App INSIDER: Nutrition & Recovery Roundtable

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill, cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. All right, so when, when you're at a camp like this or when you're traveling, when you look at things from a recovery standpoint and you look at things from a nutrition standpoint, there are special considerations that go above and beyond what what you normally do at home. So what I want to go over with you guys are some of my biggest wins from a recovery standpoint and then also from a nutrition standpoint. And some of those things really do overlap, honestly, because nutrition is so intimately tied to recovery. And I'll kind of go through like the 10 minute overview with you guys and then kind of open it up to questions. If I repeat your question, it's just so that I make sure that the recording picks it up because I'll make sure y' all get a recording afterwards. Now, you may have noticed that today I was wearing my stretchy pants during lunch after our little bike run session. And that falls into the category of one of the things that I'll take along with me when I'm traveling to a race or when I'm traveling for business. Because I work out when I'm on the road as well, there are certain things that I can do when I travel that I found to be really, really big wins for me. So these are the type of things I really encourage you guys to do this week if you have access to this gear or kind of in the future as you go down the road in your triathlon careers, unless you completely decide you don't ever want to do triathlon again or exercise again once you finish this week, which could happen. Could happen. So compression, there are varying degrees of compression gear, but I pretty much anytime I get on a plane now, I wear the sleeves, I wear calf sleeves, and then I combine those with compression shorts. Now, the reason that I do that is that I don't look like a complete tool wearing full on compression tights on the airplane like I was wearing at lunch today, like we're at a triathlon training resort. This is one of the few places where I can get away with walking around with compression tights. But usually what I'll do is either the Nike or the 110% compression shorts. And then I'm really not too picky on the sleeves. What I do is I keep them in my pocket or I put them in my carry on bag and then as soon as I get on the plane, I'm off with the shoes, on with the, on with the skins. And the added benefit is if you're traveling to a race, you can put Those on in T1. You would never want to wear those underneath your wetsuit because they can cause too much calf compression. But you can put them on in T1 and they can help you a little bit with not necessarily performance, but the way that your body and your calves and your legs feel after the race because there's just less tissue jostling that goes on. All right, so what are you putting on in T1? So what I mean when I say putting on in T1 is I will have the compression garment, in this case the sleeves that go over the lower leg like laid out near the bike in T1 or in a race where it's a clean transition, they'll be in my T1 bag. So for example, in these races that we're doing this weekend, it's an actual bag. So you can't have stuff laid out on your bike. So if you were going to do something like where like compression socks or skins or anything like that, you have just about everything in that bag and you're grabbing it from the bag and putting it on as you go. But that's something you would have, for example, in T1. So you don't actually lay it out on your tail like normally. Exactly. So it's a clean transition area. Yeah, exactly. Are both races like that? They probably. The challenge would be for sure. Laguna Phuket Triathlon. Sometimes they're a little bit more casual about that, but they'll likely, they'll likely both be clean transition areas and they supply you with like a little plastic bag and everything. So what we're talking about right now, those of you who just walked in there, are just some of the little things that I take with me when I'm traveling for recovery. The next thing is I don't really travel with the foam roller or anything like that. But you know, as Cricket knows, because I loaned in my little rumble roller ball. Up until the past, I've just traveled with lacrosse ball or a tennis ball. And a lot of times when I'm at a hotel or I'm at a place like this, they'll sometimes have a foam roller that I can use there. And what I'm using now is the same company that makes the foam roller that I really like to use, the rumble roller. They now make a ball that has little ridges that come out of it, and that's really good for tissue work in the hips. Tissue work especially like in the internal rotator underneath the armpit. A lot of times, like, if I'm at a conference or if I'm at any place where we're sitting around listening to people, I'll be rolling, sitting in the back, working stuff, doing soft tissue work. You know, when I was recently doing a consulting gig with Nike, last week, one other guy and I in the room, Kelly Starrett, who's a real kind of expert in mobility, he and I were in the room. We were both sitting like I am right now about 10% of the time. And the rest of the time we were getting weird looks from everybody in the room because we were, like standing, kneeling, lunging. We were changing positions, like every five minutes. But I guarantee at the end of the day, we're the only two people in there that didn't have tight psoas, tight hip flexors, you know, open, low back. You know, we were kind of leaning against the wall, doing this kind of stuff against the wall. And there's. There's no reason that, that you can't do that kind of stuff. You just kind of have to be willing to kind of think outside social norms. And if you get lucky, you're going to inspire some other people to be healthy right along with you and do that kind of stuff. But that's. That's another thing that I'll take along with me is anything I can use for soft tissue work. And usually it's a. It's a ball or something like that. So I do compression. I do anything I can use for deep tissue. Another thing that I use quite a bit when I'm traveling, that has been a big win for me lately and that I also use at home when I'm short on sleep or I need a little bit of extra recovery, is curcumin. You can get curcumin from your health food store. What do you spell it? You spell it C U R, C U M I N. It is the active ingredient in turmeric and in curries. But if you have like a bowl of curry, like here at the restaurant after our talk, you're probably going to get tops if it's a pretty spicy dish, about 200 to 300 milligrams of curcumin in that dish. And what you're Looking at for a pretty efficacious dose when it comes to helping you feel really good when you're traveling. Fight against brain inflammation kind of stuff. Seal up a little bit of a leaky blood. Brain barrier is 1000/mg so you would actually want to dose with. Unless you're going to eat a crapload of curry, this is something you would want to take in just like capsule form. I've recently been alerted to the fact that liquid based curcumins are better absorbed than like a capsule form. I have yet to find like a liquid form of that. I am guessing it might taste pretty dang spicy or something. But when I'm at home I liberally use turmeric throughout the day with almost every meal except breakfast. And when I'm traveling I use a high dose curcumin. What I use for that is phenocaine. Technically that's a painkiller. It's got other stuff in it too. I use it because I get a good deal on it, because I sell it and so I can get a wholesale deal on it. So I keep it around and that's what I pop for curcumin. But anything you can find as far as curcumin goes is a pretty good way to go, especially when you travel. If you pop about 1000 milligrams, it's an anti inflammatory. It counts for recovery as well. So that's another thing that I'll use when I'm traveling to enhance recovery and leading up to a race like this. You said phenocaine is a version of curcumin. Phenocaine. If you take four capsules of phenocaine, that's 1,000 milligrams of curcumin. That's exactly what I do every morning when I travel. And it really helps. You just do it on an empty stomach right when you get up. So that's another big win. The next thing is cold. And this is something that's huge for jet lag. It's huge for recovery. I think that just about all of you who've read my blog or listen to my podcast know that I'm a fan of cold thermogenesis and cold showers. The deal with cold, there's kind of like this misconception that it needs to be uncomfortably cold. And this was something that Ray Cronice really hit on in our Become Superhuman conference is it's the body's perception of a shift of temperature from heat to cold that's more important than the actual extreme of heat or extreme of cold itself. So what that means is if you hop in your shower here, you're going to notice you can't get that water very cold, you know, compared to like, if you're from, you know, Michigan or Coeur d'. Alene. It's like at my house in Spokane right now, when I turn the water cold, it's effing cold. Like I'm hoping the kids aren't standing in the bathroom because I'm, you know, turning the air blue when that water hits me. But what's more important is that your body experience that shift in temperature. So when that occurs, you get a release of what's called endothelial nitric oxide synthase. Very important molecule for blood flow and for vasodilation, very important molecule for brain health. Your body releases a lot of that when you're asleep, which is one of the reasons that sleep is so important for you to actually have really good oxygenation for your brain throughout the day. But you can, whether you're low on sleep, traveling, jet lagged, whatever you can hack your way into up regulated endothelial nitric oxide synthase by doing hot, cold contrast in the shower. So 10 seconds hot, 20 seconds cold, you go about 10 times through five minutes. If you can do it at the beginning of the day. At the end of the day when I'm traveling, I'll pop into the lounge. If I'm doing international traveling and I've got long, long layovers, I'll actually go into the airline lounge. Any of the lounges with the showers, you can do that in those and you'll feel like a million bucks. Especially if you're doing a lot of plane hopping, a lot of travel. So it's just hot, cold, contrast showers. And again, I'm focusing on the things that don't require you to either spend a bunch of money on all this new equipment when you're traveling, or things that you can just easily do when you're traveling. Just little hacks that you can throw in to help you recover faster. What's releasing in nitric oxide, basically, you could just take some Viagra too, that would probably work. But sleep is incredibly important for recovery and specifically that drop in body temperature that occurs between about 2am and 6am, which is when most of your neural restructuring and your memory formation takes place. That's about the time when you get into that deep, rapid eye movement sleep where you're dreaming. That is the point that's really, really important for you to get into Especially like in the days leading up to a race or when you're traveling. And so I consider sleep to be a crucial part of recovery. I'm personally short on sleep right now and like, I can tell, you know, I don't form thoughts as clearly. I don't feel quite as on top of things. And there, there is this, this idea out there that when you short yourself on sleep, your body gives itself a little bit of a hormetic effect and you grow stronger and, you know, you kind of get tougher, so to speak, which is, you know, why they do like Navy Seals Hell week where they, you know, short you on sleep just so you're able to survive without sleep. But ultimately, really prioritizing sleep is super duper important when you're traveling. So I don't have them with me right now, but I always wear those blue light blocking glasses. Those are not expensive. Best place to get them right now at this point is lowbluelights.com so I travel with those and when I'm on the road, those go on like as soon as it's to the point where the sun is setting. Now the way that the body is actually built is it's supposed to get exposed to dim light, which releases kind of like a precursor for melatonin and then dark, which is where you start to prep for that melatonin release that's really going to peak around midnight. And you want to ideally get your body into that phase as much as possible when you're traveling. So like screen exposure, TV exposure, kindle exposure, all that stuff you're really trying to eliminate as, as the day goes on. And I know I'm probably preaching to the choir with some of this stuff because I know that a lot of you, I think most of you have either heard me talk or been exposed to the idea of being really careful with light exposure, especially in the evening, and trying to get yourself as close to that kind of hunter gatherer mode as possible. The problem is when you're traveling and you're at conferences and you're at business events and you're. A lot of times, like when I'm at a conference, many times people are going out to the bars afterwards, they're drinking, you're exposed to lights. There's just like all this stuff that's going on that's way outside the comfort zone that you're able to create for yourselves at home. And even here in Thailand, there's times when we are exposed to light when normally we would probably be able to control for that at home. So some of the things that I do to help out with the melatonin release that have really been working well for me lately. There's a patch made by a company called Restroom that's probably the best patch that's out there. When it comes to a slow release melatonin patch that you put on about 30 to 60 minutes before you go to bed, oral melatonin is really poorly absorbed. Now if you do a search on Amazon for melatonin patch, just about any of them work. But I believe it's R E S P, R O, Rest Pro. I'm pretty sure I have the spelling on that right. That's the one that I found to work really, really well. When we're talking about like stacks of things that really work pretty well in conjunction with one another, you probably heard me talk about this on a podcast. I really like to combine an extract called Passion Flower along with the melatonin patch. That 1, 2 combo, for some reason, especially when I'm traveling, works super duper well for getting me. I mean, like, you know, I've used magnesium and what else like valerian root and melatonin capsules and different strategies. That one, two combo, though, the melatonin patch plus the Passion Flower does work really well if you combine those. The Passion flower takes about 30 minutes to hit your system. Melatonin takes about 60 minutes to hit your system. So if you really want to time this, ideally, let's say you want to go to bed at 10, you slap that melatonin patch on at 9, and then the passion flower extract, usually about 20 to 30, drops like 30 minutes before you go to bed and you're just like out like a light. Once you actually do hit the sack, you'll get about a good four to six hours of decent sleep out of the melatonin patch. You may still wake up, you know, like when we're here in Thailand, how many of you have woken up at like 3, 4, 5am and you're just awake? Yeah, like everybody, the melatonin patch will at least ensure that that sleep that you are getting in that time frame is really, really high quality sleep. The other thing that you can do is it's okay to use that Passion flower as much as three times in a 24 hour time period. So you can keep that on your stand, like your nightstand next to your bed while you're sleeping. If you wake up at 3am, you can do a few more drops of that like under your tongue and just like let it sit there. Sublingually and absorb and that can help you get back to sleep. The other thing that can help you get back to sleep when you wake up at that point is magnesium, which I know you love, Mikael, and use quite a bit, like having a little natural calm magnesium, rather than taking it right before bed when you're traveling or when you're kind of out of your zone, like your circadian rhythm is getting thrown off. You save that for when you wake up at like 3 or 4 or 5am because if you take it right before you go to bed and then you also take it then, you know, wake up and like have a dumb and dumber moment on the toilet potentially because you don't want too much magnesium. So that's kind of the sleep hack that's been working really well for me though lately. So I do compression, I do deep tissue, I do curcumin, I do cold thermogenesis, really prioritize sleep. A couple of the other little things that work well, and these are pretty simple tricks. Inversion at the end of the day, that's a really good strategy. If you can get to a position where your feet are higher than your heart at the end of the day or in between some of our sessions, that's really good. So I mean, the rule for running is a minute in inverted pose with your legs up for every mile that you've run. I don't really time it as much as I just get in that inverted position until I feel like my legs have kind of had some of that blood flow out of them. And that works really well. And that's something that I'll personally throw in a few times this week and over the next few weeks as we're like racing and training and back and forth, getting into that inverted pose that, that gets blood flow to the legs even quicker than like a, like a massage will. So that's another thing that works well as inversion. And there's one other thing that I wanted to cover with you guys. Let me check my, check my notes here and then I'm going to answer some of your guys questions because I know there was. There were seven things I wanted to cover. Let me check. I was going to talk about the pulsed electromagnetic field stuff like the magnets, but I want to really focus on just like the easy wins today. Oh, choline. So what happens is when you're traveling a lot, we kind of talked about choline a little bit today. Catherine, we can revisit your question that you had about choline earlier. Choline is really important for your nerve health, for your myelin sheaths, for the firing of your nervous system, and basically for how able you are to be on top of things. A lot of those smart drugs that are out there, like aniracetam and modafinil and all these compounds, they work really well, but they rapidly deplete your choline stores, which is why anytime you take one of those type of smart drugs, you always want to take walnuts or fish or, like, a choline supplement along with them. But when you're traveling, when you're stressed, when you're hurling 40,000ft above Earth's atmosphere in a metal tube, you tend to basically turn over choline in a more rapid manner, similar to what you would do if you were to take a smart drug or something like that. Best sources of choline, fish oil or fish walnuts. Egg yolk. Those are the top three. So, like, eating whole eggs using, like, a good fish oil that says, like, phosphatidylcholine or cytokoline. Krill oil is really good for that type of thing. And then, like, walnuts are a really good source. But the body tends to be low on choline when you're traveling. It's hard in the first place to even get your hands on, like, good, healthy fat sources, too. But if you can travel with, typically boiled eggs aren't really going to be quite as easy. Fish oil, if I travel with that, you just got to be careful to keep it cold. Eating fish on a regular basis when you can get it is a good idea. And then walnuts are pretty easy to pack in a Ziploc bag and travel with, like, a good, like, raw, fresh walnut that's not super rancid or old or anything like that. It's a good source of choline, too. And it's, you know, like I was talking to Catherine about, it's like, if you have a lot of trouble, like, getting up to a high cadence or getting your body to respond and fire, a lot of times that can be a choline deficiency. And it's just a matter of, like, stepping up the amount of egg yolks and fish and walnuts that you eat. You can take again, like, a krill oil supplement or fish oil supplement. But I'm a bigger fan of structuring your diet first and then throwing in the supplements afterwards. But, I mean, it's always better to just look around you for real food sources when you can. So, Clinton, the official supplement that you use, I don't know what it's Called again. So you store that in your fridge. What I do when I travel with fish oil is I keep it on my carry on bag because I can at least monitor the temperature of that and it's not in the belly of the airplane. And then as soon as I get where I'm going, it goes in the fridge. Fish oil should not be kept at room temperature. The fish oil that I use is packaged that super essential stuff. It's packaged with vitamin E and astaxanthin. So during its shipping to you, that's enough to keep it from going rancid in the heat. If it arrives at my doorstep, like let's say I get back home from this trip and I've got some packages on my doorstep and there's fish oil or fats or some kind of supplements. If that box is hot or if I know it's been heated, I won't go near this stuff because it's doing more harm than good to your body if that's the case. So you always want to make sure that stuff gets in the fridge as soon as possible. If it's got fats in it, cool, dry place, it's the next best thing. But you definitely don't want it getting hot. So oxidized fish oil is bad, bad news just while it's in front of me because it's kind of the elephant in the room. There's this pile of supplements that Mike kind of threw here. A few quick things about these supplements because he tossed these over. And Mike, you're kind of looking at carrying some supplements like this in your facility. So I just want to just a few lessons for you guys because these are actually pretty common supplements. So this one here is called a glutathione accelerator. Glutathione is really, really cool. It's one of your body's most potent antioxidants. You can make it yourself. You can also get it from foods that you eat. Probably the best way to get your glutathione levels up naturally is, is whey protein. If you're using whey protein, that's one of the best glutathione precursors you can put into your body. And it's not expensive. I mean you can get organic cold processed whey protein from a good grass fed cow or goat for not that expensive at all. There's sales going on all over the place all the time. Now this stuff, it doesn't actually have glutathione in it. It's got milk thistle extract and vitamin C and Glutamine and N acetylcysteine and a lot of this stuff, it's okay. But people see this and they think it's glutathione and it's not. It's just a bunch of stuff that your body uses to make glutathione. If you want your body to make its own glutathione. I'm a bigger fan of just taking away protein if you're looking at saving money. Now, I know you're kind of in a different business where you're actually selling people a supplement. If you were going to sell people a supplement, I would get liposomal glutathione. And you look at Dave Asprey's bulletproof exact website where he has that glutathione that you spray under your tongue. It's awesome for hangovers or when you've been drinking or when you've been exposed to toxins or pollutants. Really, really good antioxidant. Not necessarily something you take every day because it's liquid gold. It's expensive. It actually tastes really nasty. It tastes like it gives you really bad breath. It's a sulfur. It's a. It's a sulfur based compound. And this is something I didn't really mention to you guys called liposomal glutathione. We loaded. This is something Jess and I talked about for a while in the Inner Circle video that we shot before we left. But we all loaded up with tons of onions and garlic in most of our meals in the last week before we flew out to come here. Because your body, in the same way that it rapidly turns over things like choline when you're exposed to a lot of the inflammation that occurs during air travel and changes in circadian rhythms, it also turns over a lot of sulfur based amino acids, like cysteine, for example. And that's why it's important to eat sulfurous, kind of like stinky foods. Don't eat a clove of garlic right before you get on a plane. But in those days leading up to the flight, you can stock your body with a lot of those sulfur based compounds. You can do red onions and garlic and eggs and a lot of these things that are natural sulfur based compounds. That's why glutathione tastes so bad. It's a really potent sulfur based compound, really powerful antioxidant. But yeah, as far as glutathione precursors go, most companies that sell glutathione precursors are riding on the bandwagon of glutathione. Kind of being known as a really powerful antioxidant. But the fact is by eating whey protein, you can get a lot of glutathione, especially if you combine it with sulfurous foods like onions and garlic and stuff like that. Pretty good way to go. Electrolyte tablets like this. Most of these electrolyte tablets are pretty decent ways to allow your body to stay a little bit more hydrated than it normally would like when you're traveling or like. You'll notice me salting my food a ton this week and I just go through a lot of salt. Any of you who are subscribed to my newsletter may have seen. I sent out a newsletter on salt earlier today and a few weeks ago as well. Big, big fan of salt, especially in the days leading up to a hot race. Now you could go out and do the entire like triathlon this weekend and next weekend with no salt at all, assuming that you've adequately taken care of your electrolyte stores in the days leading up. So that's more important than what you take in during the actual race itself. With modern farming practices and agriculture and fertilization and lack of us like doing proper soil turnover methods, a lot of the soil that a lot of our fruits and vegetables are grown in tend to be mineral depleted. Which is why even if you're eating a healthy diet, it can help to use stuff like this, like minerals, electrolytes, sea salts, trace liquid minerals. There's kind of more than one way to skin a cat you just want to stay away from. You'll notice that like in the restaurant over here, it's a nice ground, like almost like a sea salt or a rock salt. Way different than like aluminum cakes, table salt. So you won't see me reaching for the table salt shaker much, but if it's like that, that salt grinder, I'll use that stuff all day long. The main issue with this kind of stuff though, these, these electrolyte tablets is you want to look for sucralose, acetylthamine, potassium, like noon like this has sucralose in it. But they've got another brand called U hydration that doesn't because they wanted to be able to sell at Whole Foods and Whole Foods wouldn't allow them to have sucralose in it. This one, I don't know. I mean, I could look at the ingredient label and I don't see any artificial sweeteners on here. So this one's probably fine. But that's the main thing Most of them are just magnesium, vitamin C. One thing I should point out though, about vitamin C, if any of you guys ever get to the point where you're feeling really run down during travel and really stressed out, taking about 4 to 5 milligrams of vitamin C, or I'm sorry, 4 to 5 grams of vitamin C. Your adrenal glands store vitamin C in addition to a lot of these electrolytes. And in early stage adrenal fatigue, one of the first things that you see is vitamin C depletion. And if you take vitamin C until you're just about ready to explode on the toilet bowl, like, that's how close you have to get. Like, because you guys know when you take vitamin C, sometimes it makes your stomach feel a little funky and then you take more and more and eventually you almost get like, it's kind of like magnesium. But if you're really run down, like if you almost overdose with 4 to 5 grams of vitamin C, it can really, really help. So when I'm feeling really run down, I'll get like the. Not like airborne because it has artificial sweeteners in it. But there's some brands that help food stores. Or you can just get like vitamin C capsules, I'll use those. I'll cut open lemons and squeeze lemons for all that ascorbic acid. But I really load with vitamin C. Great for colds, flus, adrenal fatigue, stuff like that. And a lot of these type of effervescent tablets have vitamin C in them as well. These are just gels, right? Yeah. So maltodextrin, fructose based gels. I'm pretty sure. Raise your hand if you don't know my thoughts about using sugar versus fats and amino acids as a fuel. I've talked pretty extensively about it. I'm just not a huge fan of using. So sugar works great. What's the good and bad about the caffeine based ones and stuff like that? So here's the deal with both caffeine and then also fructose and maltodextrin. And by the way, it's good that they flavored these with natural flavors. They don't use artificial sweeteners. Usually what you want to look for if you are going to use a gel is look that it doesn't have artificial sweeteners in it and look that they've put branched chain amino acids in it. I think the best gel on the market if you were gonna use gels right now is Roctane made by Goo Just because the amount of branched chain amino acids and some like lactic acid buffers and stuff that they have in there. What'd you call it? Roctane. Is this called Goo gels? Yeah, it's made by Goo G U Roctane. I raced just fine and had some of the best races of my life using gels and sports drinks and the traditional endurance sports fuels, they work just fine. The reason that I made a personal decision for myself and also to encourage on my podcast with people I coach to kind of migrate away from that scenario is because if you can achieve similar levels of performance without consuming all that sugar, it's just better from a long term health perspective. So I'm not saying stuff like this doesn't work because it works really, really well. And it's just one of those deals where you've got X amount of time in your life where you could either be consuming sugars or consuming things that don't cause quite as much glycation, formation of reactive oxygen species and cell inflammation or nerve inflammation. So that's the issue is I'm just careful with how much sugar I dump it in my body. But as far as the gel, look for branched chain amino acids. Caffeine certainly helps. What I did when I used Roctane was I found the first time I used Roctane in an Ironman, I was like, this stuff has like whatever, 50, 60 milligrams of caffeine in it. Awesome. If I'm eating four of these an hour, I can get in like 200 milligrams of caffeine an hour. And I'm just going to be on cloud nine during the whole race. I found about six hours into an Ironman I started to get really loopy. So if you are using a caffeinated gel, I recommend sticking to whatever brand you're using for a gel, but alternate one caffeinated and then one non caffeinated. So if you're using gels, work back and forth between the two so that you're not overloading your body with caffeine. Caffeine is another one of those things where I'm a bigger fan of just microdosing it. For me, I'll use that X2 performance stuff once every couple hours during the race just to get little hits of caffeine as you go. So you just have to be careful with caffeine, especially in low long races where over several hours you can, you can get to the point where you kind of crash. And then the last thing here, sitting in front of me is a bar. And when you're looking at bars, pretty much even the healthy bars are unhealthy. Like right. Like they all have organic raw cane syrup or agave. Like they're all designed for westernized palates that's used to sugary, yummy food foods. And if they don't, they taste like cardboard, frankly. Like even like the Coco Chia bar, which is mostly like coconut and chia seeds, like the one that I sell on my website that I really like, even that, I mean it's still sugary, still going to spike your blood glucose levels, it's still going to spike your insulin levels. I mean, you know, when I look at this one, it's got soy protein isolate in it, sugar, it's got peppermint in it, which is cool because that helps settle the stomach. I would, as soon as I see soy though, like, I wouldn't go near it just because soy. Yeah, just because of the soy. So the big like red flags I look for on a bar are soy, wheat, sucralose, acesulfamine, potassium, what else? Like the whole syrup, cane syrup, agave thing. If the farther that is listed on the ingredients list, like the farther down the ingredients list, the better. It's like when you bite into a bar, the more it tastes kind of fatty, coconutty, the less sweet it is, the better. And the more natural fruit based sweeteners they use, the better as well. But organic cane syrup, fructose agave, I mean it's all just sugar. So just if you're going to do a bar, only eat it in that insulin sensitive window before or during after exercise when your body's not going to be as likely to respond by having a blood glucose. But like, so yeah, but I mean this isn't a bad bar, but just the fact that it has soy protein isolated in it, I wouldn't go there. So if you're, if you're, if you're looking at a bar, look for a grass fed whey, rice protein, hemp protein, pea protein. Those would be the top type of proteins to look for in a bar. Or else a combination of seeds and nuts, which a lot of the vegan bars are, if they aren't like hemp or rice or pea. So yeah, if I had to choose another bar, Hammer Nutrition makes really good bars too. Those are organic grass fed cows that they get their whey from. They do a really good one called Recovery Bar. Really tasty. It's got like a little chocolate coating on it. Not a ton of sugar though. Those are pretty good. The hammer bars, The cliff bars, a lot of the Clif bar bars have gluten. And so I'm not a huge fan of those because even if you're fine with gluten from a stomach sensitivity standpoint, it's typically healthier from a nervous system standpoint to try and go gluten free when you can. So a really, really good resource to learn a little bit more about that. I think it was podcast 260 where I droned on for like 30 minutes about gluten. That one just kind of went into how even if gluten doesn't mess with your stomach, it's still not all that hot for you from a nervous system and an immunity standpoint. I'd like to open it up to you guys for about 20 minutes or so of just your questions if you have a specific question you'd like to ask. I know a lot of you have swam and biked and ran today and you're all jonesing for food, but let's use this opportunity to get a a few of your questions answered. If any of you have any burning questions about nutrition or recovery specifically. Well, I've got one. Jurgen said to me out next to the pool, he said, oh, you didn't keep up with the group today? And he said you weren't trying hard. You weren't trying hard. He said you weren't trying hard. He said, I wasn't trying hard now. And it was interesting because of the talking class to you about that earlier. Whereas I can't seem to get firing, I can't get the firing. So I'm going as hard as I can, but I'm not getting the firing. You're not getting that turnover. And when I did your bike fit, I noticed the same thing. When I told you to speed up, you didn't speed up. It was like you wanted to, but your brain wasn't saying missing to your muscles. So when you're having difficulty elevating your cadence or you've just reached this plateau and you can't seem to get any faster, no matter what you do, there's usually two issues going on. It's either musculoskeletal and fascial related, or else it all comes back to nervous system health and fatty acids. So for the former, and we talked about this a little bit, lots of tissue work, lots of mobility work. So, you guys, what I do for my personal soft tissue mobility kind of work routine is I do a monster foam rolling session where, and this is twice a week it's 20 to 30 minutes. Me, Rumble Roller, put on my MP3 player and I just go to town and I also have my little ball there where I hit the spots that my foam roller can't get. And that's just life. Like I will do that until I'm 70, 80 years old, whatever. That's how I keep my body. I used to drive and go see a massage therapist every Friday to do that. And he sponsored me and I got a free one hour massage every single week. I quit doing that just because of the drive time and the fact that I could hit most of what he was hitting within 20 minutes on a foam roller with a lacrosse ball. Hopefully he doesn't hear me talking about this. So the idea is you don't have to go see a massage therapist now. When I travel to a race, I'll usually treat myself, especially when I'm in a place like this in Thailand. Like when we go down to Aung Sana on Thursday, like the race is on Sunday. Friday I'll get a 60, 90 minute massage. Saturday, same thing. Sunday after the race, same thing. Like I'll probably from the point we leave this resort for the rest of the trip, I'll be getting a massage almost every day. And by the time I get back from Thailand, like my entire fascia will just be like reinvented and I'll feel like a million bucks. And I'm still foam rolling 20 to 30 minutes twice a week. Okay, so that's number one is soft tissue work. It has to be done. And a lot of times if you are messed up and you need a lot of work, you need to go see a massage therapist who really can read the body and knows what they're doing and go in there for like 60 to 90 minute sessions. So that's, that's number one. And then number two, when I talk about fatty acid deficiencies, the biggest things I tend to see are overloading with omega 6 fatty acids from seeds, nuts, peanut butter, nut butters, heated vegetable oils, cheeses, etc. Without enough nice cold fish oils, raw nuts, raw seeds, walnuts, chia seeds, flax seeds, things like that, algae based sources like spirulina and chlorella. So basically way too many omega 6 fatty acids, not enough omega 3 fatty acids. And then deficiencies in something like choline, that's a big one. Saturated fats are another big one. Like not getting enough like full fat, raw dairy, grass fed, marbly steak, stuff like that. Instead of eating whatever chicken breast or turkey burgers or whatever so typically a low fat diet combined with higher intake of vegetable oils and roasted seeds and nuts and heated rancid oils is the number one reason that fatty acid issues would lead to nervous system issues. Choline is the protein whey. Whey would not have much choline in it. The best way to get choline would be fish, fish oils, walnuts, some of those other foods I mentioned earlier. And you can take phosphatidylcholine as a supplement. Krill oil is another good one. There's the latest one in squid. That much research on the squid oil, I've heard about the squid oil, I know it sells for a lot of money. I'm just not sure. It's kind of similar to krill oil. I'm not sure. It's kind of like that dollar versus absorptability, you know, if it's, if it's absorbed twice as well but sells for 10 times as much, it's like, is it worth paying that? So, yeah, I personally just use the fish oil and then just eat a lot of fish. Other questions, nervous system health and then are using HRV to measure that at some level with the bulb. Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up because this stuff can be tough to quantify. Like you can say, well, okay, I kind of worked some omega 6 fatty acids out of my diet, started to eat more Omega 3, stepped up my choline intake and I feel like I'm pedaling faster. I feel like it's easier. So that's one way to go about things. That's a really qualitative kind of way to assess this. But you can also, like Cricket is alluding to, you can use heart rate variability, meaning that you can get the Sweet Beat iPhone app or you can get the Omegawave app or the Bioforce app or the Tinky. Exactly. Any of those are going to give you a measurement of your heart rate variability. And if your heart rate variability score is climbing consistently, then that means that your nervous system is getting stronger and more robust. So yes, you could quantify that. There's a lot of confounding variables. I mean, it might just be that you had a good night of sleep or that you're well rested or you haven't had a lot of stress during the day. But consistently elevating scores, it's at least a trend that you can look at. And then looking at that score. Sweet Beat nerd screen, the sympathetic parasympathetic balance system. Is it better to have. So you have those numbers that are sitting there and the gap shows and a lack of balance of your nervous system. So if you can put. So I'm like massive sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system. What I understand is high but very separated from my. So is it better to depress the sympathetic nervous system and bring the parasympathetic up and have them equally high? Right. So you know what I'm saying, Is it better to have a low sympathetic that's equal to your parasympathetic or to drag your parasympathetic up? Yeah. So what Cricket is referring to is the Sweet Beat phone app in particular not only tells you what your heart rate variability is, which is kind of like a bird's eye overview snapshot of your nervous system health, but it also tells you what's called your high frequency score, which is the strength of your parasympathetic nervous system. Your rest and digest nervous system. That tends to get overworked, especially when you've been doing a lot of aerobic training volume, which a lot of endurance athletes do. And then also it will tell you your low frequency score, which is the strength of your sympathetic fight and flight type of nervous system. You see a lot of cross and sprints, football player types get that more overworked. That also gets more overworked when you're really stressed out. Lifestyle stress, family stress, running from a lion during the day, that type of thing. So if you wake up in the morning and you look at your. Let's say you're using the Sweet Beat phone app and you look at your parasympathetic nervous system score or that high frequency score and it's really, really high. And your low frequency score is really, really low. What that would indicate is you've got a really, really well primed, well rested parasympathetic nervous system, but your sympathetic nervous system is overworked. What you wouldn't want to do is try and get those numbers closer by going out on a long easy aerobic bike ride. See if you can work that parasympathetic nervous system down. What you would instead want to do is ask yourself, why would my body be creating a bunch of cortisol? What am I doing to my body that's not telling it that it is needing to run from a lion. What did I do yesterday that would have put my body in that mode? Whether it be drinking two extra cups of coffee, getting into an argument with a co worker or something like that, going out and doing a really hard weight training session. So that's what you're looking at in a situation like that. Now, if you see that your sympathetic nervous system is really, really healthy, that low frequency score is really high. But. But the high frequency score is really, really dipping low. All right, so just low and high thing is the thing. I have the whole problem every discusses when I send it to Rhonda and Asta specifically. I know she doesn't want to talk numbers because she doesn't want to say it like, well, this is good, this is bad, right? But there's no. Is 13,000 good? It's 2,000 good. That's the issue is it is really, really variable. I have yet to have found a research paper or been able to see any trends in data that show like. And what Cricket is asking is, this Sweet Beat phone app will show you your low frequency or your sympathetic nervous system and your high frequency or your parasympathetic nervous system score. And sometimes it's in the hundreds and sometimes it's in the thousands. The higher the better for both. I can tell you, for me personally, I tend to be between 6 and 10,000 when I'm in a good spot. Right now, if I had to guess based off of travel and me being short on sleep, I'm probably closer to about 1,000 to 2,000 for both. And my sympathetic nervous system is probably a little bit lower than it would normally be. And that's primarily because I'm basically, for me because I'm an introvert. When I lead groups and camps like this, it's stressful for me, like, and that's the reason for that is because I am charged by being alone and being by myself. And I get very exhausted, like, being like. It's easier for me when I'm, when I'm teaching to a group like this than when I'm like at a cocktail party where I'm having to surf among a lot of people. But both situations where I'm with a lot of people because I'm an, I'm an introvert, my sympathetic nervous system gets really kind of overworked by that. Like, the whole time I'm with a group. Like, my cortisol is kind of a little bit higher than it would normally be. So that's why I say my sympathetic nervous system is probably low if I were to go test it, you know, with that app. So. But it's really variable as far as the overall score. And time seems to be like a massive factor in this thing too. Even if you do nothing during the day, if you measure a different time during the Day, it's like slow. So I only ever measure heart rate variability for about five minutes in the morning when I wake up. Try to do that too. At the same time. Yeah, but some days you don't. And even like two hours time different in the morning, it's like. Yeah, blood pressure. Slow. That too. So then rf. Sorry, one more thing. The other. This is the thing I've been waiting on. So then there's the brain, heart. The heart, brain connection. The mean standard deviation RSMS figures for the hrb. Yeah. And that one fluctuates massively. That one seems the most variable out of the three numbers that I have. And so then you get that heart math training tool to try because in my case the comparison with that means massive. It's low compared to my sympathetic. So you try training it back up. Right, right. Like no bringing that up at all. But I seem to get better in the heart method of bringing it, but it doesn't seem to affect my HRV numbers. Yeah. So this is where the physical and the mental are two different components. So let's say that you have an overworked parasympathetic nervous system, which would typically be the case if you've been doing a lot of aerobic training, if you've been doing a lot of endurance training, that type of thing. Now if you were doing everything that you can from a biofeedback standpoint, and what I mean by that is there is software out there and this is gonna sound kind of airy, fairy and woo, woo, but it'll show you like a garden on the screen and you'll hook the heart rate variability up to your earlobe and it will track your heart rate variability, the amount of time spent between each heartbeat. As you're staring at the screen and as you focus on positive thoughts, on relaxing, on deep breathing, you'll notice like flowers start to grow and trees start to bloom and you're able to actually use the way that you feel to change what's happening on the screen. It's just basic biofeedback, basic neurofeedback. Now if you have a weak parasympathetic nervous system, let's say you've gotten really good at that and you can relax, you can get into cohesion, you can do the whole deep breathing thing. If you're aerobically over trained, all of that's still not gonna matter. So what you would do is you would basically have a recovery day or have a couple, you know, a couple recovery days or recovery week or you would Even just train the sympathetic nervous system for a few days. Just lift weights and throw in a few sprints here and there. Stay off the bike, stay out of the pool. You know, I just never get those two to come together right away. I'll take a week off. Yeah, yeah. And it's just like. I'm like, interesting. So the last thing. And this is opening up a big can of worms, but the last thing that you look into at that point would be your actual neurotransmitter balances. So that's actually looking at your levels of dopamine, serotonin, gamma amino, butyric acid, all these neurotransmitters that talk to your brain, because that can indicate that there's some kind of a disconnect going on as far as how your nervous system is actually talking to your brain. That actual signal. The two best resources I can give you on that would be you're in Michigan, so you could do this Direct Labs has a neuroendocrine profile that will actually test your levels of neurotransmitters. And you would see a snapshot right off the bat. You could see, wow, I'm off the charts on serotonin, and my dopamine levels are super low. In which case you would, like, take dopamucuna or something to get your dopamine levels back up. The other resource that you could use would be the book, why isn't my Brain Working? No offense, I'm not saying any brain, but it'll give you a really good education on neurotransmitters and how they interact with the nervous system. It's a really good book. It's really well written. It's got a lot of cool case studies in there, kind of more written for doctors and practitioners, but the general population totally get it. And you're geeked out on this stuff anyway, so you'd like it. Let's go with. With one more question. Who has the best question? This is a really easy one. Okay. Where do you get good fish? Well, when we're at. Out in, like, Coeur d', Alene, Washington, I've usually got friends who are, like, going up to Alaska on fishing trips. And so, like, they'll. They'll send me some fish or I'll get some wild fish, like during the summer, you know, again. And where Clinton lives in Coeur d', Alene, they get, like a fresh fish guy that comes to Pilgrims Market there. And I also fish, so I have a fishing license. And. Yeah, catch fish. And so Michigan I mean, yeah, we have the Great Lakes. Yeah, I was gonna say you guys have, have a lakes there. There's just everything's so polluted. You know, the fresh water ways, if you believe it. So you're, you're always, you're always going to be dealing with some amount of pollution when it comes to fish. And of course even a wild caught fish will have been exposed to metals and toxic toxins and pollutants and even radiation in this day and age with Fukushima and everything. So what you want to do is try and just mitigate the damage as much as possible. A, you want to pick wild fish, period. You don't want to go after farm fish as much as you can. You want to choose the smaller fish, you know, like tuna and sea bass and stuff like that would be larger fish that eat other fish that tend to have more of the metals stored versus mackerel and sardines and anchovies and stuff like that. Number two is you need to know that fish have naturally high levels of things like selenium in them. Selenium binds a lot of those toxins. That's one of the reasons that the fish itself, like if you're eating the entire meat of the fish, it's actually got a lot of what it needs in there to bio remediate a lot of the metals and the toxins and the pollutants and stuff like that. One of the biggest issues is iodine. If you're actually consuming radioactive iodine, that tends to, to displace the natural iodine that would normally be bound to receptors in your thyroid gland. So eating good sources of iodine. Sea vegetables are one of the best sources. That's why a diet rich in sea vegetables plus fish is like turkey and cranberry. It's a really good mix because the iodine from the sea vegetables helps to mitigate some of the crap that's in the fish. So that's why that's a really nice one two combo. So you do sea vegetables or you take an iodine supplement. And if you don't want to do sea vegetables like nori and chlorella and spirulina and stuff like that, you get wild fish. I get iodine. I get a form called nascent iodine from Magnetic Clay, the same company I get my magnesium from. So you don't have the sea vegetables where you buy trustworthy sources. Just like the Asian market, the grocery stores where we get ours, we get like mori and kelp and dulce, just like the dehydrated Sea vegetables. Sometimes we'll do the seaweed salad. If it's not the stuff with the food coloring and the sugar and stuff like that. But you go to brand. Yeah, I don't remember the brand that we get. I'm really bad with brands because Jessa does most of the grocery shopping. I'm more like, here's what's getting than she. She shops. But I don't remember the brand of Nori that we actually get. I don't remember. She'll know. If you ask her at dinner, she'll remember. Well, I mean, with that said, do you need to be concerned with where it came from and. Yeah, to a certain extent, yeah. I mean, if you're shocked, I mean, if you're buying your vegetables at something like, let's say Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, you're probably going to be getting a lot higher quality. And then the last thing that I do as far as that's concerned is once every year I do a 30 day heavy metal detox. So I use, it's a sublingual supplement similar to that liposomal glutathione I was talking about. You spray it, you hold it under your tongue for about 90 seconds. I use stuff called metal free. That is something that's made by Dr. David Minkoff in Florida. He's also the guy who makes the master amino powder supplement. You don't want to necessarily do metal detoxes all the time because when you detox and you pull metals from the body, they wind up in your bloodstream. They can cross your blood brain barrier and then give you some brain fog. And long term, they can cause some issues. But once a year I do a 30 day metal detox. And that's what I use for it is metal Free. And that at least helps to clean up a little bit of those issues. So you said eat lots of fish. How often do you eat fish? Because with everything I read, I'm afraid to eat fish. I eat fish almost every. Every day. I have at least a can of sardines almost every day. BPA free. Sardines cane and olive oil. Yeah, that one is. You had to ask me that. That's another one that Jesse gets. I don't remember. It's one of, one of the Portugal sardines can and olive oil. Portugal. Off the coast of Portugal. They've got really good. I have it on the, on the can. I want it BPA free. Yeah, they should. Yeah, most of the time. So it's not a problem to find that. Yeah, yeah. With the bones, with the skin is better. With the vitamin D or calcium and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. You get it mixed with onions and chili and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, that's all good. Well, I go for sardines again because it's a smaller fish. Less. Less issues with toxic and metals than tuna. But. Yeah, yeah, that trouble is, a lot of those tuna tins in Australia, they're made with vegetable oils. Yeah. You don't want a can of canola oil or olive oil is better. The salt water ones. I have a question. Yes, I do. This master amino pattern and also the recoveries. Yes. For example, today when we came back from the bike ride and the run, I took 10 of the Mastermino peppermint, eight of the Coes. But after the swim, would you take again? No, I wouldn't take them again. Now, most of the reason for that is just money. Like, if expense is not an issue for you, I mean. Yeah, if you're taking. Actually, for the recoveries, you can overdo it on proteolytic enzymes. They break down fibrinogen so it can make your blood too thin. If you were exceeding eight per day on recoveries for master amino pattern, I mean, you could like Dr. Minkoff, for example, he's got some of his patients doing 30, 40, 50 grams of that, which is 30, 40, 50 tablets of that per day. Yeah, it doesn't taste that great. But the idea with that stuff is. Yeah. Like if you were to, with breakfast, lunch and dinner, do 10 master amino pattern or in between breakfast, lunch and dinner, after every workout, and you do like recoveries. Yeah, I mean, it's gonna help you recover, but I mean, that's like. Like what, eight bucks worth of supplements every single day? I mean, so for that it just comes down to an economics choice. So. Yeah. But ultimately, just be careful with the proteolytic enzymes. That would be the one main thing not to overdo it on. My rule is normally if it's a long day, I do eight. Yeah. It's a normal day before and that's fine. Yeah. Another thing. Would you add a protein shake after workout even if you do these two things? Even if you do both of those? So. So what happens is you can get to a certain ceiling of protein. So every time you digest an amino acid, it kicks off a nitrogen and your kidneys have to churn through those. So you can overdo it on protein. I wouldn't do both. As far as actual protein, I mean, everybody's got their own kind of ratio of nitrogen turnover and nitrogen balance. And I mean, technically, if you really wanted to see if it was doing damage, you would get a kidney panel and you would look at your blood urea nitrogen and your creatinine, and then you would like, double up and take more do your master immunopower, your protein. Then if you tested a month later and your blood urea nitrogen was even higher, that indicate that you were getting a lot of nitrogenous waste product from something like that. But ultimately, if I take something like master amino pattern after a workout, I don't go out of my way to also do a protein shake or something like that. Like, I. I only do one or the other, but not both. I thought Matt was pretty dirty. Yeah. MAP can be after too. You can use that as a recovery supplement. Like, honestly, and this is gonna sound kind of funky, but a lot of times I'll like, pop 10 Master Amino Pattern and have a glass of wine while I'm waiting for dinner. Like, so I've got some carbs from the wine with alcohol, some amino acids. I mean, like. Yeah, but you take five before as well. No, I don't want to take it out. You could use it before, during, or after. I mean, well, if you take it before, it keeps you from breaking down muscles. So if you take it after, it assists with recovery and amino acid uptake and protein synthesis. If you take it during, it keeps your blood levels of amino acids high, so you have a lower rating of perceived exertion during an ironman. I'll take it before, during, and after. Yeah. Okay, so you're taking before? Yeah, yeah. I mean, this stuff's liquid gold. It's not a cheap supplement. So, you know, but, you know, ideal scenario, you can do it before, during, and after. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's. Let's go eat, you guys. What do you think? Good stuff? Yeah. All right, cool. Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition, and performance advice.