S2_EP_29 How to Recover Faster and Be More Resilient via Sleep and Sports Supplements with Dr Greg Potter

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Dr Mike

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Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00:01):

Hey, welcome back to the flex diet podcast today. I’ve got a great interview with Dr. Greg Potter, and we talked all about resiliency, a lot of stuff on sleep, like certain things about the best dose of melatonin. Rather, there are other supplements that can help with sleep such as [inaudible] and even range across the board into some pathologies like PTSD or traumatic brain injury. My ran my crazy kiteboarding supplement routine past him in case I get dropped on my head out of the sky and just really fascinating interview. I think you’ll really enjoy this. So Dr. Greg Potter is an expert on circadian rhythms and how they interact with nutrition and sleep. He was formerly a content director over at human OS, their good friend, Dr. Dan party. And now Greg is helping with some nutrition consulting and has his own nutrition company, a resilient nutrition.

Speaker 1 (00:01:13):

When we talk about that also, I talked briefly about his background. He worked at the university of, of Leeds and his background is actually in exercise physiology, which is awesome. So the beginning part, it takes a little little while for us to get into it, but kind of wide ranging topics here, the overall arching theme related to resilience and the role of sleep. So enjoy this podcast, coming up with the Dr. Greg Potter as always. This is brought to you by the flux diet certification, go to flux diet.com F L E X, D I E t.com. And the certification we’ll be opening up again in early January, 2021. So go to the notifications list at the top to get on the waitlist. I’ll put you on the list where you’ll get access before everybody else, and I’ll probably have another cool bonus for you there and flex diet.com. Sign up there, get on the newsletter and enjoy this podcast from Dr. Greg Potter.

Speaker 2 (00:02:32):

Hey, what’s going

Speaker 1 (00:02:32):

On? And it’s Dr. Maxine Alison here on the flex diet podcast, and we are back talking about resilience and many other topics today with Dr. Greg Potter. Welcome to the show doctor.

Speaker 2 (00:02:46):

Hey Mike, thanks very much for having me.

Speaker 1 (00:02:49):

Thank you. And you’re hanging out in London right now, so hopefully everything is going okay for you.

Speaker 2 (00:02:57):

Christmas is approaching, so I’ve got no complaints and there’s lots of tasty food around suits me. Absolutely fine.

Speaker 1 (00:03:05):

Yeah, that’s always good. So how for listeners who may be under a rock or not familiar with you, give us a, just a little bit more info on your background and then how you got interested in the topic of resilience.

Speaker 2 (00:03:21):

I think most of this is probably not familiar with me and my background is largely in exercise science. So I studied exercise science for my undergrad and my master’s degree. And in between those, I also worked briefly in professional rugby at the rugby football union. And as I was going through that process, I recognized the biological rhythms and sleep are very important and went on to do a PhD at the university of Leeds, which focused on the intersection between biological rhythms, sleep nutrition and metabolic health. But I did those degrees because I’ve always been fascinated by how lifestyle in general affects our performance and also our long-term health. And since then I’ve been involved in a few different projects, but right now I am chief science officer and co-founder of the company based in the UK named resilient nutrition. And in that role, I spend most of my time working on product formulation, but I also work with some athletes athletes who represents our brand. So they’re primarily ultra endurance athletes. And I really enjoy that side of the job too, because coaching is something that I’ve done for about 13 years now.

Speaker 1 (00:04:44):

Nice. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. What made you go into exercise science? That’s what I did my PhD in so great topic. Of course,

Speaker 2 (00:04:56):

I think it came down to teenage insecurity. Let’s be honest. I was playing rugby when I was 12 and hurt my back. And that was right around the time I became interested in girls too. And off the back of that injury, I started going to the gym, became increasingly interested in nutrition, spent far too long, reading things like men’s health, but slowly found better sources of information. And when I was going through what a cool GCSE and A-level was over here. So my education around the ages of 15 to 18, I was a lot of my free time reading, elite FTS, and several other related websites, and also became interested in science in general. And I had a place at university to study English literature and recognize that if I were spending all of my free time, finding out about performance, nutrition and strength, training and related topics, then I was probably on the wrong trajectory.

Speaker 1 (00:06:04):

Got it. And how did you get interested in sleep? Because you’ve published areas in the sleep and obviously have more formal education in there. It sounds like it was more of the intersection and coming at it from a performance angle.

Speaker 2 (00:06:20):

It wasn’t really, I think I first became interested when I heard a couple of people speak about sleep on some podcasts, probably around 2010 or so. And then off the back of that, I started reading some books and I just found the whole thing. Fascinating. And to this day, it’s a subject that the more that I find out about it, the more intriguing it becomes because there are so many unsolved mysteries within the field of sleep research. And I think that that field is in its infancy too, which is true, the exercise science research while too. But I think that sleep is such a fundamental human behavior and it’s not quite such a nice subject niche subject is excise science that it’s surprising that the research into it has only been going on for a relatively short period of time.

Speaker 1 (00:07:20):

Yeah, I’ve always been, I’m not very, I’d say up-to-date on a lot of the sleep research, but to me it’s always been fascinating that at a base level, I believe the human body is survival orientated. And the fact that will literally entirely shut down, which I know is an oversimplification, but we have to take a good third of our day to be not really cognizant of what’s going on potentially at a risk of being eaten by a lion or something similar would give us the data that there has to be super important reasons for sleep. But yet if you ask a very, which I would ask you this question, like why, why is it that we sleep? I mean, it’s, we have some data, but it still seems like a lot of it is a big mystery and the unknown.

Speaker 2 (00:08:14):

Yeah. And this is something that people go back and forth about a lot. And I don’t think that there’s a unified theory of why we sleep, but that said, I think that there are plenty of things that we can point to that show the importance of sleep and some of the functions that it fulfilled. And I think that it’s probable, but it has some different functions in some different species. If you look across species, then no one thing seems to strongly predict how much sleep a species needs. But there are a few factors that do relate to that, including things like the type of thought they can seem to whether that carnivorous or I’m never saw, however, social dynamics, how complex their nervous systems are. And then of course there are some things that are common to species. So I think that sleep is a period of adaptive inactivity.

Speaker 2 (00:09:15):

So it optimizes when we’re active and for how long, and one of the functions, or probably fulfills is energy conservation, but that’s probably a very small function, but I think a lot of the functions of sleep relate to its effects on the brain. And there are various relevant theories, but one of them relates to the activity in our signups seas. And as we’re awake during the day, exploring our environments, the strength in inverted commas of various signups is in our brains increases. And when we sleep, it’s a period in which that is a selective downregulation of the strength of some of those signups, so that we only hold onto the most pertinent information. And then there are some other factors at play too, like physical restoration and so on. And I think that it doesn’t make sense to think about sleep without contrasting it with wakefulness. And fundamentally, I think that sleep is the price that we pay for wasteful behavior and it’s therefore really to prevent malfunction during week. But the fact that sleep deprivation has been used as a form of torture in many countries, eons tells us a lot.

Speaker 1 (00:10:39):

Yeah. I always think of what happens when you do the opposite, right? So what happens with loss of function? Do you get and where two different functions drop off once someone is more on the sleep deprived scale and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think some of the processes you talked about with different synopses is that a lot of the learning more or less takes place during sleep. So we have kind of the stimulation, different synopsis kind of get marked with different chemical messengers during the day. And then at night, it’s kind of like this housecleaning effect where, Ooh, we need to get rid of this guy. Ooh, this is a good one. We did a lot of stuff over here. Let’s just make sure this is nice and robust and Oop don’t need this one anymore. And then when we kind of impair that process of sleep, no matter how high quality of work we did or what we did during the day, we see sort of a diminished result from that because we’re kind of skipping over at very best diminishing that process during sleep.

Speaker 2 (00:11:43):

I think there are a couple of things you mentioned there that it worth picking up on one is this idea of housekeeping and in the last seven years or so, there’s been a lot of in the glymphatic system, which is a bit like the brain’s waste disposal system. And during sleep, we have these large slow waves during the deepest stage of sleep. And those seem to influence cerebral blood flow and thereby the flow of fluid through the glymphatic system. And during this stage of sleep, the spaces in the system open up and that flow of fluid helps wash the debris. That’s accumulated with metabolic activity during wakefulness out of those spaces, clearing out toxic waste that could otherwise be detrimental. So that’s one thing. And then you’re also touching on the roles of sleep and learning and memory in relation to signups at homeostasis. One thing that does seem apparent is that sleep does free space, your real estate, if you like to learn new things.

Speaker 2 (00:12:50):

So even a brief nap during the middle of the day will help with subsequent learning for instance, but then sleep is also important to things like the consolidation of memories and arrange of information too, in different stages of sleep, probably differentially important to this. So for example, during stage two non REM sleep and the deepest stage of sleep that is transfer of information from the short-term limited storage Depot in the hippocampus to regions of the neocortex, which are more like a long-term volt for information. And then during REM sleep that stage in which we dream a skeletal muscles are mostly paralyzed, not essential muscles like respiratory muscles and cardiac muscle, but because of that, our brains have free rein to explore different motor patterns, for instance, without risk of us acting those out. And so that stage of sleep is probably very important to things like motor learning, but it’s probably important to creativity and evolution of intelligence too. And that there is that free space in which to try out different things and creates a virtual model of the world. If you’d like to try and better understand how we interact within it.

Speaker 1 (00:14:09):

Yeah. That’s one thing I tried for a while, but I eventually gave up on it because the practice was, it was kind of a pain, but is my thought was okay if I can learn to, you know, wake up during my dreams and control my dreams, could I practice new motor patterns like kiteboarding doing jumps or heavier deadlifts, and then go back to sleep the rest of the night and reconsolidate those patterns. But in essence, I could do it without any fear response or worry of damage, quote, unquote to the system. But I wonder would that even if it did work, which I honestly gave up after about eight weeks, cause it was a monster pain in the, my life I always wonder what did even transfer to real life because it, it is so different, but any thoughts on that? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:15:10):

A few thoughts. So one is the REM sleep, that particular stage of sleep in which we do most of our dreaming, not all of our dreaming does seem to be important to most of learning in general, but what you’re touching on is lucid dreaming, right? And that is when we’re conscious during our dreams. And during those dreams, we often have some control over the contents of the dreams too, although that’s probably not an essential parts of lucid dreaming per se. And about half of people will experience at least one lucid dream over the course of their lifespan that they remember, but it does seem that it’s somewhat trainable. And in recent years there’s been a resurgence of interest into dreams and into whether lucid dreaming training has some potential therapeutic applications. And there’s been some fascinating research published very recently by people like Jason Ellis showing for instance, that you can take adults who have insomnia and some related psychiatric issues, anxiety, and depression, and you can put them through a short term intensive lucid dreaming training program lasting only a couple of weeks and quite dramatically improve their insomnia severity as well as some of the anxiety and depression symptomatology, which is fascinating.

Speaker 2 (00:16:34):

And the strategies that people use are probably some of those that you tried Mike, but they include things like keeping a dream diary. And then within those dream diaries, by identifying unusual elements within dreams, and then you’re using a technique named autosuggestion in which you take that element. And if you recognize it within a dream, you use that as a trigger to cue lucid dreaming. But then there are some other strategies that people will try out too. So some people for instance, will use an alarm to wake themselves up during certain stages of dreaming, which they think that they might be particularly likely to be lucid dreaming at that time. There also reality checks that people will do over the course of the day. So colon one is just to look at your hand and ask yourself whether you are awake and in daily life, or if you are in fact dreaming and people in that particular study, I think set a timer on their phone every hour to remind themselves to do that.

Speaker 2 (00:17:38):

And the point is that those people could increase their frequency of lucid dreaming, and it does have some other potential applications too. So for example, it might be helpful in PTSD. One of the problems that arises in PTSD is that people experienced nightmares that relate to stressful experiences. And what will happen is that that nightmares will be so distressing that they will spontaneously awake from them. And if we return to the idea of rapid eye movement, sleep, being a safe place in which to explore previous experiences and try and make sense of the world, then it’s as if their mind is like a broken record. They keep waking up from this particular stage in the record, and they never quite managed to process it and get to the end of the track. But if they can lose a dream, then they can take control over their dreams.

Speaker 2 (00:18:32):

They can reduce some of that negativity within the dream and thereby, potentially have some positive effects on their symptoms and their daytime function. But going to your particular example, Mike, and whether it’s possible to practice motor skills during lucid dreaming in a way that facilitates you improve those mode skills and the rest of your life. I don’t know if that’s been studied it hasn’t to my knowledge, but it is something which is definitely why the, of exploration. And I think that it makes some mechanistic sense and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was proven to be beneficial.

Speaker 1 (00:19:11):

Yeah. Cause if anyone’s ever had a lucid dream when you’re doing it, or even just dreams in general, I mean, you are absolutely convinced that it’s real when it’s going on. Which to me is fascinating. And then I don’t know if there’s any research on this too. You talked about someone looking at their hands. So one of the cues I tried to use was looking at clocks or watches, so I’d wear a watch. And so I tried to train myself every 15 minutes when I was awake to look at the watch and ask myself, am I dreaming or awake? Or what time is it? And I noticed that in dreams, again, this could just be me that you can’t really get a sense of time. Like even looking. I remember having a lucid dream looking at the clock and I couldn’t figure out what time it was. And then I was like, Oh, I’m dreaming.

Speaker 2 (00:20:09):

And, and that is a common experience. There’s a complete distortion of time. And I think people often wake up from their dreams feelings if they’ve been stuck in that dream for days. And the bouts of dreaming might’ve actually lasted several minutes,

Speaker 1 (00:20:25):

Is that related to areas of the brain that basically are helping with our perception of time, right. That gets into, you know, different flow States and how you may have a dilation or a compression of time. And, you know, at the end of the day, time is basically kind of a, I don’t want to say a neural construct, but it’s not as static as what we think it is. It’s more of a, I guess almost a perception per se,

Speaker 2 (00:20:56):

I don’t know is the short answer, but that certainly makes sense. So it wouldn’t surprise me whatsoever if that was the case.

Speaker 1 (00:21:04):

Yeah. That’s something I’ve been interested into related to the PTSD. I just read some of the research on it and I’ve been kind of fascinated for several years now about how someone can have a very, you know, traumatic type experience. And there’s also a post-traumatic growth that can potentially happen from it. There’s also PTSD that can happen. And sometimes there’s not that much of a change and there’s some preliminary research that I think you touched on that quality of sleep after an event may predispose one person to one direction or the other. But the theory is if you had a traumatic event and your sleep is disrupted for the next two nights, you can’t enter that REM stage are missing out on some of that processing that as you mentioned, the record just gets kind of stuck there, where if you can get high quality sleep, maybe post one, two nights, I’m not sure the duration that you can then process that information and kind of reach the completion in the end. And then you may end up with a more positive result than a quote unquote negative result from a similar traumatic event.

Speaker 2 (00:22:23):

Yeah. And I don’t know much about PTSD, but I’ve heard that too. And that makes complete sense to me in the context of how thief influences responses to a variety of stresses. So in the case of vaccines, for example, if you take a salient example, then if people sleep well around the time of the inoculation, then that antibody titers are likely to become much higher in response to the vaccination. If they sleep well, pre vaccinations, Leif is somewhat predictive of those responses. So different stressor in this case, a psychological one, I’m sure that sleep would influence how we respond to that. And we also know something about sleep being predictive of some other related problems, such as traumatic brain injury. If somebody has a concussion that will likely disrupt their sleep, but in turn, how they sleep in the following nights will influence the time course of their symptoms and their recovery from the trauma.

Speaker 1 (00:23:27):

Interesting. So the theory there being, if you get kind of locked in the head, if you get better sleep for the next couple of nights, your symptomology would be a little bit better.

Speaker 2 (00:23:38):

Yeah. I think people would probably be less likely to experience some of the negative consequences that come TBI. So that, that might be anxiety, for example, will low mood.

Speaker 1 (00:23:52):

No, that’s fascinating. I just finished up creating a course for the Kerrigan Institute and they do clinical neuroscience. So I worked with them and looking at the ketogenic diet and traumatic brain injury. And so on my little again, this is what I do for myself, my checklist of stuff. If I’m out kiteboarding and get dropped 20, 30 feet out of the sky on my head and have kind of a bad injury, I have ketone esters in my bag to put myself in a state of ketosis. I’ll use a CBD with a small amount of THC beforehand, just like an over-the-counter supplement high dose creatine, high dose fish oil. And then on the list I have is I would probably just not ride any more that day to risk any more injury and then just go to bed as soon as possible. Does that sound somewhat sane or is that just batshit crazy?

Speaker 2 (00:24:50):

Well, I think, I think that will sound very seen to me again, I’m no expert in this stuff, but certainly in terms of brain energy metabolism, the exogenous ketone supplementation makes sense the importance of EPA and DHA to formation of the brain during early life and the possible effects of those and that ratio to some Amiga. And Amiga six fats that also makes sense creates an it’s particularly interesting to me because of its potential effects on sleep, which I think probably massively underappreciated because it’s an under studied subject. But when people think about things that affect their sleep, they often immediately think of nicotine, alcohol and caffeine. And the most relevant of these is caffeine. Caffeine is an antagonist that all of the adenosine receptors and the longer that you’ve been awake, the greater the accumulation of adenosine in the extracellular fluid in the brain, which then acts on its receptors to promote sleepiness.

Speaker 2 (00:25:59):

So caffeine blocks this interaction there by reducing that sleepiness signal. If you think about creates a hydrate there, when people supplement with creatine, they boost their phosphate creates installs and they do so in their brain to the degree to which creates in supplementation, supplementation does that. And humans is likely lower than how much it does that in rodents. For example, however, it probably still does that. And as a result of that, that free adenosine can be more readily recycled to ATP offsetting the accumulation of that sleepiness a signal. And there was a fascinating paper published three years ago by Marcus Boruch, who I think is no longer in research by belief has a paper coming out on next year, showing something similar. And what he showed was that when you add, create some on a hydrates, the chow of rats for I think four or five weeks, you quite dramatically affect their sleep architecture.

Speaker 2 (00:26:56):

So specifically their sleep is shortened. They spend less time in the deepest stage of sleep. The intensity of the deepest stages of sleep is lower and then their rebounds sleep in response to sleep deprivation is also lower. So it creates, and it’s clearly very strongly affecting sleep homeostasis. And what is fascinating to me about creating is that if creating shortened sleep and I’m almost certain it does in humans too. And I think the markets for Apple show you this in the paper next year, then you’d expect it to have negative consequences on the basis of all the literature on sleep restriction is the deprivation, right? However, if you look at all the research on creating one, a hybrid supplementation, then it’s good across the board. Think about its effects on athletic performance. It boosts adaptations to strengthen power training. It might also do so for cardio respiratory fitness too.

Speaker 2 (00:27:51):

It improves Thermo regulation. During exercise has positive effects on brain function, particularly during sleep deprivation. There’ve been interesting studies on rugby skills, for example, but also on cognition. It can have some positive effects on mood and people have treatment resistant depression when used as an adjunct therapy, at least. And it also has some favorable effects on cardio metabolic health T. So CLICO regulation for instance, and homocysteine. So if it’s affecting sleep, then it doesn’t come with the attendant negative effects of less sleep. So if there’s ever a situation in which he can’t get enough sleep, there’s one supplement you go for should be creatine monohydrate. And we don’t know what the optimal dose is or anything like that. But I suspect that it’s higher than the dose that you would use for exercise performance. So if you think about creatine people commonly either have a loading phase in which they might consume five grams, four times a day or something, or they take three to five grams

Speaker 1 (00:28:54):

Every day, maybe

Speaker 2 (00:28:57):

During TBI, something more like the

Speaker 1 (00:28:59):

Loading phase is

Speaker 2 (00:29:01):

Closer to optimal. We don’t know, but if you go for one of those high doses, you want to split up your intake just because it does have quite strong osmotic properties. So if you consume lots of it at once, then you probably draw a bunch of fluid into your GI tract and cause some bloating and other related problems too. But Mike Long story short, I think you’re doing things in a really smart way. And there are potentially a couple of other things that might be helpful. I’ll defer to your expertise here, but other things such as Citicoline potentially on the Aerie, they have some neuroprotective properties. So they might be useful.

Speaker 1 (00:29:38):

Yeah. I’m a huge fan of CDP Coleen. It’s I’ve used it for quite a while. And even just a couple of supplements, I helped formulate it. I recommended it and now it’s becoming pretty popular again. I mean the patent still exists on it and the company does enforce the patent. So it does tend to be a pricier ingredient. So what I’ve seen in some of the new ones, at least in the U S is it’s being touted as the next kind of greatest supplement. And there’s a lot of very positive research on it. And Renshaw was one of the main researchers and then they just chronically underdose it? Cause they’re too cheap to put a legit like dose the product. So it’s like, yeah, you got part of it. Right. But didn’t quite in quite yet.

Speaker 2 (00:30:24):

It’s, it’s frustrating. There were so many nootropics on the market or purported nootropics, at least that contained a hundred milligrams of Citicoline. Whereas if you look at the research, then in healthy adults, slightly lower doses seem to be beneficial in some context. So there’s a study of adolescents and a study of healthy women, both of which use 250 milligrams, but in the context of brain injury and vascular dementia and some other neurodegenerative problems, higher doses seem to be preferable. It’s like maybe half a gram to a grammar Placer to the sweet spot.

Speaker 1 (00:31:02):

Yeah. No, that’s fascinating. That’s super interesting about creating too, because I’m very similar to you. I’ve I’ve just recommended it as a general health supplement for probably four or five years now, which two athletic populations, not really shocking, but when people ask you like, Oh, what’s, you know, kind of your top supplement recommendations, like, eh, some protein, maybe a good multivitamin fish oil. And I’m like Korea team. They’re always like crazy. And what are you talking about? I’m like, there’s just every time we turn around, there’s more benefits associated with it. And I can add, you know, some very interesting sleep stuff thanks to you to that list. And we have like so much data, just show that there’s very little to almost no downsides. You know, even in, I talked to Dr. Tommy wood and he was describing an elderly population where I think they were using 10 or 20 grams a day and you just saw a little bit of GI upset and a few people Tarnopolsky did a study with 20 grams a day looking at, I don’t remember if it was Parkinson’s or ALS, but extremely well tolerated for like many, many months, you know?

Speaker 1 (00:32:15):

So there’s almost like a node downside to it. So even if it doesn’t have the next latest, greatest potential for whatever yeah. We know it’s pretty about as safe as you’re going to find anything too.

Speaker 2 (00:32:30):

Yeah. And I think that, that those of 30 grams or so has been studied out to three years plus. Yeah. So no safety crimes whatsoever, but if your sleep is very shallow and you’ve been taking creatine for a long time, then hopefully light bulb, might’ve just gone.

Speaker 1 (00:32:51):

So in that case, what would you, what would you do? I have an idea, but would you opt to dose then to try to change the sleep architecture?

Speaker 2 (00:33:03):

It depends what the person wants. So if the person’s sleep as a result of taking creates and supplementation is slightly shorter and slightly less steep, so maybe they’re marginally more prone to waking up during the night, but there’s no obvious negative outcome that relates to that. So they don’t feel like their daytime functions and pad, they don’t feel fatigued. They don’t feel like they have difficulty concentrating and that performing well in the gym and that cardio-metabolic health seems to be good. Then I wouldn’t worry about it. If however, you are somebody who has anxiety because of the fact that you don’t feel your sleep is very well consolidated and you’ve been taking creatine then doing away with it for a period of time while reducing your caffeine intake or eliminating it entirely will likely positively affect your sleep architecture. So at least that would put your mind at rest.

Speaker 1 (00:34:04):

Could you go the other direction and do a higher dose to see if it kind of changes, sleep the other direction then? So there’s like a directionality associated with it.

Speaker 2 (00:34:17):

What I think would happen is the creates supplementation. So if the person has been using creatine for a long period of time, it probably more or less saturated that brain phosphate creates instincts. So going to higher dose wouldn’t top up those stores anymore, if full and they therefore wouldn’t experience any additional benefits or effects on mass leap in response to that higher dose, for somebody who is using it acutely, they can probably saturate those stores faster with higher doses. There is also a related metabolite named [inaudible] acid, which is probably better boosting brain phosphate creates in the stores. And it has actually been compared head to head with creating insights and context. It’s used to feed animals and make them gain weight faster. And it’s very anabolic at lower doses than creatine, but it does come with some potential side effects that creates and doesn’t really, so for example, it might boost homocysteine. I’d be fascinated though, to see a study comparing guanos Dino seeds and creating for their effects on brain phospho creates in stores and sleep architecture. But the research on GAA is relatively scam right now.

Speaker 1 (00:35:35):

Yeah. I remember looking that years ago. I think it was my buddy, Dave BARR pointed it out to me and I’ve just kind of followed it and it’ll kind of, you know, in esoteric bodybuilding forums and stuff here and there, you’ll see it kind of pop up as the latest, greatest thing. And I don’t know, every time I check into it, similar to you, like there might be something there, cause it does hint that there’s some potential, but I remember being a little bit kind of shied away by some of the potential downsides and just not that much data that I could find at least in humans. Unless you’ve seen a lot of data in humans,

Speaker 2 (00:36:12):

There’ve been a few studies that have come out recently, mostly by the Serbian guy and his lab, which very intriguing, but that haven’t been enough studies that I’d be comfortable to take it. And I certainly wouldn’t recommend taking it. I suspect that it’s relatively benign, but if you’re somebody who already has a health profile that would contraindicate it, then I certainly wouldn’t touch it. Of course. And my guess is that it’s probably not more efficacious than creating enhancing adaptations to exercise, but its affects on creating stores in the brain are interesting and it wouldn’t surprise me if they do boost those possible creates in stores more than creatine monohydrate alone.

Speaker 1 (00:37:00):

Very cool. Do you think some of the other intermediate may be beneficial? I remember talking to, you know, Dr. Roger Harris about beta Elene years ago and he was saying there’s, you know, newer data coming out on that. And there’s a couple of pieces of data. Now since then have shown it, you know, may have similar benefits kind of to create a novel it’s obviously operating on a different effect. So it kind of any of those bioenergetic intermediate that we’ve kind of classically used for exercise physiology may hold potential for brain metabolism. Also

Speaker 2 (00:37:41):

The short answer is, I don’t know, and I haven’t seen that research on beets or alanine specifically, I’m guessing that it relates to its actions as a buffer.

Speaker 1 (00:37:53):

Yeah. Buffer intermediate. Yeah. Similar, similar mechanisms as muscle, just well as best we understand it.

Speaker 2 (00:38:01):

Sure. Yeah. But in, in terms of other products that have historically been used in the context of sport science and whether they have applications to brain health, I think ketone esters are up there. Of course. And there certainly are plenty of overlapping areas that relate to both brain health and to exercise performance. So for example, agents that improve blood flow are often conducive to vascular function in the periphery and in the brain take cocoa flavanols if you get a high quality cocoa product. And there are few of those, I think in the UK there’s Acticoat cocoa powder, which is made by Barry Callow bough and in the States, I know that Mars has a very pure extract. I believe it’s called cocoa via if you consume 500 milligrams, 2000 milligrams of those on a regular basis, then you’ll like the enhance your endothelial function and possibly also improve angiogenesis.

Speaker 2 (00:39:13):

And specifically in certain parts of the brain that are important to things like memory. So hippocampus for instance, and there’ve been studies of elderly adults showing that when they consume high dose flavonols for a period of several weeks, they experience improvements to various aspects of cognitive function, improving memory. And similarly, the have been studies looking at exercise performance and Coco showing that it might have some small beneficial effects on endurance exercise performance and vascular function during set exercise. And the same is likely true of beet tree beetroot too, which of course relates to its effects on nitric oxide, metabolism and thereby blood flow. One thing that I find very interesting is how these different things interact because typically and completely understandably, these things are studied in isolation, right? When they’re studied together, you might expect them to have additive effects, but that doesn’t necessarily seem to be the case. And Louise buck wrote a very thoughtful essay on that few years ago. And it’s really difficult thing to study, but obviously in reality, most people who are supplementing with one of these agents are taking others too. And right now we just don’t understand how those different things affect one another. Do they synergize? Do they cancel each other out? We don’t really know.

Speaker 1 (00:40:41):

Yeah, no, that’s a great point because in the supplement world, everything is advertised as synergistic effects, right? So for the listeners who already know this, you know, one plus one would normally equal to, well, if it’s a synergistic effect, one plus one is four or five or seven, it’s crazy. You know, you need to take them together and are 17 individual products all in one. And man, you look in the literature and there’s, there’s not a ton of literature on combinations really from what I’ve seen. Hadn’t if you even see an additive effect, that’s pretty cool. I, I can’t even think of one like legit study. I would say that there was a dramatic synergistic effect.

Speaker 2 (00:41:29):

I think the only example that comes to mind is the combination of Corinne and [inaudible]

Speaker 1 (00:41:35):

Okay. Yeah, I would, yeah. I would give you that one. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:41:38):

Cause the, the bioavailability of most forms of curcumin are so poor. Right? And if you take piperine, which is a polyphenol in black pepper and cumin at the same time then because of its effects on various enzymes that are involved in liver metabolism, you can dramatically improve the uptake of curcumin. Although in recent years there have been new forms of Kakuma and developed that seem to be much more bioavailable. One of them is named [inaudible] and one of them is named hydro Kirk Theracurmin is probably the best study of them. It just contains very, very small particles of curcumin and an interestingly because of that seems to probably permeate the blood-brain barrier and might going back to your kite surfing concussion example, Theracurmin is probably one of those agents that would benefit you in that context. And one thing that acumen seems to consistently do is boost BDNF and something that you want to support.

Speaker 2 (00:42:43):

That there’s been a Metro analysis showing that in recent years and something that he wants for obviously in the context of brain injury is neurogenesis. And while BDNF expression is only a proxy of that, it’s certainly an encouraging one. And based on the limited number of studies today, human does seem to boost brain health in general, at least in people who have impaired baseline brain health. And that’s an important distinction because there are many instances in which something that helps people who are in the States of chronic disease or impaired function, the compound might not benefit people who are otherwise healthy. And I think this is very much true of nootropics. If you’re undergoing some sort of duress, which reduces your function below baseline, that’s when nootropics really come into their own. So take the context of sleep loss. Creatine seems to enhance cognition during sleep loss. If you take somebody as well, rested creates and doesn’t really seem to affect their cognition. And that’s probably true of many of these things that you’ve discussed.

Speaker 1 (00:43:51):

Yeah, no, that’s a great point because our brains are wired to think linearly. So like the old example I use at the assets all the time is just zinc. It’s like, yeah, if you were very deficient in zinc and you take it, you could see your testosterone go up. But if you’re sufficient in zinc taking more, your testosterone is not going to go up anymore, which we could argue testosterone going up or down is debatable in terms of performance, depends on where you land on the scale, but within physiologic range. And if you keep taking more and more zinc, now you’re going to start having issues with copper depletion and other things going on. But the standard media line, especially with supplement sales is, Oh, look at this study done in, you know, hypogonadal rats that were depleted on zinc and we gave him zinc and it went up like 400%. This is amazing.

Speaker 2 (00:44:47):

I think, I think we’ve all fallen for those at some point.

Speaker 1 (00:44:50):

Yeah. And I mean, I remember taking ZMA back in the day and having crazy dreams from it and I’ve tried it again. And do you think it’s the, the zinc, the magnesium, or I think it’s actually the B6 for some reason or is it just, we’ve all been anchored with the Ronal thought of, Oh, whenever you take CMA, you just get crazy dreams. So that just kind of happens.

Speaker 2 (00:45:20):

Yeah. It’s so interesting that you use that example because I remember buying a fitness magazine when I was a teen and it came with a free sample of Zetta may when it was all the, which was probably around the time of BALCO scandal. And I of course expected to have crazy dreams. And I did have the most vivid dreams that night when I took it. And if you look at the research on it, however, then the Zetta Mae combination hasn’t really been well studied, certainly not in the context of sleep. Right? If you look at the research on zinc supplementation and sleep health, then it doesn’t seem to do much some of the cross-sectional research points towards some weak effect on sleep. But the actual intervention trials in which people are supplemented with zinc, don’t tend to show much B vitamins. Likewise, theoretically, they can be important things like supporting melatonin synthesis, which you might expect to have some bearing on sleep, but they don’t seem to do much high doses of one of them might increase the salience of dreams, but that’s been shown by one study.

Speaker 2 (00:46:31):

And then magnesium is the most interesting of them. Magnesium is not in the same category as creating for me, but if they’re a supplements that I regularly recommend taking the magnesium is one of them. If you look at the, you look at us adults than something like 68%, don’t get enough magnesium on a regular basis. And the nice thing about magnesium is that if you take too much of it, it will probably just cause you some GI distress, which is it. It’s not the end of the world. But when you take people who have poor cardio metabolic health, then magnesium can actually quite potently improve some of those aspects of health, blood pressure, regulation, glucose regulation, so on. So I think magnesium taken as big as glycinate or three and eight. If you want, the brain benefits can be helpful. There’s only one study to my knowledge on magnesium three and eight and sleep showing that it might some positive effects in an elderly population, but there are reasons to think that magnesium could enhance sleep.

Speaker 2 (00:47:36):

It does seem to have some general relaxation effects. If you look at brain ion balance, it has a clear circadian rhythm and the concentration of magnesium in some brain cells is substantially higher during the sleep period. Hmm. So taking it late in the day probably makes sense because you might better support that process. And some of those restorative processes that take place during sleep, but compared to some of the other sleep supplements that are out there, I’m not sure that it’s a particularly strong sleep aid with that said not many sleep AIDS seem to be that helpful for many people, none of them have very strong effects on things like sleep duration or sleep latency or sleep consolidation of the different supplements that have been studied, the best evidences for melatonin. You look at Metro analyses on melatonin. Then when people take it, they tend to fall asleep faster and have slightly higher sleep efficiency, which is just the proportion of time that someone’s in bed.

Speaker 2 (00:48:41):

They’re actually asleep and they might feel subjectively like their sleep quality is slightly higher too. And the right dose for most people is probably somewhere between 300 micrograms and five milligrams, depending on what you’re after in the context of jet lag, it’s probably around one milligram. If you want the potential effects of melatonin on oxidative stress and cardio-metabolic health. So it might have some blood pressure lowering effects and some glucose lowering effects too. And people with metabolic syndrome, then the higher dose might be preferable, maybe five milligrams. And there’s also a time release version. The patient version of that is named Circadin, but there’s also an over-the-counter form named micro active two to three milligrams of that might be better at helping people sleep through the night and maintaining sleep. And then there are a couple of other supplements, which I think are helpful in some instances, one of which is pea, which is an analog of an endo-cannabinoid Palmer toil, Espanola MIDE.

Speaker 2 (00:49:51):

There’s a very bioavailable form that was made recently showing that, and this particular form seems to help sleep and people have neuropathic pain. So specifically there was a study of patients with carpal tunnel tunnel syndrome showing that when they supplement 600 milligrams of it twice a day, they reduce their pain and thereby improve their sleep. And then some other agents that have some anxiety, agentic and anxiety, lytic effects such as our theming might be helpful and ashwaganda healthy. And in the right doses, probably something like 200 to 400 milligrams. And the best studies on ashwaganda generally supplement 300 milligrams of KSM 66, twice a day. So I think those are some of the sleep supplements that are more helpful for most people, but it always depends on the context. And I think that people often look at sleep supplements. They think, Oh, that’s something that will help my sleep.

Speaker 2 (00:50:49):

And it might help some people with their sleep depending on the source of their sleep issues. But for someone else, the supplements support, their sleep will be completely different. So just as an example of this, there’s a sleep disorder named restless leg syndrome, which used to be thought to be idiopathic. So people thought that it didn’t influence risk of health outcomes later on, but we now know that it’s strongly influences risk of disorders and diseases such as Parkinson’s dementia with Lewy bodies. And interestingly, for many RLS patients, it seems to be a disorder of iron metabolism in the brain. And when they supplement with iron, they can dramatically improve their restless leg syndrome. But if you are, I might take high dose iron, then we would be very unlikely to experience any improvements to our sleep.

Speaker 1 (00:51:43):

Hmm. Potentially risk high oxidation at some point since we’re both male.

Speaker 2 (00:51:47):

Absolutely. Yeah. We probably want to go and give blood straight afterwards.

Speaker 1 (00:51:50):

Yeah. Well that’s super cool. That’s super fascinating. Do, what are your thoughts on a phenom Butte as a sleep supplement? Cause I know that’s been on the FDA at least in the U S kind of the gray area for many years now. And I’d have to look up again to see what the status was. I heard it’s kind of on the naughty list now again, but who knows?

Speaker 2 (00:52:15):

Yeah, I believe it is. And I haven’t looked at it since 2018, but I remember briefly looking at the literature then, and it wasn’t at all convincing that it was a helpful sleep aid. And like you say, I believe it’s now regulated. It’s certainly regulated over here in the European union. We are still part of the next few weeks. So I wouldn’t recommend it. And another consideration here is the veracity of product claims. The supplement industry is so poorly regulated, but if you buy something, especially by something which has a bit gray market, then the likelihood of you buying something that contains what it claims to might not be that high. There was a study published within the last couple of years on melatonin supplements, showing the amounts of melatonin in them varied from less than a hundred percent to more than 400% of the product label claim.

Speaker 2 (00:53:13):

Some of them also contain things like serotonin, which is part of the same pathway in the brain. So you need to be careful when sourcing your supplements. And fortunately there are a third party testing company. So one of them is consumer lab that do go out, take products off the shelves and check them for the presence of banned substances and other contaminants too. So you’re not part of the membership site of consumer lab and you’re interested in sourcing good supplements. Then that is one route that you might want to explore. But just as a general tip, thorn and life, extension supplements always seem to fare very well on their site. And I say that as somebody who is co-founder of a food product company, but for that, for the products that we don’t make ourselves by generally default to life extension, because they always seem to contain what they claim to. And they also have a very large product range.

Speaker 1 (00:54:21):

Yeah. The whole, there’s only like a handful of supplements. I recommend, you know, thorn is one of them just because trying to stay up to date on that is very difficult. And even, you know, places like with I’ve toured, you know, Charlotte’s web who makes CBD and other products. And that was a couple of years ago. That was great. You know, I signed an NDA, I got to see all the facilities spend two days with them. It was great. Everything about it is awesome. They have traceability, but the end of the day, I’m not there every day, no matter what the place or the manufacturer is. And you get into, especially smaller companies I get really nervous about because they just don’t have a lot to lose. You know, if you’re generally a bigger company and you’ve been around for quite a while. Yeah. If something goes wrong or your testing doesn’t look so good on consumer labs and you don’t fix it, you have a lot of business to lose. If you’re some fly by night company that starts up and sells, God knows whatever in a capsule. And we find out it’s just bad or non-existent, or potentially toxic or heavy metal Laden, whatever. We’ll just file bankruptcy, disappear to some Island in the Caymans. Good luck. Trying to find us

Speaker 2 (00:55:38):

Bowel Chestnut bowel Chestnut. What is that? Oh, that’s probably a British thing. Just, just ignore me.

Speaker 1 (00:55:47):

Oh, you just said follow Chestnut. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (00:55:49):

No, I know that that old Chestnut, Oh, people have been doing that stuff forever.

Speaker 1 (00:55:58):

Unfortunately. Yes. So he has to tell us more about the supplements that you’re helped co-founded right now and working with them.

Speaker 2 (00:56:08):

Sure. So the website is resilient, nutrition.com and we launched it earlier this year, off the back of some work that we did helping two guys get ready to row the Atlantic last year. So w one of the things that I do is help prepare people for certain athletic events and help them also with health and performance in general. And I was helping my friend Allie, get max Thorpe and Dave Spellman ready, helping them specifically with their nutrition and also their sleep. And as you can imagine, when you’ve got two guys who are over a hundred kilos who are going to be rowing for several weeks on end, they need a lot of calories. And they spent most of their time growing into our shifts two hours on two hours off. So we estimated that they’d be burning more than 10,000 calories a day, at least initially.

Speaker 2 (00:57:05):

And they therefore needed easy to digest energy, dense nutrition that would support that performance, but also be usable in those conditions. They don’t have a fridge or anything on board, so it has to be stable. And what we did is we started playing around with different versions of nut butters, and we came up with a suite of them, for the guys and they used them during the event, love them. We ourselves use them in different contexts, too, including things like knowledge work, but also some other athletic events. And while we take no credit for this, they did really well. They broke the world record at the start of this year. And so we thought was there a way that we can scale this? And we since then spent time refining the formulations. And now there are four versions of our first product, which is named long range fuel, and the versions are better suited at different times of day.

Speaker 2 (00:58:06):

That is so-called energized version that contains caffeine and Elfie and IIN. And going back to that discussion about things that have been studied together, caffeine and Althea painting is one of those rack combinations that seems to have some additive effects on cognition. And that’s, well-suited being taken at the start of the day before knowledge work and also to support wakefulness if you have to be up during the night. So if you’re a night shift worker, for instance, then we have bomb versions, which contain the dose of ashwaganda, which is that’s generally been used in research. So they contain 600 milligrams of KSM 66 ashwaganda per pouch, which is 100 grams. And ashwaganda is so-called at that gen that helps people better cope with stress. It tends to reduce people’s subjective feelings of stress, but also some related stress hormones. But interestingly, when people regularly take it, they tend to boost their cardiorespiratory fitness.

Speaker 2 (00:59:09):

There was a matter analysis published recently, looking at the effects of ashwaganda in take on VO two max showing that it does have a small effect on improving VO two max. And there’ve been a couple of studies too, looking at ashwaganda intake and adaptations to strengthen power exercise, showing that when people take it every day for several weeks, they gain muscle mass and strength slightly faster, LinkedIn CME ashwaganda. So it’s not only good for brain health, but it also seems to support exercise performance. And then both of those energizing conversions are available. And so called rebuild versions, which just contain added whey protein, isolate, and L leucine. And that makes them a particularly good meal replacement. We add the L leucine because it’s the one amino acid that seems to independently quite strongly trigger the synthesis of new proteins and skeletal muscle. But it also seems to have some appetite regulation enhancing effects.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):

And in some contexts, it can be useful for some other aspects of metabolic health too. And that all nut butters that are all based on tree, nuts, not peanuts or anything like that. So they contain things like almonds and hazelnuts. And obviously I’m very biased, but they’re really, really tasty too. So that’s long range fuel. And right now I’m working on formulating our next products, which will hopefully launch early next year, which I’m really looking forward to. And it’s also a project that we, we try and give back whether it’s not just about trying to sell products, but we, for example, give 1% of our sales to a charity that works with governments and communities and tropical countries to protect their rainforests. And given my background, I also try and create useful educational content. So I recently wrote a free ebook about nutrition, which people can download from the website and we’ll have lots of more content coming out too in the coming months. So that’s resilient nutrition in a four minute nutshell

Speaker 1 (01:01:23):

Nutshell. I like it. Very good nutshell. Not a Chestnut or whatever, any hints on the, on the new product or is it top secret, top secret, right. Okay. I had to ask, you know,

Speaker 2 (01:01:41):

Unfortunately, but hopefully at some point next year we might be over in the U S and if that’s the base, then I’ll have to get some over to you to try.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):

Yeah. That was my other question. Do you ship a worldwide or is it just mainly in the UK right now?

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):

Right now, it’s in the UK in the next few weeks. It will be in Europe too. So we’ll be on Amazon over here shortly. And then hopefully next year, we’ll transition to North America too. And then ultimately we’d love to be in the Asia Pacific region. So 2021 fingers crossed in North America, but right now it’s, it’s just over the side of the pond. Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):

Awesome. Well, thank you very much. I know we talked about sort of a subset of resilience related to sleep and other supplements and things that are useful, which I think is always beneficial for a lot of people. So where can people, what’s the best way for them to find out more about you and about resilient, nutrition,

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):

Resilient, nutrition, it’s resilient, nutrition.com. And we’re also on Instagram at resilient nuts. And I have my own social media, which is at Greg Potter PhD, which sounds ridiculously self-indulgent. But at Greg Potter was taken, I don’t post there that much, but I’m going to probably start posting more regularly in a few reach out to me on there and send me a message. Then at some point I will get back to you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:09):

Awesome. Yeah, I know. That’s always, sometimes you get interesting emails from people it’s like, why do you have to put doctor on everything? It’s like, well, sometimes the normal name was taken and it’s just the easiest way to get the next normal semi looking name.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):

I actually, I hate being called doctor. Just if it feels wrong, I always say, I’m not a real doctor. I’m just a PhD.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):

Yeah. I had that one. So when I checked into a hotel, my assistant made the booking. It was a couple of years ago and she goes, Oh, and how was your stay? Oh, Dr. Nelson. I said, Oh, it was good. She’s like, Oh, what kind of doctor are you? I said, well, actually I did a PhD in exercise physiology. She goes, Oh, you don’t cut people open. I’m like, no, I’m not, not a surgeon. She’s like, Oh, well have a good stay there. Mr. Nelson,

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):

Did you take any muscle biopsies during your PhD?

Speaker 1 (01:04:07):

No, I didn’t. We, our lab was weird that we were an exercise physical lab, but to get to do any bloods, we had to go to the what’s called the clinical research center and to get IRB approval process was completely separate. And then because of the way the budgets were set up, the GCRC charged us, literally an arm and a leg just for us to walk into their building. So we did everything unfortunately possible to avoid that, just due to the sheer cost of it. We did do some stuff over there. We did some stuff with like nitroglycerin and some other stuff related to flow me to dilation and to seal function for doing it as a chemical in part of the studies. But unfortunately, no, that’s one of those weird things I always wanted to do. Or in some, I dunno, weird way have done to me, but I haven’t. It’s a masochistic way. Yeah. Yeah. Yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):

Although my undergraduate thesis was looking at the association between quadriceps muscle isoform composition and sprinting jump performance and untrained young men looking at, yeah, we were looking at where the fast Twitch fibers associate with performance, but that’s, that’s the closest I’ve come and I’ve, I’ve never, I’ve never been stabbed in the leg in the interest of science.

Speaker 1 (01:05:36):

I know. I, my good buddy, Dr. Andy Galpin, I’m sure. He’s like, well, we can do it here. Unfortunately all their studies due to the recent COVID stuff are all, all on hold. So I talked to me their data. I said, well, what are you actually really doing? It’s like, well, not really a lot, because you can do virtual biopsies like, Oh yeah, that would be pretty hard. So, yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for all your time today. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):

Thanks, Mike.

Speaker 1 (01:06:09):

Thank you so much for listening to the podcast greatly. Appreciate it. Big, thanks to Dr. Greg Potter for coming on and sharing all of his knowledge with all of us today. Super insightful and again, a lot of good practical knowledge that you can take forward if you were in the UK, make sure to check out his nutrition company, resilient nutrition, even if you’re not in the UK, still check out all the great information that he’s put out over many years. I always enjoy listening to him on other podcasts and reading his work. So this show is brought to you by the flux diet certification, learn eight different interventions on how to get better body composition and performance without wrecking your health via nutrition and recovery interventions certification goes through the top eight related to protein fats, carbohydrates, ketogenic diets, fasting, neat exercise, sleep, and more.

Speaker 1 (01:07:15):

Each module has a big picture. We’ll be talking about the overall concept of the flex diet, which is a mashup between metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting. And then each one has about an hour technical primer. So everything you wanted to know about protein metabolism, how does it work? What is the role of branch chain amino acids? The leucine terms you may have heard Uber geeks throw around like muscle protein, synthetic response all broken down into a language. You can understand everything is fully referenced. And then each intervention has five very specific action items. So as a coach, you know what to do with clients, and this is all in a complete system where I show you how to use each one, where to start and how to know what action item is going to be best for each client at that time.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):

So it allows you a complete, but it’s done in a very flexible approach. And we also have a ton of expert interviews everything from Dr. Dan party, Dr. Stu Phillips talking about protein metabolism from McMaster, Dr. Jose Antonio talking about protein overfeeding. And what happens when you feed people too much protein, Dr. Eric Helms discussing flexible dieting, Dr. Hunter Waldmann talking about changes in metabolic flexibility and insulin dynamics and many other expert interviews there also. So that’s all in the flux diet. It will open up again January of 2021. I would love for you to be a part of it and get onto the wait list right now, go over to flux diet.com F L E X, D I E t.com. That’ll put you onto the daily newsletter and you will be the first people notified. So thank you again for listening to the podcast greatly appreciate it. Always feel free to leave any comments, feedback, or reviews for us in your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):

Cool. Cool. Sounds good. And how are you, how are things your end how’s how’s business being given the context?

Speaker 1 (01:09:42):

You know, it’s actually been pretty good. I mean, in all honesty, like income wise this year was better than last year. Although I’ve worked probably twice as much just cause I haven’t been traveling really at all. So since we got back from Costa Rica in March, like everything just got like the whole year just got wiped out in terms of presentations and even academic stuff. So I’m like, well, whatever, we drove out to visit some of my wife’s family in July when kiteboarding and hood river. And then we did a five, six weeks trip, just drove down to Texas, did some kiteboarding down there and October, November. And yeah, I got freaked out because all my clients are mostly online trainers. So I’m like if their gym closes, why are they going to pay me to do their training? So in like April and June, I just said yes to every online product thingy known demand because everyone in their brother’s like, Oh, you need someone to do online stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:10:40):

Who’s that, Hey, you we’ve done this before. And eh, you know, some of them were okay. Some of them were just when they actually released it’s I sold three, you know, so somewhere just a complete disaster, maybe they’ll sell more next year or whatever. So it’s, you know, overall it’s been good, just interesting with all the variability in the, you know, projects that we started, you signed the contract, everything’s good. You get 40% done. And then they’re like, I dunno, we just can’t do this. Like, you know, some something happened family wise or you don’t know and then just cancel it. So that goes away and yeah. So it’s been interesting to say the least, but it’s, it’s been okay. Which is good.

Speaker 2 (01:11:25):

It’s cardboard and a great love of yours. I can see your board there in the background. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:29):

Well, it’s my surfboard. I’m like, have you ever watched the show Seinfeld where he had the Cannondale bike in the back? So I’m like secretly wondering if like Slingshot a lover, watch my videos and be like, Oh, there’s a Slingshot surfboard in the back. So yeah, I’ve done it backwards. I’m actually trying to teach myself how to surf using a kite first and then go back the other way. Which I don’t know everyone else, like, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m like probably, but it’s like, I can, I’m okay with the kite and yes, I’m using that to hide like every flaw with the board, but the amount of times I can actually get on a wave is just exponentially higher than if I have to rely on myself to paddle all the way out, try to figure out the timing, you know, all the effort, get to a place where I can actually do it. They actually have ways that are not going to fricking kill me and you know, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah. So I’m still trying to do one fugly transition on a board, which I’m not used to riding on boards that are smaller and to move your feet around. It’s just so different, but it’s fun.

Speaker 2 (01:12:33):

You can do it in a socially distance way too, as a bonus.

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):

Yeah. Which is great. Cause when we were down in South Padre, everyone’s like, Oh, what are you doing? You’re hanging out with all these people. And like it’s an Island in Texas. There’s not many people that come in and out. Most of the people by definition are generally healthy. Vast majority of the time we’re outside. It’s like, we’re not that close to people when you’re riding on the water. If you, if you’re within six feet of someone else, like something bad probably happened, you know? So it’s so that’s been good. But I know even a couple places, they closed beaches. A buddy of mine does a lot of surfing, moved to Puerto Rico. And for awhile they were just completely, he’s like, yeah, I live across the street from the ocean and he’s like, I can’t even go out of my townhouse. I was like, Oh, so yeah. Screen-Sharing yeah. You don’t serve for cardboard or anything.

Speaker 2 (01:13:23):

It’s kind of surfing the same as kiteboarding by the way.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):

Yeah. It’s the same thing. Sometimes you use like surf boards, sometimes you don’t, but same thing.

Speaker 2 (01:13:31):

I’ve only been surfing once in Indonesia, six years ago and I was rubbish as you might imagine that stuff. And then I, I actually lived in Sardinia for two months, from September, until mid November. And while we were out there, we watched a lot of kite surfing. Oh nice. Yeah. Everywhere. There are four or five hotspots around the Island. Oh, interesting. You go. There are certain times and certain days and everyone is out with their boards. I think it’s just, it’s the, it’s the wind conditions, but also it’s a beautiful place, gorgeous beaches. So I sort of regret not trying it while we’re out there trying to convince my girlfriend to move back out there again at the start of the new year. So

Speaker 1 (01:14:20):

There you go. Yeah. If you get back there, you don’t take a lesson, give it a whirl. It’s super fun. It’s a kind of a steep learning curve. But to me, it’s also at the same level of one of the more, I’d say accessible action or extreme sports. I don’t really like that term, but you know, if you practice it, you can ride relatively fast. You have the illusion of, of speed of going really fast. Cause you’re just going across the water and you know, you can learn to do jumps and stuff like that. And you know, the amount of time it would take you to do a 10 foot jump on a snowboarder skis is probably exponentially higher than you can do it on a kiteboard and still in theory land pretty soft. So it’s yeah, super fun.

Speaker 2 (01:15:01):

I’ll just, I’ll take my creatine and my Citicoline with me.

Speaker 1 (01:15:04):

Yeah. They give you your supplements there and you’ll be good to go. Yeah. Cool. Well thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And keep in touch.

Speaker 2 (01:15:17):

Cool pleasure. Nice to meet you, Mike. Good to see you. Bye bye. Bye bye.