In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I discuss the critical role of temperature regulation in optimizing athletic and physical performance. I explain why overheating can hinder performance and endurance and how techniques like palmar cooling can help extend physical effort by aiding temperature regulation. I also highlight how specific body areas, such as the palms and face, are key targets for regulating temperature, allowing heat to dissipate efficiently. Lastly, I discuss how temperature can support training recovery while cautioning that extreme cold, such as ice baths immediately after training, can block adaptations. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes—approximately 30 minutes—focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will still be released every Monday. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Physical Performance & Skills, Temperature 00:03:03 Sponsor: AG1 00:04:07 Temperature Homeostasis, Vasoconstriction & Vasodilation 00:06:42 Elevated Heat & Performance Barrier 00:08:26 Regulating Temperature, Glabrous Skin, “AVAs” 00:12:20 Sponsor: Eight Sleep 00:13:49 Strength Training & Heat Effects, Tool: Palmar Cooling 00:17:21 Endurance, Temperature & Willpower 00:20:54 Tool: Resistance Training, Running, Palmar Cooling & Water Temperature 00:24:23 Sponsor: Function 00:26:09 Ice Bath & Blocking Training Adaptations; Tool: Glabrous Skin & Recovery 00:29:31 NSAIDs (Tylenol) & Training 00:31:56 Recap & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures
Chapter 1: What are Huberman Lab Essentials about?
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring you zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. We just closed out the episodes on hormones. Now we are going to talk about how to optimize physical performance and skill learning. There are so many variables to physical performance.
and we can manage physical performance and skill learning from a variety of contexts. I made just a short list of some of the things that come to mind that can powerfully impact physical performance and skill learning. Some of them are what I would consider foundational. They allow you to show up with your current ability. And if you were to disrupt those, you would perform less well.
So things like getting a good night's sleep, things like being properly hydrated, things like being well-nourished, there are supplements, there are drugs, there are different ways to breathe. There are so many tools related to mindset visualization. It's just a vast space, but it's not infinite.
Chapter 2: How does temperature affect physical performance?
And there are a few things in the list of things that can impact and even optimize physical performance and skill learning that have an outsized effect that any of you can use. So today we are going to focus on what I believe to be one of the most powerful tools to improve physical performance and skill learning and recovery. And we'll talk about why that's important. And that's temperature.
Believe it or not, temperature is the most powerful variable for improving physical performance and for recovery. There are two aspects to temperature, of course. There's heat and there's cold. We are mainly going to focus on cold as a way to buffer heat. We're going to talk about cold from the standpoint of thermal physiology.
This is a literature that's rich in scientific information that goes back very deep into the last century. where physiologists and neuroscientists figured out that there are different compartments in your body that heat and cool you differently, and that you can leverage those in order to double, even triple or quadruple your work output, both strength, repetitions, and endurance.
So this is not weak sauce as they say, this is the stuff that can really shift the needle quite a bit. And it's not just about performing well once, It's about being able to perform well and recover from that performance so that you do even better when you're not incorporating these tools. On days where, for instance, you can't access cold or an ice pack or an ice bath or things of that sort.
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. As somebody who's been involved in research science for almost three decades and in health and fitness for equally as long, I'm constantly looking for the best tools to improve my mental health, physical health, and performance.
I discovered AG1 way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast or even knew what a podcast was, and I've been taking it every day since. I find that AG1 greatly improves all aspects of my health. I simply feel much better when I take it. AG1 uses the highest quality ingredients in the right combinations, and they're constantly improving their formulas without increasing the cost.
Whenever I'm asked if I could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be? I always say AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim a special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer.
Let's start by talking about temperature. How does temperature impact the body and its ability to perform, including learn new skills? So everyone probably remembers or has at least heard of the word homeostasis, right? That the body wants to remain in a particular range of temperatures, that it doesn't like to be too hot or too cold. Heating up too much is just plain bad.
It's not just bad for physical performance, it's bad for all tissue health. cells stop functioning, they stop being able to generate energy, they stop being able to digest things, you stop being able to think, and eventually those cells start dying off entirely. Now, you don't want to become hypothermic either. You can die from hypothermia just like you can die from hyperthermia.
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Chapter 3: What is palmar cooling and how does it work?
However, that you have a lot more range to be cold than you do to be too warm. And in general, the idea is to keep the body and brain in a particular range, but anytime we do anything, our body temperature can shift. So for instance, if you were to stand next to a campfire or you were outside on a hot day, various things would happen to dump heat from your body. Now, what are those things?
Well, there are a huge category of them, but the simplest way to think about this process is that when we get cold, we tend to vasoconstrict. Our blood vessels tend to constrict and we tend to push energy toward the core of our body to preserve our core organs.
So our periphery, our hands and our feet and our toes and our legs become colder and our core therefore can maintain blood to that area and we are insulating our core. Conversely, when we heat up our blood vessels vasodilate, they expand a bit and more blood flows to our periphery and more blood can move throughout the body generally. And we will perspire, we will sweat.
Water will actually get pulled out of the blood to some extent, moved up through sweat glands and will be brought to the skin surface so that it can be dumped. We are dumping heat.
So it's very important that if you want to understand how you can leverage temperature for physical performance, you have to understand that you have vasoconstriction to conserve heat, vasodilation to dump heat, that you have sweating to dump heat, and you have conservation of fluids in order to preserve heat.
That's the most important thing in terms of understanding the mechanisms of maintaining and dumping heat. And now the most important thing to understand is that if you get too hot, your ability to contract your muscles stops, okay? I'm going to repeat this because it's vitally important. ATP, is involved in the process of generating muscle contractions.
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Chapter 4: Why are the palms, face, and feet crucial for temperature regulation?
The range of temperatures within which ATP can function and muscles can contract is very narrow. Somewhere around 39 or 40 degrees Celsius, it drops off and you will not be able to generate more contractions. Now it's pretty hot, but that temperature can be generated locally really fast. Put simply, if you get too hot, you stop exercising.
You may not even realize it, but your will to exercise further, your ability to push harder is entirely dependent on the heat of the muscle, both locally and your whole system. If you can keep temperature in range, however, in a proper range, you will be able to do more work. You will be able to create greater output.
You'll be able to lift more weight, more sets, more reps, and you'll be able to run further. Now there are data that I'm going to talk about in a little bit that are absolutely striking that underscore that statement. There are data from my colleague, Craig Heller's lab in the department of biology at Stanford.
Many, if not all the NFL teams are now using this technology as well as military uses it and not just for sports performance, but also firefighters, construction workers, other professions where elevated heat becomes a barrier to performance. And you can leverage this to really improve your workouts. So how do you dump heat in order to perform longer safely?
Well, in order to understand that, you have to understand that the body has three main compartments for regulating temperature, okay? We don't just have a center and a periphery, we have three main compartments. And there's one compartment in particular that all of you, or most all of you, I have to assume have,
and if you can understand how that works you can do tremendous things for your performance and for your recovery one is your core we already talked about that your core organs your heart your lungs your pancreas your liver the core of your body the other is your periphery which are obviously your arms and your legs and your feet and your hands but then there's a third component
which is there are three locations on your body that are far better at passing heat out of the body and bringing cool into the body such that you can heat up or cool your body everywhere very quickly. Those three areas are your face, the palms of your hands, and the bottoms of your feet.
Now the skin on your hands and on the bottoms of your feet and to some extent on your face are called glabrous skin. That's G-L-A-B-O-R-O-U-S, glabrous skin. And what's special about those areas of your body and the glabrous skin is that The arrangement of vasculature of blood vessels, capillaries, and arteries that serve those regions is very different than it is elsewhere in your body.
In these three regions of your hands, your face, and the bottoms of your feet, we have what are called AVAs. AVAs are a very special pattern of vasculature. AVAs are arteriovenous astimoses, A-R-T-E-R-I-O, arteriovenous, V-E-N-O-U-S, arteriovenous anastomosis, A-N-A-S-T-O-M-O-S-E-S. Arteriovenous astomosis, okay? You want to know about arteriovenous astomosis, trust me.
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Chapter 5: How can cooling enhance endurance and training?
They get input from neurons that release norepinephrine and epinephrine, which allows them to contract or dilate. Now there's some rules of physics that talk about how the radius of a pipe and small changes in the radius of a pipe leads to massive increases in the rate and amount of stuff that can flow through that pipe.
It's a rule of physics that says essentially that the radius is proportional to the amount of stuff that can flow through something to the fourth power. What you need to know, even if you don't want to know any of the underlying physics is that these AVAs allow more heat to leave the body more quickly and more cool to enter the body more quickly than other energy sources.
arterial capillary beds throughout the body. In other words, you can heat up best at the face, the palms and the bottoms of the feet, and you can cool down best at the face, the palms and the bottoms of the feet than you can anywhere else on your body.
These three compartments of your body, palms, bottoms of feet and face are your best leverage points for manipulating temperature to vastly improve physical performance. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.
Now I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each and every night. Now, one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to ensure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop about one to three degrees.
And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs.
Now I find that extremely useful because I like to make the bed really cool at the beginning of the night, even colder in the middle of the night and warm as I wake up. That's what gives me the most slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep.
And I know that because Eight Sleep has a great sleep tracker that tells me how well I've slept and the types of sleep that I'm getting throughout the night. Their latest model, the Pod 4 Ultra, also has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees in order to improve your airflow and stop you from snoring.
If you decide to try Eight Sleep, you have 30 days to try it at home and you can return it if you don't like it. No questions asked, but I'm sure that you'll love it. Go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $350 off your Pod 4 Ultra. Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE.
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Chapter 6: What are the practical applications of temperature regulation in sports?
enzymes start getting disrupted and ATP and muscles can't work so well and those muscles can't contract. The enzyme that's involved here is something called pyruvate kinase and pyruvate kinase is essentially a rate limiting step. It's a critical step that you can't bypass if you want muscles to contract and it's very temperature sensitive.
Therefore, if you can keep temperature lower, you can do more work per unit time. You can do more pull-ups. What they essentially did is they brought someone into their laboratory who could do 10 pull-ups on the first set, and they were able to get 10, rest two or three minutes, get another 10, rest two or three minutes.
And if you've ever tried this, what you find is that you start dropping to eight, seven, six, et cetera. Now, the person might not necessarily feel like they're overheating, but the muscle is heating up.
Then with their knowledge that these AVAs, that these portals in the palms are a great way to both heat the body, but also to dump heat from the body, they used a device, and I'll talk about what you can do at home, but a device where they had people hold on to what was essentially a cold tube. Now this is crucial.
The tube can't be so cold that it causes vasoconstriction because then the cold won't pass from the tube to the hand and to the core. But if it's the right temperature, it's neither too hot nor too cold, that cool from the cold tube passes into the hand, these so-called palmar regions, and then cools the core.
And in theory, by lowering body temperature would allow the person or the athlete to do more work. And indeed that's what they saw. The actual data, the specific data showed that subjects could do, at least the subjects they worked with, on their first day with no cooling, about a hundred pull-ups across the timeframe that they had. Then they came back and did the cooling.
They did it the very next day, which if you've ever trained a muscle the very next day, typically you wouldn't do as well in its training if it took any damage from the previous sessions, or you at least do as well, but you probably wouldn't do what they then observed, which was they started cooling after every other set.
The person would just hold the cold tube, cool down the body after every other set, rest, everything else was kept the same. And they found that they went to 180 pull-ups, which is incredible. It's a near doubling. Now you may be asking, what about endurance? And with endurance, similar increases have been shown. And the way that they would do those tests are a little bit different.
And they also point to a really important mechanism of why we stop doing work at all when we perceive that we are putting in too much effort. So it gets right to the heart of the relationship between temperature in muscles and your willpower. Those are directly related. body heat and your willpower are linked in a physiological way.
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