#60 Lessons About Optimal Recovery with the OURA Team

Siim Land (0:00)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and today we have a slightly different episode where the guest is gonna be actually me. Yeah, it's me. Funny enough, a few months ago, I had an awesome interview with the OURA Ring team about optimal performance, optimizing your recovery and improving your health at the same time. So this was some sort of cool interview where they asked me a bunch of questions about my personal strategies for staying productive and staying healthy at the same time. So check it out. It's gonna be quite an interesting interview and I hope you enjoy it. I hope you get some valuable information from it. Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_2 (0:42)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:48)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_2 (0:49)

Control your mind.

SPEAKER_3 (0:53)

And so the themes are Optimal Recovery and Peak Performance. So what we would like to do today is to talk what Optimal Recovery and Peak Performance mean to you. What's your history, your present, and your future with these themes. And maybe at the end we can answer some questions about OURA, the Ring, and how these themes coincide and co-mingle in each other. So, you have your own podcast, and you're pretty deep into the bio-hacking scene, and texting, and trying out different things with a goal in mind, and I listened to a podcast where you were pretty keen on recovering and how important recovery is. I think you mentioned something like train hard, recover hard.

What was it again?

Siim Land (1:55)

I think it's supposed to be like train hard, and rest harder.

Because most of the response or the growth happens when you're actually resting and recovering from the training stimulus you do. It doesn't have to apply to like physical training, it applies to everything else. Well, it kind of gets into this main idea of expansion and contraction where in life in general as well, like nature follows the same certain cycles of life and death, of expanding and then contracting. And so it is with our body as well, we can't go hard all the way, all the time, because it requires, there's this period where you have to actually allow the growth stimulus to take in and the repair.

So yeah, that's what recovery is for me as well, to kind of go into this, to actually take it as something that is necessary and to not simply forget about it or to think that you're somehow special in the sense that you don't need it or think you could recover faster in something that we all need. And as much as we'd like to keep grinding and hustling all the time, it's still vital for actually to take a step back, because that down period, it's going to actually allow you to become better afterwards. It's almost like you have to suppress your ego for the time being and then kind of allow it to actually reflect back on what you're doing as well, because if you are constantly doing something, constantly pushing the envelope, then it's very difficult to actually notice whether or not you're going in the right direction as well. And that can also simply become a vicious cycle of too much stress and kind of falling into this downward spiral, you know, getting stressed out, not recovering enough. It's going to keep repeating itself in the future.

SPEAKER_4 (3:58)

What are the signs for you when you know that now I have done too much, so that I'm too stressful or too tired? Or what are the first signs for you when you know that now it's time to slow down and give some time for recovery?

Siim Land (4:15)

I think the first signs are coming from the body, definitely your body is constantly giving you some signals every day. And, you know, some initial signs of fatigue and just being stressed out, that, you know, losing your balance, you know, you kind of lose your grip on stuff as well. Maybe you fall off your key, you know, you drop your keys or something like that. And definitely like physical exhaustion as well, soreness, muscle soreness, carrying, being hunched over in a sense. So, you know, like you're kind of holding yourself more, in a more conserved manner, you're trying to preserve energy, you know, you lose your kind of explosiveness and the desire or the willingness to do something physically. And definitely some mental hints are almost as revealing. You know, you get confused, you get brain fog, those are all signs of the stress and the damage to the nervous system in a sense, which are kind of preventing you from reaching your true potential. Because you know what it's like to be on point, you really like kind of remember what it's like to be good, what it's like to be bad. And whenever you deviate from the norm of what you're used to, then you can make your adjustments and make your presumptions. So, you know, how far of the spectrum I am, in what direction am I recovered enough or do I need something more?