The Body Electric: Stimulation for Pain, Recovery, Fitness & Performance – Garrett Salpeter – #728

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's episode is a special episode recorded live at the 40 years of Zen facility here in Seattle, Washington. Today's guest is going to use me as a test subject to demonstrate a different kind of electrical stimulation than you probably know about. His name is Garret Salpeter and he's known as the health engineer. And he puts engineering and neuroscience, which are his background to, together. And he makes an electrical stimulation method called New Fit. And it's based on neuromuscular re education of your nervous system. You've heard me talk about how we have these pattern matching things in our body and that a lot of them happen without our conscious input. And a lot of 40 years of Zen. What we're doing is we're training the threat detection systems in the brain to realize that a lot of things that you think are threats, like not getting enough likes on Facebook that they're not threats, so you can stop being reactive to them, which saves energy. That's a big part of the brain neurological upgrade. That's a 40 years of Zen biofeedback based practice. But what we're talking about with Garrett here is around training the muscles and nerves in the body that aren't in the brain so that they move correctly. And Garrett, what you're doing is the best electrical stimulation that I'm aware of in years of looking at this stuff. And I'm very impressed with your tack and I want to have you on the show to talk about it. So thank you.

Thank you. It's an honor to be here.

Bottom line, I have used your waveforms New Fit to recover faster from injuries. And I'm going to tell some stories here to reverse chronic pain. And if you're not a longtime listener, you probably don't understand. I used to be fat. I had arthritis in my knees when I was 14. When I say fat, 100 pounds more than I am now. And I was in pain all the time. I thought it was supposed to hurt when you walked. I thought playing soccer was an exercise in pain tolerance. I felt like there was a candle burning in my shoulder blades all the time. So chronic pain was a huge part of my life and it's generally not anymore. And one of the reasons for that is electrical stimulation. So I want to know why that was and what your stuff does about it. But first off, just welcome and I have so many questions for you.

Let's dive in.

Okay. You have a background in neuroscience and engineering. What kind of background are we Talking about what makes you qualified to run current over me.

So I was a physics major in college. I had a real passion for physiology, but with my experiences with traditional orthopedic medicine, traditional physical therapy, I just saw nothing but dead ends for myself. And so whereas at one point I thought about going pre med, ended up becoming an engineer. And then I had an amazing experience where my last year in college, I had some torn ligaments in my wrist. I was supposed to have surgery be out for a few months, and given my previous experience, I just thought that was how it would be. But I met a chiropractic neurologist who introduced me to functional neurology, which is the basis for the work that we're doing now. And by doing this work and focusing on the activation of the muscles around that injury, and by using a more primitive version of direct current, I was actually able to heal those ligaments in a few weeks instead of a few months. Avoid surgery.

Does that imply that the other neurology was dysfunctional neurology?

I would say less than functional.

So you used electrical stimulation to do things that weren't supposed to be possible?

I did. I did.

So you used electrical stimulation to do things that weren't supposed to be possible?

I did. I did. And then because I saw the incredible power of how this neurological approach to something that traditionally would just be thought of as orthopedic and structural and tissue based, how this functional approach actually made a profound difference for me. I knew at that point that I felt called to share this work. Didn't necessarily know what it looked like at the time, but having this engineering background and then having that experience, I was able to then went back for additional graduate work in neuroscience and have started working with individual people back at home in Austin, Texas, in the back of a chiropractic office for doing that for seven or eight years before I finally saw an opportunity to leverage my engineering background and work with another team to create this device. And so it's built on.

So you've got 20 years in this. Because if you do that for seven or eight years and you open your first facility in 2009 and it's 2000s, this is two decades of looking at electrical stimulation.

Yeah, it's been about a 12 or 13 year journey of being formally professionally involved in this field. And this is built on that clinical experience.

When I talk about healing like Wolverine, there's two things that I go to. One, as people have probably read about in Superhuman, the anti aging book, there's some peptides These are chemicals that send signals in. But there's also stem cells and things. But the electrical signal here is so profoundly important. And let me. Let me share a story about something that we did together. I've been using direct current stimulation for quite a while. It's very hard to get. The gear was very. We'll call it rustic. I had to stop flying with what I had because people thought it was a bomb. It was very. Not okay. Anyway, I have an injury on my right big toe. Now, you could be like, who cares? It's just a toe. The thing is, though, Montauk Chia has just been on the show, the world's top qigong master. And when I did some training with him, it's all about the big toe for grounding. So this is a core system, and it affected my yoga practice. And what happened is I was doing a crow pose, where you're balancing on your forearms, kind of like squatting, but leaning forward. And then I kicked back into plank pose from there, which is. Which is one of those things you do to make everyone feel less good as you in a yoga class. So if you roll up a big yoga, you go. You're like, yeah, I was crow poed. Anyway, I did that. I was out of practice, and I landed with my toe straight down, and I chipped a tiny fragment off my bone. And for the next two years, that little fragment has been in there making scar tissue and just causing pain, and nothing was fixing it. I had it injected, which helped a lot with stem cells and things, but there was still this nagging pain when I would try to do, like, a squat or a lunge or a lot of the common yoga poses or any of the things for exercise. So I sat down with you. You came to my office in Seattle, and I said, I've had this going on. You're like, no problem. And you dump out the trash can. You actually did this. You remember that?

I do.

Okay. You take my trash can, and you're like, okay, we'll just dump this in the corner of the office. So I'm like, thank God I wasn't throwing confetti in there. And then you put some water in there. You toss a couple electrodes from the new fit machine into the water, put one on my upper leg, and then I start doing exercise with my foot in the water. And the reason you were doing that was to get the current all the way through and all the weird muscles, the small muscles of my foot. And I did a few things like that. And you know what My foot felt way, way better than it had in two years. Even though I had all these injections, even though I was already on the path to recovery. So it's one of those things where it did something that dry needling, that exosomes, that amniotic fluid that stem cells hadn't done. What did the machine do that all this other stuff wasn't doing?

So many times in life, there's things that happen to us, and the way we respond to it is oftentimes more important than what actually happens to us in the first place. And so when you, when you have that trauma like you had in your, your yoga injury, and when you have that bone fragment in there, that's, that's consistently irritating that tissue, there's this original trauma, then there's this low level trauma repeated over time. And in response to that, the body often guards and protects, embraces that your body thinks, oh my gosh, we could get, you know, we could get that, that big toe could get attacked again at any moment. We might fall out of that crow pose and get damaged again at any moment. And so it, so it guards around that. And that's productive if you fall right on that big toe and you have that trauma happen again. But it's actually counterproductive for healing, for movement. And sometimes it's just as simple as when all that tissue is bracing and protecting around there. It can literally cut off the flow of blood and nutrients, so you can impede and impair the healing process. And when you're in that state, your muscles can't lengthen to accommodate greater ranges of movement. And every time we walk, when we, we should, every time we walk, we should press off that big toe. That should be the last thing to hit the ground. And so the big toe extension is actually a very important component in gait walking or running. And when your muscles are bracing like that, they, they can't lengthen to accommodate that movement. So you're, you're limited. And that's one of the things that we saw in that first session, is that you were able to get more range of motion in that big toe. So what this does with this unique type of direct current, and you touched on that a little bit, what it does, as opposed to traditional electrical stimulation, which is typically alternating current and causes muscles only to contract, this actually can allow us to preferentially reprogram those muscles so that they lengthen so they're more relaxed, more pliable, and more resilient. And that allows us to move through greater ranges of motion. It opens up the pathways physically for the body to actually send the blood and raw materials and resources to help you heal. And it optimizes function in a way that just improves the overall recovery process.

I feel like in this case, my body had learned it's dangerous to bend the toe back, because in this case, it was making this little tiny shard of bone was sort of damaging the tissue every time. So it just thought, okay, I'm a dumb piece of foot. And there's a local consciousness, at least a local emergent behavior based on algorithms in the foot. And it says, okay, so let's see. Can I eat without having full range in the foot? Yes. Can I reproduce the species? Yes. Okay, foot optional. These are the algorithms of life. That's how it works. So in that case, let's just turn off that ability to bend back, because it's just not worth the amount of trouble it would take to do it. And I could have gone to a traditional physical therapist who was like, we'll just pound it into you. Over time, I guess the body felt enough pain, it learned it had to make a change, and it made the minimum necessary change to basically make the physical therapist stop bothering you. This is what your body does. You didn't choose that. It chose that in the foot, where your brain isn't. And with the electricity, though, the body's like, oh, my God, I just got shown what was happening. The electricity makes the muscles do what they don't want to do. But once the nerves there see that the muscles can do that, like, oh, I guess my assessment of my abilities was off a little bit. Maybe I'll just readjust what I'm capable of. And then the gait changed, because, I mean, it was an overnight change. Is my story there accurate?

Yeah, it's actually just like you were talking about here at 40 Years of Zen, where we have this alarm response that goes off even in times when it doesn't necessarily need to go off, when we're not facing a true emergency. And it comes back to one of the foundational principles of neuroscience, which is our brain's number one priority is survival and protection. Our brain cares so much more about us living to see tomorrow than it does about extending your big toe or running fast or stretching further or throwing a baseball faster. And so our brains actually limit us. They impose, actively impose these governors and limitations and reduce output in certain areas of the body. Sometimes it's from trauma like you experience. Sometimes there's just bad habits developed over time. And so one of the things that we're able to do with technology like this is send a signal from that area in the body. We can actually scan around and find where that, where that protective mechanism or where that threat is present. And then when we send this signal, we have a chance to progressively and safely and very powerfully load those areas of the body so that the brain starts to see more feedback, more activity there and it can start to discern, oh, this isn't as threatening as I thought. Oh, we can actually allow this to happen. And so it'll take off those protective mechanisms. It's like the brain is hitting the brake pedal and you're literally learning to take your foot off the brake. So instead of you don't always have to get more gas, sometimes you have to take your foot off the brake.

Okay, I think that's a good description for what I felt was going on in there. What's though the difference? I'm thinking I was on a trip to China a while ago, this had to be like eight, 10 years ago. And I was staying with a guy who lived in China for 20 years. And he's like, Dave, you're on a long business trip, you should come have a home cooked meal and play with the dogs. I'm like, this is so cool. And he was explaining how fast the delivery systems in China were. And he said, everyone's using electrical stim here. And he goes, here, look. And he opens an app and I wish I remember the name, it was probably Weibo or something, but I don't remember it. And he, he says, oh here, let's buy a $2 tens device. And a guy arrives on a bicycle like an hour later Delivering this $2 and tens is just the kind of cheap electrical SIM you can get. And I was like, hey, the delivery system's amazing. And B, there's enough demand for there to be $2 tens devices. And everyone in China was using them. What's the difference between this clinical grade? I mean, this is not a cheap device. This is like what physical therapists or heavy duty exercise physiologists would use. Why the disparity?

That's a great question. So this, as we mentioned, this is direct current. And the benefits of direct current were known for, have been known for decades.

You're an engineer, you know what direct current is. I'm an engineer, I know what direct current is. Most people listening, they're not engineers. So direct current versus these other things, what is that?

So direct current means it's always going in one direction.

Direct current versus these Other things. What is that?

So direct current means it's always going in one direction, whereas alternating current means it's volleying back and forth. And that's important for a few reasons. One is you mentioned in the intro how our bodies run on electricity and electricity is actually very important for the regeneration in salamanders. And salamander like animals or an Ms.

If you want to grow the lining of your nerves back. Oh yeah, same thing. Hugely important. And that's all direct current that we're using in biology.

So. Yeah, so our bodies run on direct current. And so conceptually we can think it might be important to use direct current if we're trying to use some sort of outside stimulus. And particularly in this realm of neuromuscular re education and function and trying to optimize function, it's so important because as that alternating current signal volleys back and forth, it actually causes muscles to co contract or fight against each other.

And that's what a tens unit does.

Yeah. So TENS units, if you just have them on at a low level, they can do something. Sometimes they can help reduce pain. It's kind of like an electronic aspirin. When you take it off, the pain will come back, but it can temporarily reduce the experience of pain. When you turn them up to a high enough level to really make a difference in neuromuscular function, it'll actually cause the body to fight against itself. So this metaphor of like we're driving a car hitting the throttle and the brake pedal at the same time, I think is right on. Because when you use that type of, whether it's tens or Russian stem or interferential, those alternating current devices, you're ending up, you end up training the body to resist its own movements. Like you're hitting the brake pedal as you're trying to hit the throttle at the same time, and that ends up shortening and stiffening the muscles. And that ends up getting the body in a state where it's either going to be at least having to waste energy to overcome that internal resistance in order to move. So it can make us less energetically efficient and potentially set us up for injury. Because we want to be more pliable, we want to be able to bend but not break and be more resilient. And if we're shorter, muscles are shorter and stiffer. They're less able to accommodate movement, less able to absorb force as we land or decelerate. And that's the phase of movement in which a vast majority of injuries happen, is that deceleration phase.

So.

There'S some value in using those devices at lower levels, but there's also a very low ceiling on what you can accomplish with them because of some of those effects. So direct current. It's actually interesting. In the process of developing this, I was able to do an experiment where literally I would take an alternating current device, like a Russian stimmer tension, put it on one arm, and at 50 milliamps of current, it would lock me up, where I'd be unable to move through it. With this device, you know, we're using a prototype at the time, but with this device, I could put that same 50 milliamps of current on the other arm. And even though it feels just as intense, even though just as much energy is being delivered, I'm actually able to move through it. And so of that same amount of energy being delivered, that same amount of electrical current being delivered, more of it is preferentially going into neurological and sensory inputs. Less of it's going to just pure motor output and muscle contraction. And so it allows us to do a couple things. One is ultimately to reset the tone on muscles, help lengthen out or relax tissue where there's guarding. And probably even more impactfully or more meaningfully, it allows us to make these input signals into the nervous system so we can identify where those perceptions of threat are, where that hypersensitivity or guarding is present, and then teach the brain very quickly to change the pattern so that we can change function and give an experience like you had with your foot.

Something else that's coming to mind. Quite a few years ago, I had access to the type of direct current you're using here, and I was hanging out with Steven Kotler, who's been on the show. I was the first backer of what back then was called the Flow Genome Project. And it's all evolved since then. Steven's a friend and a crazy human being. Just for the record. Do you know him or know of him?

I know of him, yeah.

Good deal. So, anyway, I appreciate him on multiple levels. He writes a lot of Peter Diamantes books. But he also is an extreme sports aficionado because that's his way of getting in flow state. We talked about the hippie speedball, which is caffeine, nicotine, cannabis, and extreme skiing. And that would be a good description of Steven. Oh, and Chihuahua racing. He has, like, 40 Chihuahuas at his Chihuahua rescue thing, and he's running down trails. Just an unusual human, and I love him.

Interesting.

But his shoulder was trashed, and so we're in a hotel room. It's like 2 in the morning. And I'm like, I gotcha. So hook the machine up, put pads on him, and I have him do a couple shoulder exercises through the pain. And of course, he screams like a girl at two in the morning in the hotel. Security didn't come, but afterwards, he's like, wow, my shoulder can do stuff it couldn't do. And the next morning he's like, dave, I can do full range of motion. I haven't had this in months. This is insane, right? And so I think he talked about it when he was on the show, but it was really cool because it wasn't that he was incapable of doing it. It was that his shoulder thought he was incapable of doing it. And it was just. You just had to show it. And that was one thing, another time. This is also a shoulder. And by the way, I'm not a professional. I know a little bit partly because you've shown me some cool stuff. I was running direct current over a special forces guy and a longtime follower and a friend who's also. I'm trying to think if I can say his name. I'm not going to say his name without asking him. But the guy who's spoken at the conference about going through 40 years of xen and just a good human being, he also trains advanced martial arts. So he has a group of these super badasses, all of whom could wipe the floor with me at his house. But one of them, same thing, shoulder injury. So we do the same thing, and I'm turning the machine up and up and up, and he's breaking into sweat. And I'm like, no, come on, push through it. Just push through it, man. And this is kind of how you show someone when they're like, my muscles. My arm is stuck. And you're like, no, just push. And then all of a sudden, they can do it, and then they can do it. So he screams, and then he's done. He's like, wow, I have range of motion. But then he looks at me and he goes, dave, I've been waterboarded. I've been tortured. For real. This is what I do for work. Because no one's ever made me scream.

Congratulations, you did it.

No, it was direct current. Dead. So what's going on? There is this weird psychological conversation where. And I mean, I've done this. I'm trying to do a squat or something, and you're like, I can't straighten out my arm. And you really. That voice in your hand is like, you can't do it. And then all of a sudden you just will yourself through it, just one little time. And all of a sudden like, oh, oops, I can. And then it's like all of a sudden it was like 10 out of 10, I'm going to die. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, it was maybe five out of ten. I was wrong. But it, it's like a light switch goes off in your head. But TENS machines don't have any of that going on. So if someone wants to do that, there's a rehabilitation side of things. But when you want someone who's going to let's do things. One is performance, one is looks. Let's do performance better. So what would the application of that kind of thinking be to performing better? Like you were an ice hockey guy. Like, how would you use new fit technology, direct current to do better at a pro sport or even an amateur sport?

That's an awesome question. So one of the first things that we would want to do is actually the same type of process we would do in a more typical rehabilitation or recovery context. Because like you talked about with Steven Kotler, he couldn't move his shoulder, couldn't move his arm past a certain point, and yet in just a few minutes, he was able to break through that in a very significant way. And we know that's an impossibly short period of time for him to remodel tissues or to gain range of motion in the way that we typically think of when someone does a stretching program and gets more flexible. So we know it's too short, far too short for any tissue remodeling, any structural changes like that. We know it's a functional change. So we know that he actually had that tissue length and that ability there all along. It was just lying dormant. And even if someone doesn't have a symptom or doesn't currently have pain, we often have these same self imposed limitations where we might not be able to get that range of motion or that last little bit of strength or speed or power. And it's because of that same type of thing, the brain is limiting that output because it perceives that as threatening.

Is it the brain or is it the body? I feel like it's not something. It's not like you didn't want it hard enough. It's like the body was convinced you couldn't do it no matter how much you wanted it.

So it's.

Which is it?

It's. Well, it's both really. It's the subconscious you know, the brain is constantly monitoring. You know, there's statistics that are, you know, some evidence or psychological writings at least, that show that the brain processes something like 10 million bits of information every second. Only 30 to 40 of those may get up to conscious awareness.

Yeah, just layers of filters and filters and filters.

Right, yeah. And so the brain is constantly monitoring the external environment, the internal environment, and it's passing every little, every one of those inputs through this filter of. Is it safe? Is it threatening? Is there something I need to act on now?

Will it get me laid all the way?

Exactly.

Sorry. That's what the brain does.

What's the highest priority? So sometimes that's it. And it's definitely passing these inputs through that filter of. Is it safe? Is this something I need to address? Because they could potentially be harmful to me. And so that's part of that mechanism that limits output in the body. It is at least in part in the brain. Sometimes it's the subconscious, or oftentimes the subconscious lower parts of the brain that we're not even aware of. But that's why when you do traditional physical therapy, if you're trying to just stretch your toe and increase that range of motion in a more traditional way, or if Steven's trying to press his shoulder through or do stretches or do band exercises, that's why it takes so long, because you're fighting against that underlying subconscious impulse from the brain that's saying, no, no, no, no, no. So it's like you're constantly pushing a boulder uphill, whereas if you can just find where that signal is present and change it, all of a sudden it's like you're going downhill instead of uphill. It just. The resistance kind of fades away.

So it's about editing out resistance. So that means if someone's looking for that final, I'm going to jump over. I'm just thinking of a strength thing, like I'm going to do a pole vault or something. And it's that final two inches where the brain, at some level, underneath, where you think, where you want, where you desire, at some level it's convinced that you will die. If you die, you will take on damage. But it's wrong because you're not going to take on damage. And that's where you would use direct current to just show the body what it's capable of. So then it knows. And that's where you would use direct current to just show the body what it's capable of. So then it knows.

So that's. That's a Big part of it. And in the beginning, whether someone comes in with an injury or has pain or something more in that rehabilitation realm, or even if we're starting with someone who has more performance oriented goals, that's the first thing we want to do, is find where essentially those dysfunctions are present, because those are the underlying things that are going to be robbing someone of performance or causing them to stay in the cycle of pain and injury, or at least slow down their recovery. So the first thing we want to do is find those weak links. And then once we found those weak links and brought them back up to baseline, then we want to talk about taking the functional capacity of the entire system and increasing it. So that's when we talk about performance. And it still takes work and the same rules of physiology still apply. So in that paradigm, if we're talking about pure performance training, then we want to talk about ways where, for instance, we could use technology like this to put it on. If we wanted to give you an arm workout, for example, we could put it on your muscles and manipulate the settings on here so it's actually going to create more load or more tension on the muscles. And then literally we could have you do two minutes of arm curls without holding any weight at all and get as much muscle recruitment as if you were lifting very heavy. Get the benefits of resistance exercise, but without the risks of injury and without nearly as much load on your joints.

It, it is stupidly effective. I tell anyone you can put an inch on your bicep or get a 2 inch butt upgrade with this. And in fact, I think we should do that on video just to show people what the difference is. Although if you're listening, I'm just going to describe what happens. But before we do that, I have to talk about the butt upgrade. So I may or may not have brought my device to health influencer events that have a poolside component. And I may or may not have offered some of my friends, hey, would you like a butt upgrade? Right? And when I say a butt upgrade, I'm talking. They do two minutes. You put the electrodes on the quads and on the glutes and you do a few squats with some current. And during that time, you may or may not squeal or yell, but when you're done, you're like, holy crap, like your butt is higher than it was before. Whether you're a man or woman, it totally works. Although I have to say, typically more women are going to take a butt upgrade than a man. I don't know why, but it's a source of humor. But also the difference in cosmetics is ridiculous. And I've thought for a very long time that if Hollywood knew about this. Let's see, I'm always wondering, who can I talk about? So Brandon Routh has been on the show and Brandon played Superman in one of the big movies. And he was the atom for a long time and Legends of Tomorrow and just a fantastic human. But he was talking, I think, on the show about the dreaded shirts off scene. And so what everyone who's on TV has to do is they. I'm going to fast for a couple days. I'll take diuretics and we'll spray on abs or whatever. And then they're doing a bunch of pushups before they go on. But I'm like, if they knew what you could do with a new fit. You slap the electrodes on and you're like, it's like Hulk mode. You look profoundly different in 10 minutes of this stuff. And you're sort of walking around. Granted, it's all. I don't know if it's all pump, but it's mostly pump. It's crazy. So anyway, at these health influencer events, we all go to a hotel and talk about how do we do a better job of helping people make good decisions. I will offer the butt upgrades. And you see people doing squats poolside going, yeah, I like my butt here. And just the humor level of that's good, but it goes far beyond just, I want a nice butt. Any muscle you want to make bigger. So if I take this over shirt off. Can we do my biceps right now and just do like a before and after shot?

Absolutely.

All right. And I'll describe what's going on as we do this so that we can narrate through it. And then if you're watching on YouTube, which you probably want to do on this one, we'll see what happens. And I'll try not to scream. Very good deal. All right. All right. And the wrinkling you're hearing now is these very cool electrodes getting taken out of a bag. These are stick on electrodes that carry a current, direct current into the muscle. And we're going to do both sides. I'm guessing I don't want to be imbalanced.

We can do the arms on both sides.

Yeah, let's just give me some biceps. Biceps, triceps. What do you like to do?

Let's do both at the same time.

All right, hook me up. So what's going on now is we've got four electrodes. So two electrodes go on each side. One's red, one's black. And which one are you going to stick? Where?

I'll go black on the bicep. There's going to be a little more stimulus there.

Okay, got it. So we basically got bicep and tricep on left. So I am now holding both my arms up. Look, those guns. Totally kidding. All right.

You must take collagen.

Yeah, I do take collagen, that's for sure. All right, what else? And testosterone. Full disclosure here. Anti aging physiological levels.

So I'm gonna turn it up. So can you scoot back a little bit? So you can literally. You're gonna just bend and straighten your arms. So here we're gonna load those muscles more. So this is more of. More of a resistance strength type workout. Also, potentially some benefits for hypertrophy.

So length and growth. Yeah. For the bicep muscle.

That's right.

I know I can embarrass you a little bit. I can tell my laugh. And I'm just having fun with you at this point, but. All right. But we will see a longer bicep muscle. That was a real question. As well as bigger. Right, because you want the muscle to lengthen.

Yeah, it'll be more full. And when you talk about how it actually looks and feels bigger for a few days. Some of that is blood in the muscle in that pump, but a lot of it is actually the movement of extracellular fluid, lymph, like blood plasma, which actually carries a lot of the proteins that we need to rebuild tissues that actually goes inside the muscle cells. And that's part of the process that kicks off muscle hypertrophy. So it actually is a precursor to hypertrophy and kind of a necessary step in that process. So that tells us that there's some good things happening.

All right, hit me.

All right.

I didn't feel anything yet.

Let's have you start curling, and we're going to turn it up to the point where it starts to become difficult. It feels like you have resistance moving in both directions.

I feel it more in my left arm than my right. Just a little bit more.

Okay.

Spikes. My left arm is weaker than my right.

All right, so we're gonna set this for two minutes here.

All right.

And I'll turn up your left side. So we're down. All right, minute 59, 58. Here comes that left side.

It's under a heavy load right now.

It is. It's under heavy load.

I'm gonna start sweating in a minute.

So you're getting the similar levels of muscle recruitment as if you were lifting very heavy. Like if you were curling, you know. No. Near the maximum weight that you could lift. And if you were going to do that in the gym, you'd do it a time or two, then you'd have to rest a few minutes, do it a time or two, have to rest a couple minutes. But here you can do it consistently. You can get a couple dozen reps in over two minutes.

I've done this while watching Netflix.

Yeah.

I also, though, did it for 90 minutes watching Netflix. I was a little bit blown out the next day. That was not a good call.

That's a little more than we recommend.