How to Achieve Optimal Rest and Recovery | Dr. Kirk Parsley

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:02)
Welcome to the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, where I believe a healthy world is based on transparent conversations.
In today's episode of the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, I sit down with Dr. Kirk Parsley. Dr. Parsley served as a Navy Seal during the first Gulf War.
He was tasked with being the SEAL team physician for the West Coast SEALs, and really after the realities of eight years of nearly continuous combat, we're beginning to weigh on the SEALs, and Dr. Parsley was tasked with optimizing and maintaining the performance of the most incredible and toughest men in the world. He was struck by the disparity between healthcare and actually health. During this time, Kirk was forced to learn an enormous amount of alternative medicine, the alternative treatments in medical literature, synthesize and apply it in a way that was both effective and practical for the SEALs to maintain peak performance 365 days a year. There is so much that we can learn from Dr. Parsley. He's worked with thousands of elite performers and has had tremendous success from the physical to the cognitive to emotional performance. And in this episode, we talk all about ways in which you can perform to your most optimal, peptides and other strategies for peak performance. And finally, the importance of sleep on training life and overall wellness. Please take a moment to rate, subscribe, share this episode, and let's dive in. Dr. Kirk Parsley. How'd you like that intro?

**Dr. Kirk Parsley** (2:01)
Great.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:03)
I'm so excited.
So that was a great podcast. We talked about a lot of things there. I'm so grateful to have you on. You are a former Navy SEAL, physician, friend, colleague, overall amazing human.

**Dr. Kirk Parsley** (2:19)
You're going to make me blush. I'm a SEAL.
Yeah. So I enlisted right out of high school, actually dropped out of high school to join the Navy and went-

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:30)
You dropped out of high school to join the Navy.

**Dr. Kirk Parsley** (2:31)
Yeah. Well, that makes it sound more romantic than it was. Actually, I went to four years of high school, but I was only a sophomore by credits at the end of that. So I just left.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:41)
You're not a good student?

**Dr. Kirk Parsley** (2:42)
Never. I started getting Ds and Fs in third grade and barely just, I think kind of got pushed ahead by my classes, just didn't have any interest in school.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:52)
But you're a highly skilled physician, highly trained SEAL and you got Ds and Fs and dropped out of finished four years of high school and dropped out.

**Dr. Kirk Parsley** (3:03)
So I had a very dysfunctional, abusive home life that kept me up till one and two in the morning with the cops at the house and all that stuff. So a lot of coming and going, like moving in with relatives and it just wasn't a good environment to be a kid.
And so, yeah, I mean, I just kind of rebelled at school. That was the only time I had any safety or fun was at school. So I didn't want to waste all that time reading it.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:38)
That makes sense.

**Dr. Kirk Parsley** (3:39)
And plus, like I said, a total blue collar, red neck family is like book learnings for sissies. If you want to be a man, you learn to be a mechanic or welder, offshore fisherman or something. So I just didn't value it.
And I still didn't value it when I went to the SEAL teams. But then you have to go through, in my day, you had to go get a job before you go to BUDS because almost everybody fails, and so you have to have a place to go back to.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (4:06)
Meaning a job in the Navy like a corpsman.

**Dr. Kirk Parsley** (4:10)
So I was a gunner's mate, so I had to go to basic electronics school, electronic and electricity school, and then gun school, which a bunch of hydraulics and all this stuff.
And I graduated at the top of my class at all those. When I joined as a SEAL, nobody knew what the hell a SEAL was. Like when I joined...

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (4:29)
How many years ago was that? I mean, you're only 25, so...

**Dr. Kirk Parsley** (4:34)
1987 Yeah. And like literally when I came home to see friends and relatives and I'd tell them I'm a SEAL, they had no idea what that was. They were like, is that like you work at SeaWorld? What does that mean? You're a SEAL.