because most people think of hydration as simply plain water or at most matching the saltiness of your sweat and i don't even see a whole lot of people even recommending that but it's actually matching the saltiness of your blood which is going to improve its absorption and be able to expand your own blood volume which is the heat it's boosting cardiac output number one so that's decreasing basically oxygen demand on heart number two it's giving you a larger volume to dissipate heat because we need to understand we lose volume from our blood to cool off like the sweat has to come from somewhere hey friends welcome back so today's show is brought to you by myoscience nutrition tools to help you support your athletic performance healthy hydration and recover from things like going in the sauna all topics that we are going to drill down today further with dr james dino glantonio the best-selling author of multiple books that i will link below so if you're interested in going in the sauna recovering from exercise getting a little bit more mileage out of your workout you should consider the electrolyte sticks that are relatively new from myoscience there's over 138 reviews from real customers people like you who are excited from switching off products that contain morton's table salt and electrolytes that don't future the synergistic nutrients like taurine like creatine albion chelated diamagnesium malate and other beneficial nutrients so don't take my word for it check out some of the reviews that i'll link below over at myoscience.com that's myo xcience.com myoscience with an x check out the electrolyte sticks i will put links below many reviews people just like you athletic people weekend warriors people who are sick of having leg cramps and things like that at night you can see what they are saying and if you decide to give it a try 30 day money back guarantee you can use the coupon code podcast to save 15 percent that's podcast to save 15 on this novel unique combination of a multi-ingredient electrolyte with creatine and torrent combo so check it out and also in the links below will be links to some of my favorite books from
links to some of my favorite books from dr james de nicole antonio he's a good friend of mine i really enjoy his company his information normally we do in person video based podcasts but this is just a zoom conversation and we're talking about hydration we're talking about athletic performance we're talking about thermal stress going in the sauna recovery periodization to increase fat loss and all that and mostly drawing off new information from his book win which is an amazing detailed expose about all things that you can do to optimize your physical performance and recovery so i'll put links below to that and other past conversations that we've had definitely check out his book the salt fix best best seller for sure an amazing book you'll definitely enjoy it and last but not least my video for some reason when i hit to stop the record the file got corrupted and because you know we did this virtual and you see me all the time anyway you're not going to see me henceforth which is totally fine you're going to get all the links to the the timestamps in the show notes below so it's all good but i hope you enjoyed this conversation with dr james dinical antonio it's great to have you back on the show we have done two in-person conversations about your various books you're the best-selling author of five more than five books and you've authored or co-authored more than 300 academic articles so it's an honor to be with you and i've been diving into your work about salt over the past several years but especially in your new book when and maybe we can just start off i want to get into all the details of hydration of heat stress and cold stress and recovery strategies and creatine and all that but you know i'm sure you've seen the reports from jama and various other articles that have found that a lot of people have gained weight due to the stress and reduced mobility over the last couple years so if we're just talking simple ideas and exercise modalities for people because you highlight in the first chapter of your book all about the different ways that we can exercise there's zone two training there's hypertrophy there's hit training from all the research that you've done for the average person who's not an elite athlete when it comes to sustainable ways to support longevity and prevent
ways to support longevity and prevent age-related fat gain and all that what are what's some like big picture advice that you would give for some of those folks that's a great question i mean undoubtedly doing resistance training of some sort 30 to 60 minutes three to four times a week is going to obviously reduce the risk of sarcopenia or basically the loss of muscle mass and strength as we age which can lead to frailty and fractures and even death so i think you know keeping your muscle is super important and the easiest way to do that is just resistance training um of course then you know there's your standard cardio zone two training which is essentially you know running at 60 to um of your max heart rate and doing that boost your endurance and then high intensity interval training or what's called supra maximal interval training which is basically sprinting as fast as you can like for 30 seconds and then resting for 30 seconds and doing that multiple times doing that like two to three times a week is going to help with your cardiovascular um basically benefits what are you personally doing now i know you've changed your routine a little bit you're doing more is it mao tai or jujitsu you're doing some more sort of um martial arts so to speak in in conjunction with your resistance training yeah exactly so i think i'm i'm more focusing on functional movements at this point and so basically moving my body in a way that i would move it but with added persistence whether that's with resistance bands or using things like electromagnetic resistance from tonal machines um but basically for my cardio i do a lot of shadow boxing and kicking because it's you know um i don't know it's quick it's a super uh very intense way to get cardio so it's like hit and cement all at once and i just find that that is just something because i work with a lot of i mean the athletes too that sort of drove that interest in kind of utilizing something that's fun um to build your cardio and strength at the same time that's awesome it seems
the same time that's awesome it seems like that's becoming more and more popular i know there's a lot more like boxing studios coming on and and people are transitioning through that sort of way to incorporate you know a movement that you might do not that you're going to box every day in life right but you're moving your muscles in a way that is more natural for the human body and i think that's one of the benefits if you can look at it that way with the pandemic is we were forced to do more body weight type movements and you know whether it's bear crawls or air squats or lunges or things like that because we didn't have access to a gym and i've seen a resurgence uh in this sort of activity which i think is unique because it lowers the barrier to entry and a lot of people kind of say well i don't have time to go gym or i don't know i don't belong to a gym i can't afford it but you can do these these different uh exercises which is uh pretty cool so you start you you do work with a lot of mma athletes and things like that yeah exactly i mean mostly on hydration it's primarily what they suffer on because they use sauna to cut weight and they don't realize that they're losing a lot of salt and fluids when they do that and other minerals so i primarily work with their on their nutrition and supplementation but also their hydration which is key and so let's maybe transition to more hydration as an ergogenic aid if you were to survey maybe 100 people on the street and that lift weights or that exercise and you say hey what are your top performance supplements i'm sure you'd hear creatine hmb taurine you'd hear about carnosine beta alanine i i bet like maybe five percent would say like oh yeah i use salt and i use you know hydration strategies to improve sports performance so you've really dove into this and i think it's phenomenal to to talk about sort of salt preloading warming up to the exercise and all that so if you were to just you know give us a big overview of how salt can be utilized as an ergogenic aid and enhance performance what does that sort of look like yeah that's a great question i think to sort of level sad
sort of level sad some of your top of ergogenic aids would be things like beetroot juice or like you had mentioned beta alanine now that's only going to allow you to vigorously exercise maybe one to two minutes longer whereas if you do salt correctly you can actually exercise over 20 minutes longer so it's essentially 20 times as good as any type of ergogenic supplement that you would take so that's the difference and like you said a lot of people actually realize how much more beneficial preloading with salt and fluids would be compared to your top supplements it's 10 to 20 times better so i think that helps level set it for people now what's interesting is the main benefit is from the boost in blood volume prior to vigorous exercise and the reason why you want to boost is because when you start exercising vigorously you have competition of blood flowing from the heart but now it has to go to working skeletal muscle and that it it also has to flow to the skin to dissipate heat so you have competition now for blood and you have about an eight to ten percent drop in blood volume within five minutes of vigorous exercise so if you can get ahead of that problem you're going to dramatically improve your performance and one of there's there's two really key things i think that a lot of people should understand is the biggest adaptation that the body goes through during vigorous endurance exercise is it will try to increase its baseline blood volume that's one number two if you give people iv saline and you prevent the drop in blood volume that happens with vigorous exercise you don't see a drop in performance so we know the linchpin on improving performance is maintaining blood volume from those two aspects um and so when you think about it a typical male adult has five liters of blood a woman has four elite athletes will have a 40 increase in blood volume they set male elite athletes at about seven liters and really elite rowers can actually have nine to ten meters of blood volume so
blood volume so there's a tremendous spectrum and a tremendous basically gap that you can improve on and a quick way to sort of reach that gap is to pre-load assaulting fluids this is really interesting i think a lot of people that have studied exercise when i think of these sort of adaptations that occur when you habitually exercise over time we think of sort of the neuromuscular contraction and increased mitochondrial density and all these different factors that uh relate to the muscle the last thing that i would ever like if i were to do a multiple choice test on exercise physiology blood volume would be sort of the last adaptations that i would consider to be very favorable to improve performance but it seems that this is a major aspect to adaptation so training in and of itself habitually leads to the body being more efficient independent of salt and fluid intake and so forth this is one of these adaptations that is really sort of malleable with training correct yes exactly and the thing is is you don't necessarily always want to preload with very high doses of salt and fluid that is specifically for prior to an event prior to competition you absolutely always want to do that however it seems that dehydration acclimation where you induce mild amounts of dehydration multiple times will help build your blood volume and then prior to competition you can do the very very high salt loading so how i utilize salt loading is if i have really lack of energy i don't feel like working out then i'll pre-load with salt and fluids because you're gonna have energy after you do that or if before a hard training session even if even if i feel pretty good and i know i'm gonna go really hard i'll probably preload with some salt and fluid but just not as much as i would prior to let's say competition and we can talk about you know what the optimal concentration should be and how you should be consuming this thing
should be consuming this thing interesting that was gonna be my next question is if we always preload salt for exercise do we sort of circumvent that adaptation so what i heard you say right there just to sort of paraphrase is you don't use this every single time it's more of and i i always think of swimmers when i think of like the psychology of this you know they train with hairy legs and arms and all that and then before training day they shave down and just the feeling in the water you're sort of gliding more and it may enhance you know sort of that mental uh aspect and increase you know sort of output on that particular competition day so that's sort of the way that you want to do this in a sense you know feeling lethargic you're jet lagged whatever right you watch netflix with your daughter or something like that so you're up late you might want to use salt but on but on every sink before every single workout you may not want to dose it at least as high as perhaps you would during a competition or or a a day where you really want to optimally perform exactly so essentially before like a typical workout i think it's pretty smart to have maybe a thousand milligrams of sodium and 10 to 16 ounces of fluid um but if you're talking about the doses that really have evidence for improving performance dramatically because they're gonna boost blood volume by around eight to ten percent you really have to have anywhere from about three thousand to forty three hundred milligrams of sodium and about twenty six ounces to thirty three point eight ounces of fluid which the thirty three point eight ounces of the fluid is a full liter of fluid and so and really actually that pipe which is like slightly hypertonic or slightly more salty than the blood actually seems to be even better than matching your uh the concentration exactly as your blood which is interesting because most people think of hydration as simply plain water or at most matching the saltiness of your sweat and i don't even see a whole lot of people even recommending that but it's actually matching the saltiness of your blood which is going to improve its absorption and be able to expand your own blood volume which is the key but even slightly hypertonic even going
but even slightly hypertonic even going a little bit higher actually even more beneficial there's a few things that i want to dive deep into if you're okay with this what does the increased blood volume do uh is it increase you know nutrient delivery to the muscles is it increased removal of waste products like what how how specifically i mean without getting into the super nuances of maybe you know intracellular ph or calcium about whatever but in the big picture what is the blood volume specifically doing big picture it's boosting cardiac output number one so that's decreasing basically oxygen demand on heart number two it's giving you a larger volume to dissipate heat because we need to understand we lose volume from our blood to cool off like the sweat has to come from somewhere it's being drawn part of it from your blood volume so if you boost your fuel you boost that tank you literally have more fluid to now cool you off quicker so that's another that's one of the other benefits but it is true too when you have a larger blood volume you can actually pull out metabolic waste in in other words the hydrogen ions which is the acid you can pull that out of the cell better too and you can deliver nutrients better as well but i think the primary benefit is the increasing cardiac output and the decrease in oxygen demand on heart that's super fascinating i mean if you were to think of you know in pe class like going back to high school or junior high school kids that weren't very fit for example running a mile we used to do the mile time test or some pull-ups or whatever they would look really exhausted and be very hot red in the face sweating everywhere whereas the athletes could you know it's like you didn't even know if they really did the same work so that ability to dissipate heat i i think uh obviously we've all sort of experienced that and i i don't want to deviate too much from this conversation but but since we're here and i want to go back to salt let's talk a little bit if we could weave in the sauna just thought i know you have this i think chapter three you talk a lot about cold stress and heat stress uh in the book win so sauna bathing is this another
win so sauna bathing is this another modality that can have sort of trans over translation or carryover to sports performance because you help with that ability to sort of it causes the adaptation to increase the ability of the body to cool itself exactly um so basically going into the sauna every single day for two weeks um allows metabolic adaptations to occur very similar to dehydration affirmations you become a heat acclimated one of the there's many adaptations that occur when you become heat acclimated number one your baseline core body temperature becomes lower so now you actually have a larger pool to soak up heat and it takes longer for you to hit a critical core temperature which means you can train and you can perform longer before basically enzymes that produce atp start shutting down because certain enzymes are heat sensitive so you have a lower baseline core body temperature the other adaptation that occurs is your sweat becomes more dilute you stop losing as much electrolytes and the benefit for that is when you have a more dilute sweat it actually evaporates faster when it's more dilute so you cool your body self off better and faster and the threshold for sweating goes down in other words you actually start to sweat faster when you are heat acclimated so you are literally a better cooling off machine when you go into the sauna every single day let's say for two weeks now how long you have to go and what temperature you have to hit you need to basically hit a core body temperature of 101.3 and you want to try to maintain that for 20 to 30 minutes and you want to do that for about two weeks consecutively once you have done that you are now heat acclimated and those most of those benefits will actually last out to two weeks as long as you maintain a good exercise program so much to take away from that and i think a lot of people are looking for the granularity when it comes to sauna duration sauna time uh and i haven't heard anyone articulate that and put language to it like you just did it you need to do this
just did it you need to do this consecutively just like you would if you want to increase your bench press or your squat or your sprinting time you really need to be vigilant about this for a consecutive period of time so that's that's a wonderful tip and just this is a super small anecdotal story i just want to share this so my daughter and i have been going in the sauna together quite a bit and i noticed she didn't sweat it was weird it was like she's nine years old and it would be hot as heck and she's not she wasn't sweating and this was like i built this sauna and all this uh over covid and so it's been about a year this week that we've been doing this pretty regularly not every single day but maybe four to five days a week and just on sunday night i've noticed she is finally starting to sweat and it was like wow it took that long to train her body and all this so you can see like the bee lips coming on her forehead and her arms and so it was interesting how you know this ability to thermal regulate and all this is is inducible and i just thought that was quite interesting because people will say why don't sweat so if he doesn't do anything for me it's like well yeah maybe you haven't trained yourself to learn how to do this with exercise or heat stress or anything like that um fascinating stuff there i i just we can continue on with heat therapy but i want to go back to blood volume because i can i can sense some people might be resistant to look i have hypertension doc said i should exercise and now you're telling me to increase my blood volume and presumably that goes along with increases in blood pressure i already have high blood pressure should i be concerned with this way of improving my exercise performance by salt preloading and things like that what would you say to that person yeah so what i would say is that athletic vigorous endurance exercisers who have large blood volumes typically have very good blood pressure so as long as your arteries are able to vasodilate well um and you don't have an increase in basically vasoconstriction with an elevation in blood volume you're not going to see increases in blood pressure per se chronically
per se chronically um but going just a quick note about the sauna you don't have to go every single day it just will take you a little bit longer to become heat acclimated so if you're someone that typically just goes four times a week that is okay that will actually work you just have to basically go for three weeks you basically need about 13 sessions and you need to hit about about four sauna sessions per week for three weeks and that will that will basically allow you to become heat out great tip yeah a lot of people i've found um just reading the comments anytime i do a video related to sauna or sauna bathing a lot of people will go after the exercise because it's at the gym you know they work out they do resistance training or cardio whatever and then they'll go into the sauna after the gym um we're kind of jumping ahead i wanted to talk to you about circadian rhythm of sports performance but since we're here we know that body temperature is highly influenced by circadian biology and and all this when if you're going to split hairs right i suggest go in the sauna when you can but if you're going to split hairs and choose to go in the sauna before exercise after exercise in the morning versus evening what would be considered sort of optimal if you're trying to maximize benefits well to be fair um i don't think they've ever actually tested let's say sauna prior to exercise versus after so i want to kind of preface it with that however the the data does set with doing sauna post exercise in regards to increasing uh performance later on so there was a one clinical study it was a three week study it was sauna sessions of 30 minutes after post-exercise um it was a traditional sauna at about 190 fahrenheit and it was two and basically 13 sessions in total and after those individuals did sauna sessions post exercise it basically you know improved their
you know improved their performance by about 10 which that's that's actually a large increase um from a performance standpoint usually you're talking maybe one or two percent being clinically significant so there was about a 10 increase in their performance after they had done that and so i like post exercise because it's a little bit more of a hormetic effect you're basically inducing dehydration on top of mild dehydration so you're going to get even more adaptations and then typically you want to wait a little bit before let's say you you cold plunge because you still want to get all those adaptations that's a really good point i think i've seen a lot of people um go right to the cold shower or the ice bath i mean this is just again looking at this through instagram videos and you see people talking about how to biohack and stuff like that but um if you were to think about barbecuing a piece of meat or whatever uh you know the cooking still happens after you pull it off the barbecue or the grill right you let it cool and i've noticed with my own body uh so what i what i'll do is i'll go and walk around or do some breath work or something like that let myself get to the point where i'm starting on the decline of cool then do a contrast and then wait and then go back in but that do you see people sort of you know maybe not getting the maximum benefits of letting their body continue to heat up before they start the contrast yeah i do i think it's um pretty common that people after exercises are already hot we'll just jump into a cold bath now i guess it depends on what your your goals are if you are in an intense training camp and you're an mma athlete there's some benefits to doing an ice bath fairly quickly to shut down the inflammation so you can train hard again the next day so you know ice baths which is a temperature of essentially 59 fahrenheit or less have been about if you do that about for three minutes after exercise that dramatically improves power output out to 96 hours so you recover much faster
to 96 hours so you recover much faster and your recovery compared to not doing that is better out to 96 hours so if you're someone in an intense training camp start cold plunging you know that's fine um but if your goal is hypertrophy like muscle increasing the size of the muscle and increasing muscle strength you don't want a cold plunge probably within two to four hours after exercising because that will inhibit some of the the gains that you would have got is that sort of like taking antioxidants after exercise you know you don't want to take vitamin e vitamin c because there is favorable signaling from these so-called inflammatory cytokines that help with the adaptation so there is context here if you're talking about performance versus hypertrophy there's different protocols for post exercise cooling huh exactly right so if you're more into endurance or you're more into recovery quickly because you're in a training camp then you know cold plunge all day so to speak but if you're someone who's looking to gain muscle in strength then you want to wait two to four hours after your training session so you don't lose the some of the increases in muscle strength and size that you would have gained gosh these conversations are so helpful for people because you know you see a snapshot of a football player that everyone thinks oh yeah well he goes in the i or she goes in the ice bath after a competition the olympics football whatever so therefore when i go to the gym i should do the ice bath after but there are subtleties here that are not really conveyed uh that i think is important so you know if you were to do two a days you know i remember when crossfit was was really big back and i'm sure it's still big in certain circles but 2014 2015 there was always these posts of these people going in ice baths afterwards and in some of those competitions especially the games there was multiple workouts throughout the day it was like two a day for football in the in the you know summer so that would be a situation where if you're training multiple times a day it makes a lot of sense uh to cool down the muscles and and accelerate the recovery process so that you can have a consecutive workout later that would be optimal exactly so
later that would be optimal exactly so like you said it just totally depends on what your goals are and like what what exact sport you're performing in will depend on when you should do an ice bath how cold it should actually be and there are pre-cooling methods too um that can dramatically improve performance and you don't have to do them pre-exercise but even during exercise in short amounts of time if you cool certain areas of the body you can cool down core body temperature pretty quickly fascinating stuff um definitely want to get into more ergogenic aids and creatine and all that but but since we're sort of here talking about temperature and chronobiology one of the things that i've really found to be helpful uh in informing my routine with regards to exercise especially during covid when you know you can go to the gym and all that is exercising at the same time every day and it just sort of helped if nothing else from a habit standpoint but also i found that my body started started to sort of anticipate that i am going to exercise and it just made things a lot easier to stick to with regards and i know you have a full chapter all about chronobiology and circadian rhythms and sleep and all that but with regards to timing of exercise uh for hypertrophy power recovery making it a habit can we sort of unpack a little bit of what you found in the literature there uh especially for people who you know are trying to figure out because i get i'm sure you get these questions should i do fasted cardio in the morning on an empty stomach or should i lift later in the day um how important is chronobiology as it relates to sports performance yeah this is another question that is highly individualized and it'll depend on if you're a morning person or you're a night owl but essentially around about eight hours after you wake up is typically when you're gonna perform the best so for you know a typical person let's say wakes up at seven in the morning somewhere between two and five pm typically is when you'll get your best workout and actually that's typically when i like to work out as well because
when i like to work out as well because i i like to have a lot of my cognitive powers early on in the day now if you do a vigorous exercise your cognition is shot for a couple hours after that because your body just put a ton of effort into you know breaking down proteins and muscle and now is trying to rebuild and so me personally i'd like to work out a little bit later in the day but you never want to work out too close to when you go to bed because it activates the sympathetic nervous system and you're never going to be able to fall asleep so it's it's that tight balance that you you need to figure out for yourself that's a really good point um a lot of people don't realize that that you you are kind of mentally shot after you exercise especially if you're exercising intensely um so on the one hand it does wake you up it's nice to have some caffeine and then go exercise but i always found myself and i thought maybe it was something wrong