#101 Dr. Andy Galpin: The Optimal Diet, Supplement, & Recovery Protocol for Peak Performance

Galpin on fasted training: fine for zone 2 runs under 60 min, risky for high-intensity

Fasted endurance training under 60 minutes may enhance fat oxidation, but for high-intensity or hypertrophy work, caloric balance and carb.

"Only big fundamental difference there might be caloric balance. That's the top layer, but other than that, it's pretty similar."

High-carb diets wrecked GI during overfeeding study: 600g carbs/day in 8 hours

In a hypercaloric study, participants struggled with 600+g of carbs in an 8-hour eating window, highlighting real-world limits of aggressive carb.

"And I don't think so because in our particular program, the training program was really aggressive. They were training hard for really well-trained people. I don't think the recovery would be there. I just don't think it would be there. When did they stop eating and how was their sleep affected? So we let them choose their window. So some of them came in and trained at like seven o'clock in the morning because they want to start their eating window at 10, right?'re college kids so most of them trained like 10 11 12 o'clock in the morning and they would start their eating windows you know between one and two o'clock in the afternoon like something like that depends on if they work or whatever they're so we let them shift a little bit the the time domains had to be the same but when the like we didn't make them start at noon like you know their life schedule. Sleep didn't really change that much. I wish we would have had some of our newer sleep technology. We could have really objectively looked at it at the time. We just had basic questionnaires. So we'll see there. What we did notice is the perceived fatigue and naps increased over time in the TRE group. And so again, a little inclination there of saying, I think fatigue was setting in more. Some of that didn't land statistically significant, but you start to see sort of multiple things in the same pattern. You go, all right, if we run a follow-up study there, that might be interesting to focus on. Why is it important for people to have carbohydrates before they're doing strength training? You don't have to. If you can get away with it, you're fine. It's not the thing we're super concerned about, depending on where you're at. If you can get through it, if your total caloric intake throughout the day is fine, if your carbohydrate intake throughout the day is fine, and depending on how often your strength training, if you're the kind of typical person who's training the same body part on non-consecutive days, then carbohydrate pre-exercise is not a big deal. It's totally fine. You can get away with your strength training. It'd be a personal preference. Again, if you're training though, the same muscle group in multiple days or multiple times per day, that's when the carbohydrate timing will matter most. So you can have it before. Generally, people feel better with it. Performance is usually better, but it's not always. Or if you're someone that is on more of a hypocaloric diet, if you're trying to lose fat or perhaps maintain your weight, you're kind of really kind of watching your calories, then perhaps you're not having a huge total caloric, you know, totally caloric intake per day that you might want to have carbohydrates in that. We will generally, as just a high level rule, try to get more of our calories around training, just period. Regardless of what we're doing, regardless of what type of training, regardless of the person, as a first level thing, that's our preference our preference. We want to either do it pre mid post in your example there. If we're trying to bring calories down, we're going to go somewhere else. If we can, it doesn't always work that way. People don't always like it, but that is, that's our default position is, yeah, we're going to do more calories in and around the training to support it. I want better performance. You perform better, you get better adaptations. That's generally how we look at it. What about people that are more endurance type of athletes? They're out running, you know, 10, 15 or more miles or cycling, biking. What about those individuals? Different equation now, right? So whether you talk about strength training or even endurance training, but as you said said earlier like you're talking sub 60 minutes at kind of a moderate to low intensity carbohydrate before training for most people is not going to matter that much now you're talking about something different really high intensity exercise for a prolonged amount and or moderate exercise for a longer amount right so we'll define longer by plus 60 minutes. Now you will very often see performance improvements with carbohydrates. That said, we have some of our people, some of our friends, a good friend of mine that I will never stop giving him the business on this one, Cam Haynes, you know Cam? Oh yeah, Cam's great. The worst performance nutrition you could just possibly dream of, right? Like he will intentionally not eat and drink water and then go run 18 miles, right? And you're just like, what are we doing here, right?"

Pre-exercise carb timing: fast-digesting glucose right before exercise causes a dip

Eating high-glycemic carbs just before exercise can cause a blood sugar crash as both insulin and exercising muscle pull glucose down simultaneously.

"Insulin starts pulling glucose down, muscle starts pulling it as well, and blood glucose actually dips. You got to be really careful with easy digesting carbohydrates right before the event."

Athletes sweat out magnesium: exercise increases micronutrient requirements

Exercise increases demands for several micronutrients including magnesium, which is lost through sweat and tissue breakdown during training.

"These athletes are sweating magnesium. They're breaking down tissue."

Galpin's supplement hierarchy: fix insufficiencies first, then add performance aids

The biggest performance gains come from correcting physiological insufficiencies in vitamins and minerals, not from adding exotic supplements.

"That is where we have actually seen by far the most enhancements in performance and recovery and sleep and cognitive function. It's by just making sure your physiology is in a healthier spot."

Vitamin D is low-risk to supplement without testing; iron needs a blood test first

Galpin says vitamin D and magnesium are safe to supplement without testing, but iron and other minerals with bigger downsides should be tested first.

"I ain't tripping if you're just like, hey, I want to take vitamin D. Very limited downside, strong likelihood you're low."

Beta-alanine shines for CrossFit-style high-intensity efforts of 30 sec to 10 min

Beta-alanine takes 3-5 weeks to build up intracellularly and mainly benefits sustained high-intensity efforts, not short strength sets or long.

"Though, again, you can see some positive benefits there. Where it mostly works are things of really high intensity. And by that, I mean cardiovascular intensity, right? So high intensity of strength training, again, I just said not super relevant because you're doing two reps. Acidic is not the problem there. So beta alanine is something that you would take chronically. You will feel an acute effect, certainly at somewhat of a higher dose, but you need three to five weeks for this to build up intracellular before it makes a difference. And so much like caffeine or creatine rather, unlike caffeine, this takes a while for you to dose it. So you can do a bunch of things to mitigate that, but you will see a pretty classic, like CrossFit would be a great example. Like you couldn't, basically couldn't engineer a supplement better for acute or for for crossfit performance um outside of beta alanine and as i mentioned it's been around a really long time it's just an amino acid it's not a stimulant it won't affect energy you you can take it right now and again like you wouldn't notice you wouldn't be like oh i'm fired up and ready to go. You wouldn't feel anything different, but you would just feel the burn is not as bad as your training. What would be the optimal dose?"

Glutamine for immune support: Rhonda's protocol for fighting off sickness

Activated T cells use glutamine as fuel. Rhonda takes glutamine daily and increases the dose when exposed to illness, based on cell biology research.

"They are fine. Because they consume glutamine as an energy source. It's used as alpha-ketoglutarate. So basically it gets converted into that. But I started taking it, and this is total anecdata, but for a long period of time I never got sick. Then I became a mom. I still didn't get sick until my son started school. And then it was insane how often I was getting sick. I was wondering if I had cancer. I'm like, what is wrong with me? And then I started to glutamine, and I don't ever get sick anymore. Really? I'm serious. I'm serious. Now, I'm sure if the flu came up or something, I'd probably get it. That doesn't count, though. But upper respiratory tract infections, if I get a little bit of anything, it's a tiny bit of a runny nose for a couple of days. I haven't been sick in months. And that's unusual as a parent, as you know. Oh, my God. So that's why I take it. I take it not for recovery reasons, but I take it prophylactically every day. Now, gut health- Five grams, 10 grams? Like I said, so right now I take five grams a day. No, 5.6. It's almost six grams. It's about six grams a day. If I have any inkling suspicion that it's coming- 25 grams. Yeah, I'm like 20 grams. I'm like up, up. And the only downside for me is I can get a little gas when I start going my dose. I think you're talking about no downsides. I would say the only downside is if someone has cancer. They have colon cancer or liver cancer or something like that. Cancer cells like glutamine. I was talking about T cells, but cancer cells can thrive with glutamine. It's an energy source. Totally. And people don't realize that. And so I was thinking about the TBI thing that I'm totally going on off a tangent here, but I'm wondering if the TBI thing, if there's an energy component to it. Oh, no, there absolutely is. There's huge. I covered this. I did a whole, we published a paper a few months ago. Myself, Tommy Wood, and Federica Conte, who works with me at Parker now as my research scientist, published a review on preventative as well as post-brain injury, concussion, all the supplementation, dosage, timing, all that stuff, as well as whole food equivalents. And that whole paper is open access. So you can go through that whole thing. But yeah, it just came out as a pretty clear one. When you start then poking around into the gut health literature as well, you start going, okay, the immune stuff you just brought up, this is such a clear connection between this entire chain from being sick to the brain health to the energy. You pay attention to how it's working, what it's doing. And you're like, okay, this is one of those times where it lines up and you go oh yeah now i get it like this is why it's having such cross benefit right absolutely makes sense in the gut too it's like it's being converted to energy your gut your gut cells are using alpha ketoglutarate i mean it's so interesting i think there's just there's so much to be discovered with glutamine yeah um that i hope people are gonna you know research that more but we do almost always 10 grams twice a day morning and night like that's a pretty thing especially if we have any inclination or direct evidence of actual gut issues that's a common one if we want to drop it then back down to 10 grams total a day like we will do that, but we will generally live at at least 10 grams a day. That said, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do your protocol because I'm not on it. You should every day. If I ever get sick again, I'm having a lawyer send a letter to you. I'm blame, everybody. I gave it to my son as well. And he's not getting sick like nearly as much's it's it's it's real so i was thinking it was placebo it was like oh it could be placebo because you know honestly if it was placebo i don't care if it works it works but my son doesn't know of course that i'm giving him glutamine what are you getting three grams i'm no i'm giving him full five almost five yeah yeah and it's like it it's been a pretty night and day difference in terms of the effects on the immune immune system i mean i'm saying immune system i don't know that it's actually i'm just saying doesn't matter yeah bringing illness into our house not getting a cold this season has been unbelievable and it's it's funny because this season has been the worst for all of my friends like Like everyone's been sick. Crushed. Yeah, everyone's been sick. We haven't. My wife probably has had one cold in a decade. Like it doesn't matter. You could soak her in a bath of 16 cold viruses. She will get nothing. I'm so envious of those people. Nothing. My daughter is like, okay, but she gets a lot. My son and I just, you bring it home, it's over. wrap I'm so done and I get so mad because I'm like I know all these things I do this whatever this is my job and I can't but I've never tried this at this level so try it um I'm so like I'm I put it in my coffee um or you know my tea and it does you can the coffee if you put like monk fruit or stevia you won't taste it but it does have a taste as you probably know you probably remember i'm a straight shooter we put it i just put it actually like in that much water yeah just right down yeah and we just dose it with all the rest it's like put creatine put it all in there deal with six ounces of the light and just get it out now what's it supposed to do for muscle recovery well if it has a conditional effect if it has any of the immune effect it's going to have the same there so you'll see muscle soreness as the primary outcome to pay attention to there like is it doing anything anabolically um in cachexia maybe or like some other situations sarcopenic but for normal people now why we do it is the other stuff for the most part like i just i just wonder how much of the glutamine you know because i remember gosh it's been so long i did some of these like substrate labeling studies and it was like you know a lot of it's getting converted into glutamate and alpha-ketoglutarate and being used as energy yep so it's it's it's fascinating you kind of wonder how much of the glutamine that you're taking in is going as an amino acid versus the energy source. That's a great question. So you're not really big on recovery supplements. I got two more to ask you about. One, and we can kind of lump them together as well, but the hydrolyzed collagen powder for joints and tendons. And this is where I get into, you know, it's high in arginine. It's actually really high in arginine. I take it mostly for skin because I've been pretty convinced by the skin data. But I was, you know, what are your thoughts on? I've changed my tune on this one. I was not compelled by this evidence for a long time. I was also not compelled that as long as your protein intake, whole food is high or higher than ish, you know, like higher than basic numbers. It's not no compelling evidence. I don't care about skin. So I'm like, whatever. I've changed a little bit. More and more research has come out. And it looks like there's something actually happening here. Where this gets sticky is still the argument of organ-specific conversion. So if you are consuming it, how do we actually know that you're consuming collagen and that's getting into collagen? Well, the argument would be if it's all being broken down into its individual constituents and it doesn't matter. and then there's some talk of like, there's these special kind of conditional ones where it gets crossed through as these combination of amino acids. So therefore it's going to be more targeting collagen. We'll wait and see if that holds true or not. I'm not entirely convinced of that either. But that said, when you go to the end of the story, it does seem to be doing stuff for connective tissue and ligaments this the study that convinced me of that very question that you were asking was actually a while published a while ago over a decade ago and it was an animal study where hydrolyzed collagen powder was radiolabeled and intact peptides were making their ways to the tendons and i was like okay i okay. I mean, yeah, it's a rodent, but are we really going to say that, you know, an intact peptide is going to make its way to the tendons? I mean, maybe, maybe it's not going to happen in a human, but it seems encouraging. And I would say- I think it's just an area where we probably don't have the answers yet. Like we don't have all the answers. It may be something else. Maybe may, maybe it's that, maybe it's not that, but something's happening here. And so now we will very often recommend it prophylactically, even if you're not injured. Certainly if you have any soft tissue injury history, you're compelled to that. Um, 30 to 60 minutes pre-exercise seems to be the time. So timing dosage does seem to matter with collagen. I mentioned earlier, co-ingested with like 50 milligrams of vitamin C. Yeah. Seems to be the thing. This is all Keith Barr's work, like many other people, but he's the one who's pushed this for many, many years now, scientifically. So he gets credit for a lot of this work. And again, I was on the other side of the fence, like, I don't buy i don't buy it it's got a very different amino acid profile than than protein though i mean completely different proline and hydroxyproline yeah i mean it's well this was the this was the argument against it for many years like this is for muscle yeah but like for connective tissue and now pairs potentially it matters right so yep we'll do it yeah um as you've heard me say many times now i also like to run like well what ifs like what's the downside there doesn't seem to be really any downside here so cost money right sure physiologically we're not blocking adaptations we're not shuttling something else out we're not doing you know long-term. We're not shutting off a pathway. Okay, worst, we spent some money. All right, most of the people I'm around, they'll take that exchange. Then you start adding with something like collagen, hair, skin, other potential benefits. Like, okay, I'm getting potential benefits in multiple areas. There is some human research on this. It might work. Very little downside. Yes, it's pretty cost-intensive relative to protein powder. And if that's your barrier, fine, I get it. No problem. But for the most part, it's not that expensive. Reasonable. Yeah, there's enough competition now that there's some quality brands that you can find um what are your what are your thoughts on glucosamine um chondroitin for tendon joint we don't use it much no no um honestly i would have to dive back into that database i haven't looked in many years kind of makes evidence as far as i last saw and same sometimes all like if i have an issue it's like okay let's try to throw it let's throw it in the bucket i don't see a big downside just in case i give it to my dogs that makes you feel any better that's the only thing we give them they're old but yeah we don't use there's just i think there's more compelling ways to go about it if we're having consistent injury issues um we're doing other things. That's not going to be our first, second, or third line of defense at all. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll hopefully get into some of that because I want to get into recovery. This is an area where it's very important, as of course you know, but I don't know that a lot of people focus on recovery. Although it's becoming, I think, more increasing, more awareness is, I think, being generated now. But I was thinking maybe you could kind of just start by walking people through the physiological process of what's going on during recovery. Why is it so important? How are you defining recovery? How are you labeling? I guess, you know, you're talking about the shifts in inflammation and immune immune immune response and cellular repair all the things that are happening in response to the workload that you've applied and the inflammation that you've generated and the you know oxidation that you've generated okay the reason i ask that is because we answer this differently depending on how people are thinking of recovery. We think about this in terms of like a muscle soreness. Are we thinking about this in terms of a, my energy's low the next day? Are we thinking about this in terms of, I felt fine, but my actual performance was just a little bit lower. Those are three different types of recovery. Are we thinking about this more chronically? Man, I've just been going down for several weeks and several months. Depending on how we frame this, my answer would completely different. So is there one or more of those that you would want to focus on? I think I'm thinking more about adaptations that are occurring to improve muscle mass and strength and your cardiorespitary fitness, for example. Yeah. Okay. So in that particular case, you've laid out the basic framework for us a second ago, right? In terms of the three big processes that happen there. It is not the case typically where you're actually tearing tissue down. In the case of strength training and muscle, we hear that all the time. Like you break the muscle down, you have these micro tears that would then have those cascades you're mentioning. That actually doesn't happen as much as people think. Most of the time, muscle tissue is fine. We're certainly not tearing down a lot of tissue in our cardiovascular system. This is more of a signaling issue than it is a damage issue. And we know that because you can induce those same adaptations if you cut those first parts of the equation out. So I can give you things that simply ramp up adaptation that don't require damage at all. I do not have to have inflammation to induce adaptation. That is the primary signal though. Same token. If I give you an inflammatory agent without any tissue damage at all, I can get similar adaptation, right? So we can cause physiological responses with an inflammatory marker that comes in rather than an actual tissue damage. So those things are independent of itself. It's not there. But you laid out the basic cascade, some sort of inflammatory immune response there, some sort of tissue edema swelling, and then some sort of back cascade. Why supplements, why different tools, why different recovery protocols work and why they matter is because they can target any aspect of that, the front side or the backside, the insult coming in or the adaptive response. And you can play a game, any part of that area. We will use different solutions based on why we think that the thing happened in the first place. So that is our overall framework of how we set up recovery in this context. Okay. So then let's take a step forward and talk a little bit about what you were asking me. And that would be like, how can a person, an athlete sort of know if they, what can they, what kind of metrics can they look at to help signal if they are, if they're helping, if they're normally sort of recovering from their training versus not. So then muscle soreness, the injury, like what, what sort of metrics? First, most important metric is how are you feeling? And I'm saying this because if you look at actually the data and we've done this across millions of data points, like literally millions of heart rate variability data points and things like that. Subjective perception, how you feel today, will stack up as tight as almost any other biological metric we can pick. It's really, really important. If you're feeling good, if you're making progress and you don't feel terrible, then I'm not worried about your recovery at all. Like we're done equation. So when you ask me, what should people measure? Most of the time, the answer is nothing. Don't worry about it. You making progress? Yeah. You in a lot of pain and suffering? No. Good. We're done. Like you want to do metric behind that. Sometimes it makes things worse. Like you, sometimes we're, we're looking at data and it's not the right way to go about it. And that can cause problems. We end up pulling technologies away from people a lot."

Pneumatic compression boots simulate exercise-like blood flow for recovery

Compression boots create cycles of hypoxia and blood flow similar to exercise.

"It's basically simulated exercise. You will actually see really compelling evidence on water immersion. Not only cold water, I simply mean water."

Galpin uses cold water for stress inoculation, not recovery -- and warns of overuse

Galpin uses cold immersion for nervous system resilience and breathing practice, not performance recovery.

"He does it, I mean, it's at least an hour before bed. Yeah, I'm not surprised at all that he likes it. Yeah, but yeah. Does he shower then before he goes to bed? Is he hot again or does he? Yeah, sometimes he does shower, but it's like a really quick. Yeah. I don't know that he gets hot. Actually, he's cold in bed so doesn't really make him hot there you go there you go but he does he does hot tub before getting in the cold oh he likes to get hot first and get in the cold they get hot and then get in the cold i hate i do the opposite i go straight cold i'm like i hate going hot oh i don't hate it but like i'm like all right just get cold just like do the cold and get over it but a lot of people like it that way i i don't really prefer i don't like doing hot to cold i get blood pressure changes that are like orthostatic too much yeah for me i'm just like i have to wait a little bit before especially if i'm like hot tub into the cold i have to i i've had like some scary times where i'm like like just i didn't like it yeah yeah yeah understood um okay so you were talking a little bit about um hrv and that's and you talk about heart rate variability and i wanted to talk about we were talking chatting a little bit about this before before we got on camera and um for for measuring something that people can like you know maybe on their wearable device yep measure a marker of recovery now you said subjective how you feel wins yeah okay um and it seems to be the case with almost everything like like how hard are you going do you feel like how what's your heart rate going up to or do you feel like your perceived exertions oh your perceived exertion is going to win right yeah yeah um so ben levine was on the podcast and he was actually arguing that heart rate variability is extremely variable in terms of the way it's measured and you know you know, he just sees tons of variability, like plus or minus 25% constantly, depending on like the variety of factors, the time of day, their breathing, just everything like that. And he likes to look at resting heart rate, like first thing when you wake up in the morning, what's your resting heart rate, as a good marker of recovery. And if your you're resting heart rates higher than it should be then it's kind of like okay maybe you're you're getting into this over non-functional overreaching which i want to talk about over training yeah um but nice use by the way good dig thank you that's good uh but hrv so do you think there's you know if if there's some way people can kind of follow this consistent measurement protocol, same time of day, same posture, same controlled breathing or something that they do like a controlled breathing thing before they measure it, something that's giving them, you know, consistency. Yeah, the big ones in this particular area, these are all respiratory related, what you just described. There's lots of ways we measure readiness, performance, fatigue, like depending on which spectrum you're in here, people will call these different things. Load management, they're performance-based ones. These ones you've all mentioned are in the respiratory physiology side. So that's great. We'll just stick right there. Now, HRV is one of them. Resting heart rate is another."