I'm curious as to what happens or what one should do if their HRV is reduced for maybe three or four or more days in a row. Absolutely. The next question that I'm going to ask is, "Ian, am I in that adaptation phase?" If so, I'm going to still ignore it just like I did if it was a single bad day, but I'm going to start watching it very carefully.

I may actually now introduce some other tests, so I may use a performance test, we may look at something else, maybe ask questions, maybe have some communication either with myself or somebody else. I'm going to start paying more attention, but I'm still really not going to take much action until that crosses more than seven days of consistent problems.

If it does do that or we're in a peaking phase, then I'm going to go to another set of solutions that are truly going to pull me out of the hole rather than just be those acute stage shifters. These are more what I call chronic stage shifters. Now some of these are actually very similar to the ones we've used before.

For example, thermal stress. So I can promise you if your recovery score is in the tanks and you walk outside and you jump in your 35-degree water and you get back out, what's going to happen is your HRV score immediately afterwards, I'm talking within seconds, is going to be significantly compromised.

In other words, think about that, remember a low HRV means a high sympathetic. I promise you cold water will put you in a high sympathetic drive. However, and we've tested this pretty extensively, looking at HRV zero, 15, 30, 60, 90, all the way up to 180 minutes post. And on average, you will see your HRV score continue to rise after that.

And so while you have this immediate sympathetic response, you will immediately then respond at about 30 minutes on most people, depends on the person though, and that score will be improved for several hours afterwards. So heat can kind of have a similar effect. That actually, again, is sort of an acute fix, but over time, as we've described earlier, that can also have a little bit of a chronic effect.

We can also then get into areas like sleep. And so now we're going to start playing and exploring why are you sleeping poor as well, or was your sleep score fine but your HRV was low. That's a little bit of a different answer. If your sleep is getting compromised, then we're going to start going into and making sure we're improving our sleep.

In terms of like brain stuff, instead of maybe playing a game or having music or some of those other tricks, those aren't going to really have a chronic effect. But you can do things like work on social connection. That's actually been shown to improve recovery over time. You can do things like journaling or meditation, and those have an acute effect as well as a chronic effect.

So again, if you go journal right now, you'll probably feel better, but also we know that over time that will gradually improve things. So adaptogens and things like that also can have a chronic effect. So can things like electrolytes or food or hydration, if those things were off. So we're going to go to a whole number of areas, but those are the primary ones.

Outstanding of all that, of course, it may be simply a time to go back and reassess our training program. That's truly the case. So that's where we're at. If so, we're probably going to either completely remove training or drop it to like 50 percent or so until we start rebounding back to baseline.

And that's generally the numbers we use. For many people who are not training for a competitive sport and maybe aren't pushing themselves really hard, you know, maybe they consider themselves somebody who exercises in order to maintain health and aesthetics and longevity, et cetera. And they never really finish any workout completely exhausted.

They're sleeping okay. Their appetite's okay. Can we assume that they are recovering well or maybe they're not creating enough of a adaptation response? Like there's no progressive overreaching. And so there's really no stimulus for recovery. What I'm saying here is on the face of it, I think is obvious, right?

If you don't train hard, there's nothing to recover from. What I'm really saying is, is the ability to recover itself something that we need to train? In other words, can we get better at recovering? And the analogy here would be something like focus. In order to perform work of any kind, but certainly mental work and physical work, we need to be able to focus.

The ability to focus is the reflection of a bunch of neural circuits and chemicals and hormones, et cetera. But we know roughly what those are. And we know that if you are poor at focusing, for every small bit of time that you can focus a little bit longer, even if it's a matter of seconds, those circuits themselves get better at focusing and so on and so forth.

So in other words, is the recovery system, however broad, neurotransmitters, hormones, neural, muscular, immune based, et cetera, can that system or set of systems become better? Can we get better at recovering? Meaning can it become faster and more effective? Can we think of the recovery system as kind of a blade that gets sharper by engaging recovery?

Because if so, then there's strong reason for people who are not pushing really hard to push at least a little bit harder than is comfortable for them every once in a while to make sure that that system doesn't start to slide back. Remember, physiology is listening to everything you do and it is always responding.

So the analogy that I will meet your analogy with that I use here is the bowling alley. So you've probably been bowling before and you've used the bumper lanes, right? Bumper lanes. I've gone bowling before and I've spent time in the gutter and I've spent time on the pins.

Okay. So it's been a while. We used to have a bowling alley in the town where I went to and it was fun. We used to slide around on our shoes and all the kids would hang out there. I feel like, do they still have bowling alleys? I don't even know.

It feels like something that may have gone the way of the mid-2000s. I don't care if no one bowls anymore, you're not going to ruin my good analogy. Okay. My intent wasn't to ruin your analogy. Okay, tell us about bowling. All the bowlers are going to come after me with bowling balls or something.

Right, you're going to get blasted with all the stats on elevations. Don't hurt me. Sorry. Cool. So if someone were to go bowling and they didn't want to put their ball in the gutter, you could put these little bumpers in those lanes and these little foam pads that go in the gutter that if your ball is going towards the gutter, it hits those and bounces off and goes back in the lane.

Right? Okay. So in this entire conversation, and this is actually true of a lot of the way people approach their fitness and health, people are very concerned oftentimes with optimizing, meaning I want to make sure I don't go in the gutter. I don't want to hit the walls. So therefore, I'm going to try to improve the accuracy in which I throw the ball.

So I want to make sure that I'm throwing it down the center of the lane more often and I want to get my standard deviation tighter and tighter so that I don't get anywhere close to hitting the wall. However, what they're not realizing is if you do that, the body will start shrinking the size of the lane because what it basically says is, huh, we haven't had a ball touch us in years.

We don't need to be this wide. Let's get smaller and smaller and smaller. So it's not that you actually are having a reduced ability to recover, but you start becoming incredibly sensitive to that. So your two strategies for enhancing recovery are to practice getting closer, throwing that ball down the middle lane, or to widen, to widen the alley.

And that's exactly what you're referring to and you absolutely should do that. And so what happens is you don't have to be so precise with what you're doing because your ability to handle so many things is widened. So if you're off now by four or five inches to the right, no problem because you've just tripled the size of your alley.

That's exactly what you want to do. So paying attention to two things, number one is getting better at accuracy, maybe staying really tight with your progressions, using nutrition and sleep to optimize your recovery and push your resilience is what we call this. In fact, there's actually a biological way to measure resilience.

We do that in all of our folks. This is scientifically validated stuff. I didn't just make it up. You can actually measure resilience. And there's more and more coming out on this, but that's exactly what that term means. So how well can you handle and bang things off the threshold?

So when you see a reduction in say 10% of your HRV today, for you that might make you feel terrible. For me, I might not feel anything because I'm well adapted to large fluctuations and therefore I'm okay. The less and less you do that, the more and more responsive you will be to those slight deviations.

So that is exactly the target and that's kind of what I allude to when I say you've got to understand what are we optimizing for. Are we optimizing for making sure I don't feel any different today or are we optimizing to make sure when I do feel different, I still am able to perform.

So this is why you want to do things like maybe use some caffeine today and feel great. But if I have to use it every day, all I'm doing is shrinking my sensitivity there. So now if I have to go a day without it, I can't train at all.

Caffeine is the easy example because people understand how that whole system works. But this is really true of everything else. So yeah, you need to practice this and the way to do that is to give yourself more stress, to continue to bring in the stress from nutrition, from training, from breath work.

You mentioned earlier about focus. The exact same thing, right? It's not just about getting better right now, it's about training a system and you can clearly train that, right? We will often say breath work is a practice. That's exactly what we're talking about, right? So you're practicing getting better at these things.

You're practicing returning your focus. You're practicing recovering and quite literally physiologically you can up-regulate whether we're talking enzymes, whether we're talking about regulators. These will be up-regulated so then the next time that insult comes in, it's not as damaging. So yeah, absolutely you can and you should strive for that.