If the answer is no, we're in a peaking phase, then we're actually going to use what I call acute state shifters. So this is a whole host of little tricks that I have that can change HRV or any recovery metric within seconds. Again, these are not chronic fixes. This is just, I'm having a bad day today.

I feel like crap. Can I make myself feel better right now? And so I kind of call these parlor tricks. A lot of the times, and there's a thousand of them. We are certainly not going to go over them, but I'll give you some examples. You can pull out, first of all, physical movement.

We'll do it. You'd be stunned how just doing some yoga, moving around, doing some jumping jacks, starting your workout. I mean, you've probably experienced this. It's sort of cliche in our world at this point, but if you ever do any serious lifting over a serious amount of time, there will be days in which you walk in the gym and you feel awful.

And somehow that day, you set a lifetime PR. - Yeah, that's a strange, strange phenomena. I've experienced that more than a few times. It's rare. The inverse is rare, however. You feel great. You have a horrible workout. It happens, and it can happen for any number of different reasons.

But yeah, I think the former, when one isn't feeling very good, and then somehow it's a terrific workout, does set a kind of a seed of doubt as to how good our subjective assessments really are, which I guess is why we're talking about objective assessments like HRV. - And remember, if it's a single day here, you can even do hard training.

People sort of have this idea like, well, if you get up and your recovery score's down, do a lighter day. That's probably, I'm probably never making that choice, to be honest, not in this situation. Remember, this is one bad day, and we are in a phase of even trying to improve performance right now.

Like, we're probably still training hard. You will, again, often see, I felt terrible, then I trained super hard, and it totally changed my day around. This is all can happen. So exercise is my first love here. Absolutely breathing. Any sort of up-regulation breathing. So we talked a lot about down-regulation breathing.

Just do the opposite, right? And so this is when hyperventilation strategies can work. Instead of accentuating the exhale, you accentuate the inhale, or you restrict the exhales. This is working on the exact opposite situation. You can also play little, this is where things like music, motivational quotes, if you're the type that follows people on Instagram that motivates you, or can work with these things.

Coaching tactics. These can be things like finding out or talking about that person's why. You sort of shared something, a mantra you use when you're training hard to keep you go better, and I'm not gonna ask you to share that now, but some people have this sometimes, right? Or you may have this conversation with your athlete.

We call this finding out your why, right? So finding out like, why are you really here? What are we doing here? And a lot of times you'll hear things like, it's because I grew up poor and I don't ever wanna be poor again. Okay, great. Or this is for my children, or like any number of things.

And you can pull that out on these days. You need to be really careful. This is why I call these parlor tricks. Because when you play that card too often, it starts to lose effect, right? And you can only dig to a hole so often before it's sort of like a...

The same thing as with music, right? Every time you go to the weight room, it's blasting death metal at level 10. Well, eventually it's no longer motivating, right? It's no longer helpful. So you wanna deploy these things strategically. - Yeah, the phrase that comes to mind is signal to noise.

The nervous system, especially the dopamine system and the adrenaline system, which are a part of this larger system called the catecholamine system. So that's dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine. The get up and go, focus on external goals, movement associated, and on and on. That system responds best to high signal relative to noise.

So if you're, as you pointed out, listening to music every time, drinking a ton of caffeine, energy drinks, pre-workout, nootropics, and then stacking all those things, sometimes refer to this as dopamine stacking, informally referred to as dopamine stacking. You're doing all those things. And then, first of all, if you're wondering why later that afternoon or the next day, you're feeling like you're under a cloud, well, it's obvious, your catecholamine system crashed.

But it's also that you don't necessarily become dependent on it. It's just that you start to wonder whether or not you have the internal mechanisms and motivation to train without those things. And so one tends to use them more and more, and then they have a diminishing effect over time.

The rule that I've been sort of applying has been, I never do two workouts in a row where I'm stacking in stimulants, loud music, and any kind of sort of high-potency inspiration. However, every set in the gym or when I run, I really try and be diligent about form and attention to what I'm doing.

The one exception would be the long-duration endurance work. Part of the reason I do that work is to let my mind go into states of drifting, of not trying to think in complete sentences or even close to it, just let my brain kind of idle at a low hum.

And for that reason, generally listen to something that's more of a story or don't listen to anything at all and just let my thoughts kind of spool through. Anyway, I don't want to take us too far off track, but I think this idea of signal to noise will resonate with the engineers out there.

But since most people are likely not engineers, it is the way that the nervous system works, evidenced by the fact that whatever area of your body right now is in contact with a chair or any other surface that it's been in contact with for more than a few seconds, you forget that it's in contact with it because there's low signal to noise at that point.

- A similar note, you actually mentioned stimulants basically there, whether you're talking caffeine or any other stimulant, any other cortisol modulators or adaptogens, any of these things fall in the category. If you're not using them consistently and you're having a rough day and all of a sudden you throw down 200 milligrams of caffeine, it's going to change real fast, the equation.

- Strong performance enhancing effect. - Yeah, absolutely. - For these reasons, right? So we mentioned a couple of them, breath work, food, more calories, just eating some food. Sometimes we'll give people what we call comfort foods. So this is just like, hey, you're from Georgia and we know you love grits.

So we're having grits for breakfast. Oh my, great. Like just something to change your mood, acute state shifters to alter it. The other couple of tricks here are light. So if we know that maybe say multiple people are struggling that day, maybe we'll put on the lights extra bright.

We'll bring in some extra things and just get it more light in the area. That doesn't even count actually going outside and seeing the sun, but perhaps we'll do that. And then other little tricks that I've learned over the years is one particular thing I love is literally drawing a line, a physical line on the ground.

And you look at that line and you say like, I'm going to train today and I'm going to accomplish this effort. I'm not going to walk past this line and into that training space until I'm ready to give that effort. And that may take a minute or 10 or whatever, but it's the physical barrier is very important to saying like, I'm not just going to get through it.

I'm going to actually perform the way I want to perform or I'm not going to do it. And I'm not going to cross this line until I'm ready to make that happen. - I really liked that tool. It also brings to mind the importance of at least thinking about how your relationship with your phone during training can perhaps help, but also impede workout motivation and performance.

In an earlier episode, you mentioned that if people are using their phone to play music during their workout, that they establish the complete playlist prior to initiating the workout and then not deviate from that playlist, as opposed to changing it in the middle, because there's just too much of an impulse to also check social media, check email, check text messages.

I mean, the way I think about the phone actually is it's a bunch of little brain areas. It's got a memory system for you. It's got lookup tables for lookup tables. It's got websites to look things up on the internet. It's got photos. I mean, it is so rich with sensory data and it's so closely linked to our own brain architecture.

The algorithms are designed for those to be that way, that I always think about it as bringing in a second person with me, but that person is my twin that has severe attention issues. And for those that already have attention issues, just think about this as a twin that would then compound you by tapping on your shoulder, talking to you all the time, interrupting you.

Somebody that you like a lot, but that frankly is a little bit irritating in that they're interrupting your ability to really show up and also your ability to show up for them. So I started to think about the phone as an entire individual and that it represents me and certainly not the better version of me.

- Great, exactly. You actually mentioned something else that we'll use occasionally in what we call brain games or puzzles, whether this is a crossword puzzle or something where you actually lose your thought of self for a second and your brain gets engaged in a task that you weren't regretting or even thinking about.

These can be stupid little games. It could be little challenges, especially if you're in like a group or a team setting. All right, like we're going to play one round of dodgeball or we're going to play one round of thumb wars. - So you do encourage this? - Yeah.

- I see. - So you would play like a thing instead of warming up. It's like, all right, get in and everyone get going. We're going to get your foam roller, your diamond or whatever thing. It's just like, all right, everyone line up and we're going to play thumb wars to see who wins.

Right, just like whatever, right? And all of a sudden you've snapped into a new mental shift or literally playing brain games, playing Tetris on your phone. Like any of these things can work in this acute setting. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)