Following Huberman’s Advice but Still Exhausted After 40?

Andrew Huberman’s advice is not wrong. Sleep, fasting, cold, zone 2 and caffeine timing all work exactly the way he says they do.

The problem is that every one of those five protocols quietly assumes something about your body is already handled before it will work, and when that one thing is off, the protocol starts working against the exact thing you are training for.

Most men over 40 never check the precondition, so they run a perfect protocol for two years and get nothing back. Ready to stop optimizing the protocol and go look at what is sitting underneath it?

In this video, I walk through all five popular protocols one at a time, name the assumption hiding inside each one, and show what it looks like when that assumption is false in a man over 40 running on 5 hours of sleep. Then I lay out the three things to actually do first, in order, with the first two costing nothing and taking a single day.

About Zac Armstrong & No Hype, Just Standards: Zac Armstrong is a former Marine, Naval Officer, and F-18 Pilot who coaches executives and high-performing leaders to optimize their biological systems, overcome burnout, and achieve peak physical and mental performance using precision data.

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Transcript

Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly formatted. Each timestamp links to that moment in the video.

0:00 Andrew Huberman’s advice is good. Sleep, fasting, cold, zone two, capping time. You did it all, right? But yet, you’re still feeling slower in a foggier version of the guy you used to be. So, you figure out you’ll just have to try harder. But, every one of those protocols is counting on something about your body already being handled before it’ll even work. And when that one thing is off, the protocol is going to turn on you. It starts working against you the exact way you’re training for. And the whole time, it feels like discipline. Now, this isn’t a takedown at all. He’s right about the mechanism. He’s just not the one sitting across the table from you. And none of this was built for a 40, 50-year-old running on 5 hours of sleep. So, let me take you through all five, and then the three [music] things to actually do first. Let’s get into it. We start with sleep because every other protocol in this video is counting on your sleep already working, whether it says so or not. And the sleep advice itself is right, all of it. Cool room, dark room, no screens before bed. I’ve also watched it do absolutely nothing. Because, here’s a guy I keep running into. He runs perfect sleep hygiene for 2 years, blackout curtains, the whole setup, right? And he still wakes up destroyed every single morning. This thing does a try harder, add a

1:01 Supplement, tighten it up. But, 2 years of running it perfectly with nothing to show for it is the experiment is already answered for you. Whatever is wrong upstream of anything of a bedroom can’t be fixed there. And the thing that sits up there way more often than anybody screens for in our modern age is the airway that closes on you at night, sleep apnea. And no cold room or magnesium tag is going to fix that because it’s never a bedroom problem in the first place. So, what do I tell a guy? Go get evaluated. A real home sleep test. It used to mean a night in a lab wired up. Now, it’s a little device you just wear home for a night and you mail it back or you take it back to the office the next morning. Next to 2 years he’s been burned on the bedroom, that’s nothing, right? That’s one night. And bring your own numbers to that conversation. If you wear a tracker or pull the overnight data, a resting heart rate that stays up all night, a breathing rate that never settles down, oxygen that keeps dipping, deep sleep you barely touch no matter how long you’re in bed. That’s not a diagnosis. Your watch can’t diagnose you with anything. But, it turns I’m I’m tired into a specific question a doctor can actually work with. Couple things before you talk yourself out of it. You don’t need to be overweight for this to be a

2:01 Thing. And snoring goes with it a lot of the time, but plenty of guys who have it don’t snore at all. I watch guys rule themselves out with those two things and walk right back to the magnesium aisle. And here’s the part nobody points out towards. Nobody builds a supplement company on sleep referral. There’s no money in telling a guy to go get one test to be done. And so he is handed 10 protocols and never once told to get tested. Take our client John. Private equity founder in Iowa. Trained hard, getting nowhere, sleeping 5 hours a night. We got him up to 7 and 1/2, 8 hours and his resting heart rate came down about 20 beats a minute on his Whoop. Same training, we just fixed the one thing underneath it. Now, second one, fasting. This is the one guys get most defensive about, so stay with me. Start with what’s true. He said it himself, if you’re going to fast, you have to protect your protein and muscle and resistance training helps. That caveat is his and it’s the exact part that gets cut from the clip. What it assumes underneath is that you’ve already got your protein and lean muscle handled. So at first, every metabolic marker looks fantastic. Fasting glucose, HBA1C, fasting insulin, triglycerides, all of it trending down. Those are exact

3:01 Number of guys been trained his whole life to watch, so he figures it’s working. And that’s the trap. Because underneath those numbers, other things might be moving in the wrong direction. Run a real energy deficit long enough and testosterone is going to tend to drift down. The opposite of what he started fasting for. His thyroid conversation starts slipping except his standard thyroid screen still reads in range. So nothing ever flags. And then there’s the stuff that isn’t on the panel at all. Working sets going down month over month, grip strength and body composition on the actual scale. And be precise here, there is no line on the panel that says fasting is eating your muscle and anybody who tells you they’ve got one is selling you on something. What you get is a pattern and only shows up when you read the panel. The body composition and the strength trend together. Reading any of them on their own and it points you in the wrong direction. The thing doing the damage is the low protein. A short eating window makes it easy to eat too little without noticing. So, fasting takes the blame when the window was really just hiding how little he was actually eating. Here’s a guy who shows up the shape of it. He comes to me a while back, right around 40, close to 350 lbs on GLP-1s and a whole stack of other medications.

4:03 And his weight was handled. That’s what the drug does. But, he has no energy. Program after program, nothing has ever stuck. And the weight that was coming off while he still felt like garbage doesn’t do much. So, we built the system underneath him, the training, the food, habits that he could actually keep. And under 6 months, he had dropped over 50 lbs, came off the GLP-1 and almost all the other medications. The way he put it, he went from feeling defeated to feeling like he could take on the world. And let me say this clearly because I know how that travels the second it leaves my mouth. I’m not anti-GLP-1. Those drugs came out to help people. And for some guys, they are the right call, full stop. What I’m against is a drug doing the job system was supposed to do itself. So, the guy never builds the thing that would have kept the results once he comes off of it. It’s the same shape as the fasting problem. The weight looks handled, so nobody goes looking at everything the drug isn’t fixing underneath. So, third one, cold. And this is the one I probably feel the most strongly about. Cold has real benefits. So, I’m not here trying to take your ice bath away from me. But, it’s a stressor, and a stressor only helps if you have got the recovery in the bank to absorb one more. Past 40, grinding on not enough sleep, a lot of guys just don’t

5:03 Do it. So, stack one more stressor into a tank that’s already empty, and there’s no benefit left to it when you get it. Then there’s a second thing here, and most guys have never even heard of it. Cold water right after you lift looks like it blunts the exact adaptation you just trained for, the muscle building signal itself. And this is well documented. Huberman says the same thing. His own guidance is to keep the cold away from your lifting body a few hours if muscle is the goal. That caveat is his. It just doesn’t survive the edit. And for a guy over 40 who’s whole fight is hanging onto lean muscle mass, that one matters. If he’s grinding through hard, cold, miserable protocol that’s working against the exact thing he’s training for, and because it’s so hard, it feels like he’s doing something. So, nothing ever tells him to stop. Now, here’s where I’ll hold the line because it comes down to measurement. I have not put a client on a scan and watched an ice bath eat his gains. I haven’t measured that. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I did. So, here’s what I can stand behind. Just move the cold away from the lift 4 hours on a different day entirely. You keep every benefit and you stop paying for it with the one adaptation that a man over 40 cannot afford to lose. There’s no cost to splitting it. So, there’s not a

6:04 Reason not to. You just stop canceling your own training. Fourth one, zone two. And the catch here is just math. Zone two assumes you got the hours to spend and most of you just flat out don’t. Zone two is good. It’s also just very time expensive. Most of the guys I work with have about 4 hours a week to train in totality. And they’ve heard, “Make sure you’re getting your zone two in.” So, they spend three of those 4 hours walking on a treadmill and they make a into an actual gym once. And a year later they’ve gotten slightly better endurance while they’ve lost muscle and they can’t figure out why. And they did everything right. They allocated their 4 hours perfectly. The protocol they were running just got written for a guy who had eight. So, here’s a split for a 4-hour week. Three of those hours are resistance training for about an hour each. The last hour is conditioning. Cut into two 30-minute pieces. One short, hard interval session and then zone two filling what’s left. And the walking you’d already do every day doesn’t count against the four. That’s just life. Now, why resistance training takes the first and biggest slice. After 40, what will decide how you’re living at 70 is your lean mass and your strength. VO2 max and mitochondrial density matter, too. I’m not dismissing them, but muscle is

7:04 Different. You’re losing it on a clock whether you train or not. And once you’ve given it away, getting it back later is a lot harder. Couple things plainly here. If you’ve already got cardiovascular disease or your valley deconditioned, hard intervals are not where you should probably start. That’s a conversation for your doctor and you first. And if you really do have eight or 10 hours a week, then the answer changes for zone two earns a much bigger slice. So, here’s Rory, injury attorney in San Diego, mid-40s, runner basically his whole life who had never seriously lifted a weight. Unhappy with his body, brain fog every day, afternoon crashes, and no idea why it kept getting worse after the harder he worked. Two things were wrong. Every hour of his training was cardio. He had never touched resistance work, and he was eating what he honestly believed was healthy, and nowhere near enough of it, and nowhere near enough protein to build a single pound of muscle. So, we flipped it. Resistance training became the priority, and we started actually tracking his protein so he wasn’t guessing anymore. He started around 150 lb. He’s up to nearly 170 now, at a weight he’s never seen in his life before, and he’s lifting at numbers he didn’t even think were on the table. The brain fog has cleared, and the afternoon crashes went away, and he’ll tell you he’s sharp and

8:05 Fully back into it. Now, let me tie these two together, because it’s really one problem showing up twice. Fasting and zone two fell on the same guy for the same reason. He isn’t eating enough protein. With fasting, the short window makes it easier to undereat protein and never catch it. Zone two does it from the other side. The cardio itself is fine. It just eats up the hours that should have gone to lifting, the one thing that needs the protein. And the last one, the light one, is caffeine timing. Nobody gets hurt on this one, which is exactly why it’s worth your attention. I know you’ve heard it. Wait 90 to 120 minutes after you wake up before your first cup of coffee, so you don’t blunt your natural cortisol’s peak. And for a lot of people, that’s probably genuinely good advice. So, I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s wrong, but it comes with a condition. It assumes you’ve got a strong cortisol peak in the morning worth protecting. And some of you just don’t. If your cortisol curve is flat or inverted, and after a couple of decades of stress and short sleep, plenty of guys are, and then you’re just white-knuckling the first two worst hours of your day to protect a peak that’s probably not even happening. So, picture the guy that’s living this. He wakes up, he’s flat. Sleeps fine, just no gas in the morning. The guy with a normal rhythm gets a real

9:05 Surge in that first half hour that carries him until the coffee kicks in. This guy gets none of it. So, he sits there for 90 minutes foggy protecting a peak that’s not even happening. Then he finally drinks his coffee at 8:30, gets the same results he would have gotten at 6:00 a.m., except now his caffeine hours are later, and it comes back to cost him at bedtime. Do that for 2 months, and he decides he’s just not a morning person, and then he quits. When really, he was just running a protocol built for a body that doesn’t have a morning peak. So, here’s what I tell him. Try it. It’s free. It’s low risk. And some guys really do feel a difference. But test it for 2 weeks, and judge it on what actually has changed for you. How the morning felt is not the thing to go by. Did the mid-morning crash go away? Are you reaching less for that second and third cup? Is your sleep improving? Because that’s really at the end of the day the whole thing is about. And if 2 weeks of nothing’s changed except for your mornings got worse, then just stop. That’s the experiment coming back with a no, and now you actually know. Gapping is just the easiest place to notice it because nobody gets hurt and nothing’s on the line. So catch the pattern here and you’ll start seeing it everywhere it’s costing you. You’ll see it in your sleep, in your muscle, or in your testosterone. So what do you actually do

10:06 First before any of these five protocols means a thing? You go and get your own numbers. That’s the whole answer. But I know you know what happens the second a guy hears go get a full panel. Expensive, slow, he’ll get to it eventually. So here’s the order and the first two cost you nothing and you can go do them today. One, test your grip. It takes 90 seconds and costs you nothing. Grip strength is one of the better validated predictors we’ve got for how the rest of your life goes. You squeeze, you write the number down, and now you’ve got one hard number about your whole body to track. Two, pull your overnight data off whatever you’re already wearing. Resting heart rate through the night, breathing rate, time in deep stages. That’s not a diagnosis, but if you run a clean sleep hygiene for 2 years and still wake up wrecked, it’s the thing that turns I’m tired all the time into a specific question your doctor can work with. Three, now book the panel, a full one with a physician actually reading it alongside with you. Then when it comes back, don’t just check whether it landed in your range. Look at where you sit inside it because the range only means you match with the average man out there. And he’s in plain, run-down, and not sleeping most likely like you. That full picture, your hormones and your metabolic inflammatory

11:07 Markers read together with your wearable data. That’s the work I do with men one-on-one inside the Executive Health Edge. If you’re done guessing about one system and you don’t get a second copy of it, the link’s in the description. But either way, go do the two free things today. You generally don’t need me for those. So stop optimizing the protocol, go check the preconditioning sitting underneath it. And if you did all five of these right and you still feel like a slower, foggy version of the guy you used to be, then the next move is to stop guessing and go look at the actual data. I made a whole video where I ran more than 80 biomarkers next to a full week of wearable data and laid out what actually matters after 40 once you can finally see what’s going underneath the hood. If that’s the honest version you came here for, that’s the one to watch next. It’s on the screen now.