Behaviors

After exercise, lower body temperature back to resting baseline as soon as possible to support faster recovery of muscles and tendons. Use safe cooling methods such as cooling the face, palms, or feet rather than whole-body cold immersion.

Avoid pre-workout drinks or substances that increase body temperature before exercise because they limit performance.

Do not ingest things after exercise that increase body temperature, because they impede recovery.

Do not cool yourself so much that you become excessively cold; use the method intelligently.

Avoid excessive warming because it can be dangerous.

Keep body weight in a healthy range to help manage blood glucose and type 2 diabetes risk.

If very hungry and wanting a steep increase in glucose, eat carbohydrate-rich food first; combining many macronutrients together is also presented as a way to get a steeper glucose rise.

Get blood levels of thyroid hormone tested to determine whether iodine or other thyroid support is needed and to assess hypo- or hyperthyroid concerns.

Make sure selenium intake is sufficient to support healthy thyroid function; check local or regional recommendations against your current intake, and if cleared by a doctor, experiment with increasing selenium to see how it affects metabolism.

Make sure iodine intake is sufficient to support healthy thyroid hormone levels, especially if following restrictive or very clean diets; if purely plant-based and eating lots of cruciferous vegetables, pay extra attention because cruciferous vegetables may increase iodine need.

Make sure L-tyrosine intake is sufficient to support healthy thyroid hormone levels.

If bringing carbohydrates back after a long ketogenic period, do it gradually to potentially avoid rapid weight gain associated with low-thyroid adaptation.

Exercise can markedly increase growth hormone release during waking and the following night, especially with weight training or endurance training lasting about 60 minutes. Use about 10 minutes of warm-up, train close to but not to absolute failure, avoid eating too close to exercise and sugary sports drinks during exercise, and cool body temperature back down relatively quickly afterward; women may see the biggest peak in the first 30 minutes of resistance exercise, while men may peak around 60 minutes total.

Some people take arginine before bedtime to increase growth hormone, provided blood glucose is low; taking arginine before exercise does not stack with exercise for larger growth hormone increases and may clamp the effect to what either one alone would produce.

Include both palm-cooling/performance and heat/growth-hormone protocols if desired, but perform them at separate times.

Before trying to learn a skill, determine whether it is open loop or closed loop.

Before or during learning, decide what to focus attention on: auditory attention, visual attention, proprioception, limb position relative to body, or outcome.

When learning a skill, work for a defined time block such as 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour, and aim for maximal or near-maximal density of safe repetitions and safe failures. If time-limited, 10 minutes of maximum-focus, maximum-repetition practice is preferable to longer unfocused practice.

Include many error reps and safe failures; errors cue attention, drive error correction, and open the window for neuroplasticity.

If errors are not hazardous, continue practicing at a high repetition rate rather than stopping when mistakes occur; learning is often possible in that period.

Avoid increasing dopamine levels before motor skill learning using pharmacology because it reduces signal-to-noise and likely hinders plasticity.

Even when working with a coach, include a period in each session where the athlete simply attends to their own errors without external cueing.

After receiving a correction from a coach, generate many repetitions from that corrected position or pattern rather than constantly switching cues.

After skill practice or training, do nothing for a brief period so the brain can replay and consolidate the motor sequence. Ideally sit or lie quietly with eyes closed for about 5–10 minutes, though even 1 minute can help; avoid new sensory input, social media, email, conversation, or shifting to other learning tasks.

In early sessions, let errors guide attention instead of deliberately cueing specific movement features. This approach may be used for one session or several sessions.

Once somewhat familiar with the movement and occasionally performing it well, deliberately cue attention to one specific aspect of the movement and keep attention on that one thing consistently throughout the session; as skill deepens, focusing purely on the motor execution itself can be beneficial.

Once making fewer errors and the core motor pattern is learned, attention can shift across features such as motor sequence, stance, grip, speed, or outcome from trial to trial; doing this too early is suboptimal.

Use ultra-slow or slow-motion practice only after some proficiency has been gained. It is suggested to become beneficial once success reaches about 25–30%, rather than when success is only 5–10%.

Determine your current repetition rate, then set a metronome slightly faster to force more repetitions and adaptive errors. Especially useful for speed work such as sprinting, swimming, or running to increase strokes, steps, or efficiency and train central pattern generators at higher speed.

To increase flexibility or range of motion, measure your current range of motion, then keep your head and body still while moving your eyes to the far periphery—left, right, up, and down—and retest. This can increase range of motion by about 5–15 degrees and can be used as a warm-up before exercise or skill learning when range of motion matters.