- Physical performance (basics):
- Good night sleep
- properly hydrated Well nourished (whatever that means to you)
- Temperature modification:
- Believe it or not, temperature is the most powerful variable for improving physical performance and for recovery. Temperature itself is going to dictate how well and when you sleep and the depth of your total recovery. There are two aspects to temperature of course, there’s heat and there’s cold. We are mainly going to focus on cold As a way to buffer heat. heat can be a powerful stimulus for increasing growth hormone which is involved in tissue repair etc and burn fat and improve metabolism in various ways. However, cold is even more powerful than heat as a tool. We’re going to talk about cold from the standpoint of thermal physiology.
- physiologists and neuroscientists figured out that there are different compartments in your body that heat and cool you differently and that you can leverage those in order to double even triple or quadruple your work output both strength, repetitions, and endurance.
- Physiology of cold and heat:
- What is temperature? How does temperature impact the body And its ability to perform, including learn new skills? homeostasis: The body wants to remain in a particular range of temperatures, that it doesn’t like to be too hot or too cold.
- Heating up too much is just plain bad. It’s not just bad for physical performance, it’s bad for all tissue health. If your brain heats up too much, neurons start dying and those neurons don’t come back, Also known as neurogenesis: the ability for the brain to regenerate itself or generate new neurons. You don’t want to lose neurons in the central nervous system. If you get too hot, that’ll happen. It’s called hyperthermia, you want to avoid hyperthermia and you have many mechanisms that are built into you to avoid becoming hyperthermic. The other thing that happens when we get too warm is that we have in all of our cells, what are called enzymes.
- Enzymes are proteins, and they have a particular structure And their structure becomes modified when heat increases and that’s not good. You want their structure to be of a particular type.
- Imagine a car with four wheels, let’s just say the car is the enzyme. If it gets too hot, it’s like two of the wheels fall off and that thing can’t function. So one of the reasons why the body and nature goes through so much effort to build in mechanisms to make sure that we don’t become too warm is because when we get to warm, these enzymes don’t function, cells stop functioning, They stop being able to generate energy, they stop being able to digest things, you stop being able to think and eventually those cells start dying off entirely. So keeping temperature in a particular range is really good, you don’t want to get too hot.
- You don’t want to become hypothermic either. You can die from hypothermia just like you can die from hyperthermia. However that you have a lot more range to be cold than you do to be too warm.
- The idea is to keep the body and brain in a particular range but anytime we do anything, our body temperature can shift. So for instance, if you were to stand next to a campfire or you were outside on a hot day, various things would happen to dump heat from your body. If you were outside on a cold day or you were to get into a cold shower or a cold lake, various things would happen to insulate heat within your body.
- When you get into cold water, you secrete adrenaline. On a hot day, if it’s really hot or in a very hot sauna or in the hot desert, you will generate what are called heat shock proteins which will set off other sets of cascades, metabolic cascades, biological cascades. But the simplest way to think about this process is that when we get cold, we tend to vasoconstrict. Our blood vessels tend to constrict and we tend to push energy toward the core of our body to preserve our core organs.
just an idea for whoever might want to use or if Cap wants to mess around a bit.
