5 Ways To Get Better at Pull-Ups, Natural Gym Bag Deodorants, Maintaining Muscle When Fasting and Much More!

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast, 5 Ways to get better at Pull Ups Natural gym bag deodorants, Maintaining muscle when fasting, Acne during pregnancy, how to exercise with a foot stress fracture, Recovery tips for eye surgery and.

Nutrition for liver bilirubin 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 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 BenGreenfield Fitness.com.

You want to play a game of who had the Better Big ass Salad?

Who had the better Big ass salad? Well, we should probably tell our listeners that we aren't recording this at our usual 8am ish timeframe. So we don't have salads for breakfast, but we are sometimes.

Do I throw some eggs on top of some spinach? Quite often I kind of have a.

Salad pulverized in a blender, to tell you the truth. But for lunch. Yeah, we're recording this later on in the day and I just finished my big ass salad I had a couple hours ago. I guarantee mine, mine destroyed yours, but you go first. What'd you have?

Okay, I had some cabbage and some peppers, like those little tiny peppers all chopped up, some broccoli, some sardines, of course, some olives and actually, I think that was it.

My salad destroys your salad.

Okay, bring it on.

I had, I had basically like a kimchi fermented cabbage carrot mix with tomatoes and jalapeno peppers over a bed of spinach with some extremely dense extra virgin olive oil sprinkled on top of that. And I'll talk about extra virgin olive oil and the very cool things that I've found out lately about extra virgin olive oil in our podcast. And then did you find out that.

They'Re not really a virgin?

It's not really a virgin. Grass fed. I heard she goes all the way grass fed. Ground beef on top of that and homemade horseradish from our horseradish root over top of the ground beef for a little kick, a little spice, sprinkled that with some sea salt and black pepper and then topped all of that off with some avocado, some liver pate.

I forgot I had avocado too. Oops, missed that one.

Some homemade liver pate, a little bit of seaweed nori rice or seaweed nori wraps to wrap that all up. In and then some flaxseed crackers for crunch.

That's just ridiculous. You went too far.

It was so nutrient dense.

Too much.

And then I had dessert after lunch, too. And for that, I had a few tablespoons of coconut milk with dark chocolate powder stirred into that and organic unsweetened coconut flakes and cacao nibs stirred into that. So I just polished off about 1500 calories, and I'm ready to rock and roll a podcast.

I had a cup of black coffee after my salad. Boo.

New splashes.

Now.

Every single day, Ben pours over. I believe it's 50,000 different studies that arrive in his inbox, in his mailbox, and on his desk. And at the end of pouring through those 50,000 studies, he comes out with a few tweets and a few Facebook posts. And this is the time where we talk about them.

I think you're exaggerating.

5,000.

I think I wouldn't have time to eat my big ass salad if it was 50,500. Yeah. I have some things that I found in the news this week that I want to talk about. And last week we talked about five exercises you could do in your car to stay really fit. And lo and behold, our friends over at Mark's Daily Apple followed up with 11 surprisingly effective exercises you can do without being that guy in the office. And I thought some of these were pretty cool. You want to hear some of them?

I'm really hoping there's something that involves a staircase, because that's what I've been doing at the office lately, and I've been getting a lot of funny looks. I'm definitely that guy. I come back from the staircase all sweaty.

Yep. So there a few of the tips are. Try walking the stairs while carrying something heavy, like a box of printer paper.

Nice.

And skip a step or two as you climb to turn a simple loaded stairwalk into a walking staircase. Lunge or even hold the paper. Overhead stair jumps.

That sounds kind of dangerous. Actually, though, holding the paper way over your head.

It's just paper, dude. Have you box of paper kettlebell?

Yeah, a kettlebell at least has a handle.

Oh, we got to get you strong, man. A box of paper. It's heavy. Oh, a whole box. I guess I'm thinking more like a.

Not a ream, but like. Like a box has like 12 reams in it.

Yeah, we're talking about squeezing in a workout when you can't squeeze in a traditional workout. What else does he have on there? Faux sitting. Engage your glutes and Raise yourself up in your chair by about an inch so you're hovering over your chair in a squat position. That's a good one by the way. That one works really well. If you are taking a crap and you want to do it in a slightly ancestral squat position and you're, you know, wherever at an airport or somewhere where you can't like hop up on the toilet, that engaging your glutes and raising yourself up in the chair actually works. Kind of squeezes stuff out of you or back in. Just be careful if you're doing it at the office. Elevated sits where you grip either side of the chair and hold your body up off the chair about an inch or so and then see if you can turn it into an L. Sit either under your desk or off to the side and you can stack some books on your lap to increase resistance. I like that one. How about he's got a bunch in here? Desk lifting Lift your desk ever so slightly and hold it until your biceps can't take anymore. Wow. Nice. I'm not sure if no no one would notice the computer and paper and folder sliding off your desk, but it's worth a try. I actually do that one when I'm in a hotel room. I do that with the bed. I do deadlifts with the bed. So you just basically pick it up and then use your back and your butt and put it down. Actually, it's a good little way to do some heavy deadlifts in your hotel room. What else does he have in here? How about resistance band shoulder abductions where you keep a resistance band in your office? And this was based on the results of a recent study that basically had two groups of office workers who had neck and shoulder pain and they had one group do resistance band shoulder abductions where you're just using a resistance band that's attached to something that's not going to move and kind of abducting your shoulder or taking it out and away from your body for just two minutes a day for 10 weeks? And in the exercise group, complaints of neck and shoulder pain dropped by 40% while their strength increased 6%, and they saw no such effect in the control group.

I like how their complaints dropped. They were afraid to complain.

Is that the case? They were no longer complaining about their boss being a pain in the neck. So we'll link to the entire article over in the show notes for this episode@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 277 but a good little follow up to our discussion last week on exercises you can do in your car. Speaking of cars, here's a good segue. Let's talk about oil. You like that? Yeah, Coconut oil. I like this one. They did a study on rats. And I know rats are not just tiny humans, but they made the rats arthritic. So I would never want to be the participant in the study that is made arthritic. But basically they induced inflammation into the joints of these rats and then they gave them what in humans would be considered about one to one and a half grams of coconut oil. And that's around a nice little tablespoon of coconut oil. They used an extra virgin coconut oil and they compared the effects of that on arthritis and inflammation with a non steroidal anti inflammatory drug. And that would be something like an IVIL or an ivil, an Advil or an ibuprofen. And what they found was a significant reduction in inflammatory marker over and above what was experienced in the nonsteroidal anti inflammatory group in the group that was using coconut oil. Wow, Soso, there you go. There's a great use for coconut oil. And actually later on in this podcast, I actually want to mention another interesting fact about coconut oil. But for now, know that if you have joint pain, if you have arthritis, if maybe you've been really beat up by a workout the day before and you've got some stiffness and soreness or swelling, coconut oil could be your friend.

It's only a tablespoon too. That's not even that much.

Only a tablespoon. Yeah, not too much. Good for satiating your appetite and all sorts of other good things too. You throw it in your coffee. Here's another cool fact about oil. Olive oil. So if you want to minimize what's called hepatic lipid production, which is, yeah, hepatic lipid production is just not fun. It's horrible. When you're laid up with some hepatic lipid production, that's basically the other day it smelt bad. Like when you eat a sugary meal, your liver is actually a fat production machine and can take some of that sugar and produce it into fats. And that's why fat free licorice, for example, isn't really fat free. And neither is popcorn by the way. Anyways, though, speaking of things you can eat at the movies that are supposed to be fat free, anyways, though, olive oil can actually minimize hepatic lipid production. And this was based off a recent study that was done at a university that showed the use of an an extra virgin olive oil and the Polyphenols specifically in that extra virgin olive oil to be able to inhibit that lipid production. So what this means is that maybe if you're eating a more say, carb intensive meal, like potatoes or rice, you probably wouldn't want to dip licorice in extra virgin olive oil. It might taste okay on popcorn. Actually, I haven't tried it on popcorn yet. But a lot of good uses for extra virgin olive oil. And I'll link of course to these studies in the show notes. But downregulation of lipid synthesis was a cool effect. And just two days ago, my shipment of extra virgin olive oil arrived. And I was pretty stoked about that. I think I've mentioned on the podcast before that every quarter I get three bottles of extra virgin olive oil from this company called the Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club. And I get these three bottles shipped to my house. And this stuff is absolutely amazing club.

Less interesting than the Chess Club?

No, like it comes to virgin olive oil Club. Dude, listen, it comes with this brochure that breaks down exactly, you know, the farms, the families, the presses where these olive oils came from, the notes and the flavors for everything. You know, everything from like notes of kale and chocolate and vanilla. And you know, how many tannins are in the olive oil and the mouthfeel of the olive oil, what type of flavors it will bring out in food. And they break down each of these oils. It's very, very similar to a wine club without the alcohol effects. So it's called the Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club. I'll link to it in the show notes. And it actually is like a club. You sign up, you pay, but it's fun. Like this month or this quarter shipment was from Spain, and I opened the first bottle a couple days ago. It's what I had on my big ass salad for lunch. And the olive oil color is like dark green gold with flecks of green in it. And I swear this olive oil tastes just like kale, Almost like a kale pesto. It's crazy. So it's basically this guy that goes around the world, he finds the best extra virgin olive oils. He makes sure that they are completely free of rancidity and toxins and that they're not like these substandard stale oils that wind up in our grocery stores labeled with extra virgin olive oil, but really old and stale and not fresh and not pure. And he ships them straight to your house. And it's just fun. So cool. Way to stay healthy with olive oil. And it turns out that it helps you when you have carbs to have some olive oil along with those carbs to shut down hepatic liver production.

So I'll be really disappointed if that guy doesn't look a lot like the Dos Equis most interesting man in the world.

He actually looks kind of cool. He's got like a fedora and like this, this goatee. And you know, he's, he's slightly plump. He could probably do a less of the carbs and a little bit more of the olive oil or maybe just a little bit less rich Italian meals in general. But he looks happy on the brochure that I get. So there you go. And I'll link to that one in the show notes too for anybody who wants to join the fresh pressed olive oil club. And then finally, this one came across my radar this week. I work with a lot of athletes whose blood RBC count that I test and then also the ferritin, the iron storage protein. And a lot of folks really are borderline anemic, especially endurance athletes based on our red blood cell turnover, and especially female endurance athletes when you combine red blood cell turnover with a monthly loss of blood. And what that means is that iron can be a helpful thing for some athletes to supplement with. But the problem is that most forms of iron are constipating, which can be pretty annoying. And I have in the past on the podcast recommended this stuff called Floradix that is ferritin pyrophosphate, but it's better at restoring the levels of iron storage protein ferritin than it is at upregulating iron. And so while it, while it does have a pretty good effect for like kind of athletic anemia type symptoms, the problem is that some people have adequate levels of ferritin, the body's iron storage protein, but low levels of iron. So this is this new form of iron, it's made by a company called Thorne Research, it's called iron bisglycinate and it's a non constipating, well absorbed form of iron that assists with red blood cell formation but doesn't cause those type of uncomfortable constipation issues that other forms of iron, like say iron picolinate, is one popular one. There's a bunch of different iron forms that are out there chelated to different minerals, but iron bisglycinate, which is an amin acid bound form of iron, is far better absorbed. And I'll link to the notes about this over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 277 but for those of you who are interested in iron, this is a good one. So check it out.

Special announcements.

So y' all Texas, y'?

All?

Heck, yeah. Got my sharpshooters, my. What do you call them? The. The six.

10 gallon hat.

Yeah, 10 gallon hat.

Oh, your six shooter.

My six shooter. My six shooter. That's right.

Actually, as far as I know, Austin is probably the least cowboy place in the world, isn't it? It's filled with, like, software developers and musicians.

Yeah. And since I just got done watching Dallas Buyers Club, all I can think of when I think of Texas now are skinny people with. With chronic debilitating HIV disease walking around. Bummer. Anyways, though, that's not what I'm going to Austin for Paleo fx. Jessa and I are going down there. We're going to be presenting on everything from ancestral athlete tactics to fermenting food to biohacking stress. I'm on a Mastermind panel for fueling workouts, another one on primal strength and conditioning concepts. A lot of different things. And Jess is doing a live cooking demo. I know that at this point, since this thing is next week, April 11th through the 13th.

Holy smokes.

A lot of folks might not be able to make it down there, but they just announced that they're going to live stream it. So you could watch, for example, any of my sessions or like Jessa's cooking demo or anything, no matter where you live. So I have got a link for that. I put it up over in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 277 so you can check that out. And then if you live in Austin or you want to register and you want to get full tickets, or you just want to get expo tickets, which means you can just swing by and kind of walk through the Expo, which is kind of cool. There's like food demos, and when you're on the expo floor, you still get access to, for example, the cooking demos. There's like, you know, a chance to try out new weight training equipment and club bells and kettlebells and stuff like that. You can get expo tickets, too, so I'll put a link to those as well over in the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 277. And that is Paleo FX in Austin.

Before other people get a chance to ask this question, I'm going to ask it right now. You may not know the answer, but if you get the live stream feed, do you have to watch it live or can you watch it later?

I'm pretty sure you get downloads later. Kind of like we did with the Superhuman event, so. Yep, exactly. So, yeah, good stuff. So if you live in Australia, you don't have to be up at like 4am or whatever watching someone talk about how important sleep is. So next up, the book ships in about a week. My brand new Beyond Training book. And I've decided that I want to give a little gift to folks who decide they want to grab a copy of Beyond Training for their family or their friends or their loved ones. Or maybe just an extra copy as a paperweight. Yeah. Or for your gym or for your personal trainer or whatever. So what I'm doing is if you go out to any bookstore, and the reason that I'm saying this, rather, I mean, like you could order multiple copies off Amazon. That's cool too. But by going to a bookstore, you amp up the ability for this thing to hit the New York Times bestseller and you support your local economy.

Crafty.

So if you can go and you can upload a photo of you holding more than one copy of the brand new Beyond Training book and please buy it, don't go to the bookstore and like walk into the book aisle and grab a couple copies and hold them up and take a selfie. That would not be cool.

Or if you're really good at Photoshop, don't cheat.

But over@beyondtrainingbook.com photo that's beyondtrainingbook.com photo there's this upload button and you just upload a photo of you with more than one copy. And if you already bought a copy off of Amazon or whatever, that's okay, go hunt down another and make a friend by giving it to them. You can. When you upload that photo, you'll automatically get your email entered in to get insider access to a free two hour live video workshop that I'm doing a month after the book comes out to answer all of your questions about materials in the book. Because I know it's a big book, it's 500 plus pages of content. And so I'm gonna give you a chance to get your questions answered. So two hour live support video workshop. When you uplo a photo of you holding more than one copy of Beyond Training Book and you upload it over@BeyondTrainingBook.com.

Photo so you gotta buy the book and read it really quickly, formulate a bunch of questions and get ready for the. For the two hour chance to ask those questions.

That's right. And then the last thing is that tomorrow the men's health contest ends. So over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com MensHealth you can vote for yours truly to be launched as Men's Health top trainer. So it ends tomorrow. I think we're pretty neck and neck with some of the other top guys in there. I think it's maybe I honestly didn't look today, but I think it's I.

Just blindly click the vote button and move along. I haven't looked at what everybody else is doing.

Me and one other guy are like right around 800 votes. So if you can go in there and just rock the vote, if you hear this podcast right when it comes out on April 2nd or April 3rd, go do it. If you already voted, you can go vote again. Like, you could vote every day if you wanted to, but at this point, if you just so happen to hear this podcast right when it comes out, go rock the vote. So I have no clue what happens after you rock the vote, but I.

Don'T give you any indication what you're going to do.

I think it's going to involve me running down the beach into a sunset on the COVID of the next Men's Health magazine. And that's well worth it.

Finally, a second 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 family 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 innercircle We'll see you inside. Listener Q and A.

Greetings, Ben and Brock. This is Phil in Chicago, but today, actually, I'm calling on behalf of my wife who has a question about push ups and pull ups. She's very fit. She does cardio every day and weights fairly frequently. But over the years she's struggled with being able to complete a proper push up and proper pull up. And I understand that this is sometimes an issue for women, but of course it also affects everyone. So perhaps you might be able to recommend some exercises that might help people develop the strength to complete a proper pull up and push up. It would be Very useful for us. Thank you for putting on a great show. I look forward to listening to all the shows down the line.

Thanks. Well, I've found that the best way to get my wife better at push ups and pull ups is I put on my army fatigues and then I bring her out to the backyard and just basically stand there and bark orders at her and tell her to get down and do another and. And then call her horrible names that.

We can't say on the screen, spray.

Cold water in her face with a garden hose and get her to do pull ups. And yeah, I find that verbal and physical abuse is generally one of the better ways to really strengthen your better half into being able to do a proper push up or proper pull up. But there you go, Phil, should that not be an option to you and should that have the potential of winding you up in the doghouse? I've got some other tips for you. So let's start with pull ups, shall we?

Yeah, cool. I love pull ups.

I love them. Okay, so pull ups, the idea is that you want to strengthen some of the rhomboids, the scapular elevators and retractors, the rotator cuff and some of the muscles that are going to help you do a pull up. And there's kind of a sequence of a few different exercises that I would recommend that you use for this before you progress to really even focusing too much on pull ups. So first of all, I would start with bent over dumbbell rows. So this is where you just bend over. You can do it with a dumbbell, you can do it with a friggin bucket, you can do it with a kettlebell, you can do it with a heavy medicine ball with handles. But that's a really good way to risk free, especially if you're just getting started out to really strengthen those particular muscles that are going to be responsible for helping you do a pull up. So that would be step one, if you're just starting from square one. If you're not starting from square one, you can jump into this next exercise right off the bat. And that's a horizontal row. So what that means, or horizontal pull up is another name for it. Now you can get one of these, one of these perfect pull up bars. I have one hanging in the door of my office.

And, and that's actually what it's called. It's the perfect pull up bar.

Yeah, exactly.

You're not just embellishing.

It's. Yeah, exactly. It is perfect. It is completely perfect. Perfect, sinless, holy pull up bar. Anyways, though I have it hanging from the door of my office. But a lot of people don't realize you can swing it down and put it into a horizontal pull up position. And of course you can also do horizontal pull ups. Like at the gym, you can take a barbell and set it on the rack. Down at the appropriate level for most folks is about the level of your hips, like your hip bone. And then you get into a horizontal position and you do horizontal pull because that means you're pulling up usually about 60 to 70% of your body weight versus your full body weight. And you're able to use your legs to help you do the pull up. So that would be kind of like the next step exercise to get really good at. After you've gotten those retractors really strong, doing something like bent over dumbbell rows. And then you'd move on to the next step, which would be assisted pull ups. Now there's a variety of ways you can do assisted pull ups. You can use the assisted pull up machine at the gym, which is a machine that counteracts your weight with a helpful weight. You can do assisted pull ups with an exercise band. For example, you could go to like the Rogue fitness website and get one of their big monster exercise bands. And you can actually just hang that from the pull up bar and your knees kind of go into that band. So you're hanging, but you've got that exercise band and the elasticity from that exercise band helping you to pull yourself up. If you don't have an assisted pull up machine or a band or even like a partner to help you do the pull up, you can also just use like a chair, so you've got a little bit of support here and there that you can use to push off of as you do the pull up. So that would be kind of like the third level as you go from horizontal pull up to assisted pull up. And then you'd move into a really good strategy for both push ups and pull ups. And that's a negative. So you jump up there on the pull up bar, you get as high as you're able to get. Hopefully by jumping, you can almost get your chin above the bar and then you lower yourself as slowly as possible.

Yep.

And that's a really good way to build up a lot of back strength and arm strength. And it works for like a bench press. Like if you want to get stronger, the bench press, you just load up the bench. And for this one, you got to have a spotter, you got to have a partner. Help you and you just lower a very, very heavy weight more than you would normally be able to lift to your chest. And then your partner helps you lift that weight back up. Works for push ups too. Like doing a super slow push up in a full push up position. If you can't do a regular push up and then you drop your knees to the floor and you push yourself back up to the start position. And then you get back into a standard position and lower yourself slowly so that, that's called a negative. So negative works really well. And then finally, after you've knocked out your dumbbell rows, you've gotten good at those. You've gotten good at horizontal pull ups, you've gotten good at assisted pull ups, you've gotten good at those negative pull ups. Finally you progress to a regular chin up and a regular pull up. And I'm a huge fan of the greasing the groove concept, so I can do lots of pull ups. Like I'm really good at pull ups now and I rarely do pull ups during my workout. I just have that pull up bar in the door of my office. And greasing the groove means that every time I walk underneath that bar, I do five. That's my rule now. And I average somewhere between 50 and 60 pull ups a day using that scenario. And it's just really great. And it kind of keeps your body pumped, keeps the metabolism elevated and it's a really good way to go. So kind of enable yourself to have a pull up bar around 247 or I guess the other option is maybe you could use one of these things that we recently talked about, those monkey bars. Did you see that post I did over at Ben Grateful Fitness on these new monkey bars?

It's like a mo n K I I bars.

Yeah, it's. If you go over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com the recent post on how to make your workout wild. These are pretty cool because you just sling them around a tree and you can just like do a pull up, you know, hanging from a, from a high tree branch, something like that, with handles. So that's the pull up component. As far as the push up component, obviously those negative push ups that I just talked about are definitely useful. A few other things. Here's a cool trick for getting better at pushups. The the staircase progression. So how this works is anytime that your hands are higher than your feet, the pull up is going to be easier. So you could, for example, push up. Yeah, the push up is going to be easier. So you could start with your hands on like the bottom of a staircase. You get your feet at the bottom of the staircase, your hands on the highest step that you can reach with your arms out in front of you. And you do a push up in that position. And then eventually you move your legs back and you do it on just the fourth step with your hands on the fourth step. And then as you get stronger, you progress to the third step and then the second step. And then eventually you're on the stair that's just higher than the main floor. And then eventually your hands are parallel to your feet and that's a really good little pattern that you can do. So you just crank out a few on the fifth stair. And then as you get stronger the next week, maybe you progress to the fourth stair, the next week to the third stair. But that's a, that's a really good one. In addition to using the, using the negatives, the other tip that I give you as far as push ups go are these handles that can make push ups a lot easier, especially if wrists tend to be a weak factor for you, which I know a lot of. That's a lot of the time. You know, women just have thinner wrists, thinner bone structures in their wrist. My wife complains about that a lot. So we have these pull up or these push up handles. So the ones that we use are called perfirmer handles. And actually in our recent inner circle workshop, I was demonstrating a few different exercises you can do with this for kind of swimsuit season. But they're just a set of push up handles that look like any push up handles that you put on the floor. Like the perfect push up handle or whatever. But they've got wheels on the bottom of them that make the push up handle if you wanted it to be unstable. Now there's an option to lock out the wheels and just have a stable push up service, but a stable push up surface. But once you get strong you can, you can enable the wheels and they kind of roll around a little bit while you're trying to do your push up and activate way more muscles. And you can do other exercises with them like roll outs and flies and stuff like that. But that's another good one is, is those, those are@aperFIRMER.com like performer except with an I. Creative, huh?

Very clever of those guys.

Yeah, so, so check that stuff out over@BenGreenLefitness.com 277 I'll put a link to one of my favorite or the perfect pull up bar that I have in the door of my office and those are some of the directions that I would go.

Interestingly enough, I actually saw a post earlier today about the Nehar Fonuni the that does a whole bunch of workout videos and stuff. She actually posted six steps to a better chin up.

Oh, nice.

We should girl gone strong.com if we.

Get a chance, we should toss that article link up in the show notes. So for sure.

Yeah, she's awesome. And not only is she like hella strong, but she's hot, hot, hot.

Hello, Ben and Brock, this is Jim from Florida and I have a, I guess a more humorous question, but I'm hoping that you all could come up with some ways to help me clean my fitness gear. It just stinks. The moment moisture hits some of my riding gear or my running gear or my yoga gear, it just stinks. So maybe some natural ways to kind of soak things. Any different solutions or whatever you guys have come up with would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much. Love the show.

I don't think Jim has ever smelt my hockey bag. If he wants to know how smelly gear can get. Hockey gear is by far the smelliest.

Yeah, my bag just smells like chlorine. Because I, I don't, I don't really have like a gym bag that has a lot of sweaty equipment in it. I guess when I used to play a lot of tennis, I had one of those big old tennis bags full of old socks and shoes and nasty reeky things.

But the awesome thing about a hockey bag is you finish playing, throw all your wet stuff into the bag, and then you throw it in your trunk and it's usually like minus 20, minus 30 out. So it just freezes, stays in there till the next game. You pull it out, it thaws as you put it on and you just, you basically recycling your sweat game after game after game.

It's boom.

Quite a magical sensation.

So just get a chest freezer gym done. Exactly. So a few things I can recommend to you. One of the things that I use quite frequently that especially I travel with is a powder that's like a deodorant powder. Now this one is made out of arrowroot baking soda, clay, and then it has a bunch of essential oils added into it. It's got sage, tea tree oil, clove bay, and I think those are the main ones that are infused into this arrowroot baking soda mix. So it's this powder that's marketed as a foot powder, but I do everything from like sprinkling it into My boxers before I go on, like, a long airplane ride to putting into my shoes after I work out to, like, when I'm. When I've been traveling and I've got dirty clothes and I haven't washed them and they're going to get tossed into my suitcase. I don't want my whole suitcase to get all nasty. What I'll do is I'll put the dirty clothes in, like, one of the plastic. Plastic bags from the hotel room and sprinkle a bunch of this stuff in there and then just like, tie up the bag and toss it in the suitcase. And it almost, like, absorbs a lot of the smell. And it's pretty antibacterial, too. So there's some effective bacterial and fungal defense as well. So that stuff is called Cool Feet and it's made by a company called Hammer Nutrition. So that's one option. Another option is don't be misled by.

The fact that it's made by Hammer Nutrition. Do not mix it up with water and drink it.

Well, the cool thing is you probably could and you wouldn't get that sick. Not that I have that rule for.

Just a little tummy.

All my personal care products, like, I should be able to consume them without dying. That's my little rule. So. So there's that. And then you could also make something very similar to that. I'm not going to give away the farm here, but my wife did, like, an hour and a half long course over on our Creative Live that we did down in San Francisco. So it's like an HD video course on how to make a bunch of your own personal care and cleaning supplies and stuff. And one of the things that she makes in there is a natural deodorant, and that's a powder. But if you wanted to make like a deodorizing, say, like a disc that you could. I mean, these are similar to the discs that they, like, toss in the urinals, you know, in men's bathrooms, in public places, places those are not actually giant mints. They are. They're kind of. Yeah, they're peacocks. But this kind of looks similar to those. But they're pretty easy to make. All you need is a couple of cups of baking soda and then 1 to 2 cups of water and then some essential oil, like lavender. Essential oil is good. Mint is another nice one, like a lemon or a citrus. Essential oil is good, too. And you can get essential oils off like. Like that if they're not meant for human consumption. You can just. You don't have to get them all organic and everything. You just get them off Amazon if you're going to consume them. Or perhaps eat your deodorizing discs, which I wouldn't recommend. You may want to go certified organic, in which case I'd use Mountain Rose Herbs is who we use for those. Those type of oils. But anyways, what you do is you add about three to four drops of the essential oil to about a half a cup of water, and then you pour that water, oil mix into your 2 cups of baking soda and you continue to add water until you get up to the full 1 1/2 to 2 cups of water or so, basically until you get a really kind of a thick paste. So once it turns into a thick paste, you take that mixture and you just put it into a bunch of. Of like the muffin pan molds. You know what I'm talking about? Like what you'd make.

You're making little baking soda cupcakes.

Yeah. And you don't put in the refrigerator, the freezer or anything. You just basically set it out and you let it dry. And after about a day, those are completely hardened. And that's a deodorant. Like you can drop that into a gym bag or use it as like a natural deodorizing disc pretty much anywhere. And it works. And just baking soda, essential oil and water. So there you go. You can make a bunch at once. Keep, you know, get a glass jar, keep them in a glass jar and your, you know, bathroom cupboard or your. Or your pantry or whatever. And, you know, that's another option. That's what I go with. And then.

So that's just for throwing into a bag that's not for rubbing on your body.

I wouldn't rub that on your body. No, no. But he's looking for ways to kind of clean his gear out. I mean. Yeah, like that.

I just wanted to clarify that.

That cool feet stuff, I do sometimes sprinkle that on my chest or in my armpit because it works for that as well. The last thing is those action wipes. I use that to wipe down my gear and wipe down my body. The. No offense intended, but the way I've heard it described is Mexican shower.

We call it a French shower.

Yeah, there you go. So you just. We all have our own offensive racist slurs.

We're all racist in different ways.

So you just wipe your body down with one of these action wipes, especially in the stinky spots. And, you know, I've done that before when I've been at conferences and stuff. And I'm like sneaking up to my hotel room to do a quick body weight workout, you know, like the, the seven minute New York Times workout. And you get a little bit sweaty, but not so sweaty that you want to jump in the shower or you don't want to get dressed and undressed. So you just use one of these action wipes to wipe yourself down. And those work pretty well too. It's just like tea tree oil and some other essential oils similar to the essential oils that I've already talked about, but they're just on almost like a baby wipe that stays really moist and wipe yourself down and you're.

I love those things. I always have those at finish lines of races. I throw those in my checked bag.

Yep, exactly. So, so helpful. Immediately you're, you're ready to hit the clubs and go straight into sweet smelling spa mode right after your workout or your race or whatever else you're, you're doing. So there you go, Jim. You are now unstinkified.

Hi Ben, my name is Mark and I have a question. I just began intermittent fasting to try to lose some body fat. I'm going to try to go from 20 to 10 if I can and I'm doing a daily 16 hour fast with putting all my calories into eight hours. My question is my workouts are very irregular due to my work schedule and sometimes I have to work out early in the morning morning, which is typically my fasting time. Is it better to have a whey protein shake after my workouts to maintain my muscle or would it be better to continue the fast and give up a little bit of muscle to cut more fat? Thank you, great podcast. Keep up the good work.

I've been kind of wondering the same.

Thing, whether you should have a protein serving after a fasted workout.

Yeah, there was a lot of when especially when you and I were doing the mass made simple thing, it was basically like just keep, keep the protein flowing at all times. But then when I stopped doing that, it was sort of like, well, I want to, I want to lose some weight, but I don't want to lose the muscle.

Yeah, exactly. So I mean when, when dosed during and in your insulin sensitive workout window, whey protein, which would normally be pretty ins. Insulinogenic, meaning it could cause an insulin spike and potentially lead to mobilization of sugars into the liver to get converted into fatty acids or potential for like a little bit of insulin insensitivity. That doesn't happen if you take it in, for example, right after a workout so kind of going into protein mode post workout is, in most cases, especially if your goal is building or maintaining muscle, pretty prudent. Of course, some people take this way out of control and consume way too much protein. You know, for. For most folks, I haven't found any benefit in any literature for going above and beyond about 0.7 to 0.8 grams per pound, and for the average person, about 0.55 grams per pound. And for most people, that comes out.

Per pound of body weight.

Per pound of body weight. So that comes out to like 20 to 30% of your daily protein intake or your daily calorie intake is protein. And that's about as much as you need. But there are, there are a few things that you can do to ensure that if you're doing intermittent fasting, compressed feeding windows, whatever you want to call it, that you are not putting yourself at risk of losing muscle if you're doing workouts that are outside of that feeding window, or if you don't want to have to be hustling to get breakfast in right away so that you don't lose muscles. Muscle. One of the things that's really prudent to do is to make sure that you exercise with high blood levels of amino acids. The cool thing about that is that also helps you stave off central nervous system fatigue. It essentially competes for some tryptophan that would normally enter your brain and cause fatigue. When you've got a full spectrum of amino acids going into your body, you inhibit some of that tryptophan entry or the binding of tryptophan to its receptors in neural tissue. So that can help stave off fatigue. High blood levels of amino acids can help to keep your brain from shutting down your muscles. It can help to keep your muscle fibers and the amino acids present in those fibers from being broken down for use as a fuel. So I'm a big fan of just using a whole amino acid Source. Usually about 5 to 10 grams for each hour that you're going to work out is sufficient. So that means if you are a morning fasted workout person and your morning fasted workout is actually tough, you would do like a master amino pattern is what I use. There are other forms of amino acids out there, but what's important is to look at the label and make sure that it's not just branched chain amino acids. So it's not just leucine, isoleucine, and valine. You want all eight amino acids. In some cases it's nine, depending on what nutritionist you Ask. But you want basically a full spectrum of amino acids, what are called essential amino acids or whole amino acids versus branched chain amino acids. So that's one thing that I would do and you would still be able to maintain kind of fat burning in that scenario. I know a lot of people are also turning to this kind of like bulletproof regimen where they're doing medium chain triglycerides, which actually are a really good way to keep your body in fat burning mode while still giving yourself some source of energy, like readily usable, easily digestible form of energy. And they're doing like a bulletproof coffee approach where they'll put medium chain triglycerides into coffee, sometimes a little bit of butter for that butyric acid component. And then some people are doing collagen now in that. And the cool thing about that is that's going to act pretty similarly to these amino acids that I just, just talked about. So for example, I know over on the bulletproof coffee website they sell this upgraded collagen stuff. And collagen is pretty cool for anti aging because it really assists with like hair, skin, nail formation, that type of thing.

But it also get it injected into your lips.

Yep, exactly. Get that Angelina Jolie look, the collagen and the Botox Boom. So that's what they should do. Upgraded Botox, Yeah. Anyways though, that stuff is pretty good because they source it from pasture raised cows that don't get touched by drugs and hormones and they're grass fed. And it's an enzymatically processed collagen that leaves the actual protein peptides intact. So it doesn't have this really strong gelatinous taste that a lot of collagen sources have. But it still gives you those benefits of being able to maintain anabolism or at least decrease the breakdown of muscle while you're in a fasted state. So if you're one of those people doing like the, the bulletproof coffee type of approach, what you could do is like add this collagen to your coffee. Or even better yet, so you don't damage it, just stir it in right after you finish blending your coffee. Alternatively you could just do your coffee and then, you know, chew on five or ten of these master amino pattern capsules. Kind of a couple ways you could skin the cat there. Doing both isn't going to hurt you, but I think it'd be a bit, little, little excessive. So I just do one or the other. And then the other thing that I like to encourage folks to do if they are fasting and they want to kind of keep their body from getting into almost like an acidic catabolic state is to use like a lower calorie greens source, like a concentrated greens powder.

Or greens replacement greens drinks. But yeah, like just straight up green.

Powder, not like alcohol athletic greens or super greens or any of these greens powders. But I especially like this for the folks who are doing like 24 hour fasts, which can be a pretty good fat loss strategy if you do it just one or two times a month. But what I'll have folks who do that do is some green tea or some caffeine and then some amino acids again to stave off too much catabalization of muscle and then some greens to maintain ph and to give the body some dense sources of nutrients in the absence of caloric intake. So like Ener prime is one brand. Capra Greens is like a powdered brand. A few different ways you could skin that cap, but it's a mix of, you know, spirulina and kelp and chlorella and broccoli and just some of these dense superfoods without a lot of the fibers and the carbohydrates and things of that nature. So I'd go amino acids, I'd go collagen, I'd toss in some greens and you, you can keep yourself in a somewhat anabolic state in the absence of doing like big post workout smoothies. But ultimately, if you want to build muscle, you do kind of have to hit that window of around within about two hours after that workout, two hours max, getting in a pretty decent kind of meal after that fasted morning workout.

So you were mentioning earlier on like right at the beginning you said that if, if you're, if you're doing the workout and it's right afterwards, you've got sort of that window before you get to, before the insulin actually causes any problem. Does that really depend on what kind of workout you're doing or how hard you're working out?

Generally the harder that you're exercising, the more insulin sensitive that you're going to be. You know, the higher your post exercise oxygen consumption is. So yeah, absolutely. After a high intensity interval training session with weight training, you're going to burn through more glycogen, you're going to be more likely to deliver consumed sugars into muscle tissue in response to insulin versus during say morning yoga session.

Yeah. Well that's super convenient then because if you're working out really hard, you're probably more worried about missing that, that meal or especially the protein for muscle building. So. And it gives makes you a little more bulletproof to it too.

It does, but it psychologically it can be a little bit tough because I know for me if I do a hard morning workout it kind of tends to shut down my appetite a little bit. It's almost like you get so cortisolic and in such a fight and flight type of syndrome after a tough morning workout you sometimes have to force feed, which I find unpleasant. So I simply don't work out hard in the morning. I just saved for the afternoon.

I see that you're going to try and claim that you don't work out hard ever.

Hello Ben and Brock, this is Alexander from Glasgow. I have a question which is absent from me but for my girlfriend who is in her second trimester of her third pregnancy and she's having terrible trouble with acne outbreak. I have followed the advice I've gathered so far from listening to your podcasts over the last three years and she stopped almost all sugars, carbohydrates, well mainly carbohydrates and grains. But there has been no change. Actually been getting worse and I wonder whether you have any ideas of what one could do. Thank you very much. Love the podcast and hope to hear from you soon. Bye.

You know what the thing that I've found to be really, really helpful for acne, Brock? What Going with the super size me option at the drive through window. Just it seems to just like all the all that oil. I think it somehow clogs up the sebaceous glands and just completely gets rid of the acne.

So I like to take the the wrapper that was around the hamburger and rub it on the most acne prone parts of my face as well.

That's perfect. Like the greasy paper bag.

It does an awesome job of like exfoliating or something.

Hopefully Alexander's girlfriend hasn't pulled into the McDonald's yet because we are kidding. We've done a lot of previous episodes. You have a beard that would be gross rubbing into the beard. All of the previous episodes we've done on acne are over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I'll link to them at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 277 but we've talked about dairy and we've talked about how insulin can you know from the sugars and the carbs and the grains that it sounds like Alexander's girlfriend is being careful with now how that can kind of cause some acne issues. In particular though during pregnancy this can happen and not be related to dairy intake, and not be related to insulin release from grains and simply be a response to the natural hormonal fluctuations that occur during pregnancy. You're typically going to get an increase in progesterone, you're going to get an increase in estrogen. And both of these can elevate everything from proliferation of the actual sebaceous glands themselves, which are going to be the glands that can tend to become blocked and clogged and cause acne. But simply elevated level levels of androgens in particular in any situation are pretty strongly correlated with increased frequency and severity of acne problems. That's why if you go to like a bodybuilding show, especially if it's not a natural bodybuilding show, not only is everyone red faced and farting, but they also are typically covered in acne. So it's just this androgen response that can happen, you know, even if you're being pretty careful with your diet from just a hormonal standpoint and same reason.

Why one of the side effects of going on birth control pills is also acne.

Yep, exactly. Hormonal fluctuations that can occur with that as well. So the, the issue here is that when you are pregnant you do need to be very careful with some typical acne treatments that I'm not a huge fan of anyways, but like retinoic acids that you're going to find a lot of of popular acne medications like Accutane and Retin A and some of these, those are pretty toxic to the fetus and even like little amounts or topical applications can cause birth defects, they can increase risk of death. So you need to be careful with that stuff when it comes to acne. And I've got some other ideas for you as far as how to kind of counteract some of this acne that's going to get produced. So first of all, don't feel guilty like you're doing something wrong in your diet because honestly once you start to churn out these androgen like hormones and that's totally natural during pregnancy, it's just more likely to happen. So it's more like kind of putting a band aid over it and treating the acne from a natural standpoint rather than necessarily trying to like shut down androgen production or come at it from a dietary standpoint, assuming you're already eating healthy. So one of the things that can be associated with high levels of acne acne during pregnancy are low zinc levels. And while you do need to be careful with any form of supplementation during pregnancy because just about anything that you take is going to affect the fetus. Just small amounts of zinc can help out quite a bit. So I would look for a good absorbable zinc in some kind of a multivitamin format like a prenatal. There's a lot of prenatals that are out there. You know, one of the ones I know actually has an absorbable form of zinc in it. And when I say absorbable, that just means it's chelated in a way that makes it more likely to be absorbed. In this case it would be zinc picolinate, about 25 milligrams or so.

Chelated to pickles.

Chelated to pickles. You got it. Just like it sounds. And this particular prenatal also has some of the active forms of folic acid like L5 methyltetrahydrofolate and folinic acid, which are, you know, the non toxic forms of folic acid. It's got zinc in there, it's got your full spectrum of fat soluble vitamins mixed in pretty good ratios. That's one made by this same company that makes the iron bisglycinate and that's the thorn prenatal. So they do a good job with their stuff. And I'll link to that one in the show notes for you. But zinc is one thing, another thing in addition to all of the fixes, because we have talked about tons of natural fixes on the show for acne. But one of the things that I already mentioned that I don't know, we've talked about a ton on the show before is coconut oil. And for acne treatment because of its antibacterial and antifungal effects, just a thin layer of coconut oil on your, your face about once a day can make a pretty big difference. So you'll want to use like a good extra virgin coconut oil as a topical treatment. But that can have some really, really good effect on like overactive sebaceous glands, on some of the bacteria that can affect acne production. And that'll work really well. So when it comes to extra virgin coconut oil, the one that I recommend is made by Nativa, that's one of the organic, non GMO forms of coconut oil. It's cold processed, it's not refined or deodorized or bleached. So you can kind of guilt free use it when you're pregnant, not have to worry about anything topically kind of winding up affecting the fetus. So that's one that I'd really look into, would be the use of coconut oil. I would look into the use of of zinc and those would be a couple of the biggies. In addition to using something like that Thorne prenatal vitamin that I talked about.

So Alexander's girlfriend could take a tablespoon of the coconut oil for her aches and pains and then rub the rest on her. On her face.

Exactly. There you go. And she'll be born. Her baby will probably come out wearing a coconut bra.

The baby will come shooting out of her.

She'll be so the lime and the coconut.

Hi, Ben, this is Chris from Maryland, and I've been listening to your podcast for about a year now. I'm 55 years old and just spiral fractured my fifth metatarsal and I need to completely stay off my foot for at least a month. I had been running and doing body weight workouts. Do you have any advice for how to help the healing process? And do you have any suggestions for workouts without putting any weight weight on one foot? I sure would appreciate that and I appreciate all the effort you put into your research and the sharing of your information. Thank you very much.

Ah, Chris, that is a bummer. Stress fractures are the worst.

Yeah.

Not only do you have to deal with having the stress fracture, but you have to figure out why you got a stress fracture.

Exactly.

And which I think is worse.

One of the big things I've found with stress fractures is simply having feet that are really not anatomically ready for the rigors of running on a lot of these, you know, surfaces that we're running on, concrete, asphalt, stuff like that. I'm going to tell you what, I want to give another podcast a shout out. My friend Evan Brand runs this Not Just Paleo podcast, and he just did an interview with a guy named Dr. Ray who is a practitioner over at Northwest Foot and Ankle in Portland, Oregon, and they talk about how most foot problems can be corrected by restoring natural foot function. That's a pretty good interview. I was actually recently on that Not Just Paleo podcast as well. So if you go over there and subscribe, be sure to check out my interview. But that's a pretty good way to kind of learn a little bit about how to correct these foot problems, because we're going to talk about how to kind of put a band aid on this and stay fit when you know how to exercise when you have a foot stress fracture. But eventually you may want to look into why you got this in the first place. If it wasn't just training too much, you know, if maybe it was Incorrect footwear. So a few of the things that you can do. And I have a whole article I'll link to in the show, notes about staying fit with an ankle or foot injury. I had an entire Get Fit Guy podcast about this. But essentially you're looking at two different types of exercise. Number one would be what are called open chain exercises for the leg where you're strengthening the legs without your your feet on the ground. So for example, that would be like machine leg extensions and machine leg curls. And then what you would do is you combine something like that with the ability to maintain cardiovascular fitness and what's called peripheral resistance or the ability to really get muscles to pump blood back to the heart to increase cardiac contractility and stroke volume. And that would be through super slow training. Super slow training is a really good way to maintain some of your cardiovascular fitness, especially if you're injured and you need to move a little bit more slowly and carefully or you can't run and jar muscles around and things of that nature. So in the weight room, for example, you could do regular speed machine leg extensions and machine leg curls. And then you could do super slow chest press, super slow seated row, super slow shoulder press, super slow pull down, for example. And you could even at the end of a circuit like that, hop on something that is not stressful to the foot or that is low impact. Like you could do a 60 second high intensity cardiovascular booster for on, on the bicycle or on the rowing machine or on the elliptical. And one really powerful way to stay fit that I like is combining superset sets with cardio boosters. So an example of that is you do machine leg extensions, you do machine leg curls, and then you do 60 seconds as hard as possible on the bike. You go through that three to four times, then you move on and you do like super slow chest press, super slow seated rows, and then 60 seconds as hard as you can go on the elliptical, and then you do super slow shoulder press, super slow pull down and then as hard as you can go on the row machine, for example.

So when you say super slow, like let's say you're doing chest press. So are you talking like 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down, or 30 seconds up, 30 seconds down, about as slow.

As your joints can move. But in most cases I find that I follow my breath and I go for 10 breaths up, 10 breaths down with some deep nasal breathing. So usually that that means I'm using about five to six reps. So I am on one particular set for about one and a half to Two minutes.

Okay.

That's about how long a set would take. So time under tension is 90 to 120 seconds or so. And again, there's not a lot of evidence that that makes you stronger or builds muscle. But there is really good evidence in terms of peripheral resistance and cardiovascular strengthening. Which is why Dr. Doug McGuff actually uses it as a therapeutical form of exercise for some of his patients recovering from heart attack heart surgery. So, or, or who are trying to, to make their heart stronger. So really cool stuff. So there's that. And then another non impact form of cardio would be water running and aqua jogging.

You're gonna say aqua jogging?

I actually, I did aqua jogging just yesterday. So I did one of my favorite workouts if I do need to do aqua jogging, which is breaking it up with swimming. So I got in the pool, I swam about 400 meters for a warm up and then I did 10 hundred meter sprints with each of those sprints separated by 25 meters of really hard, intense, deep water running. So back and forth between swimming and running, that's just a really good crossroad workout period.

Doing aqua jogging all alone is like.

Oh yeah.

It'S so good. Like it really works. It's great stuff. I use it for, for tapering sometimes like specifically in taper week. But it gets really boring. So I like that. Mixing it in the swimming.

Yeah, you mix it in and you know you grab like an underwater MP3 player, like I use the one from, from underwateraudio.com and, and you know, you just go. And that kind of keeps you entertained too while you're, you know, jogging, which I find in the pool can be incredibly boring because there's just no change of scene, you know, like a treadmill. So you can do that. And the reason I was doing that was I'm training for this. I'm going to do a Spartan race in Vegas this weekend. I'm racing the super Spartan in Vegas and I'm actually taking this one pretty seriously. I'm racing it as an elite male. I've actually whipped myself into pretty dang decent shape and I was totally out.

Of shape before when you were doing like Ironman Kona.

I'm actually, I have to say that, that I'm, I'm, I'm in beast mode right now. I'm in pretty good shape. So if you're racing against me in Vegas and you're listening in and you're racing in the elite men's wave, you're going down. I'm going to Bring it. Anyways, though, I fell off of a very high set at the playground. So I've got this playground I work out at and it was raining and I slipped and I fell and I was all prepared to land on the ground, but then I hit one of those balance posts, like those log balance posts.

I thought you were going to say you hit a child.

No, there were.

No.

I try and avoid it when there's children there. And flipped me on my backside. I'm actually headed over to the chiropractor after this to get adjusted because I'm still. I can feel my pelvic joint is still out of alignment anyways, though, so I can't run right now because I have this big old, like berry size or not berry size myself playing. Basically.

I fell off the monkey bars.

Yeah. So. And then I had to. I had to. I had to run home two miles after that. So that was really tough. Anyways, though, where was I? Oh, so that was why I was water running. So water running is really good for that. And then the last thing that I would think about, I'm actually reading a book right now and it's called the Art of Learning. It's a really good book. It's about this chess master who went on and became a martial arts master. And he talks about how at one point in his training and his fighting, he broke his hand and he had to start using his other hand. And he was actually pretty surprised at how after training with his opposite side, his side that was injured still retained a great deal of strength. And he could almost like train his opposite side just through visualization and through working with the side that was uninjured. And he doesn't talk about this in the book, but this is actually proven in exercise science. It's called a contralateral training and effect, where they have shown improved blood flow and maintenance of muscle when you work the uninjured side. And so what that means is that even though, let's say your right foot might have a stress fracture, you can do single leg squats, single leg press, single leg closed chain exercises. Closed chain meaning your. Your leg is in contact with the ground and even like plyometrics and, you know, impact type of stuff with just that left leg and still get a decent crossover training effect for the right side. So that's another strategy that you can use. You don't want to overdo it because you can create muscle imbalances potentially. But just a few times a week, training that uninjured side can certainly be helpful.

I actually did that when I had wrist surgery on my. My left wrist, I drank beer with my right hand. Like, just. Just predominant. Just used my right hand and for drinking beer the whole time. And lo and behold, when I got the cast off, I was really good at drinking beer with my left hand.

Yeah, plus you trained both your left.

And your right kidney, so, yeah, it was fantastic.

Hi, Ben, this is Kirti from San Diego. I have a PRK eye surgery coming up next month where the corneal epithelium is going to be removed and it needs to be regenerated after the surgery. Do you have any recommendations from supplement point of view so I could recover faster? I am thinking maybe supplementing with collagen could help. I would also like to hear any opinions you may have about the surgery. Thank you.

Corneal epithelium.

Corneal epithelium.

Corneal epithelium.

We did podcast 237 was like a whole podcast on Lasik eye surgery. And I know that that's not the same as PRK eye surgery per se, even though they do use lasers in that PRK eye surgery. But there are some additional things that we didn't mention in that podcast episode that I should mention. So, like I mentioned, PRK is a type of laser eye surgery. It's a little bit different than that one we talked about before, but essentially it's a really reshaping of the cornea using a laser. It's a laser that's on a shark, actually. So the shark goes into the tank and they manipulate the shark. And what they actually do is they put a fish in front of the shark to kind of guide the laser. Of course, at this point, they only do it on people with really large eyes because it's not super accurate at this point. So anyways, though, now that Keerthi is extremely excited about his PRK surgery.

Yeah, sharks.

First of all, let me say that I think, and I don't want to rain on your parade here, Keerthi, but I think more people get eye surgery than really need to. And if my vision ever starts to fail, knock on wood, it doesn't yet. And I try to take good care of my eyes. You know, I use blue light blocking, anti glare glasses. I spend time looking at the horizon for about five minutes. For every 25 minutes that I'm looking at my computer, I work on my balance. I work on my visual acuity. In my case, I read music a lot to work on the movement of my eyes up and down and to the side. But ultimately, if my eyes ever did start to fail, I would focus on this even more structurally. So there's this old school method called the Bates method, in which you actually train your ocular muscles in specific ways the same way you would train your legs at the gym. So that particular form of visual therapy works on training depth perception, peripheral range, how fast and how accurately your eyes move when you read or when you scan, which is basically scanning, movement training, visual acuity, color discrimination, contrast discrimination. The problem is it's really old school. There's this new version of it that the folks over at Z Health put out, and it's called the Vision Gym. And it's not only really useful for athletes who want to take things to the next level, and I plan on putting my kids through it once they're at about the junior high tennis level, because I'd really like to use it to help them enhance their tennis game, but it can.

That's your retirement strategy, isn't it?

That's my retirement strategy. It's. Yeah, My retirement strategy is spending whatever. I think it's $97 on this vision Gym and just keeping my fingers crossed they'll turn my children into professional athletes.

The new Williams brothers.

So it's the Brian brothers. Actually, the Williams are the sisters. So I actually do not want my twin boys to grow up to be the Williams. Freakishly muscular African American women as cool as the Williams sisters.

Yeah, they're fantastic, but not what you want your. Your little boys to grow into.

Anyways, though, the Vision Gym way or weird. I'll link to it in the show notes, but essentially it should be able in most people to vastly reduce the need for eye surgery. And, you know, even, like, my brother recently got LASIK surgery, and I didn't know that he was getting it. And when I found out later that he got it, I was like, dude, I have no problem saying this to my brother. I was like, dude, you should have talked to me. I'm like, we probably could have avoided you getting it, that I would have bought it for him. I mean, it's a 97 program and, you know, versus surgery. I. I mean, again, I don't want to rain on Kirky's parade. He's probably already had his surgery by the time this podcast comes out. It's possible, but. But I'm just saying check out the Vision Gym if you are kind of in that transition. So either way, though, let's say you've already had surgery.

Firstly, I actually had RK, like, radial keratotomy surgery back in like 90. I want to say 91. And now it's like however many zillions of years later and I still don't need any glasses. I see 20, 20. I've had no complications. Well, the only thing that I could even qualify as a complication is I have starbursts. Like when I look at, say, like a light, like a street light or a Christmas tree actually is extra pretty for me because when I look at a light, I get six points that come out of it where the scarring is left on my. On my cornea.

Yeah. And I'm. I'm totally being a dirty hippie here, like, because I, you know, I'm just being one of those people that's saying, oh, well, you know, if you don't need the surgery, why get it? But it is completely possible that there are going to be zero side effects at all. And you don't have to worry a bit. But.

But one thing about my surgery was it was pre laser. They used a diamond knife.

Okay, gotcha.

And I'm not, I'm not being a jerk either. Seriously. It was actually, it was a diamond. Diamond knife they used on my corneas.

Nice. Just like they used to steal the crown jewels in movies.

Exactly. So it went skiing around my eye.

So at the ancestral health symposium last year, there was an excellent presentation that's available for free on the Internet. It's over at SlideShare and I'll link to it in the show notes. And it was by Dr. Made at. And she went into to a lot of the natural nutritional therapies that work for improving the eyes and not only global cognitive function, but in particular ocular health. And these are a few of the things that I would be doing previous to eye surgery and also when recovering from eye surgery. So a few of the things that she goes into are, first of all, trying to get. Unless you have a known egg allergy, you shoot for the equivalent of about two egg yolks per day. So I get close to that primarily from the fact that my wife cooks a lot with yolks. Like that horseradish that I had on my big ass salad today that was made with egg yolks. And, you know, she does a lot of her everything from like baking to condiments to, you know, like the quiches and stuff that she makes. I get close to the equivalent of about two egg yolks per day by the end of the day. And that's a really, really good source of the lutein necessary for maintaining good eye health. Another thing that's really good is to shoot for the equivalent of about a cup of greens per day. About one cup. So collard, kale, spinach, Swiss chard, mustard greens, turnip greens. Again, we're talking about going after, in this case the zeaxanthin that is going to help your eyes and that can just be like a morning smoothie. Theoretically, you can even just toss an egg in your morning smoothie and kind of kill two birds with one stone. So about one pound per week of some kind of an oily wild fish that you eat with the skin. Salmon works really, really well for this. If you don't get about the equivalent of a pound of wild fish per week or that's not doable for you, the equivalent of about three tins of sardines per week. So those sardines would. With the skin, if you.

So far taking care of your eyes is delicious.

Yeah, exactly. So if you can't or don't want the sardines, the other option is they do a lot of these. Like Barleens makes a fish oil and I'm blanking on another company, I think natural vitality does one, but they're like these lemon flavored fish oils that are really tasty. So you want to go. Yeah, if you can get about a tablespoon of those per day, those are really good for the eyes too. My kids use the kids Calm liquid multivitamin. And that one's over at Pacific elite fitness@pacificfit.net and that's got this Lutein and Zeaxanthin in it as well and a little bit lower ratios just because they're kids. But that's very similar to that Norwegian fish oil stuff. So you've got egg yolks, you've got dark leafy greens, you've got fish and some of those volumes that I just, just mentioned. Now let's say you're traveling. Let's say you live in just an urban desert when it comes to good grocery stores and good, you know, pastured eggs and wild caught fish, you can head over to your friendly local computer and hop on to the Internet and get yourself some Lutein and some Zeaxanthin. I'm a bigger fan of the whole food sources. But if you wanted to sell supplement with lutein and zeaxanthin, you'd want about a 5 to 1 ratio of lutein to zeaxanthin. So typically we're going to find it in nature in a 2 to 1 ratio. But in supplemental form. What Dr. Mehta recommends is a 5 to 1 ratio. I wasn't super clear during her presentation on the biochemical reasons behind that. But you know what she recommended exactly? I can tell you what. 10 milligrams of lutein to 2 milligrams of zeaxanthin. So 5 to 1 ratio of lutein to zeaxanthin. And I'll put all that in the show notes as well. The only other thing that I would recommend in addition to fish or fish oil, egg yolks, greens, and then, if necessary, the lutein or the zeaxanthin for recovery from surgery in particular, and this would be what I would use if I were getting neat surgery or back surgery or eye surgery or any type of surgery would be proteolytic enzymes. And those are really, really good at healing up a lot of the inflammatory markers and a lot of what's called the fibrin that will be circulating in your body post surgery from the wounds and the scarring and breaking through the connective tissue and all the things that can happen during surgery. To a certain extent, that doesn't happen quite as much during something like a laser eye surgery. That's something you're going to get more of during a hip surgery or back surgery or a shoulder surgery. But my preferred form of proteolytic enzymes would just be this stuff called Recover Ease. And it's just a blend of proteolytic enzymes and some amino acids and pretty decent stuff. I used to use it post workout. Now I just use it if I'm. If I'm injured or laid up. And I definitely use it post surgery, but it's just called Recover Ease. So about. About 8 of those per day would work really well in terms of giving you a really potent, dense source of proteolytic enzymes for recovery.

Yeah.

One thing I should probably warn Keerthi, that after I had my eye surgery, I. I became colorblind.

That's kind of a big thing to know about.

No, I'm just kidding. I was born that way.

I'm like, dude, sir, why didn't you say that before? Making me sound like a hippie clown. However, you should also, in case you want to laugh a little bit about eyes, go watch Legend of Ron Burgundy and Anchorman, where he goes blind and he's like, I drank half a bottle of ketchup thinking it was a fancy Chateau de Pape. And his buddy's like, half a bottle of ketchup is like nine to ten gulps. How did you not realize that it wasn't wine? He's Like, I ate. Ate an ashtray, thinking it was a piping hot waffle. He's like, did you not feel the ashtray, that it wasn't a waffle? And then it kind of slides downhill from there, but actually, in my opinion, gets pretty funny. So there you go. Go watch Legend of Ron Burgundy. That's my final tip for you before you go colorblind.

Hi, Ben and Barack. This is George from Rhode Island. I had a question about Gilbert syndrome. It's something that I was born with. It's a liver disease. I guess I have too much bilirubin in my liver. I'm not exactly sure if I should be concerned about this. My doctor says that there's nothing to be concerned about, but just wondering your input. Thanks for your podcast. And yeah, any nutritional guidelines would be great. All right, thank you very much. Bye.

I actually went to school with a guy named Billy Rubin.

I once knew a fellow named Gilbert.

Oh, there you go. Yeah.

Coincidence. We must be getting towards the end of the podcast. Yes.

And there's your answer, George.

Well, fortunately, not to blow this one off too much, but from most of the evidence that's out there, you don't have to worry that much when you have Gilbert syndrome, because it doesn't seem to cause many long term problems. So it's this dysfunction, this inherited disorder of the liver that causes. Causes an overabundance of this substance called bilirubin. And bilirubin is normally present in your blood in small amounts, and it's a byproduct of the breakdown of hemoglobin in old red blood cells. And that breakdown product usually gets converted by the liver into a form that gets excreted from your body, typically in your stool. That's why if you have a lot of breakdown of hemoglobin, sometimes your stool can be very dark or almost. Almost kind of black. And if you have abnormalities in the breakdown of hemoglobin, it can cause blood levels of bilirubin to rise above normal, in which case this would be an issue. But if you've got Gilbert syndrome and you simply have this inherited abnormality that causes reduced production of the enzyme involved in processing bilirubin, it doesn't seem to be that much of an issue. It doesn't seem to cause that many issues as far as the. The liver or the kidney is concerned. Now, there was one study I was able to find where Gilbert syndrome was linked to increased risk of gallstones. And we've done podcast episodes on gallstones before and kind of Taking care of the liver and the kidneys from that standpoint. So, I mean, if you really wanted to, you could go after it from that level of just making sure that you include some things that are going to help with gallstones. And in that particular podcast that we did, what we recommended was you use some bitters before you have your big meals, especially meals that are heavy in fats. And you potentially even use like a. Like a bile salt supplement, like ox bile, for example, and bitters. Yes. Those are the same things that you would add to like a dirty vodka martini. You can actually use those before a meal. And then some digestive enzymes, like a, you know, cap or something. Enzymes is the stuff that I keep around for if I need a little bit of. If I'm going to eat a huge steak. And I just don't want to feel a little bit too full after that steak, I pop a couple of enzymes beforehand just to step up the digestion a little bit. And those are some of the things that can help out a little bit with gallbladder.

And now the reason you're going after the gallbladder is because gallbladder is where Bill Rubin's manufactured. Right. So gallbladder kicks it out, liver takes care of it. Yeah, generally.

Yeah. And a few of the other things that you can think about are just like using some lemon juice, like drinking some water that has like a squeezed lemon in it during the day, and that can be a really helpful digestif as well and help to lower bilirubin. Curcumin is not bad, like using some turmeric powder or using a curcumin extract. And that's something that's helpful to have around anyway. I mean, a lot of these things like lemon juice and curcumin, these are. I'm not worried about high bilirubin count personally or gallstones, but these are just kind of some things I work into my day anyways, just as natural things that you can do. So I've always got a few lemons here and there that I can have some lemon juice down again. And I keep a lot of turmeric around and curcumin, you know, I use the digestive enzymes. I don't use bitters or bile salts. If I had some bilirubin issues or some gallbladder issues, I would. So that's something else that think about. And those are some of the biggies. But ultimately I wouldn't be worrying that much. Man, if it's. If it's just Gilbert syndrome, again, like you could. You could play your card safe when it comes to the potential for gallstones. But George, I would not be too worried. Unless you run into Brock's friend Bill Arubin, in which case the dude is probably a little bit bitter and nasty based on. Off of what his parents named him. So likely. Or was it. Or was it just. Was it just Bill Rubin or was it Bill Arubin was actually his name.

That was it. That was his. He was just one name. He was kind of like Madonna or Sting.

That's two. Yeah.

Is it wrong that I want to know what George. What color George's poop is?

No, no, that's completely natural for. For guys to want to know the color of other dudes. Dung. Yeah.

Well, you know that, like, next up of bilirubin will turn your poop white.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, that would be a helpful piece of information. But we already know that he's got a lot of bilirubin in his liver, and it's likely that some of that is basically elevating levels of unconjugated bilirubin in the bloodstream, and some of that may actually pass in the stool. But again, there's no evidence that it causes some serious issues in the case of Gilbert Albert syndrome. So.

And on that note, let's. Let's take a look at our itunes review before we talk about poop too much, Mark.

Cool. And by the way, if you leave an itunes review, you can get the brand new Ben Greenfield fitness gear pack we actually ran out of. We ran out of beanies. So if you're waiting on your gear package, I just got some new ones ordered.

The beanies are the best part.

They do cost some money for me to order those. Like, you know, we spent a few thousand dollars on Ben Greenfield fitness gear this year. But the thing is, if you support the show by going to BenGreenfieldFitness.com gear, we can break even on that, and it allows you to help support the show. So if you do listen to the show, think about that. Just go and put in an order for our beanie, our sweet T shirt, which I'm actually wearing right now. And you can do all that@bengreenfitness.com gear. So check that out. Support the show. And if you just want to get your name tossed into the hat to win some gear, head over to itunes and leave your review. And I think Brock's got one picked out for this week.

Yeah, there's one from Slam Slam311slam. It's got two M's, so it's hard to say slam. And the review says, Ben and Brock give me so much information on health, wellness and fitness that I'm now going to school to become a personal trainer and continue on to other nutritional certifications. They are amazing. And as long as you can get through the lady at the beginning who talks to you like you're dialing into a 900 number. Yeah, it's funny that you say that, slam em 311 because that lady is your mom.

I wouldn't know. I've never. Boom. I've never called a 900 number.

Oh, me neither.

Yeah, just in case my wife is listening into this podcast.

Or your mom.

That lovely voice is Kelly, who does our voiceovers. And Kelly is not a porn star. She just basically. Or a 900 number.

She plays one on TV.

Yeah. However, if you'd like, Brock and I can do our best 900 number lady impersonation to play this show out. So of course we can. Thank you all for listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness show on the BenGreenfieldFitness.com 277 what are you wearing, 277-brock?

I'm wearing hockey skates and nothing else else.

Visit BenGreenfield Fitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

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