Episode 381: PhysFlex Cert Closing Tonight: Eustress vs Distress, the 4 Pillars, and Applying Recovery Tools the Right Way

Let's go on on. Welcome back to the Flex diet podcast. I'm your host, Dr.

Micci Nelson on this podcast. We talk about all things to increase muscle,

increase performance, prove body composition, do all of it, a flexible framework

without destroying your health. Today talking a little bit about the Fizz Flex

surge. It does close tonight, Monday, April 27th at midnight, Pacific

Standard Time. This is 2026. I'll put a link down below with it has all the

details and all the information. If you get to it after that day, you'll still be

able to get on to the wait list for the next time it's open, which is most

likely going to be this looks like probably October of 2026. So you still

got a little bit of time. I also got a couple bonus items there for you and just

wanted to give you a little bit more information about the Fizz Flex

Sert and then send you this reminder below. If you're looking for ways to be

more robust, anti-fragile, increase your recovery ability and just generally be

harder to kill this is the certification for you. So the level one will be the

Flex diet certification, which covers nutrition and recovery, a little bit of

exercise and movement. And then the level two is the physiologic flexibility

certification. We're once you're pretty good with your nutrition recovery and

basic sleep. This would be the next level of interventions that you can do to

increase your ability to be more anti-fragile and just more resilient to

overall stressors both in your life and from training. We cover the four pillars

of homeostatic regulation, which is number one temperature. Can you be exposed

to warmer and colder temperatures and do okay? Two would be pH. Three would be

fuels, which we expand into lactate and ketones as fuel sources. And four is air,

which is how you manage oxygen and CO2. If you get better at each one of those

areas in my biased opinion, that makes you much more resilient and robust. The

good part is like the biggest complaint about adding additional things to your

training is the factor of time. And while it is true that some of these

interventions, like we talk a fair amount about, to zone two cardio, they do add

more time. Zone two cardio is probably the biggest one from a time

investment. However, most of them are relatively short. If you're doing a

true high intensity interval training, you most people I've worked with, they

actually do less work. Although the quality has to be higher and your perceived

exertion normally is much harder. So you're going to harder, but for shorter

periods of time, therefore keeping the quality of work high. Most people I work

with, if they start sauna or cold water immersion, they tend to add too much

time or intensity too fast. I've seen much better results with going slower on

that. So less time in the cold or in the heat and changing the parameters. So

it's not as bad, meaning temperature wise for sauna is going to be a little

bit lower if you can control the temperature. Sometimes you can't. Ditto with

cold water immersion with cold water immersion. Most people, if you can

control temperature and time, if you have somewhere you can do it yourself or

if you're just using cold water in a shower, you may be limited. However, if you

can control that, I have people started around 50 degrees Fahrenheit for

literally just 30 to 60 seconds, which really isn't that much. And the

progression that I did myself took about two years to get down to 42 to 43

degrees for five minutes. Now, again, the model we're using for this is what's

called the use stress EU STRESS. So it's stress that you can apply to

yourself and your physiology, but you can generally recover from in a

relatively shorter period of time. So I'm a huge fan of doing more of the

use stress model with increased frequency and not as much on the stress. So if

you told me, okay, my options are to do one super hardcore sauna session a week

or I can do a little bit shorter duration, a little bit less temperature, but do

more frequent, ie, maybe three to four days a week. I believe the ladder is

going to be far superior. This kind of goes back to my training philosophy, too,

that high quality work done with higher frequency. I feel you're going to get

much better results than more infrequent, but high intensity training. I just

feel like the adaptations you get are much better. This goes all the way down the

list from motor learning to nutritional components support, muscle protein

synthesis, etc, etc. The same idea would apply to the interventions. You would

do that are covered in the physiologic flexibility. So I like doing things that

are more of the use stress model that are within the ability of your body to

recover within 24 to 48 hours. Now, again, there is a time and a place for

distress training, distress, meaning it's going to take you much longer to

recover, typically in the model that I'm covering in the search. And even in the

flex diet, sir, I use this exact same model. Distress training is typically going

to be a competition day or for people who are not competing a test day, taking a

little bit of a D load and you're checking your performance. Or you've got a

huge amount of life stress that happens. And sometimes you just end up with

distress training due to life events, you possibly do to travel or other

things going on. The key is deciding that you are going to do a distress

session on purpose. Most people, if I view their training, people, these are

people who are training, they're probably intermediate to advanced level

already. They're making it to the gym three to four times a week. They're

doing mostly intelligent training. I feel they get better result by turning

down the intensity, doing more high quality work, and then adding frequency

first and then duration. So if they're lifting three days a week, they could

maybe go to four days a week, but have the sessions be a little bit paradoxically

easier. I think you're going to get much better adaptations. So same thing with

the interventions here with the physiologic flexibility certification. The

good part of that model is that the time that you spend on them is actually

going to be less per session. So again, it's these same principles. I get

obsessed with one or the overarching principles that govern this. Once we

figure those out, it is rather easy to figure out how to apply them. And the

nice part is these principles don't really change that much. But I still use

the use stress distress model in the flex diet search. Again, I use that for

the physics like cert also. And then how the course is set up a similar idea

as in the flex diet search, you have your big picture of what is a concept of

homeostasis or your homeostatic regulations or your regulators and how this

applies to all of your physiology. That's going to be part one is the big

picture that's going to iterate and go through the entire certification. As

you mentioned, we've got the four pillars. So we're going to be a detail the

technical video. What is the research? A what are the mechanisms involved? Again,

this is based on human data. There is some fuzzy rat data in there once in a

while for mechanistic stuff where we don't have human data yet. Most of it is

based on actual human data. You'll learn the intricacies of it. And then part

three is the explicit action items. This is so that you can learn how to

directly apply it. So all the best information in the world doesn't do

anything unless you can apply it. And one of the issues I've seen with other

certifications is they're either pretty good on kind of the research side. They

get that generally correct. But they are completely miserable on how do you

actually apply it? And I've seen other things where the application of it is

pretty good. But the rationale why is either completely wrong or not even

existing at all. My bias belief is that you want to understand the context. If

you don't understand the context of how you are applying these at worst, you're

at the best case, you're not very effective. Worst case scenario, you

potentially can be dangerous or you can drive people into the wrong

adaptations. The example I used on a previous podcast here was if you have

someone where they're over breathing, they are off-gassing or exhaling too

much CO2. The last thing you would want them to do is a lot of super

ventilation methods, i.e. kind of Wim Hof type style breathing. Again, that

doesn't mean that type of breathing is bad or incorrect. It just depends upon

the situation. If you have someone who is already over breathing, they are

off-gassing, they're exowing too much CO2. The respiratory rate is elevated

at night. The last thing you want to do is push them further down those

adaptations. You want to go the opposite direction. If anything, you'd want to do

CO2 retention methods. I talked about this in the previous podcast. You'd want to

do some zone two stuff, some cadence stuff, nasal breathing. Again, this is a

lot of from shift adapts. Brian McKenzie, his stuff, Dr. Annie Gelpin,

has talked a fair amount about this and other people too. I even Patrick McEwen

and his book has talked a lot about that too. So again, neither one of those

interventions are necessarily bad. We just want to make sure that you're applying

the right intervention at the right circumstance, which is why you need to

understand one, the overall context of why you're doing this, where it fits in.

And then you do want to understand the physiologic mechanisms so that you can

think your way through the hard part with a lot of these more complex

physiology topics is there is not a simple straightforward easy answer. If there

was, I would have written this as an ebook and it would be five pages and would

just tell you exactly what to do. Unfortunately, we're not at that level of

understanding physiology yet. We probably will not get there for anytime soon. The

good part is we can understand the physiology and in the cert, I explain it to

you in terms that you can understand. You don't need a thesaurus next to you to

try to figure all this out. And then you can apply them either to yourself or

if you're a coach with your clients. And then when you do that, you get the

right intervention in the right context. And their adaptations and the results

are going to be greatly in hand. The beautiful thing about physiology is that

it's always constantly adapting. If that is true, the question then is what is

the stimulus that we want it to adapt to? We want to make sure that is going to

push your physiology into the right direction. I'm big of pet peeve with a lot of

these interventions from cold water immersion to sauna to breath techniques is

that not that they're necessarily bad per se is that the concept of context

isn't talked about. It is typically one intervention that is pushed as the

be all end all intervention just do this and it'll fix all your problems. And

for the right context, that can be true for the wrong context. Again, that's

going to drive you in the wrong direction. Similarly again, if I'm picking on

Wim Hof breathing just because it's popular and easy to pick on, I've had some

athletes where the heart rate variability, their stress scores were getting

completely screwy. One athlete in particular a couple of years ago, we went

through all their training, went through their nutrition, went through their

sleep, we're looking at it with or have all of everything as being monitored.

Life made I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. But I asked them,

I said, what are you doing different? They're like, oh, I started doing cold

water immersion at like 42 degrees for five minutes every day. And I added in

10 minutes of Wim Hof breathing beforehand. What we saw was their stress went

absolutely through the roof because adding cold water immersion, adding Wim

Hof breathing, both of those things can be very beneficial. But they are

stressors upon your system. And this athlete had never done either one of

those and not used a use stress approach. And this was more of a distress

training. Again, added on top of their other training that was already on the

razor's edge. So that was enough to push them over where the resting heart rate

went up, their HRV drop, they're having a hard time recovering. They felt

like crap. They felt good after cold water immersion and the Wim Hof

breathing. But only lasted a couple hours. And then they would crash afterwards.

And they started consuming more caffeine to get through their training and

that hard time sleeping at night. Again, we need to back up and look at what

is some of the root cause of this. Keep an eye on stress. Go back to what is

a model that we are using to evaluate all this. Again, I'm biased to the use

stress versus a distress model. And look at each particular intervention.

The good part is when we find the right intervention, we can see some positive

additive results by incorporating these things in. So that's today's very

short podcast. I just wanted to provide some context that some of these

interventions, again, can be super useful, which is a whole point of the

certification. But the other side of that coin is that some of these

interventions can actually push you into the wrong direction if they are not

want to apply correctly and to apply to the correct circumstance or

context. You need to understand the big picture. You need to understand each

intervention. And then you need to know how to correctly apply each one of

those. And to again, is the framework that I use for both the flex

side cert and the fizz flex cert.

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