Episode #182: What Does It Feel Like When You’re Overtrained?

In today's podcast, what does it feel like when you're overtrained? Also, abnormally low heart rate during exercise. The benefits of holding a position transitioning to barefoot running. Is calorie banking effective for bulking up the best exercise for maintaining bone density? Can you make up for lack of sleep with exercise? Dealing with pre event illness, exercise equipment for kids, how wheat affects your brain and nutritional advice for cancer patients?

Welcome to the Ben Green Greenfield Fitness.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.

Hello everybody.

Hello everybody. Welcome to episode 182 of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. It's a beautiful day to podcast, wouldn't you say, Ben?

Yeah, I think so. Let me look outside for the first time. It is. Yeah, it's mildly beautiful. It's a little overcast here in Spokane, but not too bad. I'm actually a little, I'm a little sore this morning.

Working out, a little burned.

Well, I went to the gym last night and I wanted to go swimming and there were no lanes available. I went to the downtown gym, which was a mistake. That thing is just jam packed and there was a master's class going on. So I just jumped into Master swim. And I think my problem is whenever I'm swimming with other people, I tend to push myself a little bit too hard. So I swam, swam my butt off last night and I can actually feel it a little bit.

Awesome. Keeping up to the masters is a trick sometimes. That's why they call them masters.

I know you hop in a lane that they say is the fast lane. It's just this hodgepodge of folks who I've never seen before. A lot of times I see folks around here who have raced in triathlons and I was like, oh, well here we go. And they were just all very fast.

I was in the pool the other day with a woman that at first glance she looked older, probably in her 60s, and she looked like she was swimming very slowly, but she was in the high intensity lane and I wanted to kick her out. And then I realized the reason she was swimming so slowly was because she was actually had had one of those parachutes, those drag parachutes going. So she was actually keeping up to me, but she was pulling this parachute and I was going to ask her to. To move out of the high intensity lane.

I would have just grabbed the parachute and got along for a ride.

Oh, I should have. She probably wouldn't have noticed. She was like just ripped for an old lady. It was awesome.

That's scary. Well, what do you think? Should we get into today's special announcements? Here we go.

Special announcements.

Okay, special announcements. I know you've got a few things going on, starting with I guess the nerdy one. I guess everybody's got to delete and reinstall their apps.

Yeah. If you've got the free Ben Greenfield fitness Android app or iPhone app, delete it and reinstall it so you get access to the most updated version where we fix some issues with podcasts not loading. And that app will give you access to a handy dandy ask Ben a question button, the blog, the podcast, pretty much everything that you need all in one place. But grab the most updated version, just delete it and then reinstall it. I'm sorry to say that you can't just press the update button for this particular update. The other thing that I was kind of stoked about was the ultimate weight training guide for triathletes came out this week, hard copy format. We'll put a link on Amazon so you can grab it. But pretty comprehensive book. And that is the digital version has been out for a while, but the hard copy version is now available on Amazon for all you luddites out there. That's right. I have no clue how much it costs. I think it's very reasonable. But check that out. If you're a gym junkie or you want to get stronger, that's a great guide. I put a lot of work into it. Blog post this week at BenGreenfieldFitness.com on how to be extremely active and eat a plant based diet without destroying your body. With a fairly impressive picture of a vegan ultra athlete on there.

Rick is so. He's just incredible.

Yeah, yeah. Rich roll. So check out that article. There's. There's some heated comments brewing. So go over there, read it. Leave your comment if you want to, but it goes into whether or not you can actually eat a plant based diet. We won't get into that right now, but whether you can eat a plant based diet and be a successful active athlete. So check that out.

There's very few communities that are as easy to anger as the vegetarian and vegan population. I think if you say anything even slightly derogatory, they really get on you. So I was actually surprised there aren't more more comments on that post?

Well, I've met very, very many very reasonable vegan and vegetarian enthusiasts, but there are those people that kind of get a little bit zealous about it and turn it into a religion, it seems. But yeah, it's been fun to watch people talk about it, both vegans as well as animal killers. And then Triathlon America is coming up next weekend. So I'm headed over to super bowl champion New York Gian Meadowlands Stadium on next Wednesday and I'll be over at the Team Timex Triathlon Camp over there. Then I'll jet back over to San Diego for Triathlon America. So if you're at either of those events, be sure to say hello.

Nifty.

News flashes.

Okay, well, I know there's been all kinds of stuff going on at your Google page. Do you want to talk about that as well as the www.twitter.com BenGreenfield you.

Know, if you haven't been over to the Google page, just go over there and read some of the articles. Some great articles. Everything from barefoot running to eating corn. Cool kind of mini articles. Really good content over there and it's easy to find. Just if you want to, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and click the little Google plus button. But some snippets, easy to read snippets. If a blog post is too long for you'll love our Google page. Super easy to read and good advice. So check that out. And then this week on Twitter, a few things came across my radar that I tweeted about that I wanted to get into in a little bit more detail in today's news flashes. And the first is on late night carbohydrate eating, which we have probably all heard vilified at one point or another. And the reason that an article which I linked to, which came from lengains.com the reason that article attracted my attention is because it compared epidemiological studies that kind of like look at people's late night carbohydrate snacking habits and draw a link between those snacking habits and weight gain and then actual studies. So what epidemiology finds is that people who kind of self report eating more carbohydrates later at night, they do have a higher BMI and a higher body fat. But those are not laboratory controlled studies. Those same people may be the people who watch a lot of TV in the evening, sitting in front of the TV at night. Maybe they're not quite as physically active, maybe they make poor food choices in general. And so there are a lot of confounding variables that if you eat carbohydrates late at night, may kind of enter into the equation of whether or not that actually causes weight gain. But when you actually look at calorie controlled studies in which it's a proper study, where they actually have people who are eating X amount of calories compared to people who are also eating that same number of calories, but who are eating more of the carbohydrate component of those calories in the evening, and what's found is that late night carbohydrate eating patterns actually produce superior results on fat loss and dietary adherence. And there's many biochemical reasons for that that I won't get into in detail too much in this news flash. But what it comes down to is that it can actually assist with appetite control and a lot of the hormones that are responsible for appetite control later on the next day. And of course, it may also improve sleep, which is directly tied to weight control and appetite control as well. So I thought that was a very interesting read and I'll link to the full read that is.

That's it. Especially the sleep part is quite opposite of what I've been led to believe for the last few years.

Yeah. So I have a new, a new Doritos cabinet next to my bed stand. Now it's just full of carbs.

Tons of cool ranch.

Yeah, exactly. So the next thing that I noted on a news flash was a study on massage therapy. And the fact that massage therapy attenuates inflammation after exercise induced muscle damage. There's actually been very few studies that have investigated what goes on at the biological level when you get a massage. And this study did muscle biopsies where they literally put a needle into people's quadriceps and checked out what was going on at the actual muscular level. And they found that post exercise massage did indeed reduce the production of a ton of different inflammatory markers. Okay. In the past, what you'll read on massage therapy websites is that it's going to flush lactic acid or that it's going to reduce fluid based soreness. And it doesn't do any of that. As a matter of fact, they didn't find any difference in lactic acid levels or in muscle metabolites like carbohydrates, hydrates floating around in there. But massage definitely does lower the production of inflammatory based markers after exercise. So something to bear in mind, get out your workout or a tough week Yep. Foam roller.

Yeah, foam. Roll the heck out of yourself. That's. That's what I've been doing.

Foam roller. Or hire a little massage therapist to kind of follow you around everywhere you go.

Just a little one though.

Yeah, just a little while. You got to be able to carry them in your pocket or suitcase. Yeah. But massage therapy. I'll link to that study in the show notes. Another interesting study that I came across was that branched chain amino acid supplementation enhances exercise capacity and your ability to burn fat when you're exercising in a carbohydrate depleted state. So that means if you wake up in the morning and you're doing an exercise session or you haven't eaten in a while and you're doing an exercise session, consuming amino acids and specifically taking like a branch chain amino acid pill or pills or capsules or powder prior to that exercise session is going to significantly improve your ability to burn fat and improve your time to exhaustion during that exercise session. So, you know, a couple different forms of amino acids that I recommend for something like that. One example would be recoveries. That's a little blue pill that technically you're supposed to take after exercise to reduce soreness. But it looks like it's going to be just as beneficial if you were to take it 30 minutes prior to your exercise session. If you were doing exercise in a fasted state. The other thing that you could do that's going to have just as good of an effect is a whole amino acid supplement. I'll link to this and recoveries in the show notes. But master amino pattern abbreviated map is another example of a whole amino acids supplement.

So are you actually saying like the recoveries would be. Would be better, but the map would actually be okay too?

You're gonna get amino acid releases with each, but a whole amino acid supplement is more expensive. That's kind of the kicker for a lot of people. I mean, it's like 50 bucks a bottle. That's gonna last you a month or so. Whereas recoveries would be a little bit less than that, about half that. The final thing I came across, and again, I'll link to all these in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com for this episode. Episode number 181. Was that a 182? 182. I'm sorry, we're much further ahead than what I said.

Way ahead.

A 45 minute vigorous exercise bout increases your metabolic rate for 14 hours. In this study, they put people on a bike and had people bike at about 57% of their maximum for 45 minutes and they were burning an extra. It boosted metabolic rate by about 190 calories compared to a resting group. So that was about an additional 37% increase in net energy expenditure. Basically what that means is that you don't have to go all that hard to bump up your metabolism and your metabolism is going to stay elevated for a significantly long period of time. And this is one of the reasons, like for example, I was just at a conference all week last week. This is one of the reasons I'll get up in the morning always and throw down a tough exercise session, ride a bike hard for 30 to 60 minutes or do some weightlifting with some cardiovascular intervals. And it's because, especially if you're going to go sit around or be in meetings or be in a conference or be sitting in school or whatever else the rest of the day, you're still burning a lot more calories. So I'll link to this study, but it was nice to see exactly how many calories you can increase your burn of just with a 45 minute vigorous cycling bout.

I think that's interesting that it was 57% effort. Exactly 57.

Yeah. Well, that's an average, but that's of maximum, so it's still fairly difficult, you know, if you're able to churn out a maximum. If you're going all out of say 400 watts on the bike, you're still pedaling it, 220 watts or so, which if anybody's actually done that, that's pretty tough.

Yeah, that's pretty tough.

Yep.

Listener Q and A.

All right, a good pile of awesome questions once again. And everybody please be aware when you submit questions. It's going to be a couple weeks before we get to to your question. We've got a really good backlog and every once in a while I go through and think I can cull some of them, but they just all, they're all really good. So just because. Just be patient, your question will come up. And here let's start with our first question. It's an audio question from Stuart.

Hey, Ben, this is Feeric and I have a question for this next week's podcast. It's in regards to heart rate and where it should be. I was working with my coach tonight and we were trying to do an economy run with the goal being to do one mile repeats with a rest one minute after every mile. And the goal was to keep your heart rate below 155 the entire time, no matter what pace that came out to. The problem was I couldn't get my heart rate above about 147 or 151, no matter how hard I pushed. And it seems like everybody else we were running with had to just keep slowing their pace to keep their heart rate under that. I'm in pretty good shape, so I don't know if that had a factor to do with it, but it seems like I can't get my heart rate to really go very high no matter how hard I'm working. I'm just wondering if there was maybe something wrong with my heart rate monitor that I'm using. It's been pretty consistent when I have used it. This is a good thing, a bad thing, or I just should not worry about it. So thanks, Dan. I appreciate everything and the podcast is great. Later on.

So Stuart can't get his heart rate up.

Yeah, there's one very simple reason that that may be happening, and then one slightly more complex reason. And the simple reason would be that Stuart has a great deal of cardiovascular efficiency. So your heart, when you're in good shape, is going to be able to pump more blood out of its storage capacity. It's going to have a higher stroke volume. And a higher stroke volume means that for any given work effort, you're going to have a lower heart rate. So he may just be in better cardiovascular shape than everybody else that's out there. What I see more often, though, is that some types of overtraining can cause an inability to get up to a certain heart rate. So when you look at overtraining, there's two different types of overtraining. We often simply hear that people can become overtrained, but the reality is that depending on the type of exercise that you're doing, it's going to affect the type of overtraining that occurs. So one type of overtraining would be overtraining of your sympathetic nervous system. Now, that is typically associated with, like, weight training, power sports, heavy sprint type of sports, strength activities. But the sympathetic part of your nervous system is kind of like your fight or flight. Okay? It's when you see a lion and you got to run from the lion. It's all the things that would cause your blood pressure to go up and your heart rate to go up, et cetera. And when you see people who have over trained their sympathetic nervous system, typically through too much intensity during exercise, going too heavy, not enough rest from hard weight training sessions, et cetera, you're going to see certain signs of overtraining that are Very distinctly correlated to sympathetic nervous system over training. Disturbed sleep is one of the most common. Okay. Accelerated resting heart rate is another one that you'll notice like when you wake up in the morning and your heart rate is much higher than it normally is. A lot of like restlessness, excitability, irritability, anger, losing your temper easily, that type of thing. And then similar to the other type of overtraining I'll talk about in a minute here, just basically a drop in your overall performance. But that's what sympathetic nervous system over training looks like. What you'll see more often in endurance athletes is overtraining of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest part of the nervous system. It's also the nervous system that tends to predominate during kind of like aerobic based activities. And what you'll typically see is that sleep really isn't disturbed quite as much. With parasympathetic nervous system over training you'll see people become more kind of depressed really, almost like too laid back, very inhibited a lot of times, kind of a little loss of appetite. The resting heart rate doesn't decrease as much as your ability to reach a certain heart rate during exercise, similar to what Stuart is experiencing. And you just have a really, really hard time getting your heart rate, no matter how hard you're going. And depending on the type of training that you do, it's pretty easy to kind of start to figure out paired with the symptoms, whether your sympathetic nervous system or your parasympathetic nervous system has been over trained. Now, a lot of the overtraining signs and symptoms of parasympathetic nervous system over training are the type of things that we'd want from exercise, but they get, they get thrown out of control. So for example, there's a nerve in your body called the vagus nerve and that helps to inhibit your heart rate. So it keeps your heart rate from going too high. Well, with regular exercise and with someone who's getting into shape, the parasympathetic nervous system is going to improve what's called vagal tone or the ability of that vagus nerve to inhibit the heart rate. And that's good in that it helps out with your cardiovascular efficiency and it allows your heart heart rate to remain lower at rest. But when that increased vagal tone gets out of control because you've overtrained your parasympathetic nervous system, you just can't get your heart rate very high, period, which can inhibit your performance and your ability to kind of dig deep and go hard. Another thing that you'll see with parasympathetic nervous system training is that you get a very, very even beat to beat variation in your heart rhythm. And a lot of coaches now and systems will track what's called your heart rate variability or your hrv. And when you're tracking heart rate variability, you're looking for the beat to beat variation in your heart rhythm to be very even from beat to beat. When you're over training your parasympathetic nervous system, you're getting a nice healthy beat to beat variation still in your heart rate variability. But it's like that, that beat to beat pause is too long. It's like you've over trained kind of like the sloth system of your body. And then the other thing that can happen is what's called a baroflex function and what the baro reflex function is actually what it's called that's responsible for your blood pressure regulation of your blood pressure and your heart rate. And when you're well trained and you've been doing like aerobic endurance exercise and kind of really trained good cardiovascular efficiency, what happens is you become more and more sensitive to changes in blood pressure and your body is able to regulate blood pressure and heart rate much more efficiently. When you overtrain your parasympathetic nervous system once again, you get kind of an overstimulation of what's called that baroreflex function, and your blood pressure is almost too low even during exercise. And so all of these things kind of come together to cause what Stuart would be experiencing if he had overtrained and done too much aerobic training and just kind of kind of gone too long for too long a period of time. And that is this inability to really get his heart rate up and to get his intensity up where he wants it to be. You're just kind of stuck in a low gear. So that's the difference in the two types of overtraining. And I would suspect that unless Stuart is in much better shape than the rest of these folks that he's training with, that he probably has some form of parasympathetic nervous system over training going on. And he may want to take a couple weeks to let his body rest and recover and do just easy stuff and a little bit of intensity here and there, but not very much long training at all. And then gradually work his way back into training, but do so using like high intensity intervals and not a lot of like long slow bikes or long slow runs. Or kind of like, you know, the type of training that would be considered purely aerobic and purely parasympathetic nervous system type of training. So I will shut up now and let Stuart take that where he wants to take it.

I think just one other thing, Stuart, before you go off the deep end in any of these directions, I'd say check your heart rate with a different heart rate monitor just to make sure that it's not your heart rate monitor misreading, like borrow somebody else's or something. Go to the gym and use one there just to verify that you're not getting concerned about nothing.

Yes, sometimes I overlook the simple answers.

That's what I'm here for. All right, our next question is from Pete and it's an audio question as well.

Hey, Ben, this is Pete calling from Atlanta, Georgia about your 12 resistance training plans for training for triathlon. Two questions. One, are you opposed to dips for some reason? You don't mention any dips and they seem like a good upper body building exercise to me. Two, the body weight only two exercise or routine? It's very challenging to me and it's all a lot of just holding, just holding a position. And I wanted to understand why that's a valuable type of exercise, the isometric hold to be doing when you're training for triathlon. Other than that, love the book. Keep up the good work and thank you. Bye.

Okay, so Pete's got a couple of questions there about building some muscle.

Okay. Yeah, he's asking about my book that's over@thestrongtriathlete.com and that book, the Top 12 Resistance Training Routines for Triathletes is kind of like really, really quick, effective strength training routines. Ok. Stuff that's designed to just get you in, get you out and kick your butt and have you done. But train a lot of triathlon specific muscles. And it's good for athletes in general, but I wrote it originally for triathletes. First of all, he was wondering about dips. And the thing is they're just not in there because they were not included. There are exercises that work this similar function as dips do. Narrow grip push ups and overhead presses and things of that nature. But there is no special secret reason that they're not in there. They're just freaking not in there. Okay. So you're just gonna have to be content with that, Pete. But as far as the purpose of holding a position, I have an entire workout in there that's an isometric based workout. And you don't see Isometric based workouts very much, but basically you're holding specific positions like the bottom of a P or the bottom of a squat, or the bottom of a lunge for anywhere from 30 to 90 seconds. So when you're doing an isometric contraction like that, what that means is that you're producing a force, but you're not changing the length of your muscles. You're just staying in a position, you know, the same as you would be if you were just like push against a wall and keep pushing against that wall for as long as you can until the muscle was exhausted. You can develop a great deal of physical strength with this type of working out. You don't need much equipment to do it, so you could do this anywhere. You'll find that it doesn't really cause the same type of cardiovascular response and you don't tend to sweat quite as much as you do it. So it's a workout you could easily throw down, say like in the airport, if you had a little bit of room to work with. And it's good for a quick workout where you got to build a lot of strength and you don't have a lot of time. But the issue is it's not going to develop any muscular endurance. This type of isometric exercise, it's extremely boring after a long period of time. That's why I think I designed that workout to just last about 20 minutes. And it can really increase your blood pressure. So if you have a cardiovascular condition, an irregular heartbeat, something of that nature, it could technically not be the type of exercise that you want to prioritize doing. And it doesn't burn a ton of calories either. It's primarily just strength based. And one of the reasons for that is you're not pumping blood in and out of the muscle. There's not much of a cardiovascular response going on. So in this workout that Pete is talking about, you're holding a squat position, holding a lunge position, holding a push up position, holding kind of like an abdominal position, and you're just going through a circuit where you're holding each of those for 30 to 90 seconds and then kind of going back to the beginning and doing it again. Great for strength. Great when you don't need any equipment to work out. It shouldn't be something that you rely on. But that's kind of the reason that I included isometric exercise in that book, and the reason that I included multiple isometric exercises is because it would just be boring as hell to sit there and push against a wall for 20 minutes. So it's a, it's a great way to exercise, though. I think everybody should, should try it. A little bit of isometrics now and again.

Yeah, every once in a while I'll do some isometrics. If I'm stuck in a car for a long time or stuck on a plane or something, you can just sort of even put your palms in front of your chest and just push as hard as you can against each other and get a, get a bit of a workout even if you're sitting on your butt for hours and hours.

Yeah. Butt clinchers. Yep.

Okay, next question comes from Dan. Dan says you recently mentioned that you tried and enjoyed Vibram's KSO Trek. I've been a fan of the five finger lineup for a few years now and have done two off road triathlons in my Trek sports as well as a trail half marathon in my KSO Treks. I wonder, I was wondering where you would draw the line in regards to usage and distance. Would you not recommend the Vibram Five Fingers or other minimalist foot gloves full time? Do you think mixing up the Vibram 5 fingers with typical sneakers is a good idea for training? I've learned that form is very important, but anytime I put on normal sneakers now, I feel like I'm running on marshmallows and I'm setting myself up for injury.

Yeah. As far as the Vibram Five Fingers or these Trek KSOs that Dan is asking about, these are for the people who haven't seen them before. The type of minimalist running shoes that are basically, you know, they look like a foot and your toes go into each of the little toe holds in the shoe. And it's essentially very, very similar to barefoot running with a little bit of a rubber protection on the bottom. And I've got a version of those called the KSO Trek, which is kind of like the off road leathery version. It looks like it. A chimp foot. Basically. When I got those and started using them, I had already been incorporating barefoot running intervals into my training routine, primarily in the summer and spring months. And I also use a standing workstation when I'm working. And I'm typically in my bare feet when I'm on that standing workstation. And so I spend quite a bit of time in my bare feet. I was able to transition straight into running several miles in the KSO Treks. And that's actually all I've been using for runs recently, is those KSO Treks. You know, I'll run trails, cement Concrete doesn't matter. I haven't had a single problem with them. And they're actually very, very comfortable to run in. So I'm actually turning into a big fan of running in the Vibram five finger shoes. But the. And again, my feet were very, very conditioned. And I grew up not wearing shoes very much. My brothers and I would run up and down the gravel driveway with no shoes. I would hike with no shoes. I think that a lot of people probably have worn shoes much, much more than I have. And so that's the reason that I think that I was able to transition into using those KSO treks quite a bit. And when you look at studies, there's not many studies that really go beyond the 10k distance when investigating runners who use primarily a forefoot strike, which is the type of foot strike you're going to use when you're using a minimalist shoe versus a rear foot strike. Now, the studies that are out there have shown that runners who habitually strike with the front of their foot with their forefoot actually tend to have a lower injury rate. And that is likely because when you are running in your forefoot, you are using better running form and you're landing softer, so there's less joint impact. If you go out, you know, you can try this. You take off your shoes, run in your bare feet. You don't need a pair of fancy barefoot running shoes. You're going to find that you just land more softly. It's actually very difficult to even run on a treadmill without making a bunch of noise when you're running in your bare feet or in your socks. If you try this at the gym and you'll find that you have to run very, very soft in order to not annoy people at the gym with your pounding on the treadmill, when you take your shoes off and you start to strike with your forefeet. So even in very, very advanced runners, like they've done studies in competitive cross country runners, when you're comparing a very, very good runner with a rear foot strike to a very, very good runner with a forefoot strike, you're seeing lower injury rates among the runners who have that forefoot strike. And when you look at all the different studies on barefoot runners, there's really not a lot of evidence that shows that a barefoot running gait is going to reduce risk of injury or improve performance. Really, there's absolutely no studies that show that. But we can certainly hypothesize that if running closer to the front of your foot is going to help you reduce your risk of injury or become a better runner then running barefoot or running in barefoot style. Running shoes may have that same effect if you're doing it properly. Now, bear in mind that these were good runners. They were light, they were not carrying excessive weight, and they were well trained. Ultimately, as far as the total distance that you can run in something like a, like a barefoot running shoe, it's going to totally depend on you. But I would very, very gradually build up that distance. And the other thing that of course, you need to bear in mind is that you may find yourself doing lots of training in your five fingers or your other barefoot style running shoe, but then racing with your typical, you know, your sneakers, your regular running shoes. If that's the case, then I would recommend that you include at least one training session per week where you are running in the shoes that you're going to be racing in. I haven't decided yet whether or not I'd be using something like a Vibram Five Fingers in triathlons this year. I may actually try it out in a few races. The only thing that would keep me from doing that would be how long it takes to put the shoe on. But if I can get the things on and off quickly, I could totally see myself doing a triathlon in these things.

That'd be awesome to see. All right. Well, Dan, I hope that answers your question. I. Just a word of caution. I'm on the other extreme from Ben. I've spent most of my life not only in shoes, but in great big winter boots. And I picked up a pair of the Vibrams a couple years ago, and I have played with them off and on and just had absolutely no luck. I. I pretty much get injured every time I try to run in them, even if I do a short run. I wear, like, racing flats pretty much all the time. I don't wear anything. Any big, cushiony, control kind of shoes. But I still have had a lot of trouble transitioning into the, into the Vibrams.

Yeah. And I don't, I don't want to sound, you know, arrogant or off putting, but I do think a big part of it is, you know, if you didn't grow up just basically, you know, dirty and barefoot on the porch like I did, then it may not be the shoe for you unless you are willing to really be extremely patient. I mean, ease yourself into it over a period of possibly not even months, but years. So, you know, if you've spent 30, 40 years wearing shoes, it may take you a very Long time to reinvent your body to being used to these type of shoes. And I think that's one of the reasons that they do get a bad wrath is because people are just, no offense, but people are dumb. They'll grab these shoes and just start using them way too much too soon.

Yeah, that was me for sure. I didn't have time, I guess, really to do the transition correctly. So I did do too much too fast and paid the price. But enough on that. Onto Brandon's question. Brandon says, what are your thoughts on calorie banking, cycling for a bulking regime? Is banking something that banking something to do in, in future on rest days? What would happen if I took a few days, like one weekend to bank calories without exercise? Would a metabolism slow down quickly enough to turn those calories into fat without the stimulation from the weights or high intensity interval training on a daily basis? And I guess to sum it up, meaning I should keep extra calories to extra days, Would you recommend calorie cycling for bulking the way you recommend it for weight loss plateaus?

Okay, semantics here. Calorie banking. Calorie banking is just like physical banking with your money. So let's say I give you a budget of, let's say, X number of calories per week. Let's say you've got a budget of thinking of a number that will fit real well here. Let's say you've got a budget of 21,000 calories per week. And this would be for a fairly active individual. That's a decently high number of calories. That would mean that you're going to need to average around 3,000 calories a day. But the concept of calorie banking might mean that on five days of the week you're taking in 2,000 calories. And then on the weekend, let's say you're extremely active and you're a bit, you know, let's say you're a triathlete and you're doing lots of biking and swimming and running on the weekends. You've got, you know, maybe closer to 4,000 calories on a Saturday and a Sunday and closer to 2,500 calories the rest of the weekdays. That's the concept of calorie banking. When you get to the end of the week or the end of a day, your total calorie intake is still kind of balancing the checkbook, but it may not be the same between meals or the same between days. Now, the advantage to doing something like this is you could, for example, do kind of a form of fasting or very low calorie intake, something like five days a week, and then refill the energy stores on the weekend and then go back into calorie moderation during the next week. Now, what that could do is it could teach your body how to burn fatty acids more efficiently if you were not stuffing your face with lots of calories on your lower calorie intake days. It could teach you to regulate your appetite a little bit better, make you a little bit more insulin sensitive, because you're not spiking your blood sugar quite as much on those days in which you're moderating calories, and then still allow you to kind of refill the gas tank, refill the energy stores on specific days. So calorie banking and calorie cycling, we can pretty much use those terms almost interchangeably, with the exception that calorie banking is very, very rigid. It's like you've got X number of calories to consume during the week, and here's exactly how you're going to do it. Calorie cycling is a little bit kind of more gray in terms of having a little bit more flexibility to it. It's just the general concept of eating lower calories on specific days and higher calories on other days without a set number, a set banking number, so to speak. Now, the issue with calorie banking is there may be a little bit of a mental impact to that. You know, if you're going on a very low calorie intake five days a week, it is more likely that you might fall off the bandwagon on specific days and just get so hungry that you end up binging. It could also, if you're not really careful, cause damage to your body. If you're heavily exercising on days in which you have a very low calorie intake, that's simply not all that great for your immune system or for your body. It's tough on your body to do that, so you need to do it intelligently. But to get to the meat of the question, Brandon is wanting to know if you could do something like bulk up or add muscle by using something like a calorie cycling concept. And you absolutely could do something like this. What you would want to do is if you were trying to add muscle, you'd have days on which you're doing heavy weight training and very hard exercise. And on those days, you are eating your higher number of calories, and then on your lower exercise days, you are moderating calories. And those are kind of like your calorie banking days. In my opinion, a better scenario though for putting on muscle would be to actually go through phases, like several week long phases where you're eating a high calorie intake and lifting heavy, lifting lots of heavy stuff and not depleting your body of calories on any days of the week. So you're lifting heavy, you're putting on lots of muscle and then you basically kind of do what bodybuilders do. And after you've put on a lot of muscle and eaten a lot of calories, calories, then you go into a phase and it can be a two week phase or a four week phase, or an eight week phase where you're eating fewer calories, shedding a lot of fat and kind of getting yourself ripped, so to speak. So essentially you go through a bulking phase where you're eating lots of calories and lifting heavy and then you follow that up with a lower calorie intake phase where you're lifting higher reps, higher number of sets and kind of doing more of the toning of all that muscle that you've built. I like that concept for putting on bulk better than having a week where you've got higher calorie intake and heavier lifting on one day and then lower calorie intake and lower exercise on another day. So ultimately that's a better way to put on muscle. It would be not to calorie bank but to instead just have specific phases of the year where you're eating lots of calories and then specific phases of the year where you're eating fewer calories.

Okay, our next question comes from Kathy. I'm a 42 year old female and I enjoy endurance training. You know, sometimes, sometimes I. Sorry to interrupt the question. I feel like it's almost like a singles seeking singles website sometimes. I'm a 40 year old male who enjoys. Anyway. Sorry Kathy, I just cut off your question there. I'm a 42 year old female. I enjoy endurance training.

Training.

I started cycling a few years ago and then got into triathlons. I did a few Olympic races and even managed to win my age group. But I decided to skip triathlon training this year as I'd like to have more time for my personal goals. I'm focusing on cycling, but I like running and swimming and some variety in the routine is fun. If I'm going to eliminate one, which one should it be? My main fitness goal is to improve my cycling. The faster I ride, the more fun I have have and I'll be training for the Gran Fondo in the summer, my secondary goal is to lose a few pounds. Not only will this help my watt per kilogram, right now I'm about three for three, but as I get older, it's more of a struggle just to maintain the same weight and not creep up. I lift weights once a week religiously. Due to a previous knee and shoulder injuries. I sometimes mix it with plyometrics. Swimming is very relaxing and I like the balance of cycling with the upper body. But as an older female, is running more important? I'm not sure if lifting once a week is enough to maintain bone density. So looking for some advice there.

That was a mouthful.

That was.

Now that we have Kathy's life story. Okay, basically what this question comes down to is like how to prioritize whether you're going to swim, whether you're going to bike or whether you're going to run, and specifically how to prioritize that for something like bone density, which a lot of older females are of course worried about. Now, the whole concept here that I think a lot of people are already aware of is that when you load a bone, it's going to respond by growing more dense and activities which are non weight bearing and don't load the bone are going to be less likely to improve bone density. So for example, there was an article, I think it appeared in New York Times a couple of years ago that showed that cycling could be bad for the bones. And this was a report on several studies done in competitive bike riders and competitive cyclists that found that they had significantly lower bone density than their non cycling peers. And that's for two reasons. One, it's a non weight bearing sport, you're not doing a lot of work with the upper body, and two, you are losing minerals at the same time. You're sweating, you're losing calcium, you're losing magnesium, you're losing a lot of the things that would be responsible responsible for helping you to build stronger bones. So it turns out that cycling may not be the best choice if you're looking at improving your bone density, especially compared to something like running. Now, what about something like swimming? You'd probably think that swimming, similar to cycling, would really not have much of an effect on bone density. But the fact is that they've done studies on swimming versus running. And what it turns out is that if you take someone who's not physically active at all and you throw them into a pool, and then you take someone also who's not very physically active and you have them run, they both build bone density. Specifically along the bones that are aligned with the muscles that they're working. So runners are going to build better bone density in the spine and the legs. Swimmers are going to build better bone density kind of in the shoulder and the arm muscles and a little bit in the foot muscles and some of the muscles where muscle contractions are happening. But in a physically inactive person, pretty much any activity period, when you're comparing swimming versus running is going to build bone density. In a physically active person, someone who's already in shape, swimming doesn't really build bone density either, just running does. And the only way that swimming can build bone density is because you get the action of the muscles kind of pulling on the body bones. And in someone who's not physically active and hasn't worked out at all, that is enough of a stimulus to cause some bone density formation. But in an active individual, you can't build bone density swimming. So at this point, kind of the order of activities when we're looking at bone density would be running first, swimming second, cycling last. In terms of the actual research into looking at bone density, now, a few other things about bone density is that as I mentioned, the specificity of loading is important, meaning that exercises that directly place a load on a certain region of the skeleton are going to strengthen that area of the skeleton. And so if you're choosing just one form of exercise, you're going to improve your bone density in the bones that are being loaded during that form of exercise. But the rest of the bones in your body really aren't going to get enough stimulus to improve in density or to stave off osteoporosis. So this is where weight training comes in because it has such a great propensity for you being able to place a load on any bone you want to. You want to strengthen your spine and your humerus and your arm bones. You would do an overhead press. You want to strengthen your femur and your, your tibia and your fibula. You're doing squats and lunges. And so ultimately the best bone density increasing program would be a combination of running and weight training. If you're going to throw out one activity and you're Kathy and you're trying to choose what you're not going to do, I would say that cycling would be the one to throw out and swimming would be the next one to throw out, and running and weight training should be prioritized if we're looking at this purely from a bone density perspective. But don't get me wrong, I mean, you can be A cyclist. And as long as you're getting adequate calcium and magnesium, vitamin D, vitamin K are also important, and then your weight training as well, you can maintain bone density. So you need to bear in mind that the studies that are done on cyclists that have shown that it has a capability to lower bone density were done on people that were not necessarily supplementing the way that they should have been and weren't necessarily weight training. So hopefully that helps give Kathy some direction.

Yeah, it's amazing how often the question, especially with women, come up with the bone density. It's quite a hot topic.

Yeah, it is. And unfortunately, the most common answer you see is to take calcium. And that is actually causing a bunch of women who are concerned about osteoporosis to instead get atherosclerosis as all that calcium builds up on the arteries. So magnesium, vitamin D, vitamin K2, are essential if you're taking calcium.

Awesome. Okay, next question is from Brett. And Brett says, I was having a discussion with a group of my early morning workout buddies. He put in brackets, 5, 8. If you have the choice, is it better to get a full night's sleep or to get in the workout? Lack of sleep causes a myriad of issues. Fatigue, cortisol release, etc. Does a workout trump the negative effects of no sleep or lack of sleep? Thanks. All the best.

You know, I've talked a little bit about mitigating the lack of sleep through the use of polyphasic sleeping. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. For Brett, it was episode number 110. I talked about how you could use timed and scheduled nap naps to kind of string yourself along through a period of time where you aren't getting as much sleep as you should adequately get. But chronic lack of sleep, there's certainly studies that show that that's going to decrease your reaction time, your ability to have sustained attention, it's going to decrease the ability for your body to heal and recover after a physically demanding exercise session. And it's ultimately going to have a lot of deleterious effects. Effects when it comes to your ability to respond to training and your ability to train the way that you should. I think that there are a lot of people, especially like endurance athletes, who have high training volume, walking around, underperforming mentally and neurologically, and also doing things like getting sick a lot, being in an overtrained state, having low testosterone, low work performance, low sex performance, destabilized appetite based off of lack of sleep or inadequate sleep, you know, from getting up for These four or five or sometimes earlier than that exercise sessions. Now, genetics plays a huge role in this. There are some people that can get by on lower levels of sleep. And so there may be one person in a 5am exercise group who's just fine and they went to bed at 11pm the night before. And then there's another person, and I would fall into this group group who is simply wanting to just drop out right there and go curl up in a corner and take a nap because they feel sleep deprived. So ultimately, you can't mitigate the effects of lack of sleep or low sleep with exercise. Exercise actually will ultimately magnify the problems caused by lack of sleep because exercise is going to further deplete hormones that are already depleted through lack of sleep. Further decreased levels of neurotransmitters. Especially this long, heavy style of aerobic training that Brett might be doing at a 5am Triathlon workout. And it's gonna pile things on that will cause similar symptoms to the overtraining that we started off this podcast talking about. If you're in a situation where you're simply having to make that decision between sleep deprivation and exercise, I would suggest you step back and look at your schedule and see if you're doing enough high intensity interval training, meaning that you can get an awesome aerobic workout with just 20 minutes of high intensity interval training. If you're doing a lot of slow junk miles or just training for the sake of training. And then the other thing that you may want to think about is a lot of times it is is tougher to train with a group and have really efficient training versus training by yourself. Like me, for example, I can roll out of bed in the morning, I can go for a run, throw in some high intensity interval training, be done and over with in 45 minutes. When I'm training with a group, I have to get up, I gotta drive to meet the group, we talk for five, 10 minutes, we do the workout, we maybe visit for another five to 10 minutes after I drive home. And suddenly that's a two hour commitment and that's an extra hour and 15 minutes of sleep that I could have been getting. So a big part of this might be the style of training that you do as well and some of the social impacts. So ultimately, you should not try and fight lack of sleep by exercising more. That is a recipe for overtraining.

All right, good stuff. Okay, this next question from Joshu. I kind of, I feel bad, but we always want to people. It's going to take a while to get the, the question on the show. This is definitely, this is definitely not very timely for Joshu to get his answer. But I want to cover it anyway because I think it's a pretty universal question for a lot of people out there. So here it goes. I've been training for the last 17 weeks for a cycling event on January 27th. Oops. I have put a lot of time in effort and money.

Just, just for the record, it's February 8th.

Yeah, we missed it by a good week and a half. I've been really sick for the last two days with sinus flu, cough and everything in between. The good thing is no diarrhea or vomiting. What recommendations can you give me? Or do you feel that everything is now down the drain? By the way, it's a three day event, 375 miles, and is the first time I'm going to do something like this and I'm not a professional.

Okay, first of all, my sincere apologies, Joshu, for getting to this question a long time after you needed it answered. Remember, I am a consultant. People can hire me. If you're desperate and you need something answered, just hire me. I'll get on the phone with you for 20 minutes and we'll sort you. But if I would have been in your shoes, having poured this time, effort and money into an event, a competitive event that I was getting ready for and I'd gotten sick in the kind of important training days leading into that event, I would focus on a few of the things that I've talked about on this show before. And because I've gone into some of these in detail, I'm not going to get into like the biochemistry of this stuff in detail. But I want to tell you the exact things that I would do first would be to step up intake of natural antiseptic, antiviral type of compounds. Top two would be oil of oregano and coconut oil. Okay, you can do oil of oregano, four to five drops of that, swirl it into a glass of water, or just put it sublingually under your tongue. You can just cook more of your foods in coconut oil. Or literally take coconut oil by the teaspoon or the tablespoon. Both of those are going to have very good effects in terms of their ability to fight off sickness and bump up your immune system. Ener prime and other greens supplements I've talked about before, their ability to reduce net acidity in the body and also strengthen your immune system is incredible. Whenever I am on a green supplement, I rarely, if ever get sick and When I'm off a greens supplement, I tend to get sick more often. So in terms of staving off colds, flus, when you're training for something that's very important to you, I would recommend that you be on a greens supplement as well. Now, when you do get sick and you do feel something coming on, there are things that you can take that could potentially reduce the severity and or the duration of the flu or the cold. A few things that I would use are vitamin C, 1 to 2 grams of that per day. Elderberry is another thing that could reduce the duration of the symptoms of a cold or a flu. And that's something you can just like get a little dropper of or take it like cough syrup, just like elderberry extract that you can get at a health food store. Quercetin is another. You'll find quercetin in FRS energy drinks, but the amount of sugar and caffeine and other things you'll get along with FRS energy drink is not worth it. So you can simply step up your intake of things like red apples. And another one would be red onions. Those would be two things that are very high in quercetin. I've talked about that on the podcast before and you could go look, do a search for any of these@BenGreenfieldFitness.com if you want to delve into them in more detail. And then I would be of kind careful with dairy too. That has the propensity to really increase mucus production and exacerbate a lot of the symptoms of the cold and the flu. So you'd want to avoid things like milk and yogurt during that time. But those are the things I would do. Oil of oregano, coconut oil, enerprime, vitamin C, elderberry, quercetin. Avoid dairy. You gotta throw a lot of wrenches at something like this. But I personally will incorporate a lot of that stuff if I ever feel myself coming down with something and usually can stave it off.

There you go. Good, good advice for all of us, not just for Robert in Joe Shoe of the past. Okay, next question. This one comes from Robert and it goes like this. We have a daughter who is two months premature. During her hospital stay she got meningitis and was close to death. She is now 7 years old and may have a stage like case of cerebral palsy but has not been diagnosed by her doctor. We had noticed she was very stiff on her left side. Her doctor recommended a physical activity to help her development. She's been in gymnastics for about two years. And we see a very noticeable difference. Her routine is basically a lot of stretching, running, bodyweight exercises, etc. How can we design a system or workout for children to do ourselves what the. Similar to what the local gym does. Why should we pay someone when we can have her do running, stretching and push ups, sit ups, pull ups and stuff right here at home and include our own children, our other children, ourselves?

Yeah, great question. And I'll get into a couple of my specific recommendations for something like cerebral palsy in a second. But just having the things at home that make fitness fun for kids is actually, it's pretty affordable. Kids fitness equipment is cheap. Unfortunately, it also falls apart more quickly than heavy steel dumbbells and stuff like that. But there is fitness equipment for kids. And personally, here at home, my kids play around with the Bosu ball and elastic bands and light dumbbells that are covered with a protective fabric. And they play around with foam rollers and just about any of the home exercise tools that I have. Of course, I have the advantage that because I'm in the industry that I'm in, a lot of folks send me stuff to test. And so I've just got closet full of random exercise toys that my kids just grab and play with. What I would do if I were you is you can go to a website like toysrus.com they've got an entire kids fitness section. They've got fun little jump ropes for kids. They've got basically like weight benches for kids that are super light and kids can easily play with without hurting themselves. They've got little punching bags and gloves for kids. That's another thing that we have here. By the way, my kids love to kind of fight. We'll watch Rocky and then have Fight Night. They've got little air walkers and bikes for kids. Basically just a ton of things to kind of make it fun. And the same stuff's cheap. I mean, you know, you'll spend a pretty penny for steel and for metal and for a lot of the things that you'll get when you're buying as much weight as is necessary for an adult to kind of work out at home. But a lot of the kids stuff is cheap. I mean, it's four bucks here, ten bucks there. So I'd head over to a website like toysrus.com and just grab a few toys to have around. And if you don't want to do that, go into your local sporting goods store and get a couple stability balls, get some medicine balls, get some elastic bands, get stuff that's Colorful. That's going to attract kids attention. I know my kids always grab the stuff that's like red and blue and purple from the exercise closet, and they generally don't mess around with it with the rusty dumbbells too much. But kids like stuff that look fun. So I would stock your house with some of this stuff, have it around. And what I find is my kids, a lot of time will just go grab it and start playing with stuff. It doesn't have to be an organized exercise session per se, but you can also take the things and you can write a little workout for the kids or have a PE 30 minutes or a PE hour. Now, as far as cerebral palsy goes, there are going to be some issues. It sounds like in your case it's fairly mild. But as far as muscle tone and the spasmic state that a muscle can be in with cerebral palsy, stretching is going to be a fairly useful exercise. And I would certainly include, include some type of stretching and flexibility component in an exercise program for a kid with cerebral palsy. That's going to help out quite a bit, as will the type of supplements that are going to improve muscle tone and kind of decrease the potential for a muscle to be in a spasmic state. One of the top ones I recommend would be magnesium. That can really help to improve muscle tone and decrease muscle spasmodic spasticity with something like cerebral palsy. So I'd get like a good topical or oral magnesium. Another thing that I would really look into that's, that's shown some good results, especially when it comes to muscle function and cerebral palsy is zinc sulfate. And you'll, you'll want to be kind of careful with this one. I would make sure that you're, you're not overdoing zinc supplementation, that you talk with a physician about this. But zinc sulfate would be another supplement that could assist with something like cerebral palsy. And then there can be some neurological deficits that occur with cp. And I would just go check out that article that I recently wrote over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com on mental performance hacks, because a lot of the things that can improve neurological performance or mental performance, fish oil, fatty acids, higher fat intake, things like that, they're going to help with the neurological status in cerebral palsy. So I hope that helps out a little bit. I don't want you to misconstrue this as medical advice. I'm not a pediatric doc or anything like that, but those are some of the things that I would certainly look into.

Great. Okay, next question is from Eric. And this is a question. This is about the interview that you did with Dr. Davis, the author of Wheat Ben Belly. We've sort of, we've talked the the heck out of this topic many times, but I think this is a sort of an interesting take on it. He he says, I really enjoyed your interview with Dr. Davis regarding the consumption of wheat. Prior to listening to the episode, we eliminated wheat from my son's diet and dealing after dealing with some behavioral issues and have seen a definite improvement. The improvement was so great, we have begun to eliminate it from the rest of our diets as well. And the info that was presented by Dr. Davis further solidified that decision. I was wondering if after your interview if you have any intentions of reducing or eliminating wheat from your diet. If so, it'd be interesting to see what improvements you notice and as you are so in tune with your body and your health.

Yeah. First of all, I've almost pretty much worked wheat almost completely out of my diet. My wife is 100% on board, and it's something that we're both devoted to avoiding now for both our children and us. A big part of that is based off of my conversation with Dr. Davis and what I learned about how even soaked and sprouted forms of wheat can still have some issues, especially with modern forms of wheat. So I've started to just gradually work it all out of my diet. And we're using lots of rice flour, coconut flour, quinoa flour. When you're looking at kids, yes, there is a definite correlation between gluten sensitivity, wheat intake and the mind brain connection. So it's really not that hard to understand the link between gluten sensitivity and problems with your brain. Learning disabilities, difficulty staying on task, memory dysfunction, function, poor performance in kids, acting up in kids, things like that. Gluten sensitivity in kids is caused by elevated levels of antibodies that kind of fight against gluten and a specific component of gluten called gliadin. And the antibody, it's called anti gliadin antibody. When a person is exposed to gluten, that anti gliadin antibody combines with gliadin. And when that happens, you get specific genes that are turned on in anybody who's gluten sensitive. And lots and lots of kids are gluten sensitive. And when those genes are turned on, your body produces inflammatory chemicals. They're called cytokines. And there's a direct correlation between cytokines and detriment of brain function. So you're going to see elevated cytokines in people who have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis and autism and other forms of kind of like brain disorders. But you're also going to see elevated cytokines in kids who are acting up a lot. And if you've got kids who are showing a lot of the symptoms of ADHD or poor mental performance, poor performance at school. Yeah, absolutely. Eliminating gluten, eliminating wheat from their diet can be huge in terms of treating that. One person who has been on this show before, Nora Gadgados, she actually works with lots of kids, and one of the first things that she does to affect a child positively is to eliminate gluten and wheel wheat from their diet. And it sounds kind of silly, but my kids eat extremely healthy. They're smart, they're very well behaved. And I think a big, big part of that is because they're not walking around with cytokines coming out their eyeballs and these inflammatory chemicals circulating through their bloodstream. So, yes, I personally am really, really lowering my wheat intake and gluten intake. And, yes, I think it's even more important for a kid. Cool.

So have you actually noticed improvements in yourself since you've been lowering it?

Yeah, I've noticed an improvement in gut function, specifically. I don't want to gross people out, but I mean, just like, less gas, less bloating, less using the restroom, that type of thing. So I certainly think that there's a little bit of digestive inflammation that I can get when I have wheat and gluten. Not that it was a huge part of my diet before. You know, I was probably having wheat, maybe, maybe maximum, about twice a week before, and now I'm just trying to completely avoid it.

Yeah, I'm two and a half weeks into the Rev diet. I know I bring this up in all the episodes, but it's a big part of my life right now, and I've noticed the same thing. Like, just I rarely feel bloated, I rarely feel gassy, and my bathroom habits are very regular. Not that they were ridiculously unregular before, but this is like. It's really quite, quite a difference.

Yeah. And for folks that just went over their heads, I'm coaching Brock, and we're kind of switching from marathon training to triathlon training right now. And after Brock finished his marathon down in Florida, I switched him to the Rev diet. And the first few weeks of the Rev diet are clean eating. So you're eliminating dairy, wheat, wheat, soy, pretty much anything that could cause Inflammation. You're pushing the reboot button. That's what the R in rev stands for. You're pushing the reboot button on your body. And so Brock's had all this stuff just kind of out of his diet. And it sounds like it's going well for you, man. Yeah. Yeah.

It took the first week, I was really hungry, but second week, I started to get a lot more comfortable, and right now, I think I could eat like this forever.

Cool.

Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to completely derail the Q and A here. We've got one more question left, and it's from Ferdinand. And Ferdinand says, I just had a friend tell me that he was diagnosed with liposarcoma cancer. This particular cancer is quite rare, and thus the best treatment, from the medical point of view, is still really unknown. I pointed him to a few podcast episodes that cover cancer treatment via nutrition. But I wanted to see if you could run down a few specific things that you would tell someone if they asked you for advice on combating cancer through nutrition and exercise. Exercise, yeah.

Obviously, information overload can be a big issue when it comes to cancer remedies, especially when you're looking at, like, nutritional remedies and alternative treatments for cancer that go beyond something like chemo. So I'm going to go over just a few things that I'm aware of and that I have noticed to be effective. But I want to throw a caveat in here. Liposarcoma is it's one form of a malignant tumor. The lipo part of that means that liposarcoma is present in fat cells and kind of the soft tissue in your body. And certain forms of cancer are going to respond specifically to certain treatments, and certain forms aren't. So, you know, without me being a cancer specialist per se, you know, I have to paint with a fairly broad brush here. And I have to certainly say that I'm not 100% for sure that a few of the things I'm about to mention would necessarily cause a positive change or, you know, affect something like liposarcoma. That being said, biochemically, sugar feeds cancer. Glucose, basically, sugar combined with glutamine, which is amino acid. Those are both essential for cell growth and specifically tumor cell growth. So if you're cutting off glucose and sugar to a tumor, it's going to. To die. You basically break the cycle of glucose utilization by a tumor. And this is why research studies have shown that something like a ketogenic diet, in which you cut off carbohydrate consumption almost completely in your diet and you instead force your body to utilize fatty acids and ketones as a fuel can cause marked improvement in the advancement of cancer. And that is because you are cutting off the primary fuel source for tumors. And almost every tumor is a glucose consuming tumor. This is a very uncomfortable treatment because you have to learn how to burn fatty acids efficiently as a fuel. And it can be, you know, basically like fasting yourself and almost feel like starving yourself. But a calorie restricted ketogenic diet has great potential for cancer treatment. And essentially that's the way that you want to think about it is that sugar feeds cancer. Tumor cells rely on glucose. So I would highly recommend that you look into a ketogenic diet. Diet. The next thing that I would look into is a certain vitamin in the body that has been shown to suppress tumor growth and basically inhibit the ability of tumors to utilize fuel and also cut off a lot of the capillarization or the blood vessels that can actually feed a tumor and actually specifically target tumors almost in an intelligent manner. And that would be vitamin K2. I would be supplementing with a vitamin K2, what's called an MK7 form of vitamin K2. And I will be. I didn't mention this in the special announcements. I am interviewing a physician this Friday, not only about the cancer fighting properties of vitamin K2, but many of the other very, very interesting components of this vitamin. Incredibly useful. And it's something that I would highly recommend that you listen to. We'll be going into dosage type, just everything you need to know about kind of how to use and supplement with vitamin K2. So, so that would be number two. So ketogenic diet supplementation with vitamin K2. The other thing that I would look into is there is a movie that you can watch online or you can order the DVD of and it's about a doctor who invented a form of cancer treatment using something called antineoplastins, which actually can have a significant healing effect on many incurable forms of terminal cancer. There's kind of a huge political story behind this treatment because it has been suppressed to a great extent by the U.S. food and Drug Administration. But the name of the doctor is Stanislaw. Primarily the name of the movie is the movie. I would recommend that you look into this as well. This would actually be something more involved, more expensive that would actually require you to meet with this doctor, go to his clinic and be treated. But it is certainly something that I would highly recommend that you look into. So those would be kind of three recommendations that I would give to start you off. I hope that helps. I'm sorry to hear about your friend and I hope that some of this information can be of benefit.

Okay. Best of luck to your friend Ferdinand.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that wraps up the questions for this week. Like I said, great interview coming out the this Friday. Be sure to listen to that. It may actually be Saturday morning by the time it comes out. But this weekend will be that Vitamin K interview. Really, really great interview. I highly recommend that you listen in and then remember to delete and reinstall the phone app if you've got that. And you can grab those apps over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, look into the ultimate weight training guide for triathletes, which is now available in hard copy format. And then, of course, everything that we've talked about today is in the show notes for episode number 182. And that's right over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com so I personally want to thank people for listening in. And Brock, thank you for doing lots of reading today.

Yeah, yeah. I appreciate everybody, everybody putting in all their backstories, but you make my job very difficult.

And Brock's actually very good at what he does because these questions are even longer than what Brock is actually reading. So we love the backstories. We love it, folks, when you give us details. But don't be offended when we cut some of those details out.

It's not because they're boring. It's just because there's too much.

Your donations are always appreciated over@BenGreenFulfitness.com leave the podcast a ranking over on itunes if you get a chance. And until next time, this is Ben and Brock signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com did.

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