Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Speaking of healthy habits, you talked about your workout routine. I'd love to sort of end on your healthy habits that you do, maybe daily, weekly, your diet, supplements. You talked about your workout and sleep.

Dr. Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So I try and get to bed by about 10, maybe 11 p.m. I don't always succeed. I wake up around 6 a.m. or so. If I don't sleep enough or I don't feel rested, I'll do a 10- to 20-minute, maybe 30-minute NSDR or yoga nidra. I get up, I like to hydrate. First thing I try and do is drink 16 to 32 ounces of water. I like to hydrate in the morning, get outside and get some sunlight. If I can't get the sunlight, I get in front of that 10,000-lux light. I prefer to work out early in the day, in which case I'll drink caffeine if it's a resistance training workout. For me, that's yerba mate or coffee, or both. Sometimes I'll just tell you my workout schedule is really easy to hit on. Same thing I've been doing roughly for 30 years.

Although sometimes I've been less, you know, less focused on it and let it lapse a bit here and there. So first day of the week for me, it falls on a Monday, but it could be any day. I train my legs, calves, hamstrings, quads. I'm a big believer in glute, ham raises, hack squats, leg curls, leg extensions, calf raises. Just keep the lower body strong, keep the posterior chain strong. There are a bunch of different ways to do this. One could do it with kettlebell swings or deadlifts, but those are the things that work well for me and that I can consistently add load or other ways of increasing intensity without getting hurt. Knock on wood. The whole thing takes about an hour. Next day is a rest day, typically after leg day, and I'll try and do...

I don't always do, but some deliberate heat and deliberate cold exposure. In an ideal world, it's 20 minutes of sauna, three to five minutes of cold. 20 minutes of sauna, three to five minutes of cold. 20 minutes of sauna, three to five minutes of cold. And yes, I finish with a warm shower because I'm a human being and I like that. And I will listen to podcasts or books or something while I do it and helps my recovery. It's also just thermal training. It has all the benefits of sauna and cold, and I like to do it on that day. The next day I'll do typically a run, a 25 or 30 minute run at a kind of faster pace, so where I'm breathing hard for most of it, but it's not all out, maybe 85 percent of effort, and that's it. The next day I train my torso.

I know a lot of people roll their eyes and be like, what are you talking about? I do. I do some overhead pressing, some dips, pull-ups or chin ups, and some rowing, and then I do some abdominal work. And I train my neck because it's an important part of the structure of the upper body, to keep the head stable and not get text neck and things like that. I don't train it heavy, but I train my neck and I make sure I do things like rear delts. I really am trying to emphasize outward external rotation of the limbs so we're not hunched over this and heavy in the traps, you know, just upright posture, those kinds of things. And then the next day, the only workout is about 10 minutes long. It's that 10-second hard cycling on the Assault Bike.

20-second rest – ten, twenty, ten, twenty for eight rounds. That's it. VO2 max. Saturdays, another short resistance training workout. So three total for the week. And then it's, you know, biceps, triceps, calves, little neck work, abdominal work. It's kind of just small body part stuff. And then on Sunday, which for me falls on a Sunday, I try and do some long ruck or hike, often socially put on a backpack with some weight. Or if I'm by myself, I'll do, you know, a 60 to 90 minute jog or something of that sort, maybe hike part of it and listen to music or just let my thoughts go. So what it boils down to is six days of training per week, three resistance training sessions, one longer slow run, one moderate one, and one short one.

The total amount of time is actually quite low when you think about it. And then there's that rest day where I may or may not do the heat and cold. This schedule, I could microdissect. But what ends up happening with this schedule is because, for instance, I'll train my legs on Monday directly, but I'm doing the Assault Bike for HIIT on Friday. So my legs sort of get targeted twice per week, once directly, once indirectly. So I don't have to worry about too little frequency of stimulation for things like strength and hypertrophy, although I'm not trying to grow anymore for maintaining muscle. Similarly, I'll train my torso on that one day during the middle of the week, but you're using your arms for that. And then you train your arms directly another day.

And on the arm day, you know, I'm doing some dip-like things, and so you're also hitting your torso muscles. So I never worry that it's not frequent enough. I find that getting into the gym more than three days per week or doing resistance training more than three days per week, I start to lose my motivation for it. But I like to be really focused and targeted when I'm there. And I love long runs, I love moderate runs, and I love the HIIT workout. So I get to do a little bit of everything. And I really want to emphasize that because I'm not a professional athlete or even an amateur athlete. The whole basis of this thing is to be able to do anything. Meaning I can go for a long hike or backpack during the summer with a heavy pack, no problem. I can sprint for the airplane, no problem.

I can lift things without hurting myself, no problem, provided I'm smart about it. I'm not trying to be the strongest, the biggest, or the fastest, or the one with the most endurance. Just kind of all around life. And none of these workouts is longer than an hour. And in many cases they're 12 minutes or 30 minutes. Okay. The daily routine is pretty much consistent, and I should say that schedule, if I travel, things might slide a bit. I might move day one next to day two. I move things around, but I'm careful to never weight train more than two days in a row. I personally don't recover. I don't like doing that. Okay. Nutrition. I just try and emphasize non-processed or minimally processed foods.

I'm not really hungry until about 11 a.m. and then I like some meat, some berries, some rice or oatmeal sometimes, and some vegetable. I'm not low carb. In the afternoon, I'll generally have a snack, maybe a protein drink, some nuts. You know, I do eat, you know, those Maui Nui venison jerky sticks, a bone broth, or something. It's not promotion, it's just a fact. And then for dinner, I tend to emphasize less protein. For me, that works. This runs counter to what everyone says, but I like more vegetables, pasta, rice, risottos. Occasionally I'll go out for a big steak or something like that. But generally the heavier on the starches, not heavy, but heavier on the starches, relatively. And vegetables.

And then I'll finish dinner a couple hours before sleep, ideally, but sometimes I'll finish dinner and collapse. You know, it's just life. I do find I sleep better if I allow a few hours before sleep. In terms of stress modulation and things like that, I do deploy the physiological sigh, which sounds very technical, but two inhales through the nose followed by a long exhale to lungs empty. I try and do that anytime I feel that my stress is too high. My lab published a clinical trial in Cell Reports Medicine, in collaboration with David Spiegel's laboratory at Stanford, showing that five minutes a day of breathwork of cyclic sighing. So inhale, inhale, exhale. Both inhales through the nose. Inhale, inhale, exhale, done as a dedicated practice for five minutes a day led to some interesting changes.

Positive changes in reductions in resting heart rate, reductions in blood pressure, improvements in sleep, mood, et cetera. Not all significant, but several of which were statistically significant. But I don't tend to do breathwork. I tend to just use that physiological sigh whenever I'm feeling kind of overly ramped up. I do drink caffeine. I drink in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. Supplements. Okay, this could be a long discussion. Our friend Brian Mackenzie used to tease me. If you ask me what supplements I take, he'll just shout from the background, all of them. I don't take all of them. But here's what I do take in the morning. I do take Tongkat Ali and Fadogia agrestis. This is kind of for freeing up testosterone and for luteinizing hormone stimulation for me. I've been on it for years.

It works great. It shifted my testosterone and free testosterone in the right direction, subtly. Not super significantly, but subtly and meaningfully. For me, it works. Some people have not had good results with it. Some people have. I have no… By the way, I have no relationship to any supplement company. I do have a relationship to AG1 and LMNT. We can talk about AG1 if you want, but this is not a promotion of any kind. We used to be associated with Momentous. We parted ways on great terms. It just was part and parcel for some other brand relationships we had. So search for best sources if you're going to explore these things. I make it a point to take at least a gram of EPA form of essential fatty acids through in the form of fish oil.

Probably more like 2 grams per day is what I'm shooting for. You've talked a lot about this. I make that a point for me. I feel better. Okay. My blood work looks good and that's something I really strive to do. And then I take a bunch of things that I don't know the extent to which they've really shifted my physiology in the best direction. But I know it hasn't made me worse and I feel better. Okay, what am I talking about? I take a multivitamin with my first meal of the day just to cover any bases that I might be missing out on. I take a ginger capsule. It seems to improve my digestion. I take a couple digestive enzymes when I eat. I take 100 milligrams of zinc with that meal. I do that consistently. I take. Let's see what else is in there. I take a low dose of boron.

There are a few other. And I make sure that I get enough vitamin D and K2. About 5,000 IU of vitamin D per day and some K2 and a little bit of grape seed extract. And that's it. That's it. Before sleep I will use magnesium and apigenin 30 minutes before sleep. And I've been exploring some other things for sleep. In full disclosure, because I just think it's really important. I've experimented with various peptides recently. To be honest, they are so potent in certain directions that impact my sleep that I've started to kind of back away from most of them. But I'm very curious about a lot of them. There's a ton of animal data on BPC-157. So much interest in BPC-157. Very little if any human data. That worries me. But what worries me more is that BPC-157 appears to be angiogenic.

Meaning it grows blood vessels and that can be great or it can be problematic depending on what those vessels are feeding. I'm not saying BPC-157 is bad. I'm just saying this is my caution about it.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: What do you take it for?

Dr. Andrew Huberman: I was taking it—I have a calf injury on one leg that is the result of some nerve damage from repeated skateboarding injuries years ago. I was trying to bring that back and actually it's amazing. I was injecting it directly into the calf for a couple weeks and I actually found I could. And longer actually it was a couple months by the time I finished because I was doing it infrequently. And I found I actually was able to finally contract that calf meaningfully while running and through weight workouts in a way that brought some of it back but it was pretty badly atrophied. But I've been doing other things to try and get the tissue generating again or I should say the neural activation of that calf.

It's not a structural issue that I was born with, it's injury-induced and it feels much better. But I'm currently not taking BPC-157 and I'm worried about prolonged use, that's my concern, prolonged use. Then some of the other peptides like sermorelin, tesamorelin, the so-called growth hormone secretagogues that stimulate growth hormone release. I'm not on growth hormone. My concern about sermorelin was that I would take it, I took it for… infrequently over a period of time. And I noticed that my sleep, I got a lot more deep sleep as measured by my Eight Sleep, but that it obliterated my rapid eye movement sleep like completely gone. And then I. So I stopped taking sermorelin but I wasn't taking it for that long or that frequently.

So what I found for me is that the core set of supplements plus training right, plus life lived in the way I described, some hydration et cetera that seems to work best. And what's my measure of that? Is feelings of vigor, whether or not I can recover from my workouts. Meaning am I getting any progress in terms of loads or other intensity variables or distance or speed over time with the cardiovascular stuff? And the answer is yes. Small improvements over time are really what I'm after or maybe maintaining what I've got because at 48 I'm just interested in staying healthy and I'm sure would love to be even healthier. But I'm also paying attention to how much cognitive vigor I have.

If I'm training so much or paying so much attention to nutrition that I can't engage in work and function that's not good. If I can't sit for three hours and have a conversation because I'm in pain that's not good. Fortunately I've got things in a place where I feel generally good, sometimes great but good most of the time. I still get bad nights' sleep every once in a while. I still stress, you know I don't tend to do cheat days or things like that. I love the occasional piece of pizza or croissant or something like that. But I've also learned that most of the things about taking great care from nutrition, lifestyle, mindset, and the rest creates kind of a heightened sensory experience of life. This is what I think people miss. They think of it as deprivation.

But when you're doing these things and you do them consistently, I find, at least, that, first of all, I love the foods I eat. I love meat, fish, chicken, eggs, vegetables, certain starches, fruit, et cetera, that I enjoy all those things, and I also enjoy all of life so much more, whereas I find that things, for me anyway, alcohol, highly processed foods, they create a kind of cloak over my senses. I don't enjoy life as much, but of course, a really good cookie, like a really good cookie, or…

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Sure.

Dr. Andrew Huberman: You know, that makes sense. And I enjoy those.

So I look at things, all of it, exercise, nutrition, supplementation, you know, any kind of NSDR, things like that, as, do they allow me to lean into life with more vigor, with more curiosity, with more texture, or do they kind of consume a lot of time and don't allow me to do that? And in my experience, the things that I described, and there are a few others I do allow me to live life better. It's not like I'm sleeping all the time, or I'm neurotically saying, okay, everybody, it's 8:30. I got to go to sleep. And look, I respect people's individual choices. I actually, the other day, saw for the first time in a long time, Bryan Johnson, who's whole, like, wholeheartedly and whole everything, devoting his entire energy to being the most measured human and longevity stuff. And that's what floats his boat. Me, I like to have some flexibility on my schedule in life. And if it costs me a few years of life, I'm willing to make that trade.