So what are some tools that we can use to enhance our recovery? Yeah, let's start off with that acute overload phase. So in other words, I just did a workout and I'm feeling awful, or I just did one two days ago and I'm super sore. How do I get rid of that right now?

Well, there's a couple of things you can do immediately after your workout, and then others that are maybe more actionable a day later or two days later. And we'll just cover a handful of them. We'll do some nutrition and hydration and supplementation in the next episode. I'm going to cover everything else not in that category right now.

So a couple of things. Number one, you can actually kickstart that recovery process at the end of your current training session. And I guess I should say it this way. I strongly suggest you start this recovery process immediately after the workout. You mentioned earlier about this idea of you've got to get a really high peak of stress to cause adaptation, but I actually didn't explain that correctly because what has to happen is you need that extremely high peak, but then you have to be met with an extremely sharp recovery back down.

And so, you know, you've talked about this before in some of your neuroplasticity stuff and in terms of what has to happen that caused the insult, and then you immediately need to be able to recover to make sure that that causes changes. Same thing happens here. So we need a really sharp and high inflammatory response, and then if you do not meet it with an immediate recovery period, the signal won't be there to maximize your results.

So what's that mean? You can actually do a couple of things. Number one is actually listening to slow-paced music. There's evidence to suggest fast-paced music may slow down your recovery and slow-paced would actually enhance it. So if you just change from, you know, your maximum get you up and get going music during the workout to a slower, lower cadence, that will help you kickstart the idea.

Of a similar note, you can also use what we call down-regulation breathing. You could do them in conjunction or one or the other, whichever is up to you. So my personal favorite method here is somewhere between 3 to 10 minutes of finishing your training session, laying down. I like to be in that position.

You can certainly do it in the lotus position, but I think laying on your back is generally more effective. Personal preference there, no science. I like the eyes being covered, getting into this dark, quiet sort of area. And then just breathing through your nose in a structured cadence. There's a lot of different things you can try.

An easy example is just box breathing. So you can imagine a box having four squares. So what you're going to do is inhale for somewhere between like 3 to 8 seconds, and whatever number you choose, you keep that same tempo. So let's say you chose to do a 5-second inhale.

That's going to take you up vertically, and then horizontally for your box is a 5-second hold, and then a 5-second exhale, and then a 5-second hold. And you just need to repeat that for the time domain. I typically honestly don't use a timer. You'll actually notice a lot of people will like fall asleep or get really close to falling asleep in this period.

You could do a triangle version of that where you do an inhale, hold, exhale, and then go right back into your inhale. There's a bunch of different tricks you can try here. You need to play around and see what actually works best for you. 10 minutes is probably better, but if you can just at least give me 3, that'll work.

If you're really, really resistant, you can actually do that just in the shower. And so if you're going to finish your workout, get in the shower, again just close your eyes in the shower, give me 3 minutes of focused relaxation breathing, and that will accelerate the recovery process. I love it, and I particularly love it because my laboratory works on stress and respiration, a.k.a.

breathing, and the interactions between the two. And I'll just mention a result that was just accepted for publication, so it should be out by the time this episode airs. Thank you. This is the beautiful work of not me directly, although it took place in my lab, but as we know, it's the students at Postdocs who really do the heavy lifting of Dr.

Malisse Balbon in my lab. She's a phenomenal researcher that showed that a short period of 5 minutes of box breathing, of exactly the type that you described, or cyclic sighing, so two inhales followed by an extended exhale to lungs empty, ideally the inhales are done through the nose, the exhales are done through the mouth, although it could all be done through the nose, or the mouth for that matter, but probably nose, nose for inhale, inhale, mouth for exhale, or inhales through the nose and exhale through the nose, cyclic sighing as we refer to it, done for 5 minutes, both of those produce very significant decreases in resting heart rate.

Over time it will increase things like heart rate variability and so on and so forth. So provided that there are extended exhales, it seems like the calming response and the reduction in overall stress occurs. The only thing that really sends things in the other direction would be something like cyclic hyperventilation, I'm sure you've observed that.

And interestingly, when we had people just do 5 minutes of meditation, during which of course they are breathing, but they're just allowing their breathing to progress however it happens to be in that moment, or moments across the 5 minutes, there were reductions in the same sorts of markers of stress that I described, but not as significant as breathing.

So I love the Brock's breathing tool post-workout, and there's some other alternatives there too that I just mentioned. But I think people greatly underestimate the potency of breathing for shifting one's nervous system function away from stress, or if one wants, toward more alertness and stress.