Creatine for Endurance, Our Favorite Garage Gym Purchases, and Increasing HRV by 36%

Hey, Athletes! Creatine for Endurance, Our Favorite Garage Gym Purchases, and Increasing HRV by 36% - Episode 187 of The Garage Gym Athlete Podcast is up!

Creatine for Endurance, Our Favorite Garage Gym Purchases, and Increasing HRV by 36%

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IN THIS 43-MINUTE EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Jerred and Joe breakdown a study about the effects of creatine on endurance performance
• The study included over 277 participants
• The guys give their personal recommendations even touch on creatine and hair loss
• After the study they go over their favorite pieces of GGA equipment. 
• And A LOT MORE!!

Diving Deeper… 

If you want to go a little bit deeper on this episode, here are some links for you: 

Reference these studies for this week!

• Effects of Creatine Monohydrate on Endurance Performance in a Trained Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

 Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week 

Don't forget to listen to this week's episode!

• Creatine for Endurance, Our Favorite Garage Gym Purchases, and Increasing HRV by 36%

— 

Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add it to the comments below!

To becoming better!

- Jerred

Podcast Transcript

Joe: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast, where we talk about fitness, health, and anything to help you become the most optimal human beings. Let's dive into it.

Jerred: All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. Jared Moon here with Joe Courtney. What's up, Joe? How you doing, man? I'm doing great. We are doing a lot of different things today. If you're listening to podcast, we will make it you just listen as usual, and it's awesome.

If you're on YouTube, we're gonna be sharing a lot of stuff on screen, which we don't usually do. So trying to actually give some more visuals to the YouTube audience. So what we're doing today we will be talking briefly about a new study on creatine monohydrate. Very popular supplement. So we're gonna be covering a study on that real quick.

Then we're gonna be talking about garage gym equipment, some of our favorite picks from least expensive to more expensive, but maybe not most expensive. Some things to consider. We'll be showing you guys those pieces of equipment. And then we're gonna round it out with just some [00:01:00] general updates.

But my update. Is really cool. It's how I increased my H R V by 36%, and I've been, and this has been consistently over the last month, so I wouldn't come here reporting, Hey I increased my H R V by 36%. If I'd only done it for three days. That's dumb. I've done it con consecutive on an average H R V basis.

And I know a lot of people wanna know how to increase their H R V. And I did this completely on accident, so we'll be talking about that at the end. But let's jump into the creatine monohydrate study. So let me pull that up. So the name of this study is Effects of Creatine, monohydrate on Endurance Performance in a Trained Population, A systematic Review and meta-analysis.

And this one was done in 2023. May, 2023. This is. No March. What may? It's got both dates on there. Anyway, super fresh. Super fresh. We normally are looking at things in 2022.[00:02:00] So as systematic review, meta-analysis, these are they sit on top of the of the hierarchy of literature, right?

Because they're looking at studies. It's a study of studies. And this one, they looked at 13 different studies, I think was the total inclusion, met the inclusion criteria and it was over 277 participants. And it was really just looking at the effects of creatine, monohydrate, hydrate on endurance performance.

So we know like creatine is effective, right? We know it's effective for increasing muscle size just through forcing more water into the muscle. Like it makes you bigger, thicker, whatever you wanna call it makes you stronger, it makes you more powerful. And there's a lot of research that it even has a lot of cognitive benefits, a lot of great reasons.

To take creatine, it's safe, it's effective. But where it, it's gotten, there's a lot of literature, but where we don't know as much about is endurance. And specifically, I'll just go cut straight to the chase here. They didn't find out a lot [00:03:00] of stuff here nothing beneficial. It says creatine, monohydrate supplementation was shown to be ineffective on endurance performance in a trained population.

So that's the. The short of it. What were your thoughts on this study, Joe?

Joe: I was kinda surprised at the outcome. I thought it would have at least some small benefit and maybe it might take looking into individual studies of how they actually examine people's performance benefit or what they were exactly doing and.

I guess if any, what kind of athletes they were testing. If you're just giving these to endurance athletes, then they might not have any killer benefit because creatine is is there to improve lean mass, not exactly your cardiovascular or anything like that. So if you only have people that are training endurance, then you're not really building, supporting lean mass.

But if you have a concurrent training person that is actually supporting lead mass by doing. Resistance training and all of that. Maybe there might be some. So I think this one I've had [00:04:00] more of like things to talk about, a anecdotal stuff to take away than what it actually came out with. But I was so surprised at the analysis of it and they looked at all these studies that came out with the same of that.

It was either null or some of 'em had a negative effect, but the negative effect was not really that negative. Yeah. It's yeah.

Jerred: And I wonder, they didn't get too far into the mechanisms behind it, but the fact of the matter is if you are a serious endurance athlete, weight is a problem.

Like you don't want to be 20 pounds heavier going into an Ironman triathlon or a bike race or a marathon. And you just don't wanna be heavier. And I wonder if that has something to do with it, because typically creatine is giving you usable mass. If you gain 10 or 15 pounds. Taking creatine, which that might seem like a lot for some people, but that's what seems to happen to me.

Like I've talked about being a creatine, like hyper responder, like I, my body just really responds to it. That's why I don't always take it because I just gain. I gain a lot when I'm on [00:05:00] creatine, but that would suck to just be like, gain 15 pounds and go to run. But it's normally usable mass, but it's usable in what you're talking about, like concurrent training.

It's usable in the gym if I wanna jump, lift, run, throw, those kind of things. But yeah, if I'm gonna run 20 miles, 26 miles, maybe not as useful. Maybe. And you talked about the results being Kind of a wash, right? Like for endurance athletes, like maybe that's it. Maybe it's increasing a lot of like muscular strength, power benefits, but it's offset just by the increase in mass that you're having to carry for long duration race.

That's just my 2 cents on it. I think that might be part of the issue.

Joe: Yeah, so I think takeaways for me for the study is if you're going into a endurance training season, like where you have multiple events that you actually wanna train for, get better for, and you're, most of your focus is on your endurance training, then treat team's probably not.

It is not gonna do anything for you. There's no point. But if you are preparing for a event or two events and you are, [00:06:00] cuz we, and we actually have a ton of athletes that do this just even this past couple weeks. We've had somebody post in our group about they're doing their first marathon, and we've always had people, we're training for their first ultra, but they're still doing, it's like our type of resistance training, but they're adding, three, three or so days of running or something in.

I think creatine could be a good option for those people because they are challenging themselves to do one or two events to do good on in them, but they're probably just gonna come right back to training, doing concurrent training and resistance training. So they don't, you don't, it would be a way to maintain the mass that you might have and not really make you suffer too much a afterwards.

And I think performance wise, you'd still, be, I don't think it'd make you hurt that much, but either way, af after you're done you're endurance season or whatever you're doing, I think in the long run, creatine could help you keep that lean mass.

Jerred: Yeah, I think for just Garage gym athletes in general, I think routine monohydrate is a great supplement that you can take.

I don't think that you have to take that much or take it all the time.[00:07:00] I know the general recommendation is like five grams per day. But I really think that you could get away with even less, like two to three grams per day if you're just gonna be consistent with it for long periods of time. You can cycle off.

You don't have to cycle off. One of the things that I've always. Been a little cautious about is, does creatine increase hair loss, like the speed of hair loss? Because there was one study that said that it did, they were taking like hyper doses. And then I had talked to or I listen to a podcast with He was like a hair doctor.

He was like a doctor who specialized in hair or whatever, and he straight up said yes. Because the, since creatine increases, D H T can increase your speed of hair loss. Then I was listening to another podcast with like more recently with Dr. Kyle Gillette, I think his name is if you, he's been on a couple of the bigger health podcasts recently.

Super smart dude. I might try and get him on the Garage Gym Athlete podcast. But he was saying no, he was saying like he doesn't think [00:08:00] that's true. If anything, it will optimize your d h t levels to where you would lose your hair at the rate that you would probably use, lose it anyway. But it won't necessarily speed it up, but not gonna lie, I'm not trying to lose my hair any faster than I already am.

Like I'm trying to keep it for as long as I possibly can. So that's one thing that I'm always a little cautious of with creatine because the only people I've seen who are super like, Hey, creatine does not cause hair loss. They always own a creatine supplement company. They sell a creatine supplement.

And I'm like I can't trust a word that comes outta your mouth now. And so it's very hard to find out what the truth is there. But overall, I think creatine great supplement can really help. I know it increases my performance crap ton when I take it, and that's a scientific term.

Joe: I'm glad that a guy named Gillette.

Has specializes in

Jerred: hair loss? No. So those are two different so I listened

Joe: to it. He doesn't specialize in it, but he knows about it for creating purposes. But yeah

Jerred: he still makes, he's like a family health doctor, but

Joe: I think I'm a pretty good responder with, comes to Cret [00:09:00] and I've only done it like twice and I think it's because I have gained some and it's just, it's hard for me to lose.

I'm back on the train of, I'm actually debating on. Doing a very low dose of creatine. So I might be, I don't know if you have because you've always kept tabs on sort of creatine, as you can tell. I dunno if you have a brand recommendations out there. Cuz myself, I'm I might think about it.

I don't know yet just cause I don't wanna blow up, but I know Liz is thinking about it as well. Cause she's on a more of a hyper feature training right now.

Jerred: Yeah. So the, I don't have a specific brand. A lot of companies sell it. It's A lot of companies resell this brand, should I say it's called Creapure.

So Korea pur is a supplement, supplement form that you want of creatine, monohydrate. I think it's a company made in Germany. It's very clean all creatine is synthetic cuz you can't actually pull it from meat. Or it wouldn't be cost effective to do so creapure is what you're looking for, but.

When you're looking at any supplement company that you like, like I know on it their creatine comes from CreER, but they're so does [00:10:00] everyone else. So it's, that's how funny it is. Like we could have a creatine supplement tomorrow, garage, creatine from CreER, just like all these other companies.

It'd be zero difference between your favorite brand and influencer pushing it and us pushing it, cuz we'd all be getting it from Korea pire in Germany. So anyway, Korea pire is probably the best that I've researched. Anything else is probably coming from China and. It's a little scary. Always scary.

But that's it on creatine. Let's hop into some equipment. So we're gonna be talking about. A very inexpensive piece of garage gym equipment and a more expensive piece of garage gym equipment. Some of our favorite purchases over the years. And I can go first. You want me to start with least expensive or most expensive, Joe?

Yeah. I wanna go least, least expensive. Okay. This is by far my favorite piece of garage gym equipment. I've purchased the Condor Century Plate Carrier, so I bought it from Rogue Fitness. You can buy it from their website too. And I have the what's the other one called? Tactical. [00:11:00] What's it called?

I don't know. The one everyone has, right? Hold on, I'm gonna I'm gonna look it up. Weight vest.

Joe: I also have the condors. We have two of, oh

Jerred: the five 11 tact tech plate carrier. That's the one everyone wants. It's $215. The main one, I feel like that's even gone up. It has five stars, 453 ratings on Rogue.

And just to, rehash some of my history, I've done merf like 300 times now or something. I prefer the condo century. Now it doesn't line up to perfectly 20 pounds. If you buy the Rogue plate carriers, you have to buy specific ones to make it because there's like a slight weight difference, like a pound weight difference between the condo and the five 11.

And so you have to take that into account. If you wanna be real strict with MEF and make sure you have 20 pounds, you have to add a little bit of extra weight to the condo century. But it just is actually a little bit more comfortable to me. For doing the workout and especially for running. I feel like the five 11 is something I would wanna wear if I'm [00:12:00] trying not to get shot.

For sure. Like it's very it really hugs the body and covers like a majority of you. But I don't like that for doing murf and this one rides a little bit higher. It frees up your abdomen a little bit more so you can breathe a little bit better. So I'm a huge fan of the condo century.

Plate. Carrier. Carrier. And yeah, it comes in at 51 95 without plates, and you can throw in your own weight plates in there. You can throw a 10 pound weight. If you have like metal 10 pounders on the front and back. I've done it. It's pretty simple. Do you have this one?

Joe: Yeah, we have, we, we have a black and a tan.

Yeah. So

Jerred: do I. They're awesome. Yeah, this is my favorite one. I think a lot of our

Joe: athletes preferred as well.

Jerred: Yeah. I don't know why. The five 11 s Nice, but again, it's

Joe: need that much.

Jerred: Yeah. Like I bought the five 11 too, thinking that there was some magic to it. Because I was doing merf so much, I was like, okay, this one is gonna increase my performance cuz I'm gonna be able to breathe better or move better or run easier.

And none of those things were true. They were all, the [00:13:00] opposite was true. And I'm not here to bash on five 11, like it's a good vest and all. I just, I like this one slightly better and it's super cheap and I love weight vests in general for doing all sorts of crap. Like you can make ring rows a little bit more challenging.

Like if you wanna get good at pull-ups, you can just do pull-ups, say you can already do some pullups, but sometimes just doing really slow ring rows with a weighted vest. That's a great way to build up some strength.

Joe: When I took the last year when I took six months off using the barbell, I did noted gear and I was wearing a vest for most of the strength days on, on body weight stuff.

So yeah, it was great.

Jerred: That's awesome. All right, man. Let's get yours. What's your what's your, you're gonna go inexpensive first. Yeah.

Joe: This is the brand newest thing that I even bought recently, and that is these rogue band handles. And they are really awesome because you just loop them around whatever band you have and it turns into a handle and it seems so small and almost like unnecessary.

But if you've done a ton of stuff with a band and you go to [00:14:00] grab it, like it just doesn't hold right in your fist. It'll start Or

Jerred: squeeze your palms if you're like getting too far out there or something like,

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. So it can fit on any band, loop it through however you want.

And I've been using these recently and they're really good because I do like to use bands for all kinds of stuff. And they, they're pretty cheap. They, let's see, 30 bucks, they're also part of their three ships free thing. I think that's what, that's why I got 'em. Cause I was just I got some t-shirts and I was like I need something else.

So I threw one of these on there and, Yeah, they've been doing really good. So if you do banded stuff, I would recommend them. I recommend everybody have, has bands in the garage cause they're good to do. And we've talked about way in the past of the what is the bands that we would get for our shoulders?

Crossover Cemetery. Yeah. And those are really expensive Crossover Cemetery and you have to buy each individual band. And I still have my two bands of Crossover Cemetery. They're fantastic, but you can't really adjust the resistance of them as much. But if you just get these handles, this is a cheap way to engineer that.

Because[00:15:00] the other day I was, I forgot I was doing something last week and. Clipped them to the same band. And all I did was I either had it at full length or I stepped on the band, and that just shortened it even more. And then that created more resistance and I was doing the same exercise or two different exercises with the same band, and that's all I had to do for it.

So really versatile. So taking up especially for space or travel, if you take two bands with you and these handles that'd be fantastic for travel or anything.

Jerred: The Rogue Band handle. So how do you get the handle, or how do you get the band on there? Does it like pop off?

Does the handle pop off? Yeah. I'm surprised

Joe: they don't even show off, show you how it works. Cause I, I got it. I'm like, okay, how the hell is this thing gonna work? Do I have to unscrew it? But if you look in this center thing, this line, okay. Is it comes detached. So they, so on this, so on, so it's like this, but if you look out on the side it just opens like this.

Okay. So it, they overlap. So where that cross was, they overlap like this. And when you, if the handle's down here, the arch is, it [00:16:00] just opens like that and then you just slide it in and then overlaps and hooks together. I gotcha. There's nothing that snaps or nothing like that.

It's just, it just on a spring on the inside and it just closes.

Jerred: Here, pull it back up. Does it cuz it, I was noticing. So yeah, $55 for a pair of $29 for one. Very inexpensive as far as Barr equipment goes, but 11 reviews, 3.5. I feel like that's a little low. You have any complaints? Any any problems?

Not

Joe: yet. I don't know why it's I haven't read any of the reviews. I will say my biggest complaint is so when you buy this, I guess that I didn't read too much is that I see two handles and so you go add, but it's, you only add a single handle, so you have to add the pair of handles.

Jerred: I did the same thing when I bought the S B D Neve Knee Sleeves, and also because of the price.

I forgot the knee sleeves cost, but they were like, it was like $65 or something. I was like, this is definitely for a pair. And then I get one knee leave in the mail. And I was like, why would you only sell one anyway? Who wants one knee sleeve? So yeah, I've made that mistake before. A hundred [00:17:00] percent.

Joe: Oh, so this person said the spring load of the handle is a downside because it, I guess if you don't have the band at the center, if, depending on how you're pulling it, it can spring open. But I haven't had that if so I guess because they open right here. I guess if the band goes off to the side, then it can spring open.

But Just keep the band in the center like, okay. Okay. I guess that's fine.

Jerred: Ooh, one, one star down there from Kevin 14 in Seattle. He's

Joe: not a fan. See, opens with certain me movements.

Jerred: I wonder how violent that would be though, if you got a lot of tension on the band and the band just pops out.

You're like, you're getting thrown around the garage Gym.

Joe: An alternative to that, you can get those little tiny Velcro straps, like they have those straps for like cords. Like a lot of times, oh yeah, cord chargers come with it. Just get a Velcro strap to put it on there. If you really want to add extra security to your bands,

Jerred: that's a good purchase.

I think I might actually buy those because and just so everybody knows, I know we're reviewing Rogue and like whatever we there's no affiliation here. We don't have any kind of

Joe: not, it's actually a competitor.

Jerred: Yeah. Yeah. So actually my [00:18:00] next one will be on Rogue Two. I buy from Rogue, but I can endorse that they do have quality equipment, but they're not paying us to say anything.

I'll just say that much. And we're no discounts or anything, but I'll go next with my more expensive piece. And this isn't even rogue, didn't make it. I just bought it from their website. This is next. This is my next purchase. So the concept two bike, ur here this is, I love this piece of equipment.

It's 4.8 stars on Rogue with 172 reviews. It's $1,100. It's the most expensive of the concept two series that you can get. But I just absolutely love it. I bought clip-in pedals too, so spent even more money because I already have clip-in shoes for my bikes. I bought it clip-in pedals, which you can switch out, which I actually thought was awesome.

Okay. But overall it's just a really solid piece of equipment and you can do a lot of great training on it. So yeah, I'm a huge fan of the concept two bike rg really for just about everything. Like I, I warm up [00:19:00] on it. I like to do cardio on it. And the resistance that you can change on it you can go, if you go up to a 10 it becomes very muscularly demanding, like pretty fast.

And they've done a good job of that dampener, letting enough airflow in and out to change how much that bike is causing resistance. But at the same time, as someone who's done a lot of cycling, I also like how realistic it feels. Even though we're not on a chain system, like most bikes, it's on a belt system.

It still feels a lot like a real bike when I'm pedaling and training. So I really like that too cuz you can keep it, I think I keep it around like I. Maybe it's three or four, maybe five and six. I can't really remember. Typically you're trying to keep it around 80 rpm. I think that's a better like gauge than saying keep it at a three or whatever.

Like whatever you can consistently keep at around 75, 80 rpm. That's about what you're looking for and conditioning, if you go up to eight. And you're like, there's no way in [00:20:00] hell I can maintain a d RRP m then it's too heavy if you need to go down to two. But you can maintain like, 80 is like a healthy cadence.

So that's what you're looking at. But overall, I've just been a huge fan of this. I love the roller blade wheels on the front cuz you can move it just about anywhere, way better than the crappy ones on the rower that they have that get stuck on every crack and rock and pebble that you try and take your rower around.

But I do have all three pieces of the concept two line. I have the skier, I have the rower, and I have the concept two bike. And if I had to sell all my other ones, I would, and I would keep this one even though I like the full body effect of the row. I just love the biker.

Joe: Yeah, I got to use one of those in Bahrain.

They got them while I was there, and I would end workouts a lot on them, do my warmups on them. I really do like it. We have a spin bike and it's a decent quality spin bike, but I plan on selling it and getting the biker because I just like to feel a little bit better how smooth it is. The monitor, it's the same concept.

Monitor. One of the best things is the seat adjustment. The seat and the handlebar adjustment. It's like the little [00:21:00] tiny. Teeny tiny increments versus like our spin bike, you have to unscrew it and then it's like an inch gap to the next one. And it's like that on the handles, and the handle is just too hard to move.

But with those, you can adjust it to the littlest tiny increments. Love that. Our spin. Yeah

Jerred: I'll I'll hit on that real quick. Like you can go up and down on the handle and you can go back and forth on the handle, and then the seat can go up and down too. So you can get you can get it very dialed into your very specific Ergonomic like design.

Yeah. So what else about your spin bike, didn't you like?

Joe: Yeah, so I it doesn't have all those adjustments and I know I didn't it's like a $300 spin bike, so it's not bottom of the line, but not definitely on top of the line. There's some really good ones that you, I've founded some gyms, but no matter.

No matter what, all the other spin bikes I've had a little bit of issues with them either getting settled, getting comfort. There's a lot of, it's harder to adjust here and there. There's also the resistance knobs, like whenever you would tighten it, like I feel like I would tighten it and nothing would happen that you'd find a spot where it starts to tighten it.

And then you have this tiny centimeter of dial space where it's like, [00:22:00] Not tight enough to like, too tight to I have to stand up the pedal and you have to find this teeny, tiny little adjustment. Whereas that, like the income, like I, it's the resistance isn't going to be anything too crazy.

Like probably not, I don't know if, I don't know if you put it up at a 10, is stand up. I

Jerred: almost never do. The only time I might do that is if I'd probably have to be doing like 62nd intervals, like 30 would be even too short. To put it up to 10, like if I'm trying to get like something really demanding, 30 be too short, cuz it would take 10 seconds just to get your feet like moving at a proper pace.

Then you only have 20 seconds to hit the interval hard. But 60, if you take those 10 to get up to speed, then you'd it'd be like, Biking through mud, through for the next 50, 40, 50 seconds. So that's the only time I've probably ever done it. Most of the time you can still do killer intervals.

I still want an airine. Even though I have this bike, I, this bike has been preventing me from getting an airdyne, but I still want an airdyne. Ady just hits a little bit different than a biker, but I still really like this piece. [00:23:00]

Joe: Yeah. So I, I. For the shorter, harder intervals, I'd say it's not for it, but I mostly just use my bike for longer, either longer intervals or just steady state zone two, something like that, which that's what I want it for.

So I think concept two is really shines in that regard for the biker versus the regular spin bike. I have my mind's right here in my office and I do use it. We both use it fairly often,

Jerred: all right, man. What do you have for your more expensive piece?

Joe: Speaking of we have

Jerred: an airplane, it's almost like I planned it.

Awesome.

Joe: Yeah. So I knew I wanted an aerody for the longest time. We used 'em all the time in again, Bahrain rain warming up. We had one in, we had the secondhand one in San Diego and broke it just cuz we used it so much and cause it was secondhand. The longest time I was going through, I, I thought I wanted, The Rogue Echo yeah, that is their Aerodyne bike.

So similarly

Jerred: priced, right? It's like the same kind of same price at time, I think.

Joe: I am not sure what the echo [00:24:00] is right now. If you wanna yeah I'll pull it up open. So the Raptor bike it's listed right now as a thousand dollars. I got it for seven 50. Seven 60, no,

Jerred: echo is 8 45 right now with free shipping.

Dang. I'm might, dang. I just gotta the free shipping is what gets me cuz Garage Gym equipment is expensive as ship and I don't know if they're always offering free shipping, but. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe: Also the fact that it's way less expensive than the Raptor. So the Raptor, like I said, I got it for seven 60, so it was cheaper than, yeah.

The echo I may have gotten, I think I got free shipping as well. Yeah. Yeah. There's free shipping right here. And so I was going back and forth and I equated him to about the stairs. Okay, within a hundred dollars that's that, that's negligible.

And I saw just around this time, coop had a review out for the Raptor and he reviewed it and he compared it to the echo. And every, it, everything sounded really good. It's still like really sturdy, really solid metal. What really sold me. Was, it has a little bit lower of a profile, so if you've been on [00:25:00] the Echo, they are much bigger and a little bit bulkier.

Like they are just, their frame is a bit bulkier. It's a bit wider, but also coming standard with the fringe bike has these turf tires

Jerred: to move it around. That's a massive man and that's like the first thing I noticed when you pull it up at these, if you're just listening right now, it's just, imagine an Airdyne bike, but it's got these giant like tractor wheel looking tires on the front of it that you can move this thing around with.

Yeah.

Joe: And that's if you wanna add those into the your own price, because you have to add those cost-wise for the echo. So this is great for moving around. We haven't moved it around a ton, but I've wheeled this thing out of my garage just to get out in the sun several times. Super easy.

It also comes with a fan guard. So on the very fa you can't really see it on these pictures, but facing you. The fan guard right there. So the this, so the wind doesn't blow right at you. And when it's hot, yeah, that might be fine. But it's fairly chilly here. A lot like low sixties into the fifties.

Usually it's in the fifties when we're working out and that breeze is not welcome. So the fan guards fantastic. So it comes with a fan guard. [00:26:00] Comes with the fan guard and the water

Jerred: bottle holder. Yeah. Cuz all those things are upgrades on the echo. I'm pretty sure. Like you can buy the fan guard, you can buy the wheels, you can buy a water bottle holder.

It looks like fringes. Like we're just gonna add all those things in and charge a little bit more. Yeah. So let's start to a

Joe: little bit sense now and it also has a little lip. That you can set your phone on top of if you really want to. Just so we wanna set it on there. So all those little things, I was like, okay, this kind of pushed me over to Fringe and it is solid, like the feel of it and how it rides is fantastic.

I will 100% compare this to, it's way better than the assault bike. Assault bike, I think is the way far and far bottom three, like not even close to the Raptor or the Echo. So to me it's a toss up between these two as in for quality and these, just these extra things that you get. My biggest gripe is their monitor is trash.

I had.

Jerred: Yeah, it looks, it doesn't look great. It looks like one of those monitors, like where if you press the screen real hard, like all the, like one of those old school like screens from the

Joe: nineties. Yeah. You can see the, yeah. All the things light up. So I [00:27:00] got it and within the, within a month, the up and down button stopped working.

And so I contacted 'em and was like, Hey, these, my buttons already stopped working. I just got this. And they're like, okay, we'll send you a new one. At the time I guess they had gotten busy or something cuz they, they were on back orders, so it took like a, at least another month to get a Monitor. I got that monitor.

It came, it was like taped on top. I put it on, I installed it. Everything worked. But that after again, six weeks broke, so now like my, none of my buttons down here work. I all, the only thing that works is like the enter button, and sometimes it will randomly reset. So like when you first put in your batteries or you reset it, it asks you, you put as you put in your age and then you go do stuff.

So I can't even program really intervals anymore on the monitor. I just go, which is whatever, like I liked doing it. For like 32nd and 62nd intervals in the rest time. So they would just be programmed. Not a game changer. Not a complete killer. It still works, it still lights up.

Everything's still fine. So it's still as I start pedaling, everything will light up. The time the calories, distance, that's all great. It's just the buttons stopped [00:28:00] working and it's happened to both of my monitors. So that's the biggest negative, but it's not like a complete deal. Deal breaker.

Game changer. Cuz even on the echo, like when I go use it on base, I don't exactly use, I don't program those intervals as much anymore.

Jerred: Yeah. But it's still seems a little bit frustrating though.

Joe: Yeah, but those extras, there's pros and cons and knowing the monitor situation. Yeah. I would just keep tabs on yours so that like, when you get it if anybody were to choose to get it just reach out to, to fringe and they were pretty quick to replace it.

Jerred: Doesn't sound like you just gave up on the second one. You were like, nah, whatever. I don't care. Yeah.

Joe: And it's funny, I don't even know if they must, I don't know if they know it's an issue, but. When they replaced the original monitor, like new out of box, they didn't even ask me to send it back.

They're just like, here, we'll just send you this one. Yeah. So maybe they just have a bunch of junk monitors as they just keep sending out. Yeah. I feel

Jerred: like other companies they like, send it back once we get it. We'll, yeah, like my chili pad broke and I. That was a, that was like a four month process.

Like cuz they had to send me I don't know, it doesn't [00:29:00] matter. It took forever. But they had to verify. They had to try to fix it, they had to verify it, and then they finally sent me a new one. But anyway. All right man. Awesome. That's all we'll do on equipment today.

Let's round out with some updates. I can kick it off cuz I, I did dangle that carrot at the beginning talking about how I increased my H r v 36% and no one's gonna like how I did it. So I quit drinking caffeine. I was gonna say I quit drinking caffeine. So here's what happened.

This goes back into April. I had a lot of caffeine one day. I don't drink that much caffeine. I wanna give like full context for everybody. I drink enough. My average when I was drinking co caffeine would be one, maybe two cups per day. So that was it. Like a lot of times be one, sometimes if I just wanted another cup of coffee, I would get another one.

But never, I had a strict rule on never having more than two. But then it was like Easter Sunday or something like that, and I ended up having a lot of coffee [00:30:00] because I had two cups in the morning. And then we went to church, they had free coffee. My parents like brought me coffee when they came over to hang out for the day.

And so all in all, I had five or six cups of coffee that day and I felt nothing. This was like the whole reason I decided to stop drinking caffeine. I didn't feel more anxious, more jittery, more alert. I felt nothing. It was like, like I was drinking water and I was like, okay, dude. Like officially your body does not.

Caffeine is not helping you, like it's not helping you at all. And I'm getting enough sleep. You know what I mean? Like I really, I don't know if you're still in that stage, but like baby stage, not sleeping well, I basically, I think I needed caffeine. Very much needed caffeine because what it's doing is it's like it's hitting on those receptors to make sure that you don't feel tired.

That's what caffeine does. And there are a lot of like performance benefits as well. But [00:31:00] that's what caffeine is doing. But if you're getting. I'm getting seven to eight and a half hours of sleep per night pretty consistently. I don't really have a justification to need to drink caffeine other than I always have and have for a long time.

And yeah, I like coffee. But now I drink decaf with my wife. Emily's always been drinking decaf. She doesn't really ever drink caffeine. And so anyway, I quit. I also if anyone's interested in quitting, I quit so slowly. So I did. I said I would have one to two cups of coffee, and then I went down to making sure I only had one cup of coffee for a week.

And then after that week I made, I went down to half calf for a week, and then after half calf I went down to quarter calf. And you're like how do you get quarter calf? I was actually measuring out how many decaffeinated beans and how many caffeinated beans I would use to make my coffee. And so I did a week of one cup, a week of half calf and then a week of quarter calf.

And then I went cold Turkey, or not cold Turkey, I quit. But like I've tried to go cold Turkey before [00:32:00] and I just get headaches for like days and they're real bad. And I just, I always end up drinking caffeine again when I've tried to quit in the past because I'm like, I would rather drink caffeine for the rest of my life than have these headaches.

And it always like interferes with work or whatever. So anyway, that's how I quits. Kind of the reason why I quit. And the complete unexpected thing that I didn't realize would happen, like the garment thought I was like doing something different with training. Cuz the garment is very different than something like a whoop takes your H r V.

And this is honestly what I hate most about the whoop. It takes your h r v during, like the last minute of your deep wave sleep. Something like that. They stated on their website. I don't know why they think that's the most accurate measure. Maybe they have some science I haven't seen that backs that up.

But I don't like that because I think that it makes for inconsistent measures of H R V. Garmin takes your H R V measurement average over the night, so it'll just be like the whole time you're sleeping, it'll be like, here was your H R V while you were sleeping and HR and garment does a readiness score now, and stuff, [00:33:00] and it factors the H R V in there anyway. If your H R V goes too high or too low, that's supposed to be a bad thing, like too low, it's suppressed. You might be overtraining. And then same with too high if it goes way outside your zone. And so Garmin was like, whoa, what's wrong with you? Like your H R V is like way higher than normal.

What's going on? But then it's just been that way. Every single day. It took two days after I quit caffeine for the my H R V to spike up. And then it's just been consistent for the last month. 36% higher. Yeah, unless the only time it's been down is like I had one or two beers on Memorial Day and.

That, that always screws you with my r v made it a little bit lower, made it more back to normal, which is funny. Like my old, like consistent H r V. So if you wanna increase your H R V by 36% or more, try quitting some caffeine.

Joe: I know that it doesn't, the coffee and caffeine doesn't do a ton for me anymore.

And I know that if I drink too much of it, I actually get tired, like I start yawning. Yeah. And also if I. Drink a ton of [00:34:00] caffeine and don't have any water. So I know some people get really jittery or stomach ache. I just get like tired and start yawning if I have too much caffeine and not enough water or just too much caffeine in general.

And I know that my biggest issue with sleep is that I always have a hard time falling asleep. So I have a hard cutoff time of coffee at noon. So like I, and no more caffeine afternoon, no more caffeine afternoon. And so there's a lot of times where I would still try and finish my one cup of coffee.

Usually it's 16 ounces or so. I think this mug is 12. And lately I haven't even been finishing like my 12 ounce cup. Like I might have a half or a third of a cup left. And if it's getting close to noon, I just pour it out. So the last couple weeks I have been going down just because I haven't been too worried about drinking my entire cup of coffee.

And it's fine because, and I. On those days where I drink less, I think I do fall asleep better. So I've been cutting back, not completely consciously doing it. I've just been like, okay, whatever. I don't really need or care about [00:35:00] that coffee now. But I do the, those first couple sips in the morning are still fantastic.

It's just after that I'm just like, okay I've had my, four ounces now I'm now, the rest is just, it's just whatever. If I finish, So I'd probably be fine if I did without caffeine. I don't know how I feel about decaf. I'm a little bit of a coffee snob when it comes to taste because of grinding and doing pour over and stuff.

But

Jerred: I'll send you what Emily buys because it's ridiculously expensively, stupid decaffeinated coffee. And I say that because some mornings I won't even drink coffee. She's you really just were drilling it for the caffeine. I was like, Yeah, I like coffee, but like some mornings I'm like, it seems like a waste of time.

I'm like, it's not like I don't need that drink today. Like I'm fine. Like a lot of mornings I just don't even drink anything. Now I just, I'll have water, but then I'm like, go to my day because I just don't need the caffeine. But I actually love the feeling cuz that's the only thing that I was addicted to.

I don't have a, I don't have a sweet tooth or I just don't have anything with food that like I just needed to have or like whatever. I just don't have anything like that With food. The only thing I had to have and was like actually physically dependent on [00:36:00] was caffeine. So I'm pretty happy to be off.

I don't know if I'll drink it again. My plan was to reset my sensitivity for six months and then maybe bring it back, but now my H R V increased. I don't know if I will. What's new with you, man?

Joe: Really nothing. It's getting into somewhere. We're about to do some traveling, so I'm gonna have to get creative with some travel workouts.

Maybe I might actually take these bands with me on the road because we're gonna be gone for. Two, two and a half weeks. And that's a good bit of time. So usually I would just take my running shoes, but maybe I'll take two bands and this handle, maybe I should order that other handle, see if it'll get here in time so I can have two handles.

Jerred: I might be moving this summer, so if I move this summer, my fitness is, it always gets a little bit screwed up during a move cuz Either to pack up my stuff or the garage gets too messy or whatever. So I might be going down to like bare bones style track in the near future. Yeah. I like that.

I'm almost like the, there's sometimes where it feels freeing. Yeah. Like I gotta, I've got a kettlebell, a weight vest and a pull-up bar. Like sometimes, like I just don't wanna think about anything else. [00:37:00] I'm like, yes, put me in a situation where that's all I'm allowed to use and I actually have a lot of fun.

I enjoy doing that sometimes, but then I start to miss the barbell on heavier weight. If I do that for du

Joe: all, yeah, that's why I phase out of I'll do at least a month or something of body weight type training in a year. I think I think that'll be a normal for me, just because it is nice to be a bit free from the barbell and like after a while with, it's just the thought of okay, I got squats today.

I gotta do a lot of warmup sets to get up to that set. And then that's just it's almost like a workout in itself. Yeah, so I'll be playing with that. I'll be on the east coast in North Carolina and in Virginia. Check out, at least I'll see Ryan Caswell and maybe somebody else who'll see we'll know.

We have started to bring the baby out to the gym now that he's walking and running around. So he likes to be out there just to play. And he started to mimic us and start to do those little his little air squats. So that was cool to see. It's always fun. Awesome. He enjoys being out there, so that, that's always nice.

And it's funny when he tries to, but it's cool.

Jerred: You got like a full grown kid that [00:38:00] over there, man, it's like, it's weird to it's weird running a virtual company in which I've never seen this kid. I only see like pictures and it feels like he was just born yesterday and No, he's, nah, that's running.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Joe: I just get pictures of the neighbors kids put 'em up there. Yeah.

Jerred: This is not even, my kid does not exist. It's like why is he going to kindergarten already? It's yeah. Oh, awesome. Matt does not add up. That's it for today's episode. Maybe try ditching some caffeine or buy some equipment we, we mentioned or try some creatine, mountain hydrate.

Either way we're trying some new stuff on the podcast, as you can tell, so you can expect more like this. We'd love your feedback. If you're part of the community, I'd love your feedback in the actual community app. So we use circle for our community. Let us know what you thought of this podcast. Trying some, just a new format.

Talking about equipment, things that we don't normally do and going over the study a little bit faster. Really always listening to your feedback and making adjustments off of it. We just love this stuff. We love training, we love fitness, we love programming. But we wanna make [00:39:00] sure that the community remains, number one in what we're doing.

You guys just keep us up to date in the community. Let us know if you are a part of the Garage Gym Athlete community. Thank you so much for being engaged and being a part of it. If you wanna be a part of what we're doing, the programming, that's what we're best at. You can just go to garage gym athlete.com.

You can sign up for a free trial. You can be a part of the community and we would love to have you. But that's it for this one. Thanks for watching or listening. Remember, if you don't kill comfort will kill you.