-: Post workout. We're trying to
get cortisol to come back down.
We're trying to, maybe, focus on
increasing free testosterone,
if we're focusing on a little hypertrophy, as well.
Are we gonna get a growth hormone response here?
No, we're not.
But are there types of systems where you could do
Japanese drop-sets, so you do a total,
we do a neurological workout through the whole thing,
and then at the very end you do like one set of 25,
or something, to get a little bit of a
lactic acid response, or something like that.
So, there's those type of things in there.
So, I just kind of put that in there with an asterisk.
Increased insulin. So, with this type of a workout,
I'm probably not going to be jacking up my glucose
uptake very well, so from a recovery standpoint,
I might actually focus on, I'm gonna use insulin,
to drive nutrients into my muscles,
to enhance that recovery response.
Whereas hypertrophy and metabolic training
are gonna do a better job of accomplishing that
without insulin, and then it's just a body composition,
and an end-goal situation, on whether or not
I want that insulin to be a part of that recovery equation.
In this case, in the neurological training system,
if you got a lean individual and
they're doing this type of stuff,
getting an insulin spike might be a really good way
of dropping cortisol down and increasing free testosterone,
because insulin is going to decrease SHBG,
which is the hormone that kind of binds up to testosterone,
keeps it from being free and being able to be used.
So, when you have an insulin spike,
you're gonna get that testosterone freed off,
and you're gonna get more nutrients driving
into the muscles, and you're gonna get decreased cortisol,
which is gonna lead to increasing the recovery response
from this neurological phase to a greater degree than
what the stimulus would have provided itself,
because it wasn't burning through a lot of glucose
and it wasn't as much volume as we would see
in a hypertrophy training program.
If we're training at night,
definitely wanna do things to boost GABA.
So, we wanna make sure that we get that up,
cause we wanna hit the brakes hard.
If you did something to stimulate
your nervous system late at night,
it's gonna make it really hard to fall asleep.
So, we gotta hit that brake pedal hard,
so we might actually take specific nutrients to boost GABA.
If you're doing power building or speed work,
but still want to focus on protein synthesis,
you may throw in some leucine in there,
because you're not gonna be stimulating
as much from the training, so you're might try
and stimulate a little bit more nutritionally.
So, you might have leucine and an insulin spike
as your anabolic signaling, even though the training was
not a super strong anabolic signal.
So, if you're power building, or you're doing speed work,
but you're just trying to initiate
the recovery response a little bit faster.
In a sense, we're trying to over-recover,
from a less stressful situation
by adding these nutrients in.
Your protein and your EAAs are gonna be basically based
off of how much mechanical damage and the size of
the tissue that you happen to train,
so if you were doing speed based work,
then these requirements are really low.
If you're doing heavy load, with some eccentrics in there,
and more mechanical damage, then your demand for
essential amino acids and proteins is gonna go up.
Taurine, three to five grams, we've been through that.
Calms the nervous system down.
This is also a precursor to GABA,
so taurine can be used to make GABA,
but there's gonna be stronger ways to get that
when you're training at night, we need an immediate,
so we may need to do something stronger than Taurine.
Magnesium, 200 to 600 milligrams.
Calms that down, make sure this is a ciliated version
of magnesium, so magnesium glycinate is a good option,
magnesium oxide is garbage, you might as well
lick some pennies, or something like that.
That's not a form of magnesium your body can really use.
Magnesium citrate is a ciliate,
but it's not the highest absorbable ciliate.
So, I really like magnesium glycinate
for this particular purpose, more.
Magnesium taurate, which is technically magnesium
bound to Taurine, those are gonna be better options.
Creatine, three to five grams.
Supports cellular energy, spares methyl donors.
So, this spares methyl donors thing,
without getting really complicated,
what I'm gonna say is that, creatine allows you
to deplete less choline, that's what you need to know.
So, taking creatine is gonna make it easier for me
to maintain good acetylcholine levels,
which is really important in a neurological phase.
Post workout meal.
My macros should reflect whatever my goal happens to be
in terms of my aesthetics, cause obviously I don't need
a lot of nutrition to recover from this.
I just need specific nutrients
to get that nervous system calmed down.
So, by calorie demand, it won't be
as high as it is in the other phase.
My protein, my carbohydrate goal will not be as high.
What that would be determined by is whether or not
you're trying to get insulin to be a big part
of the recovery equation or not.
So, obviously if I'm trying to do that,
then my carbohydrates are gonna be higher,
my fats are gonna be lower.
If I'm not using that, then maybe my balance
is gonna be a little bit more diet,
or like I said, you could do this full keto style diet,
you could still train the neurological system,
so this could be all protein and fat meal,
depending on your outside goals.
The benefit of the higher carbs is,
it can bring cortisol down faster,
which can be useful if you're training later in the day,
or if you have a really hard time getting
your nervous system to calm down.
Cortisol is a part of that, but in terms of actually getting
the nervous system to not be agitated from the training,
remember cortisol is a byproduct of neurotransmitters,
so getting rid of cortisol does not necessarily
fix the neurotransmitter imbalance,
so I need to still work on the brain element.
So, I need things like taurine, leucine, theanine, GABA,
and magnesium to calm down my neurotransmitters,
if I'm training late at night, not just insulin.
Cause what'll happen is insulin will calm down me hormonally
from the body, but my brain could still be racing.
So, you get into the I'm tired,
but I can't fall asleep state.
We need to get the brain calmed down.
So, things like theanine are really good
for bringing the brain down.
GABA is really good for that, but straight GABA
doesn't get into the brain very well,
or at least it shouldn't, unless you have
a leaky brain barrier, which a lot of people do.
So, the fact that regular GABA works for you
may not be a good thing, but phel GABA, or Phenibut,
those cross the blood-brain barrier,
so that's a way of actually just taking straight GABA.
I like that, especially for a short-term solution,
or people in this specific situation,
where they are training late in the evening,
but long-term, what I would like
is that people make their own GABA.
So, I prefer to use things like the taurine or the theanine,
the magnesium and get their body healthy,
so it's making the GABA on its own,
because then it's controlling its own
stress response, if you will, versus becoming dependent
on us applying the brake for it, if that makes sense.
When we look at nervous system recovery,
the essentials here are gonna be sleep, again,
much like for hypertrophy, but hypertrophy looks like,
I need to sleep more, my hours of sleep need to go up.
When you're doing nervous system training,
what it tends to do is, it tends to interfere with
the sleep quality and your ability to fall asleep.
So, when you're over trained, neurologically,
you can't fall asleep.
When you're over trained from volume,
you feel like you can't get enough sleep.
So, we need to make sure that we're doing all the things
that we can do, to make sure we get our
nervous system calmed down, so that we can fall asleep,
and we have quality sleep, but we may not necessarily
need more hours of sleep, it's just the hours
that we do have need to count,
so we need to fall asleep well.
Serotonin and B vitamins are gonna be
essential for the quality of sleep.
Remember, we need serotonin to initiate
the recovery process, so one of the things
serotonin is very important for is replenishing
the receptors for all the neurotransmitters.
So, I need B vitamins and good serotonin levels,
in order for my brain to rebuild
sensitivity to all the neurotransmitters.
So, if I have poor serotonin, I could feel
like I'm deficient in dopamine, or acetylcholine, or GABA,
because I'm not very sensitive to those neurotransmitters,
and the reason I'm not sensitive is
because I have very low serotonin.
So, if you're taking these things,
and they seem to not really be working,
or you have to take an extremely high dose to endure it,
you kinda go from it doesn't work,
or then it gives me a negative effect.
It might be that really serotonin is the issue,
not the individual neurotransmitter
that you're looking to boost, like dopamine, per se.
Bad gut health can cause low serotonin in the GI,
which can cause a lot of stress, but it's debatable about
the relationship between serotonin
and the gut, and the brain.
Serotonin serves a different purpose in the gut,
in terms of being able to control motility.
So, good serotonin levels make
a happy digestive system, a poop every day system.
Low serotonin is gonna make you constipated,
but that GI serotonin doesn't necessarily translate to
having better brain serotonin.
So, if we're looking at boosting at the brain,
our best option is actually 5-htp,
which is a precursor to serotonin.
That being said, if you have a really bad gut,
what you'll do is you'll end up breaking down
a lot of that 5-htp to serotonin in the GI tract,
and not a lot of it will be getting to the brain.
So, getting serotonin levels up is probably the hardest,
from a nutritional perspective,
of all of the four neurotransmitters.
So, lifestyle stuff and de-stressing techniques,
and stuff like that, can be extremely valuable.
You can't just rely on using supplements alone
to get serotonin levels up, because it's a lot harder
to get it up in the brain in particular,
just from supplementation alone.
You're gonna need to do some other things,
to make sure you're getting the most advantage.
Otherwise, you're just gonna get
a ton of serotonin in the GI tract.
Or, if you have a leaky brain it might happen really easy.
And then, make sure that you take into account all of these
neurotransmitter things, if you're taking any drugs
that are gonna affect neurotransmitter uptake.
SSRIs work on serotonin uptake.
Some antidepressants work on serotonin,
some on dopamine, some on both.
So, you need to be very careful about using these nutrients
if you're taking any drugs for that.
Lastly, Relora is an herbal based thing that
helps keep serotonin from breaking down.
So, that works really well when you combine it with 5-htp,
and B vitamins, so that's kind of a good combination.
If you have a good B complex, Relora and 5-htp together.
So, maybe something like 500 milligrams of Relora,
and that's a way of not only getting serotonin up,
but Relora, think of it as almost like a natural SSRI.
If you weren't taking a prescription, this would be a way of
trying to keep your serotonin levels high,
in addition, it's just providing the raw ingredients
to be able to make more.
Causes of under recovery, here.
In terms of nervous system training is gonna be
low magnesium, not enough taurine
to calm the nervous system down,
poor electrolyte balance, which is gonna keep the nervous
system agitated longer than it needs to.
All of those things are gonna make it harder for us
to get into that recovery mode from the nervous system,
so our ANS will stay in that stressed state longer,
if we're deficient in any of these nutrients.
Low dopamine will decrease our intensity,
so if we can't get intensity in our contractions
then we actually start switching the training stimulus,
but it's also important for energy production.
If we need energy to do all the recovery process.
We need energy to be able to run protein synthesis,
to run the repair process, to do the metabolic adaptations.
Low acetylcholine is gonna decrease our tolerance to volume.
So, we'll be able to switch states from relaxed to beta,
and from beta back down into a relaxed and recovery states,
so it'll make it harder, so basically
if I have low acetylcholine it also makes it harder
for me to get to that GABA dominant state,
so it's gonna affect my recovery there as well.
Low serotonin will decrease my dopamine and
acetylcholine receptor replacement,
making me less sensitive to the
neurotransmitters that I need for performance.
So, all of those things are gonna have a net effect
of making the system less trainable,
which means I'm gonna have to do more work,
or more volume, or use more supplements,
to try and accomplish this, which is gonna
decrease that trainability and eat into my recovery.