I get a nap in every day. Second to that is movement. Movement is huge, whether it be a walk. I do a lot of movement prep-work focusing on the areas that I specifically need to, on my off days. Another big piece of movement is making sure that you’re moving well to begin with. This is where like, soft tissue work things like that come in.
If I’m in some sort of compensatory pattern, and I’m moving, it’s not going to help if I’m going for a walk, and I’m favoring one leg, I’m limping a little bit, my pelvis is rotated. Every week, we actually laser my alignment of my hips and my shoulders and my spine. That drives a lot of choices and soft tissue work and retesting to verify that the work is done.
We sell soft tissue treatment tools. I do a lot of work with those. I’ve got an in house LMT, that does work on me. The first session that we do is immediately post squat. It’s about five minutes later, 15 minutes later.
Literally bars still loaded. I’m on the floor, right there after that last squat. This isn’t deep work. This is like getting the tissue relax, getting it kind of turn off that heightened state, but also addressing some of the huge outliers. If I’ve got some of the hip flexors tight on one side, we’ll start, alleviating that.
What we want is, have the least amount of time in compensatory patterns, so that just daily life actually helps with recovery. I see so many people, they’re foam rolling or doing stuff right before they go lift and I’m like, “Why did you wait all week to do that? [laughs] Now you have to do that before you go lift. You didn’t do your homework.”
Those are huge things. A lot of it is about blood flow. One of my companies is Built Fast Formula, and I don’t want to talk up, make advertising pitches. The daily use of basically nitrates is really awesome. People think about nitrates as Pump Products. Increasing vascularity, make you feel pumped and good while you train for aesthetics.
Those same things are enhancing blood flow and recovery. Making sure you’ve got muscle fullness, so that when you’re walking into a workout, you’re full and ready to train.
The daily use of that — that’s what we’ve pioneered and there’s research validating this — has a huge impact on hypertrophy, endurance, recovery. That has been a game changer for me the last year and a half is putting that in. That’s a key. Our product is called VasoBlitz. That has a great mix of nitrates, citrulline, lactate that stimulate this process.
You can also go with things like, beet juice, tomato juice, things like that as well that’ll have some similar properties. That is great. For the sleep I also use a recently added an Uhler or chili pad, which is a chilled mattress cover. You determine what your optimal cool is, to maintain your temperature.
A lot of the reasons that we wake up during the night is because of our temperature getting out of control a little bit. We heat up during the sleep. You can control that environment. That’s been awesome.
On the blood flow side, I also use a vascular flow device. It uses magnets or electromagnetism to take the small capillaries and to expand and contract them. It increases blood flow into those smaller tissues. It’s not effective begin is going and doing a light workout. It’s a passive modality.
That one is probably not worth the investment for an individual user. I’ll just be straightforward with that one. If it’s just for you, it’s probably not worth it. You could do some light work, but it’s another one that I put in there. Minor, but it’s Epsom salt baths. I’m doing those almost daily right now.
The magnesium is going to have an impact on muscle relaxation, but at the end of the day, it’s pretty minimal. That hot bath and just relaxation time, particularly before bed, again is going to help us with a lot of those other things. Stimulating that vagus nerve to relax, rest-and-relax phase, enhancing digestion, getting you ready and improving sleep quality, all these sorts of things are all tied together.
They may seem minor, but they all work together. The bigger process is sleep. [laughs] It is movement. It is blood flow. Making sure that you’re doing the work to address posture, position, and making sure that we don’t have any compensatory patterns lagging with us for any length of time.
Post session, I do blood flow restriction. I do a couple. I’ve just added it in because I dropped that secondary. Even with the nitrates, taking a whole week off, my muscles aren’t as full going into the workout.
I’ll do a little bit of blood flow restriction and a typical, how it would be employed in a rehab process, the two days prior, with some light training, just to get some volumization, get some clearance in the tissues. I’ll do that around my legs.
Post session, I do a different BFR protocol. It’s a passive one. It is developed for recovery. Dr. Mario Novo is my coach on that. He’s one of the leaders in the BFR field.
BFR, I’m not talking about just like slapping some bands on your body. You need to use an ultrasound and measure your venous flow, and know when it comes at what pressure. That happens so you can use the right parameters, and get the results from it and also not endanger yourself.