When people talk about “redox,” they often imagine a simple on/off switch: too much oxidation is bad, too little is good, and antioxidants somehow fix everything. But redox isn’t a static level. It is a movement, a rhythm, a pulse. It is the cell’s equivalent of breathing: electrons are passed, accepted, handed off, and recycled in a constant dance that allows mitochondria to do the one thing that keeps everything else alive create a stable flow of energy without generating destructive chaos. When that movement slows or stops, the body becomes metabolically stuck. It can’t shift gears. It can’t adapt. It can’t repair. And one of the simplest, most reliable ways to know whether that electron pulse is moving or jammed is something most people overlook entirely: your resting lactate and your resting heart-rate variability. These two markers act like a window into how well mitochondria are moving electrons through the respiratory chain and how much stress your nervous system is carrying while trying to compensate. To understand this, it helps to picture metabolism the way you might imagine traffic moving through a city. If everything is functioning well, cars move smoothly through intersections. Some lanes slow down at certain times, others accelerate, but the rhythm remains fluid. In the mitochondria, electrons are the cars, and the electron transport chain is the road network guiding them from one stop to the next. When the road ahead is blocked because of infection, stress, injury, hypoxia, toxic burden, inflammation, or even intense training the cars have nowhere to go. They pile up. The system becomes backed up. In cellular terms, that backup shows up as elevated NADH relative to NAD+, sluggish electron transfer, a reduced ability to pass electrons to oxygen, and an emergency diversion of energy processing toward lactate production because it’s the only exit ramp left open. This is why elevated resting lactate is so revealing. A healthy cell at rest does not need to rely heavily on lactate production. Lactate is not the enemy in fact, it’s a valuable metabolic currency during exercise but at rest, consistently elevated lactate is like seeing rush-hour gridlock at midnight. Something is blocking the flow. And when lactate stays elevated several mornings in a row, it often means the mitochondria can’t clear electrons efficiently, so cells are forced to rely on the “quick and dirty” energy pathway instead of the high-efficiency mitochondrial one. The body becomes stuck in a pseudo-hypoxic state where the cell is not lacking oxygen, but from the mitochondria’s perspective, it might as well be.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2fprUVF1byUiJheLu8K7I8?si=GHKmiEoZSZyT1W3iUpcwBA @Drew Donaldson and @Anthony Castore cover great topics here and most importantly apply common sense to peptides, small molecules and more. "Minimum effective dose" is the take home message. Great job fellas!

Anyone here use Epithalon? I’ve been reading up on it but there seems to be a lot of confusion around dosing. What protocol or dose have you found works best?