How to Use & Interpret Blood Tests for High Performance

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play and life. Welcome to Perform. Welcome back, friends. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor of kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton. I want to start today by asking a couple of questions. The first is, how many of you have ever got any blood testing done? Well, my assumption is basically all of you at this point. And the second one is, how many of you, outside of maybe finding out you had an acute infection, or disease, or something of medical emergency going on, have found that that blood testing was insightful, helpful, or really give you specific directions about what to do? Well, my guess is not many of you still have your hands up. In fact, generally, people have done testing like this, and the results and data come back, and it's fairly underwhelming. So my goal of today is to help you better understand what's going on so that you can get more out of your blood work. Let me give you a couple of examples. Well, there's a particular protein that's measured in almost all blood panels, and that's called albumin. Now, for my money, it is the single best marker of overall health of any test you could get, but we'll come back to that later. Now, albumin is interesting because it is known as an acute phase reactant, which means it is reduced or goes down in the presence of inflammation. However, it goes up in the presence of dehydration. So if you're running the math a little bit there, and you can imagine a scenario in which you're a little bit inflamed and a little bit dehydrated, the inflammation brings it down, the dehydration brings it up, so your albumin comes right back in as perfectly normal. Now, if one doesn't look at your blood results properly and contextualize it and understands your history and symptomology and other things going on, one may look at that result and say your albumin is perfect. The reality of it is you would not be feeling perfect because you're slightly inflamed and dehydrated. This is a classic example of not feeling your best or performing at your best, yet your labs don't necessarily show any dysfunction. Now, I could do this example for many other things. Another really common one that we see is a marker called mean corpuscular volume. This is kind of like the average size of your red blood cells. Again, we'll come back to these things later. It has the same issue where it goes up in the presence of vitamin B12 or vitamin B6 deficiency, which is actually quite common, but it is reduced in the presence of inflammation or even iron deficiency. So, not uncommon for someone to be low in B12 and B6, as well as iron, in which case, again, mean corpuscular volume would be normalized. So, there are things like this that are happening that you can actually identify, you can see in your labs if you know what's going on, which then gives you specific and direct information about what exactly to do to resolve those problems. It's these types of things I'd like to cover today, again, to give you more information about what's going on so you know exactly what to do, to help improve or reduce or relieve any symptoms you've got going on that you don't like, and more importantly, just simply helping you look, feel and perform at your best. Now, before we go too much further, I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors because they make this show possible. Not only are they on this list because they offer great products and services, but because I actually personally love them and use them myself. Today's episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, sleep tracking and more. I've had one for years and it is glorious. I even put one on the bed in my guest bedroom because as you'll hear me talk about endlessly here on the Perform podcast, there really is nothing you can do that makes a larger impact on your health and performance than getting tremendous sleep. The 8 Sleep is a game changer because I run hot or as my wife calls it, I'm a furnace. And that's particularly driven by the fact that I often have to do my exercise training in the evenings, which is honestly not always great for sleep, but this is also the case of many of the athletes that I work with who don't have a choice when they compete. And so being able to cool down immediately in bed does wonders for both sleep latency and sleep quality. 8 Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra has two times more cooling power, yet is virtually silent and even has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head in a few degrees to improve the airflow and stop you from snoring. Go to 8sleep.com/perform to save $350 off their Pod 4 Ultra. 8 Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, and select countries in the EU and australia. Again, that's 8sleep.com/perform.