#233: How To Become A Curvaceous, Lean, Ripped Female Athlete Without Destroying Your Health

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, how to become a curvaceous, lean, ripped female athlete without destroying your health. Also, what does deer antler velvet spray do? How to use Ucan Superstarch properly. How to get rid of migraines using your diet. What is the Moxi monitor? And are activity tracking devices like the Fitbit useful?

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

So we both survived the Become Superhuman live event.

We did.

How do you feel?

I feel good. And my. My booby doesn't hurt anymore. Somehow putting on a live conference healed my. Healed my torn pec.

So there you go. Anybody ever tears their pectoral muscle, make sure you spend a lot of money and invite a lot of people to your city and put on an awesome spread for them for two and a half days.

Yeah, that was fun. I thought, I thought the event went pretty well.

Yeah, I was blown away. I, like, not that I had low expectations, but you exceeded my expectations for sure. It was quite an event.

Highlight for me was. Was Phil Maffetone, the. The aerobic guy, when he came onto stage, he forgot his little PowerPoint dongle, which I happen to have an extra one sitting in my bag. And all of a sudden he was gone. Like, he disappeared. And we're all looking around because he's supposed to be there on stage. I'm introducing him and he's just gone. And you hear this little kind of like shuffle on the speakers overhead because he's still mic'd and he's literally sprinting back to his hotel room across the street from the conference center to go get the PowerPoint. So Phil Maffetone, the aerobic guy, dead all out sprint, comes back onto stage, red in the face, and then proceeds to talk about how to use music to relax. But I thought that was. That's pretty funny.

It was pretty awesome. He was really fast, too. And then he almost put us all to sleep, which was kind of the other thing. Not because he was boring, but because he got us to do that diaphragmatic breathing with our eyes closed and listening to one of his songs. I didn't realize he was such an accomplished songwriter. That was fantastic.

Yeah. After he coached some guys to win Ironman world championships. He disappeared off the scenes for a while and went and just wrote music and became a musician. And he's recently gotten back into endurance sports. But it's interesting stuff. And yes, I put actually that picture of everyone kind of like leaning back in their chairs and half sleeping is over on the website. And if people go over there, I did a full on synopsis. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com I did a article called superhuman review and just put pictures of everything from Phil Maffetone speaking to Ray Cronise to Dave Asprey to the nutrition diva and myself drinking superhuman cocktails to Brock slightly inebriated at the after party doing purettes and everything.

That I was not slightly inebriated.

You were fully, fully inebriated.

I was full on. That's right.

All right, well, what do you think? Should we jump in?

All right, here we go.

News flashes.

All right, if you follow ben@twitter.com BenGreenfield and go to facebook.com BGFitness and also at Google, you'll get all kinds of awesome news flashes just pretty much every day of the week. And this is the time of the show when Ben goes through those and well, helps us make sense of what the hell he's talking about.

All right, let's. Let's talk about a few studies here, Brock, shall we?

Yes, please.

Shan't we? Shall we? Time course of muscle damage and inflammatory response to resistance training. What I mentioned to folks when I tweeted about this study was just imagine what your blood would look like after Ironman if it looks like this after resistance training. And this was kind of a cool study where they went in and they looked at all of these different parameters of muscle damage and inflammation after just one bout of resistance training. And what they found was creatine kinase was through the roof C reactive protein. To the extent to where your doctor might send you into the hospital to get looked at for whether or not you were going to have a heart attack. What were some of the other, what are called neutrophils, leukocytes, a lot of these basically acute phase inflammatory response molecules, all these painkiller molecules that your body produces, almost all of them were jacked through the roof for 24 to 48 hours. And I've talked about this before and after you do say like an Ironman triathlon, you actually see this type of response for up to 19 days after a race like that. But one of the things that I think that folks should be aware of in the era of self quantification, where I think many people are getting more into taking their blood markers and looking at their lipid panels, their inflammatory markers, things of that nature is you really do need to pay attention when, let's say you test through a company like Wellness FX or Direct Labs, you actually do need to pay attention to the part that tells you to go easy on the working out for a good 24 to 48 hours prior. Because a lot of times when I'm doing consults with people through Wellness FX because they send me a lot of their crossfitters and their triathletes to look at after these people have had their blood markers drawn. I see high creatinine, high blood urea nitrogen, high creatine kinase, high hscrp, high interlacement leukins. And for me, a lot of the time when I ask people, well, did you exercise the day before this test or the two days before this test? They're like, yeah, I wouldn't hit the weights. And I actually crossfitted that morning. So yeah, be careful with that stuff, especially if you're testing. But ultimately this really highlights the importance of making sure that you're giving yourself adequate rest and recovery and taking into account that practice of putting the body into this state of inflammation that this particular study shows is quite pronounced, especially in response to weightlifting, allowing yourself to bounce back and then, you know, rinsing, washing and repeating. And I would say the two activities for which that's most important would be weight training and running. So those are, those are the two things that are going to produce the most amount of inflammation like this. But if you like to look at charts of inflammation, check out the link that we'll put in the show notes.

And who doesn't? That's how I spend my Saturday nights.

That's right, when you're not doing pirouettes at bars in Spokane, of course. So another study looked at alternate day fasting and this is something that's popular, right? The whole intermittent fasting, skipping meals, putting in 12 hour, 16 hour, sometimes 24 hour periods of not eating into your.

I think it's really hitting the mainstream too. Like I hear people talking about intermittent fasting that aren't necessarily involved in the paleo community or the low carb community. It's actually, it's really getting quite prevalent.

Yeah. And one question that I get quite a bit, and that I think I've seen pop up a few times is how this affects you in terms of your hormonal response, especially in females. Because a lot of times you tend to see females who start to do things like fasting every day, 12 hour fast, 16 hour fasts, alternate day fasts, whatever. They tend to start to do things like go amenorrheic, lose their periods, start to feel overtrained, start to lose their libido. And you know, the question is whether or not this is just them being hungry or whether there's an actual hormonal response to intermittent fasting. And it turns out that they actually put. Well, this was a test in rodents, which a lot of these tests actually are. But they looked at the effects of this alternate day fasting in rodents. And I'll put a link to the study in the show notes, but it was pretty pronounced what happened. You saw a 28% decrease in luteinizing hormone, which is the hormone in females that's partially responsible for the formation of the corpus luteum during the menstrual cycle. And in men for the formation of testosterone in the Leydig cells in the testes. You saw a 14% decrease in leptin, one of your primary Appetite control hormones. 40, 44% decrease in testosterone in men and through the roof increase in estradiol in women, which is one of the main increases that would be a symptom of estrogen dominance, meaning drop in progesterone increase in estrogens, as well as a 73% decrease in ovarian weight, which is one of the primary measurements of your kind of like your fertility or the health of your reproductive organs. So across the board, after weeks of an alternate day fasting protocol, meaning fasting one day eating ad libitum, the next day there were some pretty significant hormonal fluctuations shifted towards the side of it not being a good thing in the.

Yeah, 45% drop in testosterone. I'm. That's terrifying.

No, on the flip side, the lipid panels were really good. There was a drop in weight, there was a drop in body fat, there was a decrease in ldl, increase in hdl. So the trade off was that body composition, composition changed favorably. But you got to understand that if it's like anabolic sports performance, muscle gain, feeling good, having a libido, increasing reproductive health, limiting your calories in, in the way of frequent fasting, especially in females, is not really all that great for you. You know, if you, if you're going to combine this, especially with exercise and calorie restriction. So the message that I want to give to people is be careful and understand that yes, fasting will help to make you skinny. But that's not necessarily a good thing if your goals are like staying fertile, being healthy, that type of thing. So there's always that trade off that you got to be aware of.

You probably said this at the beginning, but I can't remember now. How long were these fasts that they were involved in?

Well, in this particular study what they were doing was one day was a fasting day where they actually so complete 24 hour period. They had a two hour feeding window put in between 12 and 2pm so they did eat some food on the fasting day but it was like 400 calories a day on the fasting day. And then they had a follow up day that was just eating whatever you want. It was called an alternate day fasting protocol. But I'll put a link to that in the show notes and it's pretty interesting stuff. The last thing I think I mentioned this last week about how they were doing P tests on guys after they got out of the shower. Actually it was guys and girls after they got out of the shower after using commercial shampoos and the amount of phthalates they were finding in their urine. But this was an interesting study where they actually measured what's called monoethyl carboxylpentyl phthalates or also affectionately known as MEPs. It's the fragrance that gets put in personal hygiene products. So whatever, kiwi, strawberry, coconut, pine, I don't know whatever your shampoo's particular flavor is. But all of the, the MEP concentrations in the post shower urine just three hours after using these fragranted shampoos and soaps and hygiene products in the shower were significantly elevated. And you can get this stuff tested. There's a, there's a metametrics panel called a, I believe it's called a, a phthalate panel. It's a urinary panel. Companies like Direct Labs allow you to do something like this, but they were significantly elevated. And this is one of the reasons that I tell people be really, really careful with these fragranted personal care products. I mean like for Me I use Dr. Bronner's Super Natural liquid soap in the shower and I put a few drops of oil of oregano in that. So it has a little bit of an antibacterial effect, antifungal effect on the skin. Just because I, you know you get exposed to a lot of fungus and stuff when you're showering in locker rooms and things of that nature. So that's, that's what I use and I Stay away from the stuff that smells nice. Now I even, you know, this is something I haven't completely given up but I'm even careful with like cologne and stuff like that now just because of the endocrine disruptors. And you know, I was meeting, I met with quite a few people after the superhuman event who kind of stayed in town and you know, I spent some coffee shop time with me just going back and forth. And there was this one women, women woman who was classically estrogen dominant. I mean she, you could, you could see it in her eyes and in her face. She had like, you know, cholesterol deposits under her eyes and she was, you know, she had, had kind of like the, the post menopausal increase in weight gain. And you know, she was sitting there eating a, eating a quote unquote healthy gluten wrap from the coffee shop and drinking a low fat coffee as she's sitting there talking to me and started to get into her personal care products. And it was just like everything was just like, you know, Mary Kay fragranted this, you know, all these different makeups and personal care products. And you know, a lot of people don't realize how much you leave on the table when it comes to your performance, your weight loss, your hormonal balance, when it comes to what you're using to clean your body. So just something to think about.

And your skin is a mouth.

That's right, your skin is. Or as we say here in the States, a mouth. Anyways, though, something to think about. We'll link to all these studies in the show. Notes for folks. So there you go.

Special announcements.

Okay, I guess we should probably mention right off the bat, make sure to go to audiblepodcast.com ben and sign up for your Audible Gold member subscription and you will get yourself a free Audible book that you can download and listen to on your MP3 player, your phone, your whatever, your CD player, your Discman. Did you ever have a Discman? That's where I first knew about Audible. They used to make books on tape and books on CD back in the.

Old days, back in the dark ages.

Back in the 1900 and 90s.

No, no I didn't. But there's a guy who has a book on Audible and I want to put my book on Audible when I finish my book. And by the way, a big apology to all my readers@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I know I said that I was going to be putting out a book chapter for my book every single week, but with this Conference. I kind of. Even though I have the chapter done, I didn't publish it because I wanted to show you guys all the. All the magic of the Become Superhuman conference. But I'll be pushing that chapter this weekend anyways, though. A guy who I'm going to be talking to tonight, I'm going to be debating tonight, has a book on Audible. Oh, yes. Tonight, Rich Roll. Rich Roll has his book on Audible. It's called Finding, Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men and Discovering Myself. And he narrated it, which I think is just kick butt. That's what I want to do when I. When my book comes out is I want to narrate it myself with. With voices too. I'm gonna. I'm gonna go back and forth. Like, I'll have like me talking and then I'll switch and go to my special. Maybe like my. My triathlete voice. I don't know who that is. My, My. My. Hey, ho, Kermit the Frog. And then go to. That's pretty good. Yeah, it is. That's. That's my Kermit the Frog. And I.

Can you do Chewbacca?

I can't do Chewbacca. No, I can't do Chewbacca. So I never was able to get the girls, but either way, yeah. Check out Rich roll's book on audiblepodcast.com Ben and then if you want even more magic of Rich Roll, go listen to me and Rich Roll and a celebrity trainer named Vinnie Tortorich. All three of us have podcasts. All three of us have some different dietary views. Rich Roll's kind of the vegan vitting torture. Just kind of like the sugar, no grains guy. And I'm kind of like the eat it if it moves guy. And we're all going to. We're all going to debate each other tonight at 6pm if you happen to be listening to this podcast on the day that it comes out. And if not, if you listen to this afterwards, don't get too depressed because you can get access to the playback of that when it comes out.

And beware everybody who tunes in. I've heard Vinnie before, and he does get a little blue occasionally. And I don't mean sad.

I was gonna say. You mean depressed.

Yeah, well, maybe. Maybe that's where his cursing comes from.

A little salty.

He gets a little salty. There you go.

Salty. Yeah. So there you go. A couple other special announcements. The. The Jimmy Moore. Jimmy Moore was actually at the Become Superhuman event, and he was a. He was a real Pleasure to listen to. He's a fun guy.

He's a delightful fellow. Oh, well, that's a terrible accent.

I can't. I like how he showed up at the after party in his paj. Everybody's all kind of dressed to hell and Jimmy's there in his pajamas because he was going to bed. But either way, good dude. And Brock and I are going to be guest hosting Jimmy Moore's low carb.

Podcast, Living La Vida. Low carb.

And when we guest host that, what we want for you to do is actually leave us your low carb questions. And you can do that by going over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and using the Ask Ben a question option, which is on the right side of the page there. Or you can just call toll free to 877-209-9439. If you happen to live in the States, it's toll free. If you live in the far reaches of Canada or anywhere else. I have no clue how much that's going to cost you.

Just, just use the website. It'll be better.

Yeah, so leave. Leave your low carb question. Help us out if you can and be like, tell us like, this one's for the Jimmy Moore low carb episode or something so that we know.

Yeah, and audio only, please. We just want to do all audio questions, so don't write them in, talk them in.

Yeah, so. And then you'll be on the. On the Jimmy Moore Living La Vida low carb episode. So what else? Oh, there's one other thing I wanted to mention. Go ahead, Brock.

I was just going to say, make sure you go over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and complete the survey. We've got a survey. There's a link in the special announcements section. If you click on that, you can go and fill out a survey and it'll just sort of help out a little bit with the, with the expenses. I mean, if we get enough responses, that is, it'll help out the hosting expenses, which is really the only hard cost associated with podcasting. So every little bit helps.

Yeah, it's one of those dumb ad surveys, but we gotta, gotta pay the bills. So. Yeah, check out that survey. It's not that dumb. Don't worry. And then the last thing is that if you miss the Superhuman Live event and you want a little piece of it anyway, a little piece of the magic, then I do have some goodie bags left over from that event and they're jam packed with a bunch of, like, supplements. There are a couple of books that I'm gonna put in there. I'm even putting a $40 to $50 value extra supplement bottle. Everything from MPX 100 to adaptogenic herbs to extreme endurance to whatever I happen to grab to surprise you with. I'll put it all in that goodie bag along with like a be greenfieldfitness.com specialized purist water bottle and a bunch of other stuff and I'll mail it to you. Free shipping anywhere in the US and just a small stipend for shipping anywhere internationally. And we'll put a link in the show notes if you want to get a custom sport bag jam packed with books and supplements and gear and everything you need to become superhuman or at least feel like one as you're traipsing around with your with your shiny new backpack.

Finally, a solution for healthy living that actually makes sense. Ben Greenfield and his wife Jessa have cracked the code on healthy living and revealed their entire system inside the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle, where you'll get Instant access to 24. 7Forum interaction with Ben and Jessa, a live monthly webinar, meal plans, videos, Ben's Body Transformation Club archives, and much, much more. If you or your want to learn how to achieve the ultimate healthy lifestyle on a budget, then the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle is for you. Get four free videos to get you started and full access to the inner circle@bengreenfieldfitness.com inner circle that's bengreenfieldfitness.com Inner Circle we'll see you inside. Listener Q and A.

Hi Ben. I've heard some recent talk about deer antler velvet spray. Just wanted to know what it is exactly and whether or not it's effective. Thanks.

You know, the only person I've actually heard talk about this before was actually ritual.

Really? Yeah. Interesting. Does he use it? Yeah, yeah.

It was one of his hidden secret things that he swears by.

So he's a vegan and he actually uses a supplement that comes from crushed deer antlers that they cut off the deer.

Well, I guess the deer survives.

So yeah, I mean that is how they harvest deer antler velvet is the antler is sawed off the base of the deer and it doesn't actually kill the deer. But if you look at some of the studies on deer antler velvet, some of the supplements actually end up with the painkiller that they have to give to the deer in the actual supplement because they got a smear lidocaine on the deer's antlers to kill the pain from Sawing off the deer. And some of that analgesic medication winds up in the deer antler velvet supplement.

Your skin is a mouth.

There you go. Yeah, I'm not quite sure about the whole cruelty to animals perspective on that. Whereas I just shoot the deer and eat the whole thing, not the antlers.

But don't eat the antlers. You should sell the antlers.

No, there's actually no evidence that deer antler velvet increases your testosterone or helps out with your libido or helps out with like, they've looked at luteinizing hormone, follicle stimulating hormone, prolactin levels, insulin, like growth factor, everything. And I'll tell you in a second some stuff that deer antler velvet could help with. But as far as like the whole sexual libido thing, which is the reason that you'd want to take it, zero evidence that it could help with that stuff at all. And I've tried deer antler velvet because the same company that makes the painkiller supplement that I really do recommend, that is efficacious. The phenocaine stuff, stuff that I use when I'm injured or when I need to shut down inflammation, they also do a deer antler velvet spray. And they've sent me samples of it before when I order phenocaine. And I used it for 30 days. I did the whole five sprays sublingually in the morning, five sprays sublingually in the evening. And then I sat there staring at my crotch waiting for the magic to happen. And it really does not do anything at all, you know, to me or in the, in the studies either. So. So there you go. Deer antler velvet.

Okay, I just pulled up the website, the four hour work week website where Rich Roll is talking about it. Yeah, he says that he's using elk antler velvet as a testosterone booster.

Elk. You know, I suspect that elk probably falls into the same category in these studies as deer antler velvet. It I'm not 100% sure on that. Elk is a bigger animal than a deer, but I believe the chemical composition is pretty similar. So likely. Yeah.

Okay. I should probably add here, I just read in the second paragraph he said I askew animal products from my diet. So I do not myself use elk antler velvet. Nonetheless, from what I understand, antler removal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So he doesn't actually use it there. I. That's probably a good night. Look that up. I don't want to make him sound like a hypocrite.

Gotcha. And don't get Me wrong. I mean, the antler does have hormones that circulate in it and it's got testosterone and epi, androsterone and progesterone and estradiol and all these things that baseball players love to munch on in the antler. But it does not appear that the actual extract is high enough in any of this stuff to cause any type of an effect in terms of free concentration in human blood.

Okay, so what would possibly come from it then?

So there's been some evidence in basically cardiovascular health studies that may help a little bit with coronary artery rebuilding after heart surgery. So it may have a little bit of a cardiovascular effect, which makes sense because antlers grow back. Right? So there's something in the antler that is helping the human body to regrow new cells after something like coronary artery damage. There is also some evidence, and this was in rodent studies, that it may have a little bit of an anti additive property, meaning that rats that were given morphine were better able to withstand withdrawal symptoms and get off the morphine when they were given a deer antler velvet supplement, which they used during the normal withdrawal period after using morphine. So it may help with, you know, like stopping cigarette smoking or stopping the use of painkillers or something along those lines. There is also the only other thing that might help with is, and this is again a study in rodents, not in humans, but it was shown to reduce immunoglobulin responses to allergens when mice were exposed to allergens. And so it had a little bit of an anti asthmatic effect in regards to allergies. And so, you know, if you deal with like seasonal allergies, stuff like that, it may help. And again, you know, it's a, it's a rodent study, but still, you know, we can extrapolate some of this slightly to humans. But as far as turning you into a sex machine, there are probably better ways to do it than your deer antler velvet or elk antler velvet. You could try elephant tusk velvet. That might be good enough to do the trick.

Hi Ben and Brock.

I have a question about trying to use UCAN Superstarch for a marathon and I'm trying to figure out how much I would use on a race. Thank you very much to great channel. Bye.

And we also got a question from Tony.

Hi Ben, Tony from Scotland. Just a question about generation. You can. I've just done two centuries and maybe.

10 days between them.

Both very similar, both in a fasted state, no breakfast, both with three Days off the bike beforehand. First one went really well. I've just done my latest century. Got about 50 miles in, stopped for water and a bag of peanuts, and then I started to weaken, then had to have two Snickers bars to get home. Just wonder what gives. So does UCAN only work when you're in a ketogenic state? Just interested to know your thoughts. Thanks for everything you do and hope to hear from you soon. Thank you.

So this is one of the things that came in that handy dandy little gift bag that you were giving out at the. At the superhuman event.

Yes. And you can. Superstarch is something that I do use. I kind of am not a fan of using engineered fuels, period, unless I absolutely have to. So don't get me wrong. Superstarch is not something that I'm like, pouring into a blender every day and starting off my day with, along with my raw eggs and steak.

Yeah, this is a race fuel or very long workout fuel. Not a everyday fuel.

Right, right. But the idea is that when you look at common sports drinks and sports gels, most of them are comprised of things like glucose and sucrose and fructose and maltodextrin. And those are all relatively simple sugars. So when you ingest them and they're broken down by the body, they give you this immediate source of energy. And that immediate source of energy causes this flood of insulin from your pancreas to be released. And what happens is that causes the glucose or the sugars to be taken up by the muscles, and then you get a little bit of a hypoglycemic drop. And you basically go through this blood sugar roller coaster ride. So the idea behind using a very, very high molecular weight starch, a starch that is literally thousands of times longer than any of these other simpler sugars, is that it gets broken down much, much more slowly and released into the bloodstream much, much more slowly. And that takes the pancreas out of the equation, meaning that you don't get that insulin spike. And when you don't get that insulin spike, what you're able to do is metabolize fatty acids a little bit more efficiently. And so there's two things that happen here. One, you're tapping into a fuel source that your body has literally tens of thousands of calories of your own storage fat or your own circulating fatty acids. And at the same time, you're also not reliant as heavily upon carbohydrates. So you can literally take in fewer carbohydrates from Superstar than you can from other starch sources. And this makes it a very palatable and attractive supplement for someone who is, say, wanting to stay in ketogenesis or wanting to burn primarily fatty acids as a fuel to use as their source of fuel. And you do get a lot of good athletes that are starting to use this stuff. Like if you look at a Meb Koflesky, who's the marathoner, he uses the high molecular weight starch. And you know, if you watch him running, he uses. If you look at his water bottle, it's a UCAN Superstarch water bottle. And that's what's in the bottle that he uses during his events. There's another marathoner, Amy Yoder Begley, who uses it as well. And she'll literally go off and do a 20 mile run using about one and a half packets of UCAN Superstarch, which only comes out to like, it's about 200 calories or so of youcan that you'd actually use. So I've found that with the athletes that I work with and also with myself, I'd take the normal amount of carbohydrate that I'd normally take in from gels or sports drinks during a race. And I raced for years on gels and sports drinks and for example, on the bike for something like a half ironman or an ironman triathlon, I'd be at about 400 to 450 calories an hour or so from traditional maltodextrin fructose blend. So I was using the goo energy gels.

And you're taking that probably like every 20 minutes on the bike?

Yeah, I didn't time it too much, but, you know, that was about what I came out to per hour. And for me it was a blend of gels and some of those like gummy chews and stuff like that. And with the you can superstarch, I get away with half of that. So I do about two packets of it per hour when I'm going hard and half heavy during a race. And, you know, I'm kind of sort of a little bit big on the triathlete size. You know, I go about 175, 180 pounds around in there. And you know, I think if you.

Fell on Pete Jacobs, you'd probably kill him.

Probably. I think I almost did fall on him at Endurance Live just based on the amount of alcohol I was consuming at that particular event. But anyways, the. The amount of carbohydrate that you need to take in when you're using UCAN is far less as well. So the tricky part here, though, is in terms of proper use, the whole idea, like I just explained, is that you are able to tap into your own fatty acids, thus able to take in fewer amounts of carbohydrates when you're using ucan. But if you start to introduce exogenous carbohydrate sources like Snickers bar bars or extra gels or anything that really has simple sugars in it, that are going to cause an insulin release, and that's important to consider because there are some sugars out there, such as fructose, and I'll get to that in a second, that wouldn't cause that same insulin release because it goes straight to the liver. But if you are taking in, like glucose and maltodextrin, things of that nature, along with Superstarch, you're defeating the purpose because you're spiking your blood sugar levels, you're causing that insulin release, you're taking yourself out of primary fatty acid utilization. If you're trying to stay in something like ketosis, you're taking yourself out of the use of ketone bodies as a fuel. And all of a sudden, the superstarch from a metabolic standpoint is not doing much for you other than providing you with some fuel. But you're not going to avoid that crash that's ultimately going to come with using the simpler sugar sources. So if you're going to use Superstarch, pretty much the only other fuels that you would want to combine with it would be using a medium chain triglyceride. So it would be okay if you mix some coconut oil or some MCT oil in with it, and that would be the equivalent of about a tablespoon or so per serving. That's something that I haven't personally experimented with too much, but something I'm going to start into this season is throwing that into the mix along with some of the other things I'm about to tell you that I personally mix with. You can Superstarch. The other things that you can use with it would be fructose. Fructose would be okay because that bypasses the whole pancreas insulin scenario and goes straight to the liver. Now, I personally use that Energy 28 stuff, which is a liquid superfood that has maca root and some of these adaptogens in it. So I put that into plain you can Superstarch to give it a little bit of flavor, but it's not causing that same insulin release. So I go about a one to one ratio. So I'll put about one serving of you of energy 28 superfood in with each serving of Superstarch that I consume for each apple. And then the last thing that I throw into the equation, another thing that's not going to spike insulin levels, that's not going to cause that strain from fatty acid utilization or that glucose based energy spike is amino acids. So I use the, there's a few different amino acid compounds out there, but I use the master amino pattern which are the MAP capsules and I just put those in a Ziploc bag in my back pocket. So what I've got in one water bottle bottle, I've got however many packets of you can Superstarch or however many servings of you can Superstarch that I'm going to be using for that, for that hour or for that multi hour event mixed with some energy 28 for each serving of you can. And then I also literally I just chew on them five of those master amino pattern capsules per hour. And then the other important thing to realize is that for your pre event meal you also need to use UCAN Superstarch. And the reason for that is because it takes about 30 to 60 minutes to hit your bloodstream and you want to be beginning to metabolize that stuff before your event. So you know when, when you're having your breakfast or whatever, you know, one and a half, two hours prior to your marathon or your triathlon it needs to be for for example, you could take a couple of packets of Yukan, you could put it in a blender with some almond butter, a little bit of some coconut milk and some ice or something like that, blend that up and go with a fat based plus Superstarch based meal prior to your event and then dump that into a cup, drink that down and then as you start into your event you're basically just using Superstar starch plus the option to use like a fructose based superfood like I mentioned, plus an amino acids like I mentioned, plus if you wanted to like a medium chain triglyceride oil or a coconut oil. And I do have like I have something I created over@pacificfit.net which is called an endurance pack where I've got a bunch of new packs over there where you save if, if you kind of get it all at once. And one of the packs over there is basically it's you can superstarch plus master amino pattern plus energy 28 and it all just comes as this bundle. And that, that would be a really good way to go as well. If you wanted to do something like that.

Now would it really, would it be effective for somebody who has been reliant on on straight up carbohydrate for all their racing? Could you just switch to that or do you need to really become fat adapted before you can use it?

Great question. There's two things you got to do. First of all, because it's such a high molecular weight carbohydrate, you have to train your stomach to be able to use it. And I've found that a lot of the athletes who I switch from using gels and traditionally, you know, like easier to digest simple sugars, they have to ease their way into using. You know, for example, like I mentioned, I use about 2 servers servings of you can per hour. But you would start at like half a serving per hour for the first week and then go into a full serving per hour for the second week and then one and a half servings for the third week and then get up to two servings for that fourth week. So you're gradually easing your body into being able to digest it. Well, if you find that it creates gastric discomfort for you, which I have found that for a few people because it's such a heavy, heavy carbohydrate that it can. And the taste is kind of chalky too, which you got to get used to. That's why what? That's another reason I mix it with the energy 28. The other thing is that it doesn't work that well if you're not fat adapted. If the rest of your diet has a lot of starches and sugars in it and you're kind of a traditional whatever, 55 to 65% carbohydrate diet type of person, it doesn't work that well for you. And it works really, really well in people who are either kind of staying in a relative state of ketogenesis. Meaning like you're testing your blood ketones and staying above one, or else you are eating a low carb diet. And for me, I don't do the ketogenesis thing quite as much as I just focus on low carb. And so for me, I'm metabolically efficient, I'm in that fat adapted state and my body really does well with that transition to using Superstarch as a fuel. And I remember when I was racing lead man last year in Bend, that race that I won every single, it was like every single half hour in that race, I was getting stronger and stronger and stronger and eating less and less and less. It was weird. And, you know, by the end of that race, I basically sprinted the last two miles just to make sure I had that gap between me and second place. And it was pretty crazy. And that was the first race where I actually broke out that ucan and used it. And then I used it again when we, we raced Thailand. And it was the same thing. Like, I got stronger and stronger and stronger. I passed. I, you know, I won my age group in, at the 70.3 in Thailand and I was, I think I was what, like third amateur overall, but I was sixth or seventh coming off the bike and just got stronger and stronger and stronger as I ran. I think that's one of the things that you feel when you use it is it stabilizes your energy levels to where you don't feel at the end of the race that like you're bonking or running out of energy as much as you feel like you're just getting better and better at tapping into your fatty acids. And I totally don't want this to sound like a, like a commercial for superstarch. I mean, you could achieve the same effect. You know, there are other things out there. Like, there's three Fuel is another example of a blend that I think, you know, that's like they use like a whey protein plus a high molecular starch, plus I think they've got some medium chain triglycerides in there. You know, more than one way to skin a cat. But ultimately what it comes down to is I'm a huge fan of kind of straying away from, from this traditional sugary carb approach, going after the, the more, you know, fatty acid burning, conducive fuel sources and then understanding that's a bad idea to mix the two, so.

Hi, Ben, my name is Jason.

I think your podcast is fantastic. Been enjoying it for the last few weeks.

I have a quick question regarding actually your wife and her migraines.

I had heard you mention recently that she was able to eliminate her migraines.

By.

Altering her level about alkalosis or acidosis in her body by utilizing certain food sources. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that as I'm a migraine sufferer and it tends to impact my training substantially and hoping you could give some suggestions.

Greatly appreciate it. Keep up the great work.

Thank you so much.

So does this really just come down to the acidity of your body?

Yeah.

Or your diet.

I'll put a link for Jason to the original episode that inspired my wife to try to get rid of her migraine headaches. By switching to what's called an alkaline based diet. And I remember when she tweeted, I put a link to the tweet in the show notes. She tweeted, I swear green smoothies have cured my migraines. I have warded off three migraines with green smoothies. Who knew? And she was convinced to do this after she met with a friend of mine who was kind of a disciple of this guy named Dr. Ted Moore. And Dr. Ted Mortar has this program and I interviewed him on the show about it. I'll put a link in the show notes. He has this program where it teaches you how to test your urine ph every day for 30 days as well as your salivary ph. And based off your urine and your salivary ph, you are able to see whether your body is in an acidic state or whether it's in an alkali state. Because certainly.

And you test that just with those little strips like you can do this at home. You don't have to ship it off and pay a whole bunch of money or anything. You just go to the drugstore, get the little ph strips and pee.

Exactly, exactly. And he has like a package, you know, he has like a package like a book and some CDs and it comes with the urine strips too. Anyways, though, you know, sometimes migraines can be caused by consumption of foods that have a lot of what are called tyramines and histamines in them. And that would be like cheeses and sauerkraut and kefir. A lot of times alcohol can cause this as well. Sometimes they're triggered by foods that have a lot of what's called arginine in them. And that would be like nuts and chocolate. But in many cases they are triggered by foods that leave what's called a net acid load when they're metabolized by the body or net acid ash. And these would be a lot of foods that would be, you know, like starches, sugars, even red meat to a certain extent. Whereas when you look at alkaline producing foods, which are primarily like dark leafy greens and you know, lemons to a certain extent, some kind of non sugary type of fruits, you know, you can find acid alkaline lists all over out there on the Internet. Internet and also in this program by Ted Mortar. But they leave this more alkaline residue. And the idea is that that doesn't leach as many minerals from your body and it also allows you to basically have better blood flow delivery to your cranial muscles and vasoconstriction a lot of times in the blood vessels to your head is one of the things that can cause migraines. It's one of the same reasons that using, like, a magnesium supplement, especially like a topical magnesium that's rubbed into your upper neck and your head, that has a similar alkalizing effect as eating an alkalizing diet. And that's another thing that, when combined with an alkalizing diet, can be quite efficacious when it comes to getting rid of migraine headaches. But, yeah, it was very, very simple. I mean, all she did was she adjusted her diet to the point where her urine was more alkalinic and her saliva was more alkalinic. And don't get me wrong, you can get too alkalinic. Like, you can take too much magnesium to the point where magnesium is actually inhibiting calcium absorption or causing you to become too alkalinic, and you can completely avoid acidic foods to the point where you're not eating any red meat, you're not eating any citrusy fruits, and kind of getting to the point where you're shifting your body towards too alkalinic of a state, which isn't great as well, because then you create mineral imbalances. But if you test as you go through this, she basically. She switched to alkalinic. She started using topical magnesium every day, and that fixed it for her. She didn't have to take out fermented foods or take out chocolate or take out a lot of these other triggers that. That can be migraine triggers. And. Yeah, and that was it. And. And she used this program by. By Dr. Ted Mortar. And I'll put a link to my interview with him in the show notes. But, you know, I was. I was pretty amazed because it was getting to the point where it was a big problem for her. Like, every month there. There would be a couple of days where she was just, like, miserable and she'd be lying in bed and I was having to take care of the kids. And. Yeah, just. Yeah, it was pretty nuts. So I check it out, and we've got a transcript of that interview as well. If you're. If you're lazy and you don't want to listen to it.

But wait, that's backwards. I think lazy people don't read.

Yeah, I guess so. But it's called the. Dr. Mortar's kit is called the. I think it's the best, like, B E S T Living Kit. So, yeah, it's interesting stuff. Hey, Ben, this is Ken from California. Got a question for you. Since you're into some digital gadgets, what is your thought on the Moxi Monitor? I think it's in prototype form. Www.moximonitormoxym.o n I t o r.com they're looking at building basically an oxygen sense muscle oxygen sensor so that you could, instead of needing a full car part to do things like lactate threshold testing, do it through algorithms with this relatively inexpensive wireless monitor. Curious if you checked it out. And if not, will you check it out? Thanks, that's awesome. Bye.

So do you think Ken invented the Moxie Monitor?

You know, I've wondered sometimes, like when people call into a podcast and they talk about a product or something, whether or not they actually are like, whatever, the mastermind behind the product and they're using their question to promote it.

But he knows a lot about it for it being in beta or in prototype. But it sounds cool though.

Yeah, I looked at their website. It actually does look pretty cool. So, you know, like in the, in the mornings sometimes, especially when I'm leading up to like an important race or Ironman, I measure my pulse oximetry, which is my blood oxygen saturation. And that's that device that you put on the end of your finger and it simply measures it, you know, the same way as the ones at the hospital measure. When you put that on the end of your finger, it measures your oxygen saturation. And generally good oxygen saturation is kind of like in that 96 to 100% range. And as you drop below that, then you're looking at improper recovery or maybe you've got low hemoglobin, low iron. Basically you're in a suboptimal oxygen utilizing state. So this Moxie monitor is kind of doing a similar thing. It's measuring oxygen levels, but in your muscles and in specific areas of muscle tissue. So rather than just putting it on your finger, it's this device that you can use to shine near infrared light into the muscle to measure the amount of hemoglobin, globin that is saturated with oxygen in whatever muscle area that you put it over. And then it spits that out, giving you your muscle oxygen saturation percentage. So you can literally, rather than just putting it on your finger and looking at your full body systemic oxygen saturation, you could see like, okay, what's the oxygen saturation in my quad or my bicep or whatever muscle that you happen to be working? So you can measure the oxygen or monitor the oxygen levels in specific muscles. And it's kind of portable, so you can do it while you're working out as well.

Would low oxygen saturation, let's say in your, in your quad, would that indicate inflammation or could it, what would it indicate?

Well, that's the thing is like I, I don't know, you know, I'm, I'm trying to wrap my head around the reason that, like how you'd actually use this information. Information because when you're working out, you're going to get to the point where in some cases, you know, especially if you are going hypoxic or you've really fatigued a muscle, or you've got a ton of lactic acid buildup, you're going to see some oxygen saturation drop anyways. And so I'm trying to figure out like when you're using amoxy monitor, what are you trying to measure? Are you trying to ensure that you are dropping oxygen saturation low enough? Are you trying to ensure that a muscle is adequately saturated with oxygen so that that's a day that you could work it hard? You know, that's what I'm trying to figure out is how you would actually use something like this. I mean, it's a cool idea, you know, and it's certainly going to tell you that, you know, it would be for me more efficacious to use something like this for recovery, like to put that, put the near infrared light over my quad, see how saturated my quad levels are with hemoglobin, with oxygen, et cetera, and then be like, okay, I've got good oxygen saturation in my quads. Yeah, I'm good to go, I'm gonna go kill it on the bike. Whereas if you've got low oxygen saturation, I guess it would be a decent tool to measure have I fatigued this muscle adequately, you know what I'm saying? Because hypoxic training, I think we've mentioned this a few times on the show before, like holding your, your breath when you're training, training in a simulated low oxygen environment that can actually cause a pretty cool growth hormone effect to exercise. It can cause basically what's called a hormetic effect that allows you to get a better response to that exercise session than you would if the muscles were in a fully oxygenated state. So cutting off oxygen to the muscle right now, for example, I've got a front mounted snorkel that I use for swimming. And when you use a snorkel for swimming, it lets you focus a little less on breathing and a little more on your body rotation and what your hands are doing, But I just found out that they make an air restrictor for this snorkel so I could put an air rest.

Like a little plug in the end.

Yeah. So I could put an air restrictor on this snorkel and be doing hypoxic training in the pool. Another example of hypoxic training would be this whole idea behind vascular occlusion training, which is this new kind of training. And they'll use this in rehab settings a lot where they're literally, tie a tourniquet above a muscle area and you'll train a muscle, like doing bicep curls with the tourniquet wrapped above the bicep. Again, vascular occlusion, cutting off oxygen to a muscle so that you get a better bounce back response hormonally.

So you could strap the moxie monitor around your bicep and while you're doing bicep curls, you wait until you get to like an oxygen saturation of 9, 93 or something before you finish your set.

Yeah, yep, exactly.

So I might, that could work.

So, yeah, I mean moxie is going to indicate your, your oxygen saturation and any. And I, I don't own one. I've never tried one. I know they have a book on their website called Using Muscle Oxygen to Guide Interval Training. I never got a chance to read it or look into it. You know, maybe I will at some point just to see what it's all about. But yeah, so, so there you go. You know, probably worth looking into. It's one of those self quantification toys that, that might be kind of cool to play around with.

Hi, Ben, I'm wondering about if you've ever used one of those activity trackers.

Like the Fitbit and if you have, what are your thoughts on it?

Do they work well?

Are they accurate? All right, thanks. Bye.

Do you have a Fitbit, Ben?

You know, I have this new black box coaching program where I've got some high level executives who I am doing a little bit more intensive coaching with. So I'm doing some life coaching. I'm tracking their sleep and their calorie burning and all these different parameters. And I'm using the jawbone up for that, which is similar to the Fitbit. It's a wristband that allows you to track sleep and track calories and movement and things of that nature. Fitbit is very similar. The accuracy is very similar. They have the same idea behind them. Unfortunately, neither is waterproof. So these, these folks can't swim with it, you know. Well, it's waterproof to the extent where you can shower and stuff with it, but you can't actually jump in the water and swim with it. Another example is they have this new mybasis watch which not only measures your motion and your sleep, but also captures perspiration and skin temperature. There's another one coming out called the BOBO device. B O, B O. And that one is actually supposed to. And I'm kind of excited about this. It's supposed to measure heart rate variability as well. And then of course you have the Nike. What's the Nike one called?

I think it might be Nike 1. Nike Plus.

Yeah, I forget. But yeah, any of these devices are going to give you a pretty good picture of calories burned throughout the day of metabolic activity, etc. And most of them are pretty decent in accuracy and getting better in accuracy. They work well. Are they worth it? They're getting less and less expensive. And so it was interesting because I was, I was sitting at a table during the Become Superhuman event where there were a lot of people who are pretty into tracking their bodies and are kind of in, you know, at the cutting edge of health and fitness. And I think it was, you know, Ray Kronice and Dave Asprey and myself, a couple of other guys, Phil Maffetone, we were all at sushi before one of the after parties on one night and I was looking around the table and like four different people at the table were wearing Fitbits or joggers, Bones or some kind of.

Yeah, I think Ray had a jawbone. Yeah, yeah. Saw a lot of jawbones.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's, it's not a bad looking bracelet. You know, it kind of blends in okay. With most outfits. And, you know, it's, it's kind of cool looking. And you know, a lot of people are using this because they're, they're eating certain ways and seeing what that does to their metabolism or they are, you know, doing certain things before they go to bed and seeing how that affects their sleep. And it is kind of cool if you like to play around with this stuff and get feedback. And if you look on the negative side, sure, maybe you don't want feedback all the time. Maybe you want to be able to unplug. Maybe you don't want something, you know, transmitting a Bluetooth signal all the time on your wrist, you know, and that's up to you. Now, I personally don't use one of these devices. I would say if they ever came out with a device that monitored in real time 24 7. My heart rate variability, which I consider to be a really, really valuable score in terms of giving me some information about how healthy my nervous system is. I would consider using one. I've thought about getting a jawbone up. I'm probably getting closer to getting one just to play around with it. But, you know, ultimately, I'm one of those guys. And I don't know if I've talked about this on the podcast before, but sometimes I get to the end of the day and I've been, like, working with athletes and clients and looking at their power readouts and looking at how many calories they've burned during the day and talking to people about their sleep levels and the amount of time they've been in deep sleep. And by the time I get to the end of the day, I'm kind of sick of all that. And I just want to go out and, you know, basically run. Run it with my. With my shorts and my vibrams through. Through a field of flowers and, you know, skip. Skip naked through the mountains of Austria, you know, but basically just, like, unplug. And so for me, a lot of times, like, I'll get. My wife will see me do this. I'll get to the end of the day and I'll just, like, hop on my mountain bike and just go. Go out for a completely unstructured training session, or, you know, literally, like, go out running in my bare feet or some vibrams and just, like, chill on the trails for a little while, or, you know, go hop in the river and just swim upstream and look at the fish. And, you know, I do quite a bit of that kind of unplugging just because for me, much of the day is spent so plugged in and looking at all this stuff and talking about all this stuff that. But I really do like to unplug. I think some people get this idea that I'm always wearing all these gadgets and tracking this and tracking that and taking all these supplements, and I really do try and keep things pretty simple, especially when it comes to my workouts. Not that I don't recognize the value in a lot of this stuff, but you know what I'm saying? Sometimes I think it's also okay to just unplug.

Yeah. Yeah. I definitely go in cycles where sometimes I. I'm hypervigilant about tracking everything. I'll have the foot pod on and the heart rate monitor and the Garmin and everything going. And then other parts of the season just. It's even seems like a chore to put the garment on. And I probably wouldn't if I wasn't supplying the information to my coach. And it's just so much easier to use the, the Garmin than it is to write down every little variable that I felt during the, during the run or the exercise.

Yeah. And I can tell you the one thing that I, that I do, do, do every day is I do track, I do track heart rate variability every, every single morning. And I talked about that at the conference when I was, when I was on stage talking about the things that are working for me right now. And I do that five minutes cohesion meditation exercise with heart rate variability measurement every single morning. And I think if you had to choose that, but choose between doing something like that and like tracking calories every day with a Fitbit, I would actually choose the form just because it kind of grounds you at the beginning of the day. And I've found that it works pretty well for me. So there you go. Hello, Ben and Barack.

I really enjoy your podcast for all.

Its informative dialogue as well as the humor. I believe that I'm probably one of the minority of your demographic of listeners. I'm a 19 year old female triathlete from Canada. I'm underweight and I'm currently looking to build muscle mass. Currently my BMI is below healthy level.

I was wondering if you could suggest.

Training protocols or methods for a female triathlete that are conducive to building muscle and if there are any hormonal correlations of strength training that would accelerate this process. I know that you've answered questions along these lines in the past, but I.

Would appreciate an answer that's more specific.

To a female triathlete.

Thank you very much for your time.

Bye. I would not say Jen is in the minority. Would you please rock.

No, that's, that's exactly what I was thinking.

Yeah. I mean, you know, if you're. Let's put it this way. What. What female does not kind of want to get good. Go, go after that, that lean and ripped look, but still be, you know, kind of, kind of curvaceous and have muscle and everything. I mean, I think that's, that's a pretty, pretty common desire among female athletes.

And the, and the desire among male athletes. Athletes as well.

Yes, in a different way. You mean the male athletes who are running behind them? Exactly. Or looking at them. Yeah, I mean, you know, when it, when it comes to female athletes, there really is that big issue. Being skinny, fat, being menorheic, kind of losing that, that curvaceous look and just like getting too skinny, you know, I don't think it's an attractive look. I think that a lot of, a lot of girls, girls and women who are out there training for endurance sports especially, I think that you kind of get two problems. You get the women who kind of get that whole estrogen dominance, fluid retention, I'm fat no matter how much I train type of look. And then you get the girls who tend to get this whole skinny, fat, too lean, amenorrheic type of look. So I've got some definite ideas in terms of things that you can do to, to make sure that you can get lean and ripped, stay curvaceous, and not kind of destroy your health or destroy your fertility in the process. While doing endurance sports. The very, very first thing that I would make sure that you focus on is knowing where you're at hormonally. And one of the best ways to do this if you really, if you're a woman and you really want to know where you're at, 24 hour urine steroid test would be the gold standard. And that's something that you can't do through one of these online testing services that you actually have to go into like a naturopathic clinic. And you'll find a lot of naturopathic clinics and in many, many places are going to do this. Jonathan Wright's clinic in Tahoma, Washington. The Tahoma clinic is the, the main clinic that kind of came up with, with this test and a lot of clinics do it now. It's the 24 hour urine steroid test. And you want to see what your estrogen level's at, what your progesterone levels are at, your luteinizing hormone, your follicle stimulating hormone. It's really, really good to get a glance at what you might be deficient in because that can give you a really, really good idea of, you know, are you estrogen dominant, do you have a progesterone deficiency, do you have a testosterone deficiency, luteinizing hormone deficiency? And once you find out what you're deficient in, you can really kind of go after things with a sniper rifle. Like if you're progesterone deficient, you could do something like liposomal progesterone. Or if you are testosterone deficient, you could look at doing something like getting off the pill if you're on the pill. But basically knowing where you're at hormonally is really, really important. If you want to make sure.

Whether.

You'Re male or female, that you're going after the right parameters from a hormone standpoint. If you can't hunt down a 24 hour urine steroid test, there is a performance panel. I will link to it in the show notes. But it does give you a good idea of some of the basic hormones. Testosterone, estrogens, cortisol, kind of three of the biggies, which for both males and females who want to look good, have good fertility, put on muscle, lose fat, you maintain health while doing endurance sports. It's important to test, I test every four months for this stuff. So I'll put a link in the show notes to both of Those tests, the 24 hour urine steroid test, as well as what's called the performance panel, which will at least give you your testosterone, your cortisol, your estrogens. So number one would be to quantify. The next thing that I would do is I would understand the whole concept behind getting strong to stay lean. Getting strong to stay lean. This is a concept again that I talked about at the Become Superhuman event. It's a concept that I like learned from a really excellent book which I'll link to in the show notes. It was written by Dan John and Dan John is a really great strength coach. I believe he's a listener to the podcast too. Hi, Dan, if you're listening in. Hi, Dan. But he has a really good book called Interventions. And in that book he talks about some of the things that he's found that if female athletes can do these things, they're going to have very, very low barriers to staying lean, getting strong. Strong and looking sexy and looking good. A few of the things would be being able to do three pull ups. Three body weight pull ups. Sounds like my dogs are killing each other right now. It's a little bit. Being able to squat your body weight. Okay. So if you're, if you're a female athlete and you weigh 135 pounds, you should be able to squat 135 pounds.

Being able, like on a, on a machine, not just stand and squat.

Well, yeah, with a barbell on your back or you know, kettlebell.

Oh, I see.

Head held your chest in addition to.

Your own body weight.

Right, exactly. So you should be able to take whatever you weigh and you should be able to squat that. You should be able to deadlift to pick up off the ground one and a half times your body weight. One and a half times your body weight. You should be able to walk a farmer's walk, which is just holding away any chance hand you should be able to walk 50ft with half your body weight in each hand. Meaning that if, you know, like I weigh 180 pounds, so I should be able to put a 90 pound dumbbell in each of my hands and walk 50ft.

And a piece of straw in your teeth.

And a piece of straw in my teeth. Because it's farmer's walk. Exactly. Yeah, I, I got that when you said the straw.

Okay, good.

Yeah, you didn't have to explain. So you should be able to do that, the farmer's walk. Like that, the deadlift, the squat, the three pull ups, those are the biggies. I think Dan John in his book talks about bench pressing and I should be able to also bench press close to body weight. But I'm not a fan of bench pressing. I think bench pressing is kind of a silly exercise in most situations. But you should understand this concept behind getting strong to stay lean. And those type of parameters are far more important than how fast you can run a mile or how long you can ride a bike. So based off of that and kind of extrapolating from that, I recommend that female athletes who want to look good, like female endurance athletes, especially who want to stay curvaceous and lean and ripped, you need to lift heavy at least twice a week, full body workout at least twice a week. You can do a whole like five by five protocol where you do, you know, something like a squat, a deadlift, a clean and overhead press and a pull up five reps of each, five sets through. You know, just, just, you know, there's more than one way to skin a cat. If you read my, the program that I wrote to get male and female athletes ripped and looking sexy without getting the whole skinny fat look. My program is@try ripped.com that's another one good one to, to look through. In addition to that book by Dan John, intervention interventions. Going to the program@tri ripped.com would be really helpful as well. So you test your hormones, you lift heavy, understanding that you get strong to stay lean, you limit cardio. This is again something that I mentioned at become superhuman and that is that if you really want to look good, if you really want to maintain hormones, fertility, sexiness, etc. You shouldn't really be running much more than twice a week. And you can, you can maintain good speed and good endurance by doing one high, high intensity interval training session for the run per week. Like a, you know, like a 30 by 30 second full on uphill sprint on the treadmill combined with one mid distance high quality type of Tempo run on the weekends and you could train for, for a triathlon and you know, be doing your biking and your swimming and your heavy lift and easily get away with doing just a couple runs a week if you're doing that type of thing. So limit the amount of running that you do, especially if you're female, because running tends to beat up females and leech bone minerals and cause that hormonal deficit even more than it does in males. Hand in hand with that, something we started off the podcast talking about and that would be to limit the amount of intermittent fasting that you do. I probably don't need to explain that again, but you know, it was the whole estrogen document, dominance drop in luteinizing hormone, drop in testosterone, drop in ovarian weight, just all these things that affect reproduction, fertility and sexiness in females. Intermittent fasting really accelerates that. And so doing these 16 hour fasts, doing the whole if thing, especially when you're combining it with exercise, not a great idea if you're a female and you want to keep your second.

But you're not saying that you should be snacking every two hours either.

No, but what I'm saying is that long periods of caloric restriction send a message to your body to down regulate a lot of that reproductive function that is going to help you to maintain those curves. So I'd be really careful with that too.

So you want to be eating like three meals a day then?

Yeah, I mean, you know, three, three to four solid meals a day. You know, there's no three meals a.

Day and I pre workout snack kind of thing.

Yeah, there's no hard and fast rule, but basically you don't send that frequent message to your body that calories are sparse and then the last thing is.

Or sparse as we say in Canada.

Or sparse as you say in Canada. Last thing for females would be, you know, when it comes to the whole supplementation protocol, naturally assuming that you're not amenorrheic, you're going to be losing more iron than a typical male. And so making sure that you're getting lots of what's called hemi rich iron. And hemi rich iron would be the most bioavailable form of iron that you're going to find in stuff like red meat and poultry and fish egg yolks would be another source. You want to make sure that you're getting that stuff in and you know, combining it with vitamin C can really help with absorption. So you know, making sure that you're getting that along with like Some citrus fruits and you know, you could even like use cast iron pans in your cooking which can help you to absorb iron. You know, some of these non hemey sources of iron are okay too, like you know, beans and peas and seeds and nuts and leafy greens. But generally you're going to want to prioritize some of those heme rich sources of iron. The other thing, and I mentioned this earlier in the podcast, was that that for that bone density, calcium kind of is a horse that gets kicked to death. For female athletes, magnesium though is what's going to help you absorb that calcium. So I recommend that you not only focus on the hemi based iron, but you also focus on good magnesium supplementation. Use some natural calm magnesium, which is like a magnesium citrate source, or use some transdermal magnesium on your muscles. But as a female athlete you should definitely make sure that you go after the stuff that female athletes tend to have issues with and that would be the iron and then the calcium. With an understanding that typically calcium, you get enough from your diet if you're focusing on a lot of these iron rich sources, you just need to make sure that you're not magnesium deficient so you're able to absorb the calcium. If you go over. I've got a bunch of new, what I call packs@pacificfit.net earlier I mentioned the pack that I've got over there which is superstarch plus energy 28 plus master amino pattern. I also have over there the muscle gain pack. And the muscle gain pack is, it's cold processed goat protein which is the deep 30. It is Capra colostrum which is the growth hormone precursor. That's a really, really great way to build muscle fast. And then it's this master amino pattern amino acid. And you know, that's something that a male or a female could take. Three pretty natural supplements, basically just protein amino acids and colostrum that you could include on a daily basis, you know, post workout to kind of enhance muscle repair, muscle recovery, muscle growth. So you know, for those packs I just tried to create a bunch of packs that were the top two or three things I'd do. Like the biggest wins that you could get and then they all include free shipping just because they are shipped as a pack. So I've got the endurance pack, the fat loss pack, the muscle gain pack, recovery pack, the injury pack, the detox pack, the anti aging pack, the brain pack and the sleep pack. But the muscle gain pack would be one to look into for, for her as well. So so yeah, that would, that would be what I would do if I were Jenna and I wanted to, to look like the Incredible Hulk.

The, the sexy lean one.

Exactly. Exactly.

So cool. Well, that wraps it up for this week. Make sure tonight, March 13th at. Did you say 6 or is it at 5:30pm Pacific?

It was gonna be at 5:30 and then, you know, it's hard when you got three people trying to get together.

But yeah, it's so 6pm Tonight on March 13th. If you're listening to the show right. Right away, you'll have to tune in tonight or watch it on spreecast a little bit later on. Make sure you go to audiblepodcast.com ben to get your free audio book and make sure to send us your audio questions about eating low carb so we can use them on the Living La Vida low carb podcast when we guest host in a few weeks. Anything else?

If, if you miss the conference, you suck. No, but, but stay, stay tuned because I'm, I've got like, I literally have a, a crap ton of SD cards on my desk right now. With every single recorded lecture that took place, it becomes superhuman. I also have all, all the slides. And so what I'm going to do for folks is I'm going to create like the, the high, high resolution videos. I'm going to have the slides available for each video. I'll totally make it, you know, affordable or whatever. And you know, two to four weeks from now, I should have all that available for you to be able to just log in and download. If I'm really on top of things, I may even get it on some, some DVDs that you could get shipped to your house or whatever. But, but stay tuned. If you miss the conference, I'll be sure that I, that I hook you up with some, some way that you can, that you can at least get some of the magic. Even though it's, it's not going 30% of the magic. Yeah. It does not include Brock doing inebriated pirouettes at the after party. So you'll just have to show up next year for that.

Never to be repeated. Never to be.

All right, well, I guess that wraps it up. Check out BenGreenfieldFitness.com and of course also check out the my list for this episode over@mylist.com BenGreenfield and on the my list, I'll put everything I linked to, you know, the, the Dan John Book Tri Ripped, the Muscle Gain Pack, the, the Moxie Monitor and the, the deer getting their antlers hacked off. So poor deer.

At first glance, triathletes appear to be a pretty fit group, at least with clothes on. But it's pretty common for triathletes to have tiny arms, a thin and weak neck, a stick like midsection, and a body that's just too skinny. But just imagine if your arms were cut and defined. Your chest and shoulders were ripped, your waistline was tapered like a V, your stomach was flat and hard, and your legs were sleek and curvaceous. In other words, what if you had the ultimate triathlon body? Now you can learn how to swim, bike and run fast and look incredibly sexy doing it. Go to tririppd.com to start today. That's tririppd.com.