Episode #119: Part II of The “Bionx Supermodel” Interview

In this podcast episode, the Bionic Supermodel Interview Part 2 A ketogenic cycle Diet Smartphone Apps for Calorie Counting Barefoot Cross Training Is distilled water healthy commuting to work on a bike, taking fat loss supplements before a run, doing a half ironman after a marathon, pain on the inside of the knee and cramping from tea and coffee.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, 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 a crisp fall morning in Spokane, Washington. In today's podcast I'm going to answer more fabulous questions from you, the listener and I'm also going to give you part two of the interview on Bionic Supermodel with James Audio. So sit back and enjoy episode number 119 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Special Announcements.

Well, here's a special announcement for those of you who are putting together your Christmas list who happen to be triathletes. If you want some new triathlon gear, I'm actually gonna be bringing back a new 2011 two piece triathlon racing uniform. Last year these are really popular, gonna get them out again this year and they should be ready sometime in January if we get the order in soon. Now here's the deal. If you would like a two piece triathlon racing suit and it kind of has the Ben Greenfield Fitness logo emblazoned on it, you need to email me if you want to see pictures of what it looks like. You can check out my latest blog post over at my triathlon racing blog that I'll put a link to in the show notes, but all you got to do is email me. I'm able to get my hands on these things at a really Good deal. They're $99 for this two piece triathlon racing uniform, but if you want one you need to email me and you need to email me before the next podcast is released next Wednesday. So you need to send an email to Ben greenfieldfitness.com and you can get your hands on that two piece triathlon suit that's going to be coming in January. So the next thing is that the Podcast Awards have arrived and while voting is not yet Open over@podcastawards.com nominating is open and I would truly appreciate it if you would go nominate the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast in the Health and Fitness category for the Podcast Awards. Very easy to do. It'll take about two minutes of your time. I would love it if you were able to nominate the podcast. A couple other announcements. The first is that last week I mentioned that if you want to keep the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle Podcast going, then I really need to get some donations from folks. And some people stepped up to the plate last week and made some donations, but it was a very small handful of folks and we need your support to keep the Inner Circle Podcast going. Now what I'm considering doing is beginning to throw in some additions to the Inner Circle Podcast, such as a forum that's open to people who donate, as well as some PDFs and cookbooks, recipes, things like that that my wife are putting together. We are keeping an email list of the people who have donated to that podcast and we will be hooking you up with some bonuses and some goodies. So you can donate to the Inner Circle Podcast by just going to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and clicking on the link that I have right there where you can sign up to do donate 10 bucks. Now the last announcement is that the triathlon training camp that I'm teaching in Austin, Texas is again coming up soon, January 31st through February 7th. You need to click on the link to register in the show notes to the podcast if you want to get into that all inclusive triathlon training camp down there in Austin, Texas. So that wraps up the special announcements. Let's go ahead and move on to this week's Listener Q and A.

Listener q and a.

If you have a question for the podcast, remember you can email ben greenfieldfitness.com you can Skype to username Pacific Fit, or you can call toll free to 877-209-9439. And the first question comes from listener Dan and Dan says, I've read about the Ketogenic cycle diet and was wondering if you could provide a brief review of it. Now we've talked about ketosis on this podcast before and what ketosis is is it's the body being in a state where it's using ketones or a certain type of byproduct of fatty acid breakdown. The for energy and the body actually very efficiently uses ketones as energy. The danger of using ketones as an energy source is blown out of proportion in a lot of the medical fields because it can be a risky state for something Like a diabetic to be in. But for the average person who just wants to burn through storage fat, lose weight, burn adipose tissue, et cetera, tapping into ketones as an energy source is a very efficient way to be using energy versus relying on constantly high levels of circulating blood sugar. And this cyclic ketogenic diet that Dan asks about is really something that we've talked about on this show before, and essentially it's pretty simple. What happens is you cycle through a period of fairly low carbohydrate eating, and then you follow that up with a couple days where you actually reload your carbohydrate stores. Now, the cyclic ketogenic diet per se, actually requires you to eat less than 30 grams of carbohydrate on your low carb days, and then, for example, on the weekends or after five to six days to load up with about 60 to 70% carbohydrate intake. And for those of you who don't know what 30 grams is, that is just a little bit over 100 calories of carbohydrates. So really, you're burning through a lot of ketones, and then you're reloading your body with carbohydrates so that A, you don't go crazy, and B, you actually refill your muscles carbohydrate stores, then you go back and you do it again. Now, this strategy can be actually a very effective strategy for burning through fat, especially in people who are willing to take that extra step to really focus on consuming that low, low amount of carbohydrate intake. But it's something that's very difficult to adopt as a lifestyle. So, for example, a bodybuilder who is preparing to cut body fat for a show, this would be a great idea for them. It really allows you to burn fat very efficiently. You heard me talk about intermittent fasting last week, where you quit eating two hours before bedtime, and then you don't eat for two hours after you get up. And sometime in between that time, you get in about an hour or so of fat burning cardio. And the idea behind that is that with that intermittent fasting strategy, you're also tapping into ketones and those fatty acids during the time that you're fasting, which is mostly just overnight for a couple hours a night and a couple hours in the morning. Now, doing the intermittent fasting, for someone who just wants that as a lifestyle, is a lot simpler than only eating about 100 calories of carbohydrate every day. I mean, that means that you'd be limited to a little bit more than a piece of fruit every day. It's very difficult if you ever try to eat less than 100 calories of carbohydrate. Very difficult to do. It's doable, but it's a tough lifestyle unless you're willing to make some real radical changes in your eating patterns. And for people who are endurance athletes or triathletes, I know a lot of you listen to this show. Not a good idea at all. For someone who's relatively inactive or who doesn't do a lot of, like, endurance sports, chronic repetitive motion swimming, cycling and running, say, who's doing bodybuilding. This is a way that you would be able to shed fat pretty quickly. And for the average sedentary person, you could also shed fat pretty quickly with something like this. But again, pretty tough to adhere to and maybe not as practically effective as intermittent fasting, which really anybody can do, including the triathlete or endurance athlete or an athlete, because you get access to carbohydrate, you just don't get access to calories at all. Or carbohydrate during the night when you're asleep and for a couple hours before bed and a couple hours when you get up. So, great question, Dan. Now, the next question is from Alan, and Alan says it is possible, or is it possible, that drinking caffeine like tea or coffee before working out can cause cramps? I ask because I have repeatedly been getting cramps in both the right side side of my neck and chest. Well, it is true that caffeine in general can inhibit the absorption of some minerals and nutrients. And so technically, you could be at an electrolyte deficiency if you were taking in caffeine on a regular basis, and especially not focusing on getting adequate mineral intake or taking in electrolytes or salts, especially during exercise. The other issue is that caffeine is, of course, a diuretic. And low water on board or a state of dehydration can also contribute to cramping, since water is necessary for maintaining the electrical conductance in your muscles. But repeatedly getting cramps in just the right side of your neck and your chest, I wouldn't be going down the nutritional route as much as I would be looking into the possibility of a pinched nerve somewhere up around in your shoulder region where there's a lot of nerve plexuses and bundles of nerves, or same thing in your neck region. I'd be looking into that region. Pinched nerve is something that you could get looked at by going to a sports Medicine physician. You could get that looked at also by a chiropractic physician. The other thing that I would look into would be the potential that you may have a rib out of place or you may just need something as simple as a neck adjustment by a chiropractic physician. Folks, anytime that you're getting cramps, especially localized to a specific area, dig a little bit deeper than just dehydration or nutrient deficiency or something like drinking too much coffee and tea. Look into equipment. If it's, you know, if it's in the feet, you can look into your shoes being too tight or too loose. You know, if you're a cyclist, maybe your pedals are turned the wrong way, but look into some of this other stuff. If it's moving up your upper body, like pinched nerves, sacroiliac joints out of place, ribs out of place, neck adjustments. Get your body looked at. If you can have anybody from a sports medicine physician to a physical therapist to a chiropractic physician, to active release technique practitioner to anybody who does good body work, actually look at you and do some diagnosis on you can be very helpful when you're getting localized muscle cramps. Next question comes from Mike. Mike says, I cook a lot, mostly with real food, and generally it's pretty complex. Do you know of any smartphone apps that you can plug either a recipe into and then it will tell you what the nutrient calorie content of a set amount will be? There's a lot of iPhone apps out there that are going to count calories for you, not necessarily ones that will allow you to create a meal based off a range of foods and calories that you feed in that I'm aware of. Now the training peaks. So software that I use to coach my athletes and my clients has that capability and it does have phone delivery, but it's not a phone app per se. Some ones that you could look into, though, would be the calorie counter phone app for the iPhone. That's probably the most comprehensive phone app out there. It does give you access to the nutrient and calorie values for pretty much any food on the planet. It gives you a list of preset foods you can choose from, lets you create your own preset foods or put custom items in there. I suppose if you were to add up all the items from the meal that you were making and put those together, you could technically use that to create the calorie counter, the nutrient count for a meal. So maybe that calorie counter app would actually work. Another really good one is Livestrong has a phone app that's a pretty decent apple. Another one is for the Droid and that's actually just the calorie counter app for the Droid. Same thing, but they've got it on Droid platform too. You know, it's $2.99, $3.99, something like that. $2.99, $3,.99. That would be worth looking into. So the calorie counter app, look into that one. Look into training peaks and look into the Livestrong app. Last one might be the Tap and track. Tap and Track lets you track a lot of foods. Really strong restaurant database that you can choose from as well. You've also got access to like over 100,000 different food items. It'll give you your daily calorie needs, your daily calorie limits. That's like $3.99. That'd be another one to look into. But try those out. And if folks, if you're listening in and you have a phone app that you'd really recommend in terms of calorie counting, leave it as a comment on the show. Notes for this podcast for podcast number 119. And of course this should go without saying, make sure you download the free Ben Greenfield fitness phone app while you're at it. And all that is it gives you all my podcasts, my videos, my blogs, my emails, everything just kind of in one spot on your phone. So it's kind of a convenience based app. Now the next question is from listener Paul. And Paul says, just wondering, with so much focus on the benefits of barefoot running, wouldn't it make sense to do cross training barefoot? Barefoot? I usually do yoga and core workouts barefoot. Other than the considerations of things like weights falling on your feet, an athlete's foot in a gym. Couldn't all cross training benefit from going barefoot? Short answer is yes, absolutely. When you're walking barefoot, you're strengthening ligaments, tendons, bones and your feet. You're exposing the natural surface and curvature of your feet to the ground. You're essentially doing a lot of benefit from a biomechanical perspective and also a foot endurance perspective. When you do the training that you can do barefoot. Barefoot. So yes, I do yoga barefoot. Whenever I'm working out at home, I'm barefoot. Whenever I'm at home, period, I'm barefoot. I walk around a lot barefoot. I run once a week barefoot. So I do quite a bit barefoot. But there are practical limitations. For example, most gyms will not allow you to go barefoot in their Gym for hygienic reasons. Also, if you're lifting heavy weights, the stability of a shoe can actually help out quite a bit. Now, most people who are runners, triathletes, endurance athletes, they're not lifting heavy enough weights to really worry about this too much. But if you're doing, say, CrossFit, if you're doing Olympic style weightlifting, if you're doing some powerlifting, shoes can actually give you quite a bit of benefit from a stability perspective. But for the lighter work, the cross training, the yoga, etc. I would encourage folks to go barefoot as much as you're able to do, without offending folks or getting too stinky in the gym, or even getting kicked out of the gym because you're breaking the rules. The last thing I want is someone in a BenGreenfieldFitness.com t shirt to be getting in an argument at the gym with a personal trainer or a gym employee. Because I told you you could go barefoot in the gym. Remember, what they say counts as the rules. Okay, Les says. I was wondering what your opinion on drinking distilled water on a regular basis is. Okay, so distilled water, for those of us who took chemistry classes, that was the water that was always there that it said, don't drink. You know, you just use it for your, for your laboratory procedures. And one of the reasons for that is that distillation removes a lot of things from the water. So dissolved solids like salt, bacteria, calcium or iron, all of that can stay in the water. Well, what happens is the distilled water is basically water that's been converted into steam and drawn out and condensed, and all those minerals and everything else have been removed. So it's pretty much just H2O, just hydrogen and oxygen. And a lot of people will say that it's healthier than tap water or spring water or purified water, because it basically doesn't have anything in it. So you don't have minerals in it, but you don't have impurities in it. Some folks will argue that not having minerals in water, not having anything in the water, actually makes the water more able to flush away minerals or toxins from the body. And then you get another camp that believes that distilled water actually leaches minerals from the body that could damage your teeth, that it doesn't contain some of the things that natural spring water would contain that would actually be helpful, healthy for you. And then the other concern is that there is some evidence that distilled water can absorb more carbon dioxide when it's exposed to the air, which could lower the PH of it, which would basically mean that you're drinking water that is more acidic. And it's been suggested that of course, acidity could lead to more health problems. That's why we want to avoid high intake of acidic foods like processed starches and sugars could be a good reason to avoid acidic water as well. Now, of course, at most grocery stores you can get distilled water. You can buy it in one gallon containers. Some bottled waters will use distilled water or what's called deionized water as a base and then they'll add back in the minerals for taste. There is not really compelling evidence either way that drinking distilled water is going to be more harmful for you than drinking regular water. There's also not very good evidence to show that it's better for your health than drinking regular water. So there's no evidence that shows that it detoxes the body. Of course, there's no evidence to show that regular water detoxes the body either. Regular water does have minerals in it. I'm a bigger fan of using regular water versus water that has been basically stripped of just about everything via the distillation process. But there's not a ton of evidence that drinking distilled water is really going to do that much damage to you. At the same time, I don't want to give folks the impression that drinking regular water is all you need to do to drink minerals. Even if you're drinking very, very hard water, which tends to have more minerals added to it in a day, that's going to give your body, maybe it basically translates to be in the range of about 5 to 15% of your daily mineral needs that you're going to get from undistilled water. So it's not like you're not going to need minerals and electrolytes that you're getting from the vitamins and the nutrients and the minerals and vegetables and fruits and real food anyway. So I don't want to give you the impression that you're going to be getting all your minerals from non distilled water. So if you're drinking distilled water, you're not missing out on a ton, maybe about 5 to 15% of your daily mineral needs. Now, as far as the concept of it possibly depleting minerals from the body, the basic idea behind this is that when the distilled water hits your small intestine, that it comes in contact with your intestinal lining and can actually leach minerals from your intestinal Lining because the minerals will go from an area of, of high concentration to an area of low concentration. The area of low concentration being the distilled water. But if you're eating and you're drinking distilled water with a meal, you know, you picture that meal. You've got all these organic and inorganic compounds, you've got hydrochloric acid from your stomach, you've got tons of stuff in that food bolus that's going into the small intestine. You know, the fact that the distilled water with a slightly lower mineral content than the regular water is mixed in with that is going to leach minerals from your body to the extent where it may be harmful for you, putting you at risk for mineral deficiency, osteoporosis, stuff like that. I'm not too convinced by that. And there's really no studies that I'm aware of that I've been able to find that show that that could be an issue. I mean, basically throw distilled water into a blender with some steak and potatoes, throw regular water into a blender with steak and potatoes, you know, drink that down. You're basically putting into your body the same thing that's going to be into your body once it hits your small intestine anyways. And I'm afraid there's not really going to be a huge difference or very significant difference in the mineral absorption or in the leaching of the minerals from your body from a meal that's absorbed with distilled water versus with non distilled regular water. So basically what it comes down to is I would drink regular water if it were me. But if you're drinking distilled water, not a ton of evidence that it's going to do a lot of damage to you. So let's move on to the next question which was asked via Twitter by Sensei K. And remember, if you want to ask a question via Twitter, just go to twitter.com and follow BenGreenfield. And Sensei says any adjustments needed to periodize triathlon training to accommodate aerobic 10 mile rides to and from work five days a week. And basically what this question is getting at is if you're following say a triathlon training program and you're riding your bike to work every day, you know, there and back, 10 miles, do you need to modify the program? The answer is yes, that's, you know, five days a week, that's 50 miles a week of riding that can add up. Specifically, for example, I commute to work, or I did commute to work for a while five days a week. And that was on my bike. I basically used that as nearly 100% of my triathlon training. The only modification I made was I went on a long ride on the weekends. If you're tacking 50 miles of bike riding, typically you might be dodging traffic, going fast, going slow, ducking cars. You've got maybe a backpack on that adds up. You can't just shrug that off as not having an effect on, on your body. So I would definitely count 50 miles of commuting as at least two sessions, probably closer to three to four training sessions on the bike per week. And the modification that you'd make to your program is you would actually need to decrease the number of bike sessions that are in your structured program if you're getting that much commuting in. Because the other thing you have to think about with commuting is it's also a two a day workout. So you're kind of beating up your body, sparking your metabolism a couple of times during the day. And again, you can't just shrug that off and act like it's just kind of added bonus for your body. There are recovery implications to that amount of training or tacking an extra 10 mile commute on every day. So the exception to that is if you're riding very easy, if you're never pressed to make it to work on time, if it's kind of easy, what we would call zone two heart rate riding, you might be able to get away with just kind of counting that as a little bit of added, you know, fat burning, calorie burning, aerobic type of bonus and still get away with doing the other harder bicycle sessions that are in your program during the week. But again, that would be if you're just riding very aerobically when you go to work. If you're riding hard like you'll see a lot of commuters, do you need to take that into account in your program and shorten some of the bike workouts or eliminate them altogether? Now John asks. Next year I'm running a marathon with my son one weekend and competing in a half ironman the following weekend. Is one week enough time to recover from an easy marathon effort in order to truly compete in a half ironman the following weekend? Well, it is fairly amazing the dearth of research that exists on long term follow up of marathon runners and how long it takes them to recover. There's tons of research out there on inflammatory markers, on cytokines, on neutrophils, on all These things that indicate muscle damage or inflammation in the hours or the day after a marathon, when you would expect that stuff to be high anyways. But aside from a study on Ironman triathletes that found that it took about 19 days for inflammation to clear and really the acute inflammation about five days to clear the high soreness type of inflammation, not a lot of studies that have been done on actual marathoners when it comes to this. And you know, it's really interesting because you would expect that there would be a lot of studies out there that kind of examine marathoners for two to four weeks after a race to see how long it takes for those inflammatory markers to clear for their soreness to subside. And there's, there's really not much evidence out there. However, if you, if you just look to marathoners in general, you know, you look to big name marathon coaches like Jeff Galloway or Hal Higdon, most of these folks in their training programs for marathons, and these are guys who have done a lot of marathons, who have worked with a lot of very good marathoners. They're saying about two to three weeks is in terms of soreness, in terms of being able to come back and do high quality workouts, what you'd be looking for to recover from that strain of running 26.2 miles. And the recommendation is that you actually do easy work or you avoid hard intervals, hard racing one day for every mile that you run in the marathon. Now this is assuming though that you're running that marathon at race pace. And like you say, if you're just kind of doing that as an easy marathon, you know, with your son, kind of guiding him through staying aerobic, conversational pace the whole time, legs aren't really sore or burning the entire time. My recommendation would be, you know, recover well, take your ice bath, get your topical magnesium, get some amino acids, some proteolytic enzymes, some high protein foods into your system, put your feet up for a couple days, recover some light, easy, non weight bearing work like swimming or elliptical trainer, and then a little bit of aerobic work later on in the week. Again, nice easy stuff, you should be fine. If you're not really racing that marathon or running it hard, you should be fine. My one recommendation or word of caution to you would be that in those days leading up to the half ironman, you not go out and do a lot of the race pace strides and harder race pace work that I would recommend that folks do usually prior to a half ironman and you instead just kind of let your body recover, do a little bit of light aerobic work to keep the blood flowing and you should be fine. But again, it's interesting how little research exists out there on marathon recovery times. Now we have another marathon question. Lots of questions from runners. Today must be marathon season. Jeffrey asks, I'm currently training for a marathon. Because of my schedule, I do all my runs in the early morning. Typically, I will run before I eat and then within 45 minutes of my workout. For my long runs, I fuel up first thing in the morning. And I am overweight. So I am using your lean factor and thermo factor supplements to lose weight. My question is this. Should I take the supplements before I work out or should I wait until my second meal of the day before starting the daily regimen? Well, the idea behind those lean factor and thermo factor supplements, Jeffrey, is that the lean factor really enhances the activation of something called cyclic amp in your lean muscle tissue. And it can enhance your ability to sustain a lean muscle contraction and also amp up the amount of carbohydrates that you burn while you're working out. So I would actually recommend that you take the lean factor before you run. However, that thermo factor is all based on the use of chromium, vanadium, bitter orange extract and things like that to stabilize your insulin and your blood sugar levels. And exercise also stabilizes your blood sugar and your insulin levels. So I actually wouldn't use the thermo factor before that exercise session. I would use that later on the day, technically about 30 to 60 minutes before lunch and 30 to 60 minutes before dinner so that your blood sugar levels are more stabilized for lunch and dinner. And you tend to store less as fat and also eat less. The lean factor, I would actually take that prior to your run, and then you could also take it later on in the day prior to a meal. Because the other thing that it has in it is Google steroids, which should help a little bit with cholesterol management and, and mobilization of cholesterol. So that's the approach that I would use is I'd take the lean factor, for example, with your morning workout and with lunch. And I take the thermal factor with lunch and with dinner. And for those of you listening in who want to read more about what those lean factor and thermal factor supplements actually are, I will put a link to those in the show notes for this episode, number 119. And then we have two questions about knee pain. The first is from Chris, who says, I have some moderate inflammation on the inside of my left knee. Do you have any advice on how to relieve this pain or stretch this area of the body and how to strengthen my body laterally without a recurrence of this pain? And then Graham also asks, just wanted to get your advice on some exercises that will help to prevent runner's knee. Now, pain on the inside of the knee, pain on the front of the knee, usually about 90% of the time, it's due to a kneecap tracking problem. So your kneecap, which is also called your patella, is that little sesame seed shaped bone, and it slides over a groove between your thighs called the femoral groove, as your knee bends and straightens, for example, while you're running. So if, let's say, your muscles on the front of your thigh, your quadriceps are weak, or they're stronger on one side than the other, that muscle imbalance can pull the patella or the kneecap to the left of the femoral groove or to the right of the femoral groove, causing it to maltrack. And that results in pressure and friction and irritation on the cartilage that's on the under surface of the kneecap anytime your knee is in motion. So anytime you're running or going up and down stairs, riding a bike, et cetera, you'd feel that maltracking causing that friction, which is in turn causing inflammation and pain. And like I said, this is usually due to some type of muscle imbalance and can sometimes be due to a mechanical error or a gear error. What I mean by mechanical error or gear error is if you're a cyclist, for example, and you have your shoes turned too far to the outside, you could actually be putting yourself in a state of what would be the equivalent of over pronation on your bike and getting pain on the inside your knee. Another example would be overpronating while you're running. So you basically are wearing a shoe that's too light for you. You're not wearing an overpronation orthotic. You're wearing a shoe that isn't stable enough. And so the pronation or the normal inward roll of your foot is causing your arch to collapse. That makes your lower leg, your lower leg, and your knee internally rotate and again can cause pain on the inside of the knee, knee, or some of that runner's knee pain. So two areas that you want to address would be the muscle imbalances and the mechanical errors for both of you from a muscle imbalance perspective. One of the exercises that I really like to do for the quadriceps is Cable kicks. And these are very simple to do. You go to a gym, or you can even use an elastic band in your home, and you attach the cable or the elastic bands to your ankle, and you do a series of kicks with your foot internally rotated so your toes pointed in. And you do those until the muscles are burning. And then you take a break for a little while. Then you do a series of kicks with your toe pointed straight forward, and then you do a series of kicks with your toes pointed out. So, for example, you could do 15 kicks toe in, 15 kicks toe straight, 15 kicks toe out. And you're doing all of this keeping your knee almost locked out. So what you're doing is you're strengthening the quadricep muscles that surround that kneecap and keep it in a properly tracked position. Now, for example, I tend to have a weak, what's called a vastus medialis, which is the muscle on the inside front of the thigh. And that muscle can be targeted more effectively when I'm contracting the quadriceps with my toes pointed out. So when I do something like a cable kick forwards exercise, I will prioritize doing more reps with my toe pointed out than I will with my toe pointed in or my toe straight forward. But that's a great exercise, believe it or not. Even though I rarely recommend this exercise, the leg extension machine at the gym can really help to isolate and build up your quadriceps, especially if you have specifically a quadriceps weakness or quadriceps deficiency. And a lot of times folks who are runners or cyclists have real tight hamstrings, fairly strong glutes and hamstrings, weak quads. And so strengthening the quads can help out quite a bit. The issue with the leg extension machine is if you already have inflammation and pain, it can aggravate it because your knee is bending and extending, whereas with the cable kick forwards, your leg is straight. There's not a lot of friction that's occurring when you're doing that exercise, but the quadriceps are still in a contracted position. Now, if your leg is really weak and you have a serious case of muscular imbalance, you may need to simply do the very simple exercise where you sit down on the ground with your legs straight and outstretched in front of you, and you simply lift your leg off the ground and then switch to the other leg, lift that leg off the ground and engage your quadriceps in a very light contraction, working back and forth between the legs. And you can wear an ankle weight to make that exercise a little bit harder if you need to. It's kind of like an easy version of the cable kicks or the elastic band kicks. And then finally, of course, have a bike fit or have someone look at your bike. If you're riding a bike and you're getting pain on the inside of your knee, usually it's because your toes are pointed too far out or your seat is too low. And if you're running, look into getting an overpronation orthotic, look into getting a run gait analysis and look into using a shoe that's designed for stability or a shoe that's designed to control over pronation. And all those things ought to help. So great questions this week, folks. And remember, you can ask a question. I love to get audio questions. Haven't been getting a lot of them lately, but if you'd like to ask your question via voicemail, it's free to call toll free in the US 877-209-9439 or you can for free. Contact me via Skype via the free Skype conferencing software. My username is Pacific Fit and I'd love to hear from you. All right, well, we have a special message and then we're going to get on to the Interview with James Audio. And if you missed last week's interview or part one of this interview, go back and listen to podcast number 118 and I'll put a link to that in the show.

Notes did you know you can get personalized nutrition and fitness consulting from Ben Greenfield no matter who you are? If you want to run a triathlon, lose a few pounds, reinvent your diet, or have Ben create a training program or nutrition plan that's customized to you. Here's what you need to do. Visit tinyurl.com helpfromben that's tinyurl.com helpfromben Ben will personally contact you within 48 hours. What are you waiting for? Visit tinyurl.com helpfromBen today and get the body and results you've always wanted. Featured Topic.

Hey folks, this is Ben Greenfield and I am back with part two of the interview about Bionics Supermodel with James Audio. In part one, we left off talking about the theory behind Bionics and how James spent literally several decades creating the formula that is now in this completed product. And today we're going to get more into the nitty gritty of what exactly is in Bionic Supermodel. Why what is in there is in there and why it's different than some of the Other ingredients you may find in other supplements. So, James, thanks for coming back.

Well, thank you for inviting me, Ben. Yeah, we went a little bit longer than we thought last time, so you have to finish up here today. You know, one thing I wanted to correct was I made an error. I said that the. I gave the rankings of the people that were customers of ours for Hawaiian Ironman in 1992. What I meant to say was the year was 1990 for that.

Ah, gotcha. Well, I'm sure not, not too many people would notice, but triathlon history experts out there may have. So what exactly is in bionics? And I know that you've before told me how you have it kind of split into several different sections in terms of the physiological benefits, but can you kind of walk me through each of those sections and the ingredients that are in each section? Yeah.

First I'll discuss the process of design and how bionic supermodel, how we go from the process of selecting the nutrients and then selecting a manufacturer and then what we do in terms of evaluating performance at the overall system level. Overall system level is the human organism level. And so when it comes to selection of nutrients, that's where we are very dependent upon classical reduction of science and reductionism. There's two facets to that. One is empirical reductionism, which is where you're using reductionism to create a scientific environment where it's very controlled, where you have a single variable and you have the control group and sometimes you have crossovers and you have peer review and you have peer reviewed journals. And so that's the testing ground for us evaluating individual nutrients. And so new nutrients are coming out all the time that are more sufficient, sophisticated than previous ones that are. Various claims are made about them. So claims are made in the magazines and the glossy advertisements which I ignore. And where I go is into the peer review research and also into clinical research for individual nutrients and evaluate them from that point of view. So through the lens of systems engineering, this particular part of the process is you're assembling a parts list that is going to be going into a specification and it's all for the end purpose on what is this product going to be for. And bionic speaker model is designed to be like a metabolic Swiss army knife so that no matter what stress the organism encounters, it's going to be able to adapt to the highest efficiency possible because everything that is needed is available in real time during the adaptive process, which I think we'll get into a little bit later. So that's the End game. The end game is we want to have this create a molecular environment that when you are training and then you are adapting to stress, that you're going to have the greatest adaptive yield possible, meaning that you're performance is going to increase because you've caused damage during training and then you have to super compensate. And that's the whole reason why you train. So backing up now to selection of nutrients is that we're looking at all of the different nutrients that are potential candidates for playing a role in adapting to stress, which basically means it's everything, every possible nutrient could play a role. And so we go through the screening process by looking at the clinical research or peer review research, either or both. And then we don't just pick a nutrient just because it came out and it's the hottest and the greatest. And it's the one that's most hyped because there's a safety element that goes into this as well, is that sometimes people will ask me, Jim, why don't you have this nutrient in there or that one? And it's because it hasn't been out long enough to have a safety or an efficacy record. And so you won't always see the fanciest things in bionic Sibo model for that reason. It's a safety reason. And there may be a lot more hype there or something may come out about it in terms of toxicity or some kind of side effect. So I'd rather have that come out in the process of where it's in a holding pattern or kind of in the pipeline rather than be in my product. And so that's the reason why that happens. So the first step is the selection of nutrients. It's a screening process. Looking at the research and out in the brochure I list a lot of the studies that have been looked at. And so I think people get the idea that the idea here is that we're using classical reductionist science, nutritional science, to evaluate potential candidates that can go onto what we look at as the parts list. And so once that's done, we have, okay, we have a parts list. When you go to the label on a product, that's what you're looking at really. It's a parts list and it has to be done in a certain format because the government makes you do that. And there's a lot of loopholes there that people can do. For example, like with minerals, it could say calcium and then list calcium oxide, calcium, ascorbate and calcium from Albion Laboratories. It lists all the different forms calcium Oxygen. It lists all these different forms, but it may say 300 milligrams of calcium and then there's a list. But see, legally all you have to do is list in descending order of their concentration of elemental calcium. And so this is a way for people, for companies to give the impression that they're using, say, calcium from Albion, that's a very expensive form, as opposed to calcium oxide, which is not very well absorbed at all. And because the person is naive, they're looking at it as, see 300 milligrams. They don't know how many milligrams of each type is in there. It's just a descending order. Or you'll see proprietary. Now, proprietary is. When I see proprietary, it makes me laugh. Because if anything that should be proprietary should be a formula that's been in progress now for refinement for 15 years and even before that. But when you see proprietary once again, it usually means that somebody is trying to hide the concentration of expensive nutrients in there, because you only have to list in descending order. And so when you see the numbers, the numbers, it's a quantitative thing. When you look at the label, it's quantitative, it's not qualitative. And the difference being that different nutrients have different bioavailabilities in the body. Like one may be five times more bioavailable than another one. You don't need to have as much of that. Plus, when you have multiple nutrients and you're mapping out the metabolic network that you can begin to harvest the benefits of synergies, therefore, you can reduce risk. In other words, by having higher dosages, you can end up getting into risky ranges of potential toxicity where you can reduce that. Because now when you have synergies that are in place, you can reduce the amount of a particular nutrient because you're going to get the benefits coming from the composite effect of all of it being there simultaneously.

Gotcha. So with that understanding, go ahead and walk us through what's in the bionic supermodel.

First, let's get into the next step is the manufacture. Because this is another area where people. Let's cover that. Dan. What I've said so far is that it's the process of how we screen nutrients and create a parts list or create a roster of all the best things. So basically what you have with a supermodel is that you have 80 of the best of breed micronutrients or complexes in the world of all micronutritional classes as a starting point, not as an ending point, as a starting point. And many of these nutrients that you'll see in advertisements in magazines, just that one nutrient, the company will be just touting that one nutrient. Where we have well over 30, you have to manufacture it. And the average person just thinks that's an afterthought. That, okay, you dump a bunch of stuff in a vat and out pops a pill or a capsule or a tablet. And nothing could be further from the truth. And so what I look for is the first step is making sure the quality control certifications are there for the laboratory. If a laboratory says that they're high quality and they don't have third party verification, you can assume that the quality control is not there because quality control comes from third party verification. In other words, there's somebody making sure that you are up to a standard. And the highest quality standards in the world are ISO 9001. ISO means international organization of Standards. And the laboratory we use, Douglas Laboratory is ISO 9001 certified. And then they're also ISO 17025 accredited. And I'll explain what that means. And so having this level of quality is the highest level of quality you can have for a manufacturer. ISO9001, ISO does not refer to the nutritional industry per se. It refers to all industries. Like if you go to Hyundai or if you go to an aerospace company like Boeing, you're going to see ISO standards there as well. And the only standards that are perhaps higher than ISO standards are Mil Spec standards. And I worked at lockheed for almost 10 years. And Mil Spec is where you have the highest standards possible, where you have incredible redundancy because you cannot have any defects because it's so mission critical, you cannot have a failure. That's the mindset that I'm coming from, is that I wish I could have Mil Spec. There is no such thing as a mil spec nutritional supplement product. But that's the idea. That's the standard that I'm setting. So the next best thing is ISO9001 certification. Okay then, okay, next step is that there are certifying bodies that just deal with, are part of their businesses just doing this third party inspection of the laboratories themselves. And NSF is an organization, I think they originally started out of the University of Michigan. And that's where they're located, right near the University of Michigan. And they go in and they make sure laboratories meet certain standards. Where in Douglas Labs is that their CGMPs, their current good manufacturing practices, they're up to NSF guidelines. And plus the, the Douglas Laboratories is regularly inspected by the fda. And very few manufacturers are regularly inspected by the fda because the majority of the clients of Douglas Laboratories are doctors and chiropractors. Internationally, they provide medical grade nutritional products. They're not the common supplements. And then beyond that, they just have a brand new manufacturing facility with all new laboratories. And the laboratories, these are things that, these are costs that other companies don't have because they're not legally mandated, but because of what Douglas Labs does and who their clients are, such as myself, and hopefully your audience is that they do additional testing. So the label tells you what is supposed to be in the product, but you also have to test to make sure things that are not on the label are not in the product. For example, like toxic heavy metals such as say cadmium, arsenic, lead and mercury. Then another laboratory, the microbiological laboratory, is inspecting for molds, yeast and pathological bacteria. And the government just recently randomly went out and tested 40 herbal supplements on the market. And they found that 16 of them, in other words, 40% of these herbal products that they randomly tested had pesticide residues that exceeded legal limits, which is basically one out of two almost. And so Douglas Laboratories, which one of their laboratories has gas chromatography, mass spectroscopy, which is for determination of pesticide residue levels. And so these are additional costs that are borne by our company and by our customer, because that's what's required. Okay, now getting into why this is required is because when you're developing a product that has the complexity of bionic sebumodel, which has 80 of these best of breed nutrients, you can't just dump things in a vat, is that you have to have the manufacturing equipment as well to end up with a product that has a homogeneous blend. And what I mean by that is just say that you have a blender you're mixing and you're throwing in strawberries and flaxseeds and banana and grapefruit juice or what have you, and you mix this up so you have a recipe and you're dumping all that in your blender. You hit the button and now you pour out a glass. Now the assumption is that what's in that glass is going to be directly proportional to your recipe. But that's not necessarily true because the quality of your blender is going to determine whether it's homogeneous. And what I mean by that is that you might pour a glass that has five strawberries in it and you might pour another glass that has three strawberries in it. And so that the label, again, getting back to the nutritional product, the label is Based upon what went into the original vet. In other words, how many strawberries and how many blueberries and how many bananas. But the bottle that you buy on the shelf doesn't necessarily reflect those proportions because the quality of the blood has to be able to produce a homogeneous blend. And with bionic supermodel you have ratios of around 12,000 to 1 in some cases with some trace minerals to say gross quantities of connective tissue substrates. And so in order to have each tablet and each caplique have the kind of have a homogeneous blend which evenly made across the entire batch is not an easy thing to do. Most manufacturers would have no comprehension of how to do this because you have to deal with all the different viscosities and all the different consistencies of the raw materials. I mean, you have some things that look like grass that are in the product and other things that are fine powders and other things are sticky. When you deal with the physical properties of all these diverse nutrients that you have in bionic sibo model, it's a nightmare in order to make that product. And so, so the average person has no comprehension of the engineering hurdles that must be overcome and the quality control that must be overcome in order to just to be able to manufacture this.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

Okay, then the next step is that over the last 20 years is that we use an engineering process of evaluating how the product performs. In other words, we get out of the scientific world, which is the controlled environment. In a laboratory we have a single variable and everything's controlled, which is what we use for the screening process of nutrients. But once you get out into the real world, we're thinking in terms of engineering, which is where you don't know how many variables you're dealing with. Like when you're training for Ironman, there's a lot of variables out there that you know of, but there's a lot of unknown unknowns. And so what we're concerned about is, is improving the reliability of the product to the best that is possible by doing field testing of the product and getting feedback from not just athletes, but say Navy Seals or are people doing high altitude climbing or are people doing race across America doing extreme things. Over the years you begin to get feedback from people that are out there in the real world pushing the human performance envelope and getting feedback from them on what the benefits are. So now we can start to get into what somebody can expect to have from using the bionic supermodel. Because the idea here is that when you're training, you have to rather Than the conventional view of where you're training to get faster because of the training, throw that out the window and instead view training, the training process, when you start to look at it from the perspective of a biological system, training is causing damage. And so when you're out training, the first thing you need to think about, like say you're going to go on a hundred mile ride. What you need to think about is that, okay, I'm going to go out on this 100 mile bike ride and it's going to traumatize me and I lot of different ways. There's going to be structural damage to connective tissue, there's going to be all kinds of damage to cell membranes. Electrolyte balances are going to be just wiped out and various nutrients are going to be expended or converted into other substances that may not be able to be resynthesized to their original state and then energy is being lost. Okay, so you do this hundred mile ride, you've done all of this. So the first thing to think about is, okay, the ride caused all this damage and now you go into the adaptive response phase, which the whole idea of this really comes back to Hans Selye's book the Stress of Life that was written in 1956, which talked about, okay, there's a stress response and then there's an adaptive response to that stress. And if it's an overwhelming stress that you go into an emergency state, kind of a metabolic mash unit, so to speak. And so, okay, so the thinking here is that, okay, you're going to do all this damage to the body to train. The purpose of the training is to improve your performance or create what I call a Delta P. Like in the economics world they talk about seeking alpha where alpha is an economic return that is above what you would NX financial return. The same thing happens here is that the reason for your training is that you want to become faster or stronger or whatever your sport is, but you want to improve that delta P so your performance improves. Okay, how does your performance improve if you just went out and caused damage so that you're actually, your performance has degraded when you get off the bike after the end of your 100 mile ride, your performance has actually degraded quite significantly and a 10 would be go ahead and do another 100 mile ride immediately and you quickly realize, oh well, your performance is not the same as your first 100 mile ride. Okay, so the body's viewing it as this major stressor that you just threw at it. It has no idea what you're trying to do, it's just going, it perceives damage. So now it's going into its modes to have an adaptive response. And this is, now I'm going to tie this into the purpose of bionic signal model. You've got this alarm response where the body needs to first it needs to compensate for the damage you already did. In other words, if you could produce such and such a time in a 100 mile bike ride, the first thing it has to do is compensate for what damage you did and restore energy stores that were lost just so that you could equal what you did. That's the first thing. But the reason why you trained was not to go out there and beat your head against the wall so that, that you could do an exact performance again. It's so that you could have an improved performance. Okay, well where does that improved performance come from? Well, that gets really complicated. And that gets back to, okay, the body is perceiving on several different levels of stress. And on a higher level, it's not about going faster on your bike, it's about mobilizing resources and adapting the stress so that you're, your survival capabilities, your ability to survive is enhanced. That's really what's going on. And so it really comes down to, okay, the body is going to respond in a way to improve its survival prospects. Okay, so this perception, most of it occurs or occurs at the system level, which is really the way to look at that is something's going on in the combined assets of your neurological immune system and endocrine systems. Just view those as one big information processing system that's involved with perception. And then at the cellular level you also have perception, which is mostly going on with the cell membrane and signal pathways that come into the cell and out of the cell and signals also coming from the system level. So now you've got all this information traffic, this is this new field of bioinformatics is where it's really impacting what the is system. This, it really has changed things dramatically. And I'm just tying into that in terms of, okay, how can I apply that to improving athletic performance? Well, it's one and the same because the organism doesn't know anything about athletic performance, but it knows a hell of a lot about perception and adaptive response. Okay, so now I'm going to tie in the bionic supermodel. Okay, so the damage has been caused and the reason for your training was to improve your performance or have an increased delta P. But in order to have that increased delta P You had to have an increased delta S which is stress. Stress was that 100 mile ride a delta S would be okay the next time I'm going to do 110 mile ride a Delta S, is that 10 miles the difference between what you're going to be able to do next time because of an improved delta P minus what you did. So that's the change you're looking at, the change in your performance relative to the change, change of the stress caused, that caused the adaptive response which enabled your improvement in performance. So now how does this happen? A major role of what happens is micronutrition has to have its presence in a way such that all of the responses that the body has are going to be met in real time in a pretty narrow. In other words, your window for adaptive response is not months, it's really a matter of hours. And say most of it occurs in 72 to 96 hours. So you have to have everything available for it to adapt to stress to maximize your return, to have your maximal improvement in that delta P. If you're missing anything that is really, really crucial, then you're going to actually go backwards. In other words, you just broke your butt riding for 100 miles. But if you do not have the necessary resources to just get back to an even keel, your performance actually degraded. Now as you get into better and better condition, what happens is that your margin for error gets smaller and smaller until it shrinks to nothing. And here's what I mean by that is that training for Ironman and many other sports like it is that you are creating an artificial environment as far as the organism is concerned. Because what you are doing we were not designed to do. And so our adaptive capacity which has genetic epigenetic limitations is at some point going to reach a point in your training to where your adaptive capacity is only equal to the stress that you cause in your training. Let's just say for getting back to the 100 mile ride, for some people, that 100 mile ride, the damage that it cost in order to create that stressor is going to be equal to your adaptive capacity, which means that there's nothing left on the table to improve performance. So that means you are in what I call performance arrest. Performance arrest means that you cannot improve because the damage that's caused by a stressor to elicit adaptive response, it cannot yield an improvement. And this happens to everybody. Now here's the real kicker here, if everybody's grasping this idea is that the biggest potential upside of what you have available as far as the six inputs to improving performance. The biggest potential upset is micronutrition. And why is that so? It's because. Because the whole field of micronutrition, the whole theory behind it has always been based upon a deficiency model about what is the minimum micronutrition to avoid pellagra, beriberi, scurvy, diseases of deficiency. And it's never been a focus on optimal micronutrition to have the greatest adaptive response to a training stress, especially at the limits of human performance. And so this is a total, totally different problem. Is there testing? Yes, there is for some things. When you go out and do nutritional testing, it's just testing for your basic vitamins and minerals. If you go to Spectracel labs in Houston, they test for some other things that are important, like CoQ10 and lipoic acid and a few other things, but there are hundreds of other nutrients that are not being tested for. And the testing is only telling you what's going on in a fairly narrow window with Spectracel, they're testing your white blood cells so that you get a longer window than you would from a normal blood test. And that's why Spectracel, I like to have people, if they're going to do testing, do it with Spectracel. But see, it's still what you're not doing is you're not testing for what the micronutritional demands are in the dynamics state while you are training and while you're adapting to stress, is that nobody knows what the demands are for various nutrients. All you can do and what I do is I look at the metabolic network and look for all the bottlenecks. What I'm doing is that I am finding out where all these bottlenecks are. And then you have to have an appropriate dosage. That's why the product has a scalable dose design. It's the only product that does this. Rather than saying, take two tablets twice a day, it has a table on it which gives you for a given body weight and a given stress level. The dose level varies with that stress. And so the red zone, what I call the red zone, and then there's a yellow zone and a green zone and a blue zone. The red zone is for when you're under extreme stress and you're looking for the best possible adaptive response. That's the dosage that you use under those conditions. And what is being provided is that this entire spectrum, going back to the original part of the discussion, is that there's this roster of all the best nutrients of all the different categories from the best manufacturers are going to an elite systems integrator. That's the company that takes all these source materials and then, and then manufactures the product. You have the elite system integrator that in the tablets and the capliques of bionic supermodel, when you're taking an appropriate dosage that you are supplying a vast array in appropriate concentrations to best address what the body's needs are to adapt to stress at the performance margin. And that's the difference. This is the only product in the world that can do that.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. So what is it exactly that you've put into it?

Okay, we can briefly go there on the website there is.

A part of.

The brochure, it has a section on. It's called a global collection of best of breed nutritional and botanical ingredients which is like 17 pages long. And so, so this goes into a description of the nutrient and reductionist format and also site studies. For example, some of the key nutrients for energy production are acetyl L carnitine, which is not to be confused with L carnitine, which is for the most part it has been used mostly in research for neurological performance, but it also plays key roles in energy production. And this is a nutrient that. See, one of the things is that there are many nutrients that the body can make. And because there is at least a theoretical synthetic pathway to make these nutrients, they're not essential nutrients. In other words, they don't make the status of being a vitamin. A mineral is a mineral, but a vitamin has to be some nutrient that the body cannot make itself. Okay, so here's the Achilles heel. And that type of thinking, that type of thinking sort of works when you're a couch potato. You're a person that's not highly stressed. But what happens when you start to introduce great stresses, especially stresses that go beyond what the human body is capable of doing chronically, is that your body is not able to synthesize these nutrients such as acetyl L carnitine and beta alanine and lipoic acid. You're not going to meet the demands. The magic of biological systems is that they have enormous resilience, which means if we didn't have the kind of resilience we had, we wouldn't be around today. So we can adapt to metabolic stress that's caused by just very low levels of nutrients. So you will survive. But that's the goal of, of improving human performance in athletic events is improving your Delta P. The whole basis of the networks in the body is mostly about resilience. It's about, okay, if you could rob Peter to pay Paul so we can rob Peter to pay Paul really, really well. And so you can get by at very low levels of all kinds of things. But that is not. It's what I call a plan B scenario is that a plan B scenario is one where a plan A scenario cannot be executed because there's a shortage of something which may not be. It may be something that's three or four or five enzymes away. Each enzyme is a catalyst in the metabolic pathway. Like say you want to get from A to E, but you're low in something that activates an enzyme at C. Well, that pathway is stunted. You can't use it very well. So thankfully biological systems have other pathways. They could get to eat, so they'll be used, but they're not as efficient. So therefore your overall adaptive response is not as good. And when you start pushing the envelope, your performance envelope to where your adaptive capacity is no longer up to the task of compensating for a stress, now you're in deep doo doo because your performance, you'll undergo performance arrest. I mean, sure, all apps athletes have reached the point to where they reach a plateau and they wonder why they don't improve. They'll change everything, right? Right, Ben? They'll change their training, they'll change their coach, they'll change their diet and sometimes that helps. They'll change how they sleep, they'll change their bike, they'll change their shoes. But the one thing they don't change is their micronutrition because they don't realize that, that there are so many possible upsides by making a major change there that if you start removing the shortcomings in your micronutrition, then all of a sudden you can have a major breakthrough in performance. A major breakthrough. So what happens is that you reach this point to where you're on the verge of a breakthrough or a breakdown. A breakdown occurs when all of a sudden you introduce a great stress and some something really bad happens. I mean metabolically and structurally can be like an avalanche that all of a sudden you put one straw too many on the camel's back and now you're done all of a sudden it could manifest an immune response to where all of a sudden you get sick. The body's really smart is that oftentimes it will get sick and at the worst possible time in your perception, like you may be three weeks away from Ironman and now all of a sudden you get sick and you're going, oh, My God, I got sick and now my performance is going to be bad. Well, it's because you were pushing the envelope there and it wanted you to pull over. And so by making you get sick, it's able to pull you over. Now, on the other side of the coin, you can have a breakthrough. A breakthrough. Is that the way you need to look at the limitations? Like say you've reached this performance plateau that you've done everything, you've hit your head against the wall, you've done all these different things that try to get over this plateau and you just can't do it. And the way you have to look at a system, this comes from system engineering, is that you have to look at it like an onion. There's many layers of limits. Well, you bump up against the limit and it's kind of like trying to figure out the combination on a lock, you know, is it 13 left, 15 right, you know, 8 left, you know. No, that didn't work. You know, you're trying all these different lock combinations, but you're at a limit. Okay. The easiest thing that you can do when you reach a point to where you've been stuck, you've been stuck in the mud, performance wise, for a long time, is introduce this bionic supermodel where you have this broad spectrum of all of these different nutrient classes of this high quality homogeneous blend, great manufacturing. So you're releasing all of these different possible limitations that are causal in why you're stuck in the mud. And so like, even when you're in your taper, this is a very smart thing to do. The physiology of the taper is not well understood at all. It's weird on how all kinds of things can happen physiologically to where you have a big performance increase. Even though in terms of your perception you think that your performance is degrading because you're not working. You equate improved performance with working hard, when actually you should equate working hard with degrading performance. Because as I said, when you're training, all you're doing is causing damage. So all the upside to your training comes from adaptive response. You need to focus on that. And so the shift of thinking should be instead of trying to push the envelope harder, introduce the idea of pulling the envelope. Pulling the envelope is the other side of the curve. It's to where instead of having maximal stress and you're not adapting well, what you're doing is that you're using much less stress, but the focus is on adaptation. That's what a taper is a taper is where you're forcing yourself to shift, to make 180 degree shift from pushing the envelope to pulling the envelope. So where the focus shifts to adapting to stress. What I'm saying is that people should think about doing that more often during their normal training cycles. And certainly in terms of micronutrition, because micronutrition, as I said, micronutrition is the silent killer of performance. Because you never know why you're not improving. There's no clues, there's no clue to why you're not improving. When you introduce a bionic supermodel into a situation to where you have these onion layers of limits, probably many of your next limitations will be micronutrients, you know, some will not be. I'm not trying to sell the idea that micronutrition is going to be the key to the kingdom of removal of barriers of limits forever, because it's not. There could be many other things in play, but it's the easiest one to do and it is also the most likely one that I have seen. So therefore there's massive upside in somebody doing this, at least trying this concept. And I would say a good one third of people will notice big benefits right away. Some people will have miraculous benefits. And I'm not saying it's going to make you walk on water, but there's some people that. It's kind of like the story of Androcles and the lion. Androcles one day met the lion, and the lion had a thorn in its paw, and so Androcles took the thorn out, and so the lion was forever in gratitude to Androcles. So it's kind of like that. It's kind of like you're this big lion, but you've got five thorns in your paws, which all are micronutritional, not necessarily deficiencies, but they are not at optimal levels. So you're not having a maximal adaptive response. So you're pulling those thorns out. Don't you think that's a good idea to do before doing something else? Pull the thorns out first. And believe me, you can see big improvements in performance by doing that.

Gotcha. So you mentioned that there's a PDF available that kind of has a list of the components.

It goes as a PDF. Yes.

And what's the title of that again?

It's on the home page, which I'm sure you'll give people the link. It's called Let Me go to the Web.

What I can actually do is I.

Can go to the profile. Yeah, you can just Pull that PDF if you want, Ben. It's called Profiles of P. Nutrients at Botanics. Because we could be on the phone for another hour from me going over nutrients, I'll put that as a link.

For folks to read. The impression that I'm getting from the two discussions that we've had so far is that, A, there's a lot more that goes into the creation of a nutritional supplement than I think a lot of people are aware of, and B, this particular supplement that you've designed was created not necessarily to be affordable, but rather the ideal supplement that one would take if cost was not an object, but performance was the performance. And having the body do what it's supposed to do was kind of the Holy Grail, right?

That's the idea. The net result of this is that. See, my vision of this is that I'm not in the nutritional supplement business. I mean, I realize legally, even right on the master of a label, it has to say dietary supplement. The law says that. But that's not the business I'm in. If somebody's calling me up and they want a vitamin, I can refer them to somebody else to buy a vitamin, because I'm not really in the vitamin business. Most people, when they really think through why they want this nutrient or that nutrient, it's not because they want the vitamins, they want some particular kind of benefit. But there's thinking is reductionist. They're thinking, okay, if I've got a sore foot, I take a product for sore feet, and if I've got a stye in my eye, I take a product for a stye in my eye. But the biological system doesn't work that way. It works as an entire unit. You need to have all the nutrients required to have the best possible response. And when you're training, you're causing enormous damage to everything in the body. When you're riding your bike, it's not just about depleting glycogen and using fat and using your heart. I mean, your immune system is getting trashed. When you get off on a long bike ride, you have immunosuppression, you have a window about three hours to where you're a target for upper respiratory infections big time, because your immune response drops like a rock the moment you've done a long training session like that. So there's so much that's going on. It's like neurological. I think that there needs to be more of a focus in athletic training, not on the stimulus side, but on the adaptive response side for improving neurological Adaptations to training. Everybody's focused upon the muscle, but it's much more about the peripheral nervous system and also central nervous system that there's a lot of upside to be had there by using nutrients that are being stressed. In other words, there's a greater demand for them imposed by the training that people realize. And because unfortunately this is, unfortunately they're not vitamin status, they're not considered that important because the statement is if the body can make it, the body can make all it needs, which is not true. And as you get older, that's for age group people. Now this is where it really gets to be a killer for age group people. Like, say when you get into your fifth decade, sixth decade and seventh decade, you have changes in gene expression for the synthesis of some of these conditionally essential nutrients, for example lipoic acid and CoQ10. These things drop off like a rock and you need those in very great concentrations. For CoQ10 the turnover per day is around 2 grams per day and most people make around 500 milligrams per day. And the dietary input is quite low. And so that's something that's being highly stressed. And where it's being highly stressed is that CoQ10, which is involved in the electron transport chain, which is after the Krebs cycle. You have the electron transport chain, but you also have the electron transport chain in what's called beta oxidation. It's where the body has a switch point between using carbohydrates or fats. The beta oxidation is at the front end, which goes in right before the Krebs cycle. And, and that is critical for another demand for CoQ10. And this is because you need to improve beta oxidation to improve fat metabolism. And that's the lifeblood of training for Ironman is adaptive response. So that one of the key adaptations is improving your maximal lipid power, which I talked about in the first discussion. Well, now I'm tying it into the nutritional needs of women. When you're stressing that system out, when you're going 100 miles and then the next time you're doing 110 miles and over the years, let's say you're doing, you're going on some ridiculous 180 mile ride because that's the stress needed to improve it. You still need to have those nutrients there in very high concentrations to have that adaptive response because you have diminishing returns and as you get older it gets far worse. And so therefore the need to, to have all of these nutrients in appropriate concentrations under conditions of real time demand becomes paramount. And that's the point I'm trying to make is that this is a totally different paradigm. The way to look at things, it's influenced by systems engineering, it's influenced by bioinformatics, it's influenced by epigenetics.

Gotcha.

Survival at the survival not just of the organism level, but also at the species level. So this all comes together and the only commercial offering that addresses this is this particular product. And to manufacture it requires the engineering expertise in order to make it happen. At the engineering deals with the real world of making stuff science is about. The basic concept of science is not to prove anything, it's to disprove. Like when somebody says this is scientifically proven, they're either a liar or they're ignorant, or they're the snake oil says them. Because science proves absolutely nothing. Science, all it can do is disconfirm or falsify. That's the purpose of science. It's testing a hypothesis. If it works, then it, then that hypothesis lives. If it was disproved, then it dies and it's replaced by something else. That's the process of science. The process of engineering is kind of like Gmail. When it came out it said beta, right? It said Beta. It said Beta. For years. Engineering is about continuous stepwise refinement. In the real world that's really messy. It has an unknown number of variables. There's all kinds of what they call black swan events or fat tail events that come out of nowhere. And that's why in engineering you have to over build things because you don't really know what you're going to encounter in the real world. You can had those rare events that can sink your ship. You know, if the Titanic had five more water, had one more watertight compartment, the Titanic would have survived. You know, so it was overbuilt to be able to handle such and such size iceberg or Katrina, you know, the levees can handle a Class 3 hurricane but not a Class 5. And so if it were overbuilt, it would have been able to handle it. But it was. But it comes down to cost. And the same thing is about bionic supermodel is that this thing is being built to be able to deal with stresses of say a Navy Seal that's been deployed is at high altitude being stressed out, half starving, being shot at or high altitude climber that's going to go from base camp to the summit of Everest and back in one move without oxygen. And it's those kinds of things where people, the clients that I have, they're interested in improving their performance. They're calling because they're looking for a reliable tool to be able to enhance their performance the most that's possible in the micronutritional dimension.

That makes sense. Well, what I'm going to do, since we're running short on time, is I'll put a link to the Bionic Supermodel in the show notes. I'll also put a link to that PDF and in the show notes. And then as we release these interviews, if you've been listening in and you have questions about some of the things that James talked about, then leave them as a comment in the show notes and we'll address those. But in the meantime, James, thanks for coming on the call, coming onto the show and spending time explaining the idea behind Bionics.

It's my pleasure, Dan.

Alright folks, so until next time, this is Ben Greenfield with James Audio signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com okay folks, so here's the deal. Obviously lots more that you could go learn about when it comes to bionx Supermodel and I will put a link to it in the show notes. I personally took it for a month, basically kind of quit taking almost everything else I was taking other than the Ener prime and it was very convenient and I really didn't notice a huge difference in terms of the energy levels that I had when I was taking everything else versus the energy levels that I had when I was taking the Bionic Supermodel. Like I said, it is expensive stuff. It's high quality stuff, but it is expensive. But if cost is really not an issue for you and you just want the convenience of only ever having to take just a couple of things rather than having to a bunch of pill bottles in your refrigerator or having to figure out when to take 18 different supplements. This is really good stuff and I would actually recommend that you check it out. I mean you got a lot of guys using it. Mark Allen is the latest guy who is using it and pushing it to his athletes and that guy really knows his stuff nutritionally. So that wraps up the discussion about Bionic Supermodel on the podcast, but I'd like to keep this discussion going in the comments. If you have questions for myself or for James Audio, then leave them as a comment in the show notes to this podcast, podcast number 119. And again you can go back and listen to the first Bionic Supermodel James Audio interview which was podcast number 118. Now be sure to leave the podcast a ranking in itunes. It really helps keep us going. This podcast lets us was actually one of the top 20 in fitness in itunes, which is great. Be sure to check out my other podcast, the Get Fit Guy Podcast. If you haven't checked that out yet, it's five to ten minutes shorter snippets. Really entertaining stuff, though. I try and keep it really dense in terms of the information since I've only got five or 10 minutes to get it out there. And then finally, if you want to keep that Inner Circle podcast going, be sure sure to donate. We'll have lots of goodies coming down the pipeline for the folks who are wanting to become a part of that Inner Circle podcast and make that $10 donation. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.