Although fighters and other combat athletes have used the sauna over the years to drop those last few extra pounds of water weight, one of its best uses is for recovery and regeneration.

This is something the Finnish know well. The sauna has been a part of their culture for generations.

The sauna falls into the stimulation category of regeneration because it drives your heart rate up and core temperature up, meaning it’s a form of stress because it activates the stress response system.
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That means it can be particularly effective during periods of intense training where you’re starting to see HRV consistently higher than normal. This can happen during prolonged periods where you’re under more stress than you can effectively recover from.

When this happens, your parasympathetic “rest & recover” system can become burnt out from constantly trying to kick your body into a recovery state.

This is often called parasympathetic overreaching or overtraining.

When you get to this point, it’s common to feel general fatigue, lack of motivation to train, higher HRV, lower resting HR, and lower heart rates during training, excessive sleep, etc.

The sauna works because it provides a very mild sympathetic stimulus that triggers the body’s adaptive mechanisms without placing physical stress on the body.

It’s akin to jump starting a car; it gets things going again.

This is pretty the same as how all stimulation regeneration techniques work, as we’ve discussed in previous lessons.

Why not use this method all the time as a preventive measure for overtraining?

It can be easy to think that using the sauna, or other types of stimulation methods, all the time is a good way to really turbocharge your recovery.

The problem with this idea is that you need a certain amount of daily and weekly stress to force the body to adapt to it and get more fit.

If you are constantly using these types of regeneration methods to promote recovery all the time, you may lose the benefits of the loading.

Remember, stress itself isn’t bad. Without it, you’d never improve.

It’s too much stress for too long, i.e. more than your body can recover from, that’s what you need to avoid.

If you feel like you have to use the sauna or other regeneration methods all the time, you’d probably be better off dialing back the level of stress in the first place.

The key is knowing when to use the sauna, as well as getting the dose right, as we’ve covered before. And that’s why we pay attention to your Morpheus recovery score and trends in your HRV.

Using The Sauna the Right Way
 

 
To get the most out of the sauna, it’s important to be pretty specific in how you use it.

Just hopping in for a few minutes and getting out probably won’t do a whole lot for stimulating regeneration.

Make sure to use a dry sauna for this method, not a steam room, wet sauna, or infrared sauna. The hotter you can get it, the better–preferably over 200° F (93.3°C).

Next, to manipulate your body temperature, it’s valuable to have shower close by to really do the method correctly. Fortunately, most saunas tend to be in locker rooms or near a shower.

Assuming you have a dry sauna that gets very hot and a nearby shower, you’ve got everything you need to use the sauna to promote recovery so you can keep training or get back to it.
 

 
Note that if you overuse any regeneration method by doing it all the time, it will lose its effectiveness.

That’s why we’re covering a range of regeneration methods in these lessons. By the end of this 30-day challenge, you’ll know how to use different ones depending on the situation.

You can use the sauna for a week or two at a time, then use something else the next time you need to promote recovery.

The Ultimate Sauna Recovery Method

What I’m going to share with you is an old-school Russian sauna method. It takes some time to do, but it’s an effective line of defense against chronic stress when you need it.

Try to follow these specific guidelines as closely as possible for the greatest recovery benefit:

1. Preheat the sauna to the highest temperature possible, at least 200° F (93.3°C) is preferable
2. Get in the sauna and stay until you first break a sweat, then get out
3. Rinse off for 5-10 seconds in lukewarm water, then get out of the shower, pat yourself off, wrap a towel around yourself, and sit down for 2-3 minutes
4. Get back in the sauna and stay for 5-10 minutes. The original method calls for staying in until 150 drops of sweat have dripped off your face. For most people, this is 5-10 minutes
5. Take another shower, this time make it as cold as possible, and stay in it for 30 seconds. Let the water cover your head completely the entire time
6. Get out of the shower, pat yourself dry, wrap a towel around yourself, and sit down and relax until you stop sweating completely and your skin is dry. This typically takes anywhere from 3-10 minutes
7. Return to the sauna and stay in for 10-15 minutes, then get out
8. Repeat steps 5 and 6
9. Get back in the sauna for another 10-15 minutes, then get out
10. Take another shower, this time make it fairly warm, and stay in for 1-2 minutes
11. Dry yourself completely off, lay down and relax for 5-10 minutes

The reason this method is so effective is because it manipulates heat and body temperature to stimulate both the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems in sequence. When used the right way, it can be an incredibly effective way to boost your recovery.

Action step:

Identify the most convenient sauna/shower for you to use in your area. Common places include large gyms, bath houses/spas, apartment complexes, etc.

If your Morpheus recovery data shows you’d benefit from regeneration methods, (your HRV is climbing and your resting HR is dropping in spite of feeling chronically fatigued/lethargic), give the sauna method a try.

Hydrotherapy is probably the most widely used treatment for ailments in human history. It’s been written about since pre-biblical times. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, prescribed soaking in spring water for all types of illness.
 

 
Given that more than 99% of the molecules that make up our body are water, it’s not surprising that it can have healing properties. In today’s world, there are almost endless types of water-based therapies available, but the two we’ll cover in this lesson are:

• Warm/hot water soaking
• Aquatic exercise

These tend to be the most easily accessible, have measurable benefits, and can be directly connected to recovery.

Warm/hot water soaking
 

 
Soaking a heated pool of water is probably the single oldest therapy there is. All it takes is a few minutes of immersion to start to feel better. Common benefits associated with soaking in water include:

• Reduced pain
• Better movement
• Increased immunity
• Lower blood pressure
• Mental relaxation

Not surprisingly, these are many of the same benefits reported from exercise. The simple reason for that is that working out and soaking in a warm or hot tub are both linked to increased blood flow throughout the body.

If you measure your heart rate in a hot tub, you may be surprised to learn that it can go all the way up to 100bpm or more—the same as a moderate speed walk for many people.

This is because when you’re submerged in warm water, blood pressure decreases and makes it much easier for your heart to pump blood and oxygen. At the same time, water immersion reduces some of the effects of gravity and allows for general muscle relaxation.

The end result is that you get many of the same effects and benefits of exercise by increasing circulation, without putting stress on your muscles and supporting tissues.

When you get out of the water, your body shifts more towards a parasympathetic recovery state as it reduces core body temperature and lowers heart rate.

This is why you often feel so relaxed and sleep better.

The key to using hot water therapy to promote recovery effectively is getting the dose right. Using a temperature that’s too high or spending too much time in the water can have the opposite effects.

The temperature range most well-supported in the research is 100-104° F (38-40° C), which is close to our natural human body temperature. Going significantly cooler than that may reduce some of the benefits, and going much hotter can cause too much of an increase in core body temperature.

A general guideline to shoot for is to soak for between 10-30 minutes, depending on the temperature of the water. The rule of thumb is the hotter the water, the fewer minutes you should soak in it.

A particularly good time to soak is around 90 minutes before you plan to go to bed. There’s research that this can speed up how quickly you are able to fall asleep, while also supporting better sleep quality as well.

Aquatic exercise
 

 
While soaking in warm/hot water can provide a range of health benefits, exercising in water has even more potential to speed up recovery. It’s not just for the elderly or the injured.

More and more athletes and teams are turning to training in the water to build fitness, enhance recovery, and stay healthy.

That’s because training in the water can supercharge blood flow even higher than soaking, with research showing circulation to deep tissues can be up to 200% greater when submerged up to the neck.

This is due to the movement and the pressure changes that come from being surrounded in a larger pool of water.

Given how easy it is to move underwater, you can perform almost an infinite number of exercises and movement patterns.

A particularly effective way to use the pool to promote recovery is to focus on muscles that were worked at higher intensities the previous day.

Getting in the pool and doing 3-4 sets of 8-10 jump squats or lunges in the water a day after a hard lower body workout can have a huge impact on soreness and recovery.

This type of training is also perfect for incorporating the recovery workouts we’ve talked about.

A simple, but highly effective, pool workout to help drive recovery is one I used for years with some of the world’s best combat athletes:

• 5 min of deep water treading to warm up
• 5 min of shallow water mobility exercises
• 4-6 sets of 8-10 reps of jump squats/lunges or other exercises
• 5-10 min lap swim
• 5 min of deep water floating for cool down

 

 
The advantage to this type of training is that it doesn’t take much time, won’t add any stress on your joints or soft tissues, and it drives a ton of blood flow throughout every tissue in the body.

Even a single pool workout per week can make a noticeable difference in your ability to recover from your higher intensity sessions and the stress of life.

Taken together, soaking in warm/hot water and training in the water have been used for centuries for a reason. They can effectively boost your recovery while supporting all-around health, wellness, and even longevity.

Action step

Try taking a hot bath 7 nights in a row around 90 minutes before bedtime. Look at your total sleep time and average HRV across the week and see if you notice a difference in your recovery.

If you have access to a pool, try to fit in at least one recovery workout in the water this week.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of what recovery is, why it’s so important, and how it’s connected to your lifestyle, it’s time to dig into some popular tools and methods promising to help you improve it.

Over the next 10 lessons, I’m going to help you separate fact from fiction and dig into how to incorporate regeneration strategies into your overall recovery program.

To get things started, we need to talk about the basics of how all regeneration methods work to begin with.
 

 
Relaxation vs. stimulation

Although all the biological processes and mechanisms around adapting to stress are incredibly complex, the basic principle underlying efforts to speed up recovery is quite simple.

It all comes down to getting the body to expend less energy dealing with stress, i.e. turn down the stress response, and spend more energy on recovery by turning up the recovery response.

This means shifting the body away from a sympathetic state to a more parasympathetic state.

While there are almost endless strategies to achieve this, there are generally two different approaches. They can be defined as either relaxation or stimulation, depending on the immediate effect they have on the body.

The goal of relaxation methods is to cause an immediate decrease in sympathetic activity.

These types of methods generally revolve around things like mindfulness drills, meditation, breathing, float tanks, and soft tissue therapies.

During the activity itself, the goal is to drive heart rate down and HRV up.
 

 
This is an indication that the body is turning down the stress-response system and shifting more towards a recovery state.

The other path is stimulation.

In this case, the concept of hormesis becomes important to understand.

This concept can be best summarized by a 16th century alchemist named Paracelsus, who was one the first to write about it when he said:

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

What this means is simply that the body often responds to the same thing very differently depending on the dose. This is particularly true when it comes to the stress of training.

The right amount of training can increase your fitness to almost unimaginable levels compared to where you started. Too much training, however, can leave you broken down, injured and less fit.

This same concept applies to stimulation types of regeneration methods.

They work by putting the body under a relatively small amount of stress in order to trigger the body to then activate the recovery response afterwards.

Things like recovery workouts, cold plunges, contrast therapy, the sauna, etc., all drive heart rate up when you’re doing them. This has the added benefit of increasing blood flow, another key part of recovery because it drives oxygen and nutrients into the tissues.
 

 
After you’re done with these types of methods, you should see a decrease in heart rate and feel increasingly relaxed in the hours following.

The key here is the dose.

Too much of any stimulation method can cause too much stress and slow down recovery rather than speed it up.

Do a recovery workout for 90 minutes straight or spend so much time in the sauna that you become dehydrated, and you won’t do your recovery any favors.

Where do regeneration methods fit in?

The use of regeneration methods can be incredibly powerful when they are incorporated correctly, or a waste of time (or worse) when they’re not.

With so many tools and tech popping up all the time, it can be tempting to buy into the hype and go all-in on a single method.

But just as with training itself, there is no one-size-fits-all approach or single method that always works, all the time, for everyone. The key is to be strategic about when and how you use regeneration strategies.

This is where it becomes hugely valuable to use Morpheus to:

A) evaluate how well your regeneration methods are working
B) build a personalized regeneration strategy

In the coming lessons, we’ll cover exactly how to do that.

Action step

Are you using any regeneration strategies now? Have you used any in the past?

If so, make a quick list and see where they fall in the categories of relaxation or stimulation.

This will help you choose the right methods as we talk more about putting together your personal regeneration strategy.

Written by Guest Expert Robb Wolf, former research biochemist and 2X New York Times/WSJ Best Selling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired To Eat.

So, you just wrapped up a solid training session and are wondering what to eat to optimize your hard work.

What do you eat?

Well, it depends.

What is your primary goal? Fat loss? Muscle gain? Improving a specific physical attribute like endurance, strength or power?

Your primary goal should dictate not just a significant portion of how you compose your post-training meal (including timing), but it should inform your overall nutritional strategy.

Ok, so your primary goal is a biggie in this story, but perhaps the next most important feature is what you actually DID for training.

A blistering session of hard glycolytic intervals will likely need a very different post-training meal than a neurological-based strength session with low volume but high intensity (based on a percentage of repetition maximum).

Instead of tackling all this with iron-clad specifics (“eat exactly this”), let’s look at this more as the parameters that will influence what you eat after your workout.

I think the following is a solid way to think about post-training nutrition:

Protein

 
Regardless of your goals and training, orienting your meal towards ADEQUATE protein is going to be a win.

“Adequate protein” is arguably anything north of about 30g of dense protein that is rich in branched chain amino acids, particularly leucine. This appears to be a minimum threshold to hit if we are to produce anabolic signaling, nutrient partitioning and all the good things we associate with protein.

30g is by no means the top end here, but should rather be viewed as a minimum.

Carbs

 
Total amount of carbs will be based on your training, goals and individual physiology. Some people do well on a high carb intake, others thrive on lower relative levels.

Higher intensity, glycolytic activities will produce a greater need for carb intake,, while more neuro-based strength work will likely require less.

Fats

 
Similar to carbs, fat intake will be highly dependent on your individual situation.

Some people do quite well on lower total fat intake while others are crushed by this type of plan. Ultra-endurance athletes appear to benefit (in general) from a fat-centric dietary approach (although targeted carbs are critical for most).

So, how do we take the above and put something together that looks like a post-training meal?!

1. Make sure to hit that minimum of 30g dense protein.
2. Be aware of the tradeoffs of fat and carbs as they relate to your needs, specific training etc.
    
   Hard glycolytic sessions necessitate more carbs, a genetic predisposition towards carb intolerance may reduce carb need and/or efficacy. You likely have a sense of where you are in this story.
3. The post training meal should constitute between 20-33% of your daily calories. If you eat 3 meals per day, that 33% level is likely good. If you eat more meals, you can certainly drop that down closer to the 20% amount.

 
I know this is a somewhat vague prescription, so how do we know if we are getting all this right?

• You should be making gains towards your primary goal.
• You should notice improvements in how you look, feel and perform
• Your average HRV score should increase and/or remain at a favorable level.

Based on these guidelines, we can tweak the timing, amounts and ratios of our post-training nutrition to optimize for our individual needs.

With the popularity of Fitbit and other step trackers, you could probably ask any grade-school kid how many steps people should get each day and you’d get the same answer: 10,000.

But where did this number actually come from? And does it have anything to do with health and fitness?

To answer these questions, we have to go back in time to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

In the leadup to the Olympic Games, the Japanese government tried to promote awareness around being active. And in the wake of all that promotion, an opportunistic Japanese company created the “Manpo-Meter”, which literally translates to “step meter.”

Not the most exciting marketing. So, the Manpo-Meter soon became the “Manpo-Kei Meter,” or the “10,000 step meter.”

And that is literally it. All the magic beyond 10,000 steps/day lies in a clever marketing campaign to sell pedometers, not in research or coaching experience.

Which leads us to the natural question of how many steps do you actually need?

How many steps do you really need?

The short answer is that it’s not a number, it’s a range.

New research shows that the floor of that range is around 7,000 steps/day (Paluch et al, 2010). This appears to be enough activity to significantly lower the risk of premature, all-cause mortality in both men and women compared to people who move less.

Intuitively, a minimum number of steps/day makes sense. We know that moving around is an important part of being healthy.

It’s also a number that’s generally enough to support recovery and it’s the number you’ll need to hit each day to earn points throughout the challenge.

But if 7,000 is the minimum number of steps you should take, what’s the maximum? And why is there a maximum in the first place?

To get to the heart of the story, we have to understand the connection between energy and activity.

The easiest way to think of activity is turning energy (in the form of calories) into movement.

The further you go, the more energy it takes to get you there.

On the one hand, we’ve talked about how movement supports recovery and is crucial for health, wellness, and longevity.

On the other hand, energy is also your body’s most important, and limited resource.

The same energy that powers your steps is also required to fuel your workouts, repair damaged tissues, recover from training, power your brain, and perform basic biological functions.

So, if you spend a ton of energy on activity, there will be less available to go towards other areas that are important for health and fitness.

That means to fully answer the question of how many steps are too many, we have to get an idea of roughly how much energy your body’s metabolism can produce a day in the first place.

The metabolic ceiling—why more is not always better

The concept of the metabolic ceiling comes from research by Dr. Herman Pontzer. It started when he was studying a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa called the Hadza tribe.

He wanted to find out how many more calories they burned per day than other, less active populations like those in the west.

When his team crunched all the numbers, he was shocked to find that even though the Hadza were far more active, they ultimately burned roughly the same amount of calories each day.

While it might not make intuitive sense that if you go 20,000 steps a day you’re not actually burning more total calories per day than if you only go 10,000 steps, that’s what his research showed.

The reason for this is what we’ve been discussing. Your body has a limit to how much energy it can produce in a day. Just because the Hadza moved more didn’t change the rules of metabolism.

Dr. Pontzer followed up his initial research to try to better understand these rules of metabolism and what the upper limits are.

Through his work, he discovered this limit appears to be right around 2.5 x the amount of calories your body needs to just stay alive each day. This is also known as your basal metabolic rate or BMR.

So, if your BMR is 1,000 calories, then the most calories your body can produce in a single day will be right around 2,500.

While it’s possible to exceed this limit for short periods of time, his research showed that even top endurance athletes and people doing long, high-mileage treks ultimately ended up falling within this 2.5 x BMR number.

He coined this term the metabolic ceiling.

Your activity sweet spot

The important lesson to learn from Dr. Pontzer’s research is that there is a real cost to being too active. It forces your body to pull energy away from other important areas like recovery, regeneration, and even the immune system.

If you’re trying to improve your fitness, it’s counterproductive to put so much energy into moving and training that your body doesn’t have enough left over to drive recovery and make you more fit.

Because all steps aren’t created equal and there’s a difference between working out and walking, it’s better to consider the upper limit of daily activity in terms of energy (calories) rather than just step count.

To do this, you’ll need to estimate your own metabolic ceiling.

Most people have never had their basal metabolic rate tested before, but you can use what’s called the Mifflin-St Jeor equation to estimate it.

You can find calculators for this formula online. Once you’ve input your height, weight, and age, it will give you an estimated BMR.

From there, multiply this number by 2.5 to get the maximum amount of energy (calories) your body can consistently produce each day.

Using Morpheus and a connected activity tracker, you can gauge how many calories you burn at different activity levels each day. You’ll also be able to see the difference in daily calories and steps depending on your training.

It’s also important to keep in mind that just because the upper limit is 2.5 x BMR, it doesn’t mean that’s how many calories/steps you should shoot for every day. You want to give yourself a bit of a buffer and make sure your body always has plenty of energy to go towards recovery.

This also means it’s a smart strategy to adjust your activity and calories each day based on your recovery in Morpheus.

If your recovery is lower, you want to make sure you have plenty of energy available for the body to repair and regenerate itself. That means sticking closer to the 7,000 steps per day floor than to the upper limit.

When your recovery is higher, on the other hand, then you can be more active and spend more calories on training without worrying about it potentially slowing down your recovery.

Using this strategy, you might not win any competitions for the most steps, but staying within your activity sweet spot each day will help you win the game of fitness (and do well in the challenge).

Action step

Take a few minutes to calculate your BMR using the Mifflin-St. Jeor formula and then multiply by 2.5 to get your metabolic ceiling.

If you’ve been using an activity/calorie tracker, look back through your numbers to see how often you come close to this limit.

These days, it’s no secret that sleep is important for almost every area of health, fitness, and performance. Sleep tech has become a multi-billion dollar business. There are endless trackers and new devices popping up all the time.

All of this has certainly increased general awareness of the need to get enough sleep.

…But after looking at sleep data from thousands of people who’ve connected their favorite wearables to Morpheus, it’s clear that there’s a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

Despite people knowing how important sleep is, it’s still often the biggest thing limiting their recovery. To understand why, it’s important to know how the two are connected.

Sleep and hormones

The reason sleep is so important when it comes to fitness is because when you’re asleep, your body is shifted into a parasympathetic state. This is particularly the case during the 3 stages of non-REM (NREM) sleep.

Remember, when your body is in a parasympathetic state, it’s driving energy into repairing and remodeling tissues to make them more fit. This process is inherently anabolic, meaning it’s building your body up rather than breaking it down.

The problem is that when you don’t get enough high-quality sleep, it does more than just deprive your body of recovery throughout the night. It impacts your recovery throughout the next day as well.

That’s because lack of sleep can throw off your circadian rhythm, increase your heart rate and decrease your HRV.

That means not only is your body spending fewer hours driving energy towards recovery, it’s shifted into a more catabolic state where it’s breaking tissues down.

You’ll see decreased levels of anabolic hormones—like growth hormone and testosterone—that drive recovery, and increased levels of catabolic hormones—like cortisol.

This is not a good recipe for recovery.

The end result is that you’re much more likely to lose muscle, particularly if you’re burning a lot of calories throughout the day and/or dieting to try and drop fat.

You can see the impact of sleep on body composition directly by looking at the results of a research study on the effects of sleep on dieting.

The researchers looked at total weight loss as well and where that weight loss came from, as well as how much sleep the participants got. They segmented people by those who averaged 5.5 hours of sleep and those that got at least 8.5 hours.

As you can see, there was very little difference in the total amount of total weight both groups lost. That’s not surprising because the caloric deficit was the same across everyone in the study.

There was a huge difference, however, in where that weight came from.

Those with less sleep ended up losing almost entirely muscle mass and very little fat. The group with more sleep still lost muscle, but it was less than half of the muscle lost by the low-sleep group.

The reason this happened is because insufficient sleep inherently decreases energy spent on recovery and muscle building and shifts it to breaking down muscle to use for energy. If you’re trying to improve your fitness, this is the exact opposite of what you want to happen.

The bottom line is that consistently undersleeping leads to negative changes in body composition, increases your risk of injury, and shifts your brain to want to eat more and move less.

Not good.

Fix your bedroom

If you live an average lifespan and get roughly 8 hours of sleep per night, you’ll spend about 229,961 hours in your bedroom. That’s a lot of time in one room and why it’s the most important room in your house.

If you haven’t optimized your bedroom for sleep, you’re missing a huge piece of the recovery puzzle. If you’re still sleeping on an old mattress, the same pillow you’ve had for 5 years, and your room is bright and loud, it’s time to do something about it.

Think about how much money you spend on your phone, computer, TV, etc. None of those things will improve your recovery to drive your health, fitness, and performance. Investing in your bedroom environment will.

Follow these four principles of bedroom design and your body will thank you for it:

• Make it dark. Use blackout blinds or use a high-quality face mask
• Make it quiet. Soundproof your room, and/or use a white noise machine
• Make it comfortable. Get the most comfortable bed and bedding that you can afford. It will pay off
• Make it cold. Sleeping hot is not a good recipe for recovery. Keep your room cool and sink into higher-quality sleep

Fix your caffeine habit

In moderation, and at the right times, caffeine is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s even been shown to have some performance-enhancing benefits in certain uses.

Where things often go wrong, however, is when moderation turns to excess and it’s used to get through the day. This usually translates into having some form of caffeinated drink too close to when you sleep.

Most people probably know that taking a stimulant right before bedtime, or even 3 hours before, isn’t great for sleep.

What most people don’t realize, however, is that taking caffeine 6 full hours away from when you plan to sleep can still have a dramatic impact on both how much sleep you get and the quality of that sleep.

Take a look at the results of the research below. 400mg of caffeine consumed 6 hours before bed reduced sleep by 41 minutes (Drake et al, 2013). And here’s the worst part: people in the study reported feeling no effects of the caffeine when they went to bed.

This is what makes caffeine and stimulants such a problem. It often doesn’t feel like they’re impacting your sleep, but they are.

To maximize your recovery, avoid caffeine and other stimulants as far away from bedtime as possible. You might not immediately notice it’s making a difference in your sleep, but over time, your results and your recovery score will show that it is.

Fix your training

Sleep and training can work together to maximize your recovery and drive results, or they can compound to have the opposite effect.

As we’ve talked about in previous lessons, stress, whether it’s physical or mental, shifts the body into a sympathetic, fight or flight state. If you chronically overload your body with stress, it can have a big impact on your ability to fall asleep.

Impaired sleep is one of the first signs that your body isn’t recovering fast enough from your training. Not getting enough sleep then slows down recovery even more and amplifies the stress of training.

If you don’t adjust your training and get your sleep back on track, it can quickly lead to a downward spiral in your recovery.

Fortunately, Morpheus can help you prevent this from happening.

First, if you’re using a sleep tracker, chances are, you can connect it to Morpheus in the tracking settings.

If you don’t see it listed in the settings, choose “Apple Health” (iPhone) or “Google Fit” (Android). Your device likely shares your sleep data with those platforms and Morpheus can import it from there.

This will help you see the connection between sleep, HRV, and recovery.

When sleep does drag down your recovery, keeping it from progressing into spiral by training smarter is easy with Morpheus:

• Train in the right zone. Because Morpheus adjusts your zones based on your recovery, you’ll be less likely to continue to overload your body if you stick to the guidelines in the last lesson on Morpheus heart rate zones.
• Be mindful of the impact of high intensity strength work. Strength work above 90% of your max puts the body under a ton of stress and drives it into a very sympathetic state. Any time you see your recovery below 80%, be mindful that this type of lifting will have an even bigger impact on your body. It doesn’t mean you can’tlift heavy, it just means it’s better for your recovery to limit the total number of reps.
• Incorporate rebound/recovery workouts on a consistent basis.One of the easiest ways to balance your training intensities is to incorporate at least 1 recovery workout for every high intensity training session you do. This simple strategy will greatly reduce the chances of your training having a negative impact on your sleep.
• Incorporate a cooldown at the end of every workout. Another simple way to prevent your training from keeping you up at night, particularly if you train in the evenings, is doing a cooldown at the end of each workout. You can follow the recovery workout guidelines in previous lessons and apply them to any time of training. This helps shift your body out of the sympathetic fight or flight state towards the recovery side.

Action step

To perform well throughout the rest of the challenge, you’re going to have to consistently get enough sleep. You’ll earn 10 points for each night you get more than 8 hours, 5 points for 7-8 hours, and you’ll lose 5 points if you sleep less than 6.

If getting enough sleep is difficult for you, start by fixing the most common problems listed above and tracking the results in Morpheus. Whatever your goals are, sleep is a key to reaching them. Putting in the work to fix your sleep is always worth the effort.

One of the most important things Morpheus enables you to do is train in heart zones based on your recovery each day. The three Morpheus zones are based on a concept called dynamic heart rate training.

The biggest problem with the way heart training has traditionally been done is that the zones are entirely static. They never change and are only based on a percentage of your maximum heart rate.

There are two big problems with this approach. The first is that most people use the 220-age formula to determine their max heart rate.

That formula is outdated and research has shown it to be extremely inaccurate for most people. That’s because it was developed more than 50 years ago without any real research to even support it at the time.

It was also never intended to be applied across all ages and fitness levels in the first place.

The other big issue with the traditional approach to heart rate training is that even if you do use an accurate max heart rate, there is no connection to recovery. Your zones are always the same.

It doesn’t matter how fatigued or recovered you are.

The zones are the same either way, but that’s not how the body works.

Think about lifting weights. When you’re tired and sore, the bar feels heavier. It takes much more effort to get in the same number of reps. You can’t hit the same max numbers.

As we’ve discussed in previous lessons, fatigue and stress impact our bodies in many ways.

One of the most important of these is that they increase the cost of doing more work. This often decreases our ability to perform as a result.

That’s why heart rate training zones need to be dynamic and adjust to where your body is at each day.

How the Morpheus heart rate zones work

The Morpheus heart rate zones can help you improve your fitness faster because they are:

• Built around your recovery and adjust to your body on a daily basis. Not on static zones that never change.
• Take into account your overall fitness level and adapt as you get more fit.
• Use the latest science to estimate your max heart rate and update as you train so they’re accurate..
• Are designed to help you improve your recovery and conditioning without leading to overtraining

To make the zones as accurate as possible, you will need to do two things when you set up the Morpheus app.

First, select your fitness level between low, moderate, and high. You can always go back into the settings in the app at any time and change these fitness levels as necessary.

• Low – You have not been training recently and/or are just starting out.
• Moderate – You train recreationally a few times a week, but know you still have a lot of room to improve your overall fitness.
• High – You consistently workout 5-6 days a week and have a resting heart rate in the 50s and/or HRV in the 80s.

Second, if you know your max heart rate and/or anaerobic threshold from specific testing you’ve done, you can enter them into the app.

If you don’t, then you can start by letting Morpheus estimate your max heart rate based on the most recent and well-validated formula that it uses. If you achieve a heart rate higher than this during a workout, Morpheus will automatically adjust this for you.

Once you’ve completed these two steps, you’re ready to start getting in your zone.

Note that if you do not take a recovery score for the day, you will still see the colored zones. Instead of being dynamic based on your recovery, they will be set at your baseline levels derived from your fitness level and max heart rate.

The blue zone

The Morpheus blue zone is the low-to-moderate intensity zone and it’s designed to help you speed up recovery in two effective ways.

The first is through the recovery workouts we covered yesterday. Doing this type of training, with 30-45 minute workouts in your blue zone, will help drive blood flow and speed up recovery.

The second is that consistently training in the blue zone over time can help increase your average HRV and improve your body’s ability to adapt to all kinds of stress. That’s because training at lower and moderate intensities develops the aerobic system in some important ways that higher intensities do not.

The truth about intensity and fitness is you don’t need only low or only high intensity. There are unique benefits to different intensities. Your training should incorporate the full range of intensities across all three Morpheus zones.

A very general rule of thumb is that if your goal is to increase your aerobic fitness and conditioning, roughly 75-85% of your total training time across each month should be in your blue zone.

The green zone

The Morpheus green zone is a step up in intensity from the blue zone and as such, most workouts will end up with less overall time in it than the blue zone.

When you’re in the green zone, you’re tapping into more muscle fibers than when you’re in the blue zone. This also means you’re also driving much more oxygen throughout the entire body. This is an important part of developing aerobic fitness and why it’s called the conditioning zone.

Towards the middle and top of the green zone, you’ll also start tapping more and more into the anaerobic side of your body’s energy systems.

There are two anaerobic energy pathways that create energy without oxygen. They can produce energy much faster than the aerobic side, but the cost of this is they also lead to fatigue much faster as well.

The higher up you go in the green zone, the more you’ll be tapping into the anaerobic side. This will make it more and more difficult to keep going without hitting a wall and gassing out.

When you do higher intensity workouts, you should generally shoot for anywhere from 20-40% of the total workout time in the green zone.

Because your workouts should be a balance of higher and lower intensities, your overall weekly and monthly time in green should end up around 15-25% of the total time.

The red zone

The Morpheus red zone is the highest intensity and puts your body under the most stress. This is why it’s called the overload zone.

It puts the body under maximum load and taxes the aerobic system to its limits, while also pulling in energy from the anaerobic side as well.

This is important to drive your fitness to the highest levels, but the key is to be careful to not spend so much time in your red zone that your recovery suffers.

Because the intensity is at the highest levels, you generally don’t need more than a few minutes of time within the red zone in a workout to see the benefits. You also don’t need to drive your heart rate all the way up to the red zone every workout, either.

Depending on your fitness level, anywhere from 1-3 workouts per week with time in the red zone is all that’s needed. Averaged across a week or month, generally no more than roughly 8-10% of your total training time needs to be in your red zone to see continued results.

Action step

If you haven’t had a chance to put the Morpheus heart rate zones to the test yet, do a warmup and then spend 2 minutes in your blue zone, 2 minutes in your green zone, and then 2 minutes in your red zone.

This will give you a chance to see how each of the zones feel while you’re training. You can also repeat this on a day when you have a low recovery score to see how the zones dynamically adjust each day to meet you where your body is at.

There are many ways to try and speed up recovery these days, from massage and soft tissue work, to hydrotherapy, meditation, and more.

One thing people almost never consider as a potential recovery tool, however, is a workout.

That’s because when it comes to training, most people think of high intensity, fatigue, and soreness. Working out is a way to get stronger, leaner, faster, etc., but not to recover.

But what if there’s a way to use a workout to get better by speeding up recovery rather than putting the body under more stress?

The story of Rebound Training

The idea of using training to speed up recovery came from two things:

1. Years of working with combat athletes who were doing strength and conditioning in the morning and skill training in the evening. I needed to train them in the morning without leaving them too fatigued to perform their second workout.
2. Research done by the military on elite special forces units that measured changes in HRV during periods of extremely stressful training. They found that people whose HRV went up as soon as the stress was over, indicating a shift towards recovery, were the ones who were able to make it through training.

Over time, I experimented with a wide variety of training methods to try and speed up recovery. With enough trial, error and data analysis, I eventually came up with a specific workout strategy that I called Rebound Training.

When it’s incorporated into a weekly training program, Rebound Training has a ton of benefits. It:

• Helps shift the body into a “recovery state” where the body becomes more parasympathetic and HRV is driven up.
• Stimulates blood flow into every muscle fiber without providing too much additional stress that’ll slow recovery down rather than speed it up.
• Develops the metabolic systems that drive recovery — so that someone’s overall ability to tolerate and handle the stress of life  improves.
• Improves breathing and movement quality in a way that can reduce joint stress and help avoid unnecessary increases in stress hormones.
• Doesn’t take too much time. Working on recovery shouldn’t be boring or take as long as a normal workout. I designed the workouts to be no more than 30-45 minutes.
• Makes you feel better. After a Rebound Training session, you should leave the gym feeling better than when you walked in.

Rebound Training with Morpheus

One of the great things about recovery workouts is that there are virtually endless ways to do them. They are also convenient because they don’t take much time and they don’t require any sort of specialized equipment.

The key is to just follow three basic principles:

1. Keep the workout short. No more than 45 minutes. I’ve found that 25-35 total minutes from start to finish tends to be the sweet spot for most people
2. Stay in the blue zone.The blue zone in Morpheus is called the recovery zone for a reason. This is the right level of intensity to promote recovery, so you’ll want the majority of the workout to be in the blue. You’ll also need to keep your average heart rate over 100bpm. Going for a walk can be good for staying active and will increase your step count, but a recovery workout is about more than just taking steps.
3. Use a variety of movements. In order to drive blood flow into as many muscle groups as possible, it’s beneficial to include a variety of movement patterns.

If you have an area that’s particularly sore from a previous workout, spend extra time doing exercises using those muscles to drive blood flow into them and promote recovery.

Rebound Training Template

As long as you follow the principles above, you’ll be on the right track to speed up your recovery in between your more intense training sessions. To make it easier to be consistent and to make the workouts as effective as possible, I typically use a template with the same four components:

Breathe and mobilize (5 min)

I like to start most workouts with a few minutes of breathing drills and mobility exercises. These can help develop and reinforce healthier breathing patterns while supporting better mobility.

There is a wide variety of types of breathing you can do, but if you’re just starting out and want an easy one, give box breathing a try.

To do it, inhale slowly through the nose for 4-5 seconds. Next, hold your breath for 4-5 seconds before exhaling through your mouth for 4-5 seconds. Finish that cycle with another breath hold for 4-5 seconds before repeating.

After a minute or two of doing breathwork, move on to 2-3 of your favorite mobility drills to finish the warm up.

Recovery zone training (15-20 min)

After the warm up, it’s time to get in the blue zone and ramp your heart rate up. There are a couple of ways you can do this.

The first is simply doing a circuit of a few different exercises. I like to use 3-5 exercises for 60-90 seconds each while keeping heart rates relatively constant when moving from one exercise to another.

The second method is doing what I call high/low intervals in the blue zone.

Here, you’ll keep your heart rate in the middle of the blue for 60 seconds, then drive it up to the top of the blue for 60 seconds, and repeat.

You can choose to switch exercises after each round, or you can do a few rounds in a row with one exercise before moving on. It’s generally valuable to incorporate 3-5 different exercises into the recovery zone training time.

This will help drive blood flow to as many different muscles and tissues as possible.

Strength stimulation (5-10 min)

Once you’ve finished your time in the recovery zone, adding in a couple of strength exercises is optional, but it can help drive blood flow into the bigger, stronger, fast-twitch muscle fibers.

These fibers normally don’t get worked much at lower intensities.

The key is to keep the volume low. No more than 2-3 working sets of a single total body exercise like deadlifts, squats, or even explosive movements like box jumps.

If you don’t have any equipment, exercises like bodyweight jump squats and explosive push ups can do the trick.

You can do the strength exercises at higher intensities, but keep the volume limited to no more than 8-10 total reps across the 2-3 sets. This will ensure you speed up recovery instead of slow it down.

4. Recovery cool-down (3-5 min)

The last and final component of a recovery workout is spending a few minutes driving your heart rate as low as possible. Your goal should be to get it within 5-10 bpm of your morning resting HR as quickly as possible.

The easiest way to do this is to lay on the ground and focus on breathing and relaxing. The more you practice dropping your heart rate quickly, the better you’ll get at it.

Once your heart rate is down, finish off with any type of soft tissue work that you enjoy. There are a huge variety of tools available today that can be used for this purpose. The end of a recovery workout is a great time to use them.

Earning points with recovery workouts

Throughout the challenge, you can earn points for up to 3 recovery workouts per week. You’ll get a baseline of 10 points for completing the workout, plus bonus points based on how much your recovery score increases in Morpheus as a result.

If you follow the guidelines above, you should see your recovery score increase 3-5% on average. This lets you know that you’ve spent the right amount of time at the right intensity to speed up recovery.

If you see a smaller increase, or none at all, it means you probably went too hard and/or trained for too long.

Remember, everything comes down to energy. If you end up burning too many calories or adding too much stress, it defeats the purpose of doing a recovery workout.

When it comes to recovery, less is often more.

Action step

As a general rule of thumb, I encourage you to do one recovery workout 12-24 hours after every high intensity workout.

Doing this consistently can make a huge difference in the results you see and your ability to continue training hard without hitting plateaus or risking injury.

Over the weekend, get in at least 1 recovery workout. If you’re on IG, make sure to share the workout and tag Morpheus when your recovery score goes up! @trainwithmorpheus

Over the last few years, heart rate variability, or HRV, has become a widely used metric across a variety of fitness apps. It’s also at the heart of how Morpheus calculates your recovery score.

But what is HRV? Why does it matter?

The easiest answer is that when we measure HRV on a daily basis, it’s a noninvasive measure of how much energy your body has been spending on recovery.

Because of this, it gives us a window into the physiological cost of all the stress your body has been under recently.

When we look at HRV over the long run, the baseline HRV number is a powerful gauge of your body’s resilience against stress – both physical and mental.

People with higher average HRV tend to have greater life expectancy, lower overall disease risk, higher cardiovascular fitness, and even better self-restraint.

To understand why that is, we have to look deeper at how HRV is connected directly to recovery.

Why your heart does not work like a metronome

It’s easy to confuse heart rate with heart rate variability, but they are two very different things.

Each minute, the average person’s heart beats somewhere between 60 and 100 times.

People with higher levels or cardiovascular fitness often have resting heart rates well below that range. Of course, you can see what yours is in Morpheus.

Resting heart rate is a good gauge of general fitness, but on a daily basis, it doesn’t tell us much about recovery.

For that, instead of measuring the amount of times the heart beats in a minute, we have to look deeper.

Measuring HRV starts with accurate detection of the exact time between each heartbeat.

This is called the R-R interval.

If your heart worked like a metronome, then the R-R interval would always be the same between each heartbeat. The human body is much more complicated than that, however.

Instead, your heart rate is influenced by many different factors and it’s constantly changing. When you’re moving around and/or training, your heart rate increases as the need for oxygen to drive aerobic energy production increases.

The body’s stress response system that we discussed in earlier lessons is largely responsible for how this works.

At rest, however, the need for energy isn’t constantly changing. In this case, it’s the system that drives energy into recovery and adaptation, the parasympathetic nervous system, that plays the biggest role in controlling your heart rate.

When it fires, it causes the heart rate to slow down. At rest, it’s constantly firing, but it does so in a pulsatile pattern that has a natural variability to it.

This is much different than the constant rate of a metronome.

The result is that the stronger your parasympathetic nervous system fires, the more variable the time between heart beats becomes. This is where the variability in heart rate variability comes from.

Higher HRV means the parasympathetic nervous system is more active and driving more energy towards recovery, repair, and adaptation.

How HRV changes with stress and recovery

Given what I just said, it might seem like higher HRV is always a good thing and lower HRV is always a bad thing. Unfortunately, this is a common belief, but the truth isn’t quite that simple.

We can see why by looking at a typical pattern of HRV in response to a single period of high stress, followed by 3 days of recovery.

During the period the body is under stress, HRV drops rapidly as the body shifts a large amount of energy towards dealing with whatever the stress is.

In this example, let’s imagine it’s an intense training session. The kind that you know you’re going to feel the next day.

Over the next two days, your body cranks up recovery by shifting more energy to rebuild and remodel all the stressed tissues, restock energy stores, etc. During this time, you’ll typically see a big rise in HRV, often well above where you started.

Exactly how high it goes depends on a variety of factors like how stressful the workout really was. How fit you are. How much you help your body out by getting enough sleep, eating well, managing mental stress, etc.

This is where your lifestyle plays a massive role in either supporting or sabotaging your recovery.

If you don’t do another hard session or put your body under another big period of stress, your HRV will eventually settle back down to your general baseline, i.e. your average HRV range.

Putting it all together

If you look through your HRV numbers in Morpheus, chances are that you’ll be able to find patterns similar to the one above.

Where things get more complicated, however, is when you train hard multiple times a week, often on back to back days. There isn’t enough time to fully recover, so you see the compounding effects of adding stress on top of stress.

When you factor in all the lifestyle pieces that help or hinder recovery, it’s easy to see why HRV being higher or lower on a single day is not always as simple as it’s often made out to be.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a data scientist or crunch all the numbers to use HRV.

Morpheus is doing that work for you and looking at the patterns and trends when it calculates the recovery score each day.

HRV plays the biggest role in this calculation because when it’s measured accurately using Morpheus, it’s the single best overall tool we have to gauge the balance between stress and recovery.

Even more, if your goal is to look and feel your best, perform at the highest levels, and increase your healthspan, tracking your average HRV is an incredibly important and powerful way to make sure you’re on the right track.

Action step

Now that you know what to look for, take some time to look through your HRV numbers in Morpheus. See if you can find a hard training session followed by a couple of days of rest, or lower intensity, and see if you can find the pattern shown earlier.

Next, take a look at your HRV patterns across each week. See if you can spot the swings up and down based on your training schedule and lifestyle influences. Now that you know what you’re looking for in your HRV, it should become easier to see the patterns that are driving your daily recovery score.