Ross Edgley
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Huberman Lab · Unlocking Persistent Motivation & Extreme Resilience | Ross Edgley
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What Is a Strength Reserve?
Ross Edgley says a strength reserve is why he still strength trains. He raises his one-rep max on pull-ups so that each swim stroke, which he compares to a one-arm lap pull-down, is a smaller percentage of what he can do.
He points to Eddie Hall. In a CrossFit event with 60 kilos on the bar, Hall was so strong that the lift looked like a front raise to Ross Edgley. Ross Edgley says that lightness is a strength reserve, and that the idea is inspired by Eddie Hall and Cam McAvoy.
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Can Creatine Help After Lost Sleep?
Andrew Huberman says that if someone is mildly or severely sleep deprived, 10 or even 20 grams of creatine the next morning can partially rescue some cognitive function and maybe some physical vigor. He says it is not a replacement for sleep.
He says the best evidence is that creatine puts water in the muscles and makes a person stronger because of that. He has taken it since he was 17, about 10 grams a day, with an occasional washout of about a week. He says he does not think there is evidence that it makes hair fall out, that it is inexpensive, and that it seems safe. Ross Edgley says he did not take creatine on the Yukon swim.
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How Do Caffeine, Nicotine, and alpha-GPC Differ?
Ross Edgley says that toward the end of the Yukon swim they were getting into grams of caffeine, and that 400 milligrams made a hurting, mundane stretch feel better about 15 minutes later.
Andrew Huberman says he loves caffeine and has a high tolerance for it. Nicotine sets up a quick dependence for him, a fast up and down, so he does not treat it as an everyday tool. He keeps it as oral nicotine, such as a lozenge, not smoking or vaping. He calls alpha-GPC a milder alternative to nicotine. If he takes it late in the day, he says it can increase REM sleep instead of wrecking sleep the way many stimulants do. If he takes it too early, he crashes in the late afternoon. Besides caffeine, he sa
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What Is Deliberate Cold Exposure?
Andrew Huberman says deliberate cold exposure, done as a shower or a cold plunge and done safely, lets a person get familiar with a flood of adrenaline. The mind is in disarray for the first 20 or 30 seconds, and the person can slow their breathing and make a strategy to get through it or get out of it. He calls that stress inoculation: the chemicals do not change, and familiarity keeps panic from pushing adrenaline higher.
He says he is tired of seeing people hyperventilate and then go into cold water and die, and of videos of people jumping into ice holes and getting swept under. He says not to jump into an ice hole.
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Why Does Mild Anger Feel Motivating?
Andrew Huberman says neurosurgeon Robert Heath let patients with electrodes in the brain stimulate themselves. Across those patients, the spot they chose most was the midline thalamus, where the feeling was mild frustration and anger. They found it arousing and motivating, even though the stimulation did nothing useful while they sat in the chair.
Huberman says the result is a little dark. That arousal, a me-versus-them feeling, can drive people who might otherwise become complacent.
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Why Did Andrew Huberman Swim Toward Great White Sharks?
Andrew Huberman says his lab recorded great white sharks in the wild to bring into a VR lab. Photographer Michael Muller convinced him to get dive-certified and swim toward the sharks outside the cage. He had an air failure on the hookah line the day before, not outside the cage, and he says 2017 was when he deliberately stopped taking risks with his physical life.
Ross Edgley says that the first time he dived with tiger sharks and great whites, they came straight for him. The divers told him to control his breathing and slow his heart rate, and the shark looked at him and then left him alone. Andrew Huberman says great whites come in slowly and are not actively hunting a person when tuna a
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Why Did Brown Bears Worry Ross Edgley on the Yukon?
Ross Edgley says black bears on the Yukon in Canada were skittish and felt fine, while brown bears were not skittish and looked at him as if they were deciding what he tasted like.
He asked the support team if he was okay, because a brown bear was looking at him like he was dessert. He told Andrew Huberman the crew pulled out a cannon, not a gun, and said that if the bear got too close it would end up in the freezer. Ross Edgley kept swimming.
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Can What Makes a Champion Make a Bad Human?
Ross Edgley says what makes a great champion can make a bad human. He says he knows some of his swims are bad for his health, but they are good for his soul.
He recalls a comment about fighter John Jones. John Jones is incredible and unbelievable, but there is not enough money to fill the void in his life, and that same drive pushes him to greatness. Andrew Huberman says he does not know John and is not versed in mixed martial arts.
Ross Edgley calls the pattern strange. The void that money cannot fill is also what drives a champion.
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Why Did a Dying Man Steer the Yukon Swim?
Ross Edgley says a terminally ill man insisted on steering the boat for the Yukon River swim after doctors told him he had weeks to live.
The crew was missing a few boats. The man had lived on the river for years. He said they could have the boat, but he would be on it and he would steer. People told him it was a terrible idea. He refused to stay off the water, and everyone reluctantly agreed. He went out with his son. For the next 70 hours Ross Edgley swam down the Yukon, shoulders hurting, hypothermia seeping into his bones. Whenever he looked up he saw the man cheering, and he kept asking how he could stop. They finished the swim and broke the record. A documentary later went up on YouTu
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How Did Ross Edgley's Dad Keep Coaching With Cancer?
Ross Edgley's dad kept coaching tennis after stage four skin melanoma spread through his legs and stopped him from running. Ross Edgley says the family lost his dad four or five years ago. Doctors said the tumours had spread and they did not want him on his feet coaching 12 hours a day. He looked the doctor in the eye, said it was not a problem at all, and told them they already had a wheelchair tennis coaching system he would use.
He had built tennis centers up and down the UK. He taught wheelchair tennis and visually impaired tennis, and sometimes blindfolded himself so he could play. After a bad fall, Ross Edgley ran to the hospital and found blood down his dad's face. His dad told him n
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How Do Heavy Hangs Prime Pull-ups?
Ross Edgley primes a heavy pull-up with a short maximal hang so the nervous system is already switched on. Before a clean pull-up with about 60 kilos, he sometimes loads anywhere between 80, 90, and 100 kilos, holds an active hang for only three seconds, jumps down, takes the extra weight off, puts 60 kilos back on, and waits two minutes. The hold is there to switch him on, and he is not trying to get fatigued. When he then pulls, he pulls through 60 kilos.
Strength sessions stay 45 minutes long. Past that point the reps drill bad technique, and strength, speed, and power drop out of the session. He can run the hangs at home, where the heavy load, the hang, and the two-minute wait are easy
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How Do Cuttlefish Eyes Change When They Hunt?
When a cuttlefish sees something it wants to eat, the eyes move from the sides of the head to the front, and the animal becomes a depth-perception hunter.
Andrew Huberman studied cuttlefish in his lab in San Diego. Cuttlefish are cephalopods, like octopuses. They normally swim with the eyes on the sides of the head, wary, with near 360 degree vision, because they are prey and can see far behind them. They have no skeleton for protection, only a bone that lets them float, so they are basically a protein snack. The eye move happens first. Body patterns then change through chromophores, camouflage drops away, and hunting takes over. He says the shift is real: it recruits machinery in the brain
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Why Does Tunnel Vision Raise Energy?
Andrew Huberman says aiming vision at one target raises arousal and the ability to recruit physical energy and mental energy. Opening the gaze does the reverse: the body relaxes, and less energy can be sent to one place.
Animals with eyes on the side of the head tend to be prey and take in a panorama. Animals with eyes in front tend to be predators and get stronger depth perception. Some animals can shift the eyes from a wide view to a focused view. Human eyes stay fixed in the head, but moving vision toward a vergence point, a target, still raises arousal. People in the fight game know the narrow view. Dilating the gaze is like coming off the gas pedal. Vision and time perception are linke
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Why Does Ross Edgley Strength Train for Swims?
Ross Edgley strength trains heavily between country-length swims because a ligament or a tendon is what stops the swim, not lactic threshold, VO2, or technique.
Olympian friends ask whether the swim around Iceland used a two-beat or four-beat leg kick, whether he was breathing on both sides, and what his VO2 and lactic threshold were. Caught in an Arctic storm and windmilling, none of the usual swim measures matter. He lifts for mechanotransduction: strength work does more than make muscles stronger. Connective tissue, ligaments, and tendons get stronger too. Andrew Huberman calls the result the chassis, and Edgley agrees the chassis cannot break down. He jokes that Adam Peaty, from Loughbo
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What Does a Yaminawa Initiation Feel Like?
Ross Edgley says initiation with the Yaminawa tribe felt cathartic. The ceremony ended with a good feeling, short of euphoria, and a sense of wow, we did it. He is not advocating or recommending the week to anyone. He thinks he may have been pushing a button in the brain, a pattern he recognized from a study, and he says many times in his life he was pushing the button.
The first night of ayahuasca went wrong. Sweat poured off him as if somebody had thrown a bucket of water over him, his tongue swelled bigger than his mouth, and projectile vomiting purged his system. He turned to his friend, who works at Glastonbury, and his friend was licking a feather from the floor to taste the colours.
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What Four Things Make Up a Japanese Reason for Being?
Ross Edgley says a Japanese idea of a reason for being is why you get up in the morning, made of four things that all have to be there: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. He says people so often forget the paid part, almost become like a martyr, and are not making any money.
The chance to swim around Great Britain came up when the boat crew needed a deposit and a crew. At 32, Ross Edgley told his girlfriend he should probably do the responsible thing, get a house and a mortgage, or put the money on a boat and a crew and try to swim around Great Britain. She said she hated to say it, but he might be 80 with loads of money and able to buy
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Why Did Ross Edgley Picture His Dad in Heaven?
Ross Edgley fueled the swim around Iceland by picturing his dad in heaven, a tennis coach looking down and telling everyone else that the swimmer circling Iceland was his. The image gave Ross goosebumps, felt primitive, and got him through dark times. Even now, he said, the thought could send him another hundred miles.
Ross lost his dad four years before the conversation. His dad had been his mentor and his coach. Ross was becoming a dad and was trying to get back from the Iceland swim for the birth of his son. In the book he wrote about Iceland, he wanted the swim to stand as a tribute to everything his dad taught him and as a letter to his future son. In the water he imagined his dad on a
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Why Did Doubt Stop Helping Ross Edgley?
Ross Edgley says outside doubt became less and less useful across his career because fewer people doubted him. He says the swim around Great Britain was probably the biggest one, and once they had swum around Great Britain he missed the doubt.
Weekly vlogs of the swim went up on YouTube. Ross Edgley read every comment on the first vlog because he was excited. Commenters said he was far too big to be a swimmer, that he would give up after 100 kilometers, and that he would not even make the south coast. He thinks it was five years ago when he went back and found someone had replied that the old comments had not aged well, and the reply made him feel good. After the Great Britain swim, people
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Why Does Prefrontal Activity Turn a Loser Into a Winner?
Andrew Huberman says activity in a top-down circuit from the prefrontal cortex drives persistence and winning when other factors stay roughly equal. Quiet that region in a mouse that always won and the mouse becomes the loser. Raise activity in the same region in the loser, in real time, and the mouse wins every time. Cortisol and testosterone levels do not explain the switch.
A fetal mouse still cannot beat an adult mouse, and stimulating Huberman's prefrontal cortex would not let him out-deadlift someone clearly stronger. Huberman calls himself reasonably strong and says the other person absolutely is stronger. When two competitors sit within 10 or 20 percent of each other's ability, the
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What Happened on Ross Edgley's Loch Ness Swim?
Ross Edgley picked up cellulitis on a 56-hour nonstop swim of Loch Ness. The water was about four degrees, barely above freezing. He did not stop for sleep. No one could touch him, and he could not touch the boat.
Andrew Huberman asked what cellulitis is. Ross Edgley called it a skin infection. Fresh water and a chafing wetsuit drove the rub so deep that the skin turned infected, and he said the infection can be fatal if it reaches the lymph nodes or the bloodstream. Toward the end he had hypothermia. He was shaking from the inside, in his bones, while his skin was on fire from the cellulitis.
The injuries recalibrated his sense of pain. Swimming around Iceland, Ross Edgley would get very