Andrew Huberman

On its own, it's a passive system, no pump, and it's fighting gravity all the time.

So how does lymph move through these lymphatic vessels?

Nature came up with a brilliant solution.

It's actually the movement of your body that creates the movement of lymph up through these vessels from the lower half of your body or down from the vessels in the upper part of your body or in from your arms and fingers toward the center of your body to eventually be returned back to the venous blood supply.

This is really important to understand.

The movement of your muscles, not necessarily resistance training, although that would contribute to it, but low level muscular contractions of the sort that occur when you walk, when you stand up and sit down again, when you make little micro movements, but certainly the movement of the large musculature of your body in particular, like your legs and your trunk and your arms,

That's what's going to move this lymphatic fluid along because the lymphatic vessels can sit very superficially just underneath the skin, right?

Very, very close to the surface.

The lymphatic system also has these, you know, small diameter things we call lymphatic capillaries, but it has bigger diameter vessels within the deeper tissues, closer to the muscle and intimately related to what's called the fascia.

I know some of you have heard of the fascia.

Some of you perhaps have not.

if you've ever prepared a steak and you saw there's kind of a, not the fatty stuff, but it's like a white fibrous sheet that you can almost peel off the meat, your muscles are surrounded by fascia and those deep lymphatic vessels are closely tied to the fascia and to the muscular system so that when you move your body, walking or running, could be exercise, but even just everyday activities, that lymphatic fluid is being carried back up toward the heart to return and join the blood supply.

So hopefully you're getting a sense of the organizational logic of the lymphatic system.

Nature has co-opted movement as a way to move lymphatic fluid along and encourage lymphatic drainage.

And you want lymphatic drainage.

You want that fluid pulled out of the extracellular space into those vessels and then returned back to the heart.

And as I mentioned before, a bunch of other great things happen along the way in terms of immune surveillance.

So if we're going to discuss protocols, one of the most important ways to encourage lymphatic drainage, which is a good thing, and to encourage the general health of your lymphatic system, because you don't want lymph sitting stagnant in those vessels, especially if it has contaminants within it,

is to make sure that you're moving enough each day.

And we hear a lot these days about, you need 10,000 steps a day, or maybe it's just 7,000, or maybe it's 3,000.