Longevity vs. Muscle Gain, How Much Cardio Is Too Much, Blood Flow Restriction Training, Sex Supple

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, Explosive lifting in a competitive format under heavy load typically results in knees, elbows, low back, whatnot. It's very rare to find a crossfitter who isn't in some state of injury rehabilitation. It's something you don't want in your system when you go to buy a car because it makes you very trusting. You don't want to negotiate with oxytocin in your system. I'm a fan of the high intensity interval training approach for cardio with occasional bouts of stamina built in health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

All right, I hope you're ready for.

Some fun with my boys from Australia.

Or Oz, as they say.

I had a ton of fun with.

These cats from ATP Science.

You're gonna really dig today's they have a supplements company in Australia. This podcast is brought to you by Kion. There are a variety of different herbs and spices that can increase the conversion of white fat into brown fat, which is something that occurs when you are say, combining fasting and cold. And one thing that I do 365 days a year if I'm doing this intermittent fasting combined with cold exposure to stay lean, is I always take two of the Kion lean because the bitter melon extract and the rock lotus extract in there, which help to activate something called ampk. AMPK is a special protein pathway that can actually accelerate metabolism and mimic many of the effects that you get from calorie restriction, but also upregulate the conversion of white fat into brown fat. So this is one of my favorite fat loss supplements. It's not one of the ones that jacks up your nervous system or gives you the jitters. You get a 10% discount on it and all you need to do is go to getkeon.com that's getk A-I-O-N.com the product is called Lean and your 10% discount code is BGF10. That's BGF10. Over at getkeon.com this podcast is also brought to you by something that pairs quite well with cold and heat, and that is light. We know that infrared light is one of the best ways to charge up what's called cytochrome C oxidase in your mitochondria. As a matter of fact, a brand new study that I'm probably going to talk about in the next podcast gets into how if you are controlling carbohydrates, if you're eating A relatively ketogenic diet, higher fat intake, et cetera. You're actually going to upregulate what's called beta oxidation or the burning of fatty acids, whether you're exercising or at rest. Well, it turns out that upregulating your cytochrome C oxidase function accelerates this process even more. And one of the best ways to do that is to expose yourself to near infrared and red light. So this is why every morning while I'm sipping my cup of of coffee, I stand in front of this Joovv light panel. They're one of the sponsors of today's show. These things are amazing. They've got a tiny one called a go that you can take with you on the go, especially if you, if you are getting exposed to like, gray skies, lots of snow, cold weather, wintry days. This can really help with the same type of natural light exposure as you'd get from sunlight. They also make these great big panels you can strip off your clothes and stand naked in front of to increase testosterone production. Collagen and elastin health in skin. Reduce pain, reduce inflammation.

Very, very cool product.

I use mine pretty much every day when I'm at home. It's called the Joovv. And you get a gift, a nice bonus gift with your purchase of any Joovv device. If you go to J O O V.

Ben, that's J O O V.

So I was recently at Spartan World Championships. I did the race in the morning, crossed the finish line and literally sprinted to go meet these brilliant Australian supplement designers and physicians from a company called ATP Science. They came all the way from Australia to cover this race and we wound up sitting down and talking about a ton of stuff. Cellular autophagy, longevity, muscle gain, fat loss.

Daily routines, collagen. It was a really great conversation. So I think you're going to dig this one. If you want to learn more about these guys or you want to delve into any of the show notes. For anything that we talk about on today's show, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com atpscience that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com ATP ATP Science. Enjoy the show.

Welcome to the ATP Project. You're with your host, Matt and Jeff. And today we have with us Ben Greenfield from Ben Greenfield Fitness. Mate, great to have you on. You're fresh off the mountain, so thank you so much. Yeah. What have you just competed in?

I don't even know. I was just following signs to the top of a mountain where it was Cold. Yeah. Windy.

Yeah.

And there were little snowflakes coming down already.

Oh, really?

And yeah, it was the. So they, they do like a VIP executive challenge, like the CEO challenge. And so was about nine and a half, 10 miles of obstacle course racing. Just basically just like up to the top of the mountain and back down. Yeah. Just, you know, sandbags and barbed wire crawls and monkey bars and the whole.

Yeah, there's a couple of. Couple of hours out there.

Yeah. And I almost went burpee free. You know, I got the spear and the tire, but there's this thing called the twister. And it's like you hang upside down, you go through these monkey bars that twist and then you transition off to more monkey bars and then back under the twisting monkey bars. And I was like three feet from the, from the bell you're supposed to ring and I fell off.

So I did.

It's pretty good, though. So a burpee is basically, if you, if you mess up a.

If you mess up on any obstacle, you got 30 burpees.

Yeah.

Which adds up. Yeah. Because even if it takes you like two minutes to do the burpees, you might go from running like a 7 1/2 minute mile to 745 or whatever. Because the burpees tire you out.

It's not a two minute wrist.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

No one wants big.

Yeah. Well, it's great having you on the podcast, mate. I mean, obviously, big fan of your work. We've been looking at your stuff, especially around your fitness and your education. But, Ben, for our listeners that, that aren't familiar with you, do you want to sort of give a bit of a rundown on how you got into the industry? You know, you started out in triathlons and Is that where you started or.

No, I started off in, in tennis, played tennis in college. I started exercise physiology and biomechanics at. Excuse me, University of Idaho. I'm burping up this marshmallowy.

Yeah.

Bite of. I don't, I don't even know what I just ate.

Yeah, I'm full of collagen. So I went to University of Idaho and studied exercise physiology and biomechanics and played tennis before that at a community college. And then up at Idaho played volleyball and water polo. And then I got into bodybuilding and graduated with my master's degree in exercise physiology.

Right.

And then after that I got accepted to a bunch of medical schools and worked in the private sector for a while in hip and knee surgical sales. Absolutely hated that and kind of jumped Back into fitness after about six months, started managing gyms and personal training studios. Worked for about five years in that I partnered up with a bunch of docs. And so we kind of worked with the exercises Medicine initiative here in the US where we would kind of get patient referrals from doctors. And even back then I was doing a lot of kind of outside the box things as a personal trainer. Like we had a lot of high speed video cameras for analyzing gaits and we actually worked with a lot of triathletes for bicycle fitting, bicycle biomechanical analysis, running biomechanical analysis, underwater video cameras for swim analysis, and then we did a lot of indirect calorimetry and VO2 max testing. We did, we did platelet rich plasma injections. It was just kind of like a sports medicine sports performance facility. And I was director of sports performance of that facility for about four years. And then in 2008 I received an honor as America's top personal trainer. At that point I started to do a lot more writing, a lot more speaking, a lot more media and eventually got rid of the gyms, got rid of the personal training studios and started doing more. What I do now, which is, you know, writing a consultant coach with a limited number of clientele from around the world, you know, via Skype and work with them on their HRV, their sleep, their nutrition, etc. Run a supplements company called Kion and then write books and work on articles. Do a lot of investing in the health and fitness and kind of health technology space. Yeah. And so that's what I do.

Yeah, that's cool.

So it's interesting I actually reading in your bio that you're also running science fiction as well too.

Not science fiction, fantasy, young adult fantasy fiction.

That's what I'm doing. Have you, have you published anything yet, Ben, or you?

Yeah, I published one book last year and then another one will come out this year. Cool. And you know, I try and weave a lot of what I learn in the health sector and also in just like, you know, I'm in that social living. I bow hunt and we grow a lot of our own food and you know, we kind of live off grid up in the forest in Washington state. So I work a lot of survival and health and foraging and fitness into the books as well. Hoping that I can, I can teach a little bit to the young adults.

Kind of funny because that's my, that's what I'm doing when I'm grow up.

Yeah.

So it's going to be so cool. And I'VE written all the. I got most of my stuff organized. I just don't have a story.

Yeah.

So I just got to think about it.

Well, I've got a tip for. For really anybody who wants to. To write a book and kind of have a skeleton, a system to follow, but also write a book that will satisfy the reader, will satisfy us human beings.

Kind of inner primal urge to either read about or live the hero's journey. Right. Which is what all the hit Disney movies are from. From the. The. What's the. What's the winter one? Frosted? Not frosted.

Frozen.

Frozen.

Yeah. Yeah, I was close.

So. So, you know, Frozen to Snow White to Sleeping Beauty to. To Rocky. You know, all of these popular movies, they all follow the hero's journey. Yeah, right. The. The hero living the ordinary life, the call to adventure, the resistance to the call, the crossing of the threshold, meeting the mentors and the friends and the. And, you know, the challenges along the way, having the final battle, returning home with the elixir. And there's a great book called the Writer's Journey. The Writer's Journey details how to craft a story that's written around the hero's journey, how to design your characters, how to make your story actually follow this hero's journey. And so when you're writing, it almost gives you confidence because you know that you're following this script and it helps you to stay with the story. It helps me when I'm making a decision about a chapter, you know, if, you know, Arya or Anya, the two princesses in the book, you know, to decide whether they are going to. To go to battle, whether they're going to die, whether they're going to meet a mentor. Like, it kind of helps me decide what the next turn of the story is going to be because I'm following the hero's journey.

Yeah, that's excellent.

Yeah, that's really cool.

And all your experience with people and the sort of people that you've experienced with, you know, the people you're coaching and those sort of things that probably inspire a few of those stories or some of those kind of emotions, I suppose.

Not really.

Not really.

I just coach a bunch of rich executives who want to sleep better. There's no heroes journey there.

People who want to do a Spartan or something like that, I guess. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, no, I. I haven't yet made that connection between getting inspiration from. From my clients for my stories. Yeah, my stories. In writing fiction, that's like my escape from. From from the real world, from the. From working with people and.

Yeah.

Try and try to figure out how to get some exec to sleep better after traveling to China or whatever.

Yeah.

That is funny. What are you gonna say?

Oh, no, I thought you were gonna.

Ask some more questions. No, no, no.

Well, no, that's it. Interviews over.

That's it.

Have a great day. I just raced me with drunk.

Now, we sometimes. What happens when we do a podcast? So sometimes we're all ready to go, we've got stuff to say. Sometimes you just find ourselves just sitting there listening and then all of a sudden we just like, oh, yeah, what we do. Now, one other thing that's really. When you said before, you said that you started off as an athlete, you went into the bodybuilding and you did the coat, you still do the coaching, and then you got the academic. I personally think that is a very important group of skills to have because every time you're doing any sort of research or learning something new, you've got all those elements to look at. So you've got the bro. So, because you've used things and you know that there's things you've used that work for you and you know you're passionate about it, you try those things. Then when you become into a coach or a physician or practitioner, all of a sudden then you're realizing that what works for you doesn't always work for everyone, and that there's a bit of system there. And then when you get into that academic space, it's like, I need to see data. I need to see how well it works across a population.

So I know how everything has to be trench tested. I mean, like, whatever. Sodium bicarb loading for mitigating lactic acidosis during high intensity sprint effort. Yeah, that looks good on paper. But then once you load an athlete and they've got explosive diarrhea halfway through their set of burpees or their statues or whatever, it's like, oh, that didn't work out quite so well.

Under sprinter that did that back in the. Was it the 90s? He had a very upright running style, the American guy. He won all the records here, I think. Did you remember that guy's name? I can't remember. Was it Owens? No, it wasn't Owens. No, I remember he blissed everything, but he was a big believer in that.

But, yeah, the latest studies on sodium bicarb loading, they actually have come back to the drawing board and they're like, okay, so it works. But how do we mitigate the gastric Distress. Yeah, exactly. And so now they're doing this, this latest study that came out last week, they used a 19 hour loading protocol, you know, like half a teaspoon every hour on the hour for 19 hours. And to me, that starts to get to the point where, okay, so if, if, if I want that extra edge, am I really going to get up every hour during the night of sleep before my event to load with sodium bicarbonate?

And is that going to really improve your performance?

Is that really going to improve my performance that much versus being sleep deprived because I set my alarm every hour to eat some baking soda.

Yeah, exactly.

So some of this stuff is just like, it's like it has to be trench test. Yeah, it has to be. I mean, and I'll come right out and say it. Like, like even, like, you know, this bar, it's amazing. Like, it tastes really good. Like this is something I'd eat on a road trip, this. But, but if you try and market that to a spartan racer out on the course and they're trying to like, choo, choo, choo, choo, choose the racing. Because I ran into the problem when I designed a bar like it, it was like you couldn't bite through the thing as soon as it got down to about 40 degrees or so. Yeah. And it turned to absolute, like mushy, seedy goo. Yeah. For people racing Iron man out in the heat. So, I mean, a lot of this stuff, like once you nail the macros, once you nail your flavor profile, then you got to go out and have a bunch of people actually test it if you're going to market as like a sports performance supplement.

Yeah, that's really.

And you pretty much try everything. I mean, I've seen a couple of your podcasts and so you get in, you're, you're your own guinea pig for a lot of these things.

Right. So, I mean, you want to know if it actually really works.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you're pretty. I'm not a pretty good. Excellent athlete. You're an excellent athlete. So, I mean, you're a good person.

Well, I'm, I'm an athlete, but let's face it, like, I'm, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to go out and like win world championships tomorrow, but I, I do like to keep myself in good shape to be able to be relatively fit.

How old are you now, man?

I'm 37.

Right.

You don't look 37.

You're.

You look about 27.

Oh, thank you.

But I Mean in terms of obviously with your triathlete career as well too, you're right up there in terms of at the top echelon of the sport.

Oh yeah, yeah. I did Ironman world championship six times and I, I won long course gold medal for USA in 2013. And for a while the first few years I raced Spartans, you know, I had a few podiums and was a top ranked Spartan. And yeah, now I'm just happy to be fit and still able to go out and you know, prove that I'm keeping myself in shape. You know, I'm not just in my mom's basement writing blog posts about peptides.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting actually. I like. You're talking about the peptides. You like the peptides. I think I was actually reading some of your research on them.

I think peptides are the future of supplementation and medicine. I mean when you can precisely via. Well, the good companies now are actually using amino acid sequencers.

Yeah.

To actually create very precise sequences of amino acids that target very precise mechanisms of action. Yeah. So you could use like, like you know we were talking about before we officially, officially started the kind of things we could slather on our balls.

Yeah.

Or transdermal delivery of nad.

Yeah.

You look at a, at a transdermal peptide like Dihexa, I mean you smear that on the carotid artery on either side of the neck and it feels like you drank six cups of coffee without any of the jitteriness. I could compare something like that to Modafinil for example. And then there are other neural peptides like cortisone and Penny Allen, which can actually improve your memory like short term and long term memory recall.

There's another one called BPC157 which is a gut healing peptide that can be taken orally. It's one of the few peptides that, that can be administered orally but it can also be injected subcutaneously as a systemic anti inflammatory, you know TB500, that's another one. It can repair myosin and actin fibers again systemically. You can inject it subcutaneously like in the abdomen with an insulin syringe.

And then you look at some of the Russian research on peptides, human clinical data on reduced all cause risk of mortality with something like a 10 day protocol once a year of the peptide epitalone. You look at a lot of these blue zones that have tested them and found that the centenarians have a higher than normal level of this peptide. Humanin circulating in their bloodstream and they can now sequence humanin and you can just do like a, like a yearly dose of humanin. I mean, I think the, the barrier for peptides is not a lot of people are going to inject.

Right?

Yeah. There's millions of diabetics walking around injecting inside insulin.

Yeah.

So people do it. But I think once these things become largely orally or transdermally available, I mean you guys owning a supplements company, like I've got my eye on that sector right now. Like if, if, if, if Keon could, could start actually putting out peptide sequences that do what supplements do right now.

Yeah.

But with way better bioavailability and way better targeted mechanisms of action. Like I think that's one of the frontiers of, of both medicine and just general supplementation as a whole with the.

BJP and the TB C400.

Is that, is that the, the BPC157 and TB500 are probably the most popular for, for muscle repair.

Yeah.

And anti inflammatory action. I know a couple docs now who are even doing IV administration of that to get even better systemic availability as well as ultrasound guided imagery injections. Like in the same way that you do like prolozone therapy with ozone or in the same way that you do like, like a nerve hydrodissection, you can actually go in and very precisely target right into an area of inflammation with a longer needle like a BPC157.

And how long typically are you looking to use those things before you start to see the results in terms of.

Gold standard is usually about a two week protocol. But I mean, you know, I'll notice things almost right away.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's some interesting. While we're talking about the peptides in regards to that collagen research, the, the Germans are doing this through Julita. We use a product called Body Balance that was targeted towards the muscle MTOR MK and those sort of pathways they originally thought. But what was interesting about it is they've gone through just a collagen process and just taking various different combinations of peptides and testing those into medical models just to see what they do. But these are actually peptides that can be naturally contained within the collagen molecules. Have you seen the new data on all the glycine based peptides that they can actually recreate out of the collagen? Because a lot of it. So what they've done recently is they went through. There's a paper to be published next year, hasn't yet been published. Where they compared body balance collagen peptides to waste protein isolates and just showed that it had a three and a half times the ability to build muscle compared to whey over placebo. And then the double the four times the strength and double the fat loss. And it was all because of these 10% of the molecule. The serve was these peptides very high in glycine and arginine, but they bypass the absorption. So they made such extreme temperatures and enzymes that they get absorbed intact. They then can actually have an effect in the body. And then broken down by the proteases to release those amino acids to help some stuff. But on the basis of that, I was at the ISSN conference last year and we had the collagen research guys doing that research. We had the whey guys, their research, and we had other guys without any supplementation, looking at what the initial changes were with muscle. And all of them were trying to work out what the bloody hell's going on. Because we got none of the leucines or anything like that in the collagen yet. It has remarkable effects at stimulating muscle hypertrophy compared to the way they then showed that the groups. And what it was is this guy, Michael Roberts, had this wicked paper that showed the initial changes in hypertrophy were actually changes in the sarcoplasmic reticulum. And that's where the collagen worked on actually enhancing the fascia, the sarcomere, and building a bigger sock, for lack of a better word. And then what happened is all the way macros, leucines, and then the MTOR pathways and everything kicked in later to fill up that sock. So I think those peptides, it's not just looking at these injectables and that in the future we might be able to master what peptides we can make out of different foods as well to get those oral ones absorbed.

Yeah.

So because there's some crazy research now that they've just opened their eyes up to looking at a different pathway other than just MTOR for muscle growth, just to see what the initial stages. But that paper by Michael Roberts was a cracker because it showed no increase in muscle protein synthesis. Initially it was just the increase in the fascia, the sarcomere, lots of hydration and everything in there as well. And then that really drove the growth to allow everything else to work, which is interesting.

If you're not targeting the MTOR pathway, you might avoid some of the, you know, almost like the accelerated aging pathways that you see with some, you know, big problem. These days is especially with the paleo industry, the fitness industry, or any of these industries where you've got a lot of methionine. Right. From either muscle meat or whey protein or whatever the case may be. A lot of people do not get enough glycine. And I'm a big, big fan of bone broth supplementation and nose to ale eating of animals, or nose to tail eating of animals, organ meat consumption. I mean, glycine is highly protective too. The researcher, Dr. James, it's like James Nicola Monto, something like that. He wrote, he co wrote the book, I believe it was called super fats with Dr. Mercola. And in that book he even talks about the protective effect of glycine on the cell membrane in response to rancid vegetable oils like omega 6 fatty acids, 20 grams of glycine and or 5 grams of spirulina, both were highly protective against something like canola oil consumption. That's my restaurant hack. Now, if I, if I'm eating out of restaurant, I just don't know. Like, I always have glycine, I always have spirulina. You know, I've got activated charcoal for the alcohol. You know, everything to sop up the mess.

Yeah.

But yeah, glycine is amazing and it may also initiate autophagy. And this was another thing I was actually talking to Mercola about is he studied up several compounds that would enhance autophagy and blunt some of the MTOR pathway. And so you can take this stuff like in a fasted state at night, and for a lot of people who are doing like a high protein anabolic type of diet by day, weight training, trying to optimize protein synthesis, but still want to optimize autophagy in the evening, from a longevity standpoint, glycine was one component of this. And the other elements were chamomile, like chamomile powder, quercetin, garcinia and pau d'. Arco. And you could put all these in, and after I talked to them a little bit about this and looked at some of the papers he sent to me, I keep all this in a glass mason jar. The chamomile, the glycine, the garcinia, the carcin and the pal d arco, and you could just basically take a couple tablespoons of that, put in some hot water, or just like, you know, if you like to chew the powder, just put it straight into your mouth and it's like, you know, nighttime autophagy powder.

Yeah, yeah.

And so in terms of the autophagy that's the.

It's not. Jeff asked me before the show what's autophagy, which is in the way we'd pronounce it in Australia.

Thank you.

And I said eating your own poo. Yeah, but no.

Yeah, yeah, that's far healthier than that. No, no, but, but. And obviously the problem with the methionine is the, the home.

But it's not just eating your own poo.

Poo problems.

Yeah.

With heart disease. Correct. And, and yeah, God forbid, Derek stains even worse. And I'm just joking. But yeah. In terms of. Do you want to explain just quickly to the listeners that might not be as smart as you two about the.

Problem with excess methionine or a methionine to glycine ratio that's too high? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, methionine, I mean it's largely going to target that MTOR path we were talking about earlier. So state of pro growth, state of anabolism.

But so problems also with cancer cells as well too, obviously.

Exactly. Yeah.

The other thing too, when you're talking before about that, we're talking about the collagen ability to bypass that MTOR and have a growth effect. The ADSET also explains how it can work in those groups because insulin resistance. A lot of people assume insulin resistance is just obese people or diabetes. But the first signs of the insulin resistance is the inability to build muscle or respond to those calorie surplus to grow. So again, when they did those big larger studies using the collagen versus whey, anyone that's insulin resistant isn't responding as well to those whey style delivery systems driving the mtor. So that was another way. And so anything to improve insulin resistance sensitivity might make those pathways work better. I think that the secret somewhere in between combining all of them, but that I think will have a big effect that insulin resistance. How often are you seeing that these days and are you finding it? Because in Australia people talk like one in four that sort of stuff. But I mean it's quite easily corrected through diet and exercise. I mean it should be a temporary state of flux. Insulin resistance, basically saying you're full.

Yeah, well, I mean, obviously for upregulation of GLUT4 transporters and increasing insulin sensitivity on the cell receptor, physical activity and exercise, particularly weight training and high intensity interval training are the best ways to do it. But when you look at for example a lot of blue zones, right, they have all these different elements in their diet. Like in Okinawa they have bitter melon and in Bama County China, they've got Rock Lotus. And you know, berberine is. I mean, there was recently a paper that came out that compared berberine and kercetin administration to metformin. And they, they even added red yeast rice extract into that. And we're getting similar results as like metformin and a statin.

Yeah, I mean, reduce is awesome. I think they banned it in Australia.

Because it's so effective. Right, Exactly.

Pharmaceutical companies basically, basically own Australian fortune.

Apple cider vinegar, Ceylon cinnamon. I mean, even for me, like, if I'm gonna have a cocktail at a bar, you know, before I go have dinner, typically I'll have like a mess of house bitters on the rocks with a little bit of gin and a squeeze of lemon. And that's a great, a great way to enhance your first phase insulin response, increase insulin sensitivity and have less of a hyperglycemic response to your meal.

And all the things that you've just mentioned, Ben and I didn't know some of the ingredients there, but they sound like relatively. I know berberine's is bitter as all hell. I mean, you're basically looking at polyphenols.

Oh, berberine's bloody horrible. Yeah, but it's great for you. And what's interesting about another big problem with the insulin resistance, we're doing a fair few organic acid tests, do a lot of work in the microbiome looking at the different colonies of bugs that can come in and can contribute to that insulin resistance and that calorie yield. And having berberine has a number of effects because it has those amazing antimicrobial effect, reducing a lot of the firmicutes that increase the calorie yield. You know, the firmicutes are normally associated with, you know, infants and place at times where we need accelerated growth and that sort of stuff because they increase calorie yield and also enhance your ability to use that fuel for growth. But berberine will actually kill off a lot of those buggers. Berberine will also stop that liver from releasing that blood sugar because the liver gets confused. You know, the liver gets a bit inflamed, especially if you've got bad gut health and the liver gets inflamed and then all of a sudden it can't pick up on the amount of glucose in the bloodstream. So then it feels the need to release sugar and signal the release of sugar into the bloodstream. That's how most people get fasting blood sugar, ray elevation.

That's how metformin works. I mean, metformin and metformin Largely it works on, it doesn't work on peripheral receptors and muscle tissue. It largely works on the liver. So I'm like 70% of your receptors are in muscle tissue, tissue. Why would you take metformin if youi mean, why not just go do some burpees before you eat or do a strength training session in the morning? I mean, because you're hitting way more receptors.

Yeah. So what do you think about that? Because one thing that we talk a lot about is if someone's what I used to do in my clinic a lot, if someone had raising blood, high fasting blood sugar, anything with like fatty livers, any of these sort of insulin resistance, the first thing I would tell them to do is before you eat any, anything, go clear the pathway, go burn some fuel, just get some stuff moving. Because ultimately insulin resistance will come from the fact that your mitochondria has already got oxidized leftover fuel just sitting there that you haven't burned. We've got to clear that away. And then you become more sensitive as soon as your blood sugar, your cellular sugar drops.

And people will say, of course, we know there's a host of data on muscle strength and functional muscle and particularly functional fast twitch type 2 muscle fibers, as you know, being longevity enhancing agents. But I think it goes beyond just the fact that it makes you harder to kill and better able to step off a curb and increases bone density and whatnot. I mean, that's a glycogen disposal tank. Yeah. I mean, or not a glycogen, a glucose disposal tank. Exactly right. And so you just basically have more of what you need to suck up glucose in a very insulin sensitive state.

And even blood like it's a good blood reservoir as well. So people with a high blood pressure, it should be able to take over.

Some of that and reduce that 42% decrease risk of all cause mortality in seniors who strength train. And the only other things that seem to have a slightly comparable effect are racket sports, swimming and cycling. So if you were going to do anything as you age, right, lift weights, like play table tennis or tennis or badminton or racquetball or pickleball or something like that, go swimming every once in a while, ride a bike, like if you were going to have a totem pole and choose what you wanted to do to live a long time. But strength training beats almost everything.

My father actually played tennis up until two weeks before he died when he was 87. And like still fit, active, healthy, you know, it's, it's, he loves it and that was the thing as well, too, Ben, like, for a lot of older people listening to this as well, too, absolutely. Weights is recommended, and you're seeing a lot more people getting introduced to that. But staying active and actually doing something that you love. If you become passionate about something like a racket sport, that's a great way to improve your.

Not CrossFit. Not CrossFit.

Not Crossfit.

Well, so many people, don't get me wrong, functional athleticism and the power and explosiveness and the study that they did on power lifters compared to general pop who weren't lifting showed that powerlifting, particularly the explosive nature of powerlifting, had a direct effect on reducing the rate at which telomeres shortened. And so there's something about moving very quickly, moving very explosively. The problem is as you age and as you're trying to stay uninjured and as you're trying to be able to whatever, you know, throw football around with your kids in the backyard, explosive lifting in a competitive format under heavy load typically results in, you know, knees, elbows, low back whatnot. It's very rare to find a crossfitter who isn't in some state of injury rehabilitation. So what I encourage especially seniors to do, and I'm largely kind of transitioning this way as I age, is do loaded strength training. And, you know, Art Devani talks about this a lot. Focus on the eccentric phase of the strength training where you get a lot of the satellite cell response you get a lot of the stem cell proliferation you get, you know, and it's very slow and controlled, almost like.

Like Dr. Doug McGuff wrote a book called Body by Science, and it's all super slow training. And you're just in and out time under tension, right? Two to three minutes maximum. One single set to failure. Chest press, leg press, pull up or pull down, some kind of shoulder press and a row, right? And that's it. You do that one to two times a week and you can maintain strength. You get a peripheral blood pressure response. So you get kind of a cardiovascular training response. And then if you want to hit that fast twitch, type 2 muscle fiber, then you go and do something like, you know, the New York Times is a perfect example. They published a couple of years ago an article called the 7 Minute Workout, where they actually showed a study about this seven minute workout. 30 seconds, as hard as you can go, push ups, 15 seconds recovery. 30 seconds, as hard and fast as you can go, lunges, 15 seconds recovery. It's a seven minute workout. And yeah, I mean, if People, I have nothing against working out for a long time. For a lot of people that's like your happy place, that's your meditation. Like, I have nothing against that. And the idea though is even like the seven minute workout, just do it and do it three times through, right? But what I'm a big fan of is super slow, loaded training with an emphasis on the eccentric phase of the lift combined with body weight, explosive training. I mean that. Play some racket sports, swim, bike, do that and you're set for life.

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I used to train, you know, I was always a fat guy, you know, and in this industry we're always overweight. And then so I was trained with angst and aggression and self hate and all that sort of stuff. I recently.

Brothers, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And even just like, you know, you look at, you see yourself in the mirror and you hate yourself. Yeah. You do these things, you know, and you. It was a terrible place. And then. And I hated it. And then I go to see a guy who basically went through and said, no, we're going to just turn this into recalibration. You spend too much time in your brain. We're going to spend some time with your muscles telling your brain just how they're going and what's going on. So for that we took the weight right off. We do 10 second reps pretty much. It's really slow, really controlled, just looking for sticky spots, looking for symmetry, focusing on maintaining the load and symmetry. I dropped 45 pound, but actually built muscle in the process and did that since March without actually even thinking about body composition.

I bet you didn't get injured either.

No. Before it, I was supposed to get a wrist reconstruction, a shoulder reconstruction and a knee reconstruction from old injuries and now I just chose not to do that. And I went through the pathway. Beautiful.

Yeah.

And it's just. And it was a very, I mean that it was a tremor therapy involved seizures and all that sort of stuff in the early phases, but now it's just about maintaining symmetry and it's, it's the ultimate recalibration because I spend the rest of the time with my brain telling my body what to do.

Ken Weir's a special person. I mean.

Ken Weir.

Yeah.

Have you heard of him? Ben.

So Ken, his name sounds familiar.

So he works on chaos theory, basically. He, he.

Where does he live?

He was on 60 Minutes because medical science can't work him out. He, he worked with a guy, John McLean I think his name is, who was in a wheelchair for 20 years and then competed in Iron Man. When we went down to interview him, I'm just like, my mind was blowing. And we went, just interviewed some, some random people down there and I pulled across one lady and I said, oh, why are you here? She goes, oh, my daughter has got severe spina bifida.

Scoliosis.

Scoliosis, sorry. She's about to have metal rods put into her back. She's 18 now. So they're going to put the metal rods in. And this was our last chance to see if, you know, we could get a miracle. And I said, oh, how long you been here? She said five days. And I said, how have you been, have you found this beneficial? Any improvement? She goes, my daughter's spine is completely straight.

No scoliosis.

They didn't put goodness.

And the surgeons refused. They went to the surgeons and said, look, you know, what should we do? Should we do this? And they said, well it's not what you should. You don't have scoliosis, we can't do surgery. It's as simple as that.

Has this guy written a book or anything?

No, he's working on a few. Yeah, I'll send you all of his.

I'd love to look over. He's awesome.

We'll hook you up. Because it's quite an amazing thing what he does. But that whole changing that perspective changed so much. An interesting thing about that is I then started looking more in towards that self hate versus self love. And then you look at that angst and aggression versus everything else and I come across all that new data on oxytocin and having a look at how amazing oxytocin is and then how cool that is. That oxytocin then directly links in with that other research that we're discovering around the fascia. And then I learned and then started looking more in towards these estrogen receptors and started understanding us. I mean if you consider the fact that estrogen itself in a female can in all within 10 days build enough collagen all through the body to hold an endometrial tissue to build a get ready for the period or the menses and then just that sudden drop of estrogen and all of that collagen breaks down. Started looking at that research showing that even women are more predisposed to injuries just when that estrogens are high. What the amount of ligamental laxity, the of amount, amount of collagen, they make women's feet get longer just prior to ovulation because of the ability to build all this extra collagen and that's all driven by estrogen receptors. And then I look back at all the bodybuilders that were telling me that they use estrogen blockers coming into comp to dry out the lower back, which was usually just a uric acid water retention in the lower back. But they'll use an estrogen blocker to do that until they flatten out until all of a sudden or until they start getting injuries and then you go, man. So this, the importance of estrogen and oxytocin to regulate collagen and fascia is a really interesting era that we're moving into. As opposed to androgens for muscle protein synthesis and anger and aggression and all that sort of stuff.

Tapping into our yin side a little bit more love.

And you get it from cuddles.

It's something you don't want in your system when you go to buy a car because it makes you very trusting. You don't want to negotiate with oxytocin in your system. But it also increases skin receptor sensitivity, which is one reason why people like to snuggle after sex, for example, or babies like to snuggle with their mothers while breastfeeding, is because all of those things cause a release of oxytocin. And as a matter of fact, this is a tip for the adults out there. You can actually get intranasal oxytocin spray. Use that prior to sex and it just brings it, you know, through the roof.

Really.

It's amazing.

Wow.

Yeah, I use. I use a compounded ketamine oxytocin spray, you know, like on date night with my wife.

Yeah, right.

That's amazing.

Yeah. And the ketamine in there as well.

Yeah, the ketamine kind of, you know, it disinhibits you a little bit. What's the ketamine? Ketamine is traditionally would be like, you know, something using anesthesia as a mild tranquilizer and a larger doses as like a party drug, but just a little bit intranasally compounded with oxytocin. It's a very, very, very fun little thing.

The wrong dose, you put a horse to sleep. But apart from him. Yeah, yeah. So that's interesting. And I've been trying to get that oxytocin nasal spray. I got promised one and it never arrived.

Bloody Steve.

So that's really interesting. And then you're talking before when you're talking about that power stuff, that seven minute workout. Again, in regards to this collagen research, there's another dude, Diego, down in South America, he just did that, published some data on cluster training. And what he did in that instance there, he preloaded everyone with creatine to get that hydration to create that swelling. And then he does 3rm, whatever the exercise is, with a 20 second break in between to allow for that ATP to regenerate. Go again with another 3 RM. They got massive amount of muscle hypertrophy. And again, most of the markers that they, they found for the initial growth was all in that hydration and the swelling and the stretching of that fascia.

And then as soon as 3 RM.

Yep.

And do you know how many sets?

Oh, then they just.

Four.

So four sets of three reps with 20 seconds of rest in between each. Creatine loading beforehand.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you know how much creatine.

No. They did the 20 gram creatine three to four days and then throughout the rest of the study they maintained that loading with about 3 to 5 grams.

And do you know what exercise modality they were using for these four sets of three?

They're doing deadlifts and squats and I'll get you all the papers, but it's mainly deadlifts and squats. Yeah. And they were getting massive measuring through the quads and again. But a lot of the markers and the initial changes again was all about that swelling and the stretching of the fascia. And this has all led me back to the totally being re interested again in creatine now because, you know, we went through that phase where creatine works because it hydrates the muscle, it just puts on water weight and or makes you train hard. It gives you more energy so you can perform better. But now that I'm seeing this importance of the swelling in through that fascia and actually the hydration within the fascia and causing that fascia to swell. And then training for pump, then I start thinking about that old school static stretching because, you know, a lot of people train for latitudinal pump. But then I probably a good opportunity then to do something sort of a longitudinal stretch to get that fascia to be more permeable and then get that.

That same swelling is one of the mechanisms of action via which blood flow restriction training works.

Yeah.

Which is something I actually do quite a bit when I travel.

Yeah.

Yes. You occlude the muscle, you know, upper body or lower body, and it essentially, you know, tricks your muscles into thinking that they're under heavy load and that there's a lot of damage going on. Lactic acidosis causes a growth hormone response. You do not need to use heavy weight. I have bands back in my hotel room here right now, so I travel with the bands. Now technically, most of the research that's come from Japan on occlusion training uses the very small elastic tubing that is very precisely controlled. The millimeters of mercury pressure in the tubing is controlled by a handheld device called a Katsu device. Wow.

And.

But that's like a fifteen hundred dollar unit. But you can approximate. I mean you can get BFR bands from on Amazon for like 40 or 50 bucks. And you occlude the arms or the legs and I mean the amount of burn you get, you know, just Like a set of 20 body weight squats for example is through the roof. And you can actually, and they've done studies on seniors, for example, you can stave off sarcopenia with no load or very light loads. We're talking about like 30% 1 RM.

That's awesome.

All the way down to body weight training just by wearing these, these BFR bands and including the muscle prior to training.

Well, for people that are older or people with injuries, you know, I mean that's excellent. As you said before, I mean the danger was with a lot of the Olympic lifts and stuff like that, especially if you're really going for heavy weight is, you know, then you damage something and then, you know, especially as you're older, the ability to recover, your ability to train then goes out the window. So.

Yeah, yeah. Plus I, I honestly like, I like it too because you can just feel the pump. It stays with you for a long time after the workout. And you know, I, you know, with as much as I travel and as often as I'm in a hotel with just a crappy gym or a lot of times like I'm in my hotel room, I got 20 minutes before I got to go down and be at a conference room, you know. But if I can like slap on those BFR restriction bands and just like spend 15 minutes doing push ups and squats, yeah, I can get a super fast one.

Let me tell you how this is going to work because.

You have to try this prototype 8 with it. So what we got, we got a cream, it's got a transdermal arginine which creates very fast pump. Like even without the bands. Like you do one set and it's stupid but in it we've got the phytoecty steroids. So we've got the 20 hydroxy ectosterone. There's a recent paper published actually suggest it was the most anabolic natural agent they could find. And it works on estrogen receptors in the fascia and it increases glucose disposal by about 30% protein synthesis up to 15. Yeah. And it is crazy.

I have a transdermal nitroglycerin cream that I use. Okay, so, so here's the deal. That ketamine oxytocin spray, I told you the only problem with the ketamine is gives you droopy dick.

Yeah, right.

So you need to take sildenafil or what works even better because you don't have to time it is you can just slap a little bit at like a small dab of nitroglycerin cream on your balls right before you, you know.

You'Re going to action.

Yeah.

And I mean it's, it's amazing.

That's so cool.

Like instant takeoff.

I think we sell more prototype as Viagra cream than we actually. And, and for the, the ladies, it actually really good for if there's any failure to orgasm and that sort of stuff like that, they just.

Oh yeah. For, for women and.

Anyone driving their minivan with your kids, they're about to grow up by about three extra years now. But like a little bit of that nitroglycerin cream on ground the, on the clitoris or a little bit of like a transdermal testosterone cream on the clitoris. And I mean it's just, it's, it's screaming good for her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

A lot of people are using the prototype 8. So we're actually going to refine that and, and bring out actually a cream which can actually be used for the guys.

And so you can, you can butter up with that prototype before you do the equivalent. You get massive pump.

Amazing.

And really, really fast. So it's like. And even to the point that with prototype, like the way we used to do it in trade shows because people, you know, they try to explain this stuff or whatever. So we just see a. Massage it on one bicep, do a series of curls and see what happens. And then they haven't even finished one set and they get in the pump.

Yeah.

Which was terrible in the fact that it worked a little bit better than we anticipated. So we have to tell people, just use it towards your. The end. You said maybe. Yeah. So you could use it as part of your quick occlusion training. If you want to get a quick 20 minute pump that's perfect for that. But if you're trying to get a proper workout out, use it just for a final drop set superset. Otherwise you get just too much pump too soon, you blow out.

Well, the other problem is blood pressure. Like I know with that nitroglycerin cream like there, there's no way you would want to, let's, let's say you know, drink beetroot juice or take Viagra and then put that stuff on because your blood pressure will drop. It just phase dilates everything. Your blood pressure will plummet.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

And that'd be pretty powerful nitroglycerin.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

Actually I have triceps and just changing tactic a little bit. Ben would be really interested and I actually really enjoyed your article on Peak fitness as well too. I actually started incorporating that when I was playing football. I've got an injury, so hopefully I'll be able to get back next year. In terms of the difference between your high intensity versus your steady state sort of cardio, but I know a lot of our listeners while we're talking a lot about training for building muscle tissue and body composition, in terms of your opinion as far as cardio, we've got so many varied opinions now. In terms of cardio specifically, not so much for fitness, but obviously for fat loss. We've got the F cardio movement and I appreciate it. And those guys are heavy listers. And it's all about doing your big compound groups. You got other people that are talking about using Tabata style training. In terms of your opinion, if someone. And obviously depending on the type of person that you're talking about to whether they're quite overweight or whether they're trying, what's your recommendation for those people?

Well, based on the research that James o' Keefe has done on arterial stiffness and increased risk of cardiovascular related mortality in response to endurance training, what he's found is that greater than about 90 minutes of aerobic exercise per day, or greater than about 60 minutes of higher endurance intensity, like moderate to high still aerobic exercise per day, because it's possible to be anaerobic for, you know, for 60 minutes, but anything greater than 90 minutes aerobic, you know, low to moderate, or Anything greater than 60 minutes moderate to high, you actually see, you know, that that's the point at which you see the increased risk of mortality and the law of diminishing returns set in. So that's where you would definitely be playing with fire. And granted, there's many people for whom new 90 minutes of cardio a day, they just don't have the time of day to do that. But then you look at a lot of Iron man triathletes and marathoners and cardio junkies.

Just laborers too. People work that way too.

Yeah, yeah. Well, when you're talking about laboring, you are very, very low on the aerobic zone. I mean, we're talking about, you know, typically, even if you're laboring, you're below aerobic threshold. Because, you know, for example, I hunt, you know, and I can hunt for seven days and be trucking all day and be nowhere near what I would be during a marathon or an Ironman triathlon, nowhere even near that. So what we're really talking about is steady state cardio. You would not want to do more than 90 minutes of low to moderate or more than 60 minutes of moderate to high on a daily basis. And then it comes down also to just the whole time hacking piece, meaning that, you know, when we can activate via, I believe it's the PPAR pathway that we would activate the same mitochondrial training response via high intensity interval training as the AMP K pathway that we would hit with that longer term aerobic training. It's kind of like two different ways to skin the cat. And you see competitive elite aerobic athletes like cross country skiers or marathoners or triathletes, using a polarized training model, meaning that they do about 80% of their training largely aerobically, with only about 20% spent in that anaerobic threshold and very little time spent in between. And that's a very good way to get fit to compete on an elite level in aerobic sports. But that style of training, because 80% is low to moderate aerobic training, you're talking about training three to four hours a day plus for the average person, that's unrealistic versus just being able to approximate that same type of approach. You're never going to be an elite world champion athlete doing a 20 minute, you know, high intensity interval training session on the bike versus hitting the hills for four hours. But you're still going to target the same mitochondrial response. So ultimately I'm a fan of the high intensity interval training approach for cardio with occasional bouts of stamina built in, like, you know, like a long hike every once in a while on the weekends or bike ride. But where I think the magic lies for the average person is hacking your workplace environment. Standing treadmills or standing workstations. Treadmill workstations, pomodoro breaks where you're swinging a kettlebell or doing a few pull ups, basically making your environment such that during a typical day of work you feel as though you're engaged in this very low level aerobic cardio during the entire day. And then if you put the cherry on top of the cake with a little bit of a high intensity interval training session at the beginning of the end of the day, or a little bit of that super slow training we were talking about, or the blood flow occlusion training or something like that, you're really just taking a brief dip into just enough to spark that mitochondrial response, enough to spark that satellite cell response, a little bit of hypertrophy. And that's how I live my life, is I do high intensity interval training at the beginning or the end of the day, but I'M still walking like 15,000 steps while I'm talking to people on the phone and working during the day, I'm taking stops to swing a kettlebell. I've got a hex bar in the room next to my office where I'm lifting heavy things every once in a while. So really I think that's where the average person can get the most bang for their buck, is by viewing their entire day as an opportunity to just take movement snacks the whole time.

Do you look at it as far as cardio is concerned? A lot of people do fasted cardio fast first thing in the morning. Do you think there's a benefit to that? Do you think that high interval training first thing in the morning is superior to in the evening? Or you don't think it makes that much difference? And as far as weights, then do you recommend weights in the evening before bed is better? Because.

Here'S what my model is.

A fasted cardio in the morning appears to be pretty beneficial for being able to mobilize and utilize fatty acids simply because you have fewer of them available from dietary sources. So you get up in the morning, you work out in a fasted state, your adipose tissue releases fatty acids. You rely upon those as a fuel versus the triglycerides and the fatty acids that you know, your liver might be churning out from you having had a meal. Okay, now the trick is that you need to realize studies have shown that that also results in a trend towards caloric hypercompensation after the fasted exercise. So if you're going to do facet exercise, you may need to just be in a state of mindfulness and know, okay, this is going to make me want to have a 1500 calorie smoothie for breakfast, but I need to remember the whole reason I'm doing this, especially if I'm doing it to lose weight, is I'm going to do my fasted exercise session, but I'm still just going to have, you know, a normal sane breakfast afterwards. Now I like that scenario of an easy walk in the sunshine or, or a little bit of yoga or some kind of facet aerobic exercise in the morning because your body temperature peaks, your testosterone peaks, your post workout protein synthesis peaks, your grip strength peaks, all in the afternoon to the early evening. So if you have the luxury of time in your schedule to be able to save your high intensity interval training or your weight training for the evening, you're going to be able to get more bang for your buck out of it when you do it. Then and furthermore, related to what we were talking about in terms of muscle being a glucose disposal sink, you also are timing one of the best things you can do for insulin sensitivity and upregulation of glucose transporters right before the one meal of the day that tends to be, for most people living in a westernized society, the meal that has the most amount of unpredictability. Dinner, right? Dinners. When we go out to restaurants, when we might have more carbohydrates, when we might have alcohol, we might have dessert. So it's really beautiful if you can save that hard, you know, insulin sensitizing exercise session for the afternoon to early evening. Because if you're like me, you know, we were talking earlier, you asked me if I was in ketosis and you know, I said I don't pay that much attention. But frankly, I'm in ketosis most of the day because I save all my carbs, right? Like my sweet potatoes, my yams, my rice, my wine, my dark chocolate, all that stuff. Stuff for the end of the day when I can sit down with my family, have an amazing meal. I've done my strength training, I'm guilt free, you know, and I wore a Dexcom continuous blood glucose monitor for a whole year. And you know, I was easily backed down into normal blood glucose levels within two hours after the evening meal when I used the ketone monitor, you know, the bloodthe keto mojo, I was in ketosis the next morning. And so it's almost like this cyclic ketotic approach to eating where you wake up facet aerobic exercise and mitigate sugar consumption during the day, exercise in the afternoon to the early evening, have your carbohydrates at night, rinse, wash, repeat. And that works well for a lot of people.

Just a clarification on that. So you recommend a steady state or you still recommend first thing in the morning, or you still fine with a 20 minute HIIT training session first thing.

In the morning if you can. I like just easy aerobic. If your schedule dictates that by the end of the day you're me. So cognitive fatigued and tired from work, there's no way you're going to want to hit the strength trainer or do high intensity cardio, eat the frog, do the hard thing in the morning. But if you have the luxury of time, you can arrange your schedule so that you can just go for an easy walk fasted in the sunshine in the morning. I always finish up with a little cold shower, a cold soak to kind of mobilize those Fatty acids even more stabilizer, insulin levels even more. As a matter of fact, wearing that continuous blood glucose monitor, the number one thing that kept my blood glucose low the rest of the day was starting off the day by getting into a cold state. Yeah. So that's really cool.

And a lot of people, I don't do the bath. I'm not gonna buy ice bags and dump them in the bath.

But what he said was really cool is that even going for a half a liter of ice cold water and then actually putting like a nice necklace around, that was, I think, I can't remember exactly, but almost 60% as good as having an ice bath. Now, for the average person, they're probably prepared to do that, whereas I'm not prepared to jump into an ice bath.

Yeah. There are companies like Cool Fat Burner, they make a vest and a device you can wear for me. Because Ray Kronice and his research on the metabolic response to cold thermogenesis, he showed that all you need to do is be at 55 degrees or less, which for most people, 55 degrees Fahrenheit is a cold shower.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. So you can stand in the cold shower for two to five minutes. You don't have to buy ice bags and dump them in a tub. And this Wim Hof thing, like, like all you need to do is just get a little bit cold.

Yeah. Even that when we're doing that research for the Amp V, the peppermint was an interesting thing because the peppermint actually tricked the nerves in the liver to thinking you were cold and actually induced hepatothermic ability. And that's one of the ways it.

Could help to marvel in ayurvedic typing. Ayurvedic medicine. If you tend to be someone who has a cool personality, like one of the things that tell you to avoid is mint.

Yeah.

Such a cooling agent for the body.

Yeah, Anything. And now when you're talking about that strategy that you used there, that's pretty much the same strategy that I started using for people with polycystic ovarian syndrome. And then my main objective in that syndrome was to avoid insulin. So I figured their big problem is they just start this cycle of carbs and insulin all day, and then they have all day exposure to insulin. So what we do is we keep the carbs out as much as possible, keep them in that insulin sensitive, glycogen depleted state, give them that opportunity to reload at night, have a good night's sleep. They get that one big insulin spike. But they only get that small exposure to insulin in a 24 hour period. And that makes a massive, massive difference in with the polycystic ovarian syndrome. And that works. That does work.

And you're saying as well too in terms of obviously when you're doing that cardio in the morning and you want to have that big food intake of food because your body's kind of demanding it and again without product flogging too much. But the amp is fantastic for that because not only does it help with obviously upright regulating the body's utilizing burning fat, but also has a feeling of satiety as well too. So it's sort of puts that bluntner on there with again as you say being conscious.

My metric is sparkling water, like sparkling water with stevia. Like I drink Pellegrino like these big glass bottles and I got good organic stevia, you know, it doesn't have the sugar, alcohols and maltodextrin in it like in the U.S. oh my gonx. Like they make a really good organic stevia. So I do that. Or Zevia soda. Yeah, Zevia is great. I get like the cream soda flavor and the ginger root beer flavor. So for me, you know, after I've had my, you know, I've broken my fast in the morning, done my fasted morning cardio cold shower, I have a little smoothie, you know and then I only eat three times a day, I don't snack at all. And so you know, I'll wait four or five hours before I eat again. But for me the appetite satiation especially because I'm aware of the caloric hyper compensation, how many calories I'm putting into that smoothie. I do the sparkling water or the stevia flavored soda and then I chew gum, I'd like chew xylitol gum. Sometimes I'll chew nicotine gum, you know for a little bit of a pick me up and I can, I can go all day without eating so.

And I appreciate we're probably running out of time, but I want to know, this is great. But I want to, I want to know Ben, in terms of just really quickly, what do you eat through the day? I mean you're lean, mean. Yeah. You're competing at a high level. You're ripped.

So what are you largely whole food diet? You know. So I hunt most of our meat. So I bow hunt, you know. So we've always got, we've got deer, we've got you know, turkey, we have a lot of wild caught salmon. I order in the US from a company called US Wellness Meats. A lot of organ meats. So I get a lot of like head cheese and Braunschweiger, some cuts of rib eye, things like that from them. So always we've got a lot of wild meat around. We have six raised vegetable garden beds, so we've got a lot of fresh veg.

However, my personal diet is as follows. In the morning I have a smoothie and the smoothie is the one meal for me that's like not real recognizable food. You know, it's. It's coconut milk, bone broth, collagen, sea salt, typically some kind of a meal replacement powder or protein powder. My stomach doesn't do as well with whey. So typically it's like a pea or hemp or rice protein or like thorn mediclear or something like that. And that's all blended up with the coconut milk with ice, with some bone broth, with some stevia, with some sea salt. And then I just.

So there's no carbs in that?

No. And then I just put a bunch of superfoods on after I mix it up. Like I mix it to like the texture of ice cream so I can eat it with a spoon like in a side bowl almost. And I top it with like some unsweetened coconut flakes, typically a little bit of cacao nib.

What else will I put on there? Sometimes like some, some nut butter. But it's like a kind of like a high fat, high protein smoothie that I start my day off with. And I like that too because typically it's during breakfast that I'm taking my first dive into my emails and things like that. So sometimes I need my hands free for typing. So a smoothie just works well for me in the morning. And then you know, I work all day. Typically that smoothie is something I'm eating around 9:30 or 10. And around 2pm I have lunch. And lunch for me is usually like a small fish like herring, anchovy, mackerel, sardine, sometime whatever meat is leftover from dinner the night before, like salmon or beef or something like this. And I always have a little bit of like a, like a pumpkin or a squash, like kind of like a starch, but a very low glycemic index, low carbohydrate starch and usually a little bit of vegetable and then side from the garden. And so typically it's just like fish, some olive oil, some seeds, nuts, things like that. And a big cup of bone broth. I have a big cup of bone Broth, always with lunch and a lot of times I'll mix black pepper and.

Salts and usually like some different vegetable powders or some turmeric or something like that in there. And then nothing, nothing, nothing until dinner. And then dinner again is just like some organ meats, typically some sweet potatoes, potato or some yam or purple potato. I'm a big root vegetable guy for most of my carbohydrates. Sometimes I'll put a little bit of raw honey or something like that on there. I'll have a glass of wine, usually a little bit of dark chocolate or something like that after dinner, red wine, sometimes a little bit of berries. What's that?

Red wine?

Yeah, like organic red wine. So stepping back, big picture, I eat a largely nose to tail carnivore esque diet. Working in tubers, raw honey, bone broth, wine and coffee. And then in the morning I have that smoothie. And during the spring and summer when we're growing our vegetables, I'll kind of add in some plant matter to that carnivore esque diet.

Do you have coffee in the morning as well too?

Yeah, I always have a big cup of black coffee in the morning.

Yeah.

Yeah, big cup of black coffee in the morning. Glass of wine or a little bit of like the bitters with some gin or vodka at night? Night.

And do you do anything specific after you do like a heavy weight training session? Do you, do you put in anything at that point in time or do you just wait for your evening meal?

No, I don't, I don't, I, I just, I fast. Yeah, I mean like I'm still pretty hungry after, after I weight train, but I just, I feel like I do best on three square meals a day with no snacking and I kind of like to be hungry. It like kind of lets me, me have my edge. Like I just, I probably just burnt what I was out there two hours on that course, probably at about 1100, 1200 calories per hour intensity. So I already burned 2500 calories and all I've had today are two scoops of yogurt with a little bit of dark chocolate. So that was about 200 calories. A little, a little wafer out on the course which is 100 calories and whatever you guys just fed me. So I mean I'm at probably 3,000, 000 calorie burn right now and I've had 500 calories. It's you know, 11:30.

It keeps you shopping.

I sometimes like to be hungry and, and yeah, if I was a high school football player trying to put on £20. Like I'd be mowing down amino acids and protein and stuff post workout. But, you know, I'm. I'm trying to strike the balance between performance and longevity and staying lean so that three square meal a day works for me.

Yeah, that's excellent.

Excellent. Yeah.

Matt, I think we're running out of time. Not only that, Ben had the whole podcast. Has kind of been squatting after.

I'm totally going to be foam rolling out. Yeah, I gotta. I got over. I'm staying over at Squaw Valley Lodge. The gym has foam roller, so I'm making love to that thing. Yes.

Yeah.

Well, mate, really appreciate you coming.

We have to do more because I want to talk all about the nootropics I want to talk about. So there's so much we have to do. More of these.

Yeah, yeah, you got. You guys ever. You guys ever interview people on Skype or anything like that?

Yep.

Yeah. Hop on Skype again.

Yeah. Be fantastic.

Cool. I'm down.

I know that you've got a good following in Australia, actually, because I talked to a few people and, you know, I'll be in Greenfield.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know who Ben is.

I've never been to Australia. Yeah, it's like when I. When I used to race triathlon, everybody's like, come to Australia, do it. And it just. It never happened. And I've never. I've never put together the pieces, you know, because it's a long ways to go. If I come to Australia, I want to do some talks. I want to, like, make the most out of the journey. But it. I would to, like, love to go someday.

We do an annual summit where what we do is we get our friends and people like yourself that are. And that sort of stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. And Ben friends. And then Ben can come too. No. So what we basically do is we create a weekend where people at the start, they go through a series of, you know, questionnaires and just different ways of investigating themselves to work out what their health priorities are. And then over the weekend, we have different guest speakers and that sort of stuff that you can direct your own journey to what you want to learn so you can make the. The learning experience more relevant to you and what you need. So that's the sort of thing that we'd love to get you involved in. Yeah, that'd be excellent.

Sounds cool.

And we bring, like, Ken Ware and all those other guys as well, so you'd fit in perfectly.

Sounds Cool.

Yeah, it's got to be absolutely amazing for me to make the 18 hour journey.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm down.

I'm down, mate.

Try anything once.

Thanks again, Ben. Really good to have you on. Actually, it's one of the podcasts I've really been looking forward to and it certainly didn't.

Oh, thanks, man.

I really, really appreciate, appreciate the knowledge and, and what you bring to the industry.

Glad I didn't die up on top of the mountains.

I would have been hanging for a long time. But mate, thanks for coming, mate. You go and get your foam roller and whatever else that you need to go get. Have a shower as well. Do your bath.

Roller. Yeah.

And yeah, thanks again and we'll definitely would love to catch up and do some more podcasts.

Word.

Fascinating.

We'll do it.

Yeah.

All right, guys, thanks.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.