5 Ways To Mitigate Damage From Endurance Sports, Is Deer Meat Healthy, Is Progesterone Dangerous & Much More!

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast, 5 Ways to Mitigate damage from endurance sports. Should you change your running form? Is deer meat healthy? Is progesterone dangerous? Do standing workstations cause varicose veins? Getting rid of heavy metals, and the Magnetico versus Biomat sleep pads.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon, and wellness advice from the top 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 did you see any gators lately?

Gators. I actually saw a big gator. I am here in Florida and went for a run yesterday on the last day of our Team Timex camp at the IMG Performance center in Bradenton. And lo and behold, about a ten footer, I'd say, on this little trail back behind the academy. So I think it's probably been eating young teenage tennis players. Yeah.

Oh, teenage children. It's that big.

Yeah. And finished up camp, which was great. And I'm actually up here in Orlando now where my kids are going to come in and go to Legoland. And I'm actually podcasting. I'm going to. I'm going to put up a photo to our Facebook page. I'm podcasting standing up in the hotel room with the computer perched next to the TV and my microphone inside my running shoe sandwiched between two pillows. That. That is how much I love our listeners.

That is ingenious.

And in the delivery of quality audio. So I know we, the folks at.

Home, can smell something that kind of vaguely smells like cheese. That's the running shoe. Or maybe it's the pillows, depending on the quality of the hotel you're staying in.

I actually carry around clove powder that I sprinkle into my running shoes so they smell like a clean baby's butt. And I use the stuff from Hammer Nutrition called cool feet. And I only feed my babies cloves.

Clothes and stinky cheese.

New splashes.

All right, if you don't already Follow Ben on twitter.com what the heck is wrong with you? Because every day I'd say there is another cool study that he's putting up on the Internet for the people to find out about. And this is the part of the show where we're gonna whip through them all.

That's right. And let's start with something really Happy. The death test. This was a study. The death test dance.

They do that at Legoland, don't they?

I. So since everything is awesome, Everything's awesome.

Legoland.

So what they've done in this study is researchers at the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Finland, of all places, they did a blood analysis to figure out which of the most important blood parameters are most likely to predict your risk of death or susceptibility to disease. So they looked at a bunch of them. Four different biomarkers, though, turned out to be the biomarkers that need to be looked at when it comes to finding out if you're gonna die early or have increased risk of death.

So this is more accurate than the death clock that you can look upon the Internet.

Even more accurate than the Internet death clock. So if you want to test these biomarkers or you want to go to WellnessFX, or you want to approach your doctor and you want to look at these biomarkers. And we'll link to the study in the show not too over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 275. The biomarkers are. Drumroll, please. Alpha 1 acid glycoprotein.

I love that one.

Which basically indicates the level of glycation that's occurring in your body. And by the way, glycation is something that happens when you consume processed sugars along with fats or along with proteins, such as a nice baked goody. And also something that forms when you consume vegetable oils. So no surprises there.

Doesn't it also form when you get old?

Technically, yeah, you do get some connective tissue degradation and glycoprotein adhesions and tangles as you age. But that is all accelerated. I mean, we're talking about kind of flipping the middle finger to the aging process. That's all accelerated when you're consuming foods.

That accelerate that process and running away.

Exactly. So albumin is another one. And up until this study, that was really the only biomarker that scientists in the past have actually, actually links to poor health is albumin. And then the next one was citrate and also low density lipoprotein, but not LDL cholesterol, more specifically LDL lipoprotein particles. So that would be a test called an APOB test that you can get. And if that's highly elevated, that indicates high levels of inflammation, propensity for infection, propensity for decreased vascular health. And also the albumin and the citrate are linked to lower liver and kidney function. So the four are alpha 1, acid, glycoprotein, albumin, citrate and LDL particles. So you could actually go to your doc and kind of do a do it yourself am I gonna die Test and just ask them to run that panel for you. And then if you wanna kind of take things into your own hand and go over and look at the study and kind of see how your numbers match up to what they saw in that. In that death test, you can go do it. We'll link to it over in the show notes.

All right. That's a way to either make yourself feel a lot better about everything or scare the absolute bejeebas out of yourself.

That's right, because we all want to know the exact moment we're going to die, so we can just basically go crack cocaine and beer. Up until that point, the beer next to crack cocaine is kind of innocent.

Yeah, yeah, maybe really, like, that's. You can. You can survive quite long time on. On beer. Just ask the Egyptians.

That's true, that's true.

But I don't think crack cocaine has ever been held in any sort of high esteem by any civilization, except maybe our Toronto mayor and people in Las Vegas.

Okay, number two, don't have carbs with your fatty coffee. Now, this tweet was sparked by me reading a study out of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute. Incidentally, I actually spent the past three days exercising at the gym right next to the Gatorade Sports Science Institute because it's at the IMG Performance Academy. And they actually had an interesting study that came out called they do some really Cool Stuff.

It's sad that they're actually called the Gatorade Sport Institute because they do some really cool studies. And I think this day and age, they get a really bad rap.

Yeah, they do.

You should change their name.

Their lab is very cool. They have some pretty damn expensive treadmills in that lab. Let me tell you, everything's changed the.

Name to Damn Expensive Treadmill Lab.

The Dam Expensive Treadmill Lab. Det of Awesomeness. Anyways, this study was called New Concepts in Fat Metabolism. Metabolism. Metabolism during Exercise. And one of the things that really leapt out at me in this study was it looked at the utilization of triglycerides by muscle tissue and the fact that that muscle can really easily feed intramuscular triglycerides into the Krebs cycle to produce ATP during exercise. But the interesting thing is that the one thing that can inhibit the mobilization of triglycerides for use as an energy source is insulin secretion. So the takeaway from this is that if you consume something that spikes your insulin levels along something that you're taking to enhance fatty acid utilization, like say coconut oil or medium chain triglyceride oil, bulletproof coffee drinkers, what happens is that you inhibit your mobilization of your own fat stores or the fat stores that you consumed along with that, say, fatty cup of coffee. So what you need to do is if you're going to do something like a bulletproof coffee or MCT oil or coconut oil or something like that for fat loss, you need to make sure that you're not consuming carbohydrates along with it. Okay? So that means honey and sugar in there would be out. I'd sweeten that kind of stuff with stevia, cinnamon, things of that nature. And then of course, the other thing that's very insulinogenic is something like say whey protein. And I know that some people have been doing things like adding whey protein or protein powders to fatty coffee. It would be better to go with either amino acids or collagen. And that's what I personally do when I make myself a cup of something like bulletproof is I put in not a whey protein source, but an amino acid or a collagen based source. So FYI, if you're trying to use that as a fat burning trick, make sure that you're not getting an insulin spike along with it.

So is it really having carbs along with it like at the same time or should there be a window on either side so like you don't have any for another four hours or something?

You would ideally be for ideal fat loss, starting off your day with like a breakfast in a fasted state of that type of fatty coffee. That would be nice.

So you haven't had anything since dinner the night before. You have that and then you wait X amount of hours because depending on.

Who you are, insulin is going to stay in your bloodstream after a carb or protein based meal for anything from one to four hours. And then the last thing I wanted to mention was a brand new study out from our friends over at Cool Fat Burner. They just published a brand new video over there on a study that they did that involved two different PET scans which allowed them to look at the activation of brown adipose tissue, which is that fatty tissue that can basically, when you're cold, burn your own fat calories to generate heat. So what they did was they compared sitting in a normal 70 degree Fahrenheit room for an hour and looked at what happened with brown adipose Tissue activity. And they did that by actually injecting radioactive tracers into the body that allowed them to track the movement of fat throughout the body. And then they compared that with the use of a cool fat burner vest in the same room, but while wearing this cool fat burner vest for an hour at a level that caused a mild amount of shivering, which is not hard to do with that vest on. And then what they looked at was the actual brown fat activity. And I'll link over to the blog. Cause it's really interesting. They actually show the scans and you see the brown adipose tissue activation, especially around, like the neck and the collarbones and around the ribs and down around the kidneys, just through the roof compared to not cooling the body. So it's really interesting. It proves that you do indeed get a huge boost in metabolic activity even when you do something as simple as decrease the temperature of your upper body by wearing a vest that has some ice packs in it. And so, you know, this, this is actually a little biohack that I like to go. Like if, let's say you have the flexibility to say, get up in the morning, not eat breakfast, but do just something like that fatty coffee instead, and then combine it with, say, an hour of work wearing this cool fat burner vest. That's a really cool little one, two fat burning biohack combo that if you want to burn fat, you don't have time to exercise. You need to get some work done. Really good way to do it. Or maybe you've binged the night before on whatever. Yeah, poutine and beer. Exactly. Or popcorn and butterscotch chips. Butterscotch chips are really good in pop.

Butterscotch chips. Never heard of them.

And sea salt.

So wait, how did they see the activation? What were they using to see the brown adipose tissue?

It's called a PET scan.

Oh, PET scan.

Okay. Yeah, you said that. Yeah, yeah. Positron emission tomography, I think. Tomography, yeah.

That stuff's super cool.

Not the PET scan where you take your kitten and put it on. It's totally different.

Totally.

Special announcements.

Last time I looked over at Men's Health, you were, shall I say, kicking everyone's ass in the votes.

Well, I'm trying to hack the Men's Health magazine fitness vote. They're doing a search for what they call the next big name in fitness. So they're looking for what they're calling the top trainer, the best trainer that Men's Healthy hasn't yet discovered. And they describe it as a fitness Professional who is a top mind in the field, but who also looks the part and who has the ability to captivate any audience. I think I might have one of three of those.

I have none of three, which is why you won't find me on there.

So anyways, you can vote for me to be the Men's health top trainer. And right now we are destroying everybody else. You can vote every day. I've just been leaving a browser window open and going to Twitter and voting every day. Check it out. You can check it out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com MensHealth and I think it would be freaking awesome if we had the Ben Greenfield Fitness army allow us to rock the vote.

Yeah, just blow it up.

And also I put a video on there, a bodyweight workout video called Grounded and it's a two minute body weight workout. And you should try that out too because it's actually a good workout.

It's a really good workout.

And speaking of crowdsourcing, I'm a fan of Kickstarter and there's this really cool new fitness apparatus called monkey bars over there. And this is actually like a portable monkey bar set. And I know it sounds really clunky and heavy, but it's literally just these two tiny bars that have 18ft of high weight, high resistance suspension line stored inside each bar. And if you go there and watch the videos on the Kickstarter campaign, which I'll put a link to in the show notes, you can literally toss these over anything. You can adjust them, you can work out, you can hang, you can do pull ups, you can do balancing. It's way, way different than a trx and they just look really cool. They have like this aerospace grade aluminum core and this maple grip, not maple syrup.

Brock, the actual excited there for a second.

I know you did. I heard you salivating. Monkey. Monkey box.

Maple syrup on our hands to give us better grip though. That's.

There you go. So you can use that along with your monkey bars. But check that out at the Monkey bars Kickstarter campaign. I love what these guys are doing and just going to that page in and of itself to watch the video is worth it. And with Kickstarter you can just make a little donation. You can even reserve your own set of monkey bars. So check that out.

It's monkey M O n K I.

I M O n K I I. That's right. And I'll, I'll put a link over in the show notes to it too. Awesome. And then also there's this brand new optimal reset over at Jack Cruise's website. And I wanted to mention that to folks because I actually am speaking on that about how to biohack your way to optimized human performance. Now over at BenGreenfieldFitness.comOptimal you can go visit it, but already they've got some webinars up there like creating your optimal kitchen, overcoming hunger and sugar cravings, getting started with cold thermogenesis, creating optimal sleep, healing your hormones, getting started with biohacking, reducing EMF exposure in your home or office, finding a doctor to help you biohack. Really like a lot of a lot of pretty cool stuff. Some of these online conferences I think are a bunch of fluff that's already been repeated multiple times elsewhere. But this one does have some good presenters and people that kind of fly under the radar. Like that Tim Jackson guy that I had on last week to talk about digestion hormones. He's on there. So check that out. It's@BenGreenfieldFitness.com optimal so there's one thing that.

Dr. Cruz does well, it's not give you the obvious solutions to things or the things you've heard a thousand times before.

Yeah, and I'm actually sort of he.

Errs on the side of the tinfoil hat sometimes, but that's what I like about him.

He does and he does. And I'm happy about this. Have people other than him on this conference so you can actually understand it without necessarily having a PhD. So there you go. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Optimal.

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 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. We'll see you inside. Listener q and a.

Hi, my name is abigail and I'm 22 years old. I've been running since I was about 16, quite consistently until this past October. I had an injury that has prevented me from those consistent runs. Before that, I always did shorter distances and Shorter races such as 5Ks, 10Ks and I did a half marathon. I really like the idea of endurance running and I'm working on training for a triathlon and eventually I would like to to compete in several marathons. My ultimate goal, however, is to go to Greece for my 50th birthday and complete their 150 mile Spartathlon. I'd like to start training once I hit 23, but I read your article on how endurance athletes are unhealthy and I was just wondering if you think this is something I should pursue or not. I look forward to hearing your answer. Thank you.

I have a strange feeling that you. You wrote a book about this, I think, didn't you?

I did.

Isn't it supposed to come out like last week?

I mean, for sure. For everybody who's trying to order my book or who has ordered my book, please understand that this book was out of my hands once I wrote all the chapters. So the way that that book authoring goes is you write it, you finish up the manuscript, you send it off to the publisher, and any delays from there once you meet your deadline are out of your hands. So, like the COVID the publishing, the printing, all that stuff I have no control over. You can certainly order it right now@BeyondTrainingBook.com it certainly does come with a ton of bonuses. I've already written nine hidden chapters that go along with the book. I mean, you get a lot with it. I, according to my publisher, have a copy at home right now on my doorstep. I know that some bloggers are receiving copies right now, so I know that there are copies printed. But ultimately it's coming soon. I'm not going to be the boy that cried wolf for too much longer. So. Beyond trainingbook.com anyways, though. Yeah, to address Abigail's question, we've talked before in the podcast and I've certainly talked in that book before about how endurance sports can be unhealthy healthy, especially for females. I know we have a question about amenorrhea later on this podcast where I can get into how endurance sports actually affect what's called your hypothalamus and your production of hormones. What I would rather give Abigail rather than rehashing stuff I've already talked about that I'll link to over in the show notes, or that you can find in my book about how endurance sports can deplete hormones or cause some joint issues or reset your metabolic rate to be lower. Those type of things. What I want to talk about are some ways that you can mitigate the damage. Like practical things that I think every endurance athlete should be doing, male or female, especially female, because I tend to see more hormonal dysregulation in that population. But things that you can just do right away to address some of the damage. If you're going to go off and try to race 150 mile race, if you're going to go off and do ironman triathlons, marathons, kind of go and dip into any type of endurance efforts that shove you basically above the point where you've exercised for more than about one and a half to two hours. So where you're reaching glycogen depletion and you're beginning to call upon stamina and endurance, what can you do to address that? So I'm going to give you five things. The first is you want to get a baseline. There are two tests that I believe every endurance athlete on the face of the planet should do once a year. That's a blood test and a gut test. Now, the very best blood test to either go and get or to print off from this website and bring in your physician is the performance panel from Wellness fx. I personally flew down to San Francisco. I helped them put together the actual components that are measured on that panel. It is anything from DHEA to your kidney markers, your liver markers, your red blood cells, your white blood cells, your full lipid panel, the most important inflammatory markers, vitamin D, red blood cell magnesium. I mean, pretty much everything that you would need to know to be able to look at your results and say, okay, whatever, I'm low in vitamin D. So I either need to take a break from training or I need to introduce vitamin D rich sources foods into my diet. I need to start into some cod liver oil or I need to get more sunlight, anything like that. But another strategy you can use is you can just go to WellnessFX and I'll put a link to this performance panel in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 275 you can print that off and bring it in your doctor and just be like, hey, run these tests for me. I mean, you can work around WellnessFX if you wanted to. You can go through WellnessFX. They've got practitioners including myself over there who can walk you through your results. But once, once a year, I personally do it four times a year. But because I work for WellnessFX, I get a good deal and I know it can add up, it can be expensive, but at least once a year it's expensive.

Yeah, it's like $800 or something for the.

To do the full meal deal. Yeah. But ultimately you can submit that to your insurance. And I consider it to be preventive healthcare because the hospital bills that you'll rack up if you do wind up living the latter half of your life with joint degradation and type 2 diabetes. And a lot of the other stuff that chronic card can cause are not necessarily worth it. So that's test number one.

We're doing that once a year, too. Like, you think about how much money you spend on coffees. I bet I spend that on crappy Starbucks coffee.

The classic salesman approach. Well, you would spend money if you just quit drinking a latte a day. You can save money. How much are you spending on cigarettes? Okay, so the second test is the gut test. My favorite test for this is a test that we talked about with Dr. Tim Jackson last week called the GI effects panel. This is a stool test. It gets sent to your home. The current panel that I really like is called a 2205. You can order it if you're in the States, wholesale through a company called Direct Labs. If you live in the uk, there's a really good professional triathlete over there named Tamsen Lewis who has a website called kir07. @curo7.com, she'll be able to hook you up with some ideas for where you can get this test done. Over there, the equivalent of it. If you live in Australia, you're screwed, but you've got hardier genes over there anyway, so you don't have to worry about any of this stuff. If you live in Canada.

Just send it to me.

Yeah, that's right. Just send your stool to Brock.

Looks good, eh?

Looks like poop.

You're good.

So a GIFX panel is going to test for a lot of the issues that athletes wind up with. Parasites, yeast, fungus, candida overgrowth, a lot of the stuff that tends to fly under the radar but do damage over the years. So that's number one, is if you're gonna do endurance sports, commit to one gut test and one blood test a year and just do it. Number two is to include foods in your diet that help to replace a lot of the hormones that you're gonna be burning through at a very rapid pace, especially when you're competing in endurance sports, or you're doing a lot of chronic cardio or. Or foods that basically help to rebuild bones more quickly or rebuild muscles more quickly. And I know everybody's gonna wrinkle their nose when I say this. Some of you know what I'm gonna say. But basically organ meats and offal. F F A L. So organ meats would include things like liver, kidney, heart, sweet breads, a lot of the foods that our ancestors used to eat, while at the same time throwing the lean muscle to the dogs, ironically, and that we have lost touch with in our culture today. I just today@BenGreenfieldFitness.com published a fantastic article that goes into 25 foods you should be eating and 11 foods you should be avoiding. That article was influenced by the author of a fantastic book called Deep Nutrition, which goes into these ancestral eating concepts. Brock and I actually had the pleasure to hang out a few days with the author of Deep Nutrition, Dr. Kate Shanahan, down in Mexico last week and spend a few good dinners talking all about liver and organ meats while drinking. And I got to say, like, hanging.

Out with that paleo crowd, it was actually kind of, kind of sexy. How many of the girls were into organ meat?

Yeah, I will.

Did I just. Was that a little too perverse?

I won't go there. Okay, so organ meats. Another one is bone marrow. Bone marrow is easy to get by making bone broth. It's easy to get by making sure that you even do something as simple as, like when you make bone broth, keeping the bones eating the. This is gonna sound kind of gross being the little joint piece off the end of the chicken bones, for example, and sucking the marrow out. Bone marrow can actually be made. It's fantastic to do like a beef bone marrow. I'll put a link in the show notes for this episode to a recipe that my wife does. If all of this just sounds way too laborious for you, though, you can at least go and get like a good Argentine liver extract, for example. Now foods makes a good one. Now, the reason I say Argentine is because Argent beef liver is a good kind of liver because the Argentine government won't allow their beef herds to be contaminated with growth hormone. So if you get like a liver extract or a liver powder because you don't have the time to eat liver or you don't like the taste of liver, this would be a good way for you to get a lot of the valuable hormone supporting components that you're going to get from liver, but be sure that you're not getting growth hormones along with it. So an Argentine based source of liver is really good. Another thing you want to look into, of course, if you aren't going to eat, say like Sweet breads or you're not going to do a lot of organ meats would be a thyroid extract, but something that includes a full thyroid spectrum, meaning T1, T2, T3 and T4. And this may seem like a lot to go through, but you're asking your body to go through a lot that's not necessarily natural. It's like it annoys the heck out of me when somebody says, well, I'm going to go do a 150 mile run, but I'm not going to take any supplements or go out of my way to do any special recovery protocols because I just want to live naturally. And it's like technically living naturally doesn't involve, yeah, that ain't natural running 150 miles. So you do have to go out of your way and use better living through science to address some of the damage. So T1, T2, T3 and T4. Good supplement is called Thyro Gold Thyroid Extract. That one is out in New Zealand. I believe it's thyrogold.com or if you just Google Thyro Gold or I'll put a link in the show notes for this. That's another one that I would highly recommend. So organ meats, bone marrow, a desiccated liver, preferably Argentinian origin, and then a thyroid extract that's T1, T2, T3 and T4, especially for women. Okay. And even more especially if you're testing and you're seeing things on your blood results like high liver enzymes, high TSH, low T3, low T4, stuff like that. So number three would be to use a minimalist training program. Now with my book at beyond training, I include 12 free programs and all of those are, well, they're either written from a minimalist training program standpoint or another training standpoint we don't have time to get into in today's podcast called Polarized Training. But I've got minimalist training programs like triathlondominator.com for triathletes or marathon dominator.com for marathoners. And what those are based on are using short, high intensity interval training sessions sprinkled throughout the week, preferably taking 48 to 72 hours before interval training sessions that are specific to a single sport. So what that would mean is you would do two hit sessions for the run, two hit sessions for the swim, and two hit sessions for the bike per week. But like the bike hit sessions would be Monday and Thursday, the run hit sessions would be Tuesday and Saturday, and the swim hit sessions would be like Wednesday and Sunday. So you're giving your nervous system and your muscles recovery between each of those sessions. And then the other thing is only one long workout per week per sport. So let's say for a triathlete, only one long swim, one long bike and one long run per week. But the definition of long is way different. So long would be like for example a long run would be for a marathoner a 70 to 90 minute run that's just a series of very focused race pace efforts with recovery periods in between each. Or a long bike for an Ironman triathlete would be for example a 2 and a half to 3 hour ride as opposed to like a 5 to 6 hour ride again with short race pace based intervals spread throughout. Or a swim would be like 4 by 500 rather than like a steady state 4000 meter swim. So minimalist training with the trust that that high intensity training is still going to result in endurance adaptations and favorable endurance adaptations which is does and I'm actually getting in about a week here. One of the athletes who I coached for Kona, I did about a 45 minute long interview with him on some of the strategies that we used for him to help mitigate the effects of chronic cardio and still allow him to do really well at Ironman Hawaii. Okay, so number four would be consistent use of de stressing protocols. And this is for some reason the hardest thing for me to convince folks to do is to consider the fact that you only have X number of stress points during the day. Okay, just picture it this way. Let's say you have 100 stress points during the day. Whether it is stress from life, from electromagnetic field exposure from your computer, from relationship conflicts, from work duties or from exercise. All of those eat up those stress points. So you only have so many stress points in the bank. And it's not like you can work all day, be low on sleep, and just throw down a workout and have that workout be the only stress. Everything else you're doing counts as stress too. So you must, must, must mitigate stress. I have an article that I'll link to in the show notes called seven of the Best Ways to Stop Stress. And it goes into in great detail, kind of why the mind body connection is so important. But just as a brief overview, the top seven protocols for reducing stress are number one, to learn deep diaphragmatic breathing and to use it consistently. Number two, to use mindfulness based meditation. And again, if you want to study up on any of this stuff, I'm going to link to a very comprehensive article I wrote about each technique. Number three is yoga. Number four is Tai Chi. And you can combine those two yoga and Tai Chi in like a flow based nasal deep breathing yoga. Number five is coherence, which is the use of heart rate variability training. Number six is to have hobbies that go outside of that chronic repetitive motion of say just running, swimming or cycling. And then number seven is a solid eight to nine hours of sleep a night, period. No exceptions. So those are seven things that you must do consistently if you want to be in this for the long haul. And if you want to look, feel and perform like a million bucks and still do this whole endurance athlete thing. So that's number four. Okay, so number five would be to eat a completely anti inflammatory diet. So if you're going to beat up your body with the type of glycation that we talked about earlier and oxidation that we talked about earlier, you more than anybody else need to go out of your way to avoid salad dressings that are made with vegetable oil, including canola oil. And you got to look at the label or just accept the fact that you're going to be an extra virgin olive oil vinaigrette type of person. Any low fat products that have been subjected to protocols that are going to make them more inflammatory like homogenization and high heat pasteurization. So it include most commercial milks, cheeses, salad dressings, etc. Cookies, baked goods, just about any packaged or heated baked product you'd want to avoid that, of course, processed sugars, sodas, juices, that type of thing. Most energy bars, most health bars you'd want to avoid boxed cereals. And one that kind of tends to fly under the radar. Most powdered proteins, unless they're cold processed, like a good cold processed whey based protein, that'd be fine. So you're trying to avoid anything that's heat treated, anything that's vegetable oil based, anything that is potentially inflammatory, particularly inflammatory because it's been exposed to some type of a man made process. Now coconut milk for example, is technically based on its omega 6 fatty acid content on a website like inflammationfactor.com considered to be inflammatory. But the fact is that that has mild amount of omega 6 fatty acids in it that do not cause high amounts of inflammation, that don't cause the same type of what's called eicosanoid release that something like a vegetable oil does. So if you're looking at a food's inflammatory potential, you do need to consider whether or not it's a natural based inflammation, like even something like Kale can cause mild amounts of inflammation in the digestive tract, but it's a good kind of almost what's called a hormetic inflammation that your body responds favorably to versus an unnatural inflammation which would be what you'd get from a heat processed vegetable oil like a canola oil, like you'd get from a baked good at Starbucks, like that type of thing or a 2% milk at the grocery store. So you more than anybody else need to go out of your way to almost follow like a 100% anti inflammatory based diet. So I know that was a long response, but quick review. Number one, monitor your blood and gut. Number two, eat organ meats or take some type of extract that has organ meat extract in it. Number three would be in a minimalist training program. Number four would be to consistently de stress every day and make it a part of your life. And number five would be to go completely anti inflammatory on your diet.

Love it.

Hi Ben, I've been recently reading more.

And more about Chi running. I've got a dvd, been watching a little of that.

It seems to really make sense. But changing my form at this point.

Of a 40 year old woman. I'm really stuck in my old ways.

And it's really hard to just do that on your own. But I'm just wondering if it's worth.

The time to put into that method of running called chi running.

And it seems to be getting more popular.

Okay, thank you, Bye.

All right, cool. Key running. We've done two episodes, I think on key running before and I'll link to.

That and have Danny Dreier on the show.

Yeah. Who's a long time ago inventor of key running. And you know, I think he says chi. I don't know, actually, I may think.

I think Danny himself said chi.

That's why I say chi. Well, it's influenced by Tai Chi, which we don't pronounce as Tai Chi, so you're probably right. So we'll just say chi. So anyways, so Tai Chi focuses on things like alignment and relaxation and proper form and controlled breathing. And that's why it works really well for de stressing you. It helps out with relaxing your legs and your arms. It helps out with mindfulness and knowing where your body is at in space. It helps out with core strength because of the use of a lot of your deep diaphragmatic breathing muscles. So the idea is that when we take all these concepts from Tai Chi and we use them when we're running, we get a lot of those benefits. When we're running. And so Danny Dreyer, the inventor of Tai chi, developed this technique that has cues like focus your mind, sense your body, breathe to tap into your inner chi, relax your muscles, practice good posture, start slow. And what he instructs folks to do is to run, to have a straight back, a slight forward lean, and bent knees to take a lot of the pressure off your calves and kind of put you in more of a position like a ball that's just kind of constantly rolling forward. Well, I think that on paper, this is a really good idea. But what I've seen is that, that some folks tend to overthink it when they switch to chi running, and it just throws their entire running system to pot. Now, if you are in it for the long haul, kind of like barefoot running, and you're willing to learn how to do it properly and not just kind of half ass your chi, so to speak, you could potentially change your run form, get more efficient, gain more economy, and do so Even if you're 40 years old and stuck in your stuck in your ways. If you just dabble with it and you don't really commit to learning every principle and kind of go outside your comfort zone to learn this stuff, that's when it can kind of almost cause paralysis by analysis as you're out running. Now, I'm going to link to a really good article. I was actually here at Team TimexCamp with one of my teammates whose name is Bo Parish. And Bo has a really interesting story. He had ulcerative colitis and had to change a bunch of things in his life to kind of be an ironman triathlete and adapt to some of the things that his body was throwing at him. But he talks about the importance of going outside of your comfort zone sometimes during exercise. And that can include going outside your comfort zone mentally and being willing to be uncomfortable so that you change a specific movement pattern if it's going to allow you to become more efficient, more economical, decrease your risk of injury, perhaps even improve your enjoyment during running. Running. Perfect example for me was I picked up on this whole nasal breathing during running thing last year, and it's changed my entire approach to running. But it was incredibly painful. For the first couple of months, I had to go to a track to run so that I could focus on my nasal breathing so I could focus on my rhythmic breathing. And it took a long time to learn. But now that I know it, I can get into this flow, like this zone at the drop of a hat. Like, be just right in the Zone when I'm running. And it's a really cool feeling, but it took time to learn. So a few resources that I would point you to. The first is Amazon has some great Chi Running products, books, Danny Dreyer's DVDs. I'll link to those in the show notes. Anytime we link to Amazon from the show notes, it puts a few nickels in our hat if you use our link.

So go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Amazon throws a little money, are we?

That's right. So go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 275 and check out some of the Chi Running products we'll link out to. I'll link to that article that I mentioned from my Timex teammate, Bo Parish, a link to our previous episode that we did on whether Chi running is good for you. And I have a couple other things that I want to give to you. The first is that I actually started to delve into Chi running about three years ago and, and found that in order for me to learn how to relax, lean slightly forward, keep those knees slightly bent while I ran, I needed some kind of an audio cue while I was running. So what I did was I recorded 10 minutes of audio to remind myself how to run properly and I could play that in my MP3 player when I was out running. Well, I initially only made it available to the athletes who I coach, but I'm going to put that entire recorded audio of Chi Running tips and cues for you in the show notes. So you can go download it as an MP3 file, load it up to your audio player and listen to it when you're out on your run to kind of help bring you into that Chi running form, if that helps you a little bit. And then the other thing is we have kind of a running form expert on staff over at Pacific Elite Fitness. His name is Graham Turner. He's an Australian coach. And I'd like to also get him to jump in and give his take on this question. So, Brock, what do you think you want? Bring Graham on.

Yeah, we've got Graham standing by. Take it away, Graham.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Al. I mean, I thought it was interesting when you said that you were, you know, was it worth doing when you're 40, which is funny when you're kind of getting closer to 50 like myself, but me too. I know you don't know whether to laugh or cringe when you hear things like that sometimes, but, I mean, at 40, I think it's important to realise two things you've probably got more than half your running life, even two thirds of your running life still ahead of you. You know, you've got at least another. Another 20 years of hopefully enjoying running. Yeah. But the other thing obviously, is that once you get 40 or above, like ourselves, things like, you know, decreases in bone density, decreases in muscle mass, all kind of increase the risk of injury. Things like, you know, shin splints or hip issues. So if you've got bad technique, you know that loss of bone density almost exacerbates the risk of injury.

So things you're able to get away with, basically, that, when you were younger, may start to cause more problems as you get older in quotation marks.

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. So where you could, you know, basically muscle through a problem, now your body is a little bit more susceptible to some of the, you know, the impacts of bad technique. So the short answer to that is, you know, at 40, it's absolutely worth looking at your technique and looking at whether you can. Whether you can run a bit more efficiently or a bit more effectively. When Elle mentioned chi running and she was looking at using books, using DVDs, I mean, chi running, there's pose, there's a few different ones. They're all quite good. But probably say there's two issues there with using books or the dvd. The first one is there isn't really a transition from your current run technique. There's how you're running now and there's how they want you to run within these books. So it's not looking at what you're doing now and saying, how do I evolve that into this technique? It's almost binary. It's one or the other, which can make switching technique very, very difficult. Because, said, you're either doing one or the other.

Yeah, that makes sense.

The other issue with doing with books or with DVDs is it's hard for her to know if she's actually doing the right thing. So feet and hands are what we call long levers. It's hard to actually be aware of where they are in space. And you often see this with swimmers where they think their hands are in one position, but when you show them on the video, it's in a completely different position. And so while doing the drills or doing the technique, without someone who actually knows about the technique looking at her, she may be completely doing the wrong thing and again, risking injury.

Yeah. So when she hears or reads in the chi running book that you need a forward lean, if she leaning from, say, the waist instead of the ankles. Well, it's still a forward lean, but it's not exactly what they had in mind.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And also that can be relative. If she's someone that, for example, already leans forward, then trying to lean forward even further can result in her kicking her feet out the back and jamming her feet into the ground. So again, those expressions need to be relative to the person that's actually doing the technique.

Yeah, I suppose conversely, if she's already leaning, if she's leaning really far back, if she's one of those very upright runners, she may have just moved herself into. Into an upright position rather than a forward lean, which I guess is still an improvement, but it's still not the. The exact technique.

Yeah, that. That's exactly right. Exactly right. So. So, so while those. While those strategies, while those methods are very good, it might be better to have someone look at her current technique and then recommend specific drills or strengthening exercises based on where she is now in order to take away any issues with her current form.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that would entail, like, actually finding somebody in the area, or would you say that doing something through email via, like some videos here and there, would that work?

Yeah. So, for example, I look at a lot of people's running technique. I just get them to video it on their iPhone and either send through the file or put that up on YouTube and can go through there and look at the angles and then recommend what it needs to be done. So, obviously, working with someone face to face is best because you can get direct feedback on what you're doing. But don't be limited by the fact that you have to find someone in your local area. With technology, it's quite easy to look at people's run technique and kind of evolve that.

You could put it up on YouTube and see how many people like your video, and that'll determine whether your run technique is getting better.

Yeah, that's a pretty good point. Although people do get nervous about putting videos up on YouTube. There's obviously, you can put that up as hidden videos so that only people that have the actual URL. Yeah, so for people that are self conscious about exactly that, about people laughing at their run technique, then it's not quite that scary.

Cool. So you just recommend that she really, instead of working from a book or from a dvd, find somebody to actually help her transition rather than doing that. This is the way you're running and this is the way you should be running. Kgo.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

All right, Well, I like it. What do you think, Ben?

Well, it was good to have Graham's take on that, and it's never a podcast without our token Australian accent, so that was also nice to get the Oz on the call.

Yeah, sorry, Ben, I'm not really sure you know what kind of accent you're talking about, mate.

Thanks, Graham.

Thanks, guys.

Hi, Ben.

I was wondering if you could enlighten us. Any listeners out there that might be interested in eating deer meat. My dad is a hunter, and I.

Expect that I have some meat coming.

To me this winter. I and was wondering if there's anything.

That I should know about that kind of meat and organs that hopefully I'll be able to get from that. Thanks so much.

I don't know about you, but I love deer meat. Venison is one of my favorite meats.

Yeah, you're kind of, though, like a. You're like a savage. Like, don't you jump out of trees up there in Canada and just kind of sink your teeth into the back hide of a deer and.

Yeah, my street here in Toronto, I just dangle from a tree branch until the deer walks by and just drop.

On its back, Just knock it out with a hockey stick.

Actually, occasionally during the show, I'll just run outside and do that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's ask it. You know, I personally hunt. I take a whitetail deer up here every year and, you know, keep. Keep the meat in a chest freezer. And so I certainly eat deer. But whether or not it's better than eating beef, you can definitely make some comparisons. So there are pros and cons.

You mean better in terms of nutrition, not better in terms of flavor?

Both, really. So when you look at nutrition, deer are leaner, they're typically more wild, they're typically more active than cattle. So venison is going to have less fat than beef. So about 3 ounces of beef has around 15 grams of fat, and 3 ounces of venison has about 3 grams of fat. Venison also has less saturated fat than beef does. And I'm not saying that fat is bad. I'm just saying that because of its activity, venison tends to have less fat. Now, that can influence flavor. It can make it more chewy. It can often because fat is a flavor carrier. It can make it less flavorful, too, unless it's prepared properly. Slow cooked, for example, and marinated. But. But venison also has more vitamins and minerals per serving than beef does because it's an active animal. For example, in the Tour de France, There are some teams that eat horse for many of these advantages prior to their big stages. Because of its active nature, it's richer in mitochondria, it has higher levels of iron, it has higher levels of B vitamins. And there's also this component called L carnitine. And L carnitine is something that can actually allow for increased uptake of fatty acids into the mitochondria to be used for the production of ATP. And venison is actually higher in L carnitine than beef is, so it's got that going forward as well. So I would say for like a, you know, say like the. The night before a big workout or something like that, venison is probably going to serve you a little bit better than beef. So it's got that going for it. When we look at flavor, I think that venison has sometimes a little bit of a gamey flavor, but that's something that, to me is almost, you know, when I hunt a deer and I kill it and I'm eating that meat, to me, I almost call me again like a wild savage or whatever, but I almost kind of like that gamey flavor.

Oh, yeah, that's so good. Yeah.

There are ways that you can prepare venison that make it taste pretty good. And we don't have time to get into venison recipes on this podcast, per se. But again, like slow cooking, marinating, using some lemon juice and stuff like that to break down some of the fibers. I mean, it can be really good. Beef definitely is tender, it's fattier, it's more succulent. But I would say both have advantages when it comes to taste. They're just different animals, really, literally and figuratively. So cost is kind of interesting. Some people think it's cheaper to hunt your own food, but in most cases, deer is going to be really expensive because you get your hunting license. And hunting licenses are going to range from about 20 to $30, depending on what state that you live in. And then once you actually take into account the amount of money spent on hunting gear, guns, ammo, trip expenditures, if you're actually going out into the wilderness to get your deer, it range anything from 500 to $1,000 once you actually get the deer. So, you know, if you factor in that on the average deer, you might get about 60 pounds or so of meat, you're looking at anywhere from 15 to $30 a pound all in. So it's not necessarily an economical way to go, versus whatever, $4 to $10 a pound for beer. So I would say from a cost standpoint, there's a definite advantage to beef. Now, there are some exceptions. Like me, for example, I have 10 acres in Washington state. I've got a gun, I've got ammo. I can go out with a $21 license and take a deer for next to nothing. And that's something that I can bring in to the butcher, who lives literally about five blocks from my house, have her prepared into sausages and venison, keep the bones for bone broths and bone marrow, and I'm good to go for probably closer to two to three dollars a pound. So it kind of depends on what you have available to you. Now, there are also some.

Sounds like Jamie's in that similar situation with her dad going out hunting and bringing at home.

Yep. So there are some health considerations. So there's this issue with chronic wasting disease, which you hear about. It's this degenerative brain disease. It's kind of like mad cow disease. Nobody wants to get mad Deer disease, also known as spongiform encephalopathy. And that can literally eat away at your nervous system. And it's been around for a while. It comes from consuming certain parts of an infected animal. And there are just best practices to follow if you're going to eat venison. So, for example, you really shouldn't eat the eyes, the brain, the spinal cord, the spleen, the tonsils, or the lymph nodes of any deer. And most butchers are going to know how to make sure that you're not actually eating those parts of the deer. If you're butchering yourself, you need to make sure that you're pretty careful. I mean, like I field dress my deer, and I'm very careful to make sure the bacteria from the stomach or the intestines or the anus isn't actually spread to the meat during that gutting process. But once you actually bring it into the butcher, you want to make sure that. That they're ensuring that you're not getting pieces of some of these organs that tend to build up this chronic wasting disease protein in them. So eyes, brain, spinal cord, that type of stuff.

Yeah. If you've got the butcher doing sausages for you, that's where the problem could come in, too. When they're grinding it up.

Exactly.

Getting mulched up.

Yeah. Especially with beer. You want to be careful with that kind of bacterial or protein contamination. Most good butchers are. Are pretty good these days. It's usually people who are butchering themselves or, I don't know who's out there eating deer eyes? But folks doing that, that's where you can get some of these issues caused by what are called prions. So I'd be careful with that. You want to make sure that as far as the lymph nodes go, that you do what's called boning out the meat. You can just ask your butcher to do this and make sure they remove any of the fat and the web like membranes, the fascia that's attached to the meat, and that helps to get rid of some of these lymph nodes where those prions might reside. So as long as you make sure that you take care of that. Honestly, I think that venison is almost safer than beef. When we hear about all these people are getting sick from E. Coli from hamburgers and stuff like that, I see a lot less out there as far as venison goes compared to beef. So ultimately, there are some definite health benefits. And I think that it's a nice, healthy sporting activity. I think that there's some ethical considerations. I know that some people aren't fans of eating deer because of the whole killing Bambi's mom thing. And I just want to clarify, if I shoot a deer, I'm very careful that I don't kill it when it's running scared. So it's got really low amounts of cortisol. I take it with a very well intentioned shot. I'll never shoot if it's running or moving. I'm very, very careful from that standpoint not to be ruining any Disney movies. So ultimately consensus on deer meats for me is go for it. And sounds like you too, Brock.

And you know what else I give two thumbs up for? I just saw the FedEx truck arrive outside my house, which means my Gunnar glasses just arrived.

Oh, you gonna. You gonna run out there and rip open the box, put them on and run back in here?

Oh, it's just. It's like Christmas morning.

Do it.

But I'll be right back.

Hey, Ben, this is Jazz. Love the show.

I was just wondering if you could.

Talk about the consequences, I suppose, of taking progesterone. Specifically taking progesterone in order to induce the menstrual cycle in a female who is not lacking their menstrual cycle because the of of fitness, but was just born that way. What are the positives and negatives of taking these hormone replacements? Yeah, if you have any references also can look up and literature I can read up on, that would be great. Thanks.

So this is really interesting that she Actually says she's not a menorrheic from exercise, but was born that way.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably. I'm guessing that's sort of a turn of phrase, because obviously she would have had to wait a number of years before knowing that. Yeah, necessarily.

Yeah. I don't know. Lady Gaga was born that way, according to her. Possibly also true. So that's actually called primary amenorrhea, when you basically have absence of menstruation, but you didn't get that way by actually experiencing, like, a hormonal deficit or something like that, or digging yourself into a hole. From a hormonal standpoint point, usually it's the shape of your genital or your pelvic organs. Sometimes there are actually parts of those organs missing that would be responsible for causing primary amenorrhea. But of course, I'm sure that there are many women out there listening, based on the demographic of our audience, who also have amenorrhea, who maybe weren't born that way. So the issue here, before we talk about progesterone use, the idea behind this is when an athlete, especially a sporting female, develops amenorrhea, it's usually called hypothalamic amenorrhea or functional hypothalamic amenorrhea. It's caused by stress, it's caused by excessive weight loss, it's caused by excessive exercise, or in most cases, kind of a combination of all three. So the way that this works is that when you have an energy imbalance through not eating enough calories or exercising a lot, and you get weight loss, that disrupts your menstrual cycles. So the way it works is that weight loss can cause an elevation in a hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin is normally a hormone that would make you hungry, but it also, in high amounts, can inhibit what's called your hypothalamic pituitary ovarial axis. So elevated levels of ghrelin alter the ability of your hypothalamus and subsequently your pituitary to release luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone. And those are the two hormones that maintain normal ovulation. So once you get a bunch of ghrelin released, because you are sending a signal to your body that there is not much energy around it naturally. And this kind of makes sense from, like, an evolutionary standpoint, once you start to think about it, it naturally shuts down your fertility. So if you were going through a period of starvation, or you were traditionally, or from, like, an ancestral standpoint, Part of a culture that didn't have access to much food. It wouldn't make much sense to be propagating the population at the same time as that. So the body has this natural way to just kind of shut down fertility once you put yourself into a situation where, let's say a baby you might bring into the world would be under a lot of stress. And it kind of saves your body for a different point. So part of that might be just because females are born with a finite number of eggs. I'm not really sure of the exact biological mechanism. But anyways, it's high levels of ghrelin that actually cause that hypothalamus, pituitary, ovarial axis down regulation. So the other thing that can happen is you get low levels of the hormone leptin in females when they drop their body weight, especially when they drop their body weight quickly. And leptin is necessary also to maintain regular menstrual cycles. And you tend to see low levels of leptin or leptin insensitivity caused by excessive exercise or very, very low caloric intake, or a combination of both. So leptin is one of the things that indicates to your brain the amount of energy balance and the amount of fat stores that you have. So once you begin to get very, very decreased levels of leptin, that's pretty correlated to low levels of body fat. And that also slows the pulsing release of luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone. So this is kind of a classic precursor or goes hand in hand with what's called the female athlete triad, which is amenorrhea, it's osteoporosis, which is another serious issue. And then also disordered eating. Either an obsession with food, or wanting complete control over food, or simply really restricting calories. And there's a lot of women, unfortunately, that, that have this. Now you can be more genetically prone to this type of issue, to this hypothalamic menorrhea. There have been some studies that have been done recently that show that some women are genetically more prone to it. Whereas some women can just kind of go hard and go for a long period of time, beat up their bodies, engage in endurance exercise, and not have it cause that same amount of hormonal deficit. It's probably just based off of of your genes coming from maybe folks who got to sit around a lot and be fat and happy, and maybe their bodies just got get thrown for a complete loop when they get exposed to having to go out and run 13 miles whereas there's some folks who maybe come from a little bit stronger hunter gatherer population who kind of don't have quite that same curveball thrown at their body. My wife comes from hardy Montana rancher genes and she, she sustains most times of the year 8 to 10% body fat and she never misses a period. And that's just the way her body works. She's definitely not one of those people who are genetically prone to amenorrhea, whereas some women would just be on the couch and full on overtrained, adrenal fatigue, full amenorrheic, getting even close to that level of body fat percentage or that level of activity. So I'll link in the show notes to some interesting genetic studies that have been done that show that there are specific mutations in specific genes that can predispose women to hypothalamic amenorrhea. So in terms of the progesterone issue here, now, the idea behind progesterone is that it's kind of considered like the sexy hormone. So it's very, very common for women these days to have what's called estrogen dominance. So estrogen is something that increases fat storage. When it's in excess, it impairs thyroid function, it can lead to endometriosis, it can increase risk of breast cancer, it can create bloating and gas. And progesterone kind of does all the opposite to that. It stimulates fat, burning it up regulates the thyroid, it reduces bloating, it supports blood sugar balance. And so when you use a progesterone cream, in many cases what you're doing is restoring proper hormone balance to your body. One of the reasons this works very well in, for example, endurance athletes, athletes is because of a pregnenolone steal. So pregnenolone is a hormone precursor and it could get converted into cortisol or it could get converted into progesterone. So when you're exercising a lot, producing a lot of cortisol, you don't produce quite as much progesterone. So you get a combination of both progesterone deficiency and the subsequent estrogen dominant symptoms that can go along with that. That's one of the reasons that endurance sports can make some females look fat and bloated is because they get progesterone depletion sometimes and sometimes not accompanied by this amenorrhea and estrogen dominance. So a progesterone cream is a form of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. And that's not to be confused with hrt. Or hormone replacement therapy. So hormone replacement therapy is when you extract estrogen from pregnant horses and literally inject that into the body. Whereas bioidentical hormone replacement therapy takes hormones, usually from plant sterols, and it puts those into the body. And usually those are done via, like a bioidentical natural progesterone cream or progesterone sublingual tablet, progesterone capsule, sometimes progesterone injection. So I would encourage you to actually be pretty careful with using progesterone. And there are a few reasons why. The first is that progesterone is a band aid for a symptom. And there are women out there who find that progesterone helps to increase their sex drive or can bring their period back when they're doing a lot of exercise, but they never address the cortisol issue. They just dump a bunch of progesterone into their body to allow them to continue to make a bunch of cortisol, while at the same time putting exogenous progesterone into the body. And that not only is just a band aid for an underlying symptom of needing to control stress and maybe recover better, but it also creates what I would consider to be the second problem with progesterone, and that's this negative feedback loop. So most of the hormones in your body are governed by a negative feedback loop, and it works kind of like the thermostat in your house. So if you set the thermostat in your house to 72 degrees and the room temperature is 69 degrees, then the heater in the room is going to kick in in to warm the temperature in the room up. And when the temperature reaches, say, 72 degrees, the heat shuts off again until the temperature drops again. And so when you take a hormone like progesterone, it can shut off that hormone negative feedback loop. So it would be like heating a room by a space heater, for example. The space heater would be the exogenous progesterone that you're taking or you're smearing on your body. And so your natural furnace just shuts off because it's not needed anymore. And that means that when you take a progesterone cream or use a progesterone product, that causes your body to rely on that product and to not produce your natural hormones anymore once you quit taking that product. It's the same negative feedback loop that causes me to encourage guys not to take testosterone creams or testosterone patches or testosterone injections versus underlying just to Take.

Your furnace idea a little bit further. So does that mean, like, the pilot light actually goes out in the furnace because you're using the space heater too much?

Exactly. It would be basically, the furnace shuts off because it's not needed anymore.

So the furnace doesn't just come back on as soon as the space heater is gone?

Nope. It shuts off because it's not needed. And in the case of most hormones, it takes anywhere from six to 12 months for that furnace to turn back on, and you feel really crappy during that process. So another issue is that progesterone cream can cause progesterone resistance. So if you're not monitoring your use, if you're not testing under close supervision with a medical practitioner, your use of progesterone, an excess of any hormone, including progesterone, can cause cell receptor insensitivity to that hormone. And so you know it's the same as insulin. When you eat too much sugar, your pancreas pumps out a bunch of insulin and your cells eventually become insulin insensitive because there's constantly insulin circulating and the blood's stream. So you need more and more insulin and your pancreas poops out eventually and you get diabetes. Progesterone, you dump a bunch of progesterone, or guys, you dump a bunch of testosterone into your body and you can eventually create a cell receptor insensitivity to that hormone, needing more and more hormones to actually make it work. So that kind of leads to the last issue with progesterone that I have, and that is that it's very hard to use without proper medical supervision. Most people don't go out of their way to work with something like, say, like a Wiley practition. A Wiley practitioner is someone who's well versed in bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, but is well versed in it in terms of being able to test you and work with a compounding pharmacist in your area to adjust your dose. Now, that sounds like quite a bit to go through, and it certainly is compared to ordering cream on Amazon or a sublingual progesterone on Amazon and using that and just kind of like taking it willy nilly and keeping your fingers crossed that you're doing it right.

Right.

So if anybody out there is going to use progesterone, I would at least say work with a Wiley practitioner who's well versed in bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and who is willing to work with a compounding pharmacist to Adjust your dosage every month based off of where your levels are at. And then also understand that in many cases, if you're competing in something like triathlons or marathons or anything where you are being monitored by, like, the World Anti Doping association, you can't use this stuff anyways. It's illegal. It's gonna get you banned or get a podium or a medal or whatever taken away.

Well, you can get a letter from your doctor. You can get one of those exemption certificates.

Those are really hard to get unless you're. They're hard to get unless you're freaking old and extremely deficient. And in most cases, like I mentioned, this is just a band aid for an underlying symptom of having too much stress. And I mean freaking rewind this podcast 40 minutes and go back and listen to what I said about organ meats and reducing stress and minimalist training and all the things that you can do to fight off a lot of the things that chronic cardio does to your body. Believe it or not, a lot of those same things help women who have menorrhea reduce stress, exercise less, eat really nutritious foods, sleep more. I mean, those are the same type of things I recommend. So as far as progesterone goes, I'd be really careful with it and I would make sure that you work with a wily practitioner, ideally.

Hi, I'm listening on Paleocon to you talking about barefoot running and walking and standing. What would you say to somebody that has varicose veins and we're supposed to support the legs and the veins for health and not supposed to be standing for long periods of time and without any support? What would you say to that? Thank you.

I didn't know what you talked about at the Paleocon. Talking about going barefoot, I guess.

Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff. What's our link for PaleoCon? Is it BenGreenfieldFitness.com PaleoCon PaleoCon. Okay, cool. So that was an online payload event. And I did indeed talk about standing workstations. And like we mentioned, I'm standing right now, standing as well. And I am wearing compression shorts from about mid thigh up to my booty. And I'm wearing skins, compression sleeves from my ankle up to my knees. So I am decked out in compression gear and brock is pantless. So there you go, there's your visual.

I am wearing compression socks.

Socks. Pantless with compression socks. And the reason I do that. And I wear a graduated compression sock, which basically pumps the blood up through the leg and keeps those vein valves from having to be overworked. The reason I do that is the exact reason that Jolnhomme is concerned about varicose veins is because when you spend a lot of time on your feet, gravity does its work and eventually those veins can get blocked up. Now, we've done some very.

Damn you, gravity.

Damn gravity. We've done some very comprehensive podcasts on varicose veins. Honestly, like, we've done two of them, and I'm gonna link to them in the show notes, where I go into everything from using an inversion table at the end of a long day or using the yoga inversion poses that I'm gonna link to in the show notes to using compression gear. And I'll include all of our discount codes for compression gear in the show notes notes to using these gradated compression socks. There's a bunch of them you can get. Like I mentioned, I'm wearing the Skins brand right now, and they're one of our sponsors for Team Timex, which is why I've got a suitcase full of those. And then we also talked about herbs and blends that you can use for varicose vein, some of the best ones being grapeseed extract. And then funny names, but horse chestnut extract and butcher's broom. And those would be. If you already have varicose veins, those can help those to clear up. Essentially, though, I mean, this is really simple. You simply defy gravity. You wear compression gear, compression socks, compression leggings, that kind of stuff, and you get inverted every now and again. You change positions as you are in your standing workstation. So, like, right now, I have a chair next to me, so I've had my right foot up on that chair for some of the podcasts. I've been standing on both feet for some of the podcasts. I've had my left foot up on the chair for some of the podcast.

So when you say your foot's up on. On something, are you like Captain Morgan kind of pose?

Kind of Captain. I've got my arms folded across my chest and I'm looking out into the horizon with like.

And of course, you've got your pirate hat.

And my pirate hat. Exactly. Very Old Spice. Yeah. And of course, I'm shirtless as usual. So. So, yeah, the. I mean, like, I don't want to blow off your question, but I will put a link to all of the. The previous things that we've done on varicose veins. But I mean, like, the one biggest thing that you could do is Get a compression sock. Not just any compression sock, but what's called a graduated compression sock, which starts with high pressure lower down and lowers that pressure going farther up your leg so that you're just naturally pumping blood back up to your heart. And then. Yeah. @BenGreenfieldVentnist.com 275, I will put the mother load of links and resources for you on varicose veins.

So I think the only thing that needs to be pointed out right here is you're saying to wear compression socks. She's asking about going barefoot. So I think the, it's sort of just a semantic issue here. Like barefoot isn't necessarily like no socks, no shoes, like completely barefoot. It's not wearing big built up shoes.

Or like I'm barefoot right now, but I'm wearing compression sleeves. And that's another way to go. So. And the only real difference between wearing socks and going completely barefoot is you do still get more stimulation of nerve endings and proprioceptors when you are really like truly barefoot. And that's why even like if you're doing barefoot running, like with Vibrams, for example, like sometimes just going to a park and taking off your vibrams and just running on the grass is a good idea.

Yeah.

Hey, Ben. My name is Natalie. I had the Genova diagnostics eye and blood panel in one of the things, things they tested for was toxins such as mercury, arsenic and aluminum. Unfortunately, all three of mine were very high. I cut out fish for a month. I stopped using deodorant. And my second test results, the aluminum went down significantly. The mercury unfortunately was still high. So we've narrowed that down to my amalgam filling, which I'm going through the process of taking care of. But the arsenic was high on the first and second test. My physician said that it could be from rice, that she knows that sometimes rice has a lot of arsenic in it. But I don't really eat rice maybe once a week. And I heard on one of your podcasts you had mentioned about arsenic and protein powder. I do have usually about three protein shakes a week. And so I was wondering if maybe this was where it was originating from. So I'd love to know if arsenic is indeed found in protein powder. Any other areas that you can think of that it may be found in? Either something I'm eating or something in my home. And suggestions for a protein powder that would be high quality enough that you, you can ensure that that sort of toxin was not in it. Thanks so much.

Well, I did a really interesting podcast episode with Dr. David Minkoff. It was called how hidden sources of heavy metals are destroying your health and what you can do about it.

Nice.

I will certainly put a link to that in the show notes for this episode. But we talked with Dr. Minkoff about how metal exposure can cause everything from chronic fatigue, fatigue to poor mood to disrupted sleep, to headaches, to immune issues, to low hormones to brain fog.

Didn't it actually cause some paralysis in his wife?

Yeah, that's how he knows so much about it. Really messed up his wife. And I actually got to meet her at the Superhuman conference that we did and she's doing awesome now and she's beautiful and functions just fine.

She looked fantastic.

Yeah, I mean, she looks like she's like 30 years old. And I think she's. I think she's like in her 60s. But, but anyways, the biggest culprit for metal exposure is just like you mentioned, Brock, modern dentistry. And that's what Dr. Minkoff's wife was exposed to. And even though about 50% of dentists in the US are pretty much mercury free now, only about 10% of them actually understand the health risks that are associated with dental amalgams, which is basically just toxic mercury. Despite what the misleading term silver filling might lead you to believe, there is no silver. If you want to really get rid of heavy metals and the potential damage to organs like your liver and your kidneys, and the potential toxicity from those, you want to get rid of those fillings. And we've done previous episodes on kind of some options for everything from root canals to natural fillings. But that would be number one would be to find a holistic dentist to make sure that there's not anything going on in your mouth.

It sounds like Natalie's got that sorted. She is getting that taken care of.

But for other people listening in, if you're not sorting that, then do it now. Natalie got the Genova Diagnostics Ion Blood Panel. That's a really good blood panel. There's another one from direct labs called the Metametrix Ion Panel. The Metametrix Ion Panel is also a really good one for looking at heavy metals. And the other sources that you'd want to look at would be pollution or smog. That can be a contributor. Car keys, believe it or not, can be an issue, as can toys.

What are you doing with the car keys?

Yeah, don't chew on your car keys.

Picking stuff out of your teeth with your keys.

Pesticides and herbicides. If you're eating a lot of non organic fruits and vegetables, those can have arsenic and metals in them. Lakes or rivers, if you're doing a lot of open water swimming, like Lake Coeur d' Alene out by my house, beautiful pristine lake where they have Ironman Coeur d' Alene and one of the most polluted lakes in the country because of mining runoff from all the mines that still dot the perimeter of that lake. Food that's stored in metal containers, feeding a lot of canned food, that can be an issue. Some of the bigger, big, big fish that eat other fish like tuna and dolphin, you can get some metals accumulating in those. Bioaccumulation of heavy metals in fish is, is not as big of an issue because you get a lot of selenium in fish, which can help to bind and remove a lot of those heavy metals. But if you're eating a ton of that, it can be an issue, as can potentially nuclear runoff from Japan. But I talked about that a little bit last week and how it's probably not as big an issue as like pesticides and herbicides and stuff like that. And then of course, a lot of protein powders and dietary supplements can have heavy metals in them too. So you want to make sure any powder you get is preferably from what's called a CGMP certified facility. Regardless, though, I mean, some of this stuff you simply can't eliminate from your surroundings or from your life. So what I personally do is once a year I do a metal detox. So what a metal detox does is it collates metals and removes them from your body. And when you bind heavy metals and pull them out of your body, they generally exit your body via your stool, your urine, your hair, your breast, and your sweat. And there are some forms of chelation that can cause some serious problems because they will extract, along with heavy metals from your body, other minerals. They can also simply take minerals from parts of your body and have them wind up in your bloodstream, where they can potentially cross the blood brain barrier and cause some pretty serious issues. So the only type of chelation that I'm a fan of is called a peptide based chelation. And peptides are really short protein chains. And the way that they interact with metals like arsenic is they wrap around the metals in such a way that the metal is not free to interfere with or to block normal cellular processes. It's called cage binding. So rather than chelating precious minerals from your body, or allowing metals that have been chelated to wind up in the bloodstream interacting with other cellular processes, the peptides actually form this cage around things like mercury and arsenic and lead or aluminum or uranium, and then it simply removes mostly via your stool. In this case, in the case of a peptide based collater. So I use this stuff called Metal Free. It's a spray. You spray it sublingually. I don't do it all the time. I just do it for 30 days out of the year. And that would be the number one thing that I would do. I mean, it's possible that you're getting some arsenic from like brown rice has some arsenic. It's. It's more likely that it's multifactorial and you're getting it from a bunch of different sources. And so I would say, you know, clean up and detox as much as possible. But also I would do at least like a 30 day protocol, something like this Metal Free. And then this protein powder that you talked about, I don't know what brand it is. Pretty much the only two protein powder brands that I currently vouch for though are the Mount Capra stuff, which is a cold processed based whey protein, and then the stuff made by Living Fuel out of Florida. And that's called. That's a vegan alternative and that's called Living Protein. Like those two I know are good and they've been independently tested by third parties and free of heavy metals and all that jazz. So I'd do the metal free formula, I'd switch out the protein powders and then I'd also. If you're listening in and you do want to test for metals, I'll put a link in the show notes to the metamed ion panel through direct labs.

Hey, did you notice something about all the collars? So far they were all ladies.

Oh yeah, baby. Except for this next one, Brock and I. Oh man.

Except for this next one.

Yeah.

So we'll do this last one and then we'll get to our big gear giveaway. But first, the dude.

Hi, Ben. I hope you're well. Just had a question. So in one of your posts you recommended the magnetico sleep pad. However, I saw somewhere else that you actually use the Earth pulse. And I did note you he didn't recommended recommend using both together. So I'm just wondering what is your preference and why? Thanks very much. Maybe Shay is just a lady with a deep voice that would keep our. Keep our 100% run going.

Sorry, man. You are now an official lady.

All right, Shay. So magnetico sleep pad versus Earth pulse. And we're now scaring everybody who's never heard of these Things far away, I'm sure. So this is just a case of different things that you can sleep on that are going to help your body to recover while you are asleep or to mitigate some of the effects of, say, like, electromagnetic fields while you are asleep. So, for example, this earth pulse is pulsed Electromagnetic Field therapy, or pemf. It is a magnet. And you place it underneath your mattress, and it pulses a magnetic field that's very, very close to the same frequency that is emitted by, say, the planet Earth while you are asleep. And by pulsing this field up through the mattress while you're asleep, you can enhance everything from healing of cell membranes to mitochondrial density. It can help with stress, fractures, injuries, stuff like that. Now, some people, when they use the Earth pulse, complain that they'll use it for a few days and it will really help with sleep, and then it won't help with sleep anymore. And I've been looking into this because, for example, when I've been traveling a bunch, if I don't have my Earth pulse with me and I get home and I use it for a few nights, I will sleep like a freaking baby. And sometimes I do notice that some of the effects almost seem to kind of wear off after a few days of not using it, going back into using it. So part of this is explained by this mat called the magnetico mat. And the way that this magnetico mat is made is that it doesn't elicit or release what's called a bipolar field. So a bipolar field is a positive electrical field and a negative electrical field. When your body gets exposed to a positive magnetic field, it will slow down the movement of electrons and protons, so it slows down some electrochemical activity. Now, your body responds to this slowing down by kind of shutting down blood flow, decreasing activity, and really helping get into this deep sleep state. But the problem appears to be that when you have constant exposure to this alternating current of bipolar fields while you're asleep, what it can eventually become is almost like a stimulant, because you get to a point where your body slows down so much that your brain almost has this emergency response and a little bit of a release of endorphins while you're asleep. And this is possibly why some people say they'll use, like an earth pulse, and they'll wake up at 2 or 3am after they've used it for a week and kind of slept like a baby. So that's the difference between something like a magnetico sleep mat and an earth pulse is the magnetico is Only a unidirectional magnetic field, Whereas the earth pulse is a bipolar magnetic field. So this would be a situation where it'd be different applications for different situations. The earth pulse seems to work really, really well for about as long as a week when you need some intense recovery, recovery from jet lag when you're traveling and you want to have it with you to reduce some of the deleterious effects of airline travel. And you need something nice and, and portable to do that when you're injured and you need it to cause some frequency, like in an area where there's a stress fracture, that type of thing. But if you find yourself waking up after using an earth pulse for a set number of days, you either just use it throughout the year at points where you need it, like after you've done a really hard workout, after you've returned from travel, that type of thing. And then the other times you don't use a magnet or you use something like this unidirectional magnetic effect sleep pad. So that's the deal with the magnets. Now, as far as magnetico versus something like a biomat, well, a biomat isn't a magnet at all. So I will actually use a biomat and an earth pulse at the same time. What a biomat is, is a biomat is infrared. So it releases infrared waves, and it actually releases infrared waves that are at what are called a, a higher micron or a greater micron frequency than what like an infrared light would release. Now, infrared has been used for a long time as a way to increase blood flow, to naturally heat the body and to improve physiological function, especially glandular function, like healing of adrenal fatigue and that type of thing. The issue is that sometimes these infrared saunas don't work quite as well as a higher micron length when it comes to the actual infrared wavelength that's released. So this biomet releases far infrared. It also releases what are called negative ions. Now, negative ions are the same type of thing you'd get when you expose yourself to grounding or earthing or magnets. The biomet gives you some of the benefits of magnetizing without, without the actual use of a magnet. And it does that via crystals that are embedded throughout the biomat. So it's kind of heavy. That's what I don't like about it. You can't travel with it. But for home, it works really, really well. It's got what are called amethyst crystals and tourmaline crystals in it and those really specific waveforms that actually deliver negative ions into your body. So the infrared rays penetrate about 6 to 8 inches into your body. They're completely healthy. It's not like microwaving or anything like that. It's just natural electromagnetic energy. And then the addition of the amethyst and the tourmaline allow for the integration of negative ions, better blood flow, more of that healthy body detox type of effect you'd get if you slept just like on the ground, in touch with the earth. It's the reason why professional teams in the Tour de France coached by or who had Dr. Jeff Spencer, who first introduced me to grounding in earth, and why they would use this in between their stages along with their horse meat, incidentally. So the biomat is something you would use in conjunction with either a magnetico or an earth pulse, or you could use it all by yourself, but it's way different than a magnetico sleep mat. So a biomat is infrared and crystals and a magnetico is just magnets. And if we have anybody left listening, aside from the people wearing aluminum foil hats now, we are really lucky. But either way, I'll link to the biomat, the magnetico and the earth pulse in the show notes for anybody who just wants to check that stuff out. What I personally do is I use an earth pulse when I need to use it. I use a biomat almost every day, especially for naps. And then I of course wear my aluminum tin foil hat at all times.

I need to point out that the biomat also repels dragons and orcs.

That's right.

So if you're having any trouble with dragons and orcs, and it comes with.

It comes with a tiny hobbit sword that glows.

It sure does.

And I believe that's the first time I've actually used the phrase tiny hobbit sword on the podcast.

And the last. Anyway, let's move on to our itunes review and give away some stuff, shall we?

That's right. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com gear you can get the Bengreenfield fitness beanie, the tech shirt, and of course the BPA free water bottle. And you can support the show and pick those up for yourself as a gear pack for 47 bucks. But we also give away this gear pack once a week to people who go to itunes and click and leave us a review. So this week's review is a 5 star review. I don't think I usually read it.

But I can't actually see through my Gunnar glasses at the moment because they still have Those the plastic shield on the lenses and I can't seem to get it off, so you're gonna have to read it.

Or maybe you just slacked and didn't pick a review, so I gotta read one.

Yeah, just make something.

Yeah. Okay, so it's a five star review. I wouldn't read it if it wasn't a five star, by the way.

No.

Just a hint to those of you that screw the recipe. It's by Sneaky Tiki. So, Sneaky Tiki, if you heard us reading your review, Write into Ben greenfieldfitness.com and let us know your address. And here's what Sneaky Tiki has to say. BenGreenfield Fitness is one of only a few podcasts that I listen to and enjoy. First of all, Sneaky Tiki, you're cheating on us if you're listening to other podcasts, so stop that now. These podcasts are filled to overflow with useful content. I have a two hour commute each way to work and I'm always in need of something to listen to. Dude, I bet. I wish he would increase the frequency of his shows. Yeah, it's not gonna happen, but I understand that he is.

A week isn't enough.

He has a real life outside of itunes. No, I actually don't have a real life outside of itunes. It just takes me so freaking long to put together these podcasts that I can only do two a week. I don't know. I don't know how guys like, I don't know how guys like Joe Robin Rogan do like three six hour podcasts a week. It's crazy. Of course, I don't have the sponsors or the audience that Joe Rogan has.

Plus, I'm gonna work on that.

Not funny. And don't drink weed before we record. Did I say drink weed?

You did. I think you have been drinking weed.

Just keep that in there. So he finished says, I highly recommend anything that Ben produces and or appears on. Great job. Keep them coming. Nice. Anything. I think, I think, I think I'm gonna go for Teletubbies. We'll see what Sneaky Tiki thinks of that.

I think Sneaky.

Yeah, baby.

Teletubby.

That's right. All right, folks. Well, all right, folks. Well, if you want links to everything we talked about in today's show or the Teletubbies, head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 275. We've got it all over there. And until next week.

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

It.