Christie Aschwanden is an american journalist, science writer and author of Good to Go: How to eat, sleep & rest like a champion. Christie's work has had a huge influence on the momentum of this recovery month theme and today, we focus on Nutrition for optimal recovery. After chatting about the book we then draw our attention towards hydration to the recreational runner. How important is hydration and how do we know if we are having too little or too much fluid? We then dive into common nutrition mistakes runners often make, whether it is for recovery, race day preparation or weekly routine. We then cover a tonne of listener questions, including the relevance of the 30-minute post exercise nutrition window, how effective beer is post run, and should we follow the science claims on recovery supplements. You can find Christie's website here and also her twitter instagram and podcast If you would like to learn more about the Proximal Hamstring 4-week program please click on the link here You can find Shona's twitter account here Click here to find the Run Smarter App on IOS or Android You can also support the podcast for $5AUD per month and interact with the podcast on a deeper level by visiting our patreon page You can also click here for our smarter runner facebook group
Expand your running knowledge, identify running misconceptions and become a faster, healthier, SMARTER runner. Let Brodie Sharpe become your new running guide as he teaches you powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist while also interviewing the best running gurus in the world. This is ideal for injured runners & runners looking for injury prevention and elevated performance. So, take full advantage by starting at season 1 where Brodie teaches you THE TOP PRINCIPLES TO OVERCOME ANY RUNNING INJURY and let’s begin your run smarter journey.
:
today's episode, Understanding Nutrition for Optimal Recovery with Christy Ashwandan. Welcome to the Run Smarter podcast, the podcast helping you overcome your current and future running injuries by educating and transforming you into a healthier, stronger, smarter runner. If you're like me, running is life, but more often than not, injuries disrupt this lifestyle. And once you are injured, you're looking for answers and met with bad advice and conflicting messages circulating the running community. The world shouldn't be like this. You deserve to run injury free and have access to the right information. That's why I've made it my mission to bring clarity and control to every runner. My name is Brody Sharp. I am a physiotherapist of former chronic injury sufferer and your podcast host. I am excited that you have found this podcast and by default become the Run Smarter Scholar. So let's work together to overcome your injury, restore your confidence and start spreading the right information back into your running community. So let's begin today's lesson. This is a big one-two punch coming off the back of Shona Halston. Kristy Ashwandon is a gem. She is the author of the book, Good to Go, and subtitle, How to Eat, Sleep and Rest Like a Champion. She is an American journalist and former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight. She is awesome. She's a great person to interview. This book is... or generates a lot of content and a lot of purpose around this whole entire recovery month. And I was super stoked that she agreed to come on for an interview. And today we just cover so much. We cover hydration, nutrition, we answer a lot of your questions, and I learned a lot, a lot of new things, especially when it comes to hydration. And hopefully you learn a lot as well. Before we get started. like I mentioned last time, there is the Run Smarter app. Hopefully you have now discovered it. Hopefully you have now perused through, browse through the different blogs and different podcast episodes, and you're finding things quite nicely. And there's a few other little bits and bobs in the more section. So you can sign up for my five-day challenge. You can register for the eBooks. You can find me on online for online physio. That's just all in the more section in the little tabs there. So plenty of stuff and if you are injured out most people reach out to me via social media but a lot of people I like to think that if they have this run smarter app they can just have the contact Brody as a bit of a standby physio button if ever needed. I hope you are excited for this interview with Christie Ashwandon. And yeah, let's bring her on now. I guess we'll get started then. Christie, welcome to the Run Smarter podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I wanted to start with just telling you about how much of an impact this book has had on the entire recovery theme that I'm doing for the month of December. So first of all, I love the analogy that you have in the book around. building your house, like your body is the house and rebuilding is like your recovery. And I've already used that analogy in episode one. So I've already stolen that. Thank you very much. As we were, as I was reading through some of the chapters, I noticed that you've interviewed Shona Halston as well, who was a past guest that I've already had on the podcast. And I'm like, cool, interesting. And then I went on to. heart rate variability and I've already had Simon on the podcast as well. So already your credibility of the book has gone through the roof. And then I saw that, um, you had an, uh, chapter on over training syndrome. And I didn't even consider having that as a topic on my recovery month, but then I've changed it. And I've contacted Carl Foster to see if he can jump on the podcast and I'm interviewing him in a couple of days. And I've already got like a whole bunch of quotes already from your book that I've used throughout the month. And it's just had a tremendous impact. We've seen to be very in sync with the, it seems like you interviewed a lot of Australians for this one as well. Cause I did notice a couple of people coming up. I did. You know, it's interesting. I think there's just been so much good research coming out of Australia. And I think, you know, there was kind of this heyday golden moment for the Australian Institute of Sport. And I know things have changed a little bit. Maybe there's not as much funding there. as there was, but there was just an incredible amount of very fine work coming out of there. So I did end up speaking to a lot of Australians, which was a lot of fun. I wish I could have gotten down there, but I didn't. Uh, one thing I'm very proud of is like the, the developments in, in physiotherapy in particular around like pain and tendinopathy is like some of the world leaders, uh, here in Melbourne or around Australia. So yeah, I'm very grateful for that. But yeah, your book has had a tremendous impact on this recovery. month theme that I'm doing. So I want to thank you for the book. I'll discuss a little bit more of the book in a second, but can we start off with what inspired you to create the book? Sure. It really came out of my own personal experience. I'd say I was an athlete of several different sports. I started off as a runner in high school and college. Then I became injured and became a cyclist like so many former runners do. I have returned to running though. I should let you know. But anyway, I was a cyclist at my college and then I did that pretty seriously right after college. I also started a Nordic ski racing and that was something that I did at pretty high level living and racing in Europe for a while. So that was probably the sport I pursued at the most elite level. I was on a professional team and all of that. But looking back at my athletic career and all of those sports, the kind of common theme that I see is that I was sort of perpetually overtrained. And I also just never managed to get recovery right. And so it turns out, and this was something that I just sort of figured out and learned pretty late in my career, unfortunately. I just happened to be the kind of athlete who gets fit very fast and over-trained very fast. And so I actually require a lot less training than many athletes to get to that fitness point. And so if I'm looking around and comparing myself to what everyone else is doing, I think I'm not doing enough when in fact, I'm doing what my competitor is doing, that's a recipe for disaster for me. happened again and again, because not only was I seeing my teammates and other people training a lot more than I really needed to, but also, you know, I think when you're an athlete, you love doing your sport and you wanna do more. It wasn't just I was training for the purpose of training, but because that is what it is to be an athlete, right? And if you don't love the training, you probably shouldn't be doing it. So that was sort of the genesis of the book. It was like, there's a saying among writers that you should write what you know. Well, what I did is I wrote the book that I wished that I had had, you know, I wish that my high school coach or my college coach had given me this book. And I think I could have prevented some heartache along the way. Yeah. Well, at least, you know, you're, you're helping a lot of people that were in the same situation you were throughout the book as well. Uh, I did have, I'll just say it's something that doesn't go away. And I think that it's something that, you know, in particular, in some ways, I think that as you get older and more experienced recovery becomes even more important and there's a part in the book where I interviewed some researchers who actually went in and did in-depth interviews with professional athletes who are sort of toward the end of their careers or getting ready or having recently retired and almost all of them said, wow, I wish I had just taken recovery more seriously. It took me too long to figure that out. And so it really is something that, you know, affects all athletes at all career stages. Yeah. And I think people like injured athletes as well, they discover something about recovery. And something about injury prevention or something about like overcoming an injury that they're like, man, if I knew this years and years ago, I think, um, hindsight's a fabulous thing. It was when I was talking to Shona, she has this recovery pyramid that she talks about and the very base of that pyramid, which is the most, uh, I guess important when it comes to recovery would be sleep and downtime. And then she has this second tier up. as we work our way up the pyramid, which is nutrition and hydration. And I've already covered throughout the, this month, the importance of sleep and the importance of downtime, the power that can have for recovery, but I wanted to pick your brain a little bit regarding the nutrition side of things and the hydration side of things, because it's something I haven't necessarily covered yet. So I think as a starting question, I know a lot of people have the thought of nutrition as fuel. for performance, like the nutrition side is what drives the, like drives your physical limits as fuel, but where does nutrition, how important is nutrition, hydration for the recovery component? Yeah. I mean, I think it's such an interesting thing because we, we all know quite intuitively, right, that fuel is fundamental. It's really important. It's how our bodies work. We have to have it in order to do the exercise, to do the work. But we also have sort of given it almost like, it's interesting, it's almost become something that's more important than it is. And I wanna be really clear what I'm saying here. I'm not saying that nutrition isn't important, it absolutely is, but we've kind of become convinced and some of this is due to marketing, that there's some special food or some absolute optimal state that we can get to with our nutrition that will just sort of change everything and make life perfect. And I think if there's one thing that I really learned writing this book, it's that our bodies are really, really adaptable machines and they can really do amazing things even under like non-ideal conditions. And so, yes, absolutely, particularly if you're a serious athlete, you wanna do everything you can to make those environmental conditions as optimal as possible. But really when you're doing all this work to optimize those little things, the gains that you get at that point are very small. And many times of this sort of stress and strain and the risks of... the things that you have to do to optimize those things, sort of erase whatever benefits that you get. And so I think the classic example of this is, people who aren't sleeping, or maybe they're even skimping on sleep because they're taking extra time to do these like, weird recovery tools or rollers or whatever it is. And then, they're missing out on these great benefits that they could get from the sleep because they're pursuing this thing that's far less important. And so... Nutrition is absolutely important, both for performance and also for recovery. But the sort of takeaway here is that we've made it far more complex than it needs to be. You know, I write in the book about there's this whole idea of the recovery window. I don't know if you've talked about that on the podcast, but it was something that I was taught, particularly in the 90s when I was a cyclist. This was really big at that time. It was this idea that right after a workout, there was this small window of time when your body was craving. that nutrition and if you didn't get those calories and in particular carbohydrates and protein in during this little span of time, your recovery would not be optimal and you would not be as recovered. Yeah, your muscle glycogen would not be as restored, replenished as quickly. And it was just really important and crucial to hit this window. Well, it turns out that this so-called window was really kind of a relic of how those early studies were done. So it's not that nutrition isn't important. But the idea that it needs to be done on this particular time scale, or that if you don't get it within 30 minutes, somehow you're losing some of the benefit, turns out to just really be incorrect. I mean, it's correct only in the sense of, if you're about to perform again in short order, then of course you need to get that nutrition, you need to replenish your stores before that next bout of exercise. But if you're not doing a workout, another workout, or even an event till the next day, you really can even wait till the next. meal. And so, but what ended up happening is this recovery window concept sort of got beat into everyone's head. And then you had all this marketing and all these products that sprung up to sort of meet this phantom need that didn't really exist. But what ends up happening is people became really stressed out about being able to hit this recovery window. And there are many times in real life where you're doing a workout and then you have to go back to work or there's some travel involved or something. you don't have access to good nutrition or a real meal or whatever. And so it's not that those products and bars and shakes and things like that are terrible. And I think they can have their place, but so much of what drove this stuff is this idea that you have to have that nutrition like immediately. And if all of a sudden you don't have to have the nutrition immediately and you recognize, oh, I may be a little bit hungry for a little bit, but I could wait 30 minutes, 45 minutes. I can get home and make like the meal that I actually want to eat. Yeah, if you're an athlete, you may be watching your calories a little bit too. And so you could get into the situation where people are taking in more calories than they need and maybe calories that aren't as nutritious as they might otherwise be eating in a real meal because they're trying to meet this phantom recovery window. And so I think the real takeaway here is that you should listen to your body and if you finish a workout and you're hungry and very often that's the case, then absolutely eat. And I think one thing we've really gotten away from in our society is this ability to read our bodies. I mean, the reason you get hungry is that's your body's way of telling you need food. And if you have a hankering for a salty snack, that probably means you need some electrolytes. You don't need to drink them in a sports drink, but it's probably fine to eat some salty pretzels or some other thing with that sort of nutrition in it. But it's really, it's okay to listen to your body and eat regular food. And you don't have to have something that's really special. And You probably remember in the book, I talk about the study where they actually, it was quite clever, actually, they put people through some hard workouts in the lab, and then they followed them up with either these sports nutrition products, energy bars and shakes and things like that, or another group got McDonald's foods, so fast food with sort of what they did is they matched the calories and sort of nutritional content. And so what ended up happening was they found no difference between the two. I think the real takeaway there is that it's not that particular product or that particular formulation, but it's the substances in the food itself, the carbohydrates, the protein, all of that. And the other thing that I'll say is that it's so easy for us to be talked into this idea that we're nutrient deficient somehow and we need to take vitamins and all this, that athletes in general eat a lot of calories and more calories than the normal person. And if you're eating a caloric diet or even a diet that's meeting your regular caloric you know, in 2020, it's going to be very, very difficult for you to be deficient in any of the nutrients that you need. I'm talking here about vitamins, minerals, amino acids, all of these things, because you're going to be getting that through your normal food. If you're eating, you know, a balanced and healthy diet, you want some variety in your diet, you want to be eating sort of the basic components in the building blocks. But this idea that there's one particular special nutrient or the whole notion of superfoods is really just a load of marketing. Um, and we should really turn away whenever someone's sort of feeding you that kind of information, it's kind of a red flag that they're really just selling something and it's not based on science. Right. And I think it's, it's reassuring to know as well that this whole topic of nutrition isn't as complex as it might seem if you do find a blog or find a website that has some really complicated mathematical equations to help optimize performance that can be, um, It can be really assuring to know that it can just be that simple. While we're on that topic is coming or like researching for this book or in your athletic experience, have you come across any people, any athletes that have, um, comment, make common mistakes or often like misguided when it comes to, um, recovery and when it comes to nutrition that we haven't already discussed. Yeah. I mean, I think the major one is just, this is something that I see particularly serious athletes and particularly athletes who are traveling a lot. I'll just give an example for myself. I was a vegetarian for many, many years and I had sort of personal reasons for doing that. It wasn't so much, you know, I had like ethical reasons and environmental reasons and all of that. But what I found is it was extremely hard sometimes when I was traveling as an athlete to get good nutritious meals and restaurants, particularly in certain parts of the country or parts of the world that were vegetarian. And so it became my need to have the special diet became its own source of stress and it became very difficult. And so eventually I was also having trouble with iron deficiency and so I started eating meat again and felt much healthier. And this is not to say that I think you know it's necessary to eat meat, I want to be clear on that. But I adjusted my diet and sort of became more flexible with it and it actually had this effect of taking away the stressor that had been part of my life. And so I ended up eating just as healthy a diet, but it became much easier to do so. And instead of being stressed out about what I was eating all the time, I was able to eliminate the source of stress. And I'll just say that one of the most potent sort of steelers or downsides, the thing that will make your recovery less than optimal is stress. And so anything, absolutely anything you can do to reduce the stress in your life is going to enhance your recovery. And I think this is very often. overlooked, but I've also heard stories from other athletes of having particular foods that are really important to them, particularly these post exercise. If you really adhere to this idea of the post exercise recovery window, then that can be something that's really stressful. And if you're on the road or in an unfamiliar place, you may not have access to your normal stuff like that. And that can become stressful. So just being a little more flexible and realizing like, hey, I don't need to overthink this. And also not every meal has to be I mean, in the book, I talk about how Usain Bolt won a bunch of gold medals, eating nothing but chicken McNuggets in the Olympic Village, right? And yeah, no one's saying that that's great nutrition and he should eat that all the time. But here he was in a country that had unfamiliar foods to him, and this was something that felt comfortable. And he knew that, you know, he could digest it okay. And it had the calories and sort of the basic, you know, building block nutrients, carbohydrates, protein and all that. And so, you know, it worked out okay. He shouldn't eat that all of the time. You know, it's okay to not be perfect all the time. Your body really can handle it. And yeah, it's sort of like mastering the basics and not, um, agonizing over the stuff that matters so much less. When I think of, uh, if you were talking before about stress and managing stress, removing unnecessary stress, if you, if you like your chicken nuggets and you enjoy eating them, I guess that's a. taking your mind away from competition, taking your mind off like something that might be stressful. So that's a benefit in itself as well. Absolutely. How about hydration? Because I hear a couple of thoughts around this. If we want to try and take, have our intake optimized, a lot of people talk about weight. A lot of people talk about like drinking to thirst. A lot of people talk about focus on like your urine color. Is there any guidelines that we can follow to know that we're taking in the right hydration? Yeah, and the cool thing is it's actually super simple. So basically what has happened here is you have this whole industry of the sports drinks that has created this science around the idea and the notion that hydration is like this crucially important thing for athletes. And if you're even just a little bit off, your performance will suffer and everything will go to crap. You have to do that. And that is absolutely couldn't be further from the truth. This goes back to the concept I was saying earlier, our bodies are really adaptable and your kidneys actually have really great mechanisms for dealing with some fluid loss during exercise, handling that and coping with it. And this is not to say I'm not advising anyone to try and become dehydrated or to not hydrate when they need it, but really the easiest and best and most scientific way to hydrate is to drink to thirst. And so... what this means. And I'll just say, this isn't as simple as it seems. And particularly for people now who've been conditioned where they have to be drinking all the time. If you're drinking every hour, a lot of fluids, you may have lost sort of the feeling of what it means to be thirsty. It sounds strange, but it's actually the truth. And so I think one of the most important things that people can do is really try to pay attention to their body and to sort of learn to listen to their signals. And so, with hydration, you don't need to be wearing some kind of hydration monitor. You don't need to time it. You don't need to weigh yourself. And in fact, if you're doing an endurance event and you're weighing yourself and trying to drink enough to replenish the fluids that you've lost, you're going to end up over hydrated. And this is actually the thing, what's really ironic is, while writing the book, I tried very hard to find some examples of athletes who had died of dehydration during an athletic event because we're sort of told that it's that crucial, right? And you're gonna... die and whatever, but I couldn't find a single case. Usually when hydration is sort of brought up as some sort of cause, it's actually not hydration, it's heat stroke or some sort of heat illness. And it turns out that hydration may be a risk factor for those things, but it's not the cause and it's probably not even the most important risk factor. So what does this mean? It means that if you're going out and you're doing endurance exercise, you need to think about, okay, if I'm gonna be out for a while, it's a hot day, I'm gonna be sweating a lot. I know I'm going to be losing a lot of fluids. I'm probably going to be thirsty. So I want to be sure that I have those fluids available. And so I'm not saying like, don't worry about it. But what I'm saying is plan things out, make sure that you have access to those fluids, but then, you know, go by feel. If you're thirsty, you know, I think we've all had this experience, you know, you're For me, it's like out for a run on a really hot day and I run out of water, I get home, I'm really thirsty and I might drink two or three glasses of water and that water just tastes so good and I know that I want another glass. Like that's your body saying, yes, I need more. But it's really interesting. I didn't know this until I was researching the book, but there's actually a phenomena. I mean, our bodies are so well adapted to this that if you were sort of hydrated enough and don't need more fluids, that water won't taste nearly as good. So like... If you're sort of forcing yourself to drink more, that's a sign that you don't need it. And so I think people need to understand too, that it's actually very possible to become a little bit quote unquote dehydrated and still perform at high levels. Like our bodies are actually very well adapted to doing that. And what happens is you have this feedback mechanism that sort of is directed at your kidneys. And if you're losing a lot of fluids, your kidneys will hold onto water. So that's why if you're dehydrated, you're not peeing a lot, right? Because your body's saying, nope. we're gonna recycle this water we needed, it holds onto it. On the other hand, if you're drinking, drinking a lot and you have more than you need, then you're peeing all the time. And what ends up happening is, if you're constantly over hydrating, which so many people are doing now, because we're being told always to hydrate, your body sort of stops making these little things that go into your kidneys and retain that water. So you're actually less able to handle losing a few fluids if you've been always over hydrating. So it's actually better if you're training to not at all, I don't want anyone to become dehydrated, but you know, to sort of err on the side of like, I'm just gonna wait till I feel like taking a drink or I'm gonna wait till I know I've really gone an hour and a half and haven't drank. Like this is probably an appropriate time rather than just sort of forcing it down because that will help your body sort of maintain those adaptations so that you can perform really well. And in fact, yeah, there've been world records in the marathon done, you know. achieved by people who lost significant portions of their body weight. And so by that metric of saying, well, you need to weigh yourself, people would say, oh, you're dangerously dehydrated. We need to take you to the hospital. And in fact, the guy just set the world records. I think it's just something that's really been overhyped into a dangerous amount because I told you, I couldn't find anyone who had died of dehydration during a marathon or a sporting event. But what I did find were multiple people who've died of hyponatremia, which is basically over-hydration, also called water intoxication. What ends up happening is you just make your blood so dilute that some of these processes break down and you can get swelling in your brain and it's really terrible. And so, yeah, the real danger here is not under-hydrating, but over-hydrating. Yeah, and it seems like if you're used to drinking a lot of water, You might, and then you, like, we follow your suggestions and, um, start performing and drinking to thirst, you almost recalibrating those first signals because you might not be receiving those third signals if you're drinking so much water is the same thing for like that's on the performance side of things during performance before and after how about on say recovery days when we're not exercising and we should be taking in some levels of water, should we be following the third signals as well? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's even just as important on those rest days that you're not over hydrating. I mean, it's just the idea that by taking in more fluids, somehow things are going to be better. That's just nonsense. It's sort of like, no one's telling you, you gotta breathe extra hard today because you need more air. You need sufficient air, but getting more air isn't going to really help you. And if you're not quite getting enough, I live at altitude and so the air is a little thinner up here. but my body adapts and I'm able to exercise. And I think that that's kind of a good analogy. And so, you know, taking in more fluids or over hydrating on your rest days, there's really no benefit to be had from that. I mean, I think maybe this could stem from like the way long ago where no one thought about drinking at all or thought about fluids, but our emphasis on it now has just gone so far in the other direction. And you know, it's kind of like the last thing you need to really be worrying about. Yeah. I do have a couple of listener questions here. So Erin already asked the question around, uh, does eating in a 30 minute post-run window actually make a difference in recovery? I think we've already answered that so far, but I wanted to explore a little bit further when it came to like the protein and protein supplements. And you know, when you go to your health store and you see all these products that are out there and all the the claims on the bottles that when it comes to performance and building up muscle bulk and increasing performance, and it all seems to be quite, I guess it seems like it's evidence driven from like a marketing perspective. Can you shed some light on this particular topic? Sure, I would say that it's mostly marketing and what you'll see is if you look at the studies that are cited to support these things. They're almost all funded by the supplement industry, which has just become brilliant. I realize what they've realized is that science is the best marketing at all. And so if they do a crappy little study, and it's very easy to do a small study that shows the kind of thing you want to do, especially if you measure a bunch of different things and you just measure things until you find something that's different and you can say, oh, look here, here's this proof. But look, protein's important. And there has been sort of this idea of not just the recovery window, but the protein synthesis. So this idea of the anabolic window. So if you are a weightlifter or someone who's trying to put on muscle or worried about retaining your muscle, the idea was you really needed to replenish that protein right away after the workout. Same as what I was talking about earlier. But it turns out that again, this is not, it's not this tiny little window. Yes, you need to get that protein. It doesn't need to be in a tiny bit of window. And it's actually looking as though it's better to be getting that protein in smaller doses throughout the day, rather than like doing your workout and then getting this large bolus of protein. There's just no benefit to that. In fact, your body probably does better of just having smaller meals of protein throughout the day. So even having a protein snack before the workout is fine. And so really what this comes down to is marketing. There's a lot of people making a lot of money basically taking surplus. products from the milk industry and turning them into these products for athletes, jacking up the price. Some of this stuff really did stem from these companies having surplus and trying to figure out what they were going to do with them. And so they decided to try and sucker muscle heads into doing this stuff. And the other thing that I should say, so in the book, I have a whole chapter on supplements, which are truly problematic because they are not subject to the same oversight as pharmaceuticals are. And we have multiple examples of athletes testing positive for doping products that they ingested inadvertently in supplements and protein powders and protein shakes are no different. In fact, there were several cases that I cite in the book of athletes who ended up with positive tests that they were able to link back to a protein powder. So you really, you know, you don't really know what you're getting. And I just have to ask, you know, would you rather have this powder of sort of unknown Genesis, you know, you don't really know where it's coming from. Most of these products are being made overseas too and imported. And so now all the companies are mostly getting them sourced from the same places. It's just very hard to know what you're getting. So I think in no instance do these things, are these things, you know, superior to real food. And so ideally you want to have, you know, actual real food, something high in protein, whatever that might be. On the other hand, you know, there are some circumstances maybe you don't have access to food and you're hungry and you need to eat something. And so I don't want to just issue a blanket statement that no one should ever use these things. But I think that they're just tools and they're absolutely not essential. And I think people just need to really realize the extent to which they're being marketed to. And so many of the ideas around this stuff is really just fake science that's being used as a marketing tool. I think if I had a product that I wanted to be really successful, I'd make sure that like an athlete would have a little bit more than they probably need to. And they have like a really regimented scheduled time that they always have to have that product. And so if you try and build some science around that to make that possible, then you're on to a, you're on to a winner of successful products. So it's good to keep in mind, take with a grain and salt and maybe, um, know that they don't have to go through the rigorous like scientific realm, like the other pharmaceuticals need to. And yeah, just don't always just take the labels and the claims as true science. You did mention in your book as well that recovery window that people often talk about is more of like a barn door that takes hours to close and sometimes just takes long enough until your next meal. So that isn't something we particularly need to be worried about. Yeah, that's right. It really just, it's overhyped and like so many other things in this realm. It's just... something that's designed to sell products. Like you said, ideally your product has to be used a certain time, people need lots of it, it has to be on a daily basis, right? Like that's like the daily vitamin, right? There's absolutely no evidence to show that athletes need vitamins at all. And yet so many are convinced because it's, you know, it's also sort of ritualized. And the other thing I think people should be aware of is that, yeah, you may look at your favorite athlete on Instagram using these products. They're using these products because they're being paid. to use them and to promote them. And so it creates this vicious cycle where it seems like everyone's using this stuff and everyone's doing it. Well, yeah, they are because that's how they're making their livelihood. And so, you know, it's kind of a sad, sad thing about some of the sports that they have to do that, but it's, yeah, they really are paying to sort of get you to think that these things are essential. And yeah, I know that in some instances, the athletes aren't even really personally using this stuff. They may just be, you know, obligated by their sponsors to do this. Yeah. And the companies themselves will go out and find the best in the world to say, can you be a sponsor? And then people almost have the inverse relationship of they must be good because they have this product, but it's also the opposite way around. They've gone out to, um, produce this part because they're the best in the world. And say like a golfer has the best golf clubs. It's not because it's the golf clubs. It's because the golf club companies have gone to the best golfers in the world. Uh, I want to move on to the next question and Justin asks, what are the effects of alcohol and in brackets, beer, beer for recovery, uh, what's, is there a point where it becomes prohibitive to recovery instead of it's possibly neutral or beneficial properties? And when he asked this question, I didn't, I wasn't going to, I was trying to think of who to allocate this to. And I hadn't necessarily decided that. Christie is going to be on nutrition. And I'm thinking, who am I going to ask this question to? But then you actually have a chapter in your book that discusses beer and recovery. And I thought, oh, fantastic. It's almost like I made this up, but thanks, Justin, for asking this question. And it's right up your alley. So let's take it away. Yeah, I mean, that's the first chapter of my book is all about beer and running. And I had the same question because I'm a beer drinker. And I mean, who doesn't enjoy a nice cold beer after a hot run? But I really wondered, am I wrecking my recovery with this? And I did a study, and this is all in the book. I don't wanna go into too much detail because it's kind of complex. But basically the takeaway, so much of what I talk about with that study. So I did actually design and carry out a study to look at this. And what I found out is that, a lot of these small studies aren't reliable and it really made me more cautious about interpreting findings from some of these small exercise studies. But I did a lot of looking in the literature and interviewing other scientists. And basically the takeaway is this. I think that beer and running can go hand in hand together really nicely in some aspects. And I think that it can be something that's a reasonable recovery drink. The issue though is this, it should not be thought of like no one who was not drinking beer should start drinking beer because it's going to help with their recovery. And I wanna point out here that there are a lot of people who don't do well with alcohol and that's fine. And we should not push them into drinking beer. But where I think beer can be kind of a nice thing is that it's a nice sort of ritual for people. I have multiple groups that I've been a part of where we would all get together and have a beer after a run and it was sort of a social thing. And it's sort of a ritualized way of unwinding and sort of letting down your guard. And it's a signal in the same way that when you get up in the morning and make your cup of caffeine, whether it's tea or coffee or whatever, that sort of signaling to yourself that, okay, it's morning and getting up. and having this beverage is signaling to my body that it's time to wake up. And I think that post-exercise beer can sometimes be in the same way, a signal like, okay, it's time to wind down a little bit. We're going to relax now. The hard work is over. But where beer becomes problematic is it's one thing to have one beer after a hard run. And you probably wanna have some food too because it's pretty easy for that alcohol to go to your head if you haven't been eating anything in the interim. But so, you know, a little bit is fine. It's moderation. I won't say that it's necessarily performance enhancing, but the evidence is just not there to say that, you know, one beer or beer and a half, even after a hard bout of exercise is going to wreck your recovery or anything like that. There just hasn't, there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. There is evidence though, that, you know, knocking back six or seven, which to me sounds like, I mean, I feel like I would die if I drank that many beers in a row. But I did find there are quite a few studies on this issue that involved rugby players in Australia, New Zealand, and apparently these guys can really knock them back. So some of the studies they did looked at high consumption of alcohol, and that is, you know, I don't think that most of us need to study to know that that's not good for you. If nothing else, you're going to have a hangover the next day, and hangovers are not good for recovery. But I think that this goes back to my earlier maybe more powers to things than they have. So like the beer is not going to give you magical recovery powers that you didn't have before, but it's probably not going to completely wreck you either. And so if there are other reasons why having that beer helps your recovery, because it's, you know, a recovery ritual that you can engage in, it's part of a way of relaxing with your friends. And I think it can be helpful, but it's not helpful because there's something special in the beer, it's because of all the stuff that comes around it. Yeah, almost similar to our chicken nuggets. debate. That's right. Um, okay. Fantastic. What's, I want to finish up with some, uh, what are your final nutrition do's and don'ts to enhance recovery or have optimal recovery? Um, is there anything that you have to finish up on this topic? Yeah. I mean, I think my number one thing would be stop overthinking it. Like, you know, learn and again, this takes some work, but learn to pay attention to thirst and hunger. Like those are important signals. And, you know, maybe try sometimes to wait after your workout and see how it feels to be hungry for a little while. And what does that feel like? And what are you learning? And, you know, the most important skill that any athlete can develop is that ability to read their own body. And this goes to every aspect of recovery. and to training. You don't know what it feels like for you to be approaching over training. Know what it feels like for you to be lacking in sleep and tired because of that. Know what it feels like to be truly thirsty or to be truly hungry so that you can listen to those signals and understand them. When it comes to nutrition, I think real food is better than products and things like that. On the other hand, sometimes... you, all you have around is a bar or a shake and that's okay too. I don't, I don't think that we should be demonizing food or you know, the opposite of that is sort of taking particular foods to have superpowers because that is just sort of almost as erroneous to, to scribe those superpowers to particular foods. So I think one, like one major takeaway is just like increasing your body awareness to like listen to your body, but making sure you're becoming more in tune with what your body's actually asking, but also back to the recalibration, it's almost like you shouldn't be oversupplying your body with something that doesn't need because then you're those signals are a little bit blurry or a little bit mixed up and you can't really interpret them properly. So it's almost a combination of increasing your body awareness with that recalibration process. Would you agree with that? Yeah, that's right. That's right. Absolutely. Okay. Fantastic. Um, this has been great is if people, people are now well aware of the book, good to go, but are there any other social media platforms if people want to continue following your work where they should go? Yeah. So I'm on Twitter and Instagram as crag crest. That's C R E G C R E S T. It's named after my favorite trail run, which goes along a craggy crest. here in Colorado. I was wondering what that was. Yeah, I know people ask. Yeah, I think that's great. I also have a podcast, it's not about sport, it's called Emerging Form, but it's about creativity and the creative process. It's interesting though, how many parallels it has with athletic performance. Fantastic, yes. I was gonna see if you wanted to plug that podcast in as well, I do have that written down. If listeners have really enjoyed this, recovery theme, they're going to absolutely love this book. The book goes into a bit more detail, a bit more of a scientific, uh, like going into studies that were done and also like personal accounts or accounts from athletes, um, how they are implementing certain recovery methods. So, uh, if anyone does want the book, I will have like a link and all the other social media links to your, to your work and your content. You speak like a true scientist and I think having the combination of that, as well as your, your writing skills has produced a masterpiece when it comes to recovery. So I want to say thanks for coming on and sharing your knowledge. Thanks for all the content and the book. And, um, yeah, we've taken a lot away out of today. Thank you so much. It's been my pleasure. Really nice talking to you. Thanks for listening to another episode of the run smarter podcast. I hope you can see the impact this content has on your future running. If you appreciate the mission this podcast is creating, it would mean a lot to me if you submit a rating and review. If you want to continue expanding your knowledge, please subscribe to the podcast and get instant notifications when a new episode comes out. If you want to learn quicker, then join our Facebook group by searching the podcast title. If you want to take your learning to the next step, including injury prevention principles, injury specific insights and modules to boost your running performance, then head to our website by searching runsmarter.online and jump into our Run Smarter Online course. Once again, thank you for listening and becoming a Run Smarter Scholar and remember, knowledge is power.