Episode #153: Are Pedicures Healthy? Crossfit, Recovery & More…Ben Answers More Of Your Burning Questions About Training & Nutrition

In this podcast Beta alanine supplementation the VersaClimber are pedicures healthy back to back long run races, phosphatidylserine are growth hormones and colostrum bad eating for your body type, Drinking beer during endurance sports, limu superfoods, fructose allergies, recovering between half Ironman triathlons, when to do speed training for a sprint race and can you drink too much green tea?

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 I am sipping my coconut water. I just got back from a beautiful bike ride here in Spokane, Washington and today's episode is actually a huge grab bag of questions. I decided to catch up on all the questions, the questions that haven't been asked because before that is that I've gotten from listeners over the past few weeks before we launch into this huge series of interviews that I've kind of had stocked up for the summer kicking off next week with Dr. Bill Meisner who is a world champion masters runner who happens to be a plant based diet author and proponent. So that's coming up next week though this week a ton of questions as you probably heard from the introduction. So we will jump into the content in just a second. This week released over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com I put out a video about the five best one dumbbell exercises. I only do have one set of dumbbell at my one set of dumbbells at my house and I showed you five of my top exercises that I do with just one of them. They're in that video over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com and also put up a video that is a seminar that I taught last week about six ways to begin training for Ironman Triathlon. So a lot of content over there on the blog. In terms of special announcements, I just want to remind you that if you do want to come party with my wife and I down in Jamaica this November, there is a triathlon down there that we both signed up for. You can sign up for too. I put a discount code over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com for you to sign up. And also my book Shape 21, which is the 21 day lean body manual where I teach you how to exercise and how to eat is available on Facebook. Just go to facebook.com and start to type in the word shape21 or go to the link that I have right there in the show notes for this episode. Episode number 1:53 Our pedicures healthy and you'll be able to access that. So let's go ahead and jump right into this week's Listener Q and A. After a quick announcement, 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, 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.

Listener Q and A.

Okay, now remember, if you've got the free Ben Greenfield Fitness iPhone app or Android app which you can grab on the right side of the page over there at BenGreenfieldFitness. You can actually ask a question right there through the app. And you can also get into my Ben Greenfield Fitness inner circle for free through that app as well. So check that out if you have the iPhone or the Android Ben Greenfield Fitness Free app. The first question this week is from Kristen, who says in one of your podcasts you spoke about beta Alanine. Is this safe to take with caffeine on an empty stomach and are its effects on women different than men? Well, beta alanine in my opinion is really an up and coming supplement that shows a great deal of promise for sports performance and athletic enhancement. It's got a lot of similar research to creatine in terms of it performing over and over again very, very well. In a lot of the research. And basically the way that beta alanine works is you've got this peptide in your body. It's called a dipeptide. It's called carnosine. And carnosine is something that is synthesized from, or synthesized from a combination of histidine and beta alanine. So when you get this carnosine built up in your fast twitch muscle fibers and also in your nervous tissue, it acts as a buffer. So it neutralizes a lot of the acidity that is formed when your muscles contract in an anaerobic state, such as during a sprint, during a weight training session, during a hard cardio effort, anything of that nature. And the way that alanine or beta alanine supplementation works is pretty basic. What it does is it increases your intramuscular carnosine levels. And then you're allowed to buffer all of the hydrogen ions or the ions, the acidic ions that build up when you're exercising. And so technically, that would allow you to push through the burn a little bit better, so to speak. So there are a ton of different kind of beta alanine studies that are out there. Some of them, yes, have been sponsored by people who produce the beta alanine supplements. But just to give you kind of a smidge of some of the trials that were out there, there was a four week trial where they compared beta alanine and creatine and found that beta alanine had a lot better effects beyond creatine by itself when it was combined with creatine for delaying fatigue and increasing the amount of work that you could do. Not work, like sitting at the office typing, like work in the gym. So there was another four week trial that used beta alanine without creatine and that increased the time to exhaustion while cycling. Another 10 week trial with combined beta alanine and creatine again showed that beta alanine had a lot of effects in addition to when you just took creatine. If you took beta alanine on top of creatine for increasing maximum strength. There have been a few other studies that showed again, an increase in total work output with 10 weeks of beta alanine supplementation. And usually most of these studies were having people dose with about 4 to 6 grams or 4,000 to 6,000 milligrams of beta alanine, kind of split up into 1 to 2 milligram doses throughout the day, or, I'm sorry, 1 to 2 grams doses throughout the day. So the only issue with beta alanine is you get this reaction to it sometimes. I know I do. Called parathesia. And that's this histamine reaction. It feels like you have this itchy, tingly sensation on the outside of your skin. And, you know, you asked this question about caffeine, and caffeine can actually make that tingling or itching sensation just a little bit more intense. And one of the reasons for that is that beta alanine is nitric oxide potentiators. That means that it magnifies nitric oxide function. And so nitric oxide is what allows a little bit of extra blood to flow through capillaries close to the skin surface. And so that's part of what you feel with the tingling. And it's really harmless. But you will feel that as far as women, absolutely. There have been studies that have been done on beta alanine with women. There's one study with a little over 20 women who took about 3 to 6 grams of beta Alanine. Another group of women took a placebo and they measured the women's cycling capacity and total time to exhaustion. And the women who were on the Beta Alanine did have a significantly greater working capacity and total time to exhaustion over the people or the women specifically who didn't take Beta Alanine. So definitely a supplement that you could look into. I don't sell Beta Alanine. I'm not trying to produce a commercial for Beta Alanine. I take carnage put up by a company called Millennium Sports as a Beta Alanine supplement. And I don't use it all the time. Usually if I'm maybe I do like a sprint or an Olympic distance triathlon, that's when I'll supplement with Beta Alanine when I know I'm going to be going really hard and heavy. So. Good question. Another question here is from Matthew. Matthew says, I've been looking into this machine called the Versa Climber to help improve my running and cycling. Do you have an opinion about it, or should I just stick to running and cycling? Well, the Versaclimber is pretty cool. It's this big, long, vertical machine. You can get a home unit for a little under $2,000. Actually, you can get a home unit Versaclimber, and it's basically an upright exercise device that puts you in a climbing position. So you're working your arms, your shoulders, your back, your butt, your quads. And don't get me wrong, it's actually fairly difficult. It can burn a lot more calories than like, a spin bike or a StairMaster. And I've been on them before, and I really can't last longer than about 20 minutes without getting both tired and, yeah, maybe a little bit bored. Kind of like a rowing machine does show great promise in terms of having the ability to increase your oxygen consumption and give you a much higher heart rate during exercise compared to using a treadmill or rowing machine. And that's actually research that has been done on the Versaclimber specifically. So it does provide, in some cases, a better workout than doing things like running or rowing or riding a bike because you're using your arms, your legs, kind of similar to, like an elliptical trainer where you're using your arms and your legs, except it's a little bit more difficult because you're doing a lot more of the pushing and the pulling. So there's quite a bit less oxygen to go around. And it is certainly a good tool for improving your VO2 max, it's never going to reproduce the same biomechanical motion as running will, but it is a good alternative and similar to the Versaclimber, I'm actually right now researching another device called the Elliptigo, which is an upright elliptical machine. I'll be putting a video out pretty soon@BenGreenfieldFitness.com with me training on it and riding it and then giving you my thoughts on it. And I'm kind of excited to start using that. Some of you who are out watching Ironman Coeur d' Alene may have seen me tooling around on an Elliptigo machine and not quite sure if I'm sold on it. But stay tuned. I'll kind of let you guys know what I think about it here pretty soon in the future. But the Versaclimber is certainly a tough machine that will keep you in shape. So the next question is from Joseph, who says my feet are nasty. My wife is on my case to get a pen pedicure, which I have refused. My latest argument is that the calluses on my feet are protective and if they sand my feet down, I will get blisters. On the other hand, I see no substantive reason to get a pedicure. Is there any good argument for or against getting pedicures? Well, first of all, Joseph, I doubt your feet are as nasty as mine. I actually put a photo of my feet on the show notes to this episode, episode number 153. So you can see what exactly my ugly non pedicured feet actually look like. So for those of you who don't even know what a pedicure is, a pedicure, kind of like a manicure for the hands and the nails, is a way to help your feet and your toenails look better. So what it is is just a cosmetic treatment of your foot and your toenails. And it can help actually to prevent some nail diseases. It can help to prevent some disorders in your nails, like ingrown toenails. It can definitely make your foot look nicer. You can rub off a lot of the dead skin cells on the bottom of the foot. It would certainly get rid of those calluses. A lot of times they'll use a puma stone to kind of rub away some of the dead skin cells along the bottom of the foot. A lot of times you can get like a leg or a foot massage. When you go in to get a pedicure. You can get like shaving, waxing, exfoliation, moisturizing treatment. So it is Really a nice way to pamper yourself. I've gone in and gotten foot massages and got my feet pampered a little bit. Whenever I go down and race in Thailand, they have these big foot and I guess they would be considered pedicure parlors down there. But you certainly do want to be careful, especially in terms of the cleanliness of the place that you go to. So for example, let's say you shave and then you go in to get a pedicure. A lot of times what can happen is that shave creates these little nicks and then bacteria can enter your skin. If there are, for example, improperly cleaned foot baths at the salon where you're getting your pedicure specifically, there's a couple different types of fungi and a Myobacterium that can grow in these foot baths. And you can get a pretty serious foot infection and boils and nasty things going on with your feet when that occurs. So make sure there's a no open wounds on your feet, whether self inflicted through shaving or via some type of an accident or overuse of your foot. And then also make sure that you check and see how the actual foot baths are cleaned and how clean the salon in general is. Make sure they've got a license posted from the board of cosmetology. Make sure that they've got a health and safety poster posted. Make sure that any of like the trimming and the cutting, etcetera, Preferably is done by you. It would be better if you trim your own toenails and let them just kind of clean things up a little bit. So if you are a male, you're probably not doing anything that kind of goes down the route of the nail polish type of thing. But if you are a female, you probably are using nail polish and you do need to be careful with some of that. There are a lot of what are called dibutel phthalates in nail polish and that can cause some reproductive issues. And it's the same type of stuff you're going to find in perfume and hairspray as well. Anytime you're inhaling or absorbing these chemicals, there can be some pretty serious health effects that go on specifically in your reproductive organs. And even for males who are visiting a salon, if they've got a lot of these phthalates floating around in the air, there can be some pretty disturbing effects to male reproductive health. There can be permanent damage done to your testes and your prostate gland and your seminal vesicles and lots of other issues. Nail polish removers and Nail polish can be pretty toxic, so I would be really, really careful going to a salon that also uses a lot of nail polish or nail polish removers just because of the amount of toxic chemicals that are in those. So just make sure that if you go into a place that doesn't seem very well ventilated and there are a lot of chemicals, specifically the type of chemicals that would contain phthalates in them. Other things you need to be careful of would be to lean formaldehyde and oxybenzone. I would be careful, I would not make it a regular practice to be breathing those compounds or letting them hit your lungs. So ultimately, you know, it can help your foot health a little bit in terms of making your foot look better. If you've got poor foot hygiene, it could certainly help out with that a little bit if you're visiting a clean place. But just be careful where you go and what you're breathing into your lungs and you know, if you end up going in and doing it. Send me a before and after picture of your foot and I'll post it up over at the Facebook Ben Greenfield fitness page. So there you go. Okay. Never talked about that before. All right, question from Tony who says, Ben, I'm an experienced ultra marathoner. I've run a 100 miler, a couple of 100k and seven 50k events. Geez. Along with a few marathons. Alright, this guy's an underachiever. He says, I'm currently training for my first 50 miler on a very familiar, very hilly course. I also want to run a flat 20 miler that takes place one week before the 50 mile event. I usually have a low mileage run the weekend before an ultra, but really want to run this 20 miler and I feel I can pull it off. What are your suggestions on this? If you've got a good enough base going in, you can probably recover a little bit more quickly than a rookie can from this flat 20 miler. Obviously your age, the amount of weight training and core and hip stability that you have is certainly going to affect your ability to bounce back from a 20 mile run fast enough to do a 50 mile run the week later. But one thing I'm going to do for you is I'm going to link to an article that I wrote called Ironman Lightning Speed Recovery Secrets because there's a lot of stuff in there that can help you out quite a bit. So for example, Even before that 20 mile race starts, I would make sure that you're not going in with a lot of tightness or a lot of muscle adhesions. I'd be doing a few massage therapy or foam roller sessions the week of that 20 mile run. And I would also be following up with more of that soft tissue work to work out a lot of the metabolites and inflammation after that 20 mile run. In terms of supplements, you could certainly take some things that may help you in terms of like lactic acid buffering or hydrogen ion buffering, as well as use a gel or some type of supplement that has amino acids in it, something like a Gu Roctane, because those amino acids are going to allow you to bounce back more quickly from your 20 mile run. So I would be taking proteins during the event and when I'm talking about free radical buffers, you could use something like that beta alanine that I talked about earlier. That'd be one example of something you could use if you really wanted to make sure that you were buffering the acid as quickly as possible. You aren't going to be creating a ton of lactic acid when you're running at a 20 mile pace, but we're talking about getting every little advantage that you could get. I would also make sure that you try and grab some topical magnesium. I do have a link to that in the article Lightning Speed Recovery Secrets. And that can really increase blood flow. It can help to displace calcium, which is a common contributor to post race soreness. I would, during and after the event consider wearing compression gear to really help with a lot of the blood flow during the run and afterwards. So you could use compression socks if it's not super hot out. You could even use like a compression tight for example. I just got back from a bike ride and while I am recording this podcast, I'm wearing a compression tight called a blitz 110% and it's got all these little pockets in it that I can fill with ice packs. And so that combination of ice and compression can help you to bounce back a lot more quickly. I would do the ice and compression after the event, but certainly the compression would be something to consider even during the event if you've got your or if you have access to something like physical therapy modalities like electrostimulation, and you can get electrostimulation units for home use for as little as 100 bucks and up to $1,000. Electrostimulation is a great way to stimulate the muscles to contract and keep blood flowing without actually engaging in like heavy joint impact, the same type that you get from running. So you could Certainly use an electrostimulation device for the days after that race between your 20 miler and your 50 miler. And as far as anything else you can do, certainly focus on the recovery component of nutrition. I would consider taking like proteolytic enzymes as well as a whole amino acid source as soon as possible after the event. For example, you could use something like recoveries for a proteolytic enzyme source. You could use something like master amino pattern for an amino acid source. Continue to use like a topical magnesium for the days after the 20 mile event. And on at least a couple days after the race, try and get an ice bath and then follow that up, for example, in the afternoon or the early evening with like an Epsom salts bath or a magnesium salts bath. And that will certainly help you to recover a lot more quickly as well. Again, removing inflammation and helping out with displacement of some of that calcium that can also cause some soreness. So those are some of the stops that I'd pull out if I were trying to recover as quickly as possible between a 20 mile weekend and a 50 mile weekend. As far as workouts go, just all light, easy stuff, you know, do some aqua jogging. You can do a little bit of time on the bicycle, but I really wouldn't run much at all between this to events. So hopefully that helps you out and gives you some ideas in terms of recovery. All right, question from Chris, who says, what is your opinion on phosphatidylserine and its use with endurance athletes? Phosphatidylserine is interesting stuff. I've actually been recommending it to several of my clients specifically for people who are having some issues with really, really high cortisol levels. And I'll talk about why in a little bit. But phosphatidylserine is one of those things that is required for the functioning of pretty much all cells. And you're going to find it in really high concentration in the brain, in the heart, in the liver, and also in skeletal muscle. So it's this big molecule and it's got an amino acid called serine that's linked to a fat, basically what's called a diglyceride or a fat via a phosphate molecule that kind of bridges the two components of phosphatidylserine. And what phosphatidylserine does is it's involved really with a lot of the ways that cells communicate with each other. So for example, it regulates the release of hormones like dopamine or noradrenaline that gets secreted by Your nerve cells, it's related to the way that tissues are going to respond to some of the processes that are involved in inflammation. And it's highly linked to brain function and, you know, happiness, stress or de stress. And one of the reasons for that is that it's got such a vital role in cell communication and nerve hormone secretion, which are very, very related to brain function. So they've done studies and have shown that when you supplement with phosphatidylserin, you get an enhancement of cognitive function, you can enhance learning and memory, you can decrease a lot of the effects of stress. And so it's not only something that would be used, for example, for sports performance, but also for people who are kind of struggling with mood disorders. Phosphatidylserin can be really useful for stuff like that. Interestingly, in terms of cortisol, when you get these chronically elevated levels of stress hormones like cortisol that are associated with a suppressed immune system, with an inability to repair and recover quite as quickly, phosphatidylserine can actually have a pretty cool effect on the release of those stress hormones following an exercise session. So it can actually blunt a lot of the cortisol release that occurs after you've done a hard exercise session, but it can do that without affecting the release of growth hormone. A lot of times when you try and shut down cortisol production, you can also shut down growth hormone, which is anabolic, which allows the muscles to repair and recover more quickly. But using phosphatidylserine to control cortisol production actually doesn't cause that to happen. It can also lead to lower perceived levels of post exercise muscle soreness. It's got a little bit of antioxidant activity going for it, so it can reduce some of the markers of oxidative muscle damage. So after you exercise, you're going to get a lot of like creatine kinase that you'll find in the bloodstream, a lot of peroxides, which are free radicals, and those can do a lot of metabolic damage or damage to the cellular membranes. And phosphatidylserine can buffer some of that. There have been other studies with phosphatidylserine that actually show a longer ability to complete an exercise bout up around a fairly high intensity, about 85% VO2 max. Comparing subjects who take phosphatidylserine with those who do not. So phosphatidylserin is a legal supplement that you can take. There aren't really a lot of risks for it or deleterious side effects when you're using it for sports performance. And really most of the side effects are positive, like this improved memory and lower levels of stress hormones. I would say that if you don't really have issues with mood and you're eating lots of things like dark leafy greens and you've got meat consumption, so you're eating a lot of fish. Rice is another source of phosphatidylserine. Unless you actually have some cognitive issues or unless you're struggling with something like adrenal exhaustion or huge amounts of cortisol, maybe a really poor testosterone cortisol ratio, some of the effects of overtraining. I don't necessarily think that phosphatidylserine is as good a supplement as using something like a beta alanine or an amino acid. But if you kind of have a combination of a lot of cognitive issues along with a really, really high amount of stress, specifically from something like endurance sports, there's certainly promise for phosphatidylserine to help out quite a bit. So something to look into as far as dosage recommendations. The dosages kind of vary a lot among quite a few of these studies, and they go from about 300 milligrams per day up to about 7 to 800 milligrams per day. As far as brands of phosphatidylserine, one brand that's decent is the Jaro phosphatidylserine. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. I think you can get it on Amazon, but I'll check and throw a link in there for you. And yeah, it's a good question. Good stuff. So Kathleen says goat's colostrum seems to be such a good supplement and I want to take it, but I've had breast cancer and the information about Colostrum talks about growth hormone. It is important that I do not raise my estrogen levels. Is this growth hormone something I should stay away from? Also, it says goat's colostrum can raise low blood sugar. Should people with diabetes not take this supplement? Well, first of all, if you don't really know what goat's colostrum is, we did an entire episode on it. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for colostrum, you'll see it there. But basically what it is is it's the early milk produced by mammals during the first few days after a baby's birth. So, like a goat, a cow would be a Couple typical sources where they're going to harvest colostrum, there's no harm to the animal. They take what's left over after the baby has already fed. But the reason that colostrum could be so beneficial is it's naturally very high in some growth factors that help those baby mammals to grow muscles and to repair and recover tissue and to form nice, healthy digestive tracts. And in humans, it can have a lot of similar positive effects. And so, for example, when you give colostrum to athletes, you're going to see an increase in things like peak power and vertical jump. You can see a decrease in the amount of the gut's potential for leaking during exercise. The gut tends to get very, very permeable when you exercise. It can produce a lot of gastrointestinal discomfort. And when you take colostrum, you can get rid of a lot of that gut leakiness. There are a lot of positive health benefits to colostrum as well. But anytime that you see the term growth factor dropped, when it comes to any supplement, one of the first things you need to think about is that what cancer is, is it's basically unbridled growth of cells. And that's something that growth factor can certainly contribute to. And bovine colostrum, goats, colostrum, any of these type of colostrums can really significantly increase insulin like growth factor levels. And there are possible correlations between high insulin like growth factor levels and various cancers, including breast cancer. So it is certainly something to think about. Now, I have not seen any studies that have looked into any correlation between colostrum and cancer. I would say that if you are someone who has something like a family history of breast cancer or someone who has been previously diagnosed, it may not be a supplement that you want to mess around with too much. And, you know, I'm not a doctor, I can't say for sure, but it could certainly there's not a direct correlation, but the fact that it produces high levels of insulin like growth factor might give you pause if you were concerned about cancer risk due to growth factor. It's something that I will look into a little bit more. And I'm going to also pass this question over to Joe Stout, who's one of the head researchers over at Mount Capra. That makes the colostrum that I personally take. And hopefully we can delve into this just a little bit more. As far as the blood pressure question, I'm not really sure where you heard that, because all the studies that have been done on colostrum actually show that it reduces blood glucose and controls blood sugar levels. So this would actually be something that would be potentially helpful for diabetics and not something that's harmful. So maybe that was just a misquote. All right, question from Tiffany, who says in one of your podcasts you mentioned that you were writing or had written a book about eating in accordance with your body type. I have realized recently that I am a skinny fat person and as a vegetarian that despises weight and resistance training, I am trying to figure out what the right balance of protein, carbs, fat is for me. Thanks for any insight that you can give me. Well, first of all, I'm not writing a book about eating in accordance with your body type, however, and there is about a 100 page contract sitting here just a few feet away from me that I'm still going back and forth with the publisher on about a book that is in the works. And it does have to do with body type and body typing and exercise and getting the body that you want. That's about all that I can tell you for now. I can tell you that it's going to be a very good book. It is going to be one of those books that just about anybody can grab and instantly use to make their body look way better. It's not a bodybuilding book, but it does have some stuff in there about eating based off of what your body looks like when you look in the mirror, like the shape of your stomach and your waist and your neck and your arms and your legs. But it's not a nutrition book as much as it is like an exercise, body shaping book type of book. And I'll certainly be keeping you guys up to date on that as it gets closer. It's just when you work with publishers, it's like, I've got another book on strength training for triathlon. That book, it's about a 400 page book. It's been done for a year and I am handcuffed. I can't really do anything because the publisher has it. And when you write a book, you sign over the rights for that book to the publisher. So I can simply, simply sit here and wish that all of you could get your hands on it. So anyways, back to Tiffany's question. In the question, she says that she's a skinny fat person. And I've talked about that before in the idea that people who are naturally lean can still have quite a bit of inflammation of bloating and of subcutaneous and visceral or abdominal fat formed due to poor eating patterns. Now, the fact that you're a vegetarian kind of gives me pause, especially because you despise weight and resistance training. That's kind of like the perfect setup for getting this skinny fat look. Because it's likely that as a vegetarian, you've got a high amount of carbohydrate consumption. It's likely that a lot of that is coming from potentially inflammatory sources like wheat and soy. And then you also are suppressing a lot of your body's naturally natural fat burning ability and natural ability to produce a lot of the hormones that are going to assist with fat loss and weight loss by despising weight and resistance training. So if you're trying to find out what the right balance of protein, carbs and fat are for you, and you're already skinny fat, the fact that you're skinny fat and you're a vegetarian and that's not working for you should give you a big clue. I would consider if I were you. If you're doing any long, slow cardio, and I'm guessing that you probably are, consider ditching that in favor of more high intensity cardiovascular intervals. Start to throw a full body resistance training routine in about three days a week. And my Get Fit Guy podcast over at getfitguy.quickanddirtytips.com would be a very good resource for learning how to weight train. I would listen to the first 10 episodes of that podcast. It'll be just a goldmine of weight training information for you and maybe help you to like weight training a little bit better. And then from a dietary standpoint, I would consider upping the protein and the fat a little bit. Listen to the Perfect health diet interview that I had last week with Paul Jaminette. Maybe read that book and certainly balance that out with information. For example, I am going to be interviewing a plant food nutritionist next week. But most of the really successful vegans and vegetarians and plant food proponents that I've interviewed, they all have really, really intense focus on getting the proper amounts of amino acids and fats in their diet, whereas I find that a lot of the average vegetarians don't, and especially the ones who have to deal with skinny fat syndrome, they especially need to reinvent the diet and also pick up more of the weight and resistance training and the high intensity cardiovascular intervals. So that's what I would recommend for you and hopefully that helps. Thomas wrote in and he said the Technical University of Munich in Germany has recently published research of a positive impact of beer on endurance sports. What is Your thought on that? Well, my first thought on this was that every single study that I've seen on beer and sports has shown an incredibly deleterious effect of alcohol on the ability to do anything and a decrease in time to exhaust exhaustion, on speed, on power, on strength, everything with the consumption of alcohol. So I went and took a look at this study and they used non alcoholic beer. And specifically what they were looking at was myocardial function or the muscles of the heart's ability to function and vascular adaptation after strenuous exercise when someone consumed this non alcoholic beer versus when someone also consumed a beverage, but a beverage without what are called polyphenols, which is something that non alcoholic beer has a lot of. And they studied post hard exercise, specifically post marathon run risk for inflammation, risk for heart failure and risk for cardiac death. And the people who actually supplemented their pre and post marathon running with this polyphenolic containing non alcoholic beer actually had better recovery and a lower risk of these cardiovascular risk factors or lower incidence of these cardiovascular risk factors. Granted, they were drinking about one to one and a half of these non alcoholic beers every day for three weeks before that marathon run. And it appears, although I'm not completely sure sure from the abstract and the methods that I'm looking at, it appears they may have actually had some during the run as well. Now these polyphenols, you're going to find a lot of them in the hops that is used to make the beer. And they're basically this organic chemical and what they have the ability to do is scavenge free radicals and they up regulate some of what are called the chelation reactions within the body. Specifically what they're going to do is they're going to take care of a lot of these reactive oxygen species like hydrogen peroxide and singlet oxygen that are produced during intense endurance bouts. And they're going to remove these from the cells to maintain healthy metabolic function. And they may have some other kind of health effects, like a lot of the anti aging effects that a lot of the other antioxidants have, such as slowing the process of, of skin wrinkling and maybe preventing some of the risks for peripheral artery disease. And you're going to find them in tons of different fruits and vegetables. So apples and blackberries and chocolate and green tea and olive oil. All of these types of foods contain a lot of these polyphenol antioxidants. So do not use the results of that study to go out and drink beer every day for three weeks before your marathon and definitely do not use it as an excuse to drink during your marathon or but do use the study as a reason to include lots of polyphenol containing foods in your diet because they are fairly healthy for you and could have life extending and now we see endurance sports recovery enhancing effects. So good question and thank you for bringing that study to my attention. I was concerned at first that everything I knew about beer was wrong until I looked at the study. Okay, Tom says, at a running expo before a local run, a salesperson gave me a sample of a dietary supplement called Limu Original, the premium Fukoiden blend. What is this? Well, as soon as he asked this, I knew this was probably one of those highly overhyped and overpriced blends of some type of unknown or incredibly rare superfood that comes in a bottle that looks a little bit like a wine bottle and costs you a lot of money, but at the same time really doesn't offer you any antioxidant or nutrient benefit over and above what you would find in something like a package of organic blueberries. And lo and behold, I was correct. This is a multi level marketing company. Anytime you go to a website and one of the big buttons that's on it says opportunity, you know that you're going to be paying more for the supplement, most likely because of some of the monies that are being kicked off to all of the reps to actually keep the multi level marketing model flourishing. So I don't want to say a lot else about this because I've covered, you know, I get these questions all the time about all these different unknown superfoods. All they turn out to be really are these, you know, high, what are called high orac or high antioxidant containing components that basically have some sugar in them and taste really nice and could offer you a lot of benefit, but potentially also have a lot of potential to make expensive urine. And usually they'll say that they have vitamins and minerals and amino acids and fatty acids in them. And all of that's true. But in most cases you can replicate the properties of these by eating a healthy whole food type of diet. So, good question. Sorry for the brief answer, but that's my response. So Jack says, kind of a long question from Jack. He says, I recently competed at the Ironman 70.3 UK. I was in a good position going into the run, but after about the 1k mark of the run, I began to feel bloated and sick. This GI distress continued over the whole run and so I was unable to take on any more fuel and unable to put together the 125 half marathon I was looking for. I was forced to slow down, stop and be sick and finished with a disappointing 1 hour and 42 half marathon. I had similar issues last season in both Ironman 70.3 and Ironman UK. So this year I adopted a paleo diet to help improve my diet and reduce GI distress. I thought the reduced gluten leading up to the race would help, but this was not the case. During the race, I had a gel just before the swim start and then consumed 500ml of Gatorade per hour with a gel per hour on the bike. I would appreciate your thoughts and ideas to help me discover the cause and prevent it from ruining yet another race. Well, probably. And I'm just going to go out on a limb here and tell you something that you may want to look into. If this is something that keeps coming back over and over again to bite you, Jack, you may have a fructose malabsorption issue, which would also be known as like a fructose intolerance. And that's just basically a digestive disorder in which you, excuse me, can't absorb fructose very well because you have deficient fructose carriers in your small intestine, specifically the enterocyte cells of your small intestine, which are responsible for a lot of the fructose absorption that goes on. So when that happens, you get a bunch of fructose, basically fermenting in the rest of your intestine. It can cause a lot of irritable bowel syndrome, it can cause a lot of issues during exercise. And the fact that you were drinking one of the sports supplements that contains very high amounts of fructose, in this case Gatorade, while also consuming gels that may or may not have had fructose, could have put you at a high risk for a lot of stomach discomfort if you do have a dietary fructose intolerance. Now you can go get basically a breath test to find out if you have a fructose malabsorption issue. And that's something that's very easy to do. And if that were the case, you'd want to begin to avoid a lot of these issues that may lead to the GI distress when you consume fructose. If you were eating a paleo diet, it's likely that your consumption of fruit may have been fairly low anyways, and so you may not have noticed this until you started to throw down all of the fructose that you were consuming during the race. Now to go even further into that, even if you don't have a fructose malabsorption issue, I personally get stomach upset within about two hours of consuming Gatorade during an endurance event. My stomach simply does not do well mixing Gatorade with other sugars and that may be because of the use of multiple sugar transporters actually causing a little bit of GI distress or a little bit of malabsorption of some of the sugars that I'm consuming along with the Gatorade or the Gatorade itself, I don't know. However, I do know that when I get rid of Gatorade during my endurance efforts and instead stick to only gels with clear water, I'm fine. So those are a couple things to look into. Hopefully those help you try those out and get back to me and let me know how it goes. So another question here from Justin about triathlon and he says, I just finished my second half Ironman this past Sunday. I followed one of your training plans on training peaks and I took 23 minutes off my first first half Ironman time. I wasn't sure how it would go as I missed a ton of the workouts, but I guess between absorbing as much knowledge from your podcast and doing the workouts I did, it came together for me on race day. My question is I have another half iron race in just under four weeks. Knowing that I have the endurance to get through the event, I want to focus on getting faster now if I can. Should I be doing hill repeats and running hills to boost my strength and strength speed or what is the best way to add some speed over the next few weeks? Well, if you've got four weeks between these two races, the only concern is that you probably tapered or laid off some of your training. Cut your training volume by anywhere from 30 to 60% for your taper for your first race. And what that means is you probably lost a little bit of fitness. And so if you spend the next few weeks before your next race only doing like short hard workouts, you're going to risk losing even more aerobic capacity and losing even more fitness before this next race. So if I were in your shoes, and I do this a lot when I have kind of a one month gap between 1/2 Ironman and a half Ironman the next week or the next month. As a matter of fact, this is what I'm just going into. I did a half Ironman last month. I did a race in Kona. And this weekend I'm doing another half Ironman down in Portland, the Rev3 triathlon. What I'll do is after that first half Ironman, I'll return to about two weeks of kind of longer training to start to build back up my aerobic foundation. What I would consider to be base training. It's not a ton of hot and heavy and hard workouts which actually don't really help the muscles recover too well from that first half Ironman, but instead doing a lot of kind of slower, more aerobic kind of skill based workouts combined with some of the recovery recommendations that I gave to the previous question who had asked about how to recover more quickly. And then for a couple weeks leading into your next race, that's when you begin to reduce volume again and you do a lot of the short, more intense workouts on the bike. All of your workouts might be intervals of anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes in duration with long recovery times. All of your run efforts might be anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes in duration. Those are all interval based again with long recovery times and then short 50, 100 or 200 meter repeats in the swim to help out with your speed. Frankly, working on building your strength is something that is tough to do unless you kind of save that more for the off season or the early season. It's tough to build strength right in the middle of a couple races. You're better off focusing on speed and power and fast work application combined with a little bit of a return to volume initially after that first race. So hopefully that helps out. All right, next question is from Sarah. Another sip of coconut water. I started doing CrossFit December 1st. My background in fitness is a more traditional bodybuilding type workout with your typical cardio like running or elliptical trainer. At first I had a hard time with CrossFit since it's powerlifting type stuff. It was like I had to be trained all over again. Since then I've improved greatly but I lack in the intensity and endurance. Many times I'll stop midway to catch my breath and regroup, but I see others pressing forth and pushing past. I'd really like to get better at CrossFit. I've heard that doing two of the workout a day or the workout of the day a day may help in my endurance and intensity, but isn't that overuse? I crossfit five days a week at 5:30am what recommendations do you have for a crossfitter to get faster, stronger and to gain endurance and stamina? Well, first of all if you're getting into CrossFit and you lack in the intensity any endurance, more is not better. Shifting to 2A days, as you say, certainly is overuse. And the fast route to injury and overtraining CrossFit is very intense. Doing it as a two a day is only going to cause you to go less hard and have subpar workouts or to go just as hard as you should and injure yourself. The workout of the day was just meant to be that the workout of the day, not the workouts of the day. When you're using something like CrossFit to get fitter. What I would be focusing on instead would be first of all addressing any potential performance limiter issues that might be creeping up on you from a physiological or a biological level. So have you looked at your blood glucose? Have you looked at your minerals or your magnesium levels? Have you looked at your vitamin D? Have you looked at your hormonal or recovery status by looking at your testosterone cortisol ratios or your estrogen levels or your DHEA levels? Have you looked at into the type of diet that you're eating and whether or not it's supporting the level of activity that you're engaging in? And if you are glycogen depleted before you go to bed at night? Before that 5:30am workout, have you looked into your iron levels or your ferritin levels which can lead to poor oxygen uptake if it's low and cause a lot of the fatigue or the heaviness that you're talking about? Have you looked into your essential amino acid levels? Do you have enough on board? How is your diet in terms of whole protein intake intake? Have you looked into your essential fatty acid status? What's your omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acid status look like? Are you more inflamed than you should be based off a really high omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acid ratio? Lots of things to look into. You could do something like get a performance profile. You can get a bunch of tests sent to your house. You can drip a bunch of saliva into a tube and bleed on a blood spot and send this stuff off to a lab. You can get just about everything I just mentioned tested from the comfort of your own home. Use something like Bioletics for that. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. That's something that I did twice last year and it helped me tremendously. So I would definitely look at your internal performance factors. I would also, before you consider doing more CrossFit, consider doing less CrossFit rather than going five days a week, look at going three days a week, like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then on the Tuesday and the Thursday, consider doing some things that are slightly less intense and that focus on your base endurance. So something like 20 minute swim followed by a 30 minute bike ride or a 30 minute bike ride followed by a 20 minute run at a slightly lower intensity than you're going to be doing during the CrossFit workouts to allow you to engage in active recovery so you recover more quickly from your actual CrossFit workout that you did the day before, but also to allow you to build up kind of this base foundation of endurance which you never really had a chance to build back when you were doing bodybuilding. So that's what I would recommend. Hopefully that helps. Okay, question from Craig, who says I'm training for a sprint triathlon. At what point would you recommend including speed training? Well, Craig, for example, over at the Rockstar Triathlete Academy, where we've got about 300 people who are in there learning the sport of triathlon and we write out workouts for them and training plans. One of the training plans that we have in there, the Rockstar Triathlete Academy sprint training plan, it's almost all speed training. I mean from day one, it's a 15 week plan. And you do speed training the whole time. Because frankly, for a sprint distance triathlon, if you're wanting to go fast, you are redlined the whole time. So for example, if I wear a heart rate monitor during a sprint distance triathlon. Triathlon, my max heart rate when I test it, when I go out and do a 200 meter sprint and see what's the max heart rate I can achieve, I'm usually up around 186,188 up around in that range. If you look at my average heart rate during a sprint distance triathlon, it's usually about 180 to 184. So you are redlined during a sprint distance triathlon. And so speed training from the get go is going to help you a ton. And when I talk about speed training, I'm talking about doing treadmill or outdoor sprints. I'm talking about doing bicycle efforts that are like half mile and quarter mile repeats. Super fast stuff. I'm talking about, like I mentioned before, 50, 100, 200, even 25 meter sprint workouts in the pool. All of that stuff will help you tremendously for a sprint distance triathlon because you don't have to build up a huge aerobic base to be Fast for a sprint triathlon or to cross the finish line of a sprint triathlon. Fast speed training is always going to be or give you a better bang for your buck than long aerobic training when it comes to sprint distance training. So if you were, for example, doing two swims, two bikes and two runs a week, you could have each of those be a combination of one being like a longer kind of tempo based workout where your intervals are anywhere from, you know, three to ten minutes in duration. And then the other workout that you do for the skill would be shorter work repeats of like 30 seconds up to 3 minutes in duration for the length of the actual interval that you're doing. But the whole time, like for the 15 week sprint triathlon training programs that I write out for the academy, the entire program, we're doing speed training from the get go. So. Okay, last question from Philip who says, I recently started taking Lipton iced green tea. As I could not take the plain green tea after bringing some 36 cans at one stretch, I realized that they provide approximately 80 calories for a full can. After this, I have reduced my intake to one can a day. Is the Lipton iced green tea really harmful? Well, I think just based on the way Philip phrases his question, I think this is coming from an international listener. I'm not quite sure what you mean by bringing 36 cans at one stretch. I'm assuming you're not like drinking 36 cans in a day. But either way it kind of depends because like if you look at the ingredients of Lipton iced green tea. So you could grab one brand and one brand or one variation of Lipton iced tea is water, high fructose, corn syrup, phosphoric acid, sodium hexametaphosphate, potassium sorbate, potassium benzoate, caramel color, caramel disodium, natural flavor and red number 40. And that has a lot of refined processed ingredients in it that will be deleterious to your health, that will do things like cause your liver to pack on a bunch of fructose and convert it into fat. That will do things like put potential neurotoxins in your body with a lot of this, these artificial flavors and sweeteners and colors and benzoates and preservatives. But then if you look at another brand of Lipton green tea, like their natural green tea, the ingredients in that are green tea, water, a little bit of sugar, but not too much sugar. I'd like it better if they even just sweetened it with just stevia, citric acid, fruit extract, and then a purified stevia extract as the last ingredient. So they're using a little bit of stevia, but it's not the primary sweetener. And that's obviously a much different story. That's going to do you a lot less harm than drinking the alternative. So one of the things that this comes down to is looking at the label of the actual tea. But I would highly recommend that in most cases, unless you're an incredibly active person engaging in strenuous exercise on a daily basis in the heat, that you not drink your calories rarely, if ever. So, you know, like, there are some exceptions to that rule. Kombucha, for example. Be one exception in the inner circle. My wife and I recently did a three part video series on how to make your own kombucha. And when you first start the kombucha, before it ferments, you put about a cup of sugar in, but the bacteria feed on that sugar and there's none really left in the kombucha by the time that it actually is its finished product two weeks later. So, you know, that's a case where I can go grab some kombucha and drink that. I'm fine me drinking the coconut water right here while I'm recording the podcast after my workout. Again, I'm very, very insulin sensitive. And the small amounts of sugar in the coconut water isn't going to be a big issue at that point. But typically I would save any amount of liquid calorie consumption for pre, during or post workout. And pretty much anything else you drink should be plain water or soda water. And if that gets really boring to you, either chew a little bit of like a natural mint gum, like I use like a spry gum that's sweetened with xylitol, or you can put a little bit of stevia and lemon juice in the water. Or if you wanted to, you could take like an effervescent tablet. Like one of these electrolyte tablets has some vitamins and minerals in it. One that I use is like noon and you can drop that in some water and make that flavored. But usually the bottled stuff that you buy, that's like tea, it's always going to have some added sweeteners. But obviously there's a big difference in those two labels that I read. So you really want to educate yourself. But more often than not, drinking your calories from a processed bottled source is going to be more harmful than beneficial. So that about wraps up the questions. We're all caught up on questions. Woohoo. And you can ask your question over there@BenGreenfieldFitness.com you can ask it using the free iPhone or Android app. You can even call in and leave an audio question to 877-209-9439. And remember, please, if you get a lot out of this podcast, leave a donation over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com a $1 donation a month does a huge amount of benefit in allowing me to afford the ability to support all the downloads that this podcast gets. And then also if you get a chance, go to itunes, leave the podcast to review and a ranking and that really helps as well. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

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