Episode 379: Physiologic Flexibility Certification Open: Temperature, pH, Fuels, and Breathing for Performance

0:00Welcome back to the Flex diet podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Maxian Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase performance, increase the muscle, improve body composition, do all of it within a flexible framework without destroying your health. Today, we wanted to talk about that the physiologic flexibility certification is open for exactly one week. So today is Monday, March 20th, 2026. It'll be open through Monday, April 27th, 2026 at midnight Pacific standard time. If you want more information, that's places to hop on to the newsletter. We've got a ton of newsletters explaining all about it going out to this week. And if you want more information on the course itself, I will also put a link down below where you can get all the information on the course itself also. I think you'll really enjoy it. And it's

1:04something I keep debating about potentially splitting up into four separate areas. But I think the reason I have not is because all of those areas overlap with each other. And right now, I think there is a huge gap in terms of educating athletes and trainers and coaches on how everything overlaps with each other in physiology, nutrition, et cetera. I think with AI and everything going forward, we're going to be able to get specific information much faster. We can argue if that information is going to be always correct. Because remember, unless you're good at searching for high quality information or you put limits on what you're searching for, as of now, AI is designed to give you an answer. That answer is generally compiled from a bunch of other sources. So things that

2:09are still very popular, AI may tell you are completely correct. So related to the PhysFlexRT, I did this the other day. I typed into AI and said, you know, does cold water immersion decrease inflammation? And basically, it told me, yes, it does. And then I tried to be more specific. And it kept saying that yes, it does. But when I asked to cite specific references from PubMed, some of the references it gave me were from cryo, not necessarily cold water immersion. And it had some other references that if you read the actual full study, we're not correct. So again, the popular opinion is that cold water immersion does change inflammation. But if you actually go and pull the actual studies that have been done on this, there's three or four pretty well done studies now. Some of them are actually older, showing that changes in inflammation with cold water immersion probably don't happen.

3:13Like you can find one or two markers that do change a little bit. But as a whole, they don't really seem to change much. And this is looking at markers such as TNF alpha, IL-6, things of that nature. So again, I think with AI, we might get some good specific information. Again, I don't think that's always going to be correct. However, the overlap and the interplay between all of them, I think, is something AI will struggle with for quite a while. Again, it's pretty good at finding associations. But then transferring that into action items into a system, I think we're quite a ways away from that. So as of now, that's why I've decided to leave all four of the components in the physiologic flexibility certification, even though they all cover kind of wildly different areas. So pillar number one is temperature regulation, everything from a sauna, so heat, all the way down to cold water immersion and cold.

4:13Yeah, and you don't necessarily need technology to do this. There's ways to do it without that. And number two is pH, high low or high or lower pH. Number three is expanded fuels, which is lactate and ketones. So if you run a ton of fat through your system and you do it with a low insulin condition, you will produce ketones. We can also consume ketones now as an exogenous supplement, both the salt form or a ketone ester form. So there are ways you can increase ketones now by still having high levels of glycogen and blood glucose, just super fascinating. And then if you run a ton of carbohydrates through the system, you produce the lactate and also hydrogen ions. So the air-quote classic lactic acid, which doesn't really exist from very long at all, if it even does exist, you're actually producing the lactate, which gets used as a fuel, and then hydrogen ions. It's the hydrogen ions that create that burning sensation you feel during high intensity exercise,

5:18could be doing like extensions, high rip squats, some horrible stuff on the assault bike, roller, etc. And the last one is breathing. This is how your body is regulating oxygen and CO2. I think there's a lot of practitioners doing a lot of really good breathwork stuff. Unfortunately, a lot of the rationale given for the breathwork that is being done, even if the breathwork is good, is incorrect. And if you do a deep dive into O2 and CO2 regulation, you find out pretty fast that it's more complicated than what we realized. So with that section, I wanted to give a primer. The reality of the technical part there took me the longest to do. So when I did the flex diet, sir, the carbohydrate section took the longest. And for this one, the O2 and CO2 regulation by far took the longest. So but I was able to condense it down to about

6:19two hours and 20 minutes, which I was pretty happy with considering I took a whole 4,000, I don't know, it was a 5,000 level class once just on how your lungs function in terms of getting air in and out and all the different components of that. That wasn't even necessarily all the metabolic regulations of it. So but all four of those areas are things that your body must keep equal, or what's called in the homeostasis. However, we know that we can go into other extreme environments in terms of temperature, as long as we do it safely and we've trained for it. We know you can tolerate very low pH conditions, at least at the muscle level for a period of time doing various interval work. So if you've ever seen anyone pull lactate levels, so they are using lactate as a surrogate marker for the hydrogen low guys that are running around, basically messing up muscle contraction. They're literally dumping an acid into the muscle. So when you do lactate testing,

7:23you're using lactate as a surrogate marker for the hydrogen ions. Higher lactate levels do correlate with a more acidic environment. So we know that all these areas are actually related and overlap with each other. What I found over time is if you're getting say a B in the three basic pillars, which are going to be exercise, nutrition and sleep, then I believe this is the next area to focus on, to increase performance and also to increase your body's ability to recover and just generally be more resilient. I think the biggest mistake people make is probably putting a little bit too much time and effort in one single area without doing the basics. So as much as I love cold water immersion and sauna, I think there's a huge amount of benefits to them. If you're not already training relatively intensely with good nutrition and fairly good sleep, I don't think

8:24doing sauna is going to make a massive difference overall. I do think it is better, but you want to get the basics down pretty good. But then you can easily add different temperature, pH, expanded fuels and you can also play with breathing regulation. And the really cool part is all of these are actually overlapping with each other. So for example, if we do something like a 30 second windgate on the assault bike or the roar, what we're seeing is your body is going to run a ton of carbohydrates through the system. It's going to initially start by using this called anaerobic metabolism and the byproduct of this is going to be lactate. And as we mentioned, hydrogen ions. So lactate can be used as a separate fuel source. So that's covered under the expanded fuel source. The hydrogen ions that are generated are going to drop

9:26the local pH, which your body then has to compensate and buffer. So that's also covered under the section two, which is changes in pH. Most of the time, you're going to be producing a fair amount of heat as you're doing this, especially if you're exercising a little bit of a warmer environment. So now we have temperature regulation as part of that. And so from a pure blood flow standpoint, at some point, depending upon the outside temperature, your body has to decide what is a higher priority. Temperature regulation or muscle performance, because blood flow is going to go to slightly different areas. If we want to get rid of a lot of heat, we're going to send a lot of blood flow to more of the skin area. But we only have a limited amount. And the brain has to keep perfusion at all times on top of this. And then for some of the different exercises, you may regulate breathing. So we may start out nasal breathing and it out. Then we may switch to

10:29nasal in and mouth out. This is the gear system, which I really like from Brian McKenzie. And so now we've got an O2 and a CO2 regulation component also. And if we zoom in and we use something like a Moxie or Nears device to look at oxygen usage at the muscle level, which I've used Moxie for probably seven years now and even have a metabolic hard to look at exchange of O2 and CO2 from a full body level. But if we just look at the muscle level, we paradoxically want higher levels of CO2 because it's something called the bore effect that's going to allow us to better off load and exchange CO2 and O2. So if you are paradoxically breathing too fast and almost kind of borderline hyperventilating too soon, that'll actually impair your performance.

11:30Because at the end of the day, it is CO2 that is a primarily regulator of breathing in the brainstem and different areas and actually oxygen is the backup system. And we also paradoxically want a little bit more CO2 at the muscle level to allow the optimal exchange of CO2 and O2. So just with one exercise, we've got regulation of temperature, we have pH changes, we have expanded fuels, and then we also have O2 and CO2 regulation. And the cool part is once you understand each of these components, it allows you to become very specific with your programming. And in the example I just gave, we're doing one exercise for say a wing gate type protocol, so 30 seconds on, and we're hitting all four of those areas with really not that much additional time. So one of the things I wanted to do is to make it very

12:32time efficient. So yes, you can do specific things to hit each area, but you can also do things, what I call like the kind of combo platter, or one intervention. So in this case, doing all out 30 or 60 seconds of work can hit upon multiple different areas. And so that's the nice part is that most people don't have a lot of practice with temp changes, pH changes, and things like that, that most people are not doing a lot of intentional breath work. So adding these to their program, you will see a big effect, and it generally doesn't take a ton of time. Now again, there are some exceptions to this, if you really want to get better at CO2 regulation, that is probably going to take dedicated lower to moderate intensity work to build up over time. But most of them don't really take a ton of time if you know what you're doing. So that's why I've opted to leave all of the interventions

13:33together in the physiologic flexibility certification. And if you want more information on that, definitely hop on to the newsletter. Got a ton of information going out this week. If you have any questions, you can know where to find me, just send me any questions. You can also, get on the newsletter list and hit reply. That's probably the best way to get ahold of me for questions. And then I will put the sales page there down below. So if you've got any questions, hopefully that'll answer it. And it's open starting now as a Monday, April 20th, 2026. The Ru Monday, April 27th, 2026 at midnight Pacific Standard Time. Right now it's only open twice a year. So next time it'll be open will probably be in fall. So it'll be many months again before it's open. I've got some cool bonus items and stuff too for you. And again, if you have any questions, let me know. But so far all the feedback on it's been really good. And I haven't really seen

14:33any certifications or training that's puts all of it together. There's definitely a good stuff breathwork and temperature regulation and pH and things like that. But I still haven't seen anything that puts all of it together. So I think again, I think if you're a coach or trainer, your job is to be sort of a glorified translator. You need to know a lot of the complex physiology and how it works. Then your job is to translate that into specific and simple to do action items. Again, these action items may not always feel simple, like doing 30 seconds all out in the row or definitely doesn't feel simple. But it's relatively simple to program once you know what's going on. The key is to take complex physiology and to translate them into simple action steps. So in the PhysFlex cert, we've got the big picture that explains the concepts, we've got each individual detailed area with all the research. I think I have to go back and look

15:35to see how many final references ended up in the whole course. But it's well over 200. I think I ended up, I got the number written on somewhere. I think I ended up playing well over 400 different studies on it. And then we have 40 simple action items. So we've got in a whole area that says, for temperature regulation, here is your five areas to start. Let me show you exactly how to determine which one to start with. So at the end of the day, you'll understand the concept. You'll know all of the details and you'll have a complete system to take the correct action item for yourself, your athletes, your clients, and apply it right away. Any questions? Hit me up. Open the rest of this week. As always, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Really appreciate it. We've got a really cool podcast coming out later this week on Thursday. A very in-depth discussion about breathwork and different mechanisms. So I'm excited

16:37for that. And hope to see you in the physiologic flexibility certification. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you later this week. This podcast is for informational purposes only. The podcast is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. You should not use the information on the podcast for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease or prescribing any medication or other treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider before taking any medication or nutritional, supplement, and with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this or any other podcast. Reliance on the podcast is solely at your own risk. Information provided on the podcast does not create a doctor-patient relationship between you and any of the health professionals affiliated with our podcast. Information and statements regarding dietary supplements are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Opinions of guests are their own,

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