Dr. James DiNicolantonio: Using Salt, Creatine & Sauna to Get Stronger and Improve Exercise Performance

You're 100% correct that read meat is just simply more nutrient dense than chicken. The only thing is I will integrate pork, because pork typically tends to be 10 times higher in thiamine, or vitamin B1, and there's so many things that can deplete that B vitamin quickly. So, I like to try to integrate pork at least once a week.

Consuming liver and heart on a fairly consistent basis, it's super important. The heart for the CoQ10; liver for the vitamin A and copper, which so many people are deficient in. And a lot of this iron deficiency, anemia, is probably actually driven a lot by vitamin A and copper deficiency, which are both needed to allow iron to work.

Some of your top ergogenic aids would be things like beetroot juice or... beta-alanine now. That's only going to allow you to vigorously exercise maybe 1-2 minutes longer. Whereas, if you dose salt correctly, you can actually exercise over 20 minutes longer. So, it's essentially 20 times as good as any type of ergogenic supplement that you would take.

Around about 8 hours after you wake up is, typically, when you're going to perform the best. So, for a typical person who, let's say, wakes up at 7 in the morning, somewhere between 2 and 5 PM, typically, is when you'll get your best workout.

Most of the evidence shows that whenever you go below 3000 mg of sodium, all the stress hormones start to increase, and insulin resistance also dramatically starts to increase.

Integrating maybe half an ounce of liver every single day or an ounce three times a week is going to go a long way to providing you a lot of nutrients that you can't get, even if you're consuming muscle meat.

I've haven't seen any literature that in the face of good insulin sensitivity, low triglycerides, good HDL that elevations in LDL—outside of homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia—is going to be any sort of a risk factor for actually increasing heart disease.

Undoubtedly, doing resistance training of some sort, 30-60 minutes, 3-4 times a week, is going to, obviously, reduce the risk of sarcopenia, or basically the loss of muscle mass and strength as we age, which can lead to frailty and fractures even death.

Before a typical workout, I think it's pretty smart to have maybe 1,000 milligrams of sodium and 10-16 oz. of fluid.

The golden rule is to really not have any caffeine at least 6 hours before bedtime.

There's now systematic reviews and meta-analyses that taking creatine, 3-5 grams per day, improves cognition, particularly in vegetarians.

The data is very clear that if you are doing vigorous explosive activity that's fairly prolonged—so let's say, a minute or longer—then pre-loading with complex carbs is going to improve performance.