Hello friends. I'm finding back in the UK and you will be delighted to hear that that means a return to the twice a week podcast publishing schedule. So let's get into it. This week I'm sitting down with Christie Ashwanden, who is the author of Good to Go, What the Athlete and Oliver's can learn from the strange signs of recovery.
One of my favorite episodes of what was with Alex Hutchinson on the limits of human performance as he explained what he discovered during research at his book in June. Today we're going to look at everything on the opposite end of that spectrum. So from fancy formulas to cryogenic therapy, soreness, sleep optimization, those compression pants things, those weird compression pants things, and every other form of recovery that you can think of and you've seen, athlete teasing on Instagram, we're going to go through them today. fantastic analysis of all of the different ways that people are trying to recover and assess just what sort of impact they're having.
So if you are an athlete or you know one who is looking to improve their recovery, then today's absolutely for you. Please welcome Christie Ashwanden. Christie Ashwanden, how are you today? I'm great.
Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming on. So what do you want to learn about today? I'm sure size recovery, all things that have to do with the recovery.
Okay. Recently some of the guests will know the spot on the back of your book that Miss Alex Hutchinson, the man behind in June is a big proponent, a big supporter of your book. And obviously what he was talking about was a lot of things to do within training, what's happening while you train and the experiences that you go through during session. And you're now talking about everything else.
Yeah, that's right. And I think that that's to really make nice companion books. His book is all about training self, whereas mine is about recovery process and all these adaptations and things that happen in between workouts. Fantastic.
So where's the book begin? Actually again, it's a place called Denver Sports Recovery, which is one of many, I think of them as recovery spots that have popped up all around the US. I'm not sure actually. I think I think of the UK as well.
I'm going to guess, is it one of those places where there's a cryo chamber and you can get an IV drip of nutrients and stuff like that? Yes, exactly. No, unfortunately in the UK that's reserved for kind of elite level athletes. It's not the sort of thing.
So as far as having a mass engine and going hot tub, that's probably about the top ends. I think of what you can get in the UK unfortunately. Yeah, that's interesting. I know there are a few in Australia as well, but it's definitely a thing here in the US.
These places you can go in and for a fee, they're all sorts of things. So it's not just massaging cryotherapy. I mentioned IVs which is another common thing, but there are also all kinds of foam rollers. There are, I call them squeezing ants, but there are a few static compression sleeves.
There's like sleeping bags for your legs, you put them on in the mat, they blow up with air and compress your muscles and it frankly feels really nice. That's another popular one. They'll have ice baths, saunas, pretty much everything that you can purchase. That would be the recovery you can be found at these places.
These recovery spots. Okay, so you're at this conference and what's the story from that? Yeah, so that was kind of an introduction for me looking at, okay, when I was at a lead athlete, so I used to be a runner, then I became a cross-body's year and cyclist. And when I was doing these things at sort of an elite level in the early 2000s and late 90s, recovery was really something that we weren't doing.
It was something, and what anybody had is it was all these things that we weren't doing. You weren't standing up, you weren't staying out late at night, you weren't running around and doing other stressful things. So recovery was really about lying on the couch, maybe putting your nose in a book, but putting your feet up and resting, maybe you took an app or something. Right now sort of in the interim recovery has become its own thing and almost an extension of training where people are doing all these things.
They're putting on these squeezing hands. They're massaging all their muscles with a foam roller, they're getting massage. It's not just something that is very old and it's in my time as well, but it's become something where there's a sense that you need to do all these things. It's not enough to just lie back and wait for recovery to happen, but you need to do things to facilitate it.
So train hard recovery, hard work. Exactly, exactly. If you're not covering hard, then you're not doing enough. I thought you got it.
So what, during the course of writing this book, where was your mindset before you began? Because for me personally, I do see a lot of foam rollers that vibrate and there's one of the ways I can actually in this place, you can think about it. How far do I need to go with these marginal gains before it becomes tight and some sort of, so where do I have your mindset before all of this? We've got to go with recovery.
Yeah, that's a great question. So I really tried to go into it with an open mind. So I'm a science writer by training and by vocation and I think it's really important. If you are having a scientific mindset, that means always being open to evidence that are keeping an open mind and making sure that you're truly looking at the evidence before you without too much bias and all that.
So I wouldn't do it thinking, wow, things have really changed since I was a serious athlete and maybe this is something really important that I need to know about. But also I have a little skepticism because I thought this didn't always square with the things that I experienced as an athlete and some of the things that I knew. So I guess I would say a bit open about the second line. So it was sort of like trust but verify, I think it's a really good mantra and explanation how I went into this.
So I was definitely open to the idea that some of this stuff, this new thing was really important and in fact I did find things that were good and there's some new things that I adopted myself after researching this book. But it also turned out that a lot of the things really weren't all that they were made out to be. I think that's fairly inevitable isn't it that's unfortunately it's an area where especially when we're talking about marginal gains here, it's so easy for products to hide behind the fact that it doesn't work with a cloud mining campaign. The direction of causality is super, who knows that sometimes I wake up and feel fantastic like I'm going out to sleep.
Not because of the very particular bath salts that I had that I thought, was it the incense that was burning in the cloud? Is it just a quote of the fact that you're a dynamic system? Right. I think that's a good point.
We are dynamic systems. Our bodies are very adaptable too and that's the other thing. We've sort of been taught or sold maybe this idea that everything has to be optimal and it's possible to optimize your body and if you can just optimize it, there's this magical thing that will happen and that you may be performing well now but if you can get all systems to this mythical optimal state that everything will be perfect. And it turns out that although I think that there is some truth to that, it's also true that our bodies are really good at adapting different environmental conditions and we have all to be able to handle key and hold and all of these things that we might throw at it.
And so we're pretty good at performing in different conditions and so although there may be things that you can do that will help a little bit, I think the expectations that we have here are oversized. Yeah, I got that. So you talked about our general gains. I think that that's an interesting way of putting it in this sort of one idea that's out there like well you can do these things on their own or really small but if you put them together then you know so if you have a bunch of things that only make a one or two percent difference that may not seem like a lot but if you do five or six of them then all of a sudden you may be getting six or seven or eight percent difference and that's really huge and again it's worth even though small percent differences can be very meaningful.
And in a race a one percent difference could be the difference between the winner and someone who's also ran. So that's one idea that's really good out there. Now there's been a lot of talk. Sometimes people who talk about marginal gains have been accused of using that as we have explaining gains that might have been made by more illicit means and that's a whole debate that I don't want to get into but I assume that you're familiar with some of that conversation.
Yeah, I'm sure that's what I'm listening to. So before we get into me at the individual elements did you come with a definition of do you find appropriate definition for exercise recovery? Yeah that's a great question and that's kind of where I started and I thought okay the first thing I need to do is define this and it was like oh crap like this is actually a lot harder than I thought and everyone I talked to would have a different definition and in terms of looking at it scientifically like what are the factors that will show that you're recovered and what do we really mean by this and so I guess I would just say that on a specific level I think recovery is really about a return to readiness so you've done a hard about a exercise and recovery is basically that just means that your body is recuperated it's rested it's ready to go hard again so whatever processes need to go on between those bouts have happened and it's this return to readiness that really underlies it across the entire system. Right, right.
Okay so you found your definition. Where did you where did you move from there what were the first things that you looked into? So I started looking at what's really happening in the body when we're recovering and you know what I found in this sense where I started what I had learned back in college and also my experiences and after we as basically you know adaptations that we make in response to exercise I think it happened not during the training itself but in the interim so you don't get stronger you know while you're lifting the weights you get stronger because your body you know responds to that weight lifting that you did and exchanges and so you're creating like microscopic damage in the muscles in the muscle is rebuilding itself and sort of bolstering itself to become stronger for the next time and so that's a really important sort of fundamental concept is that recovery really is when these adaptations take place. That's something that I've heard from even when you're a gym bro when you're eating as old and you start doing your first course gym.
Okay. Here all about the fact that you don't grow in a gym you grow when you sleep and even though I had a massive amount of skepticism I'm like oh yeah whatever mate like you know I just need to lift my weight but your suggestion is that that's correct. It is and also to say it's interesting that you bring up you know you're younger self because almost universally as I was speaking to athletes about recovery and particularly very accomplished and athletes who have been in the game for a long time they almost universally told me that yeah when I was younger when I was first starting out I really didn't give recovery the attention deserved and I thought it wasn't a big deal and I never really focused on it or gave it much of a thought and as athletes age and I think it's more seriously realized oh wow this really is you know a lot of the magic here and one of the things that I really need to pay attention to and it's also true that as you get older your coverings increase so that's another reason I totally sort of have a better appreciation for recovery than younger ones. I mean when you're young when you're at a teenage athlete you just need a rubber and fairy dust aren't you and you're capable of bouncing back from anything and injuries just you grow on your arm and you're losing are you no one comes back like it's that you can't just feel like that but yeah as you mature through your athlete career you can chronically aware of your own mortality.
Absolutely absolutely yeah to fall right. So you've defined what exercise recovery is did you create a broad categories of what contributes to that? Yeah there are a couple of things I think one really important concept that came to me and I think is sort of unappreciated or underappreciated by that leads is that your body responds to stress the same whether it is physical stress or emotional stress so in other words we often repeat recovery think of it in terms of okay I did hard work out today or I didn't do it today was a rest day in terms of what my training was but at the same time don't give attention to you okay what kind of stress is going on in my life what's happening in my personal life and my stress at work or if you're a student athlete at school and these other stresses can be just as well stressful to your body as a physical stress and so to really recover well you need to address the other stresses you know psychological emotional stresses in your life and this is something that pretty much every good coach that I talked to you has also sort of learned and tells their athletes that you know if on your rest day you're dealing with stress at work or difficulties at home you're not really resting and you need to find ways to address this rest in your life. How do you manage to quantify the relative contribution to or degrading of recovery based on those factors that I guess more physical ones?
Yeah I mean that's a good question but I don't think that it has a hard and fast answer I mean a lot of this stuff is just extremely hard to quantify and I have a whole chapter in the book called The Magic Magic Magic and it's all about sort of attempts to use data to quantify recovery and find ways to measure it and it's really interesting how this is kind of a soiler but there's so many different studies and looking at so many different physiological factors but it turns out that it ends nothing really trumps just this qualitative measure of how are you feeling and things like mood actually are much better of over training than something like you know something you can measure in blood tests or on a heart rate monitor. What's very interesting about that and I'm sure that some of the listeners will be agreeing with me is that in your like Alex Hutchinson what he talked about is RPE or as I've kind of re-adopted it the rate of perceived discomfort RPE. Right. And he said you know you can look at the lateral pressure on the VODO max and you do blah blah blah but the best determinant of someone's capacity to endure is how they feel under X degree of stress and you're saying that this I guess what would we call it rate of perceived recovery the RPE are perhaps other right right that would be that would be the best overall aggregate global figure that you could give yourself.
Yeah that's right in the book I talk about some different attempts so there are some measures that are like little tests of things that people can keep track of various factors and it doesn't go down to one single thing looking at things like mood or paying attention to just sort of patterns in your life that people have been working on there actually a couple of interesting apps and sort of computer based or diary based things that people can use there's a really good one of the best measures and sort of trackers are looking at over training and athletes can use to prevent themselves from going over the edge actually looks at mood states and sort of not just how you're feeling like are you feeling tired or not are you feeling moody or you feeling depressed do you feel like training so it's really interesting for me to learn that like I have someone who during my athletic career had some out of over training and basically when this happens you just get in a hole and you can't get out of it no matter what you do you're just tired your muscles are blown and you just can't you're not coming back and it turns out and you know when I was in periods of over training I almost always felt like I didn't feel like training I didn't want to train and I was in a bad mood and when I learned when I was doing this book is that those feelings and those moves were not you know the time I really terrible here when I'm happy that I don't feel like training but like that's why I say take a rest you know lay off for a while and I think this is really common though and in fact I have some stories in my book about other athletes of all sorts of different ability levels and sort of types of athletes who have gone through this and it's almost universal I think that if you're an athlete who's training hard you're just really inherently driven and so there's a idea that you're not even telling you I'm tired and you think I just got to push through this and if I just go harder do more the rewards will be there but it turns out that that's not how it works. It's so difficult it's a very nuanced appreciation to know I'm giving up because I am stopping myself before my work is going around giving up because I push myself too hard and this came up again with Alex I'm like where do you draw the line between being a pussy what's your training under the recovery and how do you know that you're still pushing so hard and I suppose it does in the details there so if you were to take the foundations that you found in terms of the basics of good recovery would you be able to take us through those kind of what the building blocks upon which recovery should be started? Yeah so the fundamental important building walk asleep I mean it's really like if you were to ask me like tell me the one thing that works it's sleep and yeah I would say that the top 10 or top 20 things that work for recovery are sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep it's really that important it sort of like sleep is a cake and everything else is just icing it really if you're not sleeping well you're not getting a sleep you're just everything else does matter and so sleep is a really important thing and also just resting in the sense of relaxation I guess I would say so that sort of a relaxation I mean this sort of overall holistic thing where you're not just sitting still and not exercising but you're also reducing the starting life and you're feeling relaxed like that that sort of rejuvenation and relaxation is really essential to sort of letting your body do the work that it needs to be. So I think that's what I think is that you're giving it all those resources to make those repairs and to make those adaptations that you're looking for.
Was there a Goldilocks zone that you found for athletes who are training let's say that typically it's training you know between now or two hours a day five days a week was there a appropriate amount of sleep is very massive person a person. So sleep is individual but it doesn't there's a lot of people say oh I sleep six hours I feel great it turns out so there is a condition that is extremely rare though I'll say like chances are if you think you're one of these people you probably aren't there's a condition that where some people really truly only need something like four or five hours of sleep but this is something that runs in families it's very distinct it's not just like you think you feel okay if you get less sleep it's something where people just fundamentally can't sleep longer. Most people who say that they get by fine and feel great on say six hours of sleep are actually fully themselves and what is true is that they're just extraordinarily well adapted to sort of coping with the impairments that they have on that. So they're actually fully themselves and there's interesting studies about the book where they look at people you know sleep compared and what happens is the first night after you don't sleep you feel tired and you know that you're impaired and you feel awful but it continues what happens is you sort of stop noticing it and that kind of cognitive impairment and physical impairment just becomes a new normal to you.
So while you think that you're coping well you're not and you know probably if you ask you know your coworkers or friends or whatever they might be able to say you straight as well. Yeah okay so sleep important we said that is there a minimum amount that you recommend the most athletes. I think that one is kind of a minimum and again this is something individual the very best way to figure out how much you need is to have one night as an enough if you're chronically sleep deprived it's going to take you out and get caught up to where your your face line but you know have a few nights where you are not sitting alarmed don't have any reason to go up where you can just truly sleep as long as you as you want to and see how much how much sleep your body wants. And I would say less than seven you're really playing with fire and a lot of things and having talked a lot about it already in this book it seems as though many many athletes prefer to get a minimum of eight.
Yeah I think so for me the lessons that show know that we are massive Matthew Walker evangelists on the show and we've a podcast account check it out it's in the 20s maybe 29 we've talked to Greg Parker from University of Leeds we talked about the definitive guy to sleep and then now we can talk about sleep hygiene and the room needs to be a little bit cooler and hot shower go ahead and you know darkness and do a nine of the skating rhythm tonight towards you during the day and dark it's all the same hygiene stuff and you know the specifics of it side I think the bottom line is kind of the same time of attention right it's like you can try and find but it's the equivalent of buying a really nice high range of never enough for a run you know I just go to sleep and get some sleep right absolutely absolutely like you say it's really about building a habit to be a special you're trying to get more sleep more competition or after hard workout but that really becomes like the way that you live an important part of your life and really I think that it's important to note here that one of the ways that one of the things that has happened more this to you know for you to get to prioritize it you know we're just in an era where we have things constantly at us and buying for attention and it's really easy to get caught up in screens and different things and you just have to say look sleep is a priority for me and something that I'm going to prioritize over you know there may be other things that you have to give up or that you have to give lesser attention to in order to get that sleep but until you prioritize it it's just it's not going to have to be a so sleep is important how about recovering throughout that yes question so food is really important recovery obviously hard work out your burning through carbs protein. I'll kind of things are using energy that you need to replenish you need to are muscles are fuel on glycogen. So these can do the stores and so after particularly endurance workout these can be depleted and so you want to replenish those stores. And the way found out obviously the book is kind of interesting and that is yes nutrition is absolutely important of course it is but we kind of made it up to be something more precise than it is so it's important to get carbs is important to get protein and as you get older protein becomes a little bit more important to this is a little bit preliminary but it seems as though as you get older your body is so you really need to be sure not to get a little bit of a good older obviously if you're strengthening things that are really taxing your muscles are going to be a lot of repair going on in the muscles and the protein is important but this idea that there's an adequate recovery window under which you have to get these nutrients in to optimize your recovery.
It turns out that that's something that is really overstated I had a research tell me you know it's not a recovery window it's where they cover your barn door as long as you're not so there is a certain sense under which is really important to get these nutrients in right away and that is if you are about to perform again so if you are say at a track meet where you're having one other exercise and then you're going to do another one soon again if you're doing something really short you're probably not completing a ton of energy and so you don't need to get calories in the way you're going to get your calories in calories small snack will do it but unless you're in a perform again you know within the next 10 or 12 hours and being like that it's perfectly fine to just have your next meal have a regular meal you're going to be okay again it's important to your son is a car in the but getting you know this really specific amount or getting it in a particular window just isn't nearly as important as you may have been told. So the kind of like window is it's called in the intro workout school drinks and stuff like that is what the efficacy of those. Yeah so it turns out you know here the timing it's not the timing that's magical it's the nutrients themselves so like there's some studies looking at timing of protein it's like it turned out that didn't out of you the protein before the workout or during the workout or after like the results were sort of the same it wasn't that perfect timing that was making the difference. It was just that you were getting those nutrients to begin with and so it looks as though proteins right out throughout the day is a really good approach rather than trying to take it all in one bowl is right after a workout like it's fine you want to have protein in your diet you need to have carbs particularly if you are doing during exercise and I know I'm very familiar I know that there's a debate going on about whether you know that high fat low carb diet is good for athletes and some people are proposing that but I think a lot of research is just showing that you know when you exercise hard you do to complete carbohydrates and that's what your body is fueling itself on during those those bouts.
I can say what just sounds on people doing marathon's on keto. I don't have like I really strong stance on this so if you go and look I actually wrote a story for 538 remotely signs writer a few years ago I believe that I'm something like you can't trust what you read about nutrition maybe come in the show notes. But basically looking at nutrition studies and it turns out that nutrition is a really difficult thing to study and a lot of the things that we know about nutrition are based on pretty shoddy methodology and studies that aren't nearly as definitive as we've been led to believe. I think that there are a lot of ideas out there about diets a lot of it is more as a religion than science people sort of take their stand.
I think that it's totally legitimate for at least a try different diets and you know if someone finds a keto diet works for them go for it I don't see anything to tell them they absolutely can't do that. I'm not convinced that it's performance enhancing and there was the least work did study of race walkers or racewalkers where she had them on the side and did not seem to improve performance. But you know there are people that swear by it and I do think that you know diet is something that's worth playing around with an individual level but I think that we just don't have evidence on a level of granularity that we want. We want to say exactly this much of this nutrient or this food or this that or the other thing will get this outcome that those things that we're looking at are so complicated that it's really hard to attribute that to one food or to one component of food and so what ends up happening is you have what a probably small effects.
Getting drowned out of a lot of noise with complexity of these issues that you're looking at. I think I think sweating the small stuff is you know athletes seem to be super concerned that they're pre-digested vegan way that's paleo and I think the source from the mountains of Kenya has been taken in with the right blend of MC tail. Anything you still in Calorie deficit in 24 hours a day like you don't so it's most of focus on focus on the big win is which I'm going to guess is making sure you're eating enough anything very dire. Exactly exactly and I think the other thing to note here is that you know there are elite athletes in sorts that very different diets you know they're performing well so you know one athlete you know if you're in a region's year you probably start the day with toast and that brown.
So sweet cheese that they like to eat you know that's not something that people generally eat in the US but it works fine and so to say that you know those regions here so fast because of the brown cheese is just ridiculous brown cheese is like the most Norwegian food. So it's toast and brown cheese is exactly what I thought Norwegian people ate. Why do you say why do you say more well on chicken. Well I think it's an example of this showing that here you've got this guy who's the world's best printer right and like so you can decide that he's either super specific special diet but what he decided when he was at the village in Beijing and was worried about eating a local food because it was not familiar to him.
He was going to go for the thing that he liked he knew that you know he could digest it without problems and so he ate a bunch of chicken not to get the Olympics and one of a bunch of gold medals and you know to suggest that the chicken not to get for the super finagle medals is ridiculous but I think you have to look that around and also say that you know had he eaten something that we were traditionally thought was you know the performance and dancing and so the things you're mentioning you know the vegan protein or the you know whatever it is. It would be just as ridiculous and so you know it's important is that he got he replenished the calories that he needed he got protein he got carbohydrates he got the basic nutrients and so he was fine. When danger here is that if the things that you're doing recovery or if you're nutritional needs so you're in the road competing and if it becomes so important you have the special specific food that's hard to get that just becomes a new source of stress and it's kind of the opposite of recovery and you're not doing yourself any favors and chances are whatever benefit you're getting from that special food is being out way by the stress that you're experiencing by you need to procure it. Yeah, I suppose that's it's perhaps something that you know you know what carry with you or whatever it might be.
Right. You're right. You totally correct that. So you touched earlier on upon massage or sausage work or foam rolling and other techniques like that moving into that what does the science say.
Yeah, it's interesting. So I think massage is one of the most popular recovery values. I know I'm a huge and I love it. I think most athletes like it and you know when you look at the science behind it there are a lot of claims that are made.
So for instance, it's flushing your blood that's getting like a cast out of the muscles and that's important and I'll just say that whenever someone tells me that something works by flushing like a cast out and sort of like okay that that's a hold up because you know we use it to think about the acid was what made you sore after hard work out. I mean I know that's not the case and regardless it turns out that your muscles are really good at clearing like the acid on their own. So by the time you're using one of these things the lactic acid is probably gone to begin with. But massage, the other claims that are made about this or you know hormones or flushing like the acid and those don't seem to stand up.
But what massage really does and almost universally does is it makes people feel good it makes someone lie down for an hour and relax and you're not looking at their phone they're not thinking about other things. They're just sort of actively relaxing and I think you know at its most basic level that is recovery. You know anything that makes you feel good anything that allows you to take some time out of your day to really give your body a chance to rejuvenate and to relax that's recovery and that's working. We consider that working.
Yeah, so one of my first episodes actually with Dr. Quinn Henrik the doctor physical therapy for juvenile training systems and in that one just he said the sentence there is no scientific basis to say that massage, static stretching or dynamic stretching does anything on the mechanism that people think that it does work on. And he used an analogy you heard about the experiment that was done using metal tools to do soft tissue work on rats. He was a little mighty little mighty little mice ACLs so they wrote you the mice ACLs and then they did some work with steel tools.
One iteration for study they used a soft tissue work and another one they didn't do anything and they did find that in the iteration for study where they used this tool that the recovery was quicker. But what they didn't explain was that the size of the tool they were using was a human size tool and the amount of pressure that they were applying was human pressure to a mouse. And the study he ran the figures forward and basically worked out that your flesh would literally she repart. I would rip up before you created one percent shear in the tissue.
So you know I think you're right it's interesting and also reassuring to hear that there is massive amount of conflict between what you've just heard about what he says as well. But I think people presume that the lying on the phone or the vibrates because it's working out adhesions in the muscle, helping with microscopic tears and stuff like that. And yet what the main mechanism is working on is to be activating the Paris and the other system and just getting people to calm down and be in a state which is conducive to recovery. Is that fair to say is that brilliant?
Yeah you just explained it right there. It's just as you said it's not one thing that's just recurring theme in my book is that there are a lot of things that people said worked and claimed worked and really you know were like you can take this you know over my dead body. It takes away from your mind that body. But oftentimes the explanations that were given didn't hold up so it wasn't that it's not working but it may just not be the mechanisms that they say and you've just explained it quite well on the balance of the knowledge and particularly things that seems to target fascia.
And it's interesting because fascia is something that's this is an area of a lot of research right now because very early days so there's a lot more we don't know than that we do about fascia and it may end up that you know there are things that we have not yet understand. So you know in terms of whether a film rolling is good or bad I would say that right now the science that we have suggests that you know a lot of the way that it's working is really through the nervous system it's not so much that it's some physical mechanism there but we're still you know it still really days with us. So there's lots of stuff right now. So my advice here is just sort of like if you're doing it and you feel like it makes you feel better and you feel like it's quite a quirk working than keeping it.
There's no like there's nothing that I found it was going on from rolling a terrible stop doing it at the same time I did not find any compelling reason why it should be done. So if you're someone and I've had multiple people tell me please tell me I can stop filming rolling. If you're one of those people I give you I give you license to not do it. You don't need to take custody of the cross walls you can from rolling anything.
And one thing that's just in my mind there did you look at recovery and shop out so let's say that someone's doing a 5x1 mile or 5x4 meters with you know a couple minutes wrestling between did you look at that super short period recovery and what people can do because I am used to lying on the floor and hoping that the world will stop spinning but I have been told by numerous cultures I need to stand for. Yeah. So there is some evidence potentially that in that sort of scenario that a little bit of massage can be helpful that sometimes something cold might help. But really one thing that's really great is just really light exercise I mean when I was I school runner we call it a warm down or warm up right.
And so but that easy activity it could be you know in the sort of around sometimes as you guys spinning on their trainers after race. But where you're just sort of keeping them live flow going so that you know the muscles are warm that you're still doing some motion without it being taxing. So that is a good idea because you know for me as a lay person thinking about the body I think right it's work as hard as it can now needs to not work as hard as it can whereas this is more like middle ground. Right.
Right. So this is like absolutely necessary and you know interesting thing that I learned while we're going to talk about so many of the things that we do and so our base more on sort of like we've been doing this it seems to work and believes about like well this is how we did it before and we have success then on hard scientific evidence and this is to say that like people don't care about evidence or they're trying to push off things that don't work but just that this is really hard to measure sometimes and it's hard to study and so something's working there's a lot of compelling or you know it's perceived to be working there's you know compelling reasons there in any cases to keep doing it and so. If we don't know for sure whether it's good then a lot of people say well I like it's so cases that maybe. Yeah, yeah, so we talked about the trial chamber stuff like this super cools kind of tank C70 right and goes to some insanely low temperature.
Yeah, it's quite adrenaline rush. Just how cold is it going to be in one in you know I said about some times in the middle of January in the North England and I think I could last for about five seconds so. It's about that cold. Does it work and is there any evidence to suggest it works and.
Any compelling evidence that these cryo tanks were performance enhancing or recovery enhancing that said and some of the things that are made about them are just ridiculous I mean have a scene in the book where I'm sort of relaying some of the claims of an age to me by. A provider of rather be in the sort of science experts talking about starts laughing because they're really they're really. Things about. For oxygenating blood which of course isn't a thing and you know doing all these crazy hormone things.
I think at the end of the day why people like this so much is I also have a whole chapter in the book about the sea bows and the people effect and I think it's worth reading because one of the things that I get into there and it's probably on the scope of our discussion here. But it's just how some people and some coaches are using the people effect for good for good so we kind of tend to think that the sea bow factors assigned well doesn't work but it turns out that you know our bodies are really powerful and the expect an expectation that we have can be you know some cases almost like a powerful drug and so I don't think that this is something we should dismiss and it is working about whether it's something to harness and I think that you know my experience that craft chamber really had a strong. You know seem to be set up to have a strong placebo effect because. There's pretty evidence that we'll see those that are unpleasant work better than things that are pleasant or that you don't have anything so taking a pill is less effective than having a placebo shot for instance.
But I think it's a certain that the cry therapy that takes a really popular among martial arts fighters and I can totally understand because you get in there and you get out and you just have this like feeling of being totally pumped and totally empty and it's just a huge adrenaline rush and I can totally get by that. Great before it match and just really get ready. But in terms of like is this going to make you recover better there's just not. So the mechanism again what we're talking about here is that it's how it makes you feel and essentially they can think about your recovery and spend some time on what's.
What's the super cool things that spoke to Dr. Greg Park from you guys elite about the sleep activity said that the people effect is the most reliable effect on all the found ecology and if we were somehow able to bottle up a sea bow we would have a panacea. So you've got this thing which kind of doesn't work but the fact that it doesn't work is the reason it does work and it's like universal snake oil it's actually kind of it's really I find the concept might increasingly deep understanding of what the seabals can do it's really really enjoy it. So moving forward what's what's one of the crazier approaches for recovery that you came across obviously crazier than super cooling your body to like minus.
Right. I think when someone else may be the day if there was anything like every piece of try and one of them there places now that you can go to get IV injections of vitamins and things and this is supposed to be recovery and actually have a whole chapter in the book about about supplements and social supplements including vitamins. And so I said absolutely I'm not going to check these things I mean my research show that that none of these things are likely to be helpful in the first place and the idea of injecting them into my bloodstream to seem like volateness. So the IV drips.
Yeah. It's not the same in UK moments but you can actually not part of it because you can go and get like hang on with it right like you wake up in the morning and you suffering a little bit and then you go in and they fill you up with this with this drip and you lie there for an hour and then hang on with it goes away. Oh yeah so the one that I was at they actually had I was watching there was a couple there dressed in not to say close that maybe I think that these are high in parties they had just flown in that morning from already in aspirin so this is in number so they just went in specifically to get this IV and you know it was clearly intended to undo whatever damn see me. I find the whole concept of like a medical procedure to hang over.
I mean to be fair I've had some hangovers where I wish the doctor would be able to come fix it so maybe it's just maybe it's just. Yeah. I'm just a thing. The fucking pill.
Yeah. I totally get that. So you mentioned that the idea in that would be crazy stuff was there anything else you can across that you would surprise by open belief. Yeah.
So I live in Colorado I'll just preface this I think so we're at high altitude and so and we go on to where I said so people worry about the altitude and not but I was seeing multiple places that I went these oxygen and halo so they had to be able to straight oxygen and that was going to make you feel better which. Yeah. If you had a medical condition or were truly low in oxygen that could be helpful. I think anyone who's really an athlete in decent shape is probably not in that category and it's just not going to be helping you even a higher altitude.
I think that's not going to be the thing that's that's the limiting factor in your recovery. You touch the point that altitude chambers I'm going to get a common the used tool for to the front stop leads and you're in soft leads I suppose. Yeah. Yeah.
And these are used on a huge temperature recovery as for training so it's really about getting out of patience and whatnot. But they do seem. You know, it's interesting literature shows that there may be responders and less responders altitude which is kind of interesting. Some people go out to or use an altitude chamber and really.
Blood cells and others don't. I think we're still trying to figure out how that all lays out but these have been used for a long time and seem to be an effective training to particularly if you're going to be competing out to you. That is super interesting. I guess again as you said, the wrong policies are trying to learn what works for you.
One thing I wanted to jump before we finish up was did you find any particular individuals who have a natural ability to recover or some people who have particularly poor abilities to recover? Is there a big swing with regards to that? Absolutely. I think that this is in a way similar I think it's a different scale or different talent.
But just as some people respond really quickly or really well training there's some people that need more or less recovery and I talk about one person in the book her name is Camille Herron. She's an ultra nirvana and she seems to have just a super natural ability to recover. It's quite remarkable. She kind of got into the ultra endurance events after figuring out that she could do nirathons in a row and other people that do many nirathons in seven nirathons in seven days.
I think that's usually the sort of in it to finish and which is a huge accomplishment. She's someone who can actually perform at high level doing that and she is now doing ultra nirathons. She currently holds the world record for 100 miles run for any person of any gender on a certified course. She's an amazing athlete and she seems to really have to have that.
100 mile run is going to help by a female. That's right. That is crazy. Why do you think that is?
I think it's because she's an extraordinary athlete. You're asking why is this the event? This is a whole topic of conversation that's been ongoing for a long time. Is there an event where women can perform and there's a lot of thought that maybe if there was such a thing?
In terms of it might be that because of differences in metabolism and things like that. That may be part of it. I also think that this is an event that she is someone who is very elite and is probably in some of it. These things are somewhat new and entirely new.
I think she's just an incredible athlete and I don't think that her biggest accomplishments are behind her. To have an event like that which is ultra-altering where you wouldn't have considered one to be winning 100 metres. You roll that forward and you go, why is 100 miles on different? As far as I didn't know that fact, in my experience, the main endurance event that women had in advantage in as far as I knew was swimming.
Long distance swimming because of the particular negative of the body and changes in buoyancy and ability to move through the water and stuff like that. So that's the 100 mile race is one of my biggest current health by one. That's really cool. Yeah, it really is.
So Chrisie, can you tell the listeners about it to find your line and whether they can find your book? Yeah, so my book is www.goodtogobook.com. And you can find me on Twitter at cragcrest.c-r-a-g-c-r-e-s-t as in crag-crag-y crag-y crass. It's a place that's actually my favorite trail run.
And then my website is my name, Chrisieashwanden.com. Fantastic. I'll make sure that the link is too good to go. And all of your socials plus, all of your good outcomes that we've spoken about will be in the chat below.
I had one other little thing for that is next month. So in mid-February, 2019, I'm launching a new podcast. It's a little bit of a part here for what we've been talking about, but it's called emerging form. And it's a podcast about the creative process.
I co-hosted a poet and we basically spent 30 minutes each episode talking about some creative conundrum. And then we bring on the guest to help us answer some questions. And I do think that there are a couple of episodes of interesting notes, athletes as well. One of the ones that I really like is about talent and whether it's necessary.
And so we have a pretty good debate about that. That's fantastic. Yeah, you can find it at how the launch yet, but it will soon. And it's at emergingform.com.
Amazing. Well, once that's up, make sure you send it across. I will fire out to the listeners. But in any time, hopefully we will help some people understand their recovery.
At January, think that if everyone was to go back and listen to Alex at least an episode, we talked about endurance, and then comes to this. Hopefully we've got that. You're training so you know you're up to you and then you've got recovery. So you've got your up and you're up and now you just need to go and sleep and then little might.
That's right. That's all right. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for coming.
Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. I got more. I got more.