GUEST SERIES | Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimal Nutrition & Supplementation for Fitness

If you're only covering symptom, you're really missing signal. Which is, if you're constantly tired throughout the day and all you're doing is giving yourself a number of Alpha GPCs and caffeine... are you really just using that to allow your poor sleep hygiene to happen? If you took those away, I bet you would actually start addressing your sleep.

A quick tip here is wash your sheets at least once a week. One of the most common places that people get allergens in the air is actually from accumulation on your sheets ... Keep your pets out of your bedroom, and certainly keep them off your bed.

There's been a number of studies on sleep deprivation as well with creatine—that it can help. So, obviously sleep deprivation will generally reduce cognitive function, and creatine can ameliorate some of that drop.

A body weight reduction of as low as 2% via dehydration—so, imagine you're doing a bout of exercise, and you're sweating, and you lose 2% of your body weight—that alone is enough to reduce accuracy and performance.

It's just quite clear at this point: Sleeping with a partner in your bed, it's just not very good for sleep ... You can get two smaller beds and put them right next to each other. If you can actually have separate sheets, that alone can be helpful.

Half an ounce per pound of body weight is a rough rule. So if you weigh, again, 200 pounds, that would mean you drink 100 ounces of water a day.

I've started taking rhodiola before workouts, and found that I could push much harder much longer through the workout. ... What I've noticed is I can complete the entire 60 minutes with minimal fatigue.

Depending on what's keeping you up, sometimes we recommend just getting up and getting it done ... Especially if the task only, literally, would take 10 or 15 minutes. It may ruin your sleep, but you're going to have ruined sleep anyways.

If you're waking up and peeing multiple times a night, that's called nocturia. That is a very, very good sign that either one of two things happen: one, you have some sort of sleep disorder, or two, you're drinking outrageous amounts of water.

The faster you drink water, the faster it's going to expand blood volume. The faster it expands blood volume, the faster you get rid of it.

The total amount of protein you ingest throughout the day is probably a bigger determinant for things like muscle growth than the timing. So, the post exercise anabolic window—it doesn't necessarily matter. Carbohydrate is different. That does matter. It needs to be around and available.

If you're doing something where you're trying to really work hard... what you want to look for is a number something in the area of, like, half a gram of carbohydrate per pound of body weight ... Protein is about half of that—so, it's about a quarter of your body weight.

The difficult part with rhodiola, to be quite honest, is getting it from a high-quality brand and source ... If you've ever ran into somebody who has taken rhodiola, and they're like, 'It didn't do anything for me,' it's possible; nothing works for everyone; it also could just be very poor quality sourcing.

The end goal anytime I coach somebody is to get them into a physiological state in which they require no or close to no supplementation ... We should really be in a position where our lifestyle, our sunlight exposure, our stress management, our physical activity, our sleep, and our hydration, and our whole food nutrition provide us almost everything we need.

There's excellent information and data coming out on the benefits of bone mineral density and creatine. There's a ton of work looking at a host of cognitive factors—from memory, executive function, to effects, potentially, on even things like depression, mood, to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all forms of neurodegenerative disease.

There's probably a few things you should do before worrying about the alkalinity of your water, and I'll just leave it at that.

Once a night or so of urination is fine. If it is routinely or consistently more than two, you need to make some adjustments. Start with hydration.

Generally, the number we say is 3 hours. In the 3 hours preceding sleep, you want to basically limit fluid intake to sipping as needed.

Eat, mostly, real whole foods. Why? ... A huge determinant of your hydration status is your food choices.

The number we typically tell people is something like 400 to 500 mL of water in the hour preceding the training. So, that's like 13 to 20 oz.

In terms of macronutrients, the total amount throughout the day is more important, generally, than the timing of them—which is why you can do things like have a bunch of carbohydrate at night, not eat the next morning, and lift, and be just fine. It doesn't matter that you didn't have them in a few hours before.

For all pill/capsule-based supplements where I'm looking for a very targeted effect... I really believe strongly that single-ingredient formulations are the way that you can build a rational approach to supplementation.

If you're eating highly processed foods, almost by association, that means they've been dehydrated ... In addition, they have also been highly salted, in general. So, now we're in this position where we're under-hydrated and highly salted. Bad spot.