Exercise, Exhaustion & The Hangover Effect: Can Working Out Make You Sick?

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:00 --> 00:01:28)
I'm Dustin Grinnell, and this is Curiously.

I've just finished a hard workout at Orange Theory. Almost an hour of treadmill running, rowing on an ergometer, and lifting weights. I feel that rush of accomplishment after completing a tough session of exercise. But I'm also slightly worried. I know that I pushed myself hard in class, and tomorrow I'll most likely wake up feeling extremely fatigued.

Not just sore or dehydrated, but hungover, almost sick. Because of this, my mood will suffer and I'll struggle to focus and work productively. Because for me, despite all of exercise's benefits, it comes at a cost: post-exercise exhaustion. Over the years, I've asked primary care doctors about this phenomenon. They suggested it might be poor hydration or electrolyte deficiency or even a flare-up of acid reflux.

They recommended drinking more water or working out in the morning so I don't go to bed wired. But their suggestions never led to effective solutions, and I've never fully I never understood the root cause of the issue. So I decided to go on a quest to find reasons why I might feel the way I do after exercising. In this episode, I talk with 3 exercise and fitness experts, Brad Roy, April Terry, and Kelly Mollman, who offer possible causes of my post-exercise fatigue and what can be done about them. What I discovered has helped me, and for exercise lovers out there, it may help you too.

Dustin Grinnell (00:01:32 --> 00:01:35) 
So Brad, April, Kelly, welcome to the podcast.

Brad Roy (00:01:35 --> 00:01:40)
Thank you. Thanks for inviting us to talk about this really important area.

Dustin Grinnell (00:01:41 --> 00:02:03)
Yeah. So before we sort of dive into the central question of recovery after high-intensity exercise, I was thinking it might be good to maybe just do like a brief introduction of you three. So if you could just kind of say where you're at and your titles and roles and responsibilities, and then maybe a little bit about your background or specialty if you'd to share.

Brad Roy (00:02:03 --> 00:03:08)
Great. Well, I'm Brad Roy. I'm the executive director of the Logan Health Fitness Facility. It's a 115,000-square-foot medically integrated fitness center here in Kalispell, Montana, with just under 9,000 members. And then we have two smaller facilities south of town as well. I'm also the current editor-in-chief for American College of Sports Medicine's Health and Fitness Journal. Been doing that for almost 9 years. I turned out last year. I'm just finishing up one more year at their request, and that's been a really opportunity to stay in the literature and to learn a lot from our other professionals. I've been a clinical exercise physiologist in that field for almost 40 years, a fellow in the American College of Sports Medicine, also with the Clinical Exercise Physiology Association, with the Medical Fitness Association, and then challenged by some healthcare executives here to become a certified healthcare executive with the American College of Healthcare Executives. So I've been here now for almost 29 years since the day our facility opened up.

April Terry (00:03:08 --> 00:03:50)
My name is April Terry. I've been working here at Kalispell, Montana for the last 20 years. Before that, I was in Utah with the Winter Olympics. I even worked with the Utah Stars and the Jazz. So I'm an athletic trainer and an exercise physiologist. I've worked in different avenues of pro athletics, high school, college. I'm very unique now where at the hospital setting I work with work comp injuries within our hospital for our employees, but also get to tap into working with our student athletes here in the valley with concussion management and injury prevention out on the field.

Kelly Mollman (00:03:51 --> 00:04:25)
So my name is Kelly Mollman. I'm the youth development manager here at Logan Health, which includes supervising the athletic trainers and the strength and conditioning specialists that work with our middle school through collegiate athletes, and I co-lead our Save the Brain Concussion Program, which we're in 5 of 6 schools here in the Valley, and as well as a professional baseball team that's here in the Valley. I'm a physical therapist by trade with about 30 years of experience, and I specialize in functional movement and corrective exercises, and I'm also certified in dry needling and spinal manipulation therapy.

Dustin Grinnell (00:04:25 --> 00:05:10)
Okay, well, thanks for that introduction, guys, and thanks for making some time to talk about this. So the framing of this episode is really around recovery after exercise, particularly high-intensity exercise programs like Orangetheory, which I try to do 3 or 4 times a week. But I think the larger question here is about recovery after exercise. How do we recover in a healthy way? But then also maybe addressing the causes of exhaustion. Of fatigue, especially after high-intensity exercise. So as we get into this topic, I'd like to just define like some key terms, maybe like what is fatigue to you? What is post-exercise fatigue to you guys?

Brad Roy (00:05:11 --> 00:07:10)
Fatigue is something that everybody experiences in many different ways with their life. I mean, you can just be tired from inadequate sleep or whatever, and we use that term fatigue. So there's this general concept of just tiredness is normal. It usually is something you can recover from fairly easily if you take the right steps. Then there's the fatigue that we're referring to after exercise or at the end of exercise where you have been pushing really hard and maybe you're getting dehydrated, maybe your core temperature has gone up, maybe you're at a higher level of exercise and, you know, your muscles just aren't contracting as well as they could be and you have this short-term fatigue.

Maybe you've gone so hard that a couple days later you're really sore from all of that, and maybe that's the type of muscle contractions that are occurring with all of that, that type of fatigue. Generally, you recover within a couple of days pretty well. And then there's people that are training so hard and doing it so repetitively and not taking enough time to rest, they actually get into this point of failure, or what we might call the overtraining syndrome, which is a whole complication of different symptoms and things that are occurring just because of that lack of recovery or other reasons. It's very multifactorial. You know, I think fatigue also is related.

I mean, many of us are still working, right? And we get very stressed out in our jobs. We get a lot of mental fatigue that can affect our exercise fatigue as well. It's really complicated. It's a complex piece when we start looking at that overtraining type of fatigue that many people experience.

April Terry (00:07:11 --> 00:08:25)
So I do a lot of CrossFit, heavy weightlifting, and then I want to pile on the running. And so I get addicted to the high-intensity workouts. How hard can I go? Can I go a little bit longer? The fatigue that I feel is sometimes lack of motivation.

I have to really ramp myself up to go back. To do those high intensity oftentimes. So the mental aspect of being fatigued, especially like dealing with athletes or anyone who's doing high intensity workouts, as their body gets tired, you start to see other types of musculoskeletal injuries that show up— shoulder, knees, back. And I think that's also another symptom of saying, okay, so you need to re-pay attention to how your body feels. Especially like in the mornings if you're groggy, you're not getting good sleep.

Kelly Mollman (00:08:25 --> 00:09:52)
And I'll tack on, like, when you're paying attention to those things, if you throw any one of those things off, and also adding into that the age component, you can throw off your recovery and the amount of recovery that you need, right? So as I've aged and gotten older, when I work out, my recovery isn't 1 to 2 days anymore. It's like 4 if I go too hard, especially if I've taken a little bit of a break and I'm coming back into it. If I come back in too hard, it's going to take me a couple of weeks to get going on it because I have to recover before I can go again, or I'm just going to compound that non-recovery and now I'm overtraining, even if I'm not overtraining. So I think everybody has to pay attention to what their body is telling them and what they're doing for sleeping and eating and mental recovery. If you're constantly stressed at work and now my exercise is stressing me out because it's at such a high intensity level that I'm not recovering, my body's going to release the cortisol and all the stress hormones that now I'm not going to sleep, I'm not going to be hungry, I'm going to be moody. Now we're just snowballing. So you really have to pay attention to all of those facets as you're feeling out what you're doing and what does your program look like. And am I incorporating in a periodization of kind of an in-season and an off-season and a preseason and a recovery? And am I doing that on a year-round plan or am I trying to just slam it all in and prepare for something in 2 months when I should be using 7, 8, 9 months?

Dustin Grinnell (00:09:52 --> 00:10:45)
So recovery seems it's multifactorial then. And also it seems like I never thought too much about how work life or personal life and stress could impact one's recovery from a physical level. So that's kind of interesting. How do you know what dial is off, so to speak, as you're recovering? So like not getting enough sleep, maybe obvious, but like how do you know maybe that work stress is contributing or, or even like really in the minutia, like you're not getting enough carbs or your electrolyte balance is off, and so on and so forth. Like, the struggle I've had is like, I don't know what part to attack, so to speak, sometimes. And so how do you help patients or clients, or, you know, in general, what's the science on how you think about turning the right dial on your recovery?

Brad Roy (00:10:45 --> 00:12:26)
So the causes are multifactorial, and also some of the recovery Strategies are multifactorial and highly individualized. So you and I may have the same factor of stresses and everything, but our bodies are going to react very differently. And so it's very complex. And I know there's been research into looking for, you know, is there a blood test or something we could do that really would nail this down? That data just hasn't proven out simply because, again, there's so many of these different factors that come into play with that.

And then I think there's also a tendency to misdiagnose overtraining syndrome when it's simply sometimes it's just a lack of energy storage within your body, right? There's this thing, relative energy, relative energy deficiency in sports where there are athletes, there's people that are training really hard that just aren't eating the right balance of nutrition. They're either getting too low in carbohydrates or too high in proteins or a combination of all of that. So their energy stores are down and that affects their ability to mobilize and do exercise. But it's not just that.

There's so many other factors that come into this. So it really, I guess my point is you have to pull back to each individual and really have a discussion with them and really try to find out, you know, what is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? What's your history with all of this? What are you doing workout-wise and recovery-wise?

April Terry (00:12:26 --> 00:13:28)
I understand, like, you're trying to put a finger on, oh, I need to do this and then my performance will get better, or I won't be as tired. Journaling really helps so that even in journaling, I have a set goal of I want to do this, and then we always want to improve ourselves. So we start adding, okay, I'm going to go a bit longer, or I want to hit this mark. I can go run this fast. But what happens is you just keep adding more things on. And even journaling from your goals to how your performance was, or I noticed when I ate this, I felt inflammatory, or my bowels are not working like they should. There's lots of things where journaling, you can then go back and be like, Oh, I ate this and the next day I woke up, my fingers were swollen, I felt really tired and groggy. You know, you can start to track and maybe eliminate one or two things at a time versus changing everything so dramatically and being like, why is this not working? I don't understand.

Kelly Mollman (00:13:29 --> 00:15:04)
Digestion doesn't go well as I add days of eating it in a row. But when I cut it out, I noticed that I was there was a massive amount of total body pain in widespread areas that just went away because I wasn't creating this gut inflammation. So there's so many things that you can look at. So you journal your food, you journal the exercises that you did and how hard, how intense did you do it? If you're running, maybe what's your race time?

Those kinds of things. And then what is my immediate response to exercise? And then how did I wake up feeling the next day? Then how long did it take me to recover? And then you're just kind of keeping tabs on it as you go through.

It's a lot. But if I would recommend also, if you're going to make a change like April was saying, maybe make one change and track it for 3, 4, 5 days and see what is the result of that change. If it's positive, great, you can keep it. If it's negative, maybe your body wasn't telling you to make that change. Try another change and maybe you're going to make 3 or 4 in a month, but over time you'll find out what are those combinations that fit you.

Brad Roy (00:15:04 --> 00:15:37)
You know, another favorite phrase of mine is that he who coaches himself has a fool for an athlete, simply because we often don't listen to ourselves. So even if we're journaling and doing things, we still tend to deny those things. We don't want to make those changes, or we don't make the right kinds of stuff. So having someone that you can trust that's a good coach or a partner that can come alongside you and look at things objectively is really, really fulfill. And I think sometimes that, that points us in a direction we're either resistant to go to or we didn't even think of.

Dustin Grinnell (00:15:37 --> 00:17:04)
He's like, "There's a lot of protein there, but there's no carbs." And then we looked at my lunch and there's a lot of protein there, but there's no carbs. And we got this pattern. We found, oh, wow, like, isn't it like something like 40% of our diet should be carbohydrates or something like that? Yeah. And so not only was I exercising a lot, I was not replenishing my glycogen stores.

And bingo, right? You know, that came from seeing what I put in my body. One of the things that is tricky is, Brad, what you were saying, which is that it's one thing to know it, it's another thing to act on it, right? It's another thing to say, "Okay, now I need to systematically introduce carbohydrates to my diet." It's another thing to listen to it. So I don't know if you guys have ever had any experience in that category.

Brad Roy (00:17:05 --> 00:19:02)
So I do think it's helpful, you meeting with a dietitian and getting some other input or vice versa. I had an athlete, a world-class distance runner, an Olympian of ours in the 10,000 meters years ago. Who was over in Europe and racing and falling apart and called me up and said, you know, Brad, I think I should just bag the rest of the season. I'm supposed to run the World Games in 3 weeks and I'm just falling apart over here. And what do I do?

And I said, well, you know, you're flying home. Let's get you back into the lab and we have all this data on you. Let's just run a test and see how you're doing. And so came back, we ran the test and blood lactate levels were just bottomed out. And he looked at me and said, wow, I should be running world records.

Look how efficient I am at buffering off lactate. And I should be just doing great performance things. What's going on? And I said, the reason your lactates are bottomed out is your glycogen stores are completely depleted. So you can't produce lactate, right?

Because it takes carbohydrate to do that. And so I said, take the next 3 weeks and just eat. Don't run. Just rest. Of course, looked at me and like I was crazy telling them not to do any activities, but did that.

And then went to the World Games in, uh, PR, ran his lifetime best in the 10,000 meters. And so once again, there's this, this sometimes having that outside person looking in that can give you some advice. Um, but you're right, the carbohydrates, the glycogen stores are really important. Glycogen stores water. So your glycogen stores are down, you're more prone to dehydration.

Dustin Grinnell (00:19:03 --> 00:19:35)
So say you get nutrition right, say you get rest and recovery right, and say you're not overtraining. There's kind of a weekend warrior. And you're with someone who you're training or taking care of, and they're experiencing like fatigue and exhaustion after exercise. What other things are you looking for? Like, where's, where's your mind going if you think, you know, hydration and food and rest is relatively okay?

Kelly Mollman (00:19:35 --> 00:22:12)
So they're telling you, I'm eating good, I'm sleeping good, I'm not overexercising, I am resting. I see this specifically at the high school level anyway, our cross-country athletes. Rest to them is I ran 5 miles this week, not 40 or 20 or whatever they run. That's not rest, right? So we're getting the information that they're giving us and it may not be 100% accurate.

So they still might have some of those things that are going on that they think is good but isn't. A lot of high school kids there, I know my daughter included, their diet is, oh, I eat and I'm good. It's crap. It's crap food. It's carbs, it's sugar.

Late night, it's I skip breakfast. It's like all of these things that are crap and then wondering why their performance is not great. So I think taking when they're telling you everything's good with a grain of salt and still maybe making sure that you have the conversations of give me an example, like when you went through your breakfast, lunch, and dinner and you realized, oh, I am missing some things that I didn't think I was missing. She, for example, my daughter, she does not eat much protein. So she's on the other end.

So she's not— I mean, protein gives us our tissue repair, right? We don't have enough protein. If we have too much, then we're going the other way. So everything's a fine line. With females, you can add in— there could be potential for iron deficiency with their menstrual cycle.

And if they have crazy horrible cycles, they might be having some deficiency in some other things that really— that's the time we probably are going to the doctor to make sure that maybe we are doing some blood tests and some things to check. Are my hormones good? Is my iron good? Are my electrolytes and my blood counts good? And you might even start looking deeper at thyroid, liver, kidney function.

Are those things going well? Do I have adrenal fatigue? Especially if you're a high-intensity interval training person or constant high intensity or lots of miles of running. Now I'm releasing some stress hormones that might be actually causing my body to go into more of a protective fight mode, which then makes a lot of things that you're doing unsuccessful. So I think at that point you really have to start maybe going in and seeing some medical care and making sure that all of that is good.

Brad Roy (00:22:13 --> 00:23:52)
Right. And so maybe we could pull back on some of that and change our orientation of our workouts, put more variety into that. So really helping you as their friend and helping them understand their why can go a long way. And then there's also things that are really simple. And I think a lot of the overtraining is prone for people that are more the endurance kinds of athletes.

Not necessarily the short explosive types of sports, although they can overload their training as well. But I know of runners that I've worked with that come and they're just like, I'm crashing, you know, with a half mile to go on my races or a mile to go, and I just crash and I don't know what to do about it. And you start digging into their— what they're doing, and they're not warming up appropriately. It's as easy as just changing their warm-up and boom, they finish their races strong and just fine. So sometimes there's just little fine fine-tuning things you can do as well.

Dustin Grinnell (00:23:52 --> 00:24:16)
Do you guys have any other, any other people come to mind that you've worked with, coached, trained, maybe even yourself in this context of recovery? Brad, that's a really interesting example, right? You had someone who just needed to warm up. It was just a very idiosyncratic, you know,. And they did that. You turn that dial and they weren't crashing.

Brad Roy (00:24:16 --> 00:24:39)
And I'm sure April and Kelly will have some more. One other one, I had a couple of high school runners come to me. They were milers, very high-level milers running somewhere around 4:12, 4:14, and they just suddenly were kind of having terrible workouts and not performing very well. And I asked them, gosh, are you getting enough rest? Yes. Are you Are you getting good sleep?

Kelly Mollman (00:24:39 --> 00:24:39)
Yes.

Brad Roy (00:24:39 --> 00:25:10)
Yes. Tell me about your diet. Well, we just went on this high protein, high fat diet. You know, we were reading about how important that was. So, oops, they weren't getting enough carbohydrates.

So it's like, you guys, you know, here's why you need to be eating the carbohydrate. And so they changed their diet back and they ran really well. So sometimes it's as simple as that, even though they thought they were making a positive change. And they weren't admitting it right away to me. Digging down to it, we got to the bottom line.

Dustin Grinnell (00:25:10 --> 00:25:23)
When you say adding back carbs, can you unpack that just a little bit? Like, what— how did you change your diet? Um, I think the kind of popular imagination is just eat more pasta, you know? But like, what did they actually do?

Brad Roy (00:25:23 --> 00:26:27)
You know, I always talk to— and I really try to refer them to a sports dietitian if I can, but just in general, they should really be eating whole natural foods and not getting into a lot of junk things or trying to take a lot of supplements and everything, but really getting into good nutritious foods. Those, you know, those carbohydrate levels are probably 50 to 60% of their dietary intake. These guys had cut down to like 10%. I mean, there was just way low. So as they continued to train, they were just depleting their glycogen stores, and then that's why they were starting to poop out in their workouts and in their races. And so it's a matter of adding back complex carbohydrates back into their diet, making making sure they're hydrating well enough. And they were fine from that perspective. And, you know, I didn't tell them, go eat potato chips, go eat a bunch of pasta and stuff. We just kind of had a generalized conversation around that. And sometimes we make it way too complicated and we want to get into these specialty kinds of foods and diets, where I think, you know, eating nutritious whole foods is the way to go.

April Terry (00:26:27 --> 00:27:42)
And so oftentimes they'll go to the practices and then they'll do their own workouts outside because of the anxiety. If I have to be better, I have to do faster, stronger, longer. And then I'm going to cut my carbs or cut my food intake so that I can also look a certain way. Oftentimes that high anxiety, they're very competitive. They have that mental that they're always high sympathetic system.

They're just always revved up. And so high stress, low calorie intake, lack of sleep, overtraining. That's something where, as an athletic trainer, I try to dip into that so that it becomes more of the mental of, Why? Where are we going with this? How can we calm this down?

Brad Roy (00:27:42 --> 00:28:32)
You know, I think there's this tendency as human beings, we're very competitive and we want to do better than these other people. And so we feel like, oh, they're doing this. So if I just do a little bit more, I'll be better than them.. And it's really not about training harder, it's about training smarter, right? I don't have to train harder than that person, I have to train smarter than them. So when I get to the starting line of my race or whatever I'm doing, I'm rested, I'm recovered, and I'm ready to go. And I know there's a lot of elite athletes that leave their races in their training and they end up sitting in the stands watching the other people that maybe don't even have the same genetic capabilities that they do, but they're the ones running the races because they trained a lot smarter. So that's a good message for people, is it's not necessarily training harder, but training smarter.

April Terry (00:28:32 --> 00:29:21)
Oh, I'm going to do the cold plunge. Oh no, I'm going to do the sauna. No, I'm going to do this diet, or I'm going to try the foam rollers. I'm going to go to the— I mean, there are so many different kinds of things. Again, the journaling, going back to that, helps.

What what works for you. I am a big proponent for ice where everybody else is like, no, we want heat. So you have to kind of find what works for you and have that self-confidence of what do I want? How do I get there on my own? You can look into some things, try it out and see if it works for you or not.

Kelly Mollman (00:29:21 --> 00:31:14)
Why can't I do this? Barring like a specific injury, just this started hurting and I don't know why type of a patient. And I have a few that I've seen that can't find anything wrong with them on a musculoskeletal exam. Everything is fine. We can't explain it.

So that's when the questions go to not only what are you doing for exercise, but food. What's your intake and what's your response? And I've had quite a few over the years that we end up finding that they have food allergies that they didn't know they had, or more specifically, probably a sensitivity, not an allergy to the point where they're going to be sick and they need some medication, you know, like, like a Crohn's disease or something that, you know, celiac, those things like. But eliminating those foods eliminates the pain, eliminates the fatigue, eliminates the need for a longer recovery period. Personally, as, as I said, I don't, I don't eat of those things.

Now, that said, it's extremely hard for me to get my carbs where they need to be so that I don't have depleted stores, which is probably why there are times when I need those 4 or 5 days to recover after doing something that to me wasn't strenuous at one point and now feels like it is. Not as I'm doing it, but the days after. And so I have to be really cautious about my food journaling. There's several apps out there that can help you with that. They can also help put your, your percentages in, in the right for your protein, carbs, and fats.

Dustin Grinnell (00:31:14 --> 00:32:26)
Just from my own personal experience, I tend to run hot, so to speak. Even at night when I sleep, I just am emanating heat. I'm just a source of heat. And I've run a few marathons before, and I found that I was starting to shut down halfway through until I splashed water on my face. And something about that just completely woke me up and got me back in it.

And I realized I was just overheating. And they have those sponges with water that you can put on your face. Those were like lifesavers for me. And I find too, in like Orangetheory, if I'm on the treadmill and I'm running really hard, if I put the fan up on high, it changes. It's partly psychological, something of a relief.

April Terry (00:32:26 --> 00:32:26)
Sure.

Brad Roy (00:32:26 --> 00:34:16)
You know, we sweat so the sweat can evaporate and that cools us. That's our primary cooling mechanism. So putting water on your face and using the sponges is a piece of that, right? You're getting moisture on your skin, it evaporates, it helps to cool you. But if the environment is too humid, that's not going to work very well.

One byline on those sponges I learned in the year I ran Boston Marathon— I bit into one. Someone had it in a soap bucket. That was an odd thing to do. I tasted that the rest of the race. So make sure you just drink your water bottle and not bite into the sponges.

But I do think that is a big factor. So one, if you maximize your glycogen stores through your training, your tendency is to deplete those. But if you make sure you build those back up, then you also are retaining water, right? With your glycogen, you're storing water at about a 1:3 ratio. So that keeps you somewhat hydrated.

And then making sure you prehydrate going into your competitions or your workouts, and then hydrating during and afterwards appropriately also keeps that cooling and that tendency to not overheat. And then different body types. You know, I'm pretty thin, I'm pretty light, pretty small. And so I deal with heat a lot better than someone that's heavier and maybe overweight and stuff. So there's a lot of variability in that.

April Terry (00:34:16 --> 00:34:28)
So the next time you go to class, to Orangetheory, pay attention. There are some people who sweat a lot, and then there are others like I don't sweat at all.— but then I have other issues.

Brad Roy (00:34:28 --> 00:34:58)
Yeah, I was going to say too, when you're running on the treadmill, there's no air movement, right? You're just stagnant. So you're sweating, you're in a fairly warm environment, and you're not cooling as effectively until you turn the fan on. Now you got air blowing against you, right? It creates some evaporation of that sweat and it cools you off. So that's the other piece with the indoor environments is you don't have the benefit of airflow. The wind, the slight breeze or what can help cool you.

Dustin Grinnell (00:34:58 --> 00:35:13)
So there might be a tendency then to overheat. Kelly and April, if you guys sweat maybe below average, you're saying, you said, April, you said you don't sweat at all. Do you guys have overheating? Are you vulnerable to overheating as a result?

April Terry (00:35:13 --> 00:35:45)
So because I don't sweat a lot, I don't get thirsty. So oftentimes I won't drink water. And I've had episodes where I've been working outside so much and I haven't drank any water to where I get done with my workout or whatever, gardening or whatever I'm doing outside, I've had episodes of dry heaving because I pushed it over the edge. So now I'm nauseous, I'm dry heaving, and I feel horrible because I didn't hydrate the entire time I was doing my activity.

Dustin Grinnell (00:35:45 --> 00:35:49)
So that was like, probably not heat stroke, but heat.

April Terry (00:35:50 --> 00:36:16)
Yeah. I just didn't pay attention to my body. Like, a lot of swimmers are And also they don't pay— you are sweating when you are swimming, but they don't think about hydrating. And so when they get out of the pool and after the workout, they're like, wow, I feel miserable. I'm sick to my stomach. I'm very tired. That was a really hard workout. Oftentimes it's because they weren't hydrated because you don't think about it when you're in the pool.

Brad Roy (00:36:16 --> 00:37:15)
You know, there are some tests you can do to look at your hydration, your sweat rates, and to look at the composition of that sweat and try zero in a little bit on what you should be drinking and the amounts and the frequency of all of that. Not everybody can afford to go through that. So the basic thing just comes back to getting adequate water as you're doing, as you are exercising, and making sure once again you're keeping your glycogen stores up, you're, you're staying hydrated throughout the day. So when you go into those workouts, you're going in loaded, not depleted. Is a big thing. And then the flip side of that is there are people that can drink too much water either before or during their performance, and they get this condition called hyponatremia, where they start bleeding out a lot of their electrolytes and everything, and they can get into deadly situations of bad heart rhythms and other things as a result of that. So there is some balance within all of that as well.

April Terry (00:37:15 --> 00:38:29)
The energy drinks will also counter— everybody's like, oh, I want more energy. I worked out. I'm going to go have a Red Bull and I'm going to go do the Monster and those other kind of caffeinated drinks. Lotus. You are putting yourself into some major issues.

Cardiovascular, kidneys, liver, and especially these young kids. We're having to tell these kids they're on supplements that they don't even know what they're doing to their bodies. And it's all across the board from when I was with the Utah Stars. What are you on? You look good.

You're performing well. I want to take the same thing you're— and they have no idea that they're taking creatine and testosterone and whatever else. They have no clue how much caffeine they're pumping through their body. And that's a lot of stress that your body is going to try to signal you, like, knock it off. And maybe that's where you have to start paying attention again, listening self-awareness.

Dustin Grinnell (00:38:29 --> 00:39:04)
They're not helping you at all. As we think more about, you know, what could be causing poor recovery or fatigue, I think we've gone through like a lot of normal or common causes. But I think, Kelly, you were alluding to a little bit how there sometimes could be more serious things going on. And you talked about intolerances and maybe health conditions relating to hormones. But one thing I wanted to get your guys' perspective on is rhabdo—

Brad Roy (00:39:04 --> 00:39:04)
rhabdomyolysis.

Dustin Grinnell (00:39:04 --> 00:39:27)
And this is a pretty serious condition. It comes after really intense and I think prolonged exercise, right? I was just out of my own curiosity, like, how common is that? And And I feel like you have to be pretty elite and pretty intense to trigger rhabdo. Is that true? Oh, you don't. Okay. What is rhabdo? How does it occur?

April Terry (00:39:27 --> 00:39:29)
And what are the common symptoms of it?

Kelly Mollman (00:39:29 --> 00:40:46)
I mean, from a PT's perspective, when we see it is actually on the other end. When somebody falls and breaks a hip and they lay there for a couple of days before anybody finds them. And what their body actually does is breaks down their muscle tissue for a source of protein and fuel. And the protein breakdown is feeding them, so to speak, to keep them alive while they're laying there and not eating. So it's kind of, you know, they went into like a starvation mode and their body's trying to use whatever they can to keep them alive.

I mean, And that's obviously the far end of the opposite of that. But the common symptoms are fatigue and the muscle pain, which can be hard to tell the difference. Is this fatigue and muscle pain that's normal or is this fatigue and muscle pain that's now I went into some rhabdo? Other symptoms that probably would not be included with normal fatigue and muscle pain would be the dark urine. It's like tea or Coca-Cola colored, fever, nausea, confusion, and malaise.

April Terry (00:40:46 --> 00:41:23)
I want to jump in real quick. This is April. I had a young athlete who was a runner and was like, hey, if you start lifting weights, you can get stronger to kind of finish, perform better. So he had a couple of his buddies go into the weight room and they do bicep curls and they did like 150 as hard as they could go. And yeah, he started to get a fever, extreme pain. He didn't tear the muscle, but he started to break it down to where he got so sick we had to go to the ER. Like, you'll know when it happens as somebody who's just kind of trying it out, or even our athletes.

Kelly Mollman (00:41:24 --> 00:41:25)
It's—

Brad Roy (00:41:25 --> 00:41:25)
they just—

April Terry (00:41:25 --> 00:41:30)
usually it's a localized— you pick one muscle group and you just kill it.

Brad Roy (00:41:30 --> 00:42:40)
You have to be careful, though. It's not just in elite athletes. And this is an area of balance for fitness professionals because there's been a few lawsuits out there that fitness facilities have lost where people have complained of fatigue and the fitness professionals has pretty much force them to try to push through that, and they end up with rhabdo. So you have to be really careful. You know, you need to listen to your own body, and trainers need to be listening to their clients or the people they're working with and not over-push them and over-stress them. He who does too much usually ends up with some kind of an injury or not performing well. And if you under-train, at least you kind of get to where you want to be eventually. But there you have to be really careful with that. This is a dangerous situation, even though it's rare. I think it's becoming more common right now because you're seeing a lot more of these intense kinds of, or you seeing adults that are out of shape get in these multi-conditioning programs where they're doing weightlifting and running and all this stuff at one time, and they're easily overdoing it. And so we just have to be real cautious with that.

Dustin Grinnell (00:42:40 --> 00:43:47)
I'm gonna I'm going to row the hardest I can. I'm going to try to run hard. And then I'm going to not lift obnoxiously large weights, but I'm going to push it and try to escalate. And I would say every third workout I have, I will sleep horribly and wake up with a very low mood. And it's because I feel like I barely slept at all.

I was wired. This something I feel almost hungover. And that's not just with Orangetheory and not calling them out. It could be if I did a really hard yoga class. And I wonder, having covered a lot of ground here, does anything jump to mind?

Brad Roy (00:43:47 --> 00:43:49)
We talked about carbs.

April Terry (00:43:49 --> 00:43:49)
One quick thing.

Brad Roy (00:43:49 --> 00:44:31)
You know, when you talk about sleep and rest, it's restorative sleep. It's not just how many hours we get there or how long we lay there. You know, did we really get into REM and did we get that restorative sleep? I I think that's becoming a big problem across America. And you add intense exercise to that, it just really compounds that whole situation. And then people like yourself, you may be figuring out, well, maybe I need more recovery days in between those intense exercise days and balancing that all out. And then I always ask when people are pushing themselves that hard, why? Well, what's your purpose? What are you trying to accomplish from that? Step back and really answer that question.

Kelly Mollman (00:44:31 --> 00:46:27)
So my weekend rest is gone. I've had 4 days of work. So am I stressed? Have I slept not great? Has that progressively worsened over the week?

Because sleep is compounding. So, you know, if you're not getting that average 7 to 9 hours every single night, you've compounded. And even it might not just be that maybe Thursday night you didn't sleep great either, but you noticed it more than the rest of the nights. But they all count. As well as food, are you rehydrated and are you refueling your body throughout the week?

Or have we kind of, between the busy work and maybe I had too many meetings and I didn't have breakfast, or is Friday's workout in the morning and I skipped breakfast, so I went to the workout and I'm nauseous and I feel good because I didn't eat before I worked out. There's so many components that can go into is the end of that week stressful? Have I had a lot of stress the whole week? Have I sort of fell apart as the week went on? Or is your third workout Monday and I should be refreshed?

Because some of that might be, as Brad alludes to, simple answers of I need to just be consistent through the week and I need to be consistent with a routine and I need to stick to that routine so Friday workouts are better. Or am I I'm having alcohol and tobacco on the weekends and it's Monday and I'm crashing because I had some things I shouldn't have had and now those are causing my body to— like, I'm actually flushing those toxins and I feel crappy because I'm flushing the toxins. There's just a lot of things that come into play for each individual. So you'd really need to step back and analyze. Kind of that journaling would be super helpful for what did the whole week look like as a complete picture than the exercise session that seems to crash you.

Brad Roy (00:46:27 --> 00:47:42)
And another thing that I find, you know, I think our elite athletes are better at periodization of changing their routine throughout the year and into blocks of time, where those of us that are more in the fitness realm or even the health room, we just do the same thing all the time, right? And then we break our body down and we don't listen well, and we get into a lot of these kinds of situations. So even creating some periodization within your year of training and not doing the same thing all the time, but building variety in, in things. I think that's very helpful. I was thinking of Herb Elliott. I don't know if you've heard of that name. He was in 1954, he was a world record holder in the mile, never lost a mile race his entire career. But the end of it, and if it is competitive season, he would take 3 or 4 months off and he would eat, he'd gain weight. I'm not telling people to do this, but he'd smoke. He did all these things that really weren't necessarily healthy. But then he came back and built his training up and ran all these unbelievable times and stuff. But he was in this periodization cycle that in many ways allowed his body to recover and then keep continuing to build over time to a higher level. So I think that's something that within our own fitness and health routines, we could do a lot better.

April Terry (00:47:42 --> 00:47:52)
And we're creatures of habit, right? We love the routine. I teach a couple of classes here at the facility, and you'll see it every week.

Brad Roy (00:47:52 --> 00:47:53)
Monday, everybody shows up.

April Terry (00:47:53 --> 00:48:24)
Tuesday, they, some of them disappear. Wednesday, we're ready to roll again. Thursday, everybody drops off because they're tired. But then when Friday comes, they're like, well, we have to at least get one more day in the week. It is kind of funny.

Monday, we're packed here at the facility. Tuesday's a little bit lingering. Wednesday, we increase again. Thursday, it drops to nobody shows up because they're, you know, they kind of peaked. But then I got to get one more in before the weekend.

Brad Roy (00:48:24 --> 00:48:32)
And I have to watch out. Maybe, Dustin, maybe you're in this same boat. When I get in a group exercise session, I'm very competitive.

Dustin Grinnell (00:48:32 --> 00:48:39)
Yeah, me too. Yeah. I always look to my right or left on the rowing, and I'm going to beat them.

Brad Roy (00:48:39 --> 00:48:52)
Yeah. So then my tendency is I'm going to go too hard because I'm competitive and stuff. So sometimes I just have to step away and say, I'm better off today just to go out on my own and not to get into this mix of competition.

April Terry (00:48:52 --> 00:49:08)
Yeah. So I challenge to kind of mix it up, change it up. Yeah, I do like when you talked about you do the yoga or the walking. I think a lot of people, especially if you're attending classes, we never do the cooldown. Everybody's like, all right, the hour's done, let's go shower.

Dustin Grinnell (00:49:08 --> 00:49:10)
I got to get to work. I skip that.

April Terry (00:49:10 --> 00:49:13)
Yeah, I always skip it. Guilty.

Kelly Mollman (00:49:13 --> 00:49:20)
You talk about how you run hot. Your cooldown is extremely important.

Dustin Grinnell (00:49:20 --> 00:49:20)
Yeah, right.

Kelly Mollman (00:49:20 --> 00:50:26)
I will be honest, I skip it also because to me it's boring. It's not challenging, right? But it is super important. It's also probably why I now need 3 or 4 days to recover. And then your mind goes to, especially if you're not in the rest part of your— like when the guy takes his couple of months off type of rest where you're like, really, that's your periodization and I'm in recovery for a couple of months. If it's more of the rest between sessions, then you probably start to get a little bit of that. That mental and psychological component of, if I rest every 3 or 4 days, how am I ever going to get where I want to get? How am I ever going to reach my health goal or my whatever that goal is? How am I going to reach it if I have to take 3 or 4 days off every time I do something? But your body is telling you it needs it off, and you're not going to get the gains if you work out on top of that. You're actually going backwards. Rest for 4 days and then another workout where you feel like you're getting it in, or whatever number of days you need, is better than I'm going to exercise because today is the exercise day, no matter what my body is telling me, because you're just going to go backwards because your body's going to need— you're compounding the recovery that you need.

April Terry (00:50:26 --> 00:50:29)
And different types of exercise, I think, is key.

Kelly Mollman (00:50:29 --> 00:50:29)
Yeah.

April Terry (00:50:29 --> 00:50:49)
Exercise for me is very mentally good. It's my destressor. But I like to do HIIT all the time, and I've been teaching myself meditation is also a form of exercise. Learning to breathe, calming everything down instead of being high red all the time.

Kelly Mollman (00:50:49 --> 00:51:01)
Time. Yeah. And I hate cardio. I don't like to do it. I just would rather just go and lift. So April and I should work out together and I can make her lift and she can make me. Yeah, you can make me do a little cardio.

April Terry (00:51:01 --> 00:51:01)
Yeah.

Brad Roy (00:51:01 --> 00:52:14)
And I just want to pull back too, because there's a tendency right now in society with our young people to get them into, boy, all I'm going to do is play soccer, all I'm going to do is play baseball, and I'm going to be this elite athlete. Athlete. And the reality is, is they become really lousy athletes. These young kids should be doing multiple sports. They should be in a very carefully thought-through year-round pattern of movement skills and things that make them a good athlete, maximize their movement skills, and not necessarily specializing in a sport that leads them into these overused kinds of injuries, burnout, and all the other things that we're seeing in young people today. And if we do it right and we help them develop these movement skills skills and this variety of sports to become, quote, an athlete, one, eventually they'll pick a sport and they'll perform very well, or at least they'll go on in life and do things like hiking and backpacking and fishing and all those kinds of things and stay physically active. So that's just a pet peeve of all of ours, I think, is, is really helping young people develop this sort of athletic type of skill base that helps them stay physically active throughout their lifetimes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:14 --> 00:53:06)
In the time we have left, I have 3 questions that I want to ask, and one I have to say is a bit of an oddball question. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask exercise and physiology experts such as yourself about this phenomenon I've concocted in my head using my imagination. I took this intolerance test once and it showed that I was very intolerant, I guess, to lactic acid. And knowing that lactic acid is a byproduct of metabolism, it's a natural byproduct. And I know this, but I couldn't help think, oh, does one have an intolerance to their own metabolic results? Like, can you be allergic or intolerant to lactic acid? Like, what— how do I make sense of that test? It's probably garbage, but like, yeah, is there something to it?

Brad Roy (00:53:06 --> 00:55:00)
Lactate and lactic acid differ by one hydrogen. They're really a different compound. And so the byproduct in our exercise, you know, as we start getting into higher intensities and recruiting more fast-twitch muscle fibers, we tend to burn more carbohydrate or glycogen stores. That— and it happens so quickly that pyruvic acid can't shift over to lactate. I mean, it can't it shifts over to lactate to keep it going because it can't cycle around the Krebs cycle as easily.

And that system is just more quick. So once you— once you— my point is that there's a difference between those. I think the allergic pieces really go back to more nutritional or types of creams that we use and things. So people get rashes and, and they have allergies to milk products or other types of things that have lactic acid as part of that. I don't think it's related to metabolism.

I've really never picked up that, that we're allergic to our own lactate. Lactate is also a fuel. When you produce it, it gets shunted off and it can be taken back to the liver and reconverted back into glycogen and things. And so it's also a fuel for exercise. And if we weren't able to produce it and do it, we wouldn't be able to exercise as effectively as those higher levels of energy expenditure.

That's what is required to happen. So people that hit the lactate dehydrogenase enzyme time where they can't really produce the lactate, they can't get into those anaerobic levels of exercise very well, and they tend to crump out pretty quickly. So I really haven't heard of it from a metabolism standpoint. Kelly? No.

April Terry (00:55:00 --> 00:55:24)
I mean, lactic acid is a byproduct of working hard. So either you use it for energy or you need to expire it. So oftentimes, maybe again, looking at your breathing If you are doing a high-intensity workout and you're producing a lot of lactic acid, breathing through those exercises, a nice cool-down, good warm-up, get your body moving.

Brad Roy (00:55:24 --> 00:56:06)
I think, yeah, you can, you know, and for, for many, many years we blamed fatigue that shut off exercise on lactate or lactic acid. And George Brooks, many, many, many years ago at the University of San Francisco, back when he was doing his dissertation, he proved that wasn't true, that there other factors too why people shut down. They got dehydrated, they were overheated, there were some neuromuscular things going on. But he was able to show that it really wasn't lactate that was the cause of that. It's once again, it's kind of multifactorial. So we've given blood lactate or lactic acid a bad name when really it's an important energy byproduct.

Dustin Grinnell (00:56:06 --> 00:57:03)
Okay, one of the other things I wanted to ask about is exercise and the immune system and how potential health conditions related to the immune system could possibly drive fatigue. And I've also had this theory maybe that in my case, this post-exercise fatigue could be related to like a previous Epstein-Barr virus infection when I was in high school, which caused mono. And I wonder if the virus doesn't go away, it lays dormant, but it can come back, I think, in some circumstances, and I didn't know to what degree exercise can make it come out of dormancy. I've heard of people who have chronic mononucleosis and they sort of have these flare-ups over time. And what— to what degree is exercise related in chronic mono, or what do you think of when I bring this up?

Brad Roy (00:57:03 --> 00:58:14)
First, and I'll let Kelly jump in here too, the there's physical activity and there's exercise. There's purposeful training, right? So physical activity, getting out and walking, doing low-level recreational kinds of things that promote health generally helps your immune system and you become a little bit stronger and right. And it kind of ramps things up. But when you do the purposeful exercise, especially if you overtrain, there is a point in that curve where you could actually lower your resistance to viruses and things that are out there and potentially have some challenges. With that. In regard to the Epstein-Barr or the mono, I think you're right. You know, my son had severe case of mononucleosis back when he was in 8th and 9th grade, and it's been kind of a lifetime issue for him if he overdoes things. Some people recover in a period of months, and other people, it can— there can be pieces of that virus that's in there that can come back and haunt you over time.. And you just have to then be cognizant of not overtraining, watching that recovery, make sure you're fueling appropriately, et cetera.

Kelly Mollman (00:58:14 --> 00:59:27)
Yeah, those lasting effects from those illnesses can cause that kind of exercise intolerance. And obviously there are so many health benefits to the immune system from exercise, but being cautious and being careful and learning, you know, even in this case, which could be helpful for you specifically, is what type of exercise works for you, what type of exercise is going to meet your goal but not send you into that spiral, which high intensity may not be it. Or maybe Monday, Wednesday is fine, but your Friday one, because that's your third day, it's not. And finding that mix of, or maybe if I do Monday, but Wednesday is lifting and low intensity, but I'm still going to work out and I'm still going to challenge myself but not overdo it. And then Friday I can go back to again finding that balance of it because they can make the symptoms better, but they can also make the symptoms worse. And I think defining which exercise can you do to not make it worse and when on your timeline or built into your periodization over the year, and how does it look for you. But all those other things that we've been talking about with the nutrition and the hydration, and it's all going to play a piece in, and more so in somebody who's having these lasting effects.

Brad Roy (00:59:27 --> 01:00:06)
You know, we see that here in many of our clinical populations where we really have to be careful to balance their exercise activities, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, even our cardiovascular cancer patients and others, you know, they get into these points where they have a flare-up and you need to back off, right, and give them time to recover, and then you can go back into more of a normal routine. And so you always have to be listening to your own body, or if you're working with someone, listening to them and trying to create that appropriate balance within the exercise training and the recovery and all the other aspects of doing.

Kelly Mollman (01:00:06 --> 01:01:16)
I'm glad you mentioned flare-ups because I think flare-ups can kind of throw everything that works for you normally right out of the water. When you have a flare-up of— and I think of fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, those things— they sometimes even walking just wears you out and you're done. Um, and it might be that you're just really not able to do very much during your flare-up. And knowing that, you know, you do have to move because if you don't move, your flare-up can last a little bit longer, but but definitely moving within reason for your flare up and learning when I am in a flare up, which maybe that's a Friday for you occasionally, or maybe you've had even a series of a couple of weeks or a month where you've just not felt well. Maybe that's a flare up for you that, okay, now I need to completely revamp this week or this month or these 2 weeks because I got to get through the flare up and I got to keep myself moving so that I'm not stagnant. But I got to really listen to my body until 'til this kind of feeling goes away and then now I can get back into what I'm doing. And sometimes we like to, yes, we want a periodization, but sometimes our body tells us that I'm not going to listen to you this month. You got to change and listen to me and you have to adapt to what your body's trying to tell you.

April Terry (01:01:16 --> 01:01:51)
Yeah, we get lots of, I mean, I've heard lots of people say I feel a cold coming on, but I'm just going to work through it versus if they would have listened to their body and maybe have taken that day or two off when they were the scratchy throat or the runny nose instead of working through it, now they're dealing with it for a month. If they would have just balanced it out, took a day off or two, almost everybody's like, yeah, if I just would have listened to my body at the beginning, then I would have been back into it versus just trying to crawl through the rest of that week to month.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:51 --> 01:02:32)
Yeah, it seems so much of this is listening to your body and then being honest about your reaction. I wonder, like, what is it about us that doesn't want to listen? Because often, 80% of the time, I think I know what I should do, whether it's I should back it off or maybe take this day off, but I just don't do it. Like, what do you say to that person? Do you convince them that you're going to feel bad, that you're going to prolong what you're currently experiencing? Because so often I think, and this relates with people, friends, people I know, they're just like, nah, I'm going to do it anyway.

April Terry (01:02:32 --> 01:02:35)
How the hell do we just do the right thing?

Kelly Mollman (01:02:35 --> 01:02:37)
We see it all the time.

Dustin Grinnell (01:02:37 --> 01:02:37)
Yes.

Kelly Mollman (01:02:37 --> 01:03:39)
And sometimes then we've learned from now doing, and sometimes it's a repetitive thing and we're banging our head against a wall and we didn't learn and we didn't learn and we didn't learn and we didn't learn. And then eventually we do and we start listening. I think sometimes that is not going to happen for some people until you actually hit that wall and you're forced to and with something that happens that I'm not hydrated, I'm not eating right, my carbs are too low and I'm tanking. I felt sick. Well, this time when I felt sick, I passed out at the gym, right?

Like, something happened and now I'm like, scared. Holy crap. Now I got to listen. Like, this isn't well. Or you don't want to get there.

April Terry (01:03:39 --> 01:03:59)
Yeah, we don't want to get there, but sometimes that's how you do it with the muscle skeletal. Like, with running, somebody's like, I want to keep running, "But my shins are killing me, my foot hurts. Maybe I get new shoes, maybe I get this and that, run on a different surface." And sometimes the answer is get on a bike, swim, do something different.

Brad Roy (01:03:59 --> 01:04:37)
And I think we're coming back to this whole area of recovery, which is the most underappreciated piece of exercise training and trying to improve your performance or your fitness or even your health. If you can't do the recovery side, appropriately, you're going to just fall apart eventually. Right. And we're just as a society and we're not good about that. We get pushed at work, we put in long hours, we don't sleep well. We have all this stuff going on here in Montana. We're very independent. I was going to do that until you told me to and now I don't want to do it kind of a thing.

Dustin Grinnell (01:04:37 --> 01:04:39)
I'm from New Hampshire, so I get that. Yeah.

Brad Roy (01:04:40 --> 01:05:10)
Live free or die. And then oftentimes we don't really understand our why. Why are we doing this? What's our goal? Do we really have plan. You know, does this 2 days off really affect my long-range ability to get here? Or is working through this detrimental to that? We don't take that perspective. We just look at today, and then today's gone, and then today comes again, and we keep doing the same thing. And eventually we get hurt, and then we force the issue.

Dustin Grinnell (01:05:10 --> 01:05:34)
Anything else that comes to mind that maybe we haven't talked about in this space of recovery, uh, post-exercise fatigue. We've talked about nutrition and sleep and, and heat and potential clinical conditions and the psychology of it. Like, anything else come to mind for athletes, for people who are weekend warriors?

Kelly Mollman (01:05:34 --> 01:06:30)
Just curious if there's anything left unsaid. We probably haven't talked a ton about mental well-being and having that be a part of your program and having, you know, the mental fatigue can be the sometimes even the only thing that can be causing the excessive fatigue after. So, you know, really what recharges you from a home perspective, stress perspective, even workout perspective, all of those things like keeping that balance of some mental health and some mental well-being activities in there as part of your workout. Like you said, on some of your days off you do yoga and walking, which are great mental health yourself. If you're able to and you're able to walk outdoors, that's even better yet because now we're getting into some nature and some fresh air and some scenery, as long as you're not having wildfire season. But especially in the U.S., I feel like we, we don't really focus on that piece very much because we're, as Brad said, we're pushed everywhere. So taking time off to recover might be to recover mentally as much as physically.

Brad Roy (01:06:30 --> 01:07:24)
And I think an important point is, is that you don't have to train excessively hard to be healthy. And it's easy to train too hard and not be healthy. And so, you know, physical activity is the most important piece. We need to be out, we need to move, we need to be doing something, you know, most days of the week and being active. And that's going to promote our health. Certainly if we can increase our fitness some, there might be some more advantages to that. But most of the health advantages come in just getting us out chair out, off the couch and moving. Then it seems like in our society today, we have an awful lot of people that can't get off the couch and do anything. We have a few people that are maybe doing it correctly, and then we have a lot of people that are almost pushing too hard and getting into trouble on the other thing. And if we all could come back and meet in the middle and a few people be the elite athletes, we'd be a lot better off as a society.

April Terry (01:07:25 --> 01:07:56)
One other thing that comes to mind is all the technology oftentimes with my workout, how many steps, how long did I work, what's my heart rate? It's very liberating to get rid of that sometimes. So that kind of is the balance. We're always concerned about how much weight was I lifting and writing. Maybe this month you're just going to kind of go with the flow, take the watch off. When you feel like going to the gym, you go to the gym versus meeting that routine.

Brad Roy (01:07:56 --> 01:08:47)
And notice how you feel. You know, for the last probably 3 years, the American College of Sports Medicine does an annual fitness trends survey and puts that issue out. This next issue will come out in November, in the November-December issue. For the last few years, wearables have been the number one trend and continues going forward. But I think that also can become sort of a negative addiction. Addiction to physical activity, right? Yeah, I'm addicted to what that wearable is telling me, and I gotta get to that thing every single day. So then I don't listen to myself, I don't listen to my body, because I'm too focused on getting to that particular number or objective that that wearable is trying to tell me. It's controlling me rather than me having control of my own patterns and activities that I'm doing.

Kelly Mollman (01:08:47 --> 01:09:15)
So it's good and it's bad at the time. Your challenge to yourself might be, um, when you were talking about that you're in a group setting and, and you're competitive, as we all are. Your challenge might be to challenge yourself the opposite, to listen to yourself and to do what you need to do to take care of you regardless of what the group is doing, to see if you can navigate that I'm improving myself by not overdoing it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:15 --> 01:09:46)
Yeah. That makes total sense. And, and the whole conversation is prompting me at least to do more introspection, do more analysis, get honest, and then just do it. And, uh, I want to thank you guys for indulging my own unique experience with exercise, but I think also there's just so much wisdom that you guys shared for athletes, people who want to stay fit general. And I think we can leave it there. I just want to thank you guys, Brad, Kelly, April.

Brad Roy (01:09:46 --> 01:09:53)
I think it was an awesome conversation, and, uh, maybe we can do it again sometime. Awesome. Thanks for inviting us.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:53 --> 01:10:17)
It's been fun. Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Brad Roy, April Terry, and Kelly Melman. If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review. They encourage people to listen and help attract great guests.

If you like what you've been hearing and would like to sponsor the podcast, please consider supporting me on my Patreon account. Thanks again for listening. Stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet along the way.