tyson (00:00.419)
caught me. Well, you know, it usually is, but if you prefer it not to be, I'm happy for it not to be.

christie (00:00.535)
Oh, no worries, no worries. This is not video, by the way, is it? Right?

Oh, oh yeah, I didn't realize I'm in my closet where I usually record and everything. So maybe better not. Okay.

tyson (00:13.069)
Sure, nah that's fine, that's fine, that's fine. Most of the listeners come through the audio anyway, so nah, no dramas. How are you? Thanks so much for coming on.

christie (00:18.598)
Okay.

christie (00:22.298)
Oh sure, yeah, no problem. And I just have to warn you, I have 45 minutes. I assume that's enough time. Okay, yeah. I have. Ha ha ha.

tyson (00:25.967)
That's fine, that's fine, that's heaps of time. I can imagine you've done so many of these, everything that, everything needs to be boiled down into 45 minutes can be. So I'm sorry, I'll do my best to keep it as fresh as possible, but I'm guessing based on how many of these you've done, there's a very good chance that so many of the questions will be repeated.

christie (00:34.743)
Yeah.

christie (00:38.694)
No worries.

christie (00:44.502)
That's all right. I've heard them and I still enjoy it.

tyson (00:47.599)
Fantastic. Hey, so just a heads up, like a lot of the questions on the podcast are going to be sort of targeted in the sense of, or coming from the perspective of sort of endurance athletes or longer distance athletes, just as a little bit of a heads up, but I understand how well the principles apply to so many different people in different fields. So if you feel as though there's a better example going down a different avenue, just feel free to run with it.

christie (00:59.342)
Sure. Okay.

christie (01:05.138)
Oh sure, yeah.

christie (01:10.826)
Well, I'm an endurance athlete myself, so it's all good.

tyson (01:14.107)
Yeah, awesome. Should we jump into it? I'll keep my eye on the clock here. What do we got? 802-845. All right, sweet. Let's do it. Recording is going good. I was thinking just coming into the podcast about how many of the recent conversations I've had on here, which have been based around the subject of recovery, or at least some practical ways that we can help our body be more equipped for when it comes to a better performance, whether that's in training or in racing.

christie (01:16.639)
Sure thing.

christie (01:22.466)
Great.

tyson (01:44.339)
And so many things have come up throughout the course of these conversations, which are really, really interesting to talk about things like zone two heart rate training and ice baths and massage and so many things that feel really, really good to get done. And obviously when you look at the performance side of things, you hear it and you go, well, of course that's a beautiful place to start. And in so many respects they can be, but one of the things that I found most interesting about reading your book is, and I thought a cool launch pad to jump into the conversation.

christie (01:54.199)
Mm.

christie (02:12.61)
Sure.

tyson (02:13.367)
is around so many of the recovery myths. Like how much of an impact is what we're doing taking place on our performance is actual physical and how much of it is psychological. And so I thought that's not so much of a question as it is a leading statement that I wanted to throw at you and just hear what you had to say about that to kickstart the chat.

christie (02:29.25)
Sure.

christie (02:32.574)
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting and important distinction that you make, but I don't think that they can be completely separated, to be honest, and I think this is someplace where people sort of go wrong. So, for your body to properly recover, it needs downtime. It needs recovery, rejuvenation, rest. It basically needs, you need to be able to give it the resources it needs to do that healing and to...

heal any damage that was done by the heart, intense exercise, etc. And I think where people often go wrong is that they make this distinction between, well, I'm really busy at my work or I'm stressed at home or I have this thing going on. And so they don't realize that sort of emotional and psychological stress. From a physiological perspective, this also takes a very big toll on your body. So you may be taking a rest day, but if you're really stressed out,

If your heart rate's high, you know, you're fighting with your spouse or your roommate or you're struggling with something else that you're doing in your life, your body's not actually getting that full rest. So you're not actually taking a full rest day. And rest is not just about exercise. It's about sort of the full package. And I think you have to really think of yourself as this multifaceted.

individual with many different things, but all of these different aspects are playing on your physiology. And so when you're psychologically stressed, that is also stressing your body. And I think it's an incorrect assumption to think that that's completely different or separate from physical stress.

tyson (04:09.147)
For sure, I find this conversation really interesting. I had a chat to a guest on here, Gordo Byrne, about this recently, because one thing I used to notice without any of the scientific language was whenever I was stressed or anxious, or had literally, to use your example, been in a fight with my wife and then going out to try and run or to race, it was just a recipe for disaster performance-wise. There was always a real fatigue seeing to follow those emotional states. And I think...

christie (04:15.362)
Mm-hmm.

christie (04:24.279)
Yeah.

tyson (04:38.675)
It's so easy to be really black and white about performance and to be like, no, but I'm doing all of the practical things. Like if you have a look at my training and if you have a look at my recovery and if you have a look at what I've been eating and the supplements that I've been taking, there's no reason that my performance shouldn't just be incredible. But then the underlying assumption to that is that your emotions play absolutely no impact in your overall performance. And it's one thing that I think...

christie (04:42.327)
Yeah.

christie (04:46.592)
Yeah.

christie (04:51.629)
Hehe.

tyson (05:05.855)
I mean, this is a massive generalisation, but I think throughout the conversations that I've had on here, there seems to be a real awareness or a growing awareness of the fact that psychology does play a huge impact in how it is that you're able to execute your performance on race day. But it still seems to be a conversation that's catching up. And I wonder how much of that has to do with the fact that it just can't really be seen as much as felt.

christie (05:23.766)
Absolutely.

christie (05:31.718)
That may be part of it. I think honestly a lot of this comes down to right now we are at a moment where recovery has really become sort of commodified and so most of the messaging that athletes are getting right now about recovery is not science it's advertising and I think it's really important to understand this and this is particularly true so if you follow so now you know all professional athletes have social media accounts

and they are obligated by their sponsors to promote those products that they're sponsored by. And if you are an endurance athlete, your sponsors are going to include probably supplement makers, sports drink makers, nutrition stuff, all of these things, none of which are really scientifically necessary. But what's happened is these companies have created a situation where they've basically bought their way in so that every professional athlete has a sports drink sponsor and a...

you know, now they have all these massage tool sponsors, right? And everyone has them. And, you know, I'm not saying that none of these things are helpful ever at all, but I just want to emphasize that really the messaging that you're getting is advertising. It's not science. And the fact that everyone's doing it doesn't mean that it works. It means that everyone's getting a kickback and they're getting paid to promote those things. And they may really like them, but it doesn't mean that it's responsible for, you know, their performance. And there's an example that I use in my book.

with Michael Jordan and Gatorade. If you're, you may have to be as old as I am, but they used to have these ads Gatorade had, be like Mike, you know, drink Gatorade. And so the idea here is that the Gatorade was somehow responsible for him being this phenomenal athlete. But I think any reasonable person can see that the Gatorade is not what made him a phenomenal athlete. And it may be something that helped or didn't. But we have sort of this idea that if.

a very high level athlete uses a product that it gives it sort of this sheen of beneficence where it must somehow be powerful or necessary. And I think a lot of this advertising really capitalizes on FOMO. So there's this idea that, you know, the margins are so small and you don't want to miss out on anything and this must be so important because all of the pros are using them. And so what ends up happening, and I see this again and again, particularly at, at sort of

christie (07:50.422)
weekend warrior athletes, but particularly people who aren't necessarily professional, but are aiming for the elite levels. And you know, people who are basically taking sports seriously, they tend to, there's this real instinct to focus on all the stuff that's being marketed at them. These little things at very best will give you very marginal gains, while at the same time, they are not mastering the fundamentals.

Yeah, they're not sleeping enough. They're not managing their stress. They're not getting their overall nutrition right. They're not getting their training right. Maybe they're not taking rest days or they're training too hard or they're not training enough, whatever it is. You know, one very common thing is you have sort of a newbie runner who feels like every time they go out for a run, they have to eat an energy bar afterwards to replenish. And then all of a sudden they can't figure out, I'm running more and I'm not losing weight. Well, it's because, you know, you're...

adding these unnecessary calories. And there's this whole myth about the recovery window and there was this idea for a while that you needed to eat something right away after exercise to really maximize your recovery. And we know now that that's not the case, except under certain, very specialized circumstances. And that is where you're going to be performing again in short order before a meal. That's a situation where you may want to refuel right away, but otherwise it's perfectly fine to wait until your next meal.

to get those calories or you know if you finish your workout and you're hungry have a snack but realize that should come out of your overall calorie budget it's not something on top of you know your normal eating.

tyson (09:24.979)
To go to your example with advertising, it's still amazing. I've been involved in sports, whether it's distance running or just other physical sports for over 25 years now. And I was about six or seven when Michael Jordan was at his peak. And every time I put on a pair of nikes, I'm still convinced I can jump that little bit higher. And just to speak to the power of advertising, but to delve into that point a little bit more, it's a really important point because obviously, marketers understand the importance

christie (09:35.435)
Uh.

Yeah.

christie (09:41.751)
Right?

tyson (09:54.013)
athletes represent their product because that connection that it makes with our minds is, oh, they're using it, it's obviously good enough for me, and I catch this on a regular basis. Even on Instagram, when I see the paid advertising banner at the top of the post, I go, okay, I know you're getting paid for this, but still you're using it, and so I buy into that. But with saying that, there's obviously some standout and some fundamental things that actually do work on a regular basis.

christie (10:07.841)
Yeah.

Yeah. Right.

tyson (10:21.059)
But the idea of navigating your way through the chaos and the noise and the psychology of what it is that's being promoted is quite difficult for, especially a newbie athlete of any sport to try and get their way through. Are there any sort of guidelines or pointers that a person in that position can have to figure out exactly what it is that they should be using what it is that's just pure bright sparkly objects?

christie (10:37.994)
Absolutely.

christie (10:44.698)
Yeah, I mean, I think most of the stuff that's being marketed to you is bright, sparkly objects. If it's something you have to buy, it's probably not essential, frankly, because the things that are really effective are sleep, stress reduction, actual rest, like rest days, things like that, listening to your body. I mean, honestly, the most important thing that anyone can do for both the recovery and their athletic performance is to really learn to read their bodies. And this is something that can't be done with a product.

It's not something, you know, you can get the fanciest sports watch available and all of the data trackers. Those numbers are not, they can be helpful inputs and they can be things that can be helpful for you for this learning process. But you should never trust the number on a watch more than you trust how you're actually feeling. And when you talk to the real elite elites, they have an incredible ability to read their bodies and to know how they're feeling, to really

understand how they're responding to that exercise and to their training. And so you can't just rely on some external factor. And I think there's this tendency to believe that data is somehow, and by data, I mean something that you put a number on or a number that you get spit out by one of these trackers is somehow more accurate or more, you know, less biased than something like how you're feeling. But all of the data, and I go through a lot of this research in my book about

For a long time, there's been sort of this search for this magic metric that you could measure that would tell you whether you recovered or not. And there is such a thing and it's called your mood. It's how you're feeling. And this is where the athlete has to learn to read their body and to know. So the thing that's really remarkable here is that there is no one absolute universal thing. Like a lot of athletes, when they're starting to get overtrained or under recovered,

they will get really depressed or they might get really cranky. Those are very common things. Some athletes will feel a particular heaviness in their legs. There are all things like this and there are common variations, but there's no one thing that's universal. It's pretty universal that your mood will change, but whether that manifests in depression versus crankiness or some other thing is individual. But the thing that is consistent is that for whatever individual, you will have that.

christie (13:05.322)
that's consistent. And so what you need to do is learn to figure out what is it for me. So for instance for myself, I know that when I'm starting to be under recovered or over trained, I will wake up in the morning with a little bit of a sore throat. It's just a little bit and it's the kind of thing that's really easy to dismiss and say, oh I just need to have a little coffee, I'll be fine, you know, my throat's just dry. It's very easy to dismiss. But what I've learned is that this is a sign, this is my body telling me. If I'm not

that can be a sign too that maybe my body is not recovering because I'm not able to get that sleep. And even if I am, I mean, sleep is so, I just cannot emphasize enough how fundamental sleep is to recovery. And so if you aren't sleeping well, that's your number one problem. There's no supplement that you can take, no product that you can use, no gizmo or gadget or whatever that's going to overcome that lack of sleep. And so, you know, you can focus on some little tool.

whether there's a particular fascia device or a massager or something like that, or maybe you've got sucked into supplements, none of that will have anything near the effectiveness as good sleep will. I think people underestimate the amount of attention sleep deserves. It's very important. I think the mistake I see people making again and again, is that they fail to prioritize sleep. So yeah, they know it's important, but they-

keep going to bed too late and they have a hard bed, are rising in the morning time, so they can't sleep in later if they go to bed too late. And so they're chronically skimping on sleep and you're just not gonna optimize your recovery as long as you're doing that. So you could do an extra interval or you could get a little massage or you could sleep an extra hour and the extra hour sleep will make so much more difference than the other two things.

tyson (14:55.823)
For sure, I keep trying to explain this to my three year old and my one year old, but they just don't care about the science behind it. It's very interesting though to use your point about the scratchy throat and the blocked nose. I get very sinacy when I notice I start to get run down. Just three days ago, I got back from Western Australia and the flight back was the red eye flight. So we left Perth at 11 p.m. And because of the time difference, we arrived back at Melbourne at 5 a.m.

christie (15:00.723)
Oh yeah. Yeah.

christie (15:10.882)
Uh-huh.

christie (15:21.57)
Uh huh.

tyson (15:25.235)
And I got back into the day and I was like, this is gonna be interesting. There was just no sleep. I just didn't manage to sleep on the plane. And then just like clockwork that evening, I started to get a little bit of synesthesia. So I've started to notice a few of those little correlations as well. In reference to the, sorry, Ganya.

christie (15:25.242)
Ugh.

christie (15:28.724)
Yeah.

Uh huh.

christie (15:36.183)
Mm-hmm.

christie (15:40.978)
And that kind of situation, I think the impulse too, and the mistake that people make again and again until you either learn better or you end up leaving sport because you're always sick, is that when you're feeling that and you're feeling a little run down, you can say, well, I'll be fine. This will go away in a few days. And you sort of, I think runners in particular are very good at ignoring things or being in denial. But you can deny that twinge and you can say, oh, I'm just gonna run through it.

tyson (15:51.643)
Yeah.

christie (16:10.57)
And so then you can have a season long injury or a season long fatigue or bout of over training that you don't overcome, or you can take a day or two off and be done with it. And there's really no, once you get to that situation, when you're feeling a little off, there's no going back to square one, without taking that rest. So there's no, you can choose to take a day or two off, or you can choose to be,

hampered for the whole season, but that's really the choice. And I think people don't understand lots of times that that's really what they're looking at. And so the impulse is to just push through, which is the absolute wrong thing to do.

tyson (16:48.427)
Yeah, with reference to the points about data versus feeling, I'm very old school in my approach. So I'm happy to hear you say that. My first coach or one of my first coaches was nearly 80 years old when we started coaching. And the idea of heart rate monitors and gadgets and technology in general was just not something in his wheelhouse. So a lot of what we did was very feeling-based oriented. So.

christie (16:55.467)
Uh-huh.

christie (17:04.159)
Yeah.

christie (17:08.598)
Yeah.

tyson (17:13.475)
you'll run this at around 60% of your maximum, or you'll run easy and easy is based on how you're feeling that particular day. And as a result with the athletes that I coach now, my natural state, my natural habitat is to go, okay, let's go feelings-based. But one thing that I often come up against is, and I'm trying to navigate how to fit this in most effectively is a number of athletes really do appreciate the data side of running. So it might be.

christie (17:16.29)
Yeah.

christie (17:20.183)
Yeah.

christie (17:27.263)
Yeah.

christie (17:38.402)
Mm-hmm.

tyson (17:38.979)
They understand that sure, feelings is the thing that's gonna give you the most accurate representation of how you're really doing over this data. But their love for data can almost override their appreciation for the feelings. And I'm trying to find some middle ground because at the moment, another thing which has become really, really popular is heart rate-based training. Now I know it's been around for a long, long time, yeah.

christie (17:50.968)
Yeah.

christie (18:01.598)
Yeah, long time, yeah.

tyson (18:04.419)
But I mean, if you have a look at the most optimized or the most viewed YouTube videos I'm running performance at the moment, you'll probably notice that so many of them are around zone two heart rate training or this easy conversational training. And I find it interesting because probably 80% of my training load and so many distance runners training load would naturally be at around that zone two level, which is just that easy run.

christie (18:15.09)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

christie (18:26.935)
Yeah.

tyson (18:29.091)
But so many people meant one particular, I had a doctor from Ireland on here the other day and he'll say, no, it's important that what you do is all backed by heart rate because what you say you're feeling and what you're actually feeling are two very different things. So trust the data, not yourself. And he made a strong case for it, but as you were speaking, I was like, ah, but it seems to lose a little bit of touch, I think, with what it is that you're speaking about. And so with all of that said,

christie (18:51.232)
Yeah.

tyson (18:56.403)
What role does the technology play in complementing perhaps this understanding of what your body's actually feeling, whether it's good, whether it's fatigued, or somewhere in between?

christie (19:05.678)
Sure. Yeah, and I think I want to emphasize that I'm not saying data is bad, and I would never tell people not to collect any of it and that they shouldn't look at it at all. I think it can be an important piece of the puzzle. I think the danger really comes when people are trusting that over their own feelings, or they're sort of outsourcing that. So instead of really getting in touch with how they're feeling, they're looking at the numbers. And the numbers are telling them how to feel, instead of your feeling and then sort of seeing what the numbers are saying.

So it's sort of like, you know, when you wake up in the morning, do you feel rested? I feel rested. And then you can look at your thing and say, okay, how many hours did I sleep versus getting up and saying, okay, how many hours does my Fitbit say that I slept and therefore how am I going to feel? And there's an interesting study that I have in the book where they actually gave people bogus feedback about how much they'd slept and it totally affects them. So if I tell you that you didn't get enough sleep, you're going to feel tired and you're going to, you know, and you'll sort of...

project that, whereas if I tell you, oh, you slept great, even though you didn't, you know, necessarily, you know, that will carry through too. So I think there is, you know, the effect of sort of how you're interpreting what actually happens. That's really important too. And I think where data can come in and where it can be useful is when you're really using it as a way of sort of observing and coming to understand your body rather than letting it drive you. And so...

You know, if you can't stop a run at 9.9 miles because you have to think, oh, I'm so close, you know, or kilometers, whatever units you're using, you know, that sort of compulsion can be really negative, I think. And I think it's really important, and we're really living in an era now where everyone's comparing themselves all the time. You know, I think that can be, on the one hand, it can be fun. You can compare yourself to your favorite athlete, you know, which may or may not make you feel great, but.

tyson (20:36.092)
Yeah.

tyson (20:58.683)
Hehehehe

christie (20:59.362)
But it's fun to be able to do that. At the same time, I think people need to realize that people, when they're sharing these things, they're really putting their best foot forward to and their best selves. And I think it can really get people, I have seen this, where people really get sucked in by the numbers and it becomes a compulsion. And that can be really unhealthy. And the other thing to keep in mind is that if you're training for performance, you need to really be tuned into your body because everyone responds differently to training.

And even you yourself may respond differently to the same training over time, not just over the course of the season, but over the course of your career. So that you're not always gonna get the same benefits or the same effect from the same training. It's gonna depend on what kind of base you have, where you are in your cycle, all sorts of things like that. And that's why it's so important to really pay attention to how you're feeling and how you're responding. Like how is your performance also compared to how you're feeling? So it may be that on race,

race day, you feel a little bit nervous and maybe as you're warming up, you feel not so great, but then once you get into the race, you're feeling great. And so that's the important thing. And so then you need to say, okay, I have observed that sometimes before a race, if I'm feeling a little unsure of myself, I shouldn't take that as a sign that I'm going to have a bad day. And so you can take that in. But if you are the kind of person who looks at your watch and it says, oh, you're really tired today and it's race day, then all of a sudden you sort of primed yourself to have a lousy race day.

tyson (22:15.922)
Sure.

christie (22:26.314)
lousy race. And so you need to not do that. And I think the other thing to really, it's very important for people to keep in mind is that these consumer data devices, they're very variable in how accurate they are. And one thing that I would caution people is you should absolutely never trust a risk-based heart rate monitor. They just don't work that well. They're not that accurate. You're not going to get good data. And so if you are...

outsourcing your decisions about training and things to a device that's giving you sort of bogus or inconsistent or inaccurate numbers, that not only are those numbers not helpful, but you're sort of being led astray because they're not as good as you think they are. And this is also true for a lot of the sleep trackers as well, particularly any sort of consumer device that's like a risk-based thing is not going to be able to give you good, reliable data on things like REM sleep or...

what kind of sleep cycles you've had. And so I would not even pay attention to that. And this comes from, this isn't just me saying this, this is numerous researcher interviews that I've done and studies where they've compared these things and looked at them. To really get good sleep data, you have to be wearing much more sophisticated equipment like they have in a sleep lab.

tyson (23:44.039)
Yeah, that's such an interesting point. I mean, there's so many directions we could take it, but just to emphasize one thing you said, the other thing that makes me a little apprehensive about some technologies, I recently saw a notification from the brand Polar, and as you sign up to their product, you have to click some agreements to let you know that there's a good chance that with the data that you share with them, that they can use that to share with other companies for marketing reasons. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. Like I'm starting to

christie (23:58.987)
Uh-huh.

christie (24:11.257)
Oh, yeah.

tyson (24:13.873)
about just things like internet history and search history and being more cautious around who I'm allowing to see there. So the idea of just opening up like everything to do with my personal and physical health seems like a questionable move. But I wanted to go back to something that you were speaking about in reference to telling people that they had a better sleep than what they believed they did because placebo is obviously a huge factor when it comes to not just how you feel, but how you perform.

christie (24:17.824)
Yeah.

christie (24:25.357)
Right?

christie (24:29.205)
Absolutely.

christie (24:39.008)
Oh yeah.

tyson (24:42.195)
And one thing I really noticed with a lot of top athletes is you can put two people in a same situation, like perhaps a top performing athlete and perhaps a community athlete or one who hasn't quite got to that level. And a top level athlete like a Jakub Ingebrigtsen has this incredible ability even after a loss that he was expected to win, to quickly reprogram what it was or to reframe the situation in a way that leaves him still motivated to come back and not brokenhearted.

christie (25:03.894)
Yeah.

christie (25:09.858)
Yeah.

tyson (25:09.975)
And you look at that and you think, oh, in this situation, you're supposed to be devastated, but he does something that a lot of average performers wouldn't do and he sees it from the perspective of, no, this is an important part in my progress. So that placebo factor, no, that's not so much placebo, but I mean that mindset is the same as what we're speaking about, I guess, when we say placebo, it leaves us in a far more positive state.

christie (25:21.398)
Yeah.

tyson (25:32.107)
And I know with a couple of things we've touched on early around marketing and advertising and certain products that we use, whether it's Nike or supplements or insert any other thing that we're being paid to promote, placebo is a really huge factor. I'm sure there's so many different brands and what would you say, supplements and yeah, as I said, insert so many other things that would fit under this umbrella. But can you speak to this idea of placebo effect when it actually comes to recovery a little more?

christie (25:41.165)
Yeah.

christie (26:01.106)
Oh sure, I mean that's why I have an entire chapter as you know in the book about placebos. You know and I actually prefer to call it the expectation effect because what's really happening here is that your expectation of what an experience is going to feel like or what it's going to be like can actually shape what your actual experience is. So it's not, you know this idea that it's a fake response is not entirely correct, right? Like if I expect to feel better that may...

actually affect my interpretation of say the pain that I'm feeling. So for instance, if I arrive on the start line of a race feeling really prepared and feeling fit, I may still push and I'm pushing myself hard. I may feel that pain of you know pushing myself and all that but I may interpret it differently. It may feel differently to me than if I arrive thinking oh I'm under trained, I'm feeling really tired. Then at the first the first

sign of that sort of twinge of, oh, I'm pushing myself, that sort of hurts, that will be interpreted differently. It will be like, oh, I'm in over my head, or this is too fast. So that expectation can really affect not just how it's interpreted by your brain, those pain signals and whatnot, whether they feel like pain or they feel like something else, but just this expectation of what you think it will be can actually

alter the actual experience because our experience and our feeling is not just, I mean, you can think of your brain as this like very sophisticated algorithm that takes all of these physiological inputs and turns them into things like your mood and how you're feeling and the actual sort of feelings that you have in your muscles or the feeling of your breathing and whatnot. And so, you know, it's not just...

you can say that, oh, it's just a placebo effect, but that placebo effect is really your body interpreting those signals and deciding what to make of them. And I think this is one reason. It's so fascinating. I outline this in the book. But there's all this research. There are so many little things that people use, say a supplement or certain massage tools and things like this. And each of these might provide a tiny little benefit. And the benefits are usually quite small, but they're not additive. So

christie (28:17.438)
It's not like, okay, so if each one gives you a 2% advantage, if you take three of them, you don't get 6%, right? It's all sort of pulling from that same draw. And that really suggests that there may be something else going on. And in regards to supplements, I do have a chapter in the book about that, sort of outlining it, but there's really absolutely no reason for athletes to be taking supplements. A lot of these things are byproducts of...

tyson (28:20.494)
Mm.

christie (28:44.094)
You know, there's all of this stuff about amino acids and certain milk proteins and things like this. You know, the dairy industry had a problem. They had all these byproducts they needed to figure out something to do with. So, they started marketing them, you know, to bodybuilders and things. And it was very brilliant marketing. But there, again, there's just no advantage over regular food. The exception to that may be for menstruating women, women of menstruating age. They are.

can be prone to iron deficiency, but it's very important, actually, that you don't just assume that that's the case and start taking supplements. You really do need to go get tested to make sure because there is a subset of the population that actually has the opposite, where they're sort of genetically prone to keeping too much iron in their bodies. And so the symptoms can be somewhat similar. I actually know of an elite runner who had this happen, and she was taking supplements.

getting worse. It wasn't until she finally did the testing and realized, oh, wait, wait. So I think, and that's one thing too, I think it's really important to not just do this stuff willy-nilly. You should always have a reason for doing something.

tyson (29:53.648)
Yeah, for sure. This is a really interesting topic to me and I'm not sure if you're familiar with Olaf Alexander, triathlete coach to two of Norway's most elite triathletes, but he brings on that boundary of elite coach and almost philosopher. You hear him speak about the way that he gets his athletes to train and it's beautiful because it's one of the...

christie (30:12.917)
Uh.

tyson (30:17.867)
He's one of those people that you'll hear his advice to an athlete and you go, oh, that applies beautifully to every aspect of my life. But I heard him speaking on Rich Roll's podcast quite recently and one thing that he spoke about is exactly what you were saying. He doesn't get his athletes to use supplements. And this runs in the face of so much of what is popular at the moment, probably because of a lot of what we've spoken about, the advertising, the power of marketing and things like that. But on a practical level, it makes a lot of sense. I mean,

christie (30:23.123)
Uh huh, yeah, that's great.

christie (30:33.505)
Yeah.

tyson (30:46.623)
in the scheme of things, supplements have only been around for a little bit of time and not to say that disregards anything that's just been bought to sale over the recent years. But the idea of not looking at our diet, which I would say the general population doesn't really do, the idea of really boiling down, how can I get more out of the food that I'm eating is overlooked with the question of, okay, what am I lacking in my diet and how can a supplement fix it?

christie (31:13.803)
Yeah.

tyson (31:14.275)
But he spoke about this idea of just tapping into Whole Foods. Like that is one thing that is hotly debated, like anything with a lot of money behind it. There seems to be some real strong debates. It's like the carnivore vegan debate. There's strong arguments here.

christie (31:18.007)
Yeah.

christie (31:22.979)
Yeah.

christie (31:26.714)
Well, I mean, again, this is all marketing. In the book I outline, I mean, I describe, there were these supplement makers that were bad because they were being laughed off the stage at these sports medicine conferences. So they went and formed their own society. And basically, you know, so much of the stuff, it may sound like science, but it isn't. And it's really marketing disguised as science. And so, so many of these things that seem to have science behind them.

tyson (31:40.187)
Hehehe

christie (31:56.158)
So much of those studies are very small. I mean, it's pretty easy to do a bunch of small studies and keep doing them until you find something, you publish that one. So many of these studies have maybe 12 people. They're just not very reliable. And so it's garbage in, garbage out. If these things make a difference, they're gonna be very small, but the thing you have to keep in mind, I mean, I have in the book stories of multiple very elite athletes.

who have ended up missing competitions because they tested positive, because they inadvertently ingested some banned substance through a supplement. And people think, oh, I'll just take the good brands, but all of this stuff comes from the same sources, and a lot of it is not great. A lot of this stuff comes from China, they come from unknown sources. And so even if you think your brand is reliable, I mean, there's a story.

tyson (32:31.576)
Mm.

christie (32:49.258)
in my book about an athlete who tested positive from a supplement that was from her sponsor. It's just, there's just no, I mean, it's heartbreaking. There is a triathlete who tested positive from an electrolyte tablet that she took, which she never needed in the first place. I mean, it's just heartbreaking. But this again goes back to this idea, so much of what the popular notions about sport and what you need to do.

tyson (32:54.711)
Yeah. Ha ha ha.

christie (33:18.602)
come from these companies. They're not coming from true science. And you just have to be really careful. And I think one of the things I really wanted my book to accomplish is that I wanted people to read it, to end not just knowing about this particular supplement or this particular recovery technique, but to really walk away with an understanding of, how do I assess these scientific claims that are being made about products? How do I distinguish the crap from the real deal? And there are a lot of ways to do that.

But it's just so universal, this marketing that's so widespread.

tyson (33:54.139)
Yeah, with that point, I know you dedicate a lot of the time to speaking about some of the myths and we've touched on a couple of them, but just for the bit of time that we have here for athletes out there, I would love to hear some more thoughts from you personally on what you've noticed around the myths as you've delved deep into this subject because you don't have to scratch too far to realise that there's a lot. What absolutely does your head in when you see the, when you look at a number of the myths around the road to recovery and performance?

christie (34:09.386)
Yeah.

christie (34:22.222)
Yeah. Well, I think the supplements are one. I mean, there's like, I've just said that enough. Another one that's really interesting, and this was a little bit surprising to me, but there's so much around icing and ice baths and cold baths and even cryotherapy, which I tried for the book. But here it's very interesting because not only is the icing not, doesn't seem to be helpful, it may in fact be detrimental in a lot of cases. And so basically what's happening is you're shunting blood away from your muscles.

But how are you going to recover and how are you going to clear out the waste products and all that? You want circulation and so you're basically shutting that down and it's temporary. Inflammation is actually how healing happens and that's how you get fitter, faster, stronger is those changes your body, your muscles, healing, those little micro tears that they get, making all of these changes. And so when you do things to shut down inflammation, you're also...

potentially shutting down your response to exercise. And there's some really interesting data suggesting that ice baths may actually slow. And these effects are small. They're not gigantic. But they may be slightly detrimental to recovery, just in the fact that they slow it down. They don't stop it entirely. And so there's something really interesting about placebos. And that is ones that are unpleasant are much more effective than ones that are inert or pleasant. And so I think.

Yeah, I think one of the reasons people are so drawn to icing is that it really feels like it's doing something, you know, it's unpleasant, it kind of hurts. And so people think, well, I'm really doing something good for myself.

tyson (35:58.687)
Yeah, that's so interesting, because I'm such a culprit for this one as well. I always use the example of running my 800 meter PB the day after being on my feet for like 10 hours at an Italian restaurant, and I came home and I had an ice bath, and in my mind I was like, I'm ready to go, I'm good to do it. But does the impact of something like ice bath, depending on the sport that you're training for, I know this is a question you've had a lot, but it's a really interesting subject, depending on the actual sport that you're taking part in, like maybe if it's a high impact sport where you've copped a knock.

christie (36:02.207)
Yeah.

christie (36:10.434)
Uh huh.

christie (36:14.3)
Uh huh.

tyson (36:28.683)
in comparison to a long distance sport where you've just got a buildup of lactic acid or of inflammation or whatever else it might be. To use the ice bath as an example, is that good for some and not for others? Or from what you've seen or what you've noticed, it's pretty universal that it's a little questionable.

christie (36:46.334)
Yeah, the thing that it's good for, it has a numbing effect. So if you're having a lot of pain or something, that can be helpful. I think you just mentioned something that I think explains a lot of it, and that there's a psychological effect. Yeah, you feel like you did something. It can really give you a psychological boost. And I think that's actually where, if it has benefits, that's where it comes from with icing. But I'm glad that you mentioned lactic acid, because this is kind of a red flag when you're looking at marketing claims, because...

There used to be this idea that lactic acid is what made you sore and you need to flush it out. And there's all these products that are marketed to flush out lactic acid. Well, it turns out that first of all, lactic acid is not what makes you feel sore. It is a byproduct when you're exercising intensely. So that's correct. But your body actually clears it pretty quickly on its own. So for the most part, probably by the time you get around to using one of these products,

your lactic acid is already gone. And so, you know, it's too late anyway. But it's also not the thing that is limiting your recovery. So I think, you know, if you're looking at something and they're saying, oh yeah, this is gonna, you know, clear your lactic acid, you can just say, okay, good. I know I don't need that thing. You know, that's bogus. Yeah.

tyson (37:57.827)
Yeah, sure. And we see some, one thing that I've seen a lot, both in person and on social media recently, is the huge uptake in distance runners, mostly sponsored, I will say, who are using these compression pants, these compression, not tights, but the big blow up pants. I actually don't know their official name, but I hope you know what I'm referring to. Squirt perfect, I feel like that's a perfect name for it. I'm sure everyone that paints a picture for us.

christie (38:09.382)
Yeah.

christie (38:14.586)
Oh yeah. I call them squeezy pants. Yeah.

tyson (38:24.068)
Something like that, like have you delved too far into the conversation around the effectiveness of just that compression on muscle recovery?

christie (38:31.166)
Yeah, so here's my take on this. I've tried the squeezy pants. They feel great. I like them. If someone gave me a pair, I would use them. I think they're really pleasant. There's pretty much no scientific evidence that it's doing something beyond, you know, that there's some magic happening. These devices were actually devised, they were created for people with things like diabetes that have circulatory problems.

Athletes do not have circulatory problems, so it's not really going to be increasing. The one thing that it does from a physiological perspective is it can increase your blood flow, but that's not a problem that you had to begin with, so there's limited gains to be had there. But I think what makes them effective is that you're putting your legs up for 30 minutes and you're relaxing. You're taking time to do that. I have a story in the book about a coach who had a young precocious athlete at the Olympic

tyson (39:14.423)
Sure, yeah.

christie (39:24.082)
You have to do this twice a day at this time. And he wasn't doing this because he thought it was gonna do something magic to his muscles. He was doing this so that he wasn't off chasing girls and running around and doing other things. Sometimes I think when these things are beneficial, they're beneficial for different reasons. Massage is very beneficial because it's a chance for you.

tyson (39:35.034)
Hi.

christie (39:47.158)
to really relax. You're taking time out. You're not looking at your phone. Your mind isn't elsewhere. But you're also really tuned into your body. And you're paying attention to your body. You're checking in. How does that muscle feel? Oh, that muscle's really sore. And there's a lot of physiological explanations that are given for massage. Most of them don't hold up. And yet I do think that massage is beneficial for athletes. It's just not for the scientific explanations that are given. It's...

useful because you're taking time to relax, you're giving yourself some downtime, and you're taking some time to really tune into your body. And again, this comes back to my bigger point of learning how to read your body, being able to understand how you're truly feeling.

tyson (40:30.295)
Yeah, there's something else. I had a chat to my massage therapist, or a guy that I see fairly regularly around the corner from where I live. And I said, mate, part of what I love about getting a massage is even though I'm paying you, I feel as though you really care about what it is that I'm going through when we have these catch-ups. And he goes, yeah, there's definitely something to be said. There's that nurturing aspect to it as well, where when you have someone who shows an interest not only in your recovery, your performance, but your welfare, you leave there. And I'm like, okay, physically that felt as though it was good.

christie (40:36.564)
Uh huh.

christie (40:43.895)
Yeah.

Yeah.

christie (40:54.733)
Yeah.

tyson (40:59.407)
but emotionally I'm like, oh, I feel as though I've just got someone else in my corner who cares about performance. Look, I know that there's a lot of information. I'll make sure that I've got the book linked in the show description for everyone who's interested in getting their hands on it. But if you had to boil everything down to a little bite size takeaway piece for someone to take when they're looking at their approach to recovery, is it...

christie (41:03.539)
Yeah, right, for sure.

tyson (41:25.579)
Is there a sort of paragraph or a couple of sentences that you could give just to use as a foundation for everyone who's interested?

christie (41:27.938)
Sure.

christie (41:31.646)
Yeah, I would say master the basics, which are sleep, number one, training, of course, nutrition. I think managing stress is super important. And so that's gonna look different for every person and depending on what's going on in your life, but that's really important. But there's no, most of these shiny new things that are being marketed to you on Instagram or whatever the latest social media thing is, most of those are not gonna be the things that makes the difference. So I hereby give you permission to quit worrying about that stuff.

You know, and I think, you know, stop worrying about that stuff and the things that at their very best will give you these tiny little gains and focus on the things we know really work because that's where you're really going to see a benefit. And, you know, I think the other thing to emphasize here is that these things that are supposed to help with recovery can actually be detrimental when they become a new source of stress and it becomes like, okay, now I'm done with my workout, but I'm not done because there's 10 other things I have to do.

And all of a sudden now it's taking more time out of my life. It becomes its own source of stress. And that sort of worry and anxiety about it can be detrimental in and of itself. So I think just sort of letting go of this idea that there's some magic thing out there that you have to get, you have to do, and that's gonna make all the difference. The thing that's gonna make the difference is sleep. The thing that's gonna make the difference is, good training plan, eating well, taking time at it, make sure that every day you have a little time.

that's just for you, where you don't have this expectation of being productive, that there's nothing like, you need to have time where you're truly relaxing. That will look different for different people. I don't know what that is for you, but there's something. Find that thing and make sure that you really emphasize it. You need to prioritize that downtime and your sleep. Yeah.

tyson (43:16.803)
Well said, well said. Kristy, thank you so much for making the time to come on. I'm a huge fan of your work. I'm a huge fan of your book. It was a very enjoyable conversation. So as I said, the book is in the show notes below. But for now, hey, I'll let you get back on with your day. Thanks for stopping by.

christie (43:23.208)
Oh, thanks.

christie (43:32.442)
Awesome, thank you so much for having me. Alright.

tyson (43:34.863)
Awesome. I'll cut that off there. Christy. That was that was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for that I really appreciate you making the time to come on

christie (43:40.936)
Oh, you're welcome.