The Science of Exercise Before a Psilocybin Session

From the Barbell to the Brain

Before I ever imagined a future running a psychedelic retreat, I was a different kind of person. I was an athlete. I competed in Brazilian jiu jitsu, I powerlifted, and I was one of those crazy people who signed up for 10Ks that started at 6 a.m. on a Sunday, for fun. That version of me would not entirely recognize the version of me now: 43 years old, running a psychedelic retreat, slowly making peace with the fact that I am not quite as tough as I used to be.

But some things carried over. I learned things about my body and my nervous system during those years that turned out to matter enormously for how I do psychedelic work today, and it’s an insight I now seek to share with every guest who walks through Eleusinia’s doors.

I take psilocybin macrodoses regularly, roughly every six to eight weeks. That’s not because I’m continuously chasing insight or spiritual depth on some fixed schedule, though I feel I get plenty of both along the way. It’s because I manage hemicrania continua, a chronic neurological pain condition, and this has been the most effective tool I have found for controlling it. That distinction matters for how I approach my own sessions: if most of my experiences were frightening, harrowing, or consistently destabilizing, I don’t think I could keep doing this. My condition doesn’t wait politely for me to feel ready for the next round, either. The pain comes back on its own schedule, not mine, which means I need my sessions to be consistently productive and repeatable, not just occasionally transformative.

Here’s what I’ve noticed, tested, and now build into my own routine deliberately: when I time my macrodose session to land inside the afterglow after an intense workout, the session itself goes differently. It’s deeper. It’s more peaceful. I feel more connected to my body, and far more capable of just sinking into the moment instead of white-knuckling through it.

For a long time I assumed that was just a personal quirk, something particular to my own wiring. Then I started digging into the neuroscience of exercise, and it turns out there’s a real, well-documented explanation for what I was feeling.

It’s Not Just You, It’s Neurochemistry

John Ratey, a Harvard psychiatrist, spent his career studying what exercise actually does to the brain, and he lays it out in “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.” Two of his findings map almost perfectly onto what a macrodose session asks of you.

The first is about stress tolerance, and it works on two timelines at once. In the moment, a hard workout gives the sympathetic nervous system something real to do. Ratey describes this as exercise “rerouting your circuits”: instead of sitting with rising anxiety and letting the amygdala spin up a worst-case narrative, exercise gives that activation somewhere to go, and what’s left afterward is a nervous system that’s discharged, not wound up. Over time, that same practice compounds. A body that regularly trains itself to tolerate real physical intensity gets better, session after session, at staying regulated inside arousal instead of interpreting it as danger. Both timelines matter here. A macrodose experience can bring real physiological intensity: a racing heart, waves of sensation, moments that feel like too much all at once. Guests get some benefit from months or years of building a calmer baseline, and some benefit from the specific workout that morning, before they ever get into session.

The second is about attention. Ratey’s other well-documented finding is that exercise sharpens focus in the moment, a burst of norepinephrine and dopamine that puts the brain on alert and pulls attention into the present task. Circuit training gives that effect somewhere concrete to land: your breath, your form, the next rep, right now. There isn’t much room left over for the mind to wander. I’d stop short of calling this the same thing as quieting rumination, that’s a broader claim than Ratey’s attention research makes directly, but the two ideas sit close together: a brain pulled into present-focused alertness has less bandwidth left for the looping, self-referential thinking a lot of guests arrive at Eleusinia already exhausted by. It’s not the same mechanism as what psilocybin does to the brain’s default mode network, but the effect looks similar from the inside: less noise, more presence.

I want to be precise about one thing. Ratey’s research describes both of these clearly: the immediate, in-the-moment calming effect of a single workout, and the compounding, longer-term effect of a consistent practice. What it doesn’t address, because it isn’t a book about psychedelics, is what happens when you deliberately time a workout’s afterglow to land right before a psilocybin session. That specific pairing, and what I’ve noticed it does to my own experience, is my own applied observation, not a claim from the book. The mechanism is well-documented. The pairing is mine.

Farmer’s Hours, Mountain Mist, and a Kettlebell

So, what does a circuit morning at Eleusinia actually look like?

I’ll be honest: it starts early enough to land in “only for crazy early-morning-workout people” territory. Yes, it’s 7 a.m. But before you judge us too harshly, know that it’s not 6 a.m., that’s the true psycho timeslot, and we are not venturing into that madness. The whole retreat runs on what we affectionately call “farmer’s hours” anyway, early to bed, early to rise, mist still sitting on the mountain when everyone’s boots hit the ground.

The brave early crew gathers in the pool house gym while the morning is still chilly and gray. Some days it’s nearly the whole cohort. Some days it’s a handful of committed souls and a lot of mutual respect. Either way, the group that shows up is the group you get, and nobody’s keeping score of who didn’t.

We rotate the focus each session, one day leaning lower-body and mobility, the next leaning upper-body or full-body conditioning, so the same muscles aren’t getting hammered two days in a row. That’s not an accident. Eight days is a long stay, and a program that leaves you too sore to move by day three isn’t doing anyone any favors. The tools are simple: kettlebells, mobility work, bodyweight exercises. The goal is that you leave feeling stronger and more refreshed as the week goes on, not more depleted.

Who Should Push Themselves, and Who Should Ease Off

The intensity is entirely up to you. Nobody is pressured, and everybody keeps up at their own pace. What we ask instead is that you show up and make an honest read of your own body that morning, and there’s a real difference between “I don’t feel like it” and “my body is telling me something.”

So the more useful question isn’t who the circuit is for, because I think almost everyone gets something out of showing up, even at low intensity. It’s who should push themselves hard that day, and who should ease off.

Push yourself if you’re generally healthy, cleared for vigorous activity, and what you’re feeling that morning is more resistance than warning. That racing-heart, keyed-up feeling from a hard set is exactly the kind of controlled intensity Ratey is describing, the kind your nervous system can practice metabolizing rather than fearing. If that’s where you are, a harder effort that morning may genuinely prime you for a more grounded session.

Ease off, or sit this one out entirely, if you’re managing a few specific things. ME/CFS is at the top of that list: what looks like a stress-inoculating spike to someone else can trigger post-exertional malaise in a body with ME/CFS, a real crash, not discomfort. The same caution applies to POTS and other forms of dysautonomia, uncontrolled cardiac conditions, adrenal insufficiency, or a recent significant injury or surgery. For these, the sympathetic activation that helps one guest’s nervous system settle can leave another guest’s nervous system more dysregulated hours later, right when they need it least.

Trauma is its own category, and I won’t pretend there’s one right answer. For some guests, controlled physical exertion is exactly the resourcing practice their nervous system needs before something as vulnerable as a macrodose session. For others, added arousal right before an already activating day is the last thing they want. If you’re not sure which camp you’re in, that’s a good thing to discuss with our medical team at any time, not something to guess at that morning.

And here’s the part that matters most, and the part I think gets lost when people picture “workout retreat” and imagine something competitive: there is real value in the group itself, independent of output. Some of our best mornings are the ones where one guest is grinding through the heaviest kettlebell set of the week and another is catching their breath on the sideline, and both of them leave feeling like they belong to something. That feeling of belonging, of being seen showing up, whatever showing up looks like for your body that day, is doing its own quiet work before anyone even gets to the medicine.

The Invitation Stands

The circuit is optional. It’s offered every morning of your stay, dosing days included, and nobody is required to show up, hard or easy. It’s one tool in a much larger toolkit here, alongside breathwork, somatic work, and everything else that happens outside the sessions themselves, not a substitute for any of it.

What I can tell you is that it’s become one of my own most reliable tools, the difference between a session I white-knuckle through and one I actually sink into. If you want to go deeper on the science behind it, Ratey’s “Spark” is worth the read. I go back to it more than almost any other book on my shelf.

Come push yourself, come take it easy, or come and cheer everyone else on. Either way, we’ll see you there in the morning.