Welcome to the Hubertman Lab guest series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Hubertman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today's episode marks the sixth and final of the sixth episode series on fitness exercise and performance.

And today's discussion is all about nutrition and supplementation to maximize your fitness, exercise and performance goals. Dr. Andy Yalpin.

I'm super excited to discuss today's topic, which is nutrition and supplementation for performance and recovery.

And I'm particularly excited about this conversation because I've been interested in supplementation and nutrition for performance really since my teens.

But also because in recent years we've witnessed a massive transformation in the general public in terms of their view of supplementation and nutrition.

First of all, more people are thinking about nutrition. What is good nutrition? What is not a very barbed wire topic as you know, but there are some truths in there that we'll discuss.

But also supplementation. You know, whereas 10, 15 years ago, I think most people would either be really into supplements. That was a small percentage of people.

But the majority of people were either told or were thinking, oh, you know, vitamins, you mostly excrete them. They're just expensive urine.

Nowadays, it seems that many people, including many of my colleagues and physicians all the way down to sports performance experts, are taking and making recommendations about certain supplements.

And so the way that I like to think about supplements is that they aren't necessarily just supplements, which makes it sound like they are augmenting what should already be there, but you're not quite getting enough of.

But indeed, a lot of these things we call supplements are very potent compounds that can transform our ability to perform in the short term, to recover from exercise.

And that can really shape brain chemistry, hormone patterns acutely and when taken long term.

So I'm very excited about today's topic and to be able to try and sort through this, let's call it a cloud, hopefully not a storm, but this cloud of supplements that are out there.

Because indeed, many of them are excellent and can provide us a lot. Some of them are terrible.

And then some just don't do anything. And therefore are terrible because either they have side effects or because they're very expensive and they don't do anything.

And then of course within the realm of nutrition, there's an equal amount of confusion. But that's why I'm talking to you because you're going to put clarity and structure and definition on these incredibly important topics.

You absolutely nailed it there. One of the major reasons supplements can work is because you can consume nutrients in extremely high concentrations such that you would not get in nature through food.

Having said that, you really do want to focus on the basic sleep nutrition hydration. And I'm going to get into very specific detail later with some of those things.

That said, there are plenty of situations and circumstances when supplementation can do exactly what you said, also though, because you are taking them as such high concentrations, they can also be unproductive, they can be destructive or they can be counterproductive.

So in case if you're taking a couple of supplements over here, it may actually be counteracting the benefits of some of the other supplements over there.

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