Can You Still Exercise When Recovering From Overtraining, What Is The Best Blood Test, And 3 Good Testosterone Supplements.

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, can you still exercise when recovering from overtraining? How to push yourself when racing, what is the best blood test? How to fix exercise induced anemia, Natural remedies for tonsil stones are pro hormone supplements dangerous, and three good testosterone supplements.

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

So my living room is so warm right now that I'm only wearing boxer shorts.

Hmm. Yes. You know, that's always, it's a conundrum for me, really. The whole podcast with pants or podcasts without pants thing.

Yeah, really, there's no, no technical reason why we couldn't always do the show pantless. But, but right now I'm using heat as an excuse.

Yeah, it kind of depends on the quality of your, your chair. There can be some logistical difficulties too, if, if not wearing pants for you means you're going totally combat style.

Well, I stand while we're recording. I don't, I don't sit during the show, so that's not a problem for me.

See, I sit just because of, like, the location of my microphone and everything. And so I sit when we podcast. And so I do, I do have to actually have something on for me, when I put on pants, I get a little bit more professional. So usually I think a podcast listener could probably tell, you know, and you all tell me, folks listening in, you know, whether or not I'm wearing pants just based off of how, how professional versus unprofessional I actually am.

Actually, that kind of sums up our positions in the podcast. I'm, I'm obviously the, the, the idiot of the podcast.

Well, yes, Brock is always standing in the nude, as we, as we can all tell, but probably occasionally wearing like a thong and some hockey skates. You know, I, I kind of go back and forth between like, you know, a jogging suit or, you know, I'm actually wearing. Well, right now I'm wearing surfboard shorts combat style. So there you go. So today's podcast, actually, when you said.

Tracksuit, I was thinking like, like Russian mobster, like, matching Adidas thing unzipped a little too far with the gold chain.

Yeah, like, no, it's like the gray one from Rocky you know, so like when he's running through, through Chicago or whatever, getting strong.

Because Philadelphia, man.

Oh, yeah, Philadelphia, the other US City. All right, man, what do you think? Should we do this thing?

Absolutely. Can't believe I said absolutely.

News flashes.

All right, cruise on over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 24-7 to find these studies that make your sporting life and health life better and more beneficial.

That's right. Or your diet tastier. The first thing I wanted to mention is ways that you can get health, promoting, endurance, boosting nitrates. Because we've all heard about beet juice, right? Beet juice is like the sexy grandchild of the sporting industry right now, where everybody is.

That's funny. I thought of hot dogs, not beets, when you said nitrates.

Well, you know, great minds think differently sometimes.

Completely opposite.

You know, you've got a lot of elite athletes guzzling beet juice before a race. And you know, this article that Alex Hutchinson wrote in the Globe and Mail actually talked a little bit about nitric oxide and the release of nitric oxide that we get from beets. And also he listed some of the other foods that tend to have a very, very similar effect in terms of their nitrate r and really they all have very similar properties. They're all dark leaves. Right. You can get a lot of the nitrates that you get from beet juice or from beets by just eating the leaves of the beet. And a lot of these other foods are similar. Swiss chard is one. Rhubarb is another. Arugula, which I have growing outside in my garden. I've been making a smoothie in the morning where I go out there and just grab a handful of arugula is another celery. And then of course, beets. We have arugula, rhubarb, celery, Swiss chard and beet as those top five sources that are going to give you that nitrate rich boost in your cardiovascular system. And you know what the one thing is that can shut that down, that can keep these nitrates from getting converted into, into the efficacious nitrites in your body.

Eating hot dogs.

You're stuck on the hot dog thing.

I am, I'm sorry, is it because.

You'Re standing pants less that you're thinking about hot dogs? The one thing that can inhibit nitrate from these foods from getting converted into nitric oxide. You know what it is?

It's got to be something to do with your saliva.

Yeah, exactly. Because it's. There are, there are friendly bacteria that live in your mouth, that convert nitrate and your saliva to nitrite. Yogurt mouthwash. Yogurt mouthwash. So, yeah, well, antibacterial mouthwash, antibacterial toothpaste, that kind of thing. All that beet juice guzzling is for naught if you are. If you're using Listerine or something like that. So crazy. So there's. There's five ways to get your nitric oxide boost, whether it be for sports performance or, interestingly, even for, like, virility and sexual performance. This stuff works. And, you know, the quality of blood flow and orgasm or whatever for guys or girls. But also, you know, if you're combining that with mouthwash, it's really not doing you any good. So there you go.

I'm actually a company called Neogenis sent me this stuff called Beet Elite. It's like this little powdered thing that you put into water. I'm going to be testing that out over the next couple of races and just. You're supposed to put it into like 4 ounces of water and guzzle it like 30 minutes before a race and has supposed to be like the equivalent of six beets or something jammed into that little packet beetle. Let's see how that works.

That sound. Does it have, like, Captain Vegetable, like, jumping out of the can on the front of it, like, it does the Captain.

Captain Vegetable's like, holding somebody down, pummeling them.

Captain Vegetable with my hair and my celery.

Remember that from Sesame Street? That was awesome. No, you don't remember Captain Veg? I think. I'm pretty sure it was Sesame Street. Anyways. Well, we'll have. Maybe, maybe what we can do at the end of the podcast is we can find the Captain Vegetable song and play it for everyone. So we always save little surprises for the end of the podcast. For today's podcast, we'll see if we can hunt down Captain Vegetable and get ourselves. Get our pants sued off by public TV or whoever. I guess we're not wearing pants, so it doesn't matter. All right, so the next thing. Intramuscular triglycerides are a huge source of fuel during endurance. And this was interesting. It was a study that came out that looked at what happens when you have folks exercise for a long period of time in a fasted state. And what actually occurs is you get a huge, huge drop in what are called your intramuscular triglycerides, or these are also known as your intramyocellular lipids, essentially. There have been a few studies that have looked into this, but one looked at moderate intensity exercise in endurance trained males in a fasted state and found that fatty acids from the muscle and intramuscular triglycerides were a very important substrate source during fasted endurance exercise. And I'll get in a second to why this could be important for you if you're trying to boost your sports performance or figure out what you're supposed to eat during, say, endurance. But the other thing that was interesting was that there was another study that looked at basically how your body taps into this intramuscular triglyceride. And it was found that when your body is tapping into intramuscular triglyceride sources into your intramuscular triglyceride pool to use that stuff as an energy source during exercise, it can actually cause a little bit of an insulin response and cause your pancreas to have to work a little bit to churn out insulin in order for you to be able to effectively tap into this adipose tissue. And so it's one of those things where there is a little bit of stress on the pancreas when you're tapping into these intramuscular triglycerides, even though they're used as a really, really potent source of fuel for when you're out there performing specifically endurance exercise, in this case, you know, for like these fasted male endurance athletes, 60 to 70% intensity. So this got me to thinking, you know, there, there probably is quite a bit of benefit of giving your body an exogenous sorts source of triglycerides while you are exercising. This was something I experimented with. I rarely do this in my training because I'm big into this whole quality over quantity thing. But I rode 112mil on my bike. I went up to Ironman Canada, the Ironman Canada bike course up at Whistler, and I rode 112 miles three days ago on Saturday. And I took a bunch of the bulletproof MCT oil with me and I mixed that in with this Superstarch stuff that I usually use. So I had, I had about four capfuls or so, which is about 4 ounces of medium chain triglycerides. I think that comes out to right around 300 calories or so. And I put a few packets of Superstarch in there as well. And it was kind of like an oily type of flavor. Really, really interesting. But you know, the crazy thing is that I only during 112 miles, I only consumed 600 calories and I was fine. I was just like, you know, I wasn't Hammering hard the whole time. I was just kind of riding it out and stuff, but just felt great all day long. So I may. And I'm thinking about doing this as like, my Ironman triathlon protocol and possibly starting to recommend this to folks. I may start to introduce more of this kind of like, MCT oil, rather than just like throwing it into some bulletproof coffee or whatever in the morning, actually start to really use this stuff during endurance exercise based off a lot of these studies I'm seeing in terms of the body's preference to tap into these things, these triglycerides is a very significant source of fuel.

So aren't there a few of the guys that are doing the Tour, the Tour de France right now using MCT oils?

There is word on the street and kind of rumor, you know, like over on Jack Cruz's forum, for example, where there's a lot of, like, high fat intake enthusiasts over there that there are folks in the Tour de France right now who are only using MCT oil. Like that bike bottle that. That would typically be filled with Gatorade or whatever. It is, literally just pure fat MCT oil capsules. And they have been studying this stuff in the military. We mentioned this a few weeks ago on the podcast as a potential source of fuel as well. Just pure MCT oil. But it's also expensive. That is one of the things is it's some spendy stuff. And I'm curious what I need to do is go out and try. And I'm thinking about doing that this weekend to actually go try just guzzling MCT oil during like, a bike ride and then running for maybe 20 or 30 minutes afterwards and seeing if. If I wind up with just like, you know, nasty oily poo running down the back of my leg or something like that. So that seems like the biggest risk to the back of my mind is, you know, the. The oily.

They call it danger pants.

That's right, Danger pants.

All right.

One other thing that's. That's interesting, speaking of danger pants is gluten intolerance. Here is a really interesting study that came out that looked at the fact that there was no effects of gluten in many, many people who thought that they were gluten intolerant. They put these folks through a study where they compared the effects of gluten with the effects of what are called FODMAPs, which we've talked about on the show before. But that's fructose, oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides what is it? And polyols, something like that.

Fermentable oligodi monosaccharides and polyols.

If you think that you're gluten intolerant, you may not be at all. It might just be that you are sensitive to these fodmaps. And there are charts. I'll link to one in the show, notes for folks listening in, where you can go print a fodmap chart, slap it on your fridge for a week, and avoid the foods that are high and in fodmaps. So we're talking about foods typically, like foods that contain a lot of fructose. A lot of melons, you know, unfortunately in the summer are high in fodmaps. Dairy is high in the lactose part of fodmaps. A lot of legumes, like kidney beans and baked beans and stuff like that. No surprise there. Apples, pears, a lot of cereals. Anyways, there are some foods that are just really high. So you slap this on your fridge and just for like a week, try it. Try eliminating fodmaps. I'm personally kind of experimenting with this stuff myself, and I am noticing a huge change in terms of, you know, like, toots bloating here and there. You know, sometimes you'll, like, start a run or start a workout and you gotta. You gotta duck into the restroom, you know, for to light.

You say toots.

Toots gas. You know. Yeah, yeah.

You clearly have small children.

Yes. Anyways, though, grown men don't call them toots. Toots. I got me some toots. I got badass toots. Anyways, though, fodmap chart. Hang it in your fridge, check it out. And this is something that I'm actually looking into quite a bit right now for. For a few clients is this whole small intestinal bacterial overgrowth issue. I think it's something that a lot of people are dealing with. They're unaware of the issue. They think they're gluten intolerant. It has nothing whatsoever to do with gluten, but it has to do with fodmaps. I suspect that may be the issue in a lot of people. And this study, when I saw it, it was right in the midst of me kind of looking into this stuff, and it's like, boom. Maybe it's not the gluten and not the GI effects caused by bread and pizza and stuff like that. Maybe it is these FODMAPs instead. And it turns out, based off of this study, that many, many folks, it's the fodmaps not the gluten. So there you go.

But that doesn't mean you should throw a whole bunch of gluten back into your diet. Like I can see on this, I've got one of these charts in front of me. And wheat and rye bread, crackers, cookies, pasta, they're all on this, on the elimination chart as well. So. So it's kind of stay off the gluten and also stay off the apples, apricots, avocados, blackberries, cherries, etc.

Yeah, but at the same time, let's say you're, you're out at some fancy Italian restaurant and they've got a nice artisanal, you know, slice of pizza, that kind of thing, you know, and you've been just like completely 100% strict, you know, totally gluten free, kind of like, you know, whatever. Rob Wolf, Paleo esque, don't go near gluten or it's going to destroy you. Maybe, possibly. There are a lot of people out there who actually could tolerate trace amounts of gluten, sane amounts of gluten in their diet, not a loaf of bread a day or anything like that, and be okay. And maybe it's a lot of these other fermentable foods that are causing issues instead, possibly due to things like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and some GI issues. So, you know, I'm personally, through my, through my private consulting business, you know, with the, with the coaching calls that I do with folks, I've been walking a lot of people through a lot of gut issues and this is something I've found to be more and more the case is the combination of bacterial overgrowth and fodmap consumption being a big issue. So great.

Well, we've got a link to the FODMAP chart, the show notes here, and anybody who's listening to this inside the app, if you just click on that little E, there's a little lowercase E in the bottom right hand corner. If you click on there, you can find all the links laid out really nicely for you. So just scroll down there until you see the FODMAP diet.

Yeah, it's pretty useful that part of the app actually, like, honestly, like I will go through our own show notes and just click that little E button just because it's, it's super cool and it makes me feel warm inside when I see all of our links that we work so hard to put up right there for people. So if you want to feel warm inside too, that's one way to do it.

Special announcements.

All right, this Friday, 6, 6:30pm you and Jessa are gonna lead people through. Be your own diet sleuth.

That's right. I was talking to Jessa last night, and she was telling me how Friday night I was gonna be watching the kids because she's headed off to a party with some of her girlfriends. And I said, 6:30, you and me, babe. We're sitting down for the. For the Inner Circle webinar where she's been logging her diet. We're going to go through and show basically what kind of programs and apps are out there that are good for logging your diet and then how to interpret the numbers, like how to interpret calories, carbs, protein, fat, macronutrients, micronutrients. All the data you can glean from something like that. I'm personally not a huge fan of logging your diet all the time, but doing it for a week or doing it for a month, you can learn a bunch. And so before Jessa heads off to that party, I'm going to make sure she plants her butt in a chair for at least an hour with me. And so that's going to be in the Inner Circle. Every month we do a new webinar. Every month we do new bonus meal plans. You know, I spend a few hours a week in there answering questions from people on the forum, kind of giving a little bit more time and forethought to my responses and how I help people than I would in, like, you know, the comment section on the blog or something like that. So, you know, it's kind of a cool service. The whole thing about the Inner Circle is I just. I wanted to figure out a way to help people and not feel guilty that my kids were starving because I was doing it for 100% free. So I figured 10 bucks a month, you can join the Inner Circle. You get a monthly webinar from me. You take advantage of the fact that a bunch of other people are doing it. So, you know, it's not like you got to pay hundreds of dollars a month for coaching from me. Instead, it's just 10 bucks a month. And, yeah, it's the. The best $10 a month you will ever spend unless you have like an Amazon prime membership or something like that, which is honestly even cooler than the Inner Circle.

But, you know, you know, no, it actually. Amazon prime sucks in Canada, so maybe it's. It's really.

That's good for you guys, but that's what I've heard.

It's totally useless. But anyway, during the during this diet sleuth, I hope you actually you also cover how to ignore some of the feedback that you get from some of those apps. Because I know like I'm, I'm following a low carb, high fat diet and on days when I have like a bulletproof coffee for breakfast and then avocado salad for, for lunch, it like alarms are going off and it's like oh my God, you're killing yourself. This is terrible.

The animated GIF of the, the heart exploding and pretty much bursting in a flame of fat globules.

A little hand reaches out and knocks the food out of my hand. So yeah, I hope you cover, cover that information too.

Yeah, we'll do all that. And then the other thing I wanted to mention was that I'm in the midst of putting together our camp over in Thailand. We're going to be doing a bunch of I'll be doing bike fits for folks. I'm going to be doing run like tracking economy and efficiency drills. I'm going to be doing some video recorded swim lessons. We'll be doing a nutrition workshop, breathing workshop, mobility workshop, yoga workshop, strength training workshop, bunch of stuff. This is in the, in the five day camp at Tanyapura that I'm putting on in Thailand in November. And then that camp kind of culminates in a race and then we go and party on a few islands and then come back and do another race. Anyway still, still room to get in on that if you have the freedom and flexibility to get away for a few weeks to Thailand this winter and you, you want to experience the adventure of a lifetime and also learn a bunch from me and some other pro triathletes and guest lecturers I'm going to have at that camp. It's pretty killer. So it's@pacificfit.net Thailand so check it out.

Sounds awesome.

Listener Q and A.

Hey Ben, I just wanted to say thank you for the awesome custom training plan you gave me before starting with you. I was over trained and bouncing from injury to injury. So you know, I was probably training like 20 hours a week just killing myself and missing time with my family and ultimately missing my goals for triathlon which was the whole point of the training. You know, I used to be stuck in these giant heavy supportive shoes again just going from injury to injury. And now thanks to your training plan and the strength training, I've gone from slow and big heavy supportive shoes to placing the top 50 of my first 70.3 of the season which is just my B race. And so I'm excited to see what's coming. And, you know, I did that in racing flats. If you told me 12 weeks ago, I would have been running in racing flats, I would have laughed at you. I'm fitter and faster than I've ever been without all the injuries that would just constantly haunt me. You know, I look better. I don't have the skinny fat syndrome going on. You know, the icing on the cake really, with the sort of the minimalist style training is that without any loss in performance, I just have so much more time with my family and a much better balanced life. Looking forward to the rest of the season. And I'll see you in Ironman Canada. Thanks again.

Well, that is pretty cool. Chris was actually with me up in Canada three days ago. Chris and John and Tyler and Jim and Dan. Basically a group of us guys just went up there and checked out the Ironman Canada course, and we Swam like about 4k every morning and biked 112 miles on Saturday. And Chris and I actually went for a run on Sunday and kind of went out for about a half marathon run and got lost and winded up running almost 20 miles. But, yeah, it's kind of cool for me when I've got a guy, say, like Chris, who's following my triathlon dominator. Actually, no, he's not following triathlon dominator. He's doing the deal where what I do with some people is you go to pacificfit.net and you fill out a questionnaire. There's. And then I design a customized plan for your entire year based off of the races that you've chosen to do and all that jazz. And it's 500 bucks. And I basically just lay out which days you're supposed to do which workouts and based off of what your calendar is. So it's kind of like. Kind of like a hybrid between custom coaching and kind of like a generic plan. Chris did that, and for me, it's cool to go out and train with folks who are following a plan like that that I wrote for them because, you know, he. He rocked it. You know, he hadn't ridden any longer, I think, ever in his life than 80 miles. And, you know, he. He basically hammered through the. Through the 112 miles. He got four flat tires, but he still just. He killed it. And. And he was strong. And, you know, he hung with me for 20 miles of running. You know, we went out there with no food, no water, and just like, you know, we were only planning on running 13 miles. We ended up running 20 because we got lost. But, you know, no food, no water. He hammered through that, sat on my feet for two different days of swimming. Hard 4K, you know, and the dude has just been doing my quality over quantity stuff, you know, minimalist training. But it's pretty cool to see, you know, when I'm running out a plan for somebody, you know, there's a difference between it all being zeros and ones and emails flying back and forth and then me getting to actually meet them and see how the training that I've assigned to them is actually fleshing out. And so yeah, I know Chris is a podcast listener. He's probably sitting there listening with his ears burning, but you know, shout out and just cool to see that, you know, when I'm sitting down and looking at these studies and trying to, you know, take what science is telling us and apply it to training programs that lo and behold, big surprise, the crap actually works. Regardless of whether or not I'm wearing pants when I ride works. I mean, you know, and this is me being the salesman now. I mean, you do what I tell you, you do what I say, and if you're trying to go after feats of physical performance, you know, follow what I tell you and it'll work. So, so there you go. There's, there's me bragging and now I'll get off my soapbox.

I like it.

Hey Ben, it's Mark. In Texas, I've been diagnosed with overtraining syndrome where it's early onset and I've been prescribed a, like a month, a month and a half of just rest and recovery because I've been going for like seven years and never stopped training. And so during this time of four to six weeks off, other than mobility and stretching, things like that, what are some things that I can do to really sort of enhance my recovery as far as maybe supplements to take or resistance type stuff to do. So I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that. Love you doing and thanks.

Alright, so this is actually a little bit of a follow up. Mark asked us a question about high heart rate a little while ago and I guess since then he's been diagnosed with overtraining syndrome.

Yeah, and I have spent, I've probably been doing four or five consults a week with people who are in a state of adrenal fatigue or overtraining in some stage of it. Another or another they're going out and they're doing like the Metametrics panel, the blicking on the name of it it's the four daily cortisol measurements and the two daily DHEA measurements, the Adrenal Stress index, the asi. They're overtrained, they're adrenal fatigue. They're experiencing a lot of the issues that Mark is experiencing. It's crazy how many people have dug themselves into a hole. Crazy blows my mind, really. And it's sad and it's scary. It's stuff that you can fix, though. And one of the biggest questions that I get is kind of similar to what Mark wants to know here. It's like, what can you do? Because quitting cold turkey when you're, when you're addicted to exercise or when you are relying on the release of the dopamine and the cannabinoids and everything else that, you know, we kind of hit on in this, in this last podcast that I did with Mischa Shabali. You know, you can go check that out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com, the podcast we did about is it okay to be addicted to exercise? It's kind of weird because some people will turn to exercise as a way to save them from smoking or drugs or alcohol abuse or something like that, because exercise gives you that eating. Yeah. Or overeating or whatever. And then, you know, on the flip side, you quit exercising because you got over trained or adrenal fatigued or whatever. And it can be easy to turn to, like alcohol and drugs or, you know, or something like that, or simply just refuse to stop exercising because you're so. You're so just like addicted, basically. You know, that feeling that you get. So when I'm dealing with people who have adrenal fatigue or who have overtraining syndrome, the last thing I do is tell them to go lay on the couch because I know how hard that can be. Granted in many cases, they'll probably ignore you too. Yeah. And that's what happens. And I have had people who have dropped out of my program because they simply refuse to stop. In most cases, swimming, biking, and running, they just won't stop. And they, you know, and they'll keep on floundering for years eventually until the body just poops out. But for the folks who kind of adhere to the program, you know, the basics, some of the basic stuff that I work in, especially for the first four to eight weeks. And this kind of depends on, you know, we test as we go. So you look at. Even if it's impossible to test cortisol and dhea, that can be expensive, it can be time consuming. But you at least track things like your morning heart rate variability to see how that's responding as you go. And you kind of keep your finger on the pulse of recovery of sleep quality, mood soreness, heart rate and heart rate variability, things of that nature. And some of the main workouts that we'll do. Workouts are yoga mobility sessions that involve a series of foam rolling moves, you know, 10 to 15 minutes of foam rolling followed by a dynamic warm up of arm swings, leg swings, balancing drills, a little bit of body weight, core stuff, moving back into foam rolling and then finishing up with some light restorative yoga, doing like easy 20 to 30 minute nature walks, doing a lot of fascia work, mobility work with like golf balls, lacrosse balls, stuff like that. Using the break from training and the restorative portions of the workout to basically reinvent the body. And you know, Brock is as you being someone that I coach, you know that these are sometimes the types of weeks that I'll throw into your program. Yeah, I was going to say this.

Is sounding very familiar to what I'm doing next week.

Yeah, it's kind of like the stuff that I'll, that I'll do with the athletes that I coach every four weeks or every six weeks or depending on how much I'm wanting to beat up an athlete to get them ready for something even as seldom as every eight weeks. But for someone who's recovering from adrenal fatigue and overtraining, I'll take a similar recovery week and we'll do eight solid weeks of just that kind of stuff. Yoga, mobility, nature walks, easy movement. And we combine that with a lot of, for example, the supplementation protocols that I talk about in my article on overtraining recovery. And I'll link to that in the show notes over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com247. But we combine that with stuff like high mineral and sea salt intake, high vitamin C intake, high intake of licorice root extracts to kind of decrease the half life of cortisol and cause your body to churn out some of that wakefulness hormone that it needs. We'll combine it with some herbal support from something like Inner Peace or tnt, you know, some Chinese adaptogenic herbal action, you know, and there's, there's a more comprehensive list that I'll link to in the show notes. I won't get into it all just because frankly I've written free article on it, you can go read over on the website. But you combine a lot of that stuff with, you know, basic movement Protocols. And generally, if you're not in too deep a state of adrenal fatigue, you can kind of wean yourself back into doing basic workouts within four to eight weeks. And when I say basic workouts, what I'll usually start with is I'll take someone from just doing like the yoga, mobility, easy nature walks, stuff like that. And I will take, for example, one of those easy nature walks and I'll start having folks stop and do some rock lifts, some log lifts, maybe some push ups, some kind of fitness exploring type of work that still doesn't send your body that stressful, structured running from a lion exercise message, but allows you to begin to stress your muscles and joints and heart rate and cardiovascular system a little bit. And then we'll throw in some barefoot sprints or some, some real, real short, high intensity things, you know, 100 yard short sprints, 20, 50 yards, things of that nature. And then that one of the first structured sessions that I'll throw back in is super slow strength, either with a suspension strap, like a, like a TRX or a Mosfit suspension strap, or doing like a super slow protocol at the gym using something like Doug McGuff's body by science protocol, where it's lots of breathing focus and quality of movement. But again, no chronic repetitive motion. The very, very last thing that I add in, and sometimes it can be a good 12 to 15 weeks before I add in this component, is chronic repetitive motion where it's okay, you know, we're actually going to go out and go for a bike ride or swim or run or something that is, that is metabolic conditioning, road work, because that's the stuff that in someone who is over trained, who oftentimes has their parasympathetic nervous system really, really beat up, you know, if you test their heart rate variability, the number called their high frequency is really, really consistently low. You know, usually because they're a triathlete or a marathoner, it's more often I'm dealing with those people with adrenal fatigue than I am with like a crossfitter who's kind of an opposite sympathetic nervous system fatigue issue. But with those parasympathetic nervous system fatigue, the last thing we add back in is the swimming and the biking and the running. Because it's important to realize that when you're trying to recover from adrenal fatigue or over training, even if you're doing like an easy swim or an easy bike ride or an easy run, if you're a triathlete or a marathoner, or a swimmer or a cyclist. Those easy sessions still send a message to your body that you're training, that you're running from a lion and you still get that hormonal depletion. And it's so easy for it to just turn into a depletion session. And so that's the very, very last thing that I'll add back in. So that's kind of like the crow's eye view of the type of things that I'll implement in a program for overtraining recovery. And this is something that people hire me to walk them through. I'm thinking about just writing, possibly maybe just writing up a plan for training peaks or PDF or something that I can just put out there for people to use. The problem with doing something like that is a lot of this stuff is customized. Like it totally depends on genetics and your micronutrient status and how deep into the hole you've dug yourself. And you know, frankly, it requires some hand holding sometimes to get yourself back out of a situation like that. So. But those are some of the basics that I'd start with if I were Mark.

You know, those wilderness fitness walk things are, they're my favorite. I love those. Like, you do come home feeling like you had a workout, but like you said, you just don't have that fight or flight stressed out feeling because it was non unstructured and it was just goofy. Good fun. Yeah, but you still get a good workout. It's a nice way to sort of fool your body into having a workout without thinking. I'm working out.

Yeah, exactly. It's like my, you know, my little circuit at the park that I do on Thursdays where, you know, I balance on a park bench, jump off the park branch, sprint over to the, to the two like picnic benches, do like a snake, crawl under those, run to the tree, do some handstand push ups, jump up onto the fence, which is about 20 yards away from there, and I'll walk along the fence for a good two or three minutes, hop off the fence. I'll crawl literally on the ground like a, like a rabbit or a cat over to this big electrical box, kind of do a muscle up, up onto that, jump off that, land soft like a monkey, run over to this big, it's like this big. It's, it's almost like this, this pole that a sign is hanging from. And I'll do 3, 4, 5 pull ups on that and then run backwards or sideways or skip or bound or hop over to my original starting point and that you Know, these are the type of workouts that Darrell Edwards talks about in his book Paleo Fitness, you know, or on his website fitnessexplorer.com you know, just fun stuff. And you can do that kind of stuff when you're recovering from overtraining, kind of in the later stages of recovery, you know, after you've gotten usually again, four to eight weeks of kind of easy stuff under your belt. And that's a great way to kind of reintroduce your body to fitness and movement. And, you know, if you're not over trained, that's a great kind of workout to include once a week, you know, do it with your kids or whatever. If you wind up in your local municipal jailhouse for climbing up on the electrical boxes at your park, just blame the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. And there you go.

Hello, Ben and Brock. This is Brett from Sandpoint, Idaho. In the latest podcasts, Ben has been encouraging us listeners to push ourselves beyond our comfort zone to maximize our workouts. I have tried this approach, but I'm having problems. I feel as if I am, quote, unquote, saving myself for that last push of a race or workout. Do you have any ideas on how to go harder during the beginning and middle of my workouts or races? Thanks so much.

So, Brett, you know, this reminds me of Andy Potts. Andy Potts is a professional triathlete and I had the pleasure of seeing him speak. He's actually a really dynamic, cool speaker. And I saw him speak at the triathlon Business Conference in San Diego this year, and he talked about his pre race protocol that he uses to get himself pumped up to really go hard when that race starts in the very, very beginning. And it was pretty hilarious. It's like this combination of like spastic yoga breathing and like this, this almost like, what do you call it, like shamanic breathing patterns where he's like breathing in and like hyperventilating and breathing out really fast. It's actually, actually a technique that, that John Douillard talks about in his book Mind Body Sports. I, I saw Andy up on stage doing this. And a few months ago I was reading John Duyard's book and it was very, very similar. It's almost like this process of hyperventilation in a way, but lots of, lots of really crazy breathing. And it was like five minutes he demonstrated on stage and the whole room was cracking up just because he, he was literally just like filling his lungs with air over and over again and then building these breaths faster and faster and faster, like panting and then he finished with one deep, deep breath. He held it in and then he blew it out really fast. And he went through that a few different times. And it was all the more hilarious because he was like pitting out, he's wearing this dress shirt and just said like huge pools of sweat building under his shirt. But that's what the dude does. And he's known for in a triathlon just like going off the front the first 300 or 400 yards, you know, and, and that's where he breaks from the crowd right there and boom, he's gone. And that's what he does, that five minutes of breathing before his, his triathlon. And I tried something similar, I tried something similar in Japan. We had, we had no warm up, no swim warm up in Japan, you know, and I went off the front with a few other swimmers and felt great the whole time. So I'll put a link in the show notes to an actual article that describes Andy's swim routine, if you want to print that out or whatever. Like his breathing routine that he does. So that's the first thing that I'd recommend. Or go grab John Douillard's book Mind Body Sport and read. I don't remember the page that it's on, but he's got like, it's like a hyperventilation kind of blow off type of technique. So that's one thing to try these deep breathing techniques before you go out there and do the workout or the race. The next thing that I'd recommend, I'll give you five recommendations. So the first one would be to breathe. The second thing would be, and this is something really. It sounds simple and stupid, but when I'm at a triathlon or I'm at an event, I just see most people not warming up properly. A proper warm up consists of several surges that take you up into race pace that cause your body to begin producing its lactic acid buffering enzymes and cause you to begin increasing the elasticity of the lungs and really opening up the blood vessels. And a lot of people do like a light jog, light bike ride, light swim, whatever, and you actually have to throw in some real hard race pace efforts 20, 30, sometimes up to 60 seconds long to really get your body into that state that it needs to be in to be ready to push hard when the gun goes off, so to speak. Speak. So that's number two would be warm up.

I think people are generally worried about using up their finite amount of energy before the race starts, so they're just sort of Standing around really still trying to conserve every bit of energy they've got. And that's really not how the body works.

Yeah. Even before an Ironman triathlon, for example, you. You know, those things start hard. You got to be ready for it. So warm up the right way. The next thing that I'll use personally is I'm a big fan of music that gets me pumped up. I grab, like, some of the podcasts you'll find me subscribe to in itunes. I subscribe to Paul Oakenfold's Planet Perfecto podcast. I subscribe to the Tiesto Club Life podcast, the State of Trance podcast, Felix Cartel's weekend workout podcast. Like, for me, I'm a big fan of techno. Those are all techno podcasts, and that's what gets me pumped up. I suspect, Brock, you're probably more of like an 80s butt rock guy, right?

I like to call it hair rock, but.

Hair rock, yeah.

Little Pantera, maybe some rat.

Right. Some. Some, of course, mullet action. Anyways, though, you know, there's a reason that armies going into battle in history used drums and trumpets and things like that to get them pumped up. I mean, this. The crap works. So, you know, use music as well. Use an MP3 player to get yourself pumped up. And. And you can have those tunes kind of continually playing through your head, too, as you're out there pushing yourself, which is nice because they kind of stick in your head. Yeah.

Having that power song to call on that you. You know, when you're starting to fall apart, just start singing it in your head.

It really helps. The next thing that I'll do is count. So for me, sometimes, especially when it's a slow start, I'll just be like, okay, like for the swim, for example, for those first, you know, 200 yards of the swim, I'll just be counting the whole time. Like, 1, 2, 3, left, 1, 2, 3, right. 1, 2, 3, left. So it's almost like this distraction technique. I'll also use that towards the end of, say, like, a race, like a triathlon, I'll literally count to 20 over and over and over again just to distract my mind, to keep my body from shutting down. And that counting technique can work really well also. It's something that I know a lot of pro athletes will do. They'll just count to string themselves through that last little bit. So that's another thing that you can use not just at the end, but also in the beginning of an event. And then finally I would say number five. So I said, breathe, warm up properly, Use music, use counting, and then practice. Like, you know, for example, I've got one workout that I recommend that I use and some of my athletes use is called my swim start workout, where it's a series of 200 or 300 meter repeats where the first 25 or the first 50 are just all out. And then you take yourself into a cruise pace for the next 100, 200 meters or for example, for a run, rather than easing yourself into a run, do a quick warm up, five minutes of aerobic running with maybe a few short 20 to 30 second efforts thrown in and then just push yourself. Rather than waiting till the end of your run for a fast finish, use a fast start. You do the same thing on the bike as well. So in your practice sessions, for whatever it is that you're getting ready for, try to go hard in the beginning rather than going hard in the end, which is what most people really do. And that is, for example, like I mentioned how I accidentally got lost and ended up running 30k this past Sunday I went out and ran the 13 miles really hard because I was not really hard, but at a harder pace than I would have gone if I hadn't been running 20 miles instead of 13. And it was almost like I tricked my body. I ran hard for 13 miles and then tacked another seven or so on. A lot of times folks do the opposite. They run really easy for the first hour or so and then as they're getting towards the end, they start to run harder because the light is at the end of the tunnel. And instead you push yourself hard at the start and you know, just like put on your motivational music from the start, from the get go and just like push from the get go rather than building into your pace. So that's another way that you can do things. And you know, that's where something like sometimes, you know, treadmills and stuff like that come in handy to set the pace correctly for you.

So yeah, practice really is the, is the right word for it because you do have to practice at each pace so you know what you can and can't do. If you start off really hard and you just, there's no way you're going to be able to sustain this pace. Of course that's a, that's a bad strategy, especially if you're in a race. But during your practices, during your workouts, go too hard a couple of times so you know what that feels like, where too hard is and where just hard enough is. So you can gauge that when it comes to race day.

That's right. That's right. And then, yeah, illegal performance enhancing drugs was going to be number six. But I think we've got a question about that later on anyway, so we'll save that.

We'll save that.

Hi, Ben and Brock. My name is Julia and I'm from California. My question is about recovery. And this is a topic that of course you guys broach every week, usually in some way. But my question is specifically about people who have a hard time recovering quickly and not even quickly. It takes me usually three or four days between running even or spinning a spin class to feel ready to do it again due to past injuries. I don't like to work out on sore muscles and weak fatigued muscles, but at the same time waiting three to four days between just cardio sessions. And don't even get me started on weights. If I do weights, it's usually five days. I don't know if this is a diet issue or if it's a nutrition issue. I'm looking at changing things in my diet. But perhaps you have some supplementation suggestions or training suggestions even to rectify my situation of slow recovery.

Wow. Five days to recover from some resistance work. That's a long time.

Yeah, well, I mean, it can be. Depends on the resistance work. You know, there are, there are. For example, I mentioned Doug McGuff's body by science book earlier. You know that, and he recommends a full week of recovery in between those super slow resistance training exercises that he prescribes in that book. And it's because they're just so freaking hard. I mean, you're really laying it out there and you're really, really pushing your body and taking yourself to complete fatigue if you're doing those workouts properly. And sometimes that takes a full week of recovery. I remember when I was a bodybuilder, I would have some workouts where you'd have like chest day and if anybody touched your chest for the next three or four days, you'd punch them in the face because you were so freaking sore after literally doing bench press, push up, decline, fly, incline, fly incline, press, decline, press, and then finishing up with whatever, you know, push ups to, to exhaustion, you know, and you walk out of the gym 90 minutes later. And it, you know, that is the type of thing that definitely requires a fair deal of recovery. You know, so there are some workouts that are going to take, you know, I mean, heck, you know, there's evidence that something like an Ironman triathlon will take, you know, a good 19 to you know, as long as a month for recovery. So it doesn't sound like Julia is.

Doing that kind of work though.

No, it doesn't.

She's indicating a spin class or running or doing some resistance band training. Doesn't sound like it's that intense.

Exactly. So in this case, I recommend that you get tested. One of the biggest, biggest issues I've seen with people who have difficulty recovering after a, you know, a normal workout that they should be recovered from is that they've got some kind of a micronutrient deficiency going on, some kind of a fatty acid imbalance, amino acid imbalance, vitamin B deficiency, vitamin D deficiency, low antioxidant status, something in the body that is supposed to be there to help the body bounce back and recover the way that it's supposed to, to help the body repair holes in the cell walls and, you know, restore metabolic function. It's simply not there. Probably the gold standard test or not probably, but for sure, the gold standard test that I would do for something like this would be a metametrix ion profile panel. It's one of those tests that is pretty gold standard. It's not inexpensive. You can, you can use something like direct labs and I'll put a link in the show notes for you. But that particular panel, it's going to run close to, I believe, around $800. But it tests for all your functional markers for your full vitamin B panel with folic acid, for vitamin A, vitamin e, carotene, coenzyme Q10, all your amino acids, your fatty acids, what are called your organic acids, your antioxidants like your lipid peroxides, your homocysteine, extremely comprehensive, comes with a very, very nice little report that shows you exactly where you need to kind of like plug up the holes. I think everybody should be doing one of those about once a year, whether you have a doc walk you through it or whether you just do it yourself and kind of like self interpret the PDF. But that is, that's one test that I'd recommend everybody look into getting. Now the other, if you wanted to really go gold standard and go after like the, the best kind of 1, 2 combo of a blood test, you'd get that ion profile and then you do something like a, like a longevity panel. Longevity panel. I'll link to that. That's another. It's, it's going to be another close to $1,000. So you're looking at a good, you know, 2K worth of testing. But this would be like once a year you'd do something like this. And this would again be if you want to just know everything that's going on inside your body. So the longevity test is an inflammation panel that looks into like C reactive protein basically and it also includes a fibrinogen measurement, a metabolic and hormone panel. So estrogen, testosterone, cortisol, dhea, thyroid, everything from a hormonal standpoint, insulin, insulin like growth factor, full kidney and liver panel. So blood, urea, nitrogen, creatinine, CO2, body estate, acidity, liver health, everything like that, electrolyte status. So all your basic minerals, your cardiovascular health. So you know your lipoprotein, your cholesterol, particle size, hdl, ldl, another measurement called Apo B phospholipase. And you know, that particular panel also comes with an hour long console with a holistically physician who's able to kind of walk you through interpretation. So if you were to put those two together, I mean like I know that that sounds like you know, taking a nuclear bomb to the, to the issue. But if you really wanted to know beyond a shadow of a doubt and money really wasn't an issue for you or you have whatever, a flexible savings account or a health savings account if you're here in the US and you can pay for this stuff, tax deductible. That's the kind of thing that I do. If you just need help recovering. I mean honestly, like I could sit here talking for an hour about it on the podcast. Or again, like I mentioned in my response to Mark when he was asking about recovering from over training, go read that pretty freaking comprehensive article that I wrote about how to recover from workouts@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I'll link to it in the show notes again, but it's called 26 Top Ways to Recover from Workouts and Injuries with Lightning Speed. It's the one with Wolverine. Wolverine, that's right. Just because I like to toe the edge and see how much it takes for me to get sued by Marvel comics by putting photos of their stars on my blog. But I would read that article thoroughly and take into account everything that I talk about in there, from compression to ice to kinesio tape, foam rolling, electrostim. Just look at all my recommendations and see which ones that are practically within your control to implement. I talk about supplements on there too, like curcumin and proteolytic enzymes, magnesium salt baths, just all this stuff. And you'd be surprised. You put all that together and you throw it on your body post workout. You combine that with with addressing micronutrient status, inflammatory marker status, stuff like that. And you know, the body bounces back. You just got to give it what it needs. So that's, that's what I'd be doing.

Hi, Ben and Brock. My name is ken. I'm a 48 year old, healthy omnivorous guy. I don't take any medication and I have no chronic health conditions. Until recently, I went to my doctor for my annual checkup and found out that while I have a normal density of red blood cells, my red blood cell size is on the low end of normal, measured by a test called the mean corpuscular volume. And my ferritin level is about 50% of normal. So while I'm not yet anemic, I've dug pretty heavily into my body iron stores and I am almost certainly headed in that direction. I have no symptoms of any problems with my upper gastrointestinal tract to suggest an ulcer. Now, I've been a triathlete since 2008 and I've been competing in long distance events. My question is, can you talk about iron storage issues and iron deficiency among endurance athletes? Are there particular stressors that endurance training places on the athlete's ability to store iron? Thanks.

Well, Ken, the first thing is, dude, hemorrhoids, mild hemorrhoids, even just hemorrhoids in general, I'd get that looked into. I'd get that addressed.

Even if they're not bleeding very much, that's still.

Oh yeah, you know, I hate to use a word like squirting on the podcast, but blood squirting from hemorrhoids can, can definitely cause anemia, you know, in the same way that, that a woman bleeding every month can, can kind of, you know, eventually, if iron isn't getting replenished from a dietary standpoint there, you know, and you combine that with, with high levels of red blood cell turnover from endurance exercise, you know, you can get some anemia like symptoms. So don't blow off your hemorrhoids coming from two guys. Blow on them either who are pants less or underwearless while talking to you. I don't know about you, Brock, but I definitely make sure I nip hemorrhoids in the bud if that ever comes up to be an issue, which has only happened once from excessive bicycle riding. But anyways, though, if your red blood cell size is on the low side of normal, that's really not too concerning. And even hematocrit and hemoglobin levels being slightly low, that's pretty common in athletes, especially endurance Athletes. It's called sports anemia. You ever heard of that? Brock? Sports anemia.

We talked about it a lot on. On an episode that is actually available on itunes.

Yeah, actually, if you go to the itunes album, I talk about how to legally boost your hematocrit levels. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. But what it comes down to, and this is something I didn't talk about in that episode, is what's called pseudoanemia, which is naturally lower hemoglobin levels of athletes. So what happens is that aerobic exercise, specifically, it expands what's called your plasma volume, and this naturally reduces the concentration of your red blood cells. So what I mean by that is when you exercise really vigorously, it will, in the short term, while you're exercising, reduce your plasma volume by about 10 to 20%. So there's a few different ways that this happens. You get a rise in blood pressure and this muscular compression of all these capillaries, and that boosts the fluid pressure inside the capillaries of your muscles and drives out plasma volume. You get a bunch of generation of lactic acid and other metabolites, which increases the pressure in tissues. And then all of these forces drive fluid, not red blood cells, but fluid from blood to tissues. And then you lose some extra plasma water through sweat. So you get about a 10 to 20% kind of fluid loss. And then in response to that, your body releases all of these different hormones that are responsible for conserving water and conserving salt to bring your blood pressure back up. Right. Because you've lost all this volume. So your body's like, crap, I got to get blood pressure back up. So it releases stuff like renin and aldosterone and another one called vasopressin. And your body even releases extra albumin into your blood. And when this happens, your plasma volume expands. And even though while you're exercising short term, especially for like an aerobic session, your plasma volume decreases by 10 to 20% by the time your body has bounced back and responded. A single bout of intense exercise, especially like a long or a hard session, can expand your plasma volume or your plasma fluid by 10%. You can actually gain a bunch of weight from a hard workout because of this expansion of plasma volume. And when that happens, when you get this plasma volume expansion of 10%, that can happen within 24 hours. I mean, it's pretty quick. What can happen then is technically your hemoglobin concentration is going to test. If you were to test it as below normal, just because you've got this big expansion in plasma volume without a subsequent expansion in red blood cell concentration. And because red blood cell concentration is kind of synonymous with your hemoglobin levels, all of that drops. And that's sports induced anemia. And really, it's an adaptation of your cardiovascular system. Really, the result is that you become a better athlete. But you may notice that you get kind of this reduction in hemoglobin, et cetera. And that's why something like a taper before an important event works well, because all of a sudden your plasma volume has extremely expanded. You taper, and your red blood cells and your hemoglobin get a chance to kind of catch up, and then you're sitting pretty. You know, once, once you're ready to go out and really take all that fitness that you've built up and go do something like whatever, climb Mount Everest or do an ironman triathlon or, you know, do whatever. The reason you've been doing all this aerobic exercise is. So I wouldn't worry too much, you know, about something like, you know, low to normal hematocrit or hemoglobin levels or low red blood cell size. If you're kind of testing yourself in the midst of your training and it's not during a taper or a rest period when we'd expect those numbers to kind of be higher up. What concerns me, though, is the ferritin being low, because ferritin is a really critical iron storage protein. And that's one that does tend to be low in endurance athletes. And that's very, very similar to, like, an iron deficiency anemia. So there's different forms of anemia. Like you can have a B12 deficiency anemia, you can have a folic acid deficiency anemia, or you can have an iron deficiency anemia where either your iron stores are low or ferritin, which is your iron storage protein, is low. And this is something that you can definitely fix. There are two supplements specifically that I'm a fan of using when you have an issue with ferritin levels. One is called lactoferrin. And what lactoferrin does is it actually can act on your bacteria. What happens is that lactoferrin kind of sequesters iron. It's an iron transporter, and it hides iron from bacteria in your gut, which would normally be taking that iron and metabolizing it. So lactoferrin allows your body to use the iron rather than allowing bacteria in your gut to use iron. And so lactoferrin is something I've talked about on the podcast as being a really, really potent, like, bone building supplement. You get it from cap reflex, which is one thing that's always in my refrigerator for when I'm injured or whatever. I'll, I'll pop back about 8 to 12 cap reflex a day until that strain or sprain or whatever goes away. But it's also got a ton of lactoferrin in it. And so that's one thing that I'd really consider is using a good lactoferrin supplement. And then the other thing would be some kind of a ferritin iron supplement that doesn't constipate you. Because that's the issue with most of these supplements, is they constipate you. And the best one I can recommend, it's a liquid, it's a ferritin pyrophosphate that's mixed with some bitters and some herbs to enhance absorption. It's got some other stuff in there that keeps you regular so that the iron doesn't constipate you. It's called Floridex and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Floridex. Anytime. I put a link to something in the show notes, by the way, and you buy it over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com you support the show. So if I'm going to recommend this stuff to you, do go over to the show and buy it through the show notes because that actually ensures that we don't starve to death. But those are the two.

It's the right thing to do.

It's the right thing to do. Lactoferrin supplements or Floradix, you could do both of those, frankly, that would help a ton as well. And then get those hemorrhoids patched up, dude, for sure. And I think, I think we've talked about natural hemorrhoid remedies and things like that in the podcast before. So you can always do a search for that at the site. But yeah, take care of that.

Now.

This is a little glimpse into how the podcast is made. I actually, I believe I edited out the part about hemorrhoids just because I didn't want our listeners to have to picture that while they were out for a run or something. But then Ben decided to talk about it a lot. So sorry, folks, I did my best.

All right. Hi, Ben. Can you tell me everything you know.

About tonsil cheese and what you can do to prevent it? Okay. Warning to everyone, do not just Google tonsil cheese. The images actually made me gag. Yeah, I'm not a very squeamish fellow, but I gagged I retro a little.

We like to call them tonsil stones. Tonsil stones is much, much better than tonsil cheese.

I'm sure the Google images would be just as gag worthy though.

Tonsil stones, though, if tonsil cheese just takes away your appetite and ruins your day, is a better term to use. That's what I'll switch to is tonsil stones. And these are just clusters of calcium material that form in the crevices of your tonsils and they can produce bad breath, they can make it hurt when you swallow. Sometimes they're small and they don't really cause any noticeable issues, but they can get pretty big. And these clusters can be fairly annoying, as you would probably imagine based off of the cheese term. A big, big part of this is related to the growth of bacteria and fungi. So many, many times you'll find somebody with tonsil cheese or tonsil stones has some issues lower down in the GI tract Brock heaves with bacterial overgrowth or bacterial imbalance. And so one really important part of this is addressing that, and we've talked about that in previous podcasts. But I mean literally just fixing your gut, destroying bad bacteria by using something like an oil of oregano every day, taking a good probiotic supplement, eliminating the type of things that bacteria tend to feed on like carbohydrates, starches, sugars, things of that nature. And you know, really going after this from a bacterial standpoint, that's number one. There are natural kind of irrigation type of remedies that you can use for tonsil stones. And I do have some recommendations for you, especially if you're getting dragon breath from these things. So one of the things that you can do is you can gargle with lemons and aloe vera juice. And aloe vera juice or aloe vera gel is something that is really, really great for cleaning your tongue, for cleaning your mouth naturally, but can also help to get rid of tonsil stones naturally. And all you do is you take some lemon, which has some good vitamin C in it, which also helps to get rid of tonsil stones. And you mix a few tablespoons of the lemon juice into a cup of warm water and you mix equal parts of aloe vera juice or aloe vera gel into that and you just gargle for about one to two minutes with that and then spit it out. You could, technically you could swallow it if you want to. I mean, aloe vera gel has some cool kind of gut healing properties as well, but another couple of things that work really, really well as anti inflammatories or natural antibacterials would be a combination of extra virgin olive oil and garlic. Extra virgin olive oil and garlic. That's another mixture that you can gargle. You can chew raw garlic cloves if you really want to get bad breath, but you can also make like a, like a garlic oil, mix that with an extra virgin olive oil, and gargle with that a few times a day. So that would be another option. Any of these would. Would be something you wouldn't want to do in pill form because then you're swallowing it, it's going into your GI tract. It'll have some antibacterial action there, but not higher up, which is where you want it kind of more like in your upper tract. Apple cider vinegar would be the last thing. You can take a cup of warm water, you can mix a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar into that. You can gargle with that a few times a day, and that will help quite a bit as well. So we're talking about all things natural antibacterial type of compounds like lemons and extra virgin olive oil and garlic and apple cider vinegar and aloe vera, and you're just gargling with the stuff. So kind of more than one way to skin a cat there. I'm also a fan, of course, of the wild Mediterranean oil of oregano. Make sure if you get oil of oregano, you get the good stuff. Most of it is just thyme oil or has a really, really low carvacrol content. Carvacrol is the active antibacterial component of oil of oregano. So get a really, really good oil of oregano. Use some of these others like lemons and garlic and extra virgin olive oil and apple cider vinegar. And you should be able to get rid of this stuff just by treating it like a bacteria, like a fungus, and then go after the underlying issue, which is the fact that your gut probably needs some of these antibacterials as well. And fortunately, many of these same, same compounds that I just mentioned, if you're using them as a regular component of your diet, can really, really help minimize a lot of kind of floral overgrowth and gut overgrowth of bacteria.

So, you know, if you take all of that stuff, like take the oil, oregano, got garlic, some, some nice extra virgin olive oil, some lemon juice, and you throw a little bit of tonsil cheese in there, you've got yourself a.

Stew, you've Got yourself a smoothie or a stew? Yeah, tonsil cheese smoothie. That'll be the featured recipe on the Facebook page this week.

Hey Ben, this is Chaz from Ohio. My question for you is about pro hormone supplements and the use of them. In the past 18 months, I've done four different month long cycles of different pro hormones with at least three months in between each cycle. Each time I focus on dialing both my pericycle and post cycle supplementation, making sure to stay hydrated, get plenty of stuff, sleep. Even though I have been training pretty hard about six times per week with one day of rest. My ultimate goal is to build both size and strength, but specifically get the short term boost in strength that I get from these prohormones which allows me to increase my training frequency and the total time under tension which seems to lead to more permanent size gains. What I'd like to know is your thoughts on pro hormones in general. Any specific brands or companies you'd endorse or recommend. Also, are there any tips other than a proper post cycle therapy to help restore endogenous hormone levels that you might recommend? Thanks for all you provide to us fellow geeks out there. Love the podcast.

Yeah, I gotta say, Chaz sounds like he's got it pretty figured out.

Pretty figured out from like a, like a muscle gain standpoint.

Yeah. Well, and he's, the way he's cycling on and off, he's taking the three months between the cycles, worrying about the para cycling and the post cycle and everything. It's pretty good.

Yeah. That's something that you do have to do with pro hormones is you have to have to cycle them if you're going to take them because it allows your body to return to its normal level of endogenous hormone production. So anytime you're using testosterone or any of these testosterone precursors, you're artificially increasing your testosterone levels. As a result, your body generates far less, you know, if we're talking about testosterone, far less natural testosterone than normal. And so, you know, that's not really concerning when you're taking the prohormones. Once you get off them though, you feel like crap. Your body is used to all this exogenous artificial testosterone. You know, your testosterone to estrogen ratios get messed up. And so you, you do have to use what's called post cycle therapy when you're on pro hormones. And we won't, we won't get into the post cycle therapy as much on this podcast because I know we're kind of, we're kind of pushing for time. But the problem is that if you don't cycle pro hormones, it can be tough on your liver, it can be tough on your own endogenous production. So it's something that you do want to make sure that you do, that you understand how to cycle properly. And I have to be careful, of course, giving out recommendations like that on this show just because so many people who are listening into this show are competing in events like triathlons and marathons and things of that nature where they're going to be drug tested and where stuff like this would be a big no, no anyways, or they're going after more natural means. And let's face it, pro hormones can be kind of damaging to your body. And the reason for that is because a lot of these side effects, acne and hair loss and breast tissue enlargement, or you know, what we affectionately call bitch tits and dudes, prostate swelling, you know, a lot of these hormonal imbalances that get created from dumping exogenous sources of hormones into your body and creating like a hormonal melody that can be a real, real issue from a health standpoint. This is not stuff to play around with. It's why there are, you know, it's why even though I really don't feel that our government should be controlling drugs and pharmaceuticals per se, you know, it is the reason for, you know, President Bush, I believe it was, who signed the Anabolic Steroid Control act into process that really controlled a lot of these people, pro hormones from getting distributed willy nilly over here in America just because they can be so dangerous. And most of them, if you're going to order them, you got to go to worldpharma.org and order them from the European Union just because they're more available over there. So if you want to order andro or any of these pro hormones or anything like that, usually you're going to be getting it from Europe. The effects of prohormone supplementation in terms of increasing muscle mass or increasing athletic performance, it kind of goes back and forth. There have been some studies that have looked at some pretty high oral supplementation doses of stuff like androcynodione or androcynodiol and found absolutely no effect on body composition or physical performance and actually a decrease in, in hdl, one of your good forms of cholesterol. When you combine that with some of the possible pro cancer effects and the effects on the prostate, on acne, on your own endogenous production of hormones, which is why you get the testicular shrinkage and the high amounts of testosterone getting converted into estrogens and the breast tissue formation. You know, I'm really not convinced that pro hormones are worth it in my opinion. You know, as far as tips on post cycle therapy to restore endogenous hormones, you know, my main tips are cleanse your liver first of all, because it's going to be super beat up from trying to metabolize all these estrogens that are getting converted. So you're going to have to use, you know, stuff like acetylcysteine. Like N. Acetylcysteine is a good liver cleanse. Silymarin or milk thistle extract is a good liver cleanse. A lot of the stuff that I'd recommend to women for estrogen dominance, you know, those are the same type of cleanses that you're going to have to look into using for something like pro hormone therapy. You really want to stay away from alcohol because again, your liver is going to be pretty beat up from metabolizing all the extra estrogens. As far as kind of flushing out your body. There is one product called Nolvadex and that's basically it's not an over the counter drug, but it's what's called a selective estrogen receptor modulator. It's an anti estrogen. It helps to keep your body from, from basically taking all this extra testosterone and converting into a bunch of excess estrogens. It's not that safe. It's, it's also known as tamoxifen. It's the stuff that can cause like birth defects if women are taking it. It's just you can get it from the same place you're going to get pro hormones, which will be a lot of these EU websites. But again, I'm a bigger fan of going after stuff naturally, which is, you know, why I'm almost kind of blowing off the part of this question about prohormone cycling. Instead I'd recommend you just use natural testosterone precursors. So there are decent testosterone herbal support formulas out there and frankly all of them will at least they give you a little bit of an improvement in your mood and your competitive drive, which can help you to lift more at the gym. They're not going to turn you into complete freak of nature like testosterone or andro would, but they'll at least allow you to get some benefit without a lot of these downstream side effects. So I would say there's three testosterone supplements that I tend to kind of cycle between for herbal testosterone support and They've got a lot of similar ingredients, but I'll throw them out there for you. I'll put a link in the show notes. The reason, I'll tell you three is because frankly, the stuff is so popular these days that it'll tend to be sold out depending on when you happen to land on the website where you're going to buy the stuff from. One would be one called Renew Male. It's a mix of cordyceps and rhodiola. It's got some Tribulus in there, it's got Eurychima in there, which is really, really popular. You're going to find that in a lot of different testosterone herbal support formulas because it can increase DHEA and testosterone and growth hormone and insulin, like growth factor and then also Norvoline and a little bit of like an aromatase inhibitor. So Renew Mail is one and that one. Any of these you'd cycle, preferably five days on, two days off and then just like have a full three to four months during the year when you're not taking this stuff at all. But Renew Mail would be one, and that's very, very similar to the formula I'm kind of privately trying to to make for my my Rev supplements that'll launch later on this year. So Renew Mail. Another one is made by Mike Mailer. It's called Aggressive Strength. Little bit different than Renewal Male. That one is a combination of bulbein and bulbine is an herb. It's kind of similar to Tribulus and it has some pretty decent studies behind it. Stinging nettle root, which supports your free levels of testosterone as well as dht. And it also helps to kind of keep your sex hormone binding globulin under control, which can decrease the amount of free testosterone that you have available. And then Mucuna, which is something that's really, really cool because it can help you produce more dopamine and neurotransmitter, but it also supports growth hormone production. It reduces your prolactin formation, which can help to optimize testosterone levels. So kind of a different formula, which is why sometimes it can be useful to cycle between formulas as you go through the year. But that's another good one is the Mike Mailer Aggressive Strength Formula. And then the last one, the one that I'm using right now, again, because I kind of cycle between testosterone supplements. And again for me, I'm not really going after muscle mass as much as frankly my biggest boost. And I don't want to be crass or anything here, but I Have better erections and better sex and better ejaculation. When I use this stuff, any testosterone herbal support formula, I notice it more in the bedroom than I do with my workouts. So for me it's just kind of like better living through science. But it's the Onit T plus formula and the Onit stuff is it's also got the mucuna in it. They add some branched chain amino acids in it. It has the eurykima in it that the Renew mail also has. In is a powder. It's like a watermelon flavored powder that you mix into water and you take it like a half hour before workout or a half hour before sex. It's got some red clover, some isoflavones in there that help you kind of not convert testosterone into excess estrogens. So that's another one. So those would be my top three testosterone support formulas would be RenewMail, the Mike Mailer Aggressive Strength and the on it T formula. There's nothing wrong with kind of cycling between all three kind of throughout the year, weekly, about five days on, two days off or just like dose with the stuff when you, when you're planning on having whatever, like a big night with your significant other or you've got a whatever a tough game or race coming up and you want a little bit of an extra boost. None of them are going to cause you to be pulled aside and kicked out of whatever like a triathlon for testing positive. All the stuff is just natural herbal support formulas similar to like eating spinach basically. And then the last thing I would mention because I know we are getting long on this podcast would be I've put together a muscle gain formula. It's not a testosterone support formula, it's a muscle gain formula designed to enhance growth hormone release, designed to enhance recovery. It's a combination of a cold processed goat based whey protein, Colostrum, which is a growth hormone precursor and then amino acids. I'll link to it in the show notes. But it's essentially just like this box. You get it in the mail. It's those three things. You get a bottle of the master amino pattern, bottle of Colostrum, big tub of cold processed, it's a goat based whey protein. So super duper bio available. Most of the packages that I'm putting together now kind of change the way I do things. They all ship from a warehouse over in Philadelphia, so shipping to the USA is free. And then I just push this stuff out as rock bottom of cost as possible. So I'll link to that muscle gain pack in the show notes as well. That's over@pacificfit.net you put something like that together with a good herbal testosterone support formula and you're sitting pretty. And you don't have to spend a bunch of money on pro hormones or worry about a lot of those side effects and the cycling and all that jazz, that kind of tends to be a headache. So there you go.

Especially when the things that were meant to mitigate the, the side effects sounded equally dangerous. So fixing something with something that's also bad. Yeah, a great idea.

Yeah. So. So there you go. And. Hey, what do you think? That's it. Should we, should we, should we do. Should we read a kick butt review before we play the Captain Vegetable song?

I. I think that is a fantastic idea.

All right, so the, the deal is if you leave a review of this podcast on itunes and you give it a star rating, if you hear us read your review and then you write into the show and you let us know that you heard us read your review, we send you. I personally send you a care package from my office. Usually it's like a, you know, made.

Up of crap that's on Ben's desk.

Some tonsil cheese. No, like a Ben Greenfield fitness T shirt. And you know, usually I'll throw like CD or DVD or a book in there or some supplements, stuff like that. So here is a review from Clapton fan who says get fit. Back check. Leave pain behind and get life back check. And here's what Clapton fan has to say. Even though I love fitness studies and advice that I get from Ben and Brock, Ann Brock's assorted collection of musical instruments. The reason I want to leave this review is not about fitness. You see, growing up, I underwent around 80 surgeries and procedures for my kidney, one of which cut my right lower thoracic nerve by accident. Before the nerve, I had been a four year varsity athlete. But since I can't seem to get my life in order from the pain and medications, from the advice that Ben gave me, I was able to go to my doctor and we were able to set me up with a lower dose of my meds and increased focus on nutrition and vitamin supplements, Ben and Brock, there aren't enough thank yous in the world that I can give to you. One day I hope to become an accomplished doctor and shake your hand. Please give this podcast a try. I'm glad I did. So there you go. Leave pain behind.

You don't have to be a doctor. You don't have to be a doctor. To shake our hands.

That's right. We shake hands with everybody. Not just doctors, everybody. So Clapton fan 1990 too. If you heard your review, let us know. We'll. We'll send you some. Some cool stuff in the mail. And now it is time for Captain Vegetable. Out of his secret garden somewhere in.

New Jersey Comes your newest favorite superhero. It is I, Captain Vegetable with my carrots and my celery Eating crunchy Vegetable Vegetables is good for me and they're good for you so eat them too for teeth so strong your whole life long Eat celery and carrots by the bunch Three cheers for me Captain Vegetable Crunch, Crunch Crunch.

Killer.

Killer.

My name is Andy I love candy I eat candy when I. Whenever I can if it's handy Give me some candy it's so good and sweet the perfect treat if such a thrill to eat my fill and gobble till there's nothing on the plate Candy is great but wait. Who are you? Some kind of bad dream?

Do I look like a bad dream? This is I, Captain Vegas with my carrot and my celery Eating crunchy vegetables is good for me and they're good for you so eat them too for teeth so strong your whole life long Eat celery and carrots by the bunch Three cheers for me Captain Vegetable Crunch, Crunch, Crunch.

My name is Eddie I love spaghetti so I eat it whenever I can if it's ready, give me spaghetti It's a lovely thing it looks like string it's such a thrill to eat my fill and gobble till there's nothing on the plate Spaghetti is great, but wait. What are you? Are you some kind of weirdo?

Do I look like a weirdo? It is I, your newest superhero it is I, Captain Vegetable with my carrot and my celery Eating crunchy vegetables is good for me and they're good for you so eat them too for teeth so strong your whole life long Eat celery and carrots by the bun Three cheers for for me, Captain Vegetable.

See, Captain Vegetable this is the best thing to come along since meatballs Three cheers for Captain Vegetable Three cheers for me.

Captain Vegetable Crunch, Crunch, Crunch.