How to Use & Interpret Blood Tests for High Performance

1. Dr. Andy Galpin

   The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. Welcome back, friends. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor of kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton. I want to start today by asking a couple of questions. The first is, how many of you have ever gotten any blood testing done? Well, my assumption is basically all of you at this point. And the second one is, how many of you, outside of maybe finding out you had an acute infection or disease or something, a medical emergency going on, have found that that blood testing was insightful, helpful, or really gave you specific directions about what to do? Well, my guess is not many of you still have your hands up. In fact, generally, people have done testing like this, and the results and data come back, and it's fairly underwhelming. So my goal of today is to help you better understand what's going on so that you can get more out of your blood work.

2. Dr. Andy Galpin

   Let me give you a couple of examples. Well, there's a particular protein that's measured in almost all blood panels, and that's called albumin. Now, for my money, it is the single best marker of overall health of any test you could get, but we'll come back to that later. Now, albumin is interesting because it is known as an acute phase reactant, which means it is reduced or goes down in the presence of inflammation. However, it goes up in the presence of dehydration. So if you're running the math a little bit there, and you can imagine a scenario in which you're a little bit inflamed and a little bit dehydrated, the inflammation brings it down, the dehydration brings it up, so your albumin comes right back in as perfectly normal. Now, if one doesn't look at your blood results properly and contextualize it and understands your history and symptomatology and other things going on, one may look at that result and say your albumin is perfect.

3. Dr. Andy Galpin

   And the reality of it is you would not be feeling perfect because you're slightly inflamed and dehydrated. This is a classic example of not feeling your best or performing at your best, yet your labs don't necessarily show any dysfunction. Right? Now, I could do this example for many other things. Another really common one that we see is a marker called mean corpuscular volume. This is kind of like the average size of your red blood cells. Again, we'll come back to these things later. It has the same issue where it goes up in the presence of vitamin B12 or vitamin B6 deficiency, which is actually quite common, but it is reduced in the presence of inflammation or even iron deficiency. So not uncommon for someone to be low in B12 and B6 as well as iron, in which case, again, mean corpuscular volume would be normalized. So there are things like this that are happening that you can actually identify and you can see in your labs if you know what's going on, which then gives you specific and direct information about what exactly to do to resolve those problems.

4. Dr. Andy Galpin

   It's these types of things I'd like to cover today, again, to give you more information about what's going on so that you know exactly what to do to help improve or reduce or relieve any symptoms you've got going on that you don't like, and more importantly, just simply helping you look, feel, and perform at your best. Now, before we go too much further, I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors because they make this show possible. Not only are they on this list because they offer great products and services, but because I actually personally love them and use them myself. Today's episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, sleep tracking, and more. I've had one for years, and it is glorious. I even put one on the bed in my guest bedroom because as you'll hear me talk about endlessly here on the Perform podcast, there really is nothing you can do that makes a larger impact on your health and performance than getting tremendous sleep.

5. Dr. Andy Galpin

   The Eight Sleep is a game changer because I run hot, or as my wife calls it, I'm a furnace. And that's particularly driven by the fact that I often have to do my exercise training in the evenings, which is honestly not always great for sleep. But this is also the case of many of the athletes that I work with who don't have a choice when they compete. And so being able to cool down immediately in bed does wonders for both sleep latency and sleep quality. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra has two times more cooling power, yet is virtually silent and even has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head in a few degrees to improve the airflow and stop you from snoring. Go to eightsleep.com/perform to save $350 off their Pod 4 Ultra. Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, and select countries in the EU and Australia.

6. Dr. Andy Galpin

   Again, that's eightsleep.com/perform. Today's episode is also brought to you by Vitality Blueprint. Vitality is the world's only comprehensive blood work company built specifically for high performance. A high-quality blood test is one of the best ways to better understand your physiology and areas for improvement. Vitality Blueprint uses over 100 molecular biomarkers that are critical to physical and mental performance, then provides unrivaled interpretation and analysis of these data so you know exactly what's going on in your body. From there, Vitality's innovative software allows you to easily create clear and highly specific lifestyle, nutrition, and supplementation plans based upon your unique physiology and goals. Experience the world's most premium performance blood work by going to vitalityblueprint.com/perform. I know exactly how dope this thing is because Dan Garner and I built it ourselves based upon the system we've used in thousands of athletes over the last decade or so.

7. Dr. Andy Galpin

   So we're stoked that something that's previously only been accessible to the world's most decorated athletes, musicians, and so on is now open to everyone. Let's finally get you looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best, and that starts by going to vitalityblueprint.com/perform. Let's go. So the outline for today is going to be the following. We're actually going to start with what I call the pros and cons of getting blood work done for performance anyways. As much as I'm going to advocate it, of course, and there are many benefits, there are also some cons and some downsides and some things that make it unrealistic or even maybe not the best option. And so I'd like to make sure we address both sides of the coin before going any further. After that, though, we'll get into what I call the first I, and that's investigate. Within that, we'll first talk about which measures to actually go after and which markers to select.

8. Dr. Andy Galpin

   We'll then get into some of the more common panels, and we'll talk about what those things are, what they mean, and what they actually tell you. We'll get into information about how to get the best data and getting the most useful information out of your blood draw, and then finally, how to pick these markers based upon your specific goals, sports, or other activities and situations. From there, we'll move on to how to interpret that information. We'll start off by going over what I call the "compared to what" conversation. So that is understanding how to interpret your data compared to the right reference range, whether or not you're high or low, or that matters depending on your situation and context. And then finally, we'll talk about the importance of using patterns versus individual markers. May not make sense now, but I promise you, it will later. After we've done all that, we'll finally get into our third I, which is intervene.

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