What should I do during my rest periods? All right. Well, first of all, whenever your heart rate is high, the very first thing is to not to suddenly stop. Because you want to... There are valve, one-way valves in the veins that whenever you contract the muscles of the legs, they help to milk the blood back through to the heart, so basically they reduce the stress on the heart.

So just walk it out first, the first step. Even if your heart rate was high. Then the second thing is you want to do exercises. You want to do relaxation, myorelaxation, muscle relaxation exercise. What they are is if you watch boxers, how they, you know, shake off their shoulders and drop their hands and do things like that.

These exercises go back to the 30s, Soviets used them since the 30s, and they used them with elite athletes, kids in grade schools and everybody. So these exercises serve several functions. One is if you are doing an exercise that is strength exercise in nature, some of the cross bridges are stuck pretty much.

And so your muscle is thixotropic, it's like gel. So by moving your muscle in a passive manner, you get it unstuck. And so you restore circulation obviously. And the other reason is, again, control of muscular tension is very, very important. It's important to learn how to contract the muscle for strength.

It's very important how to relax for speed, for endurance, just for a happy life. If you look at the best sprinters, note how relaxed their faces are when they run their jaws. Relaxed, how relaxed their necks are. So relaxation is something that's practiced, just like tension. So regardless of what exercise that you just did, shaking off, we call this fast and loose drills.

Shaking like passive, like turn your muscles to fat. So you want to do this for a little bit. Then after that, it depends how long is your rest. So if you're taking, it depends which exactly that you're doing. In some extreme examples, let's say that you're a sprinter, remember we talked like doing sprint repeats with, let's say, 100 meters in 15 minutes.

You think, wow, sounds like a great, great training session. Well, the problem is these guys do need these 15 minutes to get the acid out of the system and have some other functions to recover. But after a couple of minutes, the CNS excitability goes down. So what the Soviets figured out back in the '40s still is what you do then after you walked it off, after you shook it off, you here and there, you insert some very kind of like enlightened easy hops or whatever using the same muscle groups.

So these poor athletes really have a complicated rest protocol. There's really no rest for the wicked there. If you are a lifter who's taking very long rest periods in between, let's say you take those 10 minutes, then after your heart rate is down and after you shook off and after you walked a little, you can just sit down, you can do whatever you want.

Do not sit a slouch because obviously, Stu McGill explained why that's not a good idea. And speaking of slouching, one reason that runners get their backs jacked up after running or some endurance event is, again, they go into their knees and they get into that collapsed posture and their discs are really pliable and warm after the run and then suddenly put them into flexion and they get messed up.

So yeah, you also got to, like you point out, to watch your posture, but you really got to watch your posture during recovery because you slump between your sets of squats and then you could blow something out right there. - Interesting. I used to think that I would have this recurring sort of lower back hip thing that I finally feel is under control and I used to think that it correlated with travel and something about maybe not sleeping as well and traveling perhaps.

But what I've noticed is even if I just sit too much after training my legs hard, I end up with this back issue. So just moving to a standing desk configuration after training legs, irrespective of travel, has really helped. And I think, I mean, nowadays there's all this excitement about walking.

I don't know if you, I don't know how much time you spend on social media, but like walking is the new thing for 2024. People discovered walking can lower post-meal blood glucose. I mean, all stuff that's intuitive, great thing to do. We'll see what happens in 2025, what the new thing is.

And I'm a fan of walking, but in no small part, because it just feels like it loosens up everything after training and I like to train early in the day if possible. And I know it's a dramatic reduction in kind of aches and strains as a function of just adding some muscle.

- Also the other thing you can do, I remember when I watched your podcast with Stu McGill, you mentioned that the upward facing dog, Cobra, Cobra helps you, right? - Yeah. - By putting yourself in extension. - And hanging into extension, yeah. - So for people who, for whom that works, it's, you can just lie on the, lie on the floor in your elbows and just read a book.

So for example, at Strong First courses, when people do exercise and then we teach them, so we have several authorized postures. So you either have to sit ramrod straight, you know, you can sit in a Lotus or a Seiza or something like that, or you can, you know, half kneel still upright, or you can lie on your stomach.

So we do not allow this collapsed posture because this is a great, great way to get hurt. Plus, you know, you look like a slacker when you're a slacker, mentally you're not gonna be focused on whatever you're supposed to be doing. So I think that's, I think that's a good idea.

- Yeah.