Episode #118: How Do Navy Seals, Jet Fighter Pilots & Ironman Triathletes Get That Extra Edge?

In this podcast, how do Navy SEALs, jet fighter pilots and Ironman triathletes get that extra edge sitting versus standing at your job? Is grazing unhealthy a recovery supplement you put into your coffee? Using amino acids during training? Which days of the week should you work out? Jogger's nipple? Triathlon bikes vs road bikes? Eliminating sweat smell, natural alternatives to antidepressants, and what tests to ask for at your doctor.

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.

Hey folks, Ben Greenfield here, podcasting to you from Spokane, Washington in the USA. I have an interview today in this podcast, number 118 with James Audio. And James is a very interesting guy, very brilliant guy actually. He's acted as a consultant to some of the top athletes and the top performers on the planet. And he is so intelligent that we actually had to split our interview into two parts. And what you'll hear today is part one. I'm going to warn you that he actually gets pretty in depth when it comes to the importance and the science behind reducing stress during competition and also performing to the best of your mental and physical abilities. And and so just be ready for that. So we're going to have James Audio's interview after today's Q and A, and first we'll have a few special announcements. So let's get started. Get the inside edge from Ben Greenfield Fitness delivered straight to your phone. Just text the word Fitness to 411247 and you'll instantly get exclusive VIP discounts and insider tips that no one else will ever see except you. Do it now. Text the word Fitness to 411247 and you'll be in Ben's VIP Text Club for free. Special Announcements if you are listening to this podcast on the day that it comes out, Wednesday, November 3rd, then you'll be interested to know that tomorrow, November 4th, I will be teaching a webinar entitled Advanced Techniques for Faster Injury Recovery. Now, that webinar will still be available for download, but if you want to watch it live, then you'll want to follow the link that I'll put in the show Notes to episode number 118. I'll be going over a ton of different techniques that go far beyond the simple rest, ice, compression, elevation that you hear most doctors tell you to do when you get injured. Or we're going to go into everything from cold laser to electrostimulation to natural topical anti inflammatories and so on and so forth. So that should be a really interesting webinar. I'll put a link to that in the show notes and if you miss that link or if you listen to this after Thursday, November 4th, you can still use that link in the show notes to episode 118 to go check out a replay of the webinar. Now another time sensitive announcement is that this Sunday, November 7th, my friend Chef Todd is going to be teaching a webinar about preparing for holiday cooking. He's going to be giving you a bunch of different ways to cook turkey. He's going to tell you how to do exact grocery shopping to save a lot of money, how to plan your holiday menu for both variety and for budget. The best ways to use leftovers to extend your investment in a meal, stuffing techniques, carving techniques, tons of secrets and shortcuts for a stress free holiday meal. So he's calling it his holiday cooking success class. It's totally free. You just have to pre register by clicking on the link that I'll put in the show notes. And if you click on that, you'll be able to participate live in that webinar, but you'll also be able to go back later and download it. Next thing is that I've had a lot of people take me up on the offer to have unlimited email access to me for training and nutrition. To do something like that is $175 a month and you can sign up on the episode show notes to this episode. You'll be able to check that out and essentially it gives you full access to be able to ask me questions anytime you want with unlimited responses. The free Ben Greenfield Fitness iPhone app. We've actually been getting a ton of questions sent through from that app for people who want to just use their phone to ask me a question. You can also get access to all my tweets, my videos, my podcasts, my training plans, everything directly through that brand new iPhone app. And again, if you're a listener and you don't have an iPhone and you're using like a Droid platform, email me if you or someone you know is a Droid developer and I would love to work with you to develop a similar app for a Droid platform. Okay, just a couple more announcements. One is that my triathlon training camp is down in Austin, Texas. And. And that's January 31st through February 7th. There's still room in that camp, but you need to sign up soon if you want to get in. So you can follow the link in the show Notes where I give you all the details to that all inclusive triathlon camp. It's going to be very cool. It's a huge blast. It's for half Ironman or Ironman triathletes, so check that out. Okay. And then finally, and this is important, many of you have listened in and enjoyed the brand new Inner Circle podcasts that my wife and I are putting out. Those are up@BenGreenfieldFitness.com we've done four of them so far, and the focus is really on creating a healthy home, raising a healthy family. We give away a lot of the things that we do in our family. And if you haven't checked out any of the comment threads that go on every time one of those podcasts is released, check out the podcast, any of them. Inner Circle Podcast number one through four. Tons of comments on everyone. Jess and I log in there every day and answer questions, spend the week preparing what we're going to share in the podcast and then put that out on a weekly basis. The issue is that we need your support to keep that going. And so beginning in the show notes to this podcast and for every podcast going forward, I'm putting a little button that allows you to donate to that Inner Circle podcast. What we're looking for from you is a $10 donation that covers a month. A $10 donation to actually keep the Inner Circle podcast going. For me to do two free podcasts is getting really tough. I appreciate everybody who's donated to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, but for that Inner Circle podcast, we want to keep doing that. We want to make it better. We want to include even more content. We want to continue to answer questions that come up after we produce the show. So a $10 donation is what we're asking for. We think that's reasonable for the month's worth of content that we put out. So if you want to keep that podcast going and keep getting in youn Circle Podcast delivered, then head over to these show notes and set up that donation. So that covers this week's special announcements. And now we're going to move forward into a really interesting Q and A.

Listener Q and A.

Remember that if you have a question, you can call toll free to 877-209-9439. You can Skype to username Pacific Fit. Or you can email Ben greenfieldfitness.com and the first question here comes from listener David and David says, I just read an interesting article on MSNBC's website that suggests that even if you exercise regularly, sitting at a desk for any significant length of time is killing you. I've heard you talk about standing during the day, but this can be awkward for many jobs. Any comments on this article? So after looking at David's question, I headed over here to look at this article for MSNBC and the article is titled why your desk job is slowly killing you. And I want to give you guys some anecdotes from that article. Specifically some of the research studies that were cited in that article. Starting off with a 2006 University of Minnesota study that found from 1980 to the year 2000, the percentage of people who reported exercising regularly remained the same, but the amount of time people spent sitting rose by 8%. Which kind of makes sense to me as things become more industrialized and we spend more time in front of computers and at computer jobs. That makes sense. In a clever study, Dutch researchers created a sort of historical theme park and recruited actors to play 1850s Australian settlers for a week. The men did everything from chop wood to forage for food, and the scientists compared their activity levels with those of modern office workers. The result was that the actors did the equivalent of walking three to eight miles more a day than the desk bound men. No surprise there, but pretty interesting study. A 2010 study in the Journal of Applied Physiology found that when healthy men limited their number of footsteps by 85% for two weeks, they experienced a 17% decrease in insulin sensitivity, raising their diabetes risk. I'm going to go on to look at a little bit more about standing versus sitting. Standing more can burn about 1500 calories while you're at work, whereas if you're sitting at a desk, you burn about 1,000 calories. You can get about 500 extra calories by standing during the day. That goes a long way in explaining why people gain 16 pounds on average within 8 months months of starting sedentary office work, which is what a study at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington found. Another study looked at the lifestyle habits of more than 17,000 men and women and found that people who sat for almost the entire day were 54% more likely to have a cardiovascular incident than those who sat for almost none of the time. A British study, a really old British study published in 1953 examined bus drivers versus trolley conductors, and at first glance the two occupations appear to Be pretty similar, but bus drivers were more likely to sit down for the entire day, whereas the trolley conductors were running up and down the stairs and aisles of the trolleys. And the bus conductors were found or the bus drivers were found to be nearly twice as likely to die of heart disease compared to the trolley conductors. One of the things that they cite during this study is what they call inactivity physiology, which looks at how exercise affects an enzyme in your body called lipoprotein lipase. And what lipoprotein lipase does is it breaks down fat in the bloodstream to use as energy. So if you don't have this enzyme, you end up storing more fat than you end up burning. And one study that was looked at found that when rodents were forced to lie down for most of their waking hours, this lipoprotein lipase enzyme plummeted. It dropped significantly. But as soon as the rodents were forced to just stand around most of the time, the gene was ten times more active. So that's pretty significant. Just knowing that the simple act of standing can amplify the activity of the primary fat burning enzyme in your body by 10 times. And that doesn't even go into the fact that you're decreasing muscle stiffness, increasing blood flow and lymph circulation, enhancing your immune system, and activating a lot of really cool things the more that you stand. So this study goes on and on, but I think you're kind of getting the idea here that it's a good idea to stand versus sit when you have the opportunity to. And this is something that I focus on a lot of the time in every situation where I'm given the opportunity to sit down. For example, when I go to renew my driver's license and there's chairs there, or when I go to the. To the doctor's office and I'm given the opportunity to sit in the office, I always stand as much as possible. Even when there's a lot of peer pressure and a lot of social expectations to sit, try and stand whenever you can. And the other thing that I do, and this is something I have more freedom to do because I work out of a home office, more of the time is I stand on the job. I have elevated workstations that mean that when I put my computer on those workstations, it's at eye level. When I'm standing, about half the time, I record this podcast in the standing position. And the other thing that I do, whenever I am in a seated position for more than an hour. My rule for me personally is that I have to do 100 jumping jacks. So, you know, if I have a whatever three hours worth of writing that I'm working on, I don't like to write when I'm in a standing position. I just find that I don't write as efficiently. But what I'll do is I'll sit down and every hour I'll stand up and I'll do those jumping jacks to keep my blood flow circulating and keep my metabolism sparked. So this is really interesting stuff. The other thing that you can do is if you really want to go all out, you can get a workstation that you put onto a treadmill. It's called a Trek desk. So let's say that you have a treadmill and you want to be able to walk slowly while you're on that treadmill. You'd get a ton of fat. Burning enzymes benefit from doing this. A Trek desk costs about $400 to $500 and I'll put a link to one place to get them. I found them for pretty cheap on Amazon.com I'll put a link to that in the show notes for you, David, or for anybody else listening in. But basically you attach it to your treadmill, you can put a computer up there and you can actually work, read, study while you're being lightly active on your treadmill. This isn't going to be a full on exercise session, but if you're looking at losing weight and getting as many benefits or as many calories burnt as possible during the day, good way to do things. Between getting a treadmill on Craigslist and picking up one of these Trek desks, you could probably create your own standing exercising workstation for under $1,000. Considering how much a personal trainer costs, supplementation costs, and how many extra calories you'd burn with this move, it's actually pretty good idea. So there you go, David. Great question, great link to an article. And I'll put a link to that article as well in the show notes for those of you who want to read the full article. So next question is from James and James asks, when you graze, is there an increased risk in regards to constantly elevated blood sugar levels? I know it will make a difference if I'm grazing on candy and processed food items, but what if I'm grazing on highly nutritious food food items? You know, my wife and I did have this discussion in Inner Circle Podcast number four, James, and we went over studies that looked at irregular versus regular meal patterns as well as three or more meals in a day versus two or fewer meals in a day. And there was definite benefit found with a more regular and higher frequency meal pattern when caloric intake was equalized. Meaning that if you're eating the same number of calories on a daily basis, you're going to have a higher metabolism and you're going to experience more weight loss or less propensity to gain weight when you spread those meals out throughout the day into several portions and eat them frequently. Now, as far as grazing and consistently elevating blood sugars, yes, that can be an issue, especially with overweight people who are trying to get their bodies to tap into storage adipose tissue and teach their bodies how to burn fatty acids. If they're constantly kind of eating like a squirrel because they heard this was a good idea, whether on this podcast or any other number of books or magazine articles, they could really be doing themselves a disservice when it comes to training the body to burn fat efficiently. I know a lot of overweight people will have the almonds, the fruit, the energy bar, the trail mix, and a couple of servings of leftovers that they take with them to work during the day or have access to during the day. And by constantly consuming those, by constantly keeping the blood sugar levels elevated, yes, you can inhibit your ability to tap into fat. This is one of the reasons that another thing I recently mentioned in the Inner Circle podcast, that intermittent fasting is so effective, because what you do is you wake up in the morning with empty carbohydrate levels, empty liver carbohydrate levels, and you can really enhance the activity of the fat burning enzymes by engaging in light physical activity, whatever, cleaning the house, going for a walk, staying active for a few hours in the morning before you eat breakfast, there's something in your body called ketones, which your body can actually burn very efficiently from, or as a fuel. And ketones are formed from fatty acids. The body runs just fine on ketones. A lot of us, if we're used to constantly high levels of circulating blood sugar and we quit snacking as much and begin to burn ketones, we feel like we have a drop in energy. But really that's the body just tapping into those extra fat levels. As long as we're not in a state of constant starvation, and that's fine. So, yes, I would recommend that you have periods throughout the day where you actually have your blood sugar levels not being constantly elevated. Now, the way that I personally do this is I quit eating by about 8pm at night, and after 8pm typically the only thing that I'll do is water or sparkling water and gum. And then I actually do a late breakfast. Now I will eat breakfast most days now at about 9 or 9:30. So I'm literally injecting a 12 to 14 hour fast into every day. And I find that it's far, far easier for me to stay lean, for me to have a six pack, for me to be a racing weight for triathlon when I'm using that strategy. So yes, I would recommend that while you should eat more than three times a day or three or more times a day, and you should engage in consistent and regular eating patterns, you should also go through periods of time where you teach your body how to burn fat as a fuel, how to survive on fat as a fuel, and how to actually kind of have a little bit of an appetite kind of nagging you at the back of your mind. Being hungry every now and then is okay. The same goes for exercise. It's okay to do some starvation sessions every now and again where you teach your body how to efficiently burn fat as a fuel. You shouldn't make that a regular practice because it's tough to get a lot of benefit physiologically out of those sessions, even though you get a lot of fat burning benefit out of them. So for example, once every couple weeks you could go on a two or three hour bike ride or hike where you're really not taking in anything except water. And again, that can break down your body if you do it regularly, but in moderation, it can really help in terms of allowing you to tap into your fat stores more efficiently. So good question, James. Now the next question was asked via Twitter and on this question Twitter user Anxh asks, or I'm sorry, Twitter user Brocksky asks, what do you think of Cafe Di Corsa? I use it after a long run in a latte with a banana and a handful of almonds. So I looked at this coffee, Decorsa, and basically what it is is it's a powder that's designed to add into black coffee. It's about 110 calories and it contains protein and carbohydrates. So it's meant to be used as a recovery beverage. Great idea, especially considering that caffeine can actually enhance the uptake of some of those carbohydrates. And carbohydrates should be taken in with protein post workout. Anyways, for best effect, when I look at the ingredients, they're maltodextrin, which is kind of a long chain sugar, a bunch of chains of glucose molecules stuck together, Skim milk powder, whey protein isolate, fructose, natural and artificial flavor and sucralose. There are a few ingredients in here that you may have heard me before kind of disapprove of on the podcast. Specifically sucralose, which is basically a sugar molecule with some chlorine attached to it, which has a little bit of a neurotoxic effect. And then skim milk powder. For those of you who are wanting to avoid dairy, some of the hormones and issues with our modern dairy supply, or any of you who are lactose intolerant, this would definitely not be your best choice when it comes to post workout recovery. So it kind of comes down to the same problem with about 90% of the nutrition supplements that we get questions about on this podcast. And that is specifically the burning desire of the people that make the supplements to have them taste very sweet, but to have low calories. And so in fulfilling that need, they put a lot of artificial sweeteners in them and in this case also include a dairy base which for anybody who's wanting to avoid dairy, for anybody who's following a paleo diet, for anybody who's lactose intolerant, would not be such a good idea when it comes to dietary inflammation or a lack of eating clean, so to speak. So I wouldn't. This isn't a supplement that I would recommend. It's an interesting idea to add stuff into your black coffee, but I mean, why not take a couple scoops of, for example, the Mount Capra cold processed double bonded whey protein, which is just stevia, cocoa and whey protein, and add that in and then if you want a little bit of sugar, I mean really drop some raw honey in there. If you don't even want the sugar, throw some stevia in there. But basically there's really no need to be using this in my opinion. I personally wouldn't use it, so I hope that helps. And Good question. Interesting concept. Joel asks. I've been experimenting with using amino acids in capsules during long training runs and marathons. I seem to notice a positive effect. Do you know of any research that supports this apparent effect? And do you have any experience with it yourself? Absolutely, Joel. The research on that has been around for quite some time in terms of the use of what are called branched chain amino acids during exercise. They're very anti catabolic. That means that they can stop muscle breakdown or slow muscle breakdown during exercise. They can help you exercise at a higher intensity, they reduce your rating of perceived exertion which means that when you're exercising hard, you don't feel like you're exercising quite that hard. And that's because of the presence of the amino acids in your bloodstream. Your body is basically a little less apprehensive about metabolic stress and about muscle cannibalization because it knows that amino acids are present or can sense that amino acids are present. And of course, if you have those amino acids circulating in your bloodstream during and after the workout, it's going to have an anabolic effect, meaning a muscle building or a tissue recovery type of effect. And it's also been shown to preserve your muscle stores of carbohydrate as well. Now, branched chain amino acids go by various names. The ones that you see most common are the three essential amino acids, leucine, isoleucine and valine. And you'll find that a lot of people who do energy gels nowadays, take Gouroctane for example, they're putting branched chain amino acids into the energy gels. And that's smart because you get your carbohydrates, you get your branched chain amino acids, you stave off fatigue a little bit longer and you improve recovery. And typically, the amount of amino acids that have been used in most Studies are about 3 to 5 grams of branched chain amino acids. As far as what you can top out at. And most people are getting that in their diet. But as far as taking it in during exercise, you could use something like one of these energy gels, or you could do what you're doing. What you're doing, Joel, and that is actually use amino acid capsules. Now, you mentioned that you were using the master amino pattern, and that's the one from David Minkoff. We've talked to Dr. David Minkoff about that master amino pattern before on this podcast. If you want to listen to his interview about that, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for map. But that's not only branched chain amino acids. It's actually a full amino acid specific spectrum. There may be a digestibility issue when it comes to taking in all of the amino acids versus just the branched chain amino acids. You're still going to get that same effect of staving off fatigue and having an anti catabolic effect. But I can't guarantee that there may not be a little bit more blood flow going into the stomach, maybe a little bit more increased need for digestion when you're taking in a full amino acid spectrum, the same as you would take in when you're eating a steak, for example, versus when you're just taking in the branched chain amino acids. So I would recommend that you use caution with those. As far as actual studies that have looked into the use of whole amino acid supplements during exercise, the one that comes to mind for me is very recent. Just came out in the October 2010 Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. And in that study, they took a carbohydrate beverage and they essentially replaced a good part of that carbohydrate beverage with a whey protein isolate. And they actually found that aerobic endurance was improved at exercise intensities near the ventilatory threshold. So fairly high exercise intensities with that addition of the whey protein isolate, even though that made the drink that people were taking in contain lower total carbohydrate and total caloric content. So I believe that when they added the the protein, it came out to be about a 3% carbohydrate, 1.2% protein supplement. So about a 2 to 1 carbohydrate to protein ratio versus a pure carbohydrate protein containing drink or a pure carbohydrate containing drink. No report in the study of gastric distress occurring among the participants. And this was 15 trained male and female cyclists. I just, I know for me from a personal point of view that when I take in, for example, the Mount Capra double bonded protein I mentioned earlier, that's the whey protein that I use. When I take that in during exercise and I head off to do an exercise session, I tend to kind of burp it up a little bit versus when I just use like the branched chain amino acids from something like a Gu Roctane. So for me personally, I find some digestibility issues. I guess what this comes down to is using yourself as a case study of one. And if you can tolerate either a whole amino acid capsule or whole amino acid source in a drink during exercise and you feel fine with it, research suggests that it could indeed help you. So I hope that's helpful, Joel. And we're going to move on to a question from Hunter. Hunter says I'm completing my first year of participating in road races and triathlons. My work schedule has changed and now I have Thursdays off as well as the weekend. How do I make the best use of the added opportunity to train on Thursdays? Well, Hunter, here's a couple rules to think about when you're adding in an extra training day or having this extra day to train and trying to decide what to do on it. If you're still doing your long running and your long bike workouts or kind of your key workouts on the weekend, which most, most working folks do, you know, the tougher workouts or the longer workouts on Saturday and Sunday, you want to consider the idea that delayed onset muscle soreness is going to peak after about 48 hours. So for a Friday workout, you're going to peak in soreness on Sunday. For a Saturday workout, you're going to or from a Thursday workout, you're going to peak in soreness on a Saturday typically. And so the way that I would recommend that you structure your week is you look at, at the muscles that you're going to be using during your key session. Let's say that you have kind of like a 15 mile run planned on Saturday. So that's going to be one of the key sessions for you during the week. You really want that to be a high quality 15 mile run. Well, Thursday it would not behoove you to go out and do say track work, say to go out and run eight by four hundreds on the track because that intensity is going to cause some muscle damage that's going to peak on Saturday. Now for me, I would be more prone to do an 8 by 400 on the track on a Thursday and then go do a long run on a Friday because I know that my body won't really be feeling the effects of Thursday too much until Saturday, at least from a muscular perspective. So that's one thing to think about is not using the type of muscles that you're going to be using on one day in a workout, 48 hours per previously, for example, on Thursday. So on Thursday you could go out and you could do like a bike interval session or a swim session. But if you had a long run on Saturday, I'd recommend that you not run on Thursday. And the same goes for if you were going to say have a key swim on Saturday. Let's say Saturday is going to be the swim where you're doing a 6 by 500 meter hard swim workout on Saturday. Well, Thursday you don't want to go out and do a bunch of bench pressing and cable work and weight work or another swim interval workout on Thursday because again, 48 hours out, you're going to feel that delayed onset muscle soreness quite a bit. And mentally, if not physically, it's going to hold you back from being able to achieve the quality of training that you're looking for on Saturday. So think about this. Whenever you're putting together Your week of training is look at what you're doing 48 hours prior and make sure that's not going to inhibit the workout two days from that point. I'm not saying that hormonally you're not going to be feeling it as soon as immediately after the next day after a tough workout. But as far as the way that your muscles feel and respond, it's going to be a couple days before your muscles get so sore that they may hold you back a little bit from achieving a high quality session. So my recommendation in terms of you having the opportunity to train on Thursday is that if you're doing your long run and your long bike workouts on Saturday and Sunday, I would recommend that you maybe do some core work, some upper body cable or weightlifting work, and some swim sessions on Thursday so you have some legs left for Saturday and Sunday. Good question. So our next question is from Anxh, who asks via Twitter. Oh, and by the way, if you want to ask a Twitter question, just go to twitter.com and follow me. Follow Ben Greenfield and ask your question. And the other benefit from following is I kind of dish out little tips all day long over at Twitter. So Anxhe asks, have you touched on jogger's nipple and what can be done to heal or protect them? That's a very interesting way to phrase that question. Have I touched on jogger's nipple? Okay, so jogger's nipple is not something that just happens to joggers or runners. It happens to anybody who can get nipple chafing from the friction of their shirt. So if you cycle row, weightlift, work outside for long periods of time, whatever, and it doesn't matter whether you're male or female or thin or thick or whatever, anybody can get jogger's nipple. I get it myself when I go on long runs wearing a singlet or a T shirt. So what can you do about it? A few different things you can do about it. The first is that you can wear the right type of content clothing. A lot of synthetic fabrics are stiff and they can really irritate your nipples and lead to bleeding or inflammation or soreness. So loose clothing and especially synthetic fabrics are going to be more likely to cause jogger's nipple than a tight fitting top. Anything that can wick sweat away that's a little bit tighter fitting, like a Lycra or a silk fabric can help out quite a bit. Whereas a synthetic fabric like cotton would be something that you really would not want. Especially something that can get wet or absorb Sweat, which can really make the irritation a lot worse. Women, of course, can wear a supportive bra, so that will help out. And of course, men have that advantage of being able to run with their shirts off when it's warm outside. But as far as clothing goes, make sure that you choose the right type of tops. Don't just go running in a kayak T shirt. You can actually put surgical tape over your nipple. You can put a band aid over your nipple. If you have hair around your nipple, it can help to shave that or to trim that hair, especially before you put that tape or that band aid on. They make breast shields for breastfeeding women, and you can actually get those. You can get them a lot of times in just the regular grocery store where they have the breastfeeding equipment and might be embarrassing for you guys to go grab some breast shields, but that's a good way to prevent jogger's nipple. And of course, another trick is you can use any type of lubricant, like a cream, a Vaseline, a diaper rash cream, shammy cream, the same type of cream that cyclists would use inside their shorts. That can help out. And basically kind of kind of keeping that skin hydrated and lubed up can help the clothing move over it a little bit more quickly. Move over the nipple little bit more quickly. The next thing, as far as treating the nipples, if they do become irritated, if you get that friction effect, creams that have lanolin in them is a good way to keep that friction or that irritated area moist so it doesn't get irritated even more. And if your nipples end up to be cracked or bleeding, you want to treat those the same way as you would an open wound. You can clean them. You can put a little bit of antibiotic ointment on them, which will prevent infection. If they're bleeding, cover them with a bandage until they heal. When you shower, try to avoid using soap, because that's going to dry out that irritated area even more. So try to keep shampoo and soap from getting onto your nipples as you're showering. And then rather than towel drying, just basically let your chest and nipple area air dry and then apply some cream on there or some lotion to keep them moist. Believe it or not, one of the best ways to heal that type of chafing would be to expose your nipples to sunlight, and that'll help heal the irritated area. Women, just make sure that you are not in view of any of your neighbors while you are exposing your nipples to the sunlight. I don't know if you can get arrested for that, but it's possible, I suppose, in some states. So anyways, I think that sets a record for the number of times that I've been able to say nipple in a podcast. So thank you for the question, Anx H. And I hope that helps. So next we have a call in question from listener Andrew. Yes, Ben, this is Andrew Cohan, and.

I just recently did an Austin half 70.3 and I did it on a mountain bike. And I'm interested in taking the next step to get a mountain bike or road bike. I mean, a tri bike or a road bike. And I was kind of curious, what do you recommend? Do you recommend a tri bike or a road bike? Plan on doing a tri maybe one to two times a year and just wanted to get your opinion on it. Thanks.

Well, first of all, Andrew, let me say that's pretty hardcore to do a half ironman on a mountain bike. You. You are a greater man than me. I guess if it was an Xterra, I'd do it, but Austin 70.3 in a mountain bike? Yeah, man, I've ridden that course. I wouldn't want to do it on mountain bike. We actually ride that course down at my camp. Okay, so the difference between a road bike and a tri bike, just to kind of go over the basics for you, this is something that could take up an entire podcast. But road bikes are really made to handle well in a ton of different circumstances. Where you're climbing, you're cornering, you're riding in packs, you're sitting upright. And that upright position allows you to have maximum power transfer when you're pedaling, especially when you're climbing. And also a quick response time when you're in a pack of riders. What's called the seat tube angle puts you into position where you're using your real powerful glutes and hamstrings. And as a triathlete, that should be concerning to you if you're on a road bike, because those are the same muscles that you primarily use when you are running. And in addition, it's very rare in a triathlete that you have to climb, corner, and deal with other packs of riders quite frequently. Most triathlon courses are relatively flat compared to most road biking courses. And the aero position allows you to simply kind of get down into like a. I like to think of it as the comparison between a semi truck and a sports car. But on a tri bike, you're in that semi truck position, just pulling, pointing and hammering and going straight forward and not turning too much, not climbing too much, not cornering too much, and not navigating around other riders too much. So tri bikes work well for that. Whereas road bikes are kind of designed for a little bit more versatility, power transfer from the glutes and hamstrings. But you're not able to run as well off that road bike. You know, try specific bikes, they have a different seat tube angle. It's usually steeper, that seat tube angle. You tend to use more of your core quadriceps than you do your glutes and your hamstrings. You tend to use a little bit less power when you're on a tri bike, even though you're in a more aerodynamic position. So oftentimes the speed trade off is pretty equal or even more advantageous in the direction of the tri bike. You'll typically have the ability to be in the aero position a little bit more comfortably on a tri bike. And there's some, some small geometry differences between a tri bike and a road bike. Like the chainstay down around your bottom of the bike is a little bit shorter. That allows your hips to stay a little bit more open when you're riding in the aero position on the tri bike. But primarily the most significant difference is the steepness of that seat tube angle and the presence of kind of an aero position cockpit. So it really depends on the type of riding you're doing. These days. A road bike and a tri bike are going to be economically pretty similar in terms of pricing. If you want to do a lot of road biking, a lot of cycling with your local road riding group, then it might benefit you to just get a road bike. But get a set of clip on aero bars that you can put on that road bike for when you do triathlons. You're still not going to benefit from the seat tube angle of a tri specific bike, but that would be kind of like the best of both worlds to do something that way. That's what I did for the first five years that I did triathlon. I just had a road bike with some aero bars and it worked out fine for me. If you're planning on primarily specializing in triathlon, get a tri bike. That's what I would recommend. One great resource for you would be synergysport.com that's s y n e r g y sport.com synergysport.com that's where I get most of my cycling equipment these days. They've got road bike frames, traffic tri bike frames, and they've got them really, really inexpensively so. Check out synergysport.com that'd be a good resource for you. Next question is from Christian. Christian says, how do you get the sweat smell out of a heart rate monitor strap or an ipod arm holder? Yeah, that can be a problem. That embarrassing stank that you get on those accessories that you wear when you are exercising. Well, any of those straps, any of those lycra elastic band type of things, you can just wash those with warm soap and water. You can also put them in a washing machine. What you don't want to do is put them in the dryer because they'll shrink. But you can clean all that stuff in a washing machine. Just make sure you take the heart rate monitor part of it off first. As far as the monitor itself, a lot of folks try to use alcohol when they clean those. Don't use alcohol. You don't want to use that. When you clean the heart rate monitor, you can basically just rinse the monitor with plain clean water. You can put a little bit of soap on there and then dry it off with a soft clean towel. And that's all you need to do. One of the things that I use quite a bit to wipe down all my equipment and that I also use when I don't have a chance to shower. I'll spray some of this on to get rid of that sweaty smell is called Action Wipes spray. It's called Action Wipe. Action Wipes. I'll put a link to that in the show note. But they make a wipe and they also make a spray. And if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for Action Wipes, I interviewed the lady who invented them on the podcast. It was really interesting. It started off as basically like a, like a sex lube type of business and then changed into like cleaning for sports and a sports performance spray. Interesting story that she tells on the podcast, but basically it's called Action Wipe Spray. It works really well. I keep it in my garage next to all my cycling equipment, use this stuff to clean my bike, to clean myself off after a workout. So that's what I would recommend. Christian. Now we have a question from Rodrigo, and Rodrigo says, I suffer from anguish and anxiety and I've been taking clonazepam similar to Prozac. Is there any suggestion you could have on some other supplement which does not need a medical prescription, which is really a pain and makes it twice as expensive? All right, so first of all, as you guys may have heard me talk about on the podcast before, I'm definitely a fan of natural alternatives. I'm not a doctor and this isn't medical advice, Rodrigo. But there are some disadvantages to drugs and antidepressants like Prozac, specifically, increased risk of violent or suicidal tendencies being the most significant. And then the fact that these are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, they actually really do mess with the blocking or the reabsorption of serotonin in your brain. And sometimes that's not the best thing to be blocking serotonin. Now, there are some things that you can do that that will give you an antidepressant like quality from a supplementation and also from a natural treatment perspective. So a few of the things that I would recommend that you look into would be foods that contain tryptophan, folic acid, and vitamin B. All of those things can help to keep your serotonin levels under control without necessarily blocking the reuptake of serotonin in the brain. So walnuts would be one example. Walnuts are really great in terms of their omega 3 fatty acid content and the content of something called uridine, which is a natural compound that can help to elevate your mood and stabilize those serotonin levels. Dark chocolates, another thing that can help out quite a bit with that. Chicken and turkey both help with tryptophan and vitamin B6 levels. And all I want you to do is just write these down and try, try and incorporate them creatively into your diet. So it'd kind of be the antidepressant diet. Salmon or mackerel, those have the omega 3 fatty acids in them. Very important for brain stability and controlling depression. Definitely recommend anybody who is depressed, anxious, et cetera, you be looking at including these amino acids and omega 3 fatty acids in your diet. So salmon and mackerel, great source of those. Similar to chicken and turkey. Cheddar cheese and Swiss cheese both have tryptophan present in them. Again, very helpful in stabilizing the serotonin levels. The folic acid in some vegetables and specifically spinach can help you to maintain optimum levels of serotonin as well. Citrus fruits, what you get from citrus fruits are dopamine. That's a really important neurotransmitter that a lot of people tend to be deficient in or unresponsive to with depression. And citrus fruits give you a lot of that dopamine production without giving you the same type of inflammation that, like a processed sugar will give you. With the processed sugars being able to produce dopamine as well, but a much, much higher risk of some other problems with the sugars. Whole wheat, you know, if you don't have gluten issues, if you don't have weight issues, that has a pretty rich carbohydrate complex that can, can help in the production of serotonin. Interestingly enough, popcorn as well can help with that. Again, for people who are trying to lose weight, whole wheat and popcorn could be two of your worst enemies. If you're not worried about that and you just want again, some of that serotonin stabilization, those are a couple things that you can, you can try out. And apart from those antidepressant foods, look at water too. Water is really, really important in maintaining our natural chemical balances in the body. And make sure that you're staying naturally hydrated. Take in at least several bottles of water throughout the day. And water intake needs really vary according to the water content of the food that you're consuming. The more natural and raw the foods that you're consuming, the more fruits, vegetables, et cetera that you're consuming, the lower your needs for water are. But most folks should at least be taking in, if you can close your eyes and picture like a water bottle from a bicycle, you should at least be taking in about 5 or 6 of those on a daily basis. The equivalent of 5 or 6 of those on a daily basis from the time you wake up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night. Now, as far as antidepressant supplements, look into St. John's Wort. St. John's Wort is an herbal antidepressant. It's been used for a long time. It's been clinically tested. It's been proven to be effective in mild or moderate depression states. A lot fewer side effects than those prescription drugs. Another one would be something called 5 hydroxytryptophan. And we talked about how some of these foods can naturally increase tryptophan. You could go straight to the source and just get your hands on some 5 HTP as well. Again, results that are, that are kind of comparative to the prescription medicine, but lot fewer side effects. Straight up omega 3 fatty acid like a fish oil or a flax oil or an Udos 369 oil. Any of those oils or all of those oils, including those on a daily basis, would be really important as well, and something I would highly recommend. Now, I briefly mentioned amino acids and I've been talking about tryptophan and that would be one example of amino acid you could use. There's others out there. Tyrosine is one, phenylalanine is another. So L tyrosine or L phenylalanine or are both two compounds that you can get your hands on at a health food store. There's another one called Sam E. Sam E. And that can increase the levels of serotonin dopamine, of what are called phosphatides, which can increase the binding of neurotransmitters to receptor sites in your brain and increase the serotonin and the dopamine effectiveness. I totally blank on what Sam E Stat stands for. It's something methionine, but basically it's an amino acid as well. Couple other things to look into. This is something I discovered down in Hawaii. I go down there quite frequently and a lot of folks down there use their equivalent of legal marijuana. And it's called kava. You can find kava online in powder form or droplet form. It's kind of like a tea. It's got a real, real kind of stuff, soothing, stress relieving quality, really cool for anxiety, for depression. It kind of makes your mouth a little bit numb when you take it in. And you feel kind of similar after trying that kava as you would after you've like smoked a joint. But it's legal and it'd be something to look into as well. It's called kava or kava root or kava powder. And then ginkgo biloba is another one we've talked about Ginkgo biloba and its effect effectiveness for people who are training at altitude, but it can also normalize your neurotransmitter levels. It can increase blood flow to the brain, it can improve mental acuity. A lot of folks use it for memory as well. And it can not only help to combat some of the side effects that you get with antidepressant drugs, but it can also really be used to improve mood. So whether you're on antidepressants and want to take that to help combat the side effects or whether you want to use that in addition to some of the other things that I just finished talking about, Ginkgo biloba would definitely be something to look into as well. Again, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I don't want you to think I'm prescribing these things. But you know, if I were having to deal with depression or anxiety, you know, if I had something happen in my life that put me at a high risk for that these are some of the things that I would get into right away if I were in your shoes. Last thing, final thing to look into from a treatment perspective would be biofeedback. And what Biofeedback is a type of therapy that kind of teaches you to exert control over your involuntary muscle and brainwave activities so you learn to respond to the signals that your own body is sending to you. I personally have done biofeedback once and I didn't do it because I was depressed. I did it to basically check it out. Because I had some clients ask me about it. I found a biofeedback practitioner. They hooked me up to a computer, asked me questions, looked at the response of some of my physical parameters like blood pressure and heart rate to these questions. And if I would have done that as a regular treatment session, I would have learned how to basically help my own body become more calms down, so to speak, and less anxious in situations. So it essentially teaches you how to have more control over the response of your mind and your body to certain situations. So biofeedback can be useful not only for depression, but also just helping your body with, for example, sports performance. Read a book if you really aren't convinced that antidepressants are that bad for you, read a book that I'll put a link to in the show notes. I think it costs like a dollar on Amazon, but it's called Prozac Panacea or Pandora. And it's written by a gal who's really considered kind of the leading experts on these serotonin uptake inhibitors. And she's testified as an expert witness in a ton of court cases involving antidepressant drugs and violence and has written a book. I would read the book. It's called Prozac Panacea or Pandora. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes for you to check out. If you just want to learn a little bit more about antidepressants and why they might not be the best thing to take. And then we have one more question from Peter. Peter says I've recently focused on healthy fat intake, vitamin D and other supplement strategies. Bio letics testing is an option for me, but I have a good health insurance from work and plan to get blood blood work done soon. If you had to get a complete assessment of your health using standard blood tests available through a physician, what tests would you request? Well, first of all, for those of you who are listening in when Peter talks about bioletics, bioetics is what I Use to test my hormones, my blood, saliva, urine, metabolism, everything. And I do all that via home kits that I send back and forth between my house and bioletics. And I'll put a link to bio letics in the show notes, even though I know that's not what Peter is asking. Peter's asking, like about what you would ask for at your doctor. Common blood tests that would be covered by insurance. So if I were going to go get a blood test, some of the things that I would ask for and some of the things that your doc would probably do anyways. But just so you know, definitely ask for a complete blood count. So a complete blood count looks at a wide variety of blood parameters, but specifically it'll tell you if you're anemic. And it'll especially be useful if you combine it with a ferritin test, which can look at a very important iron storage protein. So get a complete blood count. But combine it with a ferritin test and the complete blood count will also let you know if you have any type of infection because it will give your white blood cell count. Now, in addition to that, it can help your doctor confirm if you have a clotting issue. If you have a vitamin B12 deficiency, it can even be useful for, for diagnosing leukemia. So complete blood count, definitely look into that. But make sure you combine it with a ferritin so you get the total look at that anemia. Because even if you have a regular red blood cell count, if you have low levels of ferritin, you're still not going to have the iron storage protein that you need to be able to adequately deliver oxygen. Get a basic metabolic panel, or what's also just called a metabolic panel, that's going to look at a lot of different nutrients and electrolytes, a lot of the byproducts of key kidney filtration in your blood. So you'll get a glance at your glucose, your sodium levels, your potassium, your CO2, your chloride, your blood nitrogen. Creatinine is another one that that'll give you and it'll give you and your doc a really broad view of problems that could be going on in your kidneys or your respiratory system. It could give a good look at your insulin or your blood sugar stabilization levels. Look at whether you're adequately hydrated, whether, whether your heart is operating properly, if there's any inflammatory markers in your bloodstream. So look into that. There's also a complete metabolic panel, which actually tests just a few more components than the basic metabolic panel. But as a baseline, the basic metabolic panel will be good to get, get a lipid profile so you can look at your cholesterol and your triglyceride levels. You know, cholesterol is blown way more out of proportion proportion than it should be. If you've got super, super high LDL levels, real low HDL levels, it definitely could be a strong indicator of heart disease, especially if you're predisposed to that in your family. So lipid profile can be useful. I think it's, it's. I think people put a little bit too much emphasis on lowering cholesterol levels. I think the fasting glucose levels and levels of something called small oxidized cholesterol, as well as levels of inflammatory markers in your bloodstream like creatine kinase are really more important than your lipid profile. But I think it's worth taking a look at the cholesterol and triglyceride levels as well. So get a lipid profile. Look at your CK and your troponins. Those are inflammatory markers and those will both test to indicate heart or excessive muscle damage. And, you know, especially if you've had a heart attack, it'll tell you that right away. But that'd be something useful to take a look at as well, is the inflammatory markers like creatine kinase and troponin in your bloodstream. And those can also be done on a simple blood test. There's a test called prothrombin that you can order as well from your doc, and that'll test to see how well your blood clots. So a lot of times folks who are on blood thinning medication will get that one. But it'll also indicate any type of bleeding disorders. If you ever go in for a surgery, you know, let's say you get in a car accident or a bike accident. It would be nice if a doc could look at your previous panels and see prothrombin time just to make sure that there's not going to be a bleeding problem. For example, while you're on the surgical table, next thing to look at is a thyroid test. Don't just get the TSH test, which is what they're going to give you automatically, which can be one indicator of hypothyroidism or hyperthyroidism. But make sure you look at your T3 and your T4 as well, because TSH is just one part of the picture when it comes to your thyroid hormones. To understand that more completely, go listen to any of the previous podcasts that we've done with Dr. Roby Mitchell. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for Roby Mitchell. A couple other final tests to look at. Look at the sedimentation rate. That's another rate. Or test for inflammation in your body. Tell your doctor that you'll want a sedimentation rate test and they'll know how to interpret that. And then finally get a hepatic function panel, pretty basic panel. It'll test your liver. It'll look for things like jaundice, really any type of liver issues. But it's called a hepatic function panel. So those aren't all the tests. I mean, all the tests you get for blood would fill up an entire book. And I'm not a doctor. I haven't gone to medical school. So, you know, I'm not trained in all of the blood tests. I'm not a phlebotomist. I don't work in a lab. But those are the things that I would ask a doc for if I were going to go in and get a blood test and just want kind of a not a complete snapshot, but a pretty good snapshot from a blood standpoint. I would still recommend that you not neglect getting a look at salivary testosterone and cortisol. I would recommend that you still take a look at your urinary mineral loss via the type of test that you get through, like bioetics for urinary mineral loss. Check out urine PH for at least a week to track your PH levels. Those are some of the main things I'd look at. If you can get an amino acid test and a fatty acid test, those would be two good things to look into as well. I personally, from personal experience, don't know if that's a blood test that your doc's going to be able to give you or that your insurance is going to cover the amino acid test or the fatty acid test. But I would highly recommend that you look into those as well. And that would be about it. So I hope that is helpful, Peter. It's a great question. And yeah, that about wraps up our questions for this week. So great questions, you guys, and quick message before we move on to today's highly mentally stimulating interview with James Audio from bionx Supermodel.

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Now during this interview with James Audio, you will hear me mention his company Bionics and Bionet Worth, as well as the particular supplement that we're talking about called Bionix Supermodel. I will put a link to that in the show notes and again, I will warn you that James Audio is a very smart guy and he gets pretty in depth. In this interview. I had to split it into two parts and I still had quite a time really getting as much information as I needed to get about Bionics from James Audio. But if you're really interested in what goes on when a supplement is created and what type of things you need to think about when you're looking at what you put into your body, you're going to want to listen into this interview. And just so you guys know, I have tried this Bionic supermodel stuff that he talks about for about 30 days and it is something that I'm comfortable recommending. Hello folks, this is Ben Greenfield and on the line today I have a theoretical biologist and systems engineer named James Audio. James is the president and the founder of a company called bionetworth as well as a company called Equine Ergogenics. He attended a Polytechnic Institute in New York and the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and he not only graduated in high school as a valedictorian, but he went on to get a range of other honors. He's a certified Strength conditioning specialist with the National Strength and Conditioning association and he was employed at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company for nine years in the Missile Systems division and the process and control laboratories. He founded Bionetworth in 1989 and the Equine Ergogenics in 1996 and using those companies he develops training regimens for business professionals, Olympic track event cyclists, road cyclists and power lifters as well as state of the art micronutrient products for business professionals and athletes. He also designed eight molecular nutrient sleep systems and custom engineered Ergogenic formulas for Thoroughbred and Standard bred racehorses. And now he's helping everyone from corporate executives to physicians to attorneys, financial planners, computer programmers, Olympic world and national champions in many sports including triathlon and professional cycling, Major League baseball players, world record holders, and men's professional sprint cycling Touring PGA golfers, world record holders in swimming, former USTA number one ranked players in tennis, Breeders cup winners, and a host of other professionals who rely on the advice that James Audio gives them to reach their peak performance. Now, he's also written books. He's written Confessions of the Human Genome as well as a book called the Digital Mantrap, an operating system for the human organism. He also developed and presented a presentation titled the Unified Theory of Fitness, Aging and Disease. A new theory of fitness based on the flow of energy and the integrity of information. Now, in case you have not gotten the idea yet, the man who we're going to talk to today is very intelligent and knows quite a bit about sports performance enhancement, about anti aging and about a host of other issues that we're going to discuss today when it comes to reaching your potential and taking your potential to the next level. Specifically when it comes to employing the realm of micronutrients in that pursuit. So, James Audio, thank you for coming on the call today.

Wow, Ben, that's a long list. Over the course of those some 20 years, I didn't realize all that transpired, but I guess it did. Interesting how life evolves like that.

Well, after introducing you, I believe we have five minutes left for the actual interview.

Yeah, yeah, I guess so.

Yeah.

The business did begin in 1989, but for me philosophically you have to go back to like when I was 13 years old when I met my mentor, helped me with strength training back then. And back then it was all about bodybuilding Leader magazine. In my teens I really got into that. I was a very slight built person, strong for my size, and really got into weight training and discovered supplements back then. But back then all there was was like milk and egg wheat or milk and egg protein and very sugary products for gaining weight. And my goals back then are all about getting bigger and stronger. And that's the way it was back then. But then what happened was when I was working at Lockheed, I began to see how large systems are developed. I worked for four years in the Trident missile system division where there's a building longer than a football field, where the missile systems are developed and you see a long assembly line and you see all these different departments developing all these different parts, very, very complex and you begin to get a feel for what it takes to build really complex systems. And at that same time I was training people part time for weightlifting and working with power lifters. And so I had no exposure at all to endurance training at that point. That went all the way through my late 20s. And at one point I weighed 227 pounds and was really big and strong. Strong and had met some people that had really started the sports nutrition industry back then because it was in the Bay Area and that's where, like where Champion Nutrition started and Unipro was. And so I kind of saw at the ground floor, you know, how things were going for sports nutrition back then. And then at the same time in my day job I was working in the Trident missile system division at Lockheed. And so I just came to some insights on where things could go because the direction it was going in sports nutrition I ultimately saw as a dead end. But I wasn't sure on how to apply systems engineering to improving athletic performance yet because I hadn't put all the pieces together.

Well.

Then I left Lockheed and then I came down here to San Diego in late 89 and then started the company Elite Performance Technologies, which ironically is the same name as what I was calling myself Even in the 80s, before I had even started the company. And so what happened was in 89 was that I began to invite athletes to come in and consult with me. I was advertising at that point in the Competitor magazine with Bob Babbitt, who's Still Running magazine. And I had ran ads in there and then people would come in and then I bumped into a guy by the name of Zach Copeland, and he was a national criterium champion and then became a national sprint champion on the track in cycling. And his dad had done Ironman like five times and held several world records for his age group in track cycling. And then he referred me to Gary Allen, who was a downhill skier and kind of extreme sports. Very, very strong guy and for his size. But I didn't realize that his brother was Mark Allen and Mark Allen the triathlete that we all know. And so Mark Allen came in, this is 1990. And so at that point what happened was that I have this business where what I did is I went out and used my systems engineering thinking and went out into the marketplace and just pulled every product out there that had some kind of benefit that I could put together in a system to assemble for an athlete custom for that person based upon a one on one consultation. And so Mark Allen came in and we talked about triathlon. I didn't know anything about triathlon back then. As I said, I had no background in endurance sports. I was just learning about that. And I put together a system of products based upon what was in the marketplace. It wouldn't matter what the manufacturer was, it depended upon what the product, functionality of that, of that particular ingredient profile for that supplement would be. And I would cobble it together so that he would have a system that would be best, best appropriate for what he was trying to do. And so then more and more athletes came in. I think in 1992, seven of the top 11 athletes from California that competed in the Ironman were clients of mine and the top two guys were clients of mine. And people began to hear about what I was doing. And so people would come in and they would sit down with me. But I didn't realize I had no background in business. I didn't realize what a stupid business model this was. This was great for engineering and executing a solution for an athlete at least. It was state of the art back then. But the problem was it was a really bad business model because people would write down what I'm recommending and then they'd go shop someplace else. It was really, really bad. And the other thing I noticed is that a lot of the things that I really wanted were not available in the marketplace at all. I came to the realization that sports nutrition is not what's important here because the body has no idea what a sport is. It has no idea whatsoever. It just responds to stress. It adapts to stress according to its programming, which is not all genetic. Some of it is epigenetic, which if we have time we can get into. That's a new field that's going to become dominant very shortly. But basically a biological system is stressed and it adapts to stress. And so the field of exercise physiology, although it has meaning to us humans from the outside looking in, from the inside looking out, it has no meaning whatsoever. It's just going to deal with a stress and adaptive stress. Like Ironman, for example, it's probably thinking it's being chased by a bear for nine hours. And so it's going to do the best it can to adapt to that. Of course, the training process in order to do the Ironman is beyond what we're designed to do. So we're always operating on what I call on the right side of the human performance envelope. Now, people have heard the term pushing the envelope, but they don't really know what that means. People have a visceral feeling for what that means. It kind of means like you're going pedal to the metal. But what it means biologically is much more profound. So if you imagine a graph to where you are measuring performance, that's P. And improvements in performance would be a delta P and on the horizontal Axis you have stress. So for improvements would be based upon a positive delta S. So if you have this parabolic curve where the top of that parabola would be the optimal stress for you to do to have a maximal performance result. But see, it's very hard to know what that is. Even the very best uses of scientific measurements are very difficult because we don't really even know what that is yet. You can do all kinds of different tests for measuring your watts and your heart rate and doing all kinds of blood tests and all kinds of tests. You have to do this all the time, frequently, not just once every three months. It has to be done almost some of this stuff almost daily to monitor that you don't really know. And so you end up having to bracket the relationships of stress to performance. So what happens is that on the left side of the curve, I call this pulling the envelope. Pulling the envelope is a mirror image of pushing the envelope. Pushing the envelope. To give you a good visual example, I have clients, clients that are like Navy Seals or people that are doing 8,000 meter climbing. Like Steve Unsch, that we sponsored their K2 expedition in 94, is that their group was going to climb K2, which is the most dangerous mountain in the world. Slightly shorter than Everest, but far more dangerous. They were going to paraglide from the summit. And so when you're dealing with those kinds of stress profiles of much more than what you're going to have in dealing with Ironman or a marathon or any or even race across America.

Now, what about the stress levels of just regular life?

Regular life you have, ironically, what you have. And if you just want to look at in the west here, where we have the obesity epidemic, is that when you have too little stress, that creates a very interesting dynamic and a stress stress that is going to accelerate aging. Like part of my new theory that I'm working on, the unified theory of fitness is going to examine in detail. And what happens there is that when you look at the mammalian life cycle, beginning with an embryo and then you have early development and then you have adolescence and then you have maturity and then you have senescence. And so you have all these different phases of the mammalian life cycle, that it's not just going day to day, that there is a. It looks like what is happening is that at the level of the nervous system is where more centralized control takes place. Is that in the last 50 years the media has hammered home this genome centric idea to where intelligence is for some reason has a focal point of what your DNA is And that's just not correct. A better analogy is to look at your DNA, your genome, as a library, but the library is not the librarian. So you may have these great genes, but if they're not expressed, then they don't mean anything to you. And so the question is, what is the causal agency in how your genes are expressed? Well, that's not the source of that, is not the library. It's the librarian now. So what's the librarian? Well, the librarian is not some central aspect of the brain, because a bacteria has a mind, but it doesn't have a brain. In other words, a bacterium perceives its environment and responds to its environment, and it's very successful at it. In terms of persistence, it's far better than humans. They've been around a long time, and they're going to be around a long time. So if you measure intelligence as your capacity to adapt to the unknown, very simple organisms such as bacteria are going to be the most successful. And persistence is what matters. And at the level of an individual, phylogenetically, it's looking at the species. The proper term for fitness really is only used on the level of the species. But we have used the word fitness to apply to an individual organism. For example, Mark Allen is super fit. We use that terminology. But if you look at the word fitness, the word fit implies two. It implies an interplay between an organism and its environment. And so when you look at that, fitness is kind of a misnomer when we talk about it in the context of an individual. That conditioning is far better. But I can assure you the word fitness is never going to go away because it's so indoctrinated in our culture.

Gotcha. Well, if I could interrupt you quickly, just in the interest of the limited time that we have available on the call, can we talk a little bit about what steps that you took when you realized some of these concepts that you're right now outlining in terms of creating something that would enable someone to be able to help handle the stress of something like Ironman.

Very good question. I mean, that's really about the way that it was poised. Is that. Getting back to what I was doing as a business, I came to the realization that because there are missing components out there, because everything has done through the lens of sports nutrition and not through the lens of an organism, that you have holes in the approach of what you can do in terms of applying micronutrition to increasing what I call your adaptive yield. And if we have time, we'll get into this because it gets into the real meat of what you have to do. If you are an elite endurance athlete and you want to improve your performance, this will kind of roll out like the Manhattan Project, if we have the time to do it. And so what I did was I began to. I came to first. I came to the realization that I had to make my own products. I mean, that was first and foremost. The other thing that happened, which was kind of an odd sense of timing, but it worked out to be serendipitous, was that some guys came in from the racetrack at Del Mar, because the retail shop where I had my business was a few miles from the Del Mar racetrack where they raced thoroughbreds. And some guys came in, they saw that my store was focused on sports nutrition. They go, well, what do you have for horses? And I go, what are you talking about? And so we started to talk about it, and. And I recommended some human products that would be for their application. And they started to work. And so what I did, my first products that I designed custom were for horses.

And so were you designing these products in some kind of a laboratory?

What I did in the very beginning was that I would look at what was on the marketplace and get my Excel spreadsheet out, and I would look at the nutrient profiles that I was looking for. Kind of. Kind of like starting with a clean sheet of paper where you have a blue sky. That's, in fact, what I call the way I do things now, the blue sky project, is that you start with a blue sky saying, what if I had this? So you begin that way. What I did was I assembled the nutrient profiles that at that point were a first approximation to be what would be ideal, given my model for horses. I had a product called Vitamax and another product called muscle repair factors. And the muscle repair factors and the Vitamax, they were products that were designed to reduce inflammation in the racehorse. They weren't about ergogenic benefits. It wasn't about increasing aerobic power at that point. It was. First problem I wanted to deal with was dealing with inflammation. Because if you don't deal with that on the racetrack or in the limpic equestrian, Olympic equestrian, you have the same drug testing standards that you have for humans. It's IOC standards, World Anti Doping Agency. And so horse has to pass those stringent tests. And so I put together. I was using, like, chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine sulfate and MSM in the early 90s before people had really even heard about them. But the first application was horses. And so then my first Human product was called Rejuvenol, which if that product were still on the market today, it still would be the best natural anti inflammatory available. And it's just interesting that going back almost 20 years, if that's the case. But that was what happens when you take a cost no object approach and put something together. And so Rejuvenol was that first product. And at that time, Mark Allen was my client from 1990 till the time he retired, along with several other triathletes that they began to use the products that I was developing myself. And then to shorten the story a little bit, I asked then created a product called Muscle Repair Factors, another one called Aerobic Power Amplifier and thence Cellular Damage Protection System. And then I had a multivitam. So I ended up with a system of six products that cost somebody like $400 a month in 1993, 1994. And it was far and away better than anything that anybody had ever seen.

Now why was it better? You know, what, what makes say an exc. Expensive supplement or say the type of supplements that you were creating better than, you know, say what you go and get@vitacost.com okay.

If we begin to look at human metabolism in terms of the way the directions are going in biology, what we're seeing is a trend toward bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is a, is a way of computer modeling given inputs and outputs, how a biological system is going to adapt to a specific stress. Like we've all heard about the genome. Well, there's genomics. And then we heard about the proteome, which is the set of proteins that comes from the process of going from DNA, RNA to proteins. That's proteomics. It's a science that deals with the inventory and changes of the concentrations of those within the cell. And then metabolomics is dealing with a model of the entire cell of all of these small molecular weight molecules and the dynamics given that particular stress. And then it keeps on going like a transcriptome is looking at all of the gene expression products that you have in a given organism. And then the physiome is the grandiose holy grail of all these omics, which is looking at a model of the entire human being. And so what happens here is that the field of nutrition, which macro nutrition, has its roots going back to 1850 in Europe. And in my book, the Digital Man Trap, I go into the details of how things transform. And micronutrition in the United States goes back to the 1940s and came from a context of the post depression era of the 30s. And then in the 40s you had World War II. And what happened was that when army soldiers were being recruited, there was a high failure rate due to malnutrition. And so the concept of the RDA came from the crucible of the failure rate of draftees into the U.S. army. Army today we still have that same mindset. Everything like if you pick up any bottle of supplements on the market, it always says a percentage. Now it's called daily value is that it's all based upon the idea of what is the minimum of essential nutrients. Now this is an important point. Essential nutrients are nutrients that the body cannot make itself. So therefore that has to come from the diet, everything else. If there's a synthetic pathway anywhere in the body to make something, then it's not considered an essential nutrient. Like orotates, for example, were considered a B vitamin up until the time somebody came up or discovered the synthesis of orotates orotic acid in the body. So then they're scratched off the list. But see the problem with that is it's not about optimal function. It's only about what is the minimum to prevent a deficiency disease such as scurvy or beriberi or Pellagra and Rickett. And so that's where we are today. Our thinking of nutritional theory, micronutritional theory is still rooted in that. What makes this different? Now, Ben, getting to why this is better is that the thinking I'm using is I'm adopting the thinking that is coming out of big time systems engineering such as making missiles or Raptor fighter plane or a driving submarine. How do you design something for optimal function, not minimal function to avoid catastrophe? That's the difference. Okay, now when you start with that framework now everything changes. For example, let's just take a look at training for Ironman and put it in a context where your audience can understand this is that when you're training for Ironman and you're doing a high volume of endurance training, and if you're training smart, most of your training is going to be just in excess of maximal lipid power. We all know about VO2 max. VO2 max doesn't matter in Ironman and even the lactate threshold doesn't matter at Ironman. What matters is what is your maximal lipid power. Maximal lipid power is the greatest rate of fats that you can metabolize. Because why that matters in a race like Ironman is because that is going to ultimately determine how you're going to finish the Race because you're going to be glycogen depleted. Your VO2 max depends upon having maximal glycogen stores. And VO2 max is not a constant. People think VO2 max is relatively a constant in the 24 hour period. It would not vary. That's totally wrong. At the end of Ironman, you could take a Mark Allen who say has of VO2 max on the bike of, let's just say, for example, it's 80. And so his VO2 max on the bike at the end of Ironman is not 80. It's most likely going to be 40% less than that. And the reason for that is the maximal amount of power that you can produce when your glycogen depleted is going to be equal to your maximal lipid power. That's what you train for. I got into these kinds of concepts like back in 1992, Dr. Ferrari walked into my store and I didn't know who he was at that time. And he walked in with Moreno, Argenton, Tony Rominger and Mario Cipollini. And so we started talking. Dr. Ferrari is of course Italian, but he speaks very good English. And so he saw my products and he saw all the other products that I had there. And he was looking at things he had never seen before in his life.

And for the listeners, can you tell the listeners really quickly who Dr. Ferrari is?

Well, Dr. Ferrari, he's gotten a bad name for being involved in drug doping. But see, the thing about Dr. Ferrari was he was the protege of Dr. Conconi when the whole concept of lactate testing was used to break the hour record in cycling. And so he's an MD who is an avid cyclist himself. He's very fit and he has been a consultant to the top endurance athletes in the world, not just in Italy, but in the United States. And I consider him to be the most knowledgeable person in the world on endurance training.

So he walks into your office with.

These three guys, he walks in with these three guys and he wanted samples and I gave them to him. And then he, for a couple of years he was training his guys, all of his guys there in the off season because we have some San Diego's constant, considered to be flat, but we actually have some climbs at Mount Palomar which are quite strenuous. You know, there's some good 45 to 50 minute climbs that simulate what you're under, grades that you're going to see like in the Tour. And so he came back and he wanted more and so he became a customer and he was supplying These products to all the people that he was training. Now, this is important because here's a guy that can. He can get anything he wants in the world. And he was buying my stuff. And here's Mark Allen, you know, using my stuff and others. I can't apply. I give you their names because they don't have permission. But you'd be surprised that some of the people that have been were using my product that I had made. And so when he went to South Africa, then he sent him South Africa, and then he set up for me to do retail sales in Italy and four retail stores up until. Because the laws change, and now you can't even ship vitamin C over there. And so what happened was that with the system of products that I had was unwieldy. I was invited to the Atlanta Falcons, a Training Camp in 1994 by Bill Goldberg, who we all know as the pro wrestler, but he was a legendary defensive lineman for the Georgia Bulldogs and played on the Rams and the Panthers and Falcons. And he invited me to camp. And so I got the chance to talk. You can't do this today. It would never happen. But in 94, I got a chance to talk to virtually everybody on the team. They got samples of my products. And the complaint, though, was it was just too many bottles, even though Today people have 15 to 20 bottles. Now, this was six bottles of six functional different products.

So in order for people to take advantage of this research that you've been doing and this whole supplementation protocol that you put together, they had to be popping a lot of pills.

They were popping a lot of pills, and it was a lot of bottles, and it was unwieldy. So that's where I got the idea that I need to integrate this into one. And so Bionics 1 was born in 1995. Fast forwarding. Today, the Bionic supermodel is really the sixth generation as we've had evolved.

Can I ask you a quick question? If you take. If you take a bunch of supplements and you put them all together into one product, do you have to do things like control for one product, say, interfering with the absorption of another?

Yeah, you do. That's a very good point. And that's a big mistake that people make, especially in mineral nutrition. Minerals, when you look at, say, manganese, magnesium, copper, they all have a valence of two. If they're an ionic phase, meaning that they're cations with a valence of two, and you have what's called competitive inhibition in the small intestines, which means that some minerals are better absorbed than the other because of that property, which is called competitive inhibition. So it's possible to have high levels of minerals and you end up forcing a deficiency because you're competitively inhibiting one to where you don't even absorb it at all. Iron also fits in that category. So the way to get around that, you have to use true covalently bonded minerals, which Albion Labs has all the patents on, and those patents are enforceable. What that means is that in all the products that I make, I use Albion Labs minerals because they do not have competitive inhibition. Instead, they use an absorption mechanism such as small the di and tripeptides, which means two or three amino acids stuck together. And that's what you have with Albion Labs minerals is you have a couple of amino acids that are bonded to the mineral, so the mineral gets smuggled into the body. And this is how you avoid problems of competition. So expanding on this idea, going back to, I go back to the concept of why this is relevant to the triathlete, is that when you are doing the kind of training volume that is required to improve your maximal lipid power as much as possible. In other words, let's say you're training optimally, you've got great coaching, you've got a guy like Mark Gallen doing your coaching, so you've got somebody who knows what they're doing, you are applying the right kinds of stresses, you're doing everything right. Except when you look at the process of getting back to the very beginning of our discussion, we were talking about stress and adaptation. Well, all of the focus that we see in sports for the most part, has been on creating the right stress, which is training. But when it comes to adaptation, you don't see a whole lot that's been going on. Yes, there's been improvements in macronutrition. Yes, of course, when it comes to other dimensions, basically there's six dimensions of inputs that you have to tune in order to improve your performance. And today we're discussing the focal point is micronutrition. But you have five others, such as sleep and stress management, endurance training, strength training, balance, agility, motor control, and macronutrition. And so you have to tune all of these variables. But the biggest upside that an athlete has when they're operating at operating at the right end of that performance envelope, which is where they're pushing the envelope of where adaptive response is running really thin. Because, remember, it's not about sports. It's about what are we programmed to do? Well, we're not programmed to deal with chronic stresses such as training for Ironman or jumping out of planes from 20,000ft at 3 o' clock in the morning with 5 pound gross weight. Like these Navy Seals weigh 200 something pounds, they have a 200 pound pack and then they're going down into some cold environment in Afghanistan and people are going to shoot at them. You know, we're not designed to do that. And so what has to happen is if you have supranormal stresses, you have to begin to think in terms of supranormal adaptive tools. And so this is why this approach is superior to anything else out there. It's because the mindset and the focus is adapting systems engineering tools and networking theory and also piggybacking on the research that's being done in bioinformatics and applying it to nutrition. And this is not nutritional genomics. Nutritional genomics is a big upgrade over nutritional theory, but it's still not what I'm talking about. Nutritional genomics is about optimizing nutrition given that, given your particular genome. What I'm talking about is what is the nutritional profile that you need if you are training for something that the body is not designed to do, if you're at the far end of the envelope. And so in terms of what this means, like I was talking about this parabolic curve at the top of the parabola is optimal training. You're getting the optimal stress and you have your peak performance. But see, the tendency is for it to fall down the right side of the curve. And what you have there are decreasing marginal returns. Decreasing marginal returns means that if you increase the stress, what that means is your yield or your performance is going to suffer. And so what happens is that in training for triathlon or any sport like this, where you're pushing the envelope is that you reach a point. Every athlete reaches this point that I'm talking about. And this is, this is where I want you to pay attention, that everybody reaches the point to where there's going to be a limiting factor so that you will no longer have a positive delta P. And despite what you do by increasing delta S or stress, you will have a declining P because you've reached a point of negative diminishing returns. And so getting back to tuning these six inputs in order to improve your performance up and, and to the point to where you are reaching your genetic ceiling, or what I call more really your phenotypic ceiling, which is the phenotype is the expression of your body or soma, that is the ultimate manifestation of changes to your genome and epigenome and all these OMs I was talking about is that that is at that point you have increasingly negative returns because you will have bumped up against a micronutritional variable that is a limiting factor in your ability to adapt.

Gotcha.

And that's very, very, very, very important. And so you will never achieve that using conventional nutritional theory. I mean, even nutritional genomics will not. It doesn't deal with that type of problem. That has great value for the average person because it helps fine tune what they need. But it's not dealing with what I'm talking about.

Right. Well, I get the impression that with the knowledge that you have in developing the micronutrition that you've developed the way that you have, you could probably go on for hours. It sounds.

I do a seminar that's a couple of days.

Yeah, I've seen the PDF and I'll make that available to folks in the show notes, the actual PDF that contains some of the information you're talking about as well. But if we could, I'd like to kind of get into the meat of the final product that you've actually developed over the course of all these professional athletes that you've worked with over the years. In terms of the ingredient profile, I know that there's a large range of ingredients that have come to fruition in this final product that you've created. But can you kind of give the brief, almost like the layman's overview of what's in this and what it's called? It's bionics. It's called supermodel.

Bionic, supermodel. Because the term supermodel, I'm not using it in terms of the Milan.

The fashion industry definition of supermodel.

Not that even though that is a supermodel. I mean a supermodel actually predates that. And just to give an example of a supermodel, it's like that deeper blue IBM computer that beat Garry Kasparov in chess is that there are many chess programs out there like the ones that you can buy for $50 and put on your PC will beat virtually every human alive. But here you have a case of a computer that cost many millions of dollars because that's what it's going to take to beat Gary Gasparov. And so a Sigma model is that. And so it is a model of what is the best of as possible given what engineering has to offer.

So basically, if you had returning to this concept of a blank canvas or a blue sky, if you could take the ideal pieces of micronutrition and put them into the human body. That's your definition of the supermodel of micronutrition.

That's right. It also has another important principle, and that's scalable dose design. And so when we look at micronutrition as it's been presented for the last 50 years, is that, is that the dosage that you would give to a 350 pound nose pouch on the NFL is the same that you would give to a female 85 pound typist that's 30 years old. And something there really fell through the cracks. And so in pharmacology, my brother is an anesthesiologist and they live and die by dosage per kilo. And it's really not just even dosage per kilo, but it's doses per kilo of lean body mass, because fat tissue, even though it's metabolically active, is far less. So you have to look at the overall metabolic activity. So in micronutrition, I don't know why this idea hasn't been universally accepted, but it won't, probably because there's tremendous inertia. But you need to have scalability in micronutrition just like you would with anything else. All of my products at the very high end, like when I had them for racehorses, was called Rejuvenel 2 was $2,000 a month for a racehorse, which is nothing considering a lot of horses are racing for $100,000 a week. If you can have a small, like I say, a 2% improvement in performance, then that's what you need to do. But you need to have a dosage that's applicable for a 1100 pound animal, which works out to be about twice as what the dosage you'd have for a human. And so one important principle of the bionic Sibo model is it has a scalable dose design. And so by allowing we're using a delivery technology, it's called a caplique in one of the two bottles. And it was originally designed for the pharmaceutical industry because what it allows is that through taking two hard shell gelatin capsules and putting a band around it, as opposed to a gel capsule, which is very limited. What you can do with it within cap league, you can have multiple solid and liquid components and have a homogeneous blend and do all that simultaneously. And so what this allowed for me is that Douglas Laboratories, which if we have time, we'll get into the quality control. Douglas Laboratories was acquired by Atrium Innovations several years ago. A publicly traded company in Canada and then atrium acquired gel caps. And so, so by having these two companies operate under the same parent company, it allowed me to come in and design a product which you've never been able to do this before is to take the entire spectrum of what is possible in solids and liquids and create in just two bottles a fully scalable dose design. And that's with bionic supermodeling. So that's the overall concept of it. Now when it comes to what that's in the product is that the process works as follows. I pick the best quality single nutrients that are on the market for every category. Why am I doing this? I can use it as a selling point. By listening to me, you can tell I'm not a salesperson. I'm not that the whole purpose of doing this is that what I need to do is you need to have the best possible nutrients, I.e. ingredients or in order to have the best possible outcome. Just kind of like if you're a chef, you're not going to use crappy ingredients for your recipe, you're going to use the best that's available. It's the same idea here as in anything else. Like in the military. The reason why a toilet seat on a P3 cargo plane cost $800 is because it's a mil spec toilet seat. And we all laugh about that in the waste. But when you examine what the idea is, it means the joke is that it won't melt on Venus and it won't crack on Pluto. And so you know that that toilet seat is not going to fail is the point. Yes, it costs $800, but cost no object. If you're, if you have, if you're, if you're on something that's mission critical, you must make sure that every sub component is at the highest level of quality. Otherwise you'll fail. And here's why. It's that if I have a thousand, If I have 1000 components each of a reliability of 99.9%. So each one is 99.9% reliable. If I assemble them in a serial architecture, meaning that each one is linked to the other. Kind of like dominoes, you know, I knock over one domino, knock over all thousand of them. The problem with that is that in a serial design, when you look at the outcome, the outcome should be when I tip the first domino, the thousandth domino will fall. The problem is that it will only happen 1 out of 3, 3 times. If each domino is only 99.9% reliable because you have to raise it to the thousandth power. This is what people don't understand. They don't think about the nonlinearities that we have in the body, which means that you can be just on the precipice of some major change in the body for either good or bad. Getting back into this whole concept of applying networking theory to nutrition is that in networks where you have nodes and then you have links, just like on the computer, you've got a page, you're looking at a page on the computer and then there's a link to that, and you click on that link, it takes you to another page. When you have a ratio of links to nodes of 0.5, what you have is a situation to where all of a sudden you have global connectivity. So if you're below that threshold of connectivity in a network, you have only local communication. In other words, like Mary can talk to Jane, but Jane can't talk to Alice. And when you have just. When you just have one connection between each node, just a ratio of one to two, then you have global connectivity. This is called the small world effect. And we've all heard about this through six degrees of separation that your six phone calls from the Pope, right? The same concept in metabolism is called the metabolic diameter. The metabolic diameter is if you look at the entire metabolic, like biochemistry, you have all of the different reactions that can occur in a cell. Is that what you have is that if you look at all of the different possibilities of converting one reactant into another product is that if you add up the shortest pathways that are available for every connection that you have between every node that you have in metabolism, it has a metabolic diameter of 2.56, which means it's really, really tightly regulated. That's the good news. The bad news is it assumes that all of those pathways are working. So it's kind of like this. If you look at a map of the United States and all the highways, it's kind of like looking at that. But as you zoom in, you may see certain highways are blocked. Like for example, in the body. It's quite possible that a particular enzyme, which is what a link is in metabolism, an enzyme helps lower the activation energy to convert a react into a product. Let's just say that a mineral like manganese, which activates that enzyme, is missing. And here's where it gets back to how important and micronutrition gets to be when you're talking about when you're at the, when you're training at your limit, is that you're straining all of the redundancy of the body. When you're doing something that's beyond its design limitations, what happens is that you have to pay attention to every detail. You can go buy a multivitamin and you'll cover all your bases with essential nutrients. But that's not the problem. The problem is it might be something two or three or four or five, five enzymes away. In other words, there's a pathway. Let's say the body is trying to assemble Z and you're at A and everything's working smoothly through M, but Q is missing. Well, unless there's another roundabout way to get there, you're dead in the water. There's an old saying, remember this from Benjamin Franklin? He said, for want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. And for want of a horse, the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for want of care about a horseshoe nail. Okay. What that means is that you, when you're training for Ironman, you've got all of your horses taken care of and all of your riders, and you think you've got everything covered, but you haven't taken care of the nails. And the nails become mission critical. So the biggest upside that somebody can make in sports performance when you're at the limit is micronutrition, because nobody's doing what I'm talking about.

I see.

And I've been doing this for 15 years now.

The discussion about the nails and the nails that you've put into Bionic Supermodel. This might be something that, for those of you listening in, we may need to actually split this into two parts because we've gone for about 45 minutes now. And I know people are anxious to hear about what exactly is in this final product. And so what I'm going to do for those of you listening in is I'm going to release this part of the interview to you as part one. And in part two, James and I are actually going to discuss what is in Bionic supermodel and how to use Bionic supermodel. If you're the type of person that wants to jump ahead of the game, I'm going to put a PDF in the show notes to this interview that will allow you to jump ahead and look at what exactly is in bionics and how to use bionics and how to get your hands on Bionics Supermodel. And I will be bringing that to you along with the show notes to this podcast, as well as a link that allows you to get your hands on Bionix Supermodel. So, James, let's go ahead and continue this discussion in part two and go on and talk about what's in bionics. Would that work for you?

That would be fine.

Okay, we'll do that. All right, folks. Well, that is going to wrap up today's podcast. Please remember that if you want the Inner Circle podcast to keep going, visit the show notes to this podcast podcast number 118, and leave a donation. I've set up a donation button right there that will allow you to do that. Also, leave the podcast a ranking in itunes if you haven't yet. And be sure and review all of the special links that I put right there into the show notes for episode 118, including a link to more information on this supplement that James Audio has created called Bionics Supermodel. So if you have questions or comments, be sure to leave them in the comment section for this podcast. And until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a great week.