Shattering World Swim Records On 25-Piece Fried Chicken Buckets, Climbing Mountains While Eating...

This is a weird day why is it a weird day because my wife is out in the driveway right now using a power tool to carve pumpkins that's right she's doing a power tool carved pumpkin story she's also just this past week made apple chutney made pumpkin seeds four ways including a pumpkin pie flavored pumpkin seed mix she has been organizing the pantry in a very cool way that includes paint and curtains curtains and all sorts of things that makes our pantry kind of sexy and finally she's created spooky face masks my wife a lot of you may not know this she actually does a magazine every single month it's like this beautiful online downloadable pdf magazine with videos like tons of videos from her she literally spends the entire month putting together these amazing magazines it's called the healthy home workshop and whether you are a complete bachelor who just wants to sit at home but occasionally have people over and completely impress them and knock their socks off with your cooking and the feng shui of your home or whether you are a family mom who wants to make your family better than all the other families out there because we all know that's the way moms think you should check out her healthy home workshop how do you do it just go to bengreenfieldfitness dot com.

That'S bengreenfieldfitness dot com innercircle and you can check that out now today's podcast that you are about to listen to is pretty interesting it's about shattering world swim records on twenty five piece fried chicken buckets climbing mountains while eating defatted vegan grass fed argentinian liver anhydrate and much more now before we jump into today's show i also wanted to mention to you something else kind of weird and that's propolis propolis p r o p o l i s what is propolis well it is the immune system of a beehive it's what a bees use to sterilize their hive to protect their hive from things like bacteria and parasites and virus it's this sticky substance that they make from plant and tree resins well propolis was actually the term given to this stuff by aristotle remember aristotle yeah that guy its medicinal uses date back to at least three hundred bc it's got over three hundred active compounds and it's good for anything immune related cause it's antiviral and antifungal and antibiotics you could like take it on an airplane or a bus and spray it in your mouth and make your immune system bulletproof so it also works by the way on cold sores and canker sores for those of you walking around with giant sores in your mouth and even gingivitis and bad breath it can treat cuts burns wounds it's like a freaking swiss army knife for your immune system and they get this stuff from the bees kids can even use it so the propolis that i actually have in my fridge right now i've been playing around with it it actually tastes really good it's made by this company called beekeepers naturals beekeepers naturals and they're giving everybody who's listening in a ten percent discount so to get that you go to bengreenfieldfitness dot com beekeeper just like it sounds bengreenfieldfitness dot com beekeeper and use code ben to get ten percent off of their fantastic propolis literally just spray it in your mouth and you're off to the races so check it out and now onto today's show in this episode of the ben greenfield fitness show i.

Never had any issues psychologically showing up ready for an event i always was a great competitor i couldn't wait to get in the water i didn't care who you were went toe to toe with the biggest and baddest boys in the world and none of them scared just couldn't wait to get in and take them out for me i've always had the attitude of make the journey or the training the most miserable aspect of what it is you're going to do if you're aiming for an event so that when you get to the event all of that work is behind you you paid a dear price for it but you know unequivocally when you show up i'm ready he's an expert.

In human performance and nutrition voted america's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness his show provides you with everything you need need to optimize physical and mental performance he is ben greenfield power.

Speed mobility balance whatever it is for you that's the natural movement get out there when you look at all the studies done studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here right now on the ben greenfield fitness podcast.

Hey folks it's ben greenfield here and i actually first met or i guess got introduced to today's podcast guest when i got this bottle of strange pills in the mail and normally i would toss those bottles into my pantry or my garage with all the other random po and oils and capsules and pills and lotions and creams and strange devices that fit into various orifices of your body that all often excuse me i'm coughing on my green smoothie speaking of strange things in your body and so all these things show up at my house but this bottle kind of intrigued me because along with echinacea and beetroot extract which i know about the bottle also had some other stuff i'd never heard of like alcohol aphanizomenon flos aquei i don't even know how to pronounce that how about this one defatted vegan grass fed argentinian liver anhydrate i've heard of liver before but not that particular flavor or a special version of cordyceps called a senesis so long story short i ended up calling up this guy and this is the guy who had sent it to me and asked him what it was for and it turns out that he and this bottle are far from normal and you're going to find out why in today's episode he's got quite this story quite the interesting guy quite the athlete as well so his name is craig craig dinkle and if you are listening in you get intrigued with craig and his story and what we talk about because he's got some very i guess i would call it like enchanting and edgy info that we haven't talked about much on the podcast before if you find this stuff intriguing go to bengreenfieldfitness dot com craig that's bengreenfieldfitness dot com craig for today's show notes see craig i named the whole.

Podcast after you yeah i feel honored.

I feel honored yeah well you should be man.

I was looking over your resume in terms of for example especially your swim performances while training for the olympics i mean you were training with navy seals you were rooming with professional baseball players i know you were teammates with dara torres a pretty highly visible swimmer along with the michael phelps of water polo a guy named terry schroeder and i think only me and a small handful of listeners as x or current water polo nerds would know who he is but that is pretty cool and then you also have trained a ton of celebrities i know you worked with willie nelson and you worked with johnny mandel and ray parker junior and the guitarist for the eagles and i think one of the gals who toured with elvis presley and bruce jenner and all sorts of really interesting people so you've been all over the place man except for this show so welcome to.

This show well thanks it's really a pleasure to be here in such esteemed companies yourself high regard for you and.

Always have oh well thank you that's probably the only time today i'll be called esteemed so you got your start in the competitive sports world with swimming i know but i thought it was kind of intriguing you told me how exactly you got introduced to swimming can you fill the listeners in yeah sure.

Sure i've told this story in a couple of other spots as well but i was a two year old kid and was very interested in the water and one day family was on a pool deck southern california and decided i'd find out what it was like to get in the water so.

Parents weren't paying attention they weren't doing their job that day but my older brother who at the time was five years old was doing his job that day so what happened was i was curious and i slipped into the shallow end went down the stairs don't even know how i could do that at two years old but managed to get down the stairs and started floating pretty well off.

Into the pool and next thing i knew i was up against the side of the wall and i was drowning i was drowning i wasn't able i hadn't sunk to the bottom or anything i was on the surface but yeah i can remember that like it was.

Crazy that's crazy you were t and.

You can remember that i remember it just exactly as if it happened yesterday.

I wonder if that's common to be able to remember a traumatic experience like that when you're that young because some people will say they can remember being.

Birthed yeah see.

That goes back further than i can go and it's funny you say that because i had a friend when i was in high school actually my best friend's mother who claimed and look at it i'm just telling you what she told me i'm not saying that i necessarily go here but i'll never forget her telling me she can remember being in the womb now that seems like a huge stretch to me but this lady was a pretty special lady really a true genius and really an amazing human being someone whose feet were cleanly planted on the ground and so i had no reason to doubt her but i thought well you know the earliest recollections i have are just around two years old so the funny thing about your question or statement about traumatic experiences is that my brother dove in from the deep end of the pool he happened to see me he's only five years old and was able to push me out and get.

Me to at five years old that's kind of unique i think maybe they you guys were in california at that.

Time yeah it was santa barbara okay.

But you were born and raised in massachusetts right yes boston massachusetts and so yeah wow wow something must have been in the water down in california for your five year old brother to be able to pull you out of a pool from drowning well he was an.

Amazing you know look at he was i grant you he was only five years old and hardly formed as a human being but he ended up being a pretty really amazing guy six boys in my family and all of us have varying levels of success and stories to tell in life but of all of us he ended up having really the most interesting story of any of us we lost him to cancer about five years ago which was a real which is a real drag but great guy and he saved my life then and speaking about traumatic experiences you know my family did not treat that as if it was some sort of major you know nine one one emergency to their credit they understood the serious yeah they understood the seriousness of the situation and i say that because i can see that imagery in my mind too i can see you know the sort of nervous laughter the comfort coming from glad this didn't get any worse and no one was screaming or yelling or running around or behaving like someone just about died which i think was a good thing and so i don't know if i would have ended up later down the line becoming a swimmer or not had they had they handled it differently but i didn't have any you know it's just it just ended up being an experience that's the trick to.

Raising a world class swimmer pretend like drowning happens every day and it's the most normal thing in the world and your kids will be bulletproof to it you know i my my dad's brother who also sadly is not with us any longer he grew up as an amazing swimmer i know when he was i think four or five my grandma tells me stories how he would swim underwater and i believe the distance that he got close to underwater at five was somewhere over a hundred somewhere between one hundred and one hundred fifty that's from meters so that's back and forth quite a few times under the water for a little boy to be able to do but it's pretty amazing i have this kind of fascination with water did a bunch of cold water swimming before this episode just to get myself ready to interview you and yeah you're.

The crazy guy here you're the crazy guy i read all about you and your cold water stuff and that's tough stuff i couldn't do that yeah well.

You develop enough brown fat and enough endothelial nitric oxide production and even a skinny guy like me can handle it without being one of those big old fat polar bear swimmers so after that you got into competitive swimming yeah well.

The bottom line is the brother will jump forward many years back in boston now and that brother who saved my life became and so i just followed him into the sport because i loved him and idolized him so that's really how it began i wasn't doing anything.

In particular so when you got into high school as a swimmer one of the things that i know you told me was you dropped seven seconds in your hundred yard freestyle to actually become a competitive swimmer to be able to kind of like get into college and that's for anybody who swims that's a boatload of time no pun intended there so what did you do to actually drop that amount of time in freestyle.

Swimming that's a really good question and despite the fact it was me it could have been anybody and i say very egolessly that is a boatload of time it's an inexplicable drop really well.

Yeah i mean it would be like a lot of people let's say like a fast swim time for an average like ironman triathlete for example would be maybe you could do a minute and you know fifteen seconds for one hundred meter time you're talking about dropping that down you know for somebody who's you know recreational swimmer closer down to like a minute you know down to like one hundred eight from a one hundred fifteen which is a ton of time.

Right that's right i think you know as i look back at that i think i did start my competitive swimming in new england i was not your everyday athlete back then i seemed to possess some natural talent i didn't train that hard i didn't take it seriously i had no reason to it wasn't the environment i was in at that time was not a highly competitive environment although i was always highly competitive whenever i was in an event i was always there to win but the training is just nothing compared to what they did in california and i didn't understand how to train and i don't think the coaches were all that good and i had some minimal success there and one day in new england at a swim meet i just for absolutely no good reason broke the record of the fastest swimmer in new england who was three years older than me and that guy i knew and very very disciplined athlete trained very hard i used to watch him work out all the time another one of my idols just happened to be on the same team just the senior part of the team the varsity team and when i broke his record i thought very objectively i was fifteen and i thought well gee you know maybe there's something here and i ought to pay a little more attention to this and along with that thinking the family then moved to california and i think to answer your question i think i just landed at the right place at the right time well how do i say this i had a lot of fire in me.

Almost indescribable amount of fire in my belly for reasons not having to do with just wanting to win but for other reasons so i landed at the right place all of a sudden i was coddled by coaches i had a great i had a great head coach i had a stroke coach i happened to land on a team where one of the best swimmers in southern california was also on the team and so right away i had this heavy inauguration to what it meant to be a california swimmer just bang just like that so training changed dramatically i wasn't working out the width of the pool anymore and occasionally the length of the pool i was learning all about hypoxic training stroke training measured stroke training you mentioned the kid who could swim underwater one hundred that's a long that's a long long i mean i respect that that is some tough tough stuff to do i think maybe the best i could do as an adult was maybe seventy five to one hundred yards not meters you mentioned meters which is a big difference so that's an amazing thing so all these things were being introduced to me and it was highly focused and it was all driven toward winning at that time and so i think that i left scene a new england with probably some natural talent that just sort of bubbled up i think that's fair to say because it wasn't right for me to break the record of a guy who lived his life competing at the highest levels and training at the hardest levels and for me to just show up the meet that i broke that record in i wasn't even going to go to i was just like i've got nothing to do today i might as well just go to the meet and so it just happened like that so i think that what happened was i spent a year then of course training in that program and the next year at what they call cif which is the equivalent to the high school division one state meet i just dropped seven seconds i mean i just it was just just there it was so you.

Were just doing a whole cluster of training modalities from hypoxics training to strength training to obviously swim training were you were you using because i know you're very into into and we'll talk about this later on like you know fringe ingredients supplements legal we should throw in but were you into that stuff back then like did you have like a keen interest in health and food and supplements or were you were you like me i was a collegiate tennis player and i every day before practice would roll into mcdonald's and grab a big mac supersized fries doctor pepper that would fuel tennis every day no i think.

You really honestly just described what most athletes do i mean that is how we eat it's a myth really that athletes that with exception there are exceptions to this rule dara became an exception later because she was competing in her.

Forties and winning you mean dara torres darra torres she did the olympics she.

Was what forty yes forty two forty two forty two years old was her last olympics and she just barely she just missed the gold medal in her last olympics by i think two one hundredths of a second i mean she was effectively a gold medalist at forty two years old she got the silver crazy insane insane and so someone like her at that stage of life you have to make some serious shifts and she made a ton of them i mean she did lots of things differently but no i think guys like you and me when we're in college look at i used to go just to compete with you on the eating thing my friends and i would get out of workhouse we'd go home we'd get a couple bucks from our parents and we'd shoot over to kentucky fried chicken and we would buy the biggest bucket they had whatever that was i think it was a twenty two piece or twenty five piece bucket back in those days and we just sit down we just sit down at the dinner table there or the restaurant table and just start eating fried chicken so i'd say that my eating habits hadn't changed yet that was going to happen later but i did begin the exercise of taking supplements and just finding out what might work without much thought just sort of listening to people and hearing what they had to say and it began with something as simple and as basic as salt salt tablets i figured i was outdoors in california you swim outdoors you're in the sun all the time so.

You'Re burning off a lot of energy and blowing out a lot of salts and a lot of sodium and for some reason that seemed in those days to be the place to begin and later it gets toward my second olympic run it gets much more intense as i start figuring out what's going on in between that salt period and the the more intense trying everything under the.

Sun period gotcha okay so you went you wound up swimming in the olympics.

I did not make no i did not i wish i could say i.

Had the first olympics you were training.

For the olympics yes i qualified for olympic trials twice and competed twice in olympic trials but i didn't make the.

Team okay got it but you had a bunch of ncaa records a bunch of all american records i know you were inducted to because you were swimming for cal state right that's right right.

Cal state northridge at that time you're.

Like in their hall of fame as.

A swimmer that's correct yeah i was the fastest inductee into their hall of.

Fame and what about during that time were you in were you into like supplements or fringe training methods during that.

Time i tell you yes that that's where i think so that puts me into college and i i did start trying to figure out what was out there what might give me a biological edge because we all knew that peds have been around a long time and at the olympic level at the olympic trial level when you get out of the pool if you made the team you get out of the pool you sit on a chair and they pulled your blood right there on the deck.

And the day you don't pee into a cup they just take your blood.

Right there huh then they did then that's how they did it then a nurse would come out and they'd just strap a tourniquet around your arm serious yeah and that's what they yeah the second olympic trials i was in was in indianapolis indiana and i'll never forget seeing them come out on you know the swimmers get out of the water get in their chairs right by the starting blocks and the nurses come out and pull blood right there there was nowhere to go nowhere to run nowhere to hide they wanted to make sure that you had no chance if you were cheating to go do something in the locker room somewhere else yeah so yeah i'd say that yeah by this time then i'm starting to experiment with the fairly usual off the shelf stuff so i'm trying bee pollen i don't know how unusual some of these things are but you know bee pollen royal jelly things along those lines the usual e supplement c b you name it if it was there to take i tried it and i did that for a long time yeah i've tried bee.

Pollen and royal jelly before they actually they do have those i guess would be considered somewhat fringe but bee pollen is actually really really good for people who have like hay fever and allergenic issues it's kind of like one of those counterintuitive type of things eating small amounts what do they call it hair of the dog when you have a bloody mary in the morning after drinking bee pollen has some very interesting natural allergy relief properties which i think is kind of cool and then royal jelly that's one of those things where i don't know if you're into this same concept that i am that nature gives you clues but you look at something like the aloe vera plant and how quickly it regenerates after having its limbs cut off and it actually can increase your ability to produce stem cells when you consume aloe vera gels or in the case of royal jelly that's what they use to feed the larvae and the adult queen it's like the honeybee secretion and it's one of those things it's almost like i recently wrote a blog post about how athletes are now injecting themselves with growth hormones and insulin like growth factor and things like that and royal jelly and aloe vera and all these things that cause growth in your body or colostrum et cetera they're actually really cool cool natural forms of that but bee pollen and royal jelly i would say if you were taking those in college as a swimmer that's something a lot of swimmers i would say and collegiate athletes have not tapped.

Into i think you're right i think you're right and i desubscribe to that thinking if you look around nature you can find a lot of clues and a lot of answers and it brings up another important issue that i've held since those days which is as you mentioned it works for some people in some cases and in particular circumstances and other bodies may not work with it those things didn't work with me but i'm a big big believer in anecdotal support you can get academic studies you can get clinical studies you can get all kinds of studies that back up a given supplement or a product to help you perform better whether it's cognitive or biological and those things may not work for you and you can and there's all kinds of undocumented or documented let's say but not clinical studied or not scientifically validated supplements that do work.

For people sure i mean like right now if you hear me opening that.

Little bottle of water on my desk i'm drinking water that's you know like it's it's structured and it's clustered and it's at a specific ph after it goes through the filter in my house and everything and yeah there's not a lot of research behind that in terms of it say you know increasing intracellular hydration for example but it you know for me personally i feel a distinct difference in terms of hydration in terms of me drinking tons of water and not actually peeing out tons of water because it's actually hydrating my cells it really is interesting to use yourself as a bit of a guinea pig safely as far as exactly i endorse guinea pigging water on yourself i don't endorse that with some other things that one can inject into their body but anyway so you wound up after swimming going on and getting into the fitness business.

Yeah i didn't know what i wanted to do i had a background in music my first degree was in ethnomusicology which at the time at that time there were no such degrees today there are ucla i think has one and many many schools have degrees in ethnomusicology but i didn't really know what i wanted to do i just was an athlete and i loved music and i played guitar and i figured somehow maybe i'd work my way into the rock and roll scene become a musician but there was no money to be made in music right out of college so the only thing i knew and i knew inside out and backwards was training and fitness i knew that stuff so i started the private fitness business and that's how i met some of the people that you'd mentioned earlier i had a lot of fun doing that while i was trying to figure out what i really wanted to do and by the way i think it's only now that i've really figured out that i really want to do and i'm doing it now this is what we're doing now and the business that i've gotten into here is a lot of fun and it really puts me back in my wheelhouse but but yeah that's what i did for a while so i had a lot of celebrity clientele and it was very interesting to work with some of those folks and not willie nelson directly but his harp player his harmonica player was a client of mine and a good friend and still a friend today and a lot of those people are still friends today but you.

Trained a lot of musicians is that just like random that you had a degree in music and trained a lot of musicians or were they kind of.

Drawn to you hmm let's see now that's true that's a good point i mean i also trained jack temption whose name you don't know and no one listening knows but jack temptchin wrote many many of the hits for the eagles which i'm sure everybody knows and if they don't a little bit of research will tell them who they are so jack was a friend of mine and don felder for the eagles was a friend at the time i haven't talked to don in a long long time and mickey for willie nelson who else mike riley guy played with the allman brothers southern rock band i guess you're right i guess i never really that's.

Interesting.

Hey i want to make a quick interruption to ask you if you ever saw napoleon dynamite and the ball is it the ball no it's not a ball it's a prom it's a promise that napoleon dynamite goes to not a ball a ball would be cinderella and he's wearing this horrid suit like a like a suit coat or maybe it's his little little mexican friend in there i forget that guy's name but either way just horrible like like southern idaho fashion and the same type of fashion that you get like these these big stores where you go and you buy the suit that literally makes your shoulders stick out ten feet on either side with with the huge ugly buttons in the middle you know suits can look really really crappy on people but not my suit i got a new suit it fits my body it hugs my body like a glove it makes me look really good at least i think so it is olive green it's got like gray polka dots on it i custom designed the whole thing in a showroom it even says mister greenfield on the lapel honestly like do do a google image search for ben greenfield's suit and you might see me wearing it anyways though i feel good in it i feel confident in it and it actually it fits well it's comfortable and anybody can get a premium suit just like the one that i got for a fraction of the price of any other suit on the face of the planet most made to measure premium suits set you back over a thousand bucks but there's this company called indochino indochino and they do custom made to measure suits and shirts that fit you perfectly and they're at a really good price they use super fine fabrics you get to customize your lining your lapels you do your own like personal monogram don't put mister greenfield on yours that would be creepy mister greenfield only goes on mine but anyways it's really easy you just drop into any of their showrooms and you pick out what you want for fabrics and patterns and then after you choose your customizations you just kick back and relax and get ready with a four weeks to step into a perfectly fitting suit that makes you look really good so the way that you can do this and you get this suit for three hundred eighty nine which is a fantastic price for a custom suit you just go to indochino dot com i n d o c h i n o indochino dot com and you enter code fitness at checkout that gets you fifty percent off the regular price for a made to measure premium suit and shipping is free and i think every dude needs to have at least one frickin killer suit and this is the time to do it that's a really good discount code by the way fifty percent so indochino dot com and use promo code fitness now the other thing that i wanted to tell you about is a box that showed up at my doorstep and it's got this writing on the outside of it that says barkbox so i thought maybe somebody sent me bark like for compost in the garden and i opened it and it was chock full of toys like dog toys we're talking like little squeaky balls and little chew things and these like like jerky type of things for the dog's teeth all sorts of things that the dog can play with and my kids went ape nuts because all of a sudden they've got like six or seven new toys to throw around to the dog and the dogs are to trying just completely enamored with this stuff and frankly the dogs are not getting into things they shouldn't be getting into because they have all of these new toys from this company called bark box and the way that this works is every month barkbox pawpix see what i did there pawpix paw picks they pick the best all natural treats and innovative toys to match a dog's needs and this would include things that are hypoallergenic or things that you can customize for like the dog's chewing preferences and one hundred percent of their products are tested on their animals before they're shipped to you to make sure that an animal freaking loves this stuff and actually if your dog doesn't like anything in the box they send you replacements for anything that your dog would love for free they're all about dog happiness that's actually a really cool idea it's like a it's like a quarterly type of shipment for dogs you just tell them how big your dog is and they they ship it to you i've got a rhodesian ridgeback and a blue heeler and they just ate up this box literally each box has four to six treats in it a whole bunch of super fun toys and it's like the joy of a million belly scratches for your dog so you can get this for free you get a free extra month of barkbox when you subscribe to a six or a twelve month barkbox plan and all you do is you go to barkbox dot com barkbox bark like a dog does barkbox dot com ben and when you go to barkbox dot com ben you get shipped to your door toys treats dog edibles and an amazing unboxing experience that your dog is going to flip out over so check them out barkbox dot com ben.

When you're training musicians i mean i don't know but in most cases a lot of musicians you know i suppose unless you're like britney spears in her heyday or some of these you know modern musicians who are dancing on stage or i even think what's his face the young the young young boy i am feeling so old right now that's all right justin yeah justin bieber that's okay justin timberlake some of these guys like they're in pretty good shape you know most musicians aren't in that great of shape in my opinion at least they're really good musicians but music is not necessarily a high calorie burning activity unless you're dancing hip hop so in the case of musicians when you're training musicians is it more kind of like keeping them from dying by putting them in nautilus exercise machines or did you have a specific training approach that you use with folks like that.

Yeah that's a really really good question because it depends on the instrument they play i mean great question so just to back up a bit it yeah we see hip hoppers running around and expending a lot of energy so we think of them as the people that need the cardio core like work but remember before there was that there was mick jagger and mick taylor not mick taylor oh god now i'm not now i'm missing a name aerosmith's lead singer.

Oh yeah that's why can't i get it i guess he was on steven tyler steven tyler steven tyler yeah he was on american american what is it i so do not watch tv the idol america's idol american idol yeah so.

If you think about people like that that are enormously full of energy and running around the stage and burning calories these people take that workout very seriously so to be succinct you might with a drummer who's flailing all over the place back there depending on the band some of them are very staid quiet and relaxed by but lots of rock and rollers are really moving around so the lead singers if they're active people like mick jagger or steven tyler they need to be moved around quite a bit they might have to do some sprint work.

Really power up the quads and hams really get the lungs stretched and breathing out some core work and you might take someone like a bass player who are historically known classically known as the gentleman of the band if you watch bands play and you just focus on the bass player most of the time you'll see they sort of look like the relaxed nice guy in the band and the lead guitar player is always the guy who's you know ripping it up and trying to get the girls they're all trying to get the girls but more than anybody the lead guitar player so you might in bringing up the lead guitar player too some of those guys think of chuck berry that's going way way back let's bring it more current i can't think of anyone more current actually on the lead guitar but those guys might need some cardio core too because they tend to work to walk around run around and make a lot of noise you know who would be an example angus young of acdc there's a guy who's just all over the stage and making noise and so so but the bass player you know the keyboardist these people who are sort of quiet and more relaxed and rhythm players yeah i think you hit the nail on the head it would be a slower routine maybe a more two four routine or a nautilus like routine or yeah yeah interesting.

But you're not doing that anymore huh you're not training musicians no sometimes i.

Look back at that and think what was i thinking man it was stupid to leave that business i had a great clientele a lot of interesting people i was very good at it people liked me and it was fun to do but i still didn't know at that time what i really wanted to do well what happened was one of my clients was a very famous quietly famous legendary commodities trader and what happened was i walked into his house one day and i saw these computers and these lights blinking and he multiple screens it was crazy and it was a different scene then than it is today but i didn't know i was standing in front of a legend here as i say a quiet legend this was not a person whose name he didn't care about attention didn't care about any of that stuff he had other things that he was interested in health fitness supplementation healthy living all these things were interesting to him in fact he's such a fascinating guy that i'd say that and i don't mean to deviate here but this guy's real talent was his brain he was really interested in psychology that was his real work and becoming a legendary trader was sort of like a natural outshoot of his personality he just happened to be really good at it but he had other things that he was much more interested in crazy combination but so i met this guy and he was a major influence on me in many many many many ways became my best friend eventually but i saw what he was doing he had this big house overlooking the bluff in malibu he was an independent guy doing his own thing and making a lot of money and that all was very appealing and very attractive to me so i said hey what do you do and he said well i'm a commodities trader and i said something like oh like trading places with ackroyd and murphy and he said yeah something like that that and he ended up being a client of mine and i learned the business of commodities trading from him and i left private fitness for a little while to go to chicago to work on the floor of the chicago mercantile exchange through his door opening so that became a big part of my life too so big deviation i know we.

Weren'T expecting huge deviation yeah you went into the whole financial money making world and i know you told me you wound up doing pretty well you grew some companies did an ipo you created a half billion dollar market cap yep yes yes and then that all got.

Wiped out yeah yeah that that's boy i tell you that's that's i don't want anyone to ever have to go through something like that so if we just jump away from the trading thing for a bit we get into the nineties during the dot com revolution i was fortunate enough to start a company from practically scratch three five people and the short story is we grew that company over five years to about one thousand people over multiple states we took it public and eventually had about a half a billion dollar market cap and i was cashing out i had about ten million dollars waiting for me to cash out and i picked my spot and my spot was november december of two thousand one that's when i was going to make my move cash out and then start doing more things like what you and i are doing right now sort of move into these sort of things then but as everyone knows november december in two thousand one was just a little bit too late because in september the trade center went down thanks to osama bin laden and that wealth and the company everything got completely wiped out just gone so brokenness started september eleventh for me a week later i was worth nothing so you just learn how to cope with that it was a dream come true to build a company from nothing to something it was a realization of a dream of one of my dreams and that realization just literally went up in flames now now of course we lost a lot of people and that's much more tragic than anything i went through and my heart goes out to the families of all the people that lost loved ones during that time and the subsequent wars that followed but.

It'S still tough to forget what you went through and your own experience and what happened to you when those sort of things go down too so you know you just pick up the pieces you just start over again you just figure out you figure out how to start over you really have to do that you don't just start over and go well i know the recipe to success i'll just do it again it doesn't quite work that way or it didn't for me i had to take a couple of years to get my balance back and then when i did started to move in.

The right direction again yeah yeah so now you're knee deep in figuring out i guess how to crack the altitude nut like you got into mountaineering well.

What happened was during that same time a really crazy story had come out in nineteen ninety six so in and around that same time there was a major event on mount everest where a dozen or more people were killed in a very tragic accident and a subsequent book was written about it called into thin air and i strongly recommend the.

Book oh yeah yep i've read that book it's amazing yeah yeah it's an.

Amazing book for me it was a trifecta type of thing i didn't expect krakauer to be that good of a writer i just thought i was going to read the story of the accident and be done with it but but it turns out that krakauer is not only a great writer but he's got sort of a dark side to him that i picked up on this angst in his soul and i connected with that and not only did he write really well but i could feel some of his own stuff in that book and then reading the backstories yeah and.

For people who don't know like that whole into thin air book and i'll put a link to it in the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness dot com chris that is about the everest disaster where krakire gets up to everest i believe he wrote this in the nineties and when he turned around to start his descent after he summited there were twenty other people going to the top as a big storm rolled in and it just wound up destroying this climbing party that was going up everest but the way the book is written i obviously didn't do it any justice just now but i mean it's a thriller.

Yeah so i strongly recommend that nobody waste their time watching the movie it doesn't do the book justice there's no way to get the fullness and the depth and the profundity of this experience without reading the book and you will not be disappointed this is a page turner and so what happened was i was reading the book and i thought these people are crazy who do this kind of work i mean all i did was train like a madman you know up to six hours a day during my heyday when i was training hard up to six hours a day you know maybe on the low days you know three hours and seven days a week so in season you know so i was doing a lot of hard crazy work to get somewhere but it looked to me like these people who climb these.

Not fourteeners i was about to say fourteeners but these you know twenty thousand foot peaks and thirty thousand foot peaks which is what everest is are completely batty because the amount of training it takes to do it the amount of time it takes to prepare for it it and a desire to be on a mountain like k two or everest you just got to be a little out of your mind because there are these in mountains this tall you're going to be familiar with this ben but there are these besides the fact it's just plain dangerous to do the minute you get out of base camp your life's on the line with every step you take from base camp to the top and back and everyone knows coming back is tougher than going up on these mountains so if you just just take that yeah but.

That'S why people do it i mean if it was easy then everybody would be out climbing everest right but let's.

Add a factor of oh i don't know thirty to this now in terms of danger there's a zone on both of these mountains k two and everest in mountains like this called the death zone and in the death zone which you know about there is no it's the worst place to be because if you don't have oxygen on you're likely not going to make it you're going to die and with oxygen on on when you stick on that mask and you have that oxygen on you're still moving at half a snail's pace when you say one foot in front of the other it's more like one half.

A step in front yeah and it's kind of crazy i haven't done as extreme an amount of climbing as you have at this point but yeah one tiny step can gas you and a few tiny steps in a row will leave you at that altitude feeling as though you've been like you know running an eight hundred meter on a track track at sea level with just a few tiny steps yeah it's pretty mind blowing and so how deep into mountaineering.

Have you gotten all right so i haven't been i'm glad we're talking about that because i didn't get that deep into it i'll just tell you that so what happened was i read this story and i thought these people were batting out of their minds and after a couple of months i thought i think it's worth finding out what these people are going through and so my version of it which is nothing at all compared to what those people went through was reaching out to my brother who was a world class climber and had been as long as i'd been swimming he had been climbing mountains so we just happened to have it in the family so i called him up and said hey you guys are batty you're all completely out of your mind i don't know what it is that possesses you to do this stuff but i need to experience it i need to find out what it is you guys are going through and what that's all about so that begins my first disastrous effect trying to climb the grand teton in wyoming and so my brother remembers me as his world class athlete and always in ripped up six percent body fat great shape and able to run mountains and jump buildings and all that stuff but i wasn't twenty two anymore at this point i was in my forties and he goes look this would be great you come along just show up you'll be fine i said well what do you mean show up just show up i gotta train for this stuff he goes no no no you'll be fine you'll be fine don't ben don't ask me why i listened to him i figured he knew something i didn't know okay he's the climber he knows my background he knows i'm out of shape now but he must know something i don't know so i listened to him and i showed up and this was going to be a trip of summiting three mountains in wyoming the teton being the last of them which is i think it's right around fourteen it's a little under i had to opt out so ten days three mountains i had to opt out after failing on the first mountain because i was so out of shape my legs hurt so bad it was almost impossible.

For me that's crazy that's how bad it got from being a swimmer training for the olympics to going into business and the dot com industry and trading and everything huh yeah if you're not.

Trained if you're not working out you know it's like a language and you know this better than anybody if you're not doing it it's just going to leave you it's just going to go away now the upside is if you've got background you know what to expect when you start training hard again you know what pain is you know see.

That that's that's the point is is anybody i think goes compete at the level that you have once you get back into training you get fit so much more quickly like my wife she ran cross country in college and when she puts her mind to like let's say training for like a spartan which she's done a few times she she will be hella fit within about two months i'm and and by fit i mean she'll go out and and crush you know which which for her is pretty decent like you know sixteen and a half seventeen min.

And be able to just go out and she qualified for spartan world championships this year on like six weeks of training just because she is so used to she was trained to go to the pain cave at an early age i think that's a big advantage for a lot of people and i know that you as a swimmer not only did you get trained for the pain cave but you got trained for pretty extreme sensory deprivation.

Too your wife's an amazing athlete but i'll give my brother the one who dragged me into this the way he dragged me into it credit for understanding what you just said because i went to graduate school back in the nineties too and i remember him saying look craig this will be a different grind for you you understand pain and sports and what all that means to get from a to wherever it is you're going and all the steps in between and all the psychological barriers and physical barriers you get that but gonna be a little tougher for you to get your mba because you were paying more attention to the olympics at the time than you were to school so you're right if you know the pain cave you know the pain cave and if you know academics you know you know that you know that that's harder for.

Me you know so did you eventually summit these three peaks so yes i.

Did.

I'M glad you asked so i failed out miserably i mean when i say i failed out i limped for like a week after that first attempt and it was terrible i was embarrassed you know and i think my brother had his partner with him who he's been climbing with since they were fifteen years old all climbing and buddies and i was just embarrassed because i did have this background and here i was showing them that background means nothing if you're twenty years out of shape it doesn't mean anything you got to train for stuff if you want to do well you just have to there's no getting around it so that was a big failure and i limped for like a week or so afterwards and while i was doing it i was thinking who would do this this is a miserable experience i mean this is awful but i really had to realize that it was awful for me because i i wasn't trained up for it so i decided to prepare and do it again the next year and i did summit one of the mountains middle teton is what it's called but then i got sick and i had to leave so the next summit was going to be grand teton so that didn't happen year three comes along and i decide you know what nothing's going to stop me i'm going back to the as you put it i like that phrase ben i'm going to start using it i decided to go back to the pain camp cave and so for that year i got back into the pool and i swam three thousand yards a day every day five days a week i got into the you know it's something i know so and it helped me with my wind and stamina and all that stuff i got into the gym three days a week and i went into a very very very heavy training regime there and but most importantly you know i was living in southern california at the time and i had a backpack and during the week i would pack it up with eighty pounds of weight and i'd hike around i wouldn't go that far during the week because it's a work week and it's tough and i already swam and i might have lifted so during the week i'd go three or four miles with eighty pounds on my back but every single weekend i jacked it up to one hundred ten pounds and i'd go ten miles in the mountains of southern california so when august finally came and i only had had forty pounds on my back and with all that training in back of me i finally did some at the grand and if you've got time i'll tell you a very quick funny story about summiting the grand so the answer is yes i did summit and it took a lot of work to do it i was happy to do it and when i finally summited it as i was going through that process and spending a night on the mountain and hiking and climbing and rappelling and roping off and seeing three thousand foot exposure and crazy stuff like that i did see the joy in it because when like anything if you're truly prepared for it whatever it is and in this case you know climbing if you're truly prepared for it then the event is really really meaningful and so for me i've always had the attitude of you know make the journey or the training the most miserable aspect of what it is you're going to do if you're aiming for an event so that when you get to the event all of that work is behind you you paid a dear price for it but you know unequivocally when you.

Show up i' ready yeah you cannot magically pull a trigger and be running let's say per minute or per minute per mile pace that is ten seconds faster than what you ran in training just because you're in an event and the adrenaline and the epinephrine and everything takes over it doesn't happen you actually have to go there into the pain cave in your training i wanted to i know you have so many side stories to tell but i want to talk about this bottle of stuff that you sent over to me because i know it has to do with what we're talking about right now which is is performing and specifically i know that.

You kind of got involved into looking for ingredients that would specifically assist with blood oxygenation is that correct that's exactly.

Right because i was a sprinter so for me everything was about getting oxygen and as much as i could and when i competed you're not supposed to breathe every stroke as a fifty meter freestyler and i had a tendency to breathe just about every stroke because i just needed to oxygenate more than the average bear so yes my whole world's about oxygenation blood development and oxygenation i don't think in terms of anything else.

Gotcha so how did you start to dive into the whole researching of raw ingredients and picking out what you were going to put into a bottle to help with something like blood oxygenation yeah.

So it's a great question too so i had a lot of background between beginning in high school and all the way through my college olympic training days with sports supplements and as i said earlier for me nothing worked and i was very into it i wanted something to work i was looking for something that would give me a biological edge but nothing really did so at a certain point and i used to take like thirty thirty three pills a day sometimes all at the same time which wasn't the smartest thing in the world but i used to take a lot of supplements and i'd mix them up and i'd try them out and ultimately i just said you know what this is making me sick and nothing's working i'm not getting sick anymore any less and my performances haven't changed so when.

You were taking that many pills are you doing this for oxygenation or were you just doing it for your immune system or was it just the shotgun approach where you were taking everything at.

That time it was a shotgun approach i was trying to find a balance of things or a combination of things or a single thing that i felt was going to make the difference in terms of how i could handle my training in the pool and subsequently that would then lead into how well i would compete so no it was a shotgun approach it wasn't shotgun from the point of view where i'll just try anything i was doing the research like for bee pollen and royal jelly these are things that purportedly help as you mentioned with i think some allergies but they also have oxygen supporting components to them too but i didn't feel like any of that stuff was working i used to take different kinds of bee supplements and i didn't find that any one or combination of them was really working so a lot of time lot of time doing this i can't say at the time i was doing it scientifically the way a guy like you would today you're a really great guru in that area and an influence on me in that regard but at that time no i'd say i did a lot of reading i used to do a lot of research and a lot of reading at a high level not at the detailed level you do and say well this looks like it'll help me with endurance this looks like it'll give me more iron this looks like like it'll transport more oxygen this looks like it'll help clean my blood and i went down that road but nothing worked so i quit and what happened was i quit taking supplements that is and then when i was training for the second olympic run i just happened to hook up again in malibu with a chiropractor doctor who very gifted man still working today who also happened to be a bit of a guru on nutrition and he wanted to get involved with my olympic run and said let me help you with supplements and i said sure yeah i'm open minded but just so you know i've never done anything that's worked but i'm way open to that because you probably know something i don't know being the expert in the field so what happened was we experimented with a few things and just something hit just something hit and the combination of things that worked for me the product i gave to you is enhanced a little bit with.

With two ingredients today that i didn't take back then and i'll walk you through that but for me when i took this concoction i had a very interesting reaction to it it took me about a week or so i don't remember exactly how long but i had this.

Detoxing effect that's the only way i know how to describe it that's the only thing i can think it was you know what a niacin rush is like.

Right yeah actually i had one earlier today because every once in a while when i go to my sauna which i did before i did a my cold water swim this morning i do the hot cold i will do a form of niacin called nia safe which is kind of a non flushing form of niacin but if you take enough you can flush a little bit and i do that before i do the sauna because it can cause fat cells to basically lyse under the presence of heat or infrared when you combine niacin with infrared therapy so yes i've experienced a flush but i try not to take supplements to give a big flush because i don't like that tingly feeling but that's what you got huh well.

Yeah so i used to take niacin so i know what that feeling is like but there was no niacin in this formula and yes i my body slowly started to go through what felt like a full body tingling rush and i and it came on and it lifted through a period of about twenty seconds i remember sitting down in the bed and saying well this is weird and odd and i don't understand what's going on here but i could tell it wasn't anything bad you know i could instinctively i know knew it was something but not anything that i had to really fear but i sat down and let the feeling pass and when that was gone i just said well it was weird i just got a feeling because at that time i'd really cleaned up my eating so getting to that question that you brought up earlier at that point i was eating really clean for the eighty four games and i was taking really high quality supplements now stuff i had not taken before like the blue green algae and chlorella and now i add added desiccated liver to the routine here which is the highest quality well anyway so before i get more into the product here i found after that effect at that point i was training meters just for me personally a dramatic change in my workouts all of a sudden i was just able to train at a much higher level i mean these things don't happen just right away but you can feel in the pool or you're running or whatever your gig is whatever your thing is you you begin to feel power and strength that you didn't feel before or an endurance factor that you didn't feel before and you furrow your forehead and you go hmm something's different what am i doing different that's making me feel better and i would search hard high and low for what the difference was and the only difference in my routine at the time finally was that i was supplementing with this concoction of stuff that i believed then and i believe now because nothing else was different was what was impacting me and and allowing me to train with much greater endurance and much more speed in fact during that time in workouts describing what a workout the type of workout i'm about to go into here is a bit difficult and complicated to make sense to but they're called broken swims and they're ways to do very very so you know what that is so there are ways to get very very high intensity explosive work done and so you might let's say you did let's just say you did a series of one hundred meters or one hundred yard swims on let's just say a minute and thirty or a minute and ten seconds and you might swim seventy five yards all out and then you take five seconds rest at the wall and you go all out again to complete it.

If you're going to swim a five hundred you'd split it into ten by fifty at the maximum pace that you want to be able to swim at or you would break a four hundred eight x fifty or three hundred six.

X fifty that's right excellent that's very very good that's exactly right and the reason for these types of swim is they get your body for race pace the highest level race pace and the five second the broken part of it the five seconds rest in between is just to give you some quick oxygen so you don't completely burn out cause the idea is to keep that high quality intensity high and it doesn't stay high at race pace when you're doing ten of these things if you don't get a second of rest or two in between one of the swims there so seventy five yards is one way to do it five seconds rest and then all out for the final twenty five and so so i was swimming world record pace in workout i'd never done that before for me again and i'm speaking solely for myself that's how it worked for me i was having amazing workouts i was thrilled to death i was very happy about it and so i was taking so what was making the difference for me i believe at the time i was taking a combination of blue green algae i was taking beetroot and i was taking desiccated liver and the two products that i've added to the ingredient list here are cordyceps sinesis and eukanasia and the reason i added cordyceps is cordyceps has a very strong and documented background for being both an atp producer so to keep that battery charged which is really critical when you're sprinting and also it's known it's believed to have great oxygen carrying capacity and so my whole thinking now ben i got explained also at the time i know about cordyceps today i didn't know about it then and i didn't even know exactly what these ingredients were doing for me then other than that i felt spectacular so it wasn't till the internet age came you know sometime later that i was able to do some back study to find out what was going on so at that.

Point this was just stuff this doctor was giving you yes gotcha yeah he's.

He'S he's a wild and crazy guy and he thinks out of the box and he understood the type of training i was doing and he he he just did some unusual things with me that i i feel made all the difference in the world so looking back at it what was going on here was depending on the blue green algae you take and you know a lot about this stuff depending on the type you take you get action in your chemistry that does things like clean intoxify blood increase red blood cell production naturally.

That'S critical you mean the blue green stuff yes yeah so i was a little bit confused at first when i got this stuff because is you describe it as aphanizomenon flos aqua but it's basically like a blue green algae extract.

This is a particular and rare kind of algae that comes out of klamath lake in oregon right near you yep and it's the only place it's grown and it's got the highest content of chlorophyll check it out you'll see that i'm right and followed by i think chlorella and then spirulina oh yeah you.

Know have you heard of e three live before yes yes yes so a lot of people tell me you got to take e three live you got to take e three live and apparently it's made from this blue green algae stuff that's harvested from klamath lake but this is the same place that you're getting the algae that you're putting into.

This biotropic stuff that's correct and it performs a couple things for me i've always been just talk about that for just a second why i think it's so great i always showed up and i got a funny feeling you're like me in this regard but correct me if i'm wrong but i never had any issues psychologically showing up ready for an event i always was a great competitor i couldn't wait to get in the water i didn't care who you were went toe to toe with the biggest and baddest boys in the world and none of them scared me i just couldn't wait to get in and take them out sometimes i took them out but more often than not they took me out because they were better but i've had some really great success as an athlete but some people don't have that going on they train hard they train harder than me tougher than me but they have psychological problems or focus problems is really what i want to get on to here and one of the great things about this particular product the afa is that it's got some chemistry in it that helps with focus and so one of the reasons i like this product is it creates clarity it creates a focus it's also a mood enhancer so it lifts you a little bit psychologically if you're one of those people that has a hard time with pressure at competition it has that component to it it's called pea for short you can look it up it's actually hard to describe but i'll try to do it it's phenylethylamine that is the actual ingredient that creates that.

Focus that creates the mood enhancing effect.

Yes yes yes exactly it's also used to some effect with people who have add to help increase their focus so i'm not about personally i am not personally about having to deal with focus i don't have that issue i never did including today i just know how to show up and do it but not everyone works that way so this particular product does a couple of things several things that are very very cool in addition to creating an uplifting sense of self and a greater focus factor it also is purported to have stem cell repair capability so you mean the.

Chlorophyll correct yes yeah algae is interesting stuff i'm a big fan it's got a lot of these nucleic acids in it which i believe is what assists with the actual repair and providing the body with some of the stem cell precursors but the other cool thing i don't know if you saw this research i read a study about sunlight and chlorophyll and how increasing the concentration of chlorophyll in your bloodstream when that chlorophyll interacts with sunlight it actually produces adenosine triphosphate or atp because your body's energy currency so you can actually produce more atp without eating calories when you have high levels of chlorophyll combined with sunlight exposure which when we're talking about something like i know that you designed a big part of this for for blood oxygenation and altitude performance it is handy to be able to produce extra atp when you have this chlorophyll in your bloodstream especially if you have access to sunlight so that's one of the cooler things i think about chlorella and about blue green but this particular afa is harvested from klamath lake and it has specific properties to it based off of where it was harvested from is that.

What you're saying yes it's the only place unless something has changed since this conversation it's the only place in the world you can get it it's very special material and i strongly recommend that people try it whether they try it through my own formulation my formulation is a combination of things that are designed to develop blood increase oxygenation but if someone wanted to try it on their own i strongly recommend they do it.

The other thing i was going to say you've also got the cordyceps in there because i want to make sure during the amount of time that we have left on today's show that i touch on some of the other things that are in here because i wanted to ask you about the cordyceps so this sinensis sinensis is that form of cordyceps that's actually is this the one that they harvest from larvae of fungus.

That'S correct tibetan grown and that is exactly correct can you make it sound.

A little better no i mean it comes out like fungal i don't know like ghost moth butt basically they produce like a fruiting body and you harvest that but i know a lot of folks in asian medicine or eastern medicine use this i know a lot of like sherpas who climb mount everest will use cordyceps but the basic idea behind it you were saying is oxygenation or.

Vo two max yes both oxygenation it's purported to have very strong oxygen carrying capabilities as well as increase in atp and i always think in terms of well all three of those things atp oxygen and blood development so some of this stuff doubles up it overlaps chlorella creates that effect and so does cordyceps sinenisa so we double up on the oxygen piece of it there and the.

Atp piece as well gotcha interesting okay so we've got cordyceps and it's senesis is how you pronounce that right correct that's right okay so that's the specific brand of cordyceps or flavor of cordyceps then you also have beet in here i know a lot of people already know about beetroot as like a vasodiet it's like full body viagra but i wanted to ask you if you saw this recent study on beetroot because we talked about cold water swimming and one of the reasons that i do it is so i get that white adipose tissue to brown fat conversion they did a study with beetroot where they found that the nitrates in beets accelerate the conversion of white fat to tissue to brown fat tissue and so you can actually use something like this prior to exercise or specifically prior to cold exposure to accelerate fat loss in terms of white fat to brown fat conversion have.

You seen this research that's very interesting that's new to me i'll have to look that up and learn more about.

It yeah it came out last year and in it they actually used inorganic nitrate from beets to turn regular white fat tissue into calorie burning brown fat tissue issue it's really interesting i'll definitely look that up yeah i'll link to the study in the shownotes but you've got the beets in there which i know a lot of people know about a lot of people have also heard of echinacea before for the immune system but you also are putting it in.

There for the blood well so eukinacea is really well documented for immunity immune support and being an athlete we know being athletes we know that especially when we're in high training that we tend to walk a fine line between sickness and health we're always healthy but might get a cold easier because we're broken down and especially when you're training at a very very very high level and that's all you do all day long those people are always they're always sort of fighting with that and it's worse than it looks because you see the professional athletes out there all the time well guess what they're playing they're not letting you know they go out there sick all the time and play the only time they i mean think of michael jordan when he had to play against the utah jazz and the nba semis he went out there with the flu for seven games he had no choice he had to play and a lot of athletes are dealing with it all the time so it's in there for additional immune support but eukinacea is also known it's been purported to have gentle red blood cell production and the science of which is too much to go in right now but it's worth you doing your own research whoever's listening and validate that for yourself but they but that's one of the reasons i put it in there because i argue of course that if you have vasodilation like we talked about with beetroot you have cleaner blood and more atp going to hard working muscles and more red blood cells carrying oxygen and cordyceps also increasing the oxygen carrying capacity of your system then you're going to get it when you need it most and that's when you're training or in competition so.

That'S why i have that yeah i hadn't really thought about using echinacea before for red blood cell boosting or living altitude performance until i read it on your label and started looking into it and it turns out there actually is some pretty good research behind echinacea and blood building properties in terms of i know that it compares somewhat to epo in terms like the illegal erythropoietin blood cell precursors that people will use as an illegal performance enhancing supplement echinacea is right up there with epo in terms of the ability to build new red red blood cells so i thought that was really interesting and then the last one you have in here in addition to the blue green algae the cordycepsinesis the beetroot and the echinacea is the mouthful the argentinian grass fed clean defatted vegan liver anhydrate fill me in on this aaron why it's in there so.

There is no better source that i know of and things change and things flux and the world changes but as of this conversation there's no better source of the highest grade cleanest b suite of vitamins which i really believe in especially the oxygen and energy parts of the b suite twelve six three and so on it's all right there and there's no better source than coming from liver so that's just all there is to it some people be very transparent about this it's an animal product and if you are insistent upon not having an an product in your body don't take it find something you're comfortable with and happy with but the way around that and it's really not the way around it it's the right thing to do is just to get the cleanest possible form of it you can so you find a vegan fed cow you find vegan fed liver and so this is argentinian grass fed non hormonal defatted there's no fat in it vegan fed liver and that's why it's in there because it's the best possible quality you can get of that suite of vitamins as well as other vitamins and minerals that come with this particular ingredient so for me it was critical to be in there because that was one of the products that i took during the time when i was training that i felt made a big difference in my performance because i can't say that it was grass fed at that time but i felt that that suite of vitamins coming from that source was by and large the best of anything i ever.

Took yeah and i really again in terms of fat soluble vitamins i think a lot of people know that liver is a really good source of fat soluble vitamins but what i didn't know was some of the research that you have on your website i believe it was doctor urshoff who did research it was on lab animals not humans but they found some really significant increases like seven hundred plus percent increases in time to exhaustion when getting desiccated liver into their bodies in high amounts so it's really interesting the research on i think.

It'S great and i just say for anyone who's thinking twice about if you are thinking twice about it look at.

It'S a vegan fed it's as clean as you can possibly get source of the best suite of vitamins that you can put into your body especially for training and even if you weren't training if you weren't doing anything competitive you should take it anyway.

I held onto.

That little bottle it's been i guess probably about six months since you sent me that bottle i held onto it for a few months and i took it off on a hunting trip elevation and loaded with it because most of the research that i've seen on increasing performance at altitude not only involves moving to and training at altitude which can be impossible in many cases but also taking the type of supplements that allow one to say build new red blood cells or to increase your levels of inorganic nitrate in your body from something like beetroot they're loading for anywhere from ten to seventeen days days in most studies when you're using something to help you perform at altitude so i started using it prior to going on that trip and then just basically hunted hard for about a week and i also took a bunch going into this recent spartan world championships which was up at lake tahoe the ultra beast up at lake tahoe and i felt great both times that i loaded with it and that i took it usually if i take something i don't like the way it makes me feel or gives me explosive diarrhea diarrhea for example or it's just a crab supplement i am not gonna talk about it on the show but i actually do dig this stuff and i'd say just about just about anybody who' swho's wanting to perform at altitude or if you've got like issues with say anemia you know i know we have to be careful making medical claims but you know you don't wanna take a bunch of iron i could see it coming in handy for that type of thing too or for you know say if you've given a lot of blood and you wanna build your blood more quickly anything that would involve involve building blood or oxygenating blood i'd say that this stuff is pretty good for just from my own personal experience and looking into the research behind the ingredients so it's a good job man i mean i like the blend well.

Thank you i really appreciate it especially coming from you i have as i say great respect for you and i've got look at not everything works for everybody so try it if it doesn't work no problem just send it back and i have two other blood oxygen support products that are going to be coming to market pretty quick here and so yeah because you know look at product a may work and b doesn't and c does and you know maybe none of them work but going back to what we were saying earlier some things work for somebody and some things don't work on other bodies so you've got to have more than one way to skin a cat so that's what i'm doing here this works this worked brilliantly for me i appreciate the kudos from you thank you and keep an eye out for other stuff that i'm bringing up that i know works all.

Yeah and i know that folks if they want to can get a discount on this stuff i believe the code is just ben to get a discount on your website all right cool so i'll put a link in the show notes biotropic you can go to bengreenfieldfitness dot com biotropic if you just want to go straight to his website like biobiology and then tropic like the tropics but biotropic it's called the biotropic blood oxygenating supplement you use code ben to get a twenty percent discount and free shipping on that i think you can use that is that a one time use code or can folks just use.

It in one ever no for your people it's free shipping twenty percent off it's deeper than twenty percent really because it's discounted on the site already so it'll be closer to twenty five percent but free shipping it's an unlimited use and they can share it so that for your people they can use it.

Forever cool cool i like it and of course if you have questions about this stuff you know usage ingredients anything like that you can leave your questions or your comments and either craig or i'll roll you can do that over at bengreenfieldfitness dot com craig that's bengreenfieldfitness dot com craig so that's where the shownotes are at i'll link to some of the other stuff we talked about like that beet juice brown fat study i mentioned the into thin air book that i do recommend that you add to your reading list if you haven't read that one yet and a few of the other things that we talk about in today's show so craig i want to thank you for your time and for coming on the show today and sharing this stuff with us man it's pretty fascinating how you went from swimming to mountaineering and now figuring out how to oxygenate people's blood well yeah.

Look i appreciate you having me on the show today the next challenge is next summer i'm trying to do a long haul hike i want to do the continental divide trail it's about a six month program and so i'm training for that right now and this is a big part of helping me get there so you keep moving on thanks ben i really appreciate the time today.

Cool man well thanks for coming on the show and for those of you listening in check out bengreenfieldfitness dot com.

And until next time i'm ben greenfield along with craig dinkle signing out from bengreenfieldfitness dot com have a healthy week.

You'Ve been listening to the ben greenfield fitness podcast.

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