169: Is Nitric Oxide the Longevity Molecule Behind Racing Resilience?

If your performance feels harder to access lately, I want you to consider a different culprit than age, hormones, or motivation: circulation. When energy drops, recovery slows, blood pressure trends up, and brain fog shows up under pressure, it often isn’t a “production” issue. It’s a delivery issue. That delivery system is nitric oxide, the molecule that helps your blood vessels open so oxygen and nutrients actually reach the tissues that need them.

We dig into what nitric oxide does for vasodilation, oxygen delivery, and real-world performance output, then connect it directly to the motorsports environment. Heat, travel, sleep disruption, chronic fight-or-flight stress, and oxidative stress can quietly reduce nitric oxide availability, leaving even disciplined drivers, crew chiefs, and executives feeling flat. You’ll get a fast self-assessment for low NO, plus clear, practical ways to rebuild it using whole-food nitrates like arugula, beets, spinach, and celery.

From there, we walk through the highest-leverage habits for boosting nitric oxide naturally: quality sleep, zone 2 cardio, strength training, balanced blood sugar, sunlight and vitamin D awareness, nasal breathing, and even infrared sauna. We also cover what can destroy progress fast, including vaping, excess alcohol, and one surprise that most people never see coming: antibacterial mouthwash that wipes out the oral bacteria needed to convert nitrates into nitric oxide. We close with targeted support options like L-citrulline, the importance of cofactors like magnesium, folate, and zinc, and how to “test, don’t guess” using nitric oxide test strips.

If this helps you think differently about your health and performance, subscribe, share it with someone on your team, and leave a quick review so more high performers can find it. What’s the biggest signal you’ve noticed lately: fatigue, recovery, blood pressure, or brain fog?

Transcript

The Molecule Behind Lost Performance

SPEAKER_00 0:01

What if the reason your energy is dropping, your recovery is slower, and your performance just doesn't feel the same anymore has nothing to do with your age? What if it's not your hormones, not your training, not even your mindset, but a single molecule that your body depends on for blood flow, for oxygen delivery, and real performance output, and you're not making enough of it. Today we're breaking down nitric oxide, your body's built-in performance booster. And why, for a lot of drivers, for crew chiefs, and for high performers like team executives, the problem isn't what you're doing, it's what your physiology can no longer deliver. Today you're going to discover how to flip that stage. Let's get into it. Hello, I'm Jeffrey Morta. If you're like most in NASCAR's top tiers, drivers, crews, owners, or executives, while you're busy chasing podiums, have you fully considered who's taking care of you? Right here, you're about to start transforming your mind and body for peak race day performance with high performance health, designed exclusively for the demands of NASCAR. As a certified high performance health coach and consulting hypnotist, I've coached elite entrepreneurs and athletes to higher energy, sharper focus, and greater resilience. Naturally, safely, and backed by science. And right now, I'm bringing that same engineered approach to the best in motorsports. Here you'll find no wasted time, just a unique blend of integrative health, mental conditioning, and proven recovery strategies delivered in plain language that you can use right away. Imagine a season without burnout, brain fog, or the costly crash of your health. Because the truth is the real race starts within. I'm grateful you're here. Yes, welcome back. And today we're breaking down nitric oxide, fatigue, blood pressure, and performance decline are just a part of aging. Or maybe hormones. Well, that belief didn't come out of nowhere. As drivers, crews, uh crew chief, and yes, crews and owners get deeper into their careers, energy starts to dip, recovery slows, blood pressure creeps up, performance just feels harder to access. So the default explanation becomes, well, it's just age, or it's lower testosterone, or my doctor tells me it's thyroid issues. And in some cases, those do matter, but they're often not the root cause. Let's pressure test it here. If aging alone explained performance decline, why do some drivers stay sharp and energized into their 50s? And why do others feel like they've lost their edge in their 30s or 40s? And why do symptoms like ED, brain fog, fatigue show up together? Here's what gets missed. There are often circulation problems, not hormone problems, because if blood isn't delivering oxygen, nutrients, and hormones themselves, it doesn't matter how optimized everything else is. You don't have a production problem. You have a delivery problem. Now, that delivery system is nitric oxide. We'll call it NO. This tiny molecule controls things like vasodilation. So this is the opening of your blood vessels. It also controls oxygen delivery, nutrient transport, and cellular energy efficiency. Think of nitric oxide as your body's internal NOS system. So in drag racing, they might use nitric ox uh nitrous oxide. Well, nitric oxide, this is your body's internal NOS system. And not the bottle in drag racing, though. The biological switch that determines whether your system flows or fights itself. So low NO equals tight vessels, restricted flow, and sluggish performance. Conversely, high NO opens lanes, gives smooth delivery, and effortless output. Now, of course, there is too much of a good thing, and we want to be in balance. That goes with everything that we teach in high performance health. So instead of asking, how do I push harder or what hormone am I missing, we ask, is my system actually delivering what I already have? And this is where performance shifts from guessing to testing, or from forcing to flowing, and from symptoms to systems. Now, there are consequences here. We uh you know, the old belief goes that you chase hormones with uh while circulation stays compromised or energy continues to feel forced, or blood pressure creeps higher, or performance becomes inconsistent. Now, the new way of thinking is circulation improves, energy becomes stable and clean, and recovery accelerates. And of course, longevity becomes a strategy, not just a hope. So, how does this apply to motorsports performance? Well, in racing, things like airflow and fuel delivery and pressure systems are everything. Now layer in the environment. We have things like excessive heat, uh, tire smoke, and fuel exposure. So that leads to uh PAHs and VOCs, as we talked about in last week's episode. If you didn't catch episode 168, I highly recommend you check that one out. It can also layer in environmental things that cause sleep disruption, uh sleep disruption or chronic sympathetic stress. So that's uh more of the fight or flight response. And all of these increase what's called oxidative stress, which directly reduces nitric oxide availability. So even elite performers can feel like I'm doing everything right, but something is just off. And that off feeling often is restricted biological flow. So let's go through a quick assessment here, a self-assessment for low nitric oxide. Ask yourself: do you hit an afternoon energy wall? Do you have cold hands or cold feet? Do workouts feel harder than they should? Is recovery slower than expected? Is blood pressure trending upwards? Is there decreased sexual performance or drive? And is brain fog uh do you get brain fog under pressure? So if you answered yes to three or more of these, that equals a strong signal that your nitric oxide system needs attention. Now, there is a right way and a not so right way to building nitric oxide. And there's a half-truth. Yes, nitrates increase nitric oxide, but source matters here so much. You know, there are nitrates in things like uh deli meats and bacon and synthetic nitrates, but these come with inflammatory baggage, and that is gonna slow you down. It's also gonna cost you nitric oxide production, that inflammation. We want to build nitric oxide the right way. We want to use whole food sources. This is your performance fuel. Things like arugula. This is one of the most potent. And I know, like, who loves to eat arugula? Well, when you think of food as fuel, it makes all of the difference. Not just arugula, but beets, spinach, leafy greens, things like celery, these provide clean, usable precursors your body can convert efficiently. And there's easy, fun ways to get those into your body, like a breakfast smoothie, um, or you know, pack yourself a salad, and you feel better when you eat better. Now, there are performance levers that also increase nitric oxide. I shouldn't have said nitrous oxide earlier because now I'm gonna um be slipping up and saying that. So performance levers that increase nitric oxide. We want to build it with things like quality sleep. Sleep is such a performance accelerator. You know, if you think of Olympic athletes, these athletes are sleeping 9, 10, 11 hours per day to be able to recover from their training. Uh, aerobic cardio. So this is zone two, especially. What is zone two? Exercise is about 30 minutes of a heart rate above, uh, depending on your age, uh, about 100 to 120 beats per minute. Strength training, this improves utilization of the nitric oxide. Strength training, um, you know, more days than not, maybe three to four days a week, uh, at least 30 to 40 minutes. Excellent for uh a performance lever that increases nitric oxide. Balanced blood sugar. If you've never experienced wearing a continuous glucose monitor, a CGM, uh, for at least two weeks or four weeks, that's gonna give you a really good indicator of how balanced your blood sugar is and everything that you do can affect your blood sugar from eating to exercising to sleeping. Another performance lever is sunlight exposure. Now, although drivers and crews are out in that sunshine, they are covered in a full body uniform, a suit that is protecting them or prohibiting them from getting sun exposure. So although you're getting it in your eyes, that's great. Uh, but if you're not getting a full body tan, we should be testing your vitamin D levels because that has so much to do with nitric oxide as well. Nasal breathing. This is one that a lot of people overlook, and this is a great performance lever, has no cost to it, it just takes awareness, making sure that you're breathing in through your nose and you can either breathe out through your nose or out through your mouth. Now, if you say, Jeff, it's springtime, I have allergies, I have a hard time breathing through my nose, that's a completely different topic that needs to be addressed because we can come uh we can absolutely help to alleviate those seasonal allergies. And another performance lever that increases nitric oxide is sauneuse. More specifically, infrared sauneuse. This can help to increase nitric oxide. Now, conversely, there are things that will destroy that performance. And these are things like smoking, excess alcohol. And when I say smoking, that includes vaping as well, excess alcohol, uh, oxidative stress, which is tends to be higher in the racing environment between travel and the environmental toxicities and all those things, oxidative stress, uh, lack of sleep. Another one that can destroy it, believe it or not, is poor, uh poor oral health. And specifically, now this one's gonna blow your mind, antibacterial mouthwash. You might be thinking, Jeff, mouthwash is good. It's killing the bacteria in my mouth. Well, let's talk about the mouthwash problem here. Here's one that most people never see coming. Your mouth contains bacteria that convert nitrates into nitric oxide. An antibacterial mouthwash, it wipes them out. So you're eating the right foods, but shutting down the conversion pathway twice a day if you're following the directions and using mouthwash. So that's like upgrading fuel and cutting the fuel line. Now let's go into other things that we can do to improve nitric oxide. And I'm talking about targeted support. Now, in high performance health, we have different tiers of uh our supplement stack, and we have our foundational, and then we have um additional ones for that for like tier two, and then performance would fall under a tier three category. And in that supplement to uh supplement stack for tier three would be something called L-citrulline. This is a key driver. It's converted in the body to nitric oxide through what's called L-arginine pathways. You don't need to know pathophysiology today, but it's a science-backed option that we use in a product uh by our partner, our global leader in functional medicine, Equolife. They have advanced cell force. You can find it on our shop page, or I can link it up in the show notes for you. Absolutely amazing. It contains three other components, um, other than it's actually uh citrulline malate, so it's bound to malic acid, which helps in the Krebs cycle, the uh energy cycle, if you want to go back to biology class in high school. Advanced cell force, it's amazing. It also has creatine monohydrate, uh trimethylglycine and taurine in it as well. And this fits into our high performance health tier three optimization level uh layer. And this is where performance really gets enhanced, not just repaired. And finally, you know, we always talk about test it, don't guess. There's before and after validation that you can use like nitric oxide test strips. You can get these right on Amazon. I like the ones from Berkeley Life. Um, and you can simply just spit into a teaspoon, dip these strips in there, uh, let it dry for about 15 seconds, and then measure the color against the back of uh back of the bottle that the test strips come in. And because what gets measured gets optimized. And you can actually do a before and after. If you wanted to try the advanced cell force by Equalife, you could actually do uh a spit test with these nitric oxide test strips uh upon waking. So before you even brush your teeth, you do a test. And then after you go about your day, maybe you use the um the advanced cell force in your morning smoothie like I do every day. This is my uh my energy boost, and I add the advanced cell force in here, and then I'll test with the test strip after about 30 minutes after uh consuming my smoothie with the two scoops of advanced cell force in it. And consistently over the course of a week of testing, I can see that before and after, my nitric oxide had greatly improved back into either a normal range or just above uh normal. So I made sure that I had the amounts of nitric oxide that my body needs for my daily performance. And of course, don't miss the cofactors here. Nitric oxide production depends on things like magnesium, folate, and zinc. Uh a few more, but those are the top three. You know, any deficiencies here will net you limited output no matter what you take. And this is where at-home functional testing, uh like our vitamin TOX, uh, yeah, vitamin TOX test kit, uh, which includes uh minerals and metals test, also known as the hair tissue mineral analysis, and the Candida Metabolic and Vitamins test, which is industry known as the organic acids test, reveals what standard labs miss. And this is where you can measure your magnesium, your zinc, your folate, and so many more markers. So, final thoughts here. My performance decline as hormonal or just age when reality is your performance is being limited by how well your body delivers what it already has. So I want you to unlock your internal NOS system. And if you're ready to improve circulation, restore energy and clarity, and extend your performance lifespan, you can schedule a free performance strategy call. The link is in the show notes, and we'll identify your nitric oxide capacity, your hidden bottlenecks, and a precision, personalized, high performance health plan using real data. Because in a sport where milliseconds matter, the real edge isn't just the machine, it's in the system driving. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.