just don't think that there's any real advantage to that. And I think it could actually compromise the total work that you get done. Unless we're just speaking about the final set. But again, looking at training to failure versus training very close to failure, I don't see any real advantage in terms of the outcomes that we're interested in. And the strategy that I've always used is take however many reps you get in the first set, the activation set, and choose a multiple of that. So if you're in a low volume training phase, your target might be twice however many reps you get in the activation set. So you choose a 15 rep max, you do 14 reps. Okay, I'm going to get 28 reps in total, and I'm going to get there as quickly as possible. And that's all that matters. Like you're not saying, oh, I'm going to do sets of three or whatever. You're literally trying to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, ensuring that your technique is excellent throughout that period. So it might look like 14 and then 6 and then 5 and then 4 and then 2 and then. And I'm not saying that those numbers add up perfectly or whatever, but you get the point. That to me makes more sense than stipulating. Oh yeah, I need to do like three reps each time. It's performance based and it's time based. So that's the strategy that I would take. And again, if it was a high volume training phase, maybe the multiple is 4 or the multiplier is 4. So, okay, I'm using a 15 rep max and or let's say for ease, 16 rep max. I get 15 reps in my first set. 4 times 15 is 60 total reps. That would be a large volume. But then you're going to do 40 in the first set and then get to 60 total reps as quickly as possible. And maybe for some people it's awkward in terms of calculation, but I think you quickly get used to it and I think that works really well. Escalating density training is fundamentally very similar. So again, you're going to, in this instance do things quite similarly in terms of the loads that you use in the proximity to failure. But the variable that you're using to regulate your volume is the length of the time zone for the exercise. So the low end, that could be something like four minutes in total for the given exercise. At the high end it could be 10 minutes, let's say. And similar to MYO reps, the first set is much like an activation set. And then the question is how many total reps can you get within the four to 10 minutes and ensure that your technique throughout is exemplary. And I think one advantage of EDT is, and the same is true of Myoretz, but I think autoregulation with it is really straightforward. You feel rubbish, maybe you are recently sick or maybe you're currently sick or whatever and you've still got your 10 minutes, but you just dial things back a lot that day. So your first set is two reps and failure and you're not going balls to the wall throughout the 10 minutes. So I think the autoregulation is inherent to it. My experience is that with EDT people get substantially more total reps than they do using straight sets methods within the same time period. So imagine a situation where you're doing preacher curls and you're doing three sets with a 12 rep max. In the first set you get 11 reps. In the second set you get 7 reps. In the third set you get 7 reps. You got 3 minutes of rest between them. The whole thing takes 7 minutes. If you compare that with EDT, you definitely get more total reps than that within those seven minutes. And that, I think, is partly where the magic is. It really focuses you. And my experience is just that it works really, really well for people. And I don't get why it did fall out of favor or it just didn't gain traction. I think some of that probably relates to the person that was popularizing it and how well they did in terms of their following. And so I just think that's a shame because it's a method that's been somewhat lost. But in my experience, it's at least as effective as my reps. And again, this is just anecdote because we haven't got a good study that compares them side by side. But that approach to my reps I think works well. I think EET works at least as well. And in terms of time saving in general, obviously there are other things that you can do. Like you compare exercises. People commonly use agonist antagonist supersets like a curl and an extension for the biceps and triceps, respectively, or for the hamstrings and quads. Or you could choose exercises targeting muscle groups that don't overlap. So, like, if you're using whole body training, maybe you're training some sort of plantar flexion for your carbs with an elbow flexion for your biceps, for example. But yeah, maybe that's not adding anything to what's been said on the podcast previously, but I do think people should give escalating density training a go. And I think a lot of people really, really like it and really benefit from it. And I think a lot of people just kind of get stuck in their ways a little bit with training. That's definitely true of me. Like, I gravitate back to similar exercises and similar training strategies. But I think escalating density training generally gets me to where I want to be as quickly as anything else that I do in training. Hi, guys.
- [54:35]
Steve
Steve here. Just wanted to take a moment of your time to remind you of our online coaching service. At Revive Stronger, we pride ourselves on providing personalized service that will take your physique and knowledge to the next level. If you're interested, check the description and Sign up. Yeah, it makes sense. And when I, when we talked about it last time, when I thought about it I was like, actually fundamentally it's very, very similar tomorrow reps in that and like lots of these techniques, like a drop set or like a rest pause set, you're just maintaining fatigue to kind of continue in more effective repetitions so you're not having to have those lead in reps. So you might actually have to do less work for more effective work almost. So your volume load could be less, but you're actually like getting just as much stimulus for it. And weirdly enough, because you said time saving techniques, of course, like if someone literally has like a time that they've got available, then it's almost escalating. Density training fits the bill perfectly versus thinking about my reps. It's actually like, Well, I have 15 minutes left. Like, then you could literally be like, right, I'm going to do a tricep and bicep exercise and get in as much quality working as possible.
- [55:45]
Greg Potter
And I think that that is the magic of it for a lot of people because some, some people like you and I, Steve, might have much more flexible schedules than most do. And you can dedicate quite a lot of time to your training. And so time efficiency is less of a factor for you than it is for many people though you've got a big volume of training each week to complete, so it's still a factor. But if you think about the person with two young kids who is trying to climb the ladder at work and so on, and they're really quite time poor because their wife is going to be pissed off if they spend more than 40 minutes in the gym. EDT works charm. Yeah. And you know, you know how long it's going to take. Whereas with my reps it's like, okay, like I'm going to do that and then like I'm going to keep count, see how many I get. And then, oh, shit, was that three or four reps? And it's just a little bit more finickity. Whereas in DT is the magic of it for me is partly the simplicity of it.
- [56:38]
Steve
Yeah, yeah. It's incredibly simple and almost has that very obvious progressive overload part too in terms of did I get an extra rep in that time?
- [56:47]
Greg Potter
I didn't mention that. I didn't mention that. But the way that, that I would progress it is if within the time frame you surpass a certain number of reps, then the next session you increase the load, typically by the smallest increment available. There might be exceptions to that, but let's say that you're doing a seven minute time zone for a single exercise. Let's say it's for your biceps and you decide the threshold number of reps is 40 reps and you exceed 40 reps in those seven minutes. Then the next session you add, let's say two and a half kilos to the exercise for a bilateral exercise, like a preacher goal, and then see how many you get and you might drop down to 36 or you might still be above 40, in which case, great. Next session adding another two and a half kilos.
- [57:34]
Steve
Yeah, yeah, it makes a ton of sense, honestly. And we're going to get a bunch of listeners trying to implement this now in their training, which I actually might think about putting it in some places where maybe I have my reps at the moment and see if I can get into report back.
- [57:47]
Greg Potter
I'm curious to hear.
- [57:49]
Steve
Yeah, I'd be interested. And I know some of my clients and lots of my clients will listen to this and they'll be like, oh, I'd like to try that too. So if I can get it easily, I just need to get it plugged into my head of how a easy strategy. Well, I mean, it's an easy strategy, to be honest. So yeah, I definitely would like to give that a shot. Next question for you, Greg, is I know you've been part of a process of formulating different products. I think we talked about it in one of the episodes. You were looking to do like a. It was like a specific longevity type of supplement. You obviously have worked with various companies and helped formulate their products as well. So you know this industry well. And I'm just interested to know anything you learned from being part of that process specifically, like something that's been flagged up with Eric Helms. And I've also had Andrea Love on the podcast talking about concerns of contamination and this sort of thing. So love to hear any of the insights you have to share.
- [58:43]
Greg Potter
Well, I haven't looked closely at this literature specifically and also I haven't formulated any products in the last year or so. So I probably would have given you a better answer if you'd asked me the same question a year ago, Steve, so I apologize for that. But obviously that is a concern. It always has been. I think the general trend of the industry is positive and I think that contamination is less of an issue than it once was. And I think that when contamination is present, the contaminants are probably generally less detrimental than they once Were obviously there have been famous instances of people dying from taking supplements. I think Hydroxycut was one of them. It's one that we were taught about during my undergrad. So it's always been a problem. I think the general trend is probably positive. I think in terms of inside knowledge there might be a few things that people miss. So an interesting one for example is, and it depends on the person, depends on your means and so on. But if you look at a lot of businesses that have an informed sport tested product and a somewhat similar product at a lower price point, they're usually exactly the same and the price obviously gets marked up because of the cost of sending off to the third party for additional testing. But if you go to my protein and you buy the creatine monohydrate and there's also the informed support version, they're exactly the same. And a business that's that big is not going to do things differently and risk some sort of big issue. So I think there are instances in which unless there's a huge amount on the line for you, you don't really need to worry too much about that stuff. I listened to the episode that you had with Eric in which that came up and I think he was speaking about. Well, one exception might be where for example, there's a particular form of a product. And the example was KSM66 Ashwagandha. And because that undergoes rigorous processing and so on, it's almost as if it has been tested and cleared and it's going to be contaminant free. And I don't think that's how it works because the contamination can happen at any point in the production chain. So you can have the raw material. In this instance the supplier is Exori or biomed. They make KSM 66. You bring that into your facility and that will typically be combined with some fillers, things that help fill the capsule in question and keep the product stable. Contamination can happen there. So I wouldn't assume that just because something is a specific form of a product that's been studied in research, it's going to be pure. There is still the potential to have something nasty that enters the frame that you obviously don't want to be there. And then another comment that I add is I think people, they often talk about dietary supplements. Oh, it's terribly regulated and most of these things haven't been studied. There's this huge tendency to do this in certain fields. The geroscientists do this the whole time. Oh, the dietary supplements, none of Them have been studied and they just dismiss it out of hand, often without knowing anything about the literature. And they'll say they don't work. And you ask them to speak about specific studies in which they've been tested and they can't name any of the relevant research, they just don't know it. And they're often traditionally trained medical doctors. And I don't mean to point fingers or anything like that, it's just something that I've noticed again and again. And then meanwhile their approach to medication can be to assume that all of that is absolutely fine. And alongside that, the irony is that when a bunch of medications come off patent, the onus is on other parties reverse engineering what the medication is. And so then when you have generic forms of the drug and you've got lots of different products that are on the market that all claim to be the same thing, they're not exactly the same thing. And therefore a lot of people not being aware of that, assume, well, if I buy this medication, then I'm definitely getting that which is the one that was used in that research. And that's not true. And I'm not saying that the industry has equivalent standards in terms of testing and purity. It doesn't. The supplement industry doesn't have anything like the kind of financial resources that drug companies do. But I wouldn't assume that that is a non issue if we're speaking about certain medications too, because it is. And then we've got this additional category now of these gray market and black market products that people are using like peptides and so on, where it's really the wild west. And I suspect that the levels of. And this is, this is just me shooting from the hip. This is based on nothing apart from intuition. So bear that in mind. I could be completely wrong, definitely wouldn't be the first time. But I wouldn't assume that if you're buying a peptide, for example, one of these designer peptides that has only been studied in non human animals and people rave about for whatever it might be like recovering from an injury, that it's going to be pure because you have no idea what's in there. And even if it was the thing that you want to be in there, pretty much all the research on those is in non human animals. We know bugger all about safety and so on. So I wouldn't touch them. And I recognize in saying this that peptide is a massive class. Peptides just speaking about a certain number of amino acids chained together. So we're speaking about everything from normal constituents of your diet that you get from food to these designer peptides, where it really is the Wild West.
- [65:13]
Steve
I wanted to just confirm or kind of jump in at the comment you mentioned in terms of like a. My protein in there, if they're informed sport. And then like, the same product within my protein will be the same thing. It's just not been sent off. And just like I spoke to. When I had some sponsorships and I was talking to a supplement company, they also said the same thing essentially, whether, like, everything's in the same lab, in the same place being produced, just some are sent off, some aren't. So even though it's. This isn't saying it's informed what it kind of is, if these have come back in that sense. So I think that's a nice thing for consumers kind of listening who maybe have been a bit concerned about contamination. I don't know if you. Do, you know anything different between. Because I think the US is a bit more Wild west than the uk. The UK have a bit stricter standards.
- [66:05]
Greg Potter
Yeah, so that's probably true. You've got different regulatory bodies and in Europe you've got efsa, which oversees a lot of that stuff. And I think that they're generally probably a little bit more conservative than stringent. But there are also. There are also some laughable decisions that have been made by bodies like that. So a good example of this is in England, for instance, technically, you can't sell L theanine, and you can sell L theanine if it hasn't been synthesized, if it's extracted from green tea, for instance. But frankly, if you extract the L theanine from green tea, it's just massively inefficient process. You're more likely to have an impure product. It's. It's a more complicated, convoluted process than just synthesizing it yourself. So there are some laws in place that really don't make any sense. But, yeah, I think there probably is that difference between those geographies. Again, I couldn't say that for sure, but that's definitely my impression. I think that's the general sentiment in the industry too, and you see that with respect to which products can be sold in different places. So, like in the uk, you can't really buy lithium over the counter, like you couldn't buy lithium orotate, lithium carbonate, lithium citrate, whatever it might be. Whereas in the us, you can order lithium orotate from a business like Life Extension and not think twice about it, and you can still get your hands on those products from the UK by ordering through the parties like iherb. But I think that the total range of products that are available is lower in Europe in part because of those tighter regulations.
- [68:06]
Steve
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [68:08]
Greg Potter
They're just not all.
- [68:10]
Steve
Yeah. Do you have any? Yeah, like L Theanine, I guess. And what is it? Why have I forgotten what it's called? Melatonin. That's something that we can't easily get as well, isn't it? Yeah.
- [68:21]
Greg Potter
And the melatonin safe profile is great. There have been studies looking at melatonin products off the shelves. This is true of other products too like nmn, where they find big discrepancies between what's on the label and what's in the product. Yeah, but that, you know, that could be done with any product in any sector and we just don't really know how products compare across many different sectors. Like how bad is the supplement industry compared to others? I don't know. I do think for the most part if you're buying from heavy hitting companies with lots of resources, there's so much on the line for those businesses, you're generally pretty safe. Like I always say to people, if you're ordering from Life Extension and NOW and Swanson businesses like those, you'll probably find same for cheaper supplement companies like My Protein and Bulk. And just a tangential thought, there are some forms of products that have become popular in recent years that people assume are in some way better. So a good example of this is creapure creatine and someone might say something about solubility and therefore bioavailability or something like that. It's nonsensical. The bioavailability of creatine is fantastic. It's almost perfect. You don't need to buy creature pure creatine. Going back to what I said earlier, just because something has the creature stamp on it doesn't mean that it is pure. Because you can buy the creature creatine from the German supplier, but then it could be contaminated subsequently. So just save some money and just get the creatine. With the larger particle size it might not look quite as pretty in the bag, you might have to stir a bit more, but you could probably spend 40% less money that way for exactly the same results.
- [70:16]
Steve
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So for you Greg, in terms of mitigating risk, I guess first of all, not supplementing with things that have very little evidence to support their use would be one going for more reputable companies and would you throw out kind of those mixed ingredients, especially proprietary blends, kind of avoiding those.
- [70:39]
Greg Potter
I don't like proprietary blends regardless. So I'd almost exclude those not for the reason of contamination but just because you don't know what's precisely in them. But yeah, I think that's generally a smart strategy. Maybe there are exceptions to the proprietary blend rule. Like if you look at some of these greens products that also have vitamins and minerals added to them and they've got some proprietary blend of 15 different plants and the total quantity of that blend is 2 grams per sachet. That's doing nothing. But you shouldn't be worried about it necessarily. It's just only on there for marketing reasons. And then they can make some claim about the diversity of different things that are included in that product as if that's a good thing when you could probably use those 2 grams of product weight in much smarter ways that actually give you some results.
- [71:28]
Steve
Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Greg, final question on supplements. Retic. I don't know if I'm going to say this even right. Reticarpine, something that I've seen spoken about over the last few years a little bit in terms of increasing caffeine metabolism, which I think again for people that want to protect their sleep and get caffeine out of their system before going to bed seems like a promising thing. I think you said when we were talking off air about it, you haven't got. There's not too much you can really say, but I'd love any thoughts you have regarding it.
- [71:59]
Greg Potter
Yeah. So ruta carpine. That's how I pronounce. I don't actually know the correct way to pronounce it. So don't.
- [72:07]
Steve
Don't. I'm probably wrong. I'm normally wrong with those sort of things.
- [72:11]
Greg Potter
The rationale makes sense. It's based on frankly three studies that have been done since 2005 where they've taken rats and they've given it and they found that it induces an enzyme, the CYP1A2 enzyme in the liver in rats, which is involved in metabolizing a bunch of drugs, 13% of drugs, including caffeine, and in doing so increase the rate at which caffeine is metabolized. And that is relevant to sleep because then if the caffeine has a shorter elimination half life, your body's going to clear it faster and it's less likely to be promoting wakefulness and inhibiting sleep when your bed hits the pillow at the end of the day. But there's no Clinical research on rutocarpine. There's a tiny bit of work looking at products that contain rutocarpine as part of a plant extract. But there are other things in the plant and I think only one of those used an oral extract, like an oral product consumed the way that people might take this as a supplement. And that particular experiment found that basin doesn't do anything. They were looking at that versus I can't remember if it was ephedra or ephedrine, but they were looking at it in relation to resting metabolic rate and how people respond to a weight loss diet, I think. And basically if it did anything, the results were minuscule. So we really don't know much about this stuff and how humans respond to it, let alone things like its safety, what the appropriate doses might be. So I wouldn't touch it. But if you are interested in this subject and you're concerned that caffeine is affecting your sleep, then I think there are other things that you should consider. And if you think about caffeine metabolism in general, then the average elimination half life is between about three and seven hours for most of us. A modest dose of caffeine. The longer the, the larger the dose, the longer the half life is going to be, the longer it's going to take your body to clear the caffeine. But for some people, that half life can be over 24 hours. Wow. And that depends on a bunch of factors. So one of them is your recent caffeine intake that builds tolerance. So if you regularly consume caffeine, you'll probably be able to consume more without it negatively affecting your sleep than someone who's naive to. Depends on your genetics. So there's variation in the genes that encode the proteins that are the enzymes involved in caffeine metabolism. The most important one is cytochrome P450. That breaks down about 95% of the caffeine that you consume. So if there's variation in the gene that encodes that, then that's gonna potentially affect the caffeine clearance quite a lot. But there are some other genes that affect how you respond to caffeine. Like some of the genes that encode adenosine receptors then influence how the brain responds to the caffeine. Because caffeine is basically an adenosine receptor antagonist. And that's true all of the different adenosine receptors. So it blocks the interaction of the sleep promoting chemical adenosine with its recept. It also depends on the health of your liver. If your liver is really gummed up because you've had a lifetime of not eating very well. So a very high energy diet, it's very rich in sugar, rich in alcohol. Then that poor liver function that results from that is probably gonna slow down the rate at which you eliminate the caffeine. But it also depends on other aspects of your lifestyle. A really interesting instance of this is cigarette smoking. And I think smokers have known this for a long time. But if you smoke, you clear caffeine faster because some of the nasties in cigarette smoke, so specifically polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, actually stimulate one of those liver enzymes that's involved in caffeine metabolism. In contrast, going back to the pill, the pill can actually slow down caffeine metabolism quite a lot. It can reduce it by roughly 50%.
- [76:42]
Steve
Wow.
- [76:42]
Greg Potter
So it's going to depend on the pill that you're using. But I find it interesting when people are speaking about things like reticarpine and they're ignoring some of these other factors that are much more relevant to most of us that can actually affect caffeine metabolism quite a lot. So I think the better options are, obviously, if you think your caffeine intake is negatively affecting your sleep, then you can reduce it. And I don't think that's nearly as hard nowadays as it used to be. There are much better decaffeinated products on the market now than there were even 10 years ago. And that's true of tea and coffee. You can also mix caffeinated with decaffeinated products. So we take these arms of coffee. Steve, you know that I'm a coffee nerd, but nowadays there are good decafs. But a lot of decaf coffees have a very particular off taste. And it's actually not necessarily strongly related to the decaffeination process that's used, like ethyl acetate or Swiss water method. A lot of it is because decaf coffees have had an incredibly hard time in processing, because what normally happens is the raw material gets shipped across the world to where it needs to be decaffeinated, might be in Europe, for example, and then after that it has to get shipped back across the world somewhere else. So it just gets much more banged up than coffees that don't have to go through that process. And I think some of it therefore just relates to things like the freshness of the coffee and so on.
- [78:17]
Steve
Right.
- [78:17]
Greg Potter
But because they have that slight off taste, mixing decaf with caffeinated coffee beans can give you something where you mask that decaf taste and have something that's really quite delicious. There are also coffee varietals that are much lower in caffeine than others. So the big categorization would be Arabica versus Robusta coffees. Robusta has roughly twice as much caffeine because it's grown at much lower altitudes. And caffeine is basically an insect repellent. Like it's part of the. Part of the plant's immune system protecting against things like mosquitoes. So if the coffee is a varietal that grows well at lower altitudes, it's gonna tend to contain more caffeine. But within Arabica, there's large variation in how much caffeine different varietals have. And this is getting in the weeds a little bit. But, for example, there are some low caffeine varietals, like Laurina Aramosa Rasimosa, that really contain quite a lot less caffeine. They're just not that common. They're really nice. They can be expensive, though. So if you're a coffee nerd, you don't mind spending some money on coffee beans, then you can actually dig out some of those lower caffeine types too. But otherwise, what I would say, returning to L. Theanine and the stupid EFSA regulation, L theanine can help, and we know that L. Theanine can help with sleep in general. So the most recent meta analysis that I've seen came out last year, it was by Amanda Bauman and her and her colleagues found that it basically slightly shortened the amount of time that takes people to fall asleep. And people also felt like they slept better and they reported less daytime dysfunction, so fatigue, for example. But regarding caffeine specifically, probably the most relevant study to point to is some work that came out Japan a few years ago, where they measured sleep using eeg. So they were looking at people's electrical activity in the brain during sleep. And the study was of young women, but all those young women went through each of the conditions. It was a crossover study, as opposed to splitting them into different groups, which is inherently a stronger study design statistically. So what they did was they took those people and they gave them either a low dose of L theanine, so just 50 milligrams, a low dose of caffeine, 30 milligrams, but combined L theanine and caffeine, or a placebo, and then they measured their sleep subsequently. So speaking about low doses of each of these, there's a low dose of caffeine, it's a low dose of L Theanine, too. But they found that the caffeine increased wake after sleep onset, so their sleep was less efficient. People were awake for longer during the sleep period after consuming the caffeine compared with the placebo group. But when they looked at the L. Theanine in isolation group and the caffeine plus L Theanine group, those weren't different to the placebo. So the caffeine was being masked by the L. Theanine that was added. And I think, translating this to us, given that most of the work looking at the effects of L. Theanine on sleep has used doses between about 200 and 400 milligrams. That range has been shown to be beneficial. That roughly maps to how much caffeine people are consuming, too. So in that study, it was 30 milligrams of caffeine, 50 milligrams of L. Theanine. A lot of people in the world are gonna be consuming something like 300 milligrams of caffeine. And so 200 to 400 milligrams of L. Theanine, it's probably gonna help mask that as well. But we know much more about L. Theanine, its safety, and so on. And it generally seems to be pretty good for health. Like, it has weak positive effects on cardiovascular health and so on, which we've spoken about previously. So if you do have a day where, for whatever reasons, you can't help but drink tons of coffee or tea, or you eat five bars of dark chocolate, you could just keep some L. Theanine handy and take 204 to 200 to 400 milligrams about an hour before bed. And that should help reduce the negative effects of the caffeine.
- [82:48]
Steve
Perfect. Yeah. So that's actually great because that confirms my recent couple of few days where I've gone above my caffeine threshold that I tend to set. And when I do that, I take L. Theanine to help offset the kind of that impact. And I actually have noticed it to not worsen my sleep. And now I don't want to keep creating that habit. I want to maintain my lower caffeine intake because I find if I go above that, it's like much above 200 milligrams a day. I start feeling that my sleep quality is a little less. And then when I get up to, like, 300 or so, I take L. Theanine alongside. So also acutely with taking caffeine, L. Theanine can help mitigate some of. If people get, like, jitters and some of the negative Impacts it can create a bit. It's in a lot of like those cognitive enhancer products, isn't it, where it kind of just smooths out that kind of energy or the quote unquote energy that caffeine gives you?
- [83:39]
Greg Potter
Oh. L Theanine in isolation has some weak positive effects on the ability to pay attention during certain tasks. It's been studied quite a lot with respect to cognition. It tends to slightly reduce people's feelings of stress as well as their physiological stress responses too. So if you look for example, at the amount of cortisol in someone's saliva in response to a stressor after taking L theanine versus after taking placebo, the L theanine tends to blunt that a little bit. What I wonder is if we go back to the goal of reducing the effects of caffeine on sleep, if you took the L theanine early in the day with the caffeine, would that also have that attenuating effect? Or does the L theanine need to be taken shortly before sleep? For me, I tend to take the L Theanine earlier in the day when I have lots of caffeine and I think it still helps. But that type of timing study hasn't been done.
- [84:32]
Steve
That's what I did as well. So when you were saying it, I was like, oh, damn, I don't take the L Cleanine before bed. I take it with that extra dose of caffeine.
- [84:38]
Greg Potter
My guess seems to do it will be helpful. Yeah.
- [84:41]
Steve
Interesting.
- [84:42]
Greg Potter
Yeah.
- [84:43]
Steve
Greg, is that just. I don't know if this is a quick thing to answer. I think there's some people that try and sell products that can tell you your caffeine metabolism in terms of your fast or solar metabolizer. I don't know the efficacy of that and I don't know if in my head it seems like there should be a cheap, easy at home kind of way of doing it in terms of N equals one kind of study, you kind of can work it out yourself. I don't know if that's true. Are there things we can do to work that out?
- [85:14]
Greg Potter
I think most of those products are probably just going to be looking at the genes that encode those caffeine metabolizing enzymes and common polymorphisms in those genes then influence the protein structure and therefore the ability of the protein to interact with this target and so on. So are they worth doing? It's just a bit of self exploration. If you've got the disposable cash that you don't mind spending on Something that's not going to have a particularly meaningful effect on anything, then go for it. But I don't think most people need to go that route. Certainly not. But in terms of something that is readily accessible, that's low cost or even free, that people can try, nothing immediately springs to mind, I'm afraid, because you can do self experiments in which you blind yourself to what's going on. That's been done a little bit in recent years in certain branches of medicine. It's been done, for example, in some work looking at very low doses of psychedelics. People speak about microdosing and there was some work by one of the universities in London looking at self blinding oneself to psychedelics and whether they're taking a low dose of the real thing or a low dose of a placebo. So you can do that, but it's hard to do and a pain in the ass. And most people are not going to be interested in going to those lengths. Definitely not. So I think most of us have some sense as to where we fall on that sensitivity scale. And maybe you weren't familiar with the effects of smoking or the pill on caffeine metabolism. Obviously other drugs can affect caffeine metabolism too, but those are the kinds of factors that you might want to consider on top of what you feel like your baseline sensitivity is. You do build tolerance over time. From my perspective, I want to consume as much caffeine as possible without it messing things up. Just because I love caffeinated items like coffee and I consume more caffeine now than I used to, but my metabolism of it will be faster because of that tolerance that I built because of some of the biochemical changes that have ensued. So I think work out where you are now. If you think it might be negatively affecting you, then you could try dialing things down a little bit. The strategy that I've generally recommend to people is to basically replace whatever the latest item is with a decaf alternative when possible to start. So let's say that you have five coffees a day. Just love coffee. We'll just use this for simplicity. You could move to four coffees and then the final one is a decaf, and then you could go 3 and 2, and then you could go 2 and 3, and then you could go 2 2 and then you go 2 and 1. I wouldn't necessarily say, oh, you should go cold turkey because it's gonna suck. You're probably gonna have really bad headaches, feel miserable, might interfere with your relationships, with your working life and so on. So I would taper for most people, but you can try dialing that down or you can try that mix of caffeinate and decaffeinate that I mentioned earlier. But the experiment that I would do would be to taper your intake and see how you respond to that. But obviously as you do that, your tolerance is gonna change in lockstep with that. So it's not a perfect experiment.
- [88:39]
Steve
Yeah, yeah, I like that. And I think you're right. I think intuitively, a lot of us know, like, if you consistently don't know, have that fourth coffee and you find your sleep is a little bit worse, you just start realizing those things. Like, I found if I consistently go over that, like 200 milligrams or so a day, I know it's not great for my sleep, so I try and kind of cap it there. So really, really good tips as always, Greg. It's a joy talking to you and diving into these subjects. If people don't want to wait another 10 months for a Revive Stronger Greg episode, not to say it's going to be that long. And they're think, thinking, hey, Greg, you used to have your own podcast that no longer seems to be a thing. Where can they get more Greg? Because I believe there is something you have still going on where people can get more of the Greg if they though so desire.
- [89:24]
Greg Potter
Yeah. God knows why. Anyone want that? Yeah. So I now host a podcast for a business called Triva, which you've used, Steve, actually. So they offer at home blood testing, where you have a small device that you place typically on your shoulder and you press a button and then it basically draws out a small amount of blood that you empty into a tube or maybe two tubes, depending on which test you're getting. Send it off in the post and you get your results shortly thereafter. So the product I really like, it's incredibly straightforward. It's surprisingly fast to get your results as well. And I was familiar with it. But then I had an email late last year from someone working with them saying, we're starting a podcast and we're looking for podcasting hosts and we're interested in having you as the nerdy co host. So I chatted with their team and they're lovely, they're really, really nice people and they only have good intentions, as far as I can tell. So I wanted to work with them. And then we had to go about finding a co host and we settled on my friend Charlie as the non nerd co host. And it's great. I really enjoy recording it. With her. We've done an episode every other week so far this year, and we've covered a bunch of different subjects. It's really about healthy lifespan, but within that we've had conversations about everything from resistance training to geroscience to if we can learn anything from astronauts about how to age better to personalize nutrition. We've got episodes coming up on things like obesity, the new classes of obesity medications like GLP1 receptor agonists. The list goes on. So we cover many different subjects which I think will be interesting to people. The guests are all very carefully vetted and the experts in their respective fields. Occasionally we might do a Q and A episode. We had our first one of those recently and actually we covered caffeine in that, which is part of the reason why some of that stuff is top of mind for me. But it's really enjoyable. Like I love I just get to sit down with my mate every other week and talk to an interesting, smart person. So yeah, if people want to check that out, then it's called the Method. You can just search whichever podcast platform you use for the method or Thriver Thr VA and you'll find that, I'm sure. But then otherwise I'm just eregpotter PhD primarily using Instagram. I still have my YouTube channel, egg potterphd. I do still intend to add to that over time. Even if my previous podcast, which was reason and wellbeing, hasn't been running since I started the Thriver stuff, it's just fallen by the wayside due to time. One of the issues with traveling so much is that it does take a lot of time. It really does take a lot of time just moving between places and constantly having to sort out what you're going to do next. So occasionally something has to fall by the wayside. But I'm still podcasting this time through Thriver, and it's not nearly as technical or nerdy as my podcast was, but I think it's a level of depth that will appeal to a lot of people who are science literate, but they're also not people that are reading academic research day in, day out.
- [92:52]
Steve
Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, I've. I think I've actually got a review of the product where there's a video of me using it and I basically reviewed it. So if people are on YouTube, you can find that. Yeah, it's much better than the kind of I prefer it to the fingerprick devices that you could use, and I've used those in the past because they can become A mess. And uh, it is easy. I just. My routine coming back to what we spoke about at the start, I'm so like in routine in the mornings and it's. I believe it's. You have to do it first thing. So I actually. Because they have a subscription model so I've still got my subscription from that came through the post like probably more than six months ago. I need to. If it was something where I was like, there's a reason I need to absolutely do this acutely, I'd get it done. But I need to do it again because I paid for the. For the next kit and the results and I want to see. Because I did that one quite kind of acutely post show. It was only a few months, so I'm interested to see how things have changed since then. But yeah, breeze really easy. The whole process was really easy. So yeah, I can recommend it from like a practical standpoint. And it's nice to see that you're affiliated with them because as far as I'm concerned, you're a very good person, Greg, and you won't associate yourself with brands and companies that aren't doing great work. So it kind of confirms that for me. So I don't have a discount code or anything for people. I don't know if you do, Greg, but we can at least direct them to the podcast and that's just free info. And I'll direct them to your Instagram as well and they can check that. And if they want to get involved with Thriver, that's. That's to their own discretion.
- [94:24]
Greg Potter
It shows you something about my business savvy. The fact I haven't even thought about. Oh, should I have like an affiliate?
- [94:29]
Steve
You need an affiliate? Yeah. Maybe after this you'll go chat to them and we can get a code in for the listeners at least. But if not, they can go check it out. I don't even know if that's something they do. Some companies do, some don't.
- [94:41]
Greg Potter
I have no idea.
- [94:43]
Steve
Yeah, who knows? Guys, thank you so much for listening. Thank you again, Greg, for tuning in. I'll make sure all of the things we discussed are linked in the description and we'll catch you in the next episode.
- [94:52]
Greg Potter
Take care.
- [94:57]
Steve
This episode is brought to you by Google Health.
- [94:59]
Greg Potter
Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach built with Gemini for effortless as tracking, sleep insights and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit Googlestore to learn more and start a new relationship with your health Requires Google Account, Google Health app Internet and Google Health Premium subscription Features subject to change. Availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes. Works independently of Gemini Apps. Check responses for accuracy.