Algae For Fat Loss, Biohacking Mental Focus, American Ninja Warrior Training Tips & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show, American Ninja Warrior Training tips, biohacking, mental focus, 10k training and nutrition. Does LG work for fat loss and much more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep train and hormone optimization. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

I personally am on my third cup of coffee this morning. How are you doing for the caffeine intake, Ben?

I'm very well caffeinated, actually. As we were discussing before we began recording, I have quite a few different biochemical compounds circulating through my bloodstream right now because I woke up this morning wanting to try this new smart drug coffee that someone sent me. I get all these strange things in the mail and I got this stuff called Chimera coffee, which is basically coffee. And they've added smart drugs like Alpha GPC and taurine and L theanine and something called dmae, which is basically like a kind of choline that you find in fish. And they have all these things blended into the coffee. But then I had a, a conundrum. I already had a pot of coffee brewed from yesterday, so I had a regular pot of coffee brewed, but then I had this bag of smart drug coffee burning a hole in my refrigerator just waiting to be brewed. So I actually used yesterday's pot of coffee. I heated that up and then I used it to French press this smart drug coffee. So I used coffee to make coffee this morning. I'm scared and nothing has happened in the colon that would indicate that I have completely blown myself out. However, if you recall that episode a couple of months ago where I overdosed on THC and halfway through the episode just kind of dropped off and disappeared. Um, that may happen, but in a very opposite way. This morning I may just go into fast forward and begin talking so quickly that the microphones explode. So that's more what I'm doing.

We did that episode a few probably a couple months ago where I had a bunch of coffee, I had a bunch of creatine and siltep and then took some alpha brain and I actually got two people wrote to me on Facebook and told me that I sounded weird that day on the podcast.

Weird, not smart, just weird.

Just weird. Yeah, exactly. It's like, okay, well that didn't work.

Well, if there's, if there's anything that all of this smart drug and getting high prior to our podcast has done for us. It is one thing. We were actually the the top ranked health and fitness podcast in all of itunes this week. So there's that. Yeah, cool. So all of this only in America drug taking has paid off. I know in Canada all you guys get are hockey and yoga podcasts. Here in America, in the most important place in the world, we were number one. So there.

USA. USA. In the USA. In Canada and around the world, you can access twitter.com BenGreenfield and get all kinds of awesome news flashes. Right now we're going to talk about them.

There is no place in the world where I believe that Twitter is banned.

I think China.

China really? Is Twitter banned.

They banned a lot of. You couldn't even get Google in China for a while. I'm not sure what the state is of that.

I'm not sure Twitter is banned in China. Tell you what, while I talk about the first little, little hack that I tweeted out about this week, why don't you use Mr. Google and see if Twitter is banned in China? Because I'm actually interested in that. So in the meantime, while you keep yourself busy with that, an interesting little video came across my radar this week that I tweeted out about about a cool little free sleep hack. And I'll link to this as well over in the shownotes for today's episode@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 324 but basically the idea here is that in your feet you actually have special blood vessels. You have these in your hands too. They're called arteriovenous anastomoses. These, these blood vessels and what they're specifically, what is it called? I just want you to say it again at the risk of potentially butchering these words and saying something that would get us banned from itunes in the.

Explicit category, especially in China.

Arteriovenous anastomoses.

Nice.

So basically, these are special vessels which when coupled with the lack of hair, specifically in the bottoms of your feet, are designed to dissipate body heat very, very efficiently. And what they found in a study that they did on feet out of the covers versus feet in the covers, was that you could drop your body temperature by about 1 or 2 degrees by simply sticking your feet out of the covers when you sleep. And when you do that, you actually can get deeper, more restorative sleep because one of the mechanisms via which you churn out more melatonin as you sleep is triggered by a cooler room or a cooler body temperature, or taking a cold shower or even a bath before bed to cool the body. But it turns out that something as simple as sticking your feet out from underneath the covers can dissipate body heat efficiently enough to drop temperature 1 to 2 degrees and enhance sleep. So if you're one of those people who sleeps in wool socks with your feet all tucked up underneath the covers, you could be completely screwing yourself. And the whole reason that you're. You're ugly and you have a crappy job and you have brain fog all day long and you have appetite cravings and your body fat is just going through the roof is because you're sleeping with warm feet. So try that one out, and I'll link to the little video where. Where they kind of introduce that little hack.

They really need to make a video to show you how to stick your feet up from under the covers. That seems pretty simple.

That's right. So I've got one, an interesting one about the hamstrings, too. But before I do, any word on Twitter in China?

Yeah. According to Wikipedia, access to Twitter is currently blocked in North Korea, China, and Iran.

Hmm. Well, Wikipedia, they know.

Although then it says under the China heading. This is confusing. It says, Twitter is blocked in China, however, many Chinese people use it anyway, and it does not go on to explain how that's possible.

Well, you can be Chinese and not live in China, so maybe that's what they're indicating.

Oh, yeah, many Chinese people use it anyway. Good point. Yeah, people blocked in China fleeing.

But fleeing China in droves to be.

Able to use Twitter, cross the border, tweet like crazy, and then go home.

That's right. Okay.

Anyway, there you go.

So here's one on hamstrings, and there's this really cool, cool little infographic that goes into a study that's not new, a study that actually came out in the American Journal of Sport Medicine way back in 2011. But what it is, is it's an infographic that teaches you how to do an exercise called the Nordic Hamstring exercise. You heard of this exercise, Brock? No.

No, but it sounds intriguing. It sounds like something you do at a spa.

Yeah, it's not really something you do at a spa. Believe it or not, the Nordic Hamstring ex is an exercise in which you kneel on the ground and a partner holds onto your heels or your ankles.

Okay.

And then you allow yourself in that kneeling position to slowly lower towards the ground until you get to the point at which you simply Cannot support your body anymore. And then you kind of fall to the ground. You catch yourself with your hands, you push yourself.

Oh, wait, wait, wait. Okay, so you're going forward, like face first towards the ground.

Yeah, it's, it's essentially an eccentric lengthening exercise that increases the hamstrings ability to be able to resist rapid lengthening, which is when the hamstrings typically tear or sprain or strain when you're kicking a soccer ball or when you're sprinting, for example. And so this exercise is, is, you know, it's pretty similar to the type of training that you'd get if you were to, say, find one of those glute or ham extension machines at the gym and just lower yourself very, very slowly. Right. You could achieve a similar effect. But this one can be done with a partner. And the other thing that you can do, if you don't happen to have a partner to help you with this exercise and you don't have one of those glute ham extension machines or you don't want to go to the gym to use one, you can just tuck your feet under anything that would support your feet, like a bar or a couch or anything like that, and just slowly lower yourself towards the ground. And it turns out that in participants following the Nordic exercise program, in which they were doing about 30 repetitions of this exercise, I believe they were at three times a week in this study. And this was soccer players, a group of folks who are actually one of the most hamstring injury prone populations on the face of the.

They're always pulling a hammy. Yeah.

Because you're either kicking or sprinting. Two things that tear hammies. They experienced a 70% reduction in hamstring injuries when incorporating this particular exercise in their training program.

That's significant.

I would say so, yes. So Nordic hamstring exercise, the great hamstring saver. And I'll link to that infographic in the show notes. But it's actually, it's pretty cool. So, yeah, add that one to your repertoire. And then the last one while we're doing things like sticking our feet out from underneath the covers and doing hamstring lengthening exercises with a partner holding our ankles. Here's another one to add into your routine. The new swim stroke that this article on the website Nautilus reports could be the fastest swim stroke yet.

Yeah, yeah. The fish kick.

The fish kick. So cool. An amazing, amazing video on this site showing that compared to any other form of, would you call it locomotion in the water I guess it could be locomotion anywhere. It doesn't have to be on land for something to be considered locomotion, right?

I don't think so.

I don't. I don't really know what the word loco means. But anyways, let's say crazy, isn't it? Aquamotion? Yeah, I don't. I don't think loco means land. I'm not sure, though, and I should have taken more.

I'm thinking of Spanish.

Yeah. So anyways, though the fish kick motion is loco. Most people have seen the dolphin kick where you are on your stomach, right? You're in this. This frontal plane and you're kicking with both feet. Some people will do this with, like, a monofin. And usually, like, if you're watching the Olympics, for example, when a swimmer pushes off the edge, right, they're using the dolphin kick underneath the water to propel them as far as possible before coming up and converting into, say, like a freestyle swim stroke. Well, this new swim stroke is called the fish kick. And the way that it works is you actually shift to your side the same way that a fish would kick. And the hypothesis here is that when you're doing a dolphin kick, you're creating these vortices, or vortices, depending on what country you're from. And a vortice is something. It's this wave that's going to travel towards the pool bottom and towards the pool surface and potentially create a little bit of turbulence that could theoretically slow you down just a little bit more compared to if you send those vortices sideways instead, like parallel to the water surface. And so the idea is that you are creating a form of turbulence that's not slowing you down while getting all of the aerodynamic benefits of the dolphin kick. So it's called the fish kick. And I actually just discovered this article and the kick this week. So I haven't had a chance to get into a good open body of water and try this form of locomotion, underwater locomotion. But it's a fascinating article if you're a swimmer or if you're someone who's wanting to discover some new swim stroke that might allow you to go faster. I think it actually looks pretty cool. And some of the videos are just kind of fun to watch how fast some of these Olympic swimmers go when using the fish kick compared to the dolphin kick.

So, yeah, they go a lot faster than, like, my favorite stroke is the fish stick. That's. That's not quite as fast.

Right, right. Breaded, fried.

Exactly. Yeah. Roll around in a bunch of breadcrumbs, right? A little bit in the sun.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Listener Q and A.

Hey Ben, this is Trevor and I was hoping you could help out this ninja biohacker. I have been using your biohacking tips and tricks over the years and applied them to my Ninja Warrior training. One of my biggest challenges is improving my muscle endurance and reducing arm pump during upper body centric obstacles such as the pegboard, Especially when combining several different obstacles together back to back to back. I heard on a previous podcast you suggested using baking soda to buffer lactic acid during intense training sessions. Do you think baking soda would help with muscle endurance? And do you have any other biohacks I could add to my bag of tricks to help increase muscle endurance and reduce dreaded arm pump on the obstacles? Thanks, Ben. Rock. You guys rock. Oh, and look for me in a few weeks in the city finals of this special military episode of American Ninja Warrior.

That's super cool that he's going to be on American Ninja Warrior. I don't have cable, so I don't get to watch that show. I just get to watch the snippets on YouTube. But it's so fun.

Me neither. I just watch either YouTube or Hulu when I see something cool come across like that. I like that little like five foot tall girl, Casey.

Oh, that was awesome.

Yeah, she's pretty cool.

Tiny little ninja.

If I could be on American Ninja Wear, I would want to be a 5 foot tall female gymnast.

Who wouldn't?

Now that you all know my personal fantasy, let's move on to addressing Trevor's question. Yeah, so first of all, you know, total disclaimer. I do not profess to be an American Ninja Warrior expert. I know we do have listeners who listen in who have done American Ninja Warrior and done well in it. And I don't want you to snicker and think that I'm just this guy out there dishing out advice about something that I've never done and don't know anything about. My experience with American Ninja Warrior goes as far as I have done training at the American Ninja Warrior lounge down in Fort Lauderdale and messed around on some of the course obstacles before. There are American Ninja Warrior esque obstacles appearing with more and more frequency now and things like Spartan races. Right. Like the Spartan rig where there's like rings and bars and stuff like that. And you know, I do some bouldering, I do some rock climbing. And so I at least have my head wrapped around some of the feelings that Trevor's experiencing. As far as like you know, the arm pump, the muscle burn, the specific muscle and finger and forearm endurance necessary for something like ninja warrior training.

So we actually, we know a ninja as well. Angelo Dela Cruz.

That's right. Angelo is a ninja as well. The guy who works with, with Mark Sisson and has been at some of the conferences Brock and I have.

Yeah, he's got a website called Vitamoves daily. Vitamoves, yeah. Cool. So everybody should check that out.

Let's start here. There was actually just a couple of days ago I was reading the journal of Strength Conditioning Research, which I do when I want to have a really good time. And I was when you want to.

Have a really good dump.

They actually did or they had an interesting article on the importance of four different muscle groups for indoor rock climbing performance. And this one kind of caught my attention because it is somewhat relevant to doing things like hanging from bars, rings, pull ups, stuff like that. And what they did was they looked at specifically four muscle groups, the digit flexors, which are the flexors of your fingers. They looked at the shoulder adductors, which would be the type of muscles that you'd use when gripping walls, gripping pull up bars, etc with, with your shoulders, right, like, like that upper body muscle is involved with that. They looked at the elbow flexors, right, which would be your biceps and all the little muscles and ligaments that, that cross your elbow, that assist you with gripping and pulling. And then they looked at the lumbar flexors, the flex back, which are also, believe it or not, involved pretty intensively when you're holding onto a wall or when you're hanging from an audio, these would be considered like your kind of like your, your core hanging muscles. And what they specifically wanted to see was how important each of these were. And the way that they did this study was they took a bunch of male climbers who were familiarized with an indoor climbing route and then they randomly assigned them to climb with a pre fatiguing exercise design designed to specifically target those muscle groups that I mentioned. And they looked at what happened in terms of climbing performance when each of these different muscle groups were pre fatigued. So it actually didn't really affect the climbers very much at all when their shoulder adductors were pre fatigued or when their lumbar flexors were pre fatigued. But when you looked specifically at the digit flexors, right, so the tiny little muscles in the fingers and the wrist and then when you look at the elbow flexors, right, like the bite biceps and the brachialis and some of these muscles that are responsible for pulling at the bicep angle or at the elbow angle, pre fatiguing those muscles resulted in significant decreases in ability to complete the indoor rock climbing course. And so this gives us the first kind of clue. And this may be kind of like a head slapper for some people who climb who know how important these muscles are. But it definitely shows that if you are going to prioritize what muscles you train for something like boulder ring or rock climbing or American Ninja Warrior training or you know, Spartan training or anything else for which you, you need to be able to move across objects using your hands like this, like peg boards and pull up bars and things like that. It would behoove you to focus more on your fingers and your grip strength and also your bicep strength than it would your core strength or your shoulder strength. Okay. So fingers and elbow muscles predominate when it comes to ultimate performance for something like climbing. And if you're not training those muscles, you're definitely shorting yourself. So as far as how to train those muscles, that's what I was just going to ask. Right. I have a couple of articles, first of all. Well, one article in particular that I will link to in the show notes over@BenGrenfellFitness.com 234. It's called how to Train like an American Ninja Warrior. And all it is, it's an article about how to incorporate things like foot speed and parkour style training and grip strength training and all of the different variables, the different physical variables necessary for success on Something Like An American Ninja Warrior course. I wrote that over on the Quick and Dirty Tips website and I get into balance and flexibility and specific mobility protocols as well as. But in the grip strength part of that, I get into some of the things that have been shown in literature to be the most efficacious for gaining grip. One of the things is pinch grip. Pinch grip is incredibly important and it tends to be one of the tougher forms of grip training that you don't tend to experience with traditional pull ups and deadlifts and things like that in the gym. And the best way to do pinch grip training is literally with weight plates. You pinch two weight plates and you just carry them around, farmer's walk style or you do deadlifts with them. And what I mean by pinch is rather than gripping or holding an object, you're literally pinching it between your fingers and your thumb. That's a really, really good way to train your grip.

Sort of like you're wearing mittens and you pick up like that, right?

That would be number one. And if I could give you two other really, really good forms of grip training, one would be thick bar training. They actually make attachments that you can attach to regular size bars to make those bars thicker. And you can also, if you want to make something thicker, you can use towels, right? Like you can wrap towels around pull up bars, you can even hang towels from pull up bars and then hang from those towels. And anytime that you are hanging from something that it's hard to get your grip around, that really, really helps. Especially with that digit flexor strength that I mentioned was so important from that, that journal research.

So, so in that case you're still, you're grabbing onto it like it's a rope, right?

The thicker the two ropes, the thicker the bar, the thicker the dumbbell, the thicker the kettlebell, the thicker the towel or whatever object that you're hanging from, the more quickly your grip strength is going to grow. So that, that would be the second and then third would be passive grip strengthening. And, and I now keep, just because I'm really working on my grip strength for Spartan racing, I keep one of these captains of crush grip. And also in my bag, I don't have a really, really heavy duty one. I mean some of these that like arm wrestlers use, you know, go up to like something insane. It's like 300, £400, something like that. I just have like the hundred. I think mine is the 160 pound. And I, I will simply grip that and I'll do everything from just gripping holding one to two seconds and releasing and doing 10 to 15 reps of that to doing like rapid pull pulse grips where you'll do like 20 really rapid fire grip or you'll, you'll grip it and hold it closed for five to 10 seconds. But I'll just do that kind of stuff. You know, for example, you know, I had two hours of driving in Pennsylvania back to the airport this past week and all I did was just, you know, kind of move that back and forth from hand to hand while I'm driving. So that kind of passive grip strengthening, right? That, that greasing the groove type of grip strength. Like I know you, Brock. As a matter of fact, earlier in this podcast we had to re record something because your stupid little alarm went off on your phone. But that alarm goes off to remind you to do pushups, right?

Yeah. Every hour. Doing 30 pushups today, right? So except for this hour because we're.

Recording exactly so you know, greasing the groove, having little things that you implement like that to work on grip strength is really important too. But basically, by the way, go ahead.

There's, there's some really cool studies that have been done about grip strength, or not necessarily the grip strength, but doing that kind of isometric grip training and blood pressure lowering.

Yeah, that's right. As a matter of fact, my friend Steve Wood, I actually used to go, yeah, that's the fellow. Yeah, I used to go to church with Steve like down in Moscow, Idaho. Steve lived in Moscow and I lived in Moscow and we were church mates. I don't know, what do you call somebody you go to church with? Fellowshipper Jesus buddy. Yeah, whatever. We were Jesus buddies. But anyways though he, you know, we eventually parted. He like moved to Boise or something and I moved to Spokane. But then yeah, he's recently come out with this Zona device which is like a blood pressure reducing device that's based on grip strength. I believe that our friend Dave Asprey recently had him on a podcast talking about that Zona grip strengthener. So anyways though, added benefit there. Added benefits, added benefit. I've actually thought about that before when I'm using my Captains of Crush Crush grip strengthener that it, it does actually help with, with blood pressure as well. So anyways though some of this stuff, anyone who, who is seriously competing in American Ninja Warrior, this is not news to you how to train your grip. But those are three, three good ways to do it. The pinch the thick bar and then just greasing the groove by having one of these grip strengthening tools around.

But the other, really I'm intrigued by this towel thing. Can, can we just go back to the towel thing just for one second? So you said you, you throw a towel over top the of like a pull up bar and then you just hang from it.

Well, two different ways to use a towel for increasing your grip strength. Number one would be you use a towel to make either a bar, right, Like a barbell thicker wherever you're going to grip it. So you're wrapping around, you wrap the towel around or same thing with a pull up bar or dumbbells or whatever, right? Like you can, you can wrap a towel around anything to make it thicker. But then the other thing that you can do is you can simply take say like, like two towels, like hand towels or bath towels or whatever. You can hang them from a pull up bar and you can do your pull ups from the towels rather than from the bar. It's simply A more difficult, more slippery, thicker object to grip. And you know, it's kind of like hanging from a rope. Right. It's just more difficult than hanging from a bar or a pole. So that's, that's the, the towel trick. Pretty straightforward.

I, I misunderstood when the first time you said it, I didn't realize you were wrapping it around like multiple times just to make the bar thing thicker. I was thinking you were dangling from it. But you can do both.

You can do both? Yes.

Fantastic.

I'm glad that we were able to work the word dangling into the show. It's always important. So the other thing. Well, a couple of other things. The first is that anytime you're doing this type of grip strengthening, one of the things that's going to happen is you will develop cross linking and adhesions and some fascial immobility in your forearm muscles muscles. And when that happens, you can develop areas of hypoxia in the forearm muscles that result in an inability to remove lactic acid as efficiently or to deliver glucose and oxygen as efficiently to those muscle areas, resulting in more muscle burn when you are hanging or when you are doing pull ups or when you are doing your pegboard or anything else that you're doing for your American Ninja Warrior style training training. And because of this, it's very, very important to do deep tissue work on your forearms. So for example, there are two ways that I personally do this simply because I really have been focusing more on my grip strength than on my forearm strength. And the other reason my grip has been taking a hit, my forearms have been taking a hit is because I've been doing lots of shooting too with the bow. And that actually involves quite a bit of grip work specifically for my right arm, which I'm pulling the bow with or pulling the string with. So I do two things. The first is I keep what's called a battle star on my kitchen table. The battle star is a really, really good deep tissue massage device. And I'll try and link to some of this stuff in the show notes for you. But basically the battle star, it's almost like a bunch of rollerblade wheels stuck together that is like an incredibly hard, like a, like a polyurethane based type of foam roller. And the, the reason I keep that on my kitchen table is because I can lean over it and I can do deep tissue work on it. I can roll my arms on it, right, like the, like the top of my arms and the underside of my arms. And because it's sitting there Right in front of me on the kitchen table. I remember to take a few breaks during the day, you know, from. From typing and working to just basically foam roll my forearms. And compared to trying to lie down on the floor and work a foam roller up and down over the arms, this is a much easier way to do it. Plus, it's a great conversation piece when you have guests over and they wonder why that giant rollerblade wheel assembly is sitting on top of your kitchen table.

Can make people do that between courses of the meal.

Exactly.

You don't get your main course until you roll your forearms.

So there's that, and then there's also this device called the armade. And the arm aid was actually designed by climbers for climbers. And it's an even more impressive device when it comes to this type of deep tissue work for the arms. And I have this up in my bedroom, and it's sitting beside my bed. So when I get up in the morning and I sit there on my bed and after I've gotten up and I've done my journaling and my meditation, everything, I sit there and just for like 30 seconds, not. Not a real long time, I work each arm and I literally. It's like this device that. That pinches all the muscles of your arm. So you slip your arm into it and you just kind of like move your arm through the device back and forth and back and forth, and you rotate a little bit to the side and it just does deep, deep tissue work on all the forearm muscles. It's like one of those things that hurts so good. But it's called the arm aid. The arm aid. And I swear by that for decreasing, like, pain, fascial adhesions, you know, tendinitis in the elbow, stuff like that in the arm. So that's another really, really important thing. You know, it's just like when you run, right, like if you try and run fast, if you don't do any massage work or any foam rolling or anything like that on your quads and your hamstrings, they can sometimes feel like they're just a little heavy, right? Like a little locked up or something like that. Same thing with the forearms. Like, you got to do deep tissue work on those. And. And that's. It seems like people always think, oh, I need to do whatever foam rolling for my IT band or I need to get my low back massaged. But they neglect their forearms and that those are really important muscles to work for this.

You think you could put the armade around your neck to roll out your, like, your neck muscles.

You could not. Have you ever seen it?

Just the video that you shot with.

It, you would, you would suffocate. Yeah, it's. It's not big enough for the neck. Definitely.

Somebody should make that.

Yeah, that'd be interesting. Like some kind of a device that you could stick your head into. A guillotine like device that you could move your head around in, back and forth. Yeah, that. That would be cool. There'd probably have to be a little bit of a liability waiver with that one. And you'd have to have pretty. Pretty damn good insurance for selling a device like that, I would imagine so. Okay, so, and then, you know, and this would kind of fall into more of like a biochemical hack, like a supplement type of hack. And, you know, again, I would say that any rock climber slash gymnast worth their salt would snicker at the idea that you could somehow enhance your level of performance in a sport like that by popping a pill. But there's anecdotal evidence that you could potentially increase your ability to be able to buffer the lactic acid that builds up during something like climbing and hanging, pull ups, et cetera, by using some of these same supplements that runners or cyclists will use to buffer lactic acid. Now, one thing that we look at is baking soda. And baking soda provides carbonate ions. When you take baking soda, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, and these carbonate ions circulate in the blood and they stabilize the ph levels outside the muscle cells cells. And what that allows is more hydrogen ions to be basically buffered or shunted out of the muscle cells into the bloodstream. So it keeps ph levels more stable inside the muscle cells. And that's important because hydrogen ion buildup is what's called, is what causes acidity in a muscle area. So muscular fatigue can be caused by a buildup of these hydrogen ions and the subsequent burning that comes along with that.

Them.

So the only issue with using something like baking soda as something you. You stack with or load with prior to something like, let's say an American Ninja Warrior course to decrease the burn is that none of the studies that have been done on baking soda have really shown much efficacy for very, very short events, you know, for like, you know, anything from like 10 seconds to a couple of minutes. Right. Like, most of them are anywhere from like 2 to 10 plus minutes in terms of the efficacy of baking soda for buffering lactic acid. Okay. So baking soda is kind of, kind of blue sky if it would actually work for something very, very short. It would definitely work for like a, like a longer event, you know, like a 5K or even like a, you know, even like an 800 meter or something like that.

However, weren't most of the studies done on like bike time trials?

Yeah, stuff like that. Stuff that wouldn't be considered as short or intense, as explosive as something like American Ninja Warrior. Even though for, you know, for like a long rock climbing course, it probably would be efficacious. It's something worth trying as long as you can. You know, you, you gotta load with it in small doses leading up to the event, a little bit of carbohydrate with the baking soda, a little bit of water with it. Otherwise you get explosive diarrhea. And nobody wants to be on, on NBC with explosive diarrhea doing their American.

Ninja Warrior course, especially emergencies on tv.

Since most folks who do that wear tidy tight pants anyways. That's just a bad combo. So anyways though, there is a substance very much like baking soda. It's converted into the body to what's called carnosine. And carnosine works very similar to baking soda in terms of keeping ph stable within muscle cells and helping to buffer hydrogen ions. But this particular compound, and I'll tell you what it is in a second that actually has been studied in very, very short efforts like six second sprints and time to exhaustion tests of two to two and a half minutes and things that baking soda hasn't been used as much for. And this particular substance is called beta alanine. Beta alanine and beta alanine you can find in supplemental form, the standard doses used in most studies are anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 milligrams. Okay, so 2 to 5 grams. You get a little bit of what's called a tingling feeling when you use it. It's called paresthesia. But as long as you know that's going to happen and you're aware of it, it's a completely harmless side effect. But it is something that has not only shown efficacy in reducing the amount of lactic acid burn and decreasing or I'm sorry, rather increasing time to fatigue during short sprints. But it's also something that in some studies has been stacked with baking soda. Meaning you could load with baking soda and load with beta alanine and get kind of a double whammy. The baking soda offering you some buffering for the longer bouts of exercise and the beta alanine offering you a buffering effect for the shorter sprint based more American Ninja Warrior exercise bouts. And so, you know, this would be something efficacious perhaps for, you know, not only something like a Spartan race, for example, but also, you know, particularly from the beta alanine standpoint, something like an American Ninja Warrior course. So beta alanine with baking soda and the other interesting thing, another substance that's been shown to improve the efficacy of beta alanine is creatine. And because creatine has been well studied for its ability to enhance your capability to bang out more reps, right, like do 8 reps instead of 6 when lifting weights or be able to engage in better strength, better power, things like that. Creatine is certainly something that if someone came up to me and said, well, I'm going to do American Ninja Warrior, what supplements are going to give me the most bang for my buck Duck? Probably the first two I would say would be beta alanine and creatine. And preferably combining the two. Creatine, by the way, is about 5 grams a day and then beta alanine, like I mentioned, about 2000 to 5000 milligrams. You would take a stack like that, right, like 5 grams of creatine with, let's say 2500 milligrams of beta alanine about a half hour before any event that you were going to do for what you wanted, better power and better lactic acid buffering, that would actually be a pretty good little stack. The baking soda would be optional, but if it were a longer effort, you could throw in the baking soda as well. And that little 1, 2, 3 combo could work pretty well. Again, there are no studies that have been done specifically on that American Ninja Warrior training. No studies that have been done on that and rock climbing or anything like that. But it's certainly something to try, try it in your training before you try it in your competition. Again because of the explosive diarrhea potential. But aside from that, yeah, well worth a try. And those are all well researched supplementation stacks. So there you have it.

Ben and Brock, this is Craig from Indiana. So I've got a question for you guys that I, I think bridges across the three things you guys touch on. Physical performance, biohacking, or better yet, brain hacking and supplements. I was a competitive cyclist in College. I'm 43 right now. I'm able to push myself mentally when I'm doing physical tasks, whether it's physical work or physical exercise. The hard part for me though is getting that same mental push when I'm doing mental tasks instead. Doing my work, it's emails, phone calls, meetings, and being able to Stay focused is an issue for me. Diet wise. I probably follow the bulletproof diet 70 to 80% of the time. I am supplement wise using magnesium, zinc, calcium, fish oil, which I'll be changing over to krill oil. Thanks for. To you guys. And I also have a prescription that I take each day, 20 milligrams of Adderall, which kind of sort of helps from that focus perspective, but I still get thoughts that fly in out of my head. You know, I don't know if there's any help that you guys can offer from that perspective. Curious to see what you guys may think. Appreciate your help and I love listening to the podcast. Thanks guys. Bye.

I thought that Adderall was sort of the cure all in terms of trying to stay focused.

Yeah. But I don't like Adderall.

No, no, I don't. I'm not saying that it's a good thing. I just thought it was like if you, if you want to solve your focus issue, Adderall is the way to go.

Well, Adderall, you know, also known as modafinil can do that with some people, but some people, they get almost like too multitasky. I'm going to make up that word multitasking. So if there's some way we could combine that with the word dangling, that would be quite good. So anyways though, they bounce around too much right from task to task almost because their brain is in hyperdrive versus focus. So I would say that for focus, I would instead focus on. Yeah, that's kind of a catch 22, I guess. So assuming that, assuming that you can focus, some of the things that I would do when it comes to improving your focus and being able to have that mental push during mental tasks, first of all, understand that the brain is like a muscle in some respects. It can be trained. And that's the first thing that you want to do, is you want to train your brain. And one of the best ways to train your brain specifically for focus, not just focus, but also interestingly, IQ is called dual N back training. Dual N back training. Now you can download and I'll put a link in the show notes to a variety of different n back training apps. But honestly, you could just go to the Android store or the itunes store and find these yourself. They're cheap and or free and very easy to learn how to use. But dual n back training is a form of memory recall training that typically involves looking at a pattern or a number or a color and then remembering that number and recalling it and recalling it in A specific sequence. So, for example, when using an NBAC protocol, one plus four might be the first equation that appears on the screen. So you remember that that's five. And then three plus four might appear. And of course you know that's seven. And then maybe one plus one would appear and that's two. And then you need to remember, okay, two, seven and five. Whatever I just said, obviously I'm doing a crappy job of doing it myself. But then you move on to the next series, the next sequence of, of things to memorize, and you might get to the point where you're memorizing like 10 different things in a row and recalling what appeared like seven times ago. And it's a very, very good and simple way to train. Simple meaning that it's just an app. Right. It's not simple. Your brain's going to hurt, right? You'll feel like smoke's coming out your ears when you're doing your dual and back training. But it can improve focus. And the cool thing is you could do that while you are standing in line at the grocery store or taking a work break or something like that. So d end back training is probably when it comes to all these different brain training apps like Lumosity and Brainscape and all the different ones out there, that's the one that I like for specifically improving focus. Because you pretty much can't really be doing anything else multitasking while you're doing n back training. You're just focusing on the m back training. It's a really, really good way to, to, to increase your focus. Another thing that I would look at as far as focus goes would be smart drugs and neurotropics. And some of the ones that I would specifically look into when it comes to focus. One would be creatine. Now, creatine is a known neurotropic. I just mentioned dosage. And dosage is all you really need for that is about 5 grams a day. Studies have shown that it improves your brain function function more so in people who are creatine deficient, like if you're vegan or you're vegetarian or if you don't get enough meat. But ultimately creatine is a good one to look into. And I've talked about one form of creatine called CREO2 before, which is made by Millennium Sports and is a form of creatine that's mixed with cordyceps. There's also a company called Natural Stacks and they make a creatine called Biocreatine and it's creatine that's been blended with Himalayan pink salt, which purportedly increases the uptake of creatine. And then also something called fenugreek. And fenugreek extract activates your insulin receptors, and that may also increase your creatine absorption. So when you combine the creatine with salt and with fenugreek, your uptake might be improved or it might be accelerated. And so that's a form of creatine. To look into this bio creatine, that stuff's made by natural stacks. Or you could look into this Creo 2, which is like a capsule. I happen to have both of those forms of creatine in my refrigerator right now.

I've been taking the bio creatine. That's what I'm taking for the last few months.

Yeah, a little bit of a creatine junkie. So that's one. Another one that you could look into would just be krill oil. Now, omega 3 fatty acids are essential for brain function and brain development. And so one specifically that has higher levels of phosphatidylcholine in it, which are specifically useful as a brain nutraceutical, is krill oil. Now, krill oil is expensive compared to fish oil. The extra amount that you pay for krill oil does not give you. You know, let's say you pay, and this would be, you know, kind of like a going rate. Let's say you pay five times more for krill oil than you do for fish oil. You don't get five times more omega 3 fatty acids, but you do get a significant amount of the added phosphatidylcholine and some of the. The derivatives that can specifically be used to enhance cognitive performance. So if you're just taking something like a fish oil or an omega 3 fatty acid, not for health, but for cognitive performance or focus, krill oil would be a pretty good choice. I would prefer krill oil to fish oil when it comes to neuroprotective or memory enhancing or executive thought processing. So. So krill oil and creatine would be two. To get that. That company that I mentioned, Natural Stacks, if you're just looking to save on shipping or whatever, they. They make both creatine as well as krill oil. That's the same company that makes Siltek, which is the smart drug that Tim Ferriss wears by. And so you could. And I've never done this before, but you could theoretically stack Siltep with creatine with krill oil. I don't know how that would work out, I do not think that's almost.

What I did the time that I was told I sounded weird on the podcast.

So there you go.

Not the krill oil. I put alpha brain instead.

There you go.

So you, you too could sound weird.

Yeah. And then another interesting one. And I know, I know most of this is supp waste, but these are all things that I would, I would do and, and, and I do do. I said, dude, as an alternative to something like Adderall and Modafinil, simply because none of these are metabolized by the liver that you only have one of for the rest of your life. Which is why I'm very careful with something like Adderall or Modafinil and personally stay away from it because of its, its get is a pretty, pretty big potential damaging hit on your liver anyways, though. L. Carnitine. L Carnitine. Now, L. Carnitine is more known as like the fat that helps you burn fat or the compound that helps the mitochondria burn more fat. And acetyl L Carnitine is something that's often sold in fat loss stacks or fat loss supplements. But there is a form of L Carnitine that actually is used more for, for cognitive enhancement. And the particular form of L Carnitine that's used for cognitive enhancement is called acetyl L Carnitine or alcar Acetyl L Carnitine. So when you're looking at L carnitine supplements, there are different forms like L Carnitine. L Tartrate is typically used for physical performance and power output. If you're an athlete, that's the form of carnitine you'd want to use. There's another one that's used more for blood flow issues or what's called claudication, and that's a glycine based L Carnitine. But for cognitive performance, this LCAR or acetyl L Carnitine would be a form of carnitine that's been shown in research to assist with basically like cognitive performance and also decreasing neural degeneration. So the dosage on something like that is for Alcar, about 1000-2000mg. About 1000-2000mg of acetyl L Carnitine. So that's the form that you'd want to take. And it's been shown to help with everything from like dopamine neurotransmission to choline neurotransmission to memory and learning to. And this is Particularly relevant for you Attention. Even though the studies that have been done in attention were done primarily in 6 to 13 year old boys. However, I know many, many men whose cognitive patterns seem to simulate those of 6 to 13 year old boys. So carnitine would be another one to look into. Okay. And then the final thing that I would mention when it comes to popping pills would be one that I have been talking about quite a bit of late or talking about quite a bit of late, and that's cannabidiol. And cannabidiol, at least in the US is completely legal. It's the one that I've been using more and more of and I've been experimenting a lot with it. I've been stacking it with different things like alpha brain and Siltep. And you know, I found it to be amazing as far as either magnifying the effect of pretty much any smart drug that I've used or enhancing sleep. So, for example, on my recent flight back from Pennsylvania, I actually took, took four, I took four of these CBD capsules and was out like a light for two hours on the plane. Woke up feeling fan friggintastic. So that, that is the, the nature CBD stuff. Again, it's, it's cannabidiol. It's different than thc. I've talked about it before and had some, some podcasts and blog posts on it. So you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and just do a search for CBD if you want to want to educate yourself more on that one. But that one is particularly efficacious and whereas THC actually has been shown to potentially have some. And Brock and I were actually talking about this before we started recording today about Brock. You heard on some podcasts recently about the potentially deleterious effect of THC and marijuana on brain performance, Correct? Yeah.

It was actually interesting that you brought up the dual N back training because that's exactly the process they used to test the memory impairments. As it turned out that people who use THC on a regular basis had the people who were put through that sort of memory test of remembering numbers. If a new number was introduced, they were more likely to think that was an old number or a number they'd seen previously. If they were a regular THC user.

Yeah.

Sort of a weird memory trick that was going on.

Yeah. Plus they probably thought the N back training was really funny.

Probably.

Yeah. Or they just didn't care. They didn't care. So, you know, and again, I'm not completely against THC use. I mean I, I personally have, you know, I make my own homemade edibles. You know, I, I basically decarboxylate weed by grinding up weed very, very fine. And then I, I put that in a crock pot with, with coconut oil and make this nice little like weed based edible but ultimate in any way assist with cognitive performance whereas CBD does. So the THC would be more just for relaxation or partying basically. So explain that to your kids if they're listening in. And in the meantime, Craig, those are some of the things that I would be going after when it comes to focus. And I would be stopping the Adderall if I were you and if it were my liver. So there you have it. Hope that helps. Helps. And I'll put links to all that stuff in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 234 if.

Anybody wants to learn more about why Ben's talking about protecting liver or you actually had a really good conversation with the fellow that the podcast is coming out on Saturday where you guys talk about all that stuff.

Oh yeah, that's right. The one about how exercise can cause depression and also how to give yourself colonics. That episode. Yes, yes, that's a good one. That is coming up Saturday.

That's a good one.

Yeah.

Hello, Ben. Hello, Brock. I just took the nature CBD because I thought it sounded pretty cool and I wanted to give it a try for the inflammation of my body getting ready for a 10k coming up and got some aches and pains. My question for you is, is there any reason why I should be running 35 on the low end up to about 47 on the high end. Miles a week in preparation for a 10k. Second of all, there are some good hills on the 10k. Not really hilly, but some good hills. And would you suggest any specific hill sprints in order to do better in the 10k? And then thirdly, how would a guy like you fuel for a 10k? I am very low carb. I don't eat 80 red real traditional carbs except for a sweet potato once a week. And I guess we should count two shots of tequila once a week times two as a carbohydrate as well. So thank you much for the nature CBD. How many miles for a 10k specific running for a hilly course like a 10k? Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Brock. You're both great. Bye.

Bye.

You know, I, I think we could answer the if you were running a 10k, what would you How Would you fuel? We can answer that one pretty quickly. I'd say eat a meal sometime that day.

Yeah. So let, let's, let's start here. Yeah. So the fueling is pretty simple. A 10k, unless you're taking a very, very long time to run a 10k is not something that's going to deplete your glycogen stores. You could, could get out of bed in the morning and run a 10k pretty quickly without eating anything. And as a matter of fact, even when it comes to like an Olympic distance triathlon, which is a 1 1/2 k swim a 40k bike and then ends with a 10k, back in the day, most pro triathletes doing those things pretty quickly, like running like a, like a sub 2 hour Olympic distance triathlon would do so without eating anything at all and often without even drinking or eating during the race either.

So yeah, I just was at the Pan Am Games on the weekend watching the men's triathlon and the announcer kept saying and the athletes will be taking in some serious calories right now on the bicycle. And I watched them go by and nobody even had a bottle on their bike. I'm like, no they're not. They're doing it in 147.

Yeah, yeah. That's all kind of trickle down advice from, from Ironman Triathlon. So you really don't need to eat much. Now granted there is research out there that shows something like swishing and spitting a sugar solution can help with cyclists doing a 40k time trial even though they aren't depleting their carbohydrate stores. There's something about the taste of sugar that can somehow help your brain to compete at a higher level or to not shut down your body. So the central governor of your brain does not shut down your body quite as quickly when you taste something sweet. Same thing could be said for amino acids, right? Like if you take 5 to 10 grams of essential amino acids, even though you don't need them, you're not like breaking down all the protein in your body and somehow replacing that with amino acids, just their mere presence in the bloodstream. Kind of like the mere taste of sugar can help, but it's not necessary. That's like that little extra like 5% or whatever. Ultimately you could just get up and run a 10 can, nothing at all. If I were running a 10k and I didn't have to get up super duper early to get down breakfast, I would get up earlier in the morning and I would eat the same Type of breakfast that I'd eat for anything that's very glycolytic, extremely glycolytic, and that would be a very, very simple, easy to digest, carbohydrate based meal. So for example, like before, both the super Spartan that I did on Saturday and the sprint Spartan that I did on Sunday, both extremely glycolytic, right? Like hard efforts, burning lots of matches, going uphills, carrying heavy stuff, burning pure carbohydrates. You know, during both of those events I just had a white rice with a little bit of olive oil and sea salt. I think on, on Sunday, the day before the longer event, the one that took closer to two hours, I actually had a little bit of peanut butter in there with the white rice too, just to give myself a little bit more of a slow burning fuel. And that just happened to be the nut butter that I had around in the, in the house that I was renting. Otherwise I would have used the far healthier almond butter. But of course, ultimately, you know, very, very simple, easy to digest carbohydra. Great gastric emptying of that only takes about 2 hours compared to 4 to 6 hours for like a protein or a fat. So, you know, pretty simple. On the nutrition front, you really don't need much. Now as far as the training goes, is there any reason to run, you know, 30 to 50 miles for example, a week in preparation for a 10K? Well, you know, you will see a lot of professional athletes running with that volume for a 10k. And so, so you could certainly argue that for the higher level competition in order to develop the efficiency and the economy necessary to run extremely fast with a high turnover and a low ground reaction time or a decreased ground contact time, that, that amount of running volume can help if you, you know, if you're getting paid in a paycheck, you know that that type of volume may be necessary for something like a 10k, but ultimately let's say for like the, the average person's 10k or the person who's got a job, hobbies, you know, and they're just running the 10k as you know, for fun or to get a good time, but not because you're, you're getting a paycheck at the finish line. I would have a pretty simple training setup where in addition to any cross training or sports that you're playing and weight training that you're doing or whatever, you've got three runs a week, right? You've got your strength training based run which is steep hills and hill repeats and you Know, using an incline treadmill or using, you know, any other type of hill or a stair climber or stairs or anything else. And you're focusing on strength. And then you've got another session during the week where you're focusing on turnover and speed and short sprints, you know, 50s, hundreds, 200s, you know, short 10 to 30 second treadmill sprints and just very, very short sprints with, with high turnover and a focus on speed. And then you have one final run that is more of your aerobic run where you're stringing together anywhere from five to ten minute intervals, you know, where you're doing, you know, let's say mile repeats with quarter to half mile recovery periods and you're, you're doing that at a volume that's closer to the actual, you know, 6.4 miles that you'd run during something like a, like a 10k. But ultimately that's kind of like your three main running sessions per week, right? You've got your strength session, you've got your speed session and you've got your aerobic session. And for a hilly 10k, those hill sprints or those stair climb type of repeats and that strength work would be crucial. Now whenever I lay things out in as simplistic a way as I just did, it's important for me to highlight the fact before all the strength conditioning coaches and personal trainers listening in and begin to scream through the airwaves periodization. Here is something to bear in mind. I get some people that will ask me, well, what's the perfect training program for whatever my triathlon or my marathon, what's the exact sessions I should be doing each week? Well, it completely depends on the time of year. So in a truly well thought out and well structured training program, you would at some points during the year be doing lots of, of long, slow base aerobic work with strength training. And then as you're getting into more of a phase where you're focusing on more intensive race preparation, you'd be doing slightly longer, higher, intense intervals, continued aerobic work and continued strength work. And then as the race approaches, you'd be focusing more on power plyometrics, extremely short sprints and very, very race specific intervals. And that's going to change throughout the year. You know, that, that's why frankly people hire me to put together training plans. You know, that's why I personally work with a coach, you know, to, to do like my, my spartan training plans is, is things change throughout the year, you know, otherwise we could just, you know, have a Coach, write us out our weekly training plan and sit back and just do that same thing each week. Right. And you, you never get faster, you never get slower, you eventually burn out or you get bored. But ultimately the idea here is that things, things change throughout the year. But for a basic program, for a basic 10k program, you've got a strength training run, you've got a sprint or an overspeed training run, you've got your aerobic interval based training run with race specific intervals. And then you know, all the stuff that's peppered in between is just some strength training, some cross training and of course smart recovery. Everything from like, you know, foam rolling to cold to compression to everything else.

So, you know, it is to, to your point. We're also just guessing that Edward doesn't have any other races coming up, that he's only training for a 10k. Let's say he's got a marathon at the, in the fall. That's also, that he's also building for. He's got a triathlon that he's training for. That's. Everything changes on that front as well.

Right.

Not just the time of year, but it's. Does he have other goals? Is he trying to lose weight? Is he trying to put on muscle mass as well?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's.

I love this time of year actually like because we're into the race season, but we're just sort of still early in the race season. So coaching all of my athletes right now becomes such a mathematic kind of juggling, artistic versus math, kind of a, kind of a juggling act. It's really, it's really fun to be a coach at this time of year.

Yeah. And the last thing I'd say, obviously like shameless commercial here, but I mean like at Greenfield Fitness and Systems we have tons of coaches who specialize in run trip. We've got 15 different coaches over there, you know, as well as physicians and pretty much anything you'd need for any goal. So if you go to greenfieldfitnesssystems.com and you click on coaching a lot of people, and I do realize for people to coach with me, I'm kind of expensive. Most of what I focus on now is I train lots of CEOs who want longevity, anti aging. Some of them are doing triathlons, marathons, stuff like that. But I work with people who are, are relatively well to do and just want to outsource everything to me. Sleep, heart rate, variability, training, recovery, anti aging, longevity, blood work, lab work, everything. But I mean if, if you Just want to hire like a coach to train you for a 10k. You may not need that level of what I do, but ultimately there are a bunch of coaches at Greenfield Fitness Systems who have, you know, their own, you know, including Brock, for example, you know, they have, you know, payment systems set up that are, you know, different than, than what I charge, for example, for training. And so you can go to greenfieldfitnesssystems.com and check out some of the coaching options there as well if you want to get into a more detailed, periodized 10k program. Because frankly, if I were running a 10k, I wouldn't necessarily be relying upon a 10 minute podcast answer to form the crux of my program. But hopefully this at least gives you some direction.

Hi, my name is Sue. I bought some of this chlorella spirula trying to take some algae. I heard that it was good for weight loss. So what I'm trying to find out is, is it good for weight loss or is it just that it's so high protein it cuts down the appetite? You know, reading into it, finding out more about it, and sounds like it's really good for me and healthy and that's good. But I'm taking like 15 pills at one time a day. Doesn't bother my stomach or anything like that. That's what I was told to do when I was looking into buying it. So just want to make sure I'm doing the right thing for me. Would like to hear back from you. Thank you.

Now, you don't see a lot of skinny whales around.

No. You don't see a lot of skinny whales apparently, eating a bunch of. Well, they're, they're doing more plankton than they are algae.

That's right. It's more. Yeah, maybe that's like plankton is like the cupcakes of the sea.

Get your marine nutrients sorted, Brock. Seriously, you can tell I'm landlocked. So algae. Algae is so. So first of all, I should say that I use algae almost every day either in like the green supplement that I take or in these little things called energy bits. So I use this stuff called chlorella. Frankly, it just. Because if I don't have like something crunchy to munch on at night, I'm gonna go for dark chocolate popcorn with butter. Like, you know, I just, I get, I get the munchies at night sometimes. And so I actually eat organic cracked cell wall chlorella as my snack at night. It turns my mouth green. My wife hates it. I gotta rinse out my mouth. You Know, if I, if I want to get laid, I definitely have to brush my teeth after the chlorella or else, you know, you know, I totally get shut down.

So it does taste pretty terrible.

Yeah, but chlorella, basically what it is is that's a freshwater microalgae. It's got the highest known amount of chlorophyll that you find in anything in nature. Chlorophyll is this stuff that has a chemical structure that's very similar to hemoglobin. And because of this, it can help to carry oxygen around in the blood, it can increase your red blood cell count, and so it can assist with cardiovascular performance when you do something like work chlorophyll based compounds like chlorella into your bloodstream. The other thing that's cool about chlorella is that like activated charcoal, it can assist with what's called your phase two liver detox, meaning that it can leach heavy metals, it can assist with the removal of hydrocarbon based pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, and it has a really protective effect on the liver, which is, you know, like we mentioned early, a pretty valuable toxin filter in your body. So that's because chlorella has an indigestible cellulose on its cell wall, and that just attracts and binds a lot of those compounds and then they're simply removed from your body via your stool. So the other cool thing about chlorella is it's got RNA and DNA content that can potentially assist with slowing the aging process. Even though that's blue sky, there's no actual studies that have been done on the potential of those particular nucleic acids to assist with anti aging or longevity. However, they can definitely help with cell growth, cell repair, et cetera. So chlorella is about 3% RNA and 0.3% DNA by weight, and that's some of the highest RNA and DNA nucleic acid component of pretty much any food on the planet. So, you know, I don't like to throw around the word superfood too much, but chlorella is very, very good as far as that. And because of its nutrient density and its chlorophyll content, chlorella can stave off appetite cravings and so, you know, indirectly could help with fat loss from that standpoint. The other really, really interesting thing is this recent research that's come out that's shown that when you eat compounds that are high in chlorophyll, so dark, leafy greens, fresh vegetables, kale, whatever, and chlorella would fall into that category and Then you get exposure to sunlight. It actually assists with your body's ATP production. Normally your body would burn calories to generate ATP. But it turns out that similar to plants, humans, if we have a high amount of chlorophyll circulating in our body and we get exposed to sunlight, it can assist with our ability to produce ATP even in the absence of calories. And so again, again, indirectly, you could get energy without eating as much food and hence assist with weight loss or at least assist with lowering calorie intake while maintaining energy levels. When implementing something like chlorella or any other chlorophyll rich compound into your diet. My only beef with chlorella is it's frigging expensive to get like a good 100% organic cracked cell wall chlorella. I get my stuff from this company called Energy Bits. It's not cheap. Chlorella is expensive. And anything that has good chlorella in it is going to be expensive. Spirulina is the other probably most most popularly known form of algae that everybody at Whole Foods is talking about. So spirulina is actually higher than chlorella in protein content and because of that has even better appetite satiating properties. Spirulina does not have the same type of detoxing and like heavy metal and herbicide and pesticide binding potential as chlorella because it doesn't have as much indigestible cellulose in its wall. But spirulina is about 7% lipids. It's very, very high in gamma linoleic acid along with EPA and dha. So if you're vegan or vegetarian and you don't eat fish, and you want to get some of these good fats for your brain and your nervous system, spirulina is a really, really great source of that. It's also very high in most of the vitamins, most of the minerals. And it's got, you know, it's one of those things that has like this dizzying laundry list of nutrients that it contains that, you know, again, makes it known as, as this quote unquote, superfood. And it really is, I thought you.

Were saying that it actually makes you.

Dizzy, just dizzy, Just dizzy to read about it. And it's also got an extremely high amount of beta carotene and extremely high amount of antioxidants, like I mentioned, really, really high amount of omega 3 fatty acids. And so it's got over 40 different vitamins and minerals in it. But it's got about one calorie per serving. One calorie per serving. So similar to chlorella. Good way to ensure that you're not producing micronutrient deficiencies. If you're on a diet and you're trying to lose weight, weight, but you want to get, you know, enough vitamins and nutrients and minerals. No, studies have shown that by popping a bunch of spirulina, you're going to lose weight. But if you are controlling calories from other sources, exercising, engaging in physical activity, doing all the things that are kind of like, you know, big glaring objectives when it comes to fat loss, you could use spirulina as something, you know, for like a nutrient, vitamin, mineral source. In the absence of high amounts of calories, you could use something like chlorella as detox or an alternative energy source or even as, as a way to repair and recover more quickly. You could do one. You could do both. The, the website I mentioned, energy bits, they have their, their stuff that's called energy bits, that's spirulina. They have another product called recovery bits and that's chlorella. And again, both are expensive, but you want to make sure either way, if you're getting algae, get organic because a lot of it does get dosed if it's non organic, with lots of herbicides and pesticides, just like any vegetable. They also tend to put a lot of fillers in the gelatin capsules that you would normally get algae in. And so chewable algae, like these bits are a little bit better than getting algae in its capsule form. The country of order, you don't have.

To chew those things. It says you can swallow them.

Yeah, you can swallow them. Yeah. The country of origin is also really important. Important. A ton of the suppliers of spirulina in China falsify their paperwork and make claims about it being organic when it's really not. So I would not get a Chinese, sorry, China form of algae.

We're picking on China a lot today.

We're picking on China a lot. They can't get on Twitter. They can't grow anything except crappy algae. It's horrible. So, I mean, just like beef, though, there's different grades of spirulina and chlorella and the lower quality grades definitely have fewer nutrients, lower concentrations of, of protein, and sometimes you need like 10 to 20 times the normal amount of an inferior grade of algae to get any, any good effect. A couple other quick things when it comes to algae crack. When I say cracked cell wall chlorella, all that means is that they can crack the exterior Shell of the chlorella to allow the nutrients to be better absorbed by the body. They do, they do that using a sound chamber and sound wave vibrations for extraction. What? Chlorella?

Yeah.

That's crazy. I'm serious. Yeah, that's how they crack the cell of chlorella. That's like this, it's like this 50 year old technique. It's how they crack it in Japan. And by the way, Japanese chlorella. Hi Japan. Far, far better than Chinese chlorella. So that's an okay place to get chlorella. You can crack cell wall chlorella using high amounts of heat, but that damages the nutrient content of the chlorella. So like a sound based crack. Cell wall chlorella is better and similar to that. You don't want to use heat dried algae just because air drying is, is far less damaging in terms of oxidation. Heat drying makes it no longer like a real true raw food and can damage it. And then just make sure any algae that you get is in some kind of a non transparent container because just like most fish oil based supplement, UV rays, heat, light, stuff like that can really decrease its longevity and cause oxidation. So Energy Bits website, the place where I get it, they there is a 10 discount code on that stuff. I don't remember if the discount code is Ben or if it's Greenfield. It's one of those. I don't know. Try them both. Just go there and try. If Ben doesn't work, try Greenfield. Greenfield. They might both work.

I can look that up if you keep talking for a minute.

Yeah. Okay. Well either way. So that's the, that's the skinny on algae is it's, it's, there's no studies that show that's going to like cause you to lose fat. But you know, you could use it as a way to have a really good nutrient dense energy source in your diet that might help you to eat fewer calories. So indirectly it could help with fat loss. I'm a big fan. I use both spirulina and chloram. I like turns your mouth green but you can rinse that out with water afterwards. So there you go. Now you know everything that you need to know about chlorella and about how crappy the chlorella from China is. So just thought I'd throw China under the bus one more time while you're looking that up. Brock.

Yeah, I can't find it.

Yeah, well, either way folks, either way it's either Ben or it's Greenfield. Well, just, just go to BenGreenfulFitness.com 234 and we'll figure it out and put the link there in the show notes along with everything else. So that being said, we've been going on for a while. Should we. Should we leave?

Yeah. This is a long one.

Yeah. Should we read a review?

Probably.

All right.

Well, but we should do it at 2 times speed.

Just to 2 times speed.

Everybody on their toes.

Let's do it 2 times speed. Let's route a view at 2 times speed. This is not 2 times speed. This is just me talking faster than normal living to 150. Left a five star review. The review is from AJ21207 left on July 12, 2015. If you leave a review on itunes and you hear us read your review on itunes, we will send you a handy dandy gear pack with a tech T shirt, a bpa, free water bottle and a beanie. All you have to do is email geergreenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's gearreenfieldfitnessystems.com give us your address and your T shirt size and we will mail a handy dandy gear pack to your house. Or you could just go leave an itunes review out of the goodness of your heart to spread good karma. And now Brock will read our review. Was that pretty good? Two Times Speed.

That was pretty good.

I was.

I was convinced.

But check this. I should read disclaimers for pharmaceutical companies.

You should.

This is definitely a great podcast. Digesting all the aspects of fitness, nutrition world, from hard science to bordering on pseudo, which you'll enjoy entertaining the theories.

And testing them out.

This podcast has practically everything you need.

Download, listen on 2 times speed.

Go to the website, read over the notes and start experimenting on your body.

Trust me, you'll learn and have fun.

Dude, do not listen to us on two times speed.

Yeah. Why are you in such a hurry, AJ21207?

There's two reasons, AJ21207 that you don't want to listen to us on two times speed. Number one is you just won't absorb as much of the gold nuggets of goodness that we dish out. Number two is that you completely lose our personality when you listen to us on two Times Speed. That's why I don't listen to any podcasts on two Times Speed. A bunch of friends who do. You lose the personality, you lose the vibe. You just. I just don't like it, frankly. So don't listen to us on Two Times Speed. If she wants to talk faster. We can always talk faster.

I can't. I've tried. This is as fast as I can talk.

This is about as fast as I go.

Yeah, I prefer to go slower. This is me trying to talk faster.

Yeah, no, I'm really trying to speed things up here. I really, really, really am. So a J and all of our listeners have a. This is almost like Paul, what's his name? The old radio announcer.

Oh, Paul, what's his name?

You remember him and good day. Good day. Wow. Why am I forgetting his name anyway?

I thought you were kidding.

No. Do you remember his name? No.

Well, maybe.

Ah. If you remember, leave a comment in the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 234 Good. Good day. Good day. Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cute, cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.