Supercharge Exercise Performance & Recovery with Cooling

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring you zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health. I've done a couple of episodes now on the so-called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need, and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman and claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3 is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin D3. And K2 is also important because it regulates things like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body, and so on. Again, go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are an element, and those are sodium, magnesium and potassium, but it has no sugar. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the key role of hydration and electrolytes for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues and organ systems of the body. If we have sodium, magnesium and potassium present in the proper ratios, all of those cells function properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized. If the electrolytes are not present and if hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, hormone systems go off, our ability to get into physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratios of electrolytes. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element, that's lmnt.com/huberman, and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to element, lmnt.com/huberman.
Today's episode is also brought to us by Thesis. Thesis makes what are called nootropics, which means smart drugs. Now, to be honest, I am not a fan of the term nootropics. I don't believe in smart drugs in the sense that I don't believe that there's any one substance or collection of substances that can make us smarter. I do believe, based on science, however, that there are particular neural circuits and brain functions that allow us to be more focused, more alert, access creativity, be more motivated, et cetera. That's just the way that the brain works, different neural circuits for different brain states. Thesis understands this. And as far as I know, they're the first nootropics company to create targeted nootropics for specific outcomes. I've been using Thesis for more than six months now, and I can confidently say that their nootropics have been a total game changer. My go-to formula is the clarity formula, or sometimes I'll use their energy formula before training. To get your own personalized nootropic starter kit, go online to takethesis.com/huberman, take a three-minute quiz, and Thesis will send you four different formulas to try in your first month. That's takethesis.com/huberman, and use the code Huberman at checkout for 10% off your first order. This episode marks the beginning of a new topic for the Huberman Lab podcast. As many of you already know, we go deep into a particular topic over four, or sometimes even five episodes. We just closed out the episodes on hormones. Now we are going to talk about how to optimize physical performance and skill learning. We're going to look deep at the science behind this, as well as specific practices. In fact, today, you're going to hear about specific tools that you can use to improve endurance and strength by up to, I'm not making this up, three or four times your current capacity. This is based on studies that were done at Stanford and are currently in use by collegiate and professional teams. If you're not a professional athlete or a serious athlete, that's okay. The topics this month and all the information we are going to cover are going to make you a better recreational exerciser as well. If you're not an exerciser and you're thinking about getting into that, or if you live in the Northern Hemisphere and you're just thinking about the beach this summer or fat loss, muscle building, that sort of thing, this month we're going to cover all of that as well. There's so much confusion out there about how to optimize fat loss, muscle building, improvements in flexibility, for instance, or skill learning. I know many of you aren't so focused on the cosmetic aspects of physical exercise, but are interested in actual skill learning. We're going to talk about that too. I want to just take a moment to reflect on something that came up last episode. If you didn't see that episode, that's quite all right. But last episode, we were talking about the hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, and how to leverage those towards attention and learning. And there was a little bit of confusion that I want to clarify. I mentioned an optimal protocol for learning that involved leveraging adrenaline, also called epinephrine, and it involved four steps. The four steps that I spelled out were to be calm and focused while one is trying to acquire or learn the new skill, cognitive skill or motor skill, then to have a spike in adrenaline. I mentioned ways to do that, using cold or breathing or other tools, immediately after the learning episode, then to incorporate what I call non-sleep deep rest, a 20 minute episode of a shallow nap or some other protocol like NSDR, non-sleep deep rest protocol, of which we always provide links in the captions, and then to try and optimize sleep later that night and the subsequent night. Some of you heard this and it sunk in right away and it was straightforward. Others said, wait, I thought from a previous episode, even before that, you said you're supposed to do non-sleep deep rest immediately after learning. No, we added another step. The logic still follows that you want to be calm and focused during learning. Then you want to spike adrenaline at the end. Most people get that backward. They're drinking too much coffee or even taking nootropics and things, trying to be really focused while learning. Some people are taking Adderall recreationally, something I don't recommend. That's actually getting the whole process backwards if you look at the data and the physiology. You want to spike adrenaline at the end or immediately after a learning episode and then non-sleep deep rest and then sleep itself. Okay, four steps. Hope that clarifies things for you. If you have any additional questions, please put them in the comment section below. Okay, so let's talk about physical performance. There are so many variables to physical performance and we can manage physical performance and skill learning from a variety of contexts. I made just a short list of some of the things that come to mind that can powerfully impact physical performance and skill learning. Some of them are what I would consider foundational. They allow you to show up with your current ability. And if you were to disrupt those, you would perform less well. So things like getting a good night's sleep, things like being properly hydrated, things like being well nourished, whatever that means to you. I know some of you like to exercise fasted. Some of you prefer to have food in your stomach or have eaten a couple hours before. There are supplements, there are drugs, there are different ways to breathe. There are so many tools related to mindset visualization. There are machines and devices. It's just a vast space, but it's not infinite. And there are a few things in the list of things that can impact and even optimize physical performance and skill learning that have an outsized effect that any of you can use. Many of them, most of them are low to zero cost. So today we are going to focus on what I believe to be one of the most powerful tools to improve physical performance and skill learning and recovery. And we'll talk about why that's important. And that's temperature. Now, many of you might think, oh, well, that's kind of boring. I want to know about the magic pill that I can take that's going to allow me to dunk a basketball if I currently can't, or I want to know about the thing that's going to let me run further and faster is going to shed fat. Believe it or not, temperature is the most powerful variable for improving physical performance and for recovery. I would argue it's even more important than sleep because temperature itself is going to dictate how well and when you sleep and the depth of your total recovery. There are two aspects to temperature, of course. There's heat and there's cold. We are mainly going to focus on cold as a way to buffer heat. In a previous podcast episode, I talked all about growth hormone. You can find that episode about thyroid and growth hormone and how heat can be a powerful stimulus for increasing growth hormone, which is involved in tissue repair and et cetera, can burn fat and improve metabolism in various ways. However, cold, I would argue, is even more powerful than heat as a tool. And I'm not just talking about putting ice packs on sore muscles or slightly sprained limbs and ankles and things of that sort. We're going to talk about cold from the standpoint of thermal physiology. This is a literature that's rich in scientific information that goes back very deep into the last century where physiologists and neuroscientists figured out that there are different compartments in your body that heat and cool you differently and that you can leverage those in order to double, and as I mentioned before, even triple or quadruple your work output, both strength, repetitions and endurance. So this is not weak sauce, as they say. This is the stuff that can really shift the needle quite a bit. And it's not just about performing well once, it's about being able to perform well and recover from that performance so that you do even better when you're not incorporating these tools on days where, for instance, you can't access cold or an ice pack or an ice bath or things of that sort. Okay, so we're going to cover cold. We're going to talk a little bit about the physiology of cold and heat and how they work, because as you've probably heard me say before, if you can understand some mechanism, if you can just push yourself through a little bit of new knowledge into understanding a little bit of mechanism about how you work, you will be in a far better position to implement the tools in the best and most flexible ways for your needs. This is why at the Huberman Lab podcast, I never ever do a just list of the things that you should do. I don't believe in the just tell me what to do. First, I tell you why you should do something. What's the logical framework that it's grounded in? And then we distill that down to specific protocols. For those of you that are too impatient for that, there are millions, if not billions of other resources out there that will take you into the cul-de-sac of one protocol that will work and then stop working or might work for you indefinitely. That's not how we work here. This is about really understanding the mechanism so that you can tweak things and modify things, adjust the timing and the dosage of things and really get the most out of these tools and protocols. Everything I'm going to talk about pertains to both endurance exercise and strength and speed type exercise. So sprints, weightlifting, endurance work, and to some extent flexibility, but we are going to cover flexibility in depth, as well as another feature that's not often talked about, which is suppleness or smoothness of movement over different ranges of movement in a subsequent episode.