Episode #184: The Effect Of Alcohol On Your Physical Performance – Do Booze & Exercise Mix?

In today's podcast, the effects of alcohol on your physical performance. Do booze and exercise mix. Also quick and healthy celiac foods preparing for a pump and run. Is MCT oil better than coconut oil? HIIT versus cardio tips on patellofemoral syndrome, Seitan protein lowering high blood pressure, exercise induced asthma, nocturnal penile tumescence from increased testosterone, and is curves better than a traditional gym?

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Hello all you podcast people. Brock here with another episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. And once again, we apologize for. For last week's hiatus, but. Well. Hey, Ben.

What.

What happened? Why were we absent last week?

Because I can't podcast from airplanes.

What's wrong? What?

Basically, no, I was just very, very busy. I went over to the Team Timex triathlon camp and then over to called Triathlon America. So I was preoccupied. But I promise that that is an extremely rare occurrence. I think that's happened twice in the three years that this podcast has been going. So don't worry, folks, we're not bailing on the podcast anytime soon.

No, no, definitely not. But. So there were some pretty cool things you were doing with the Team Timex. Do you want to get into any of those things or direct people to some resources?

Well, you know, I actually want to talk about that a little bit in today's news flash in terms of hydration and electrolyte intake and what you really need. So I'll mention that later on. So, yes, I will give a few snippets here and there. So in the meantime, I'm actually really full right now and I haven't eaten since right after dinner last night. And you know what I did was I took coconut manna. Have you ever heard of that?

No.

It's incredible. Coconut mana. It's made by a company called Nativa N U T I V A and I mixed it with protein powder and coconut mana is just basically coconut oil kind of mixed with coconut meat. And man, oh man, it was good. But I woke up this morning still full. So if you need something to satiate your appetite, grab yourself some coconut manna. You can kind of, you can spread it on stuff, you know, for me, I just broke some chunks off and mixed it into some protein powder. And, man, I. I actually recommend it. It would definitely fall into the superhuman food pyramid that we have over at the website. So check it out. What do you think? Should we launch into the special announcements? Here we go. Special announcements.

All right, so special announcements. Since it has been a couple of weeks, there's a lot of stuff going on@BenGreenfieldFitness.com yeah, I've been keeping up with.

Putting out some articles, some things I've wanted to write about, and actually had some time to sit on an airplane or sit in an airport and write. One of the things that I get asked quite a bit about by women who are going to have a baby or by their husbands is how they can kind of keep their core strong. Because a lot of times you hear that you're not supposed to do crunches, which is true. So I published a cheat sheet for getting your abs back after you have a baby. It's essentially all the core exercises that you can do that you never read about anywhere else but that are acceptable for. I tell you which trimesters of pregnancy they're acceptable for, but I recommend checking out that article for sure once you head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com I also wrote about the deodorant that I used, why I use it. I use a brand called Everyman Jack. And I wrote about what you need to consider when you're using deodorant because I know a lot of folks out there, men and women, use deodorant, and there are some things to think about when you use it. So read the article about whether or not you're creating a chemical cocktail in your armpits.

That just sounds awful.

Dr. It does. There was an article, last one that I recommend folks check out is four reasons to do cardio while you're at the gym. Weight training. There's some pretty good reasons to do it, from hormonal to metabolic reasons. So check out that article as well. So a few things that I would recommend you read over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you can just go over to the website and check those out anytime.

Do it.

What else is going on? The official dates have been set for a double triathlon adventure, which myself and fellow coach Graham Turner are leading over to Thailand. That's not until this winter, folks, so you got lots of time to prepare. Think about it this way. You only live once, and this is the adventure of a lifetime. It is a fun, fun time, and we're putting the trip together. I'll put a link in the show notes. We're probably only going to be taking 12 people total on that trip. So if you want to go get signed up, this is one of those things you got to start planning for early in terms of work, plane, flights, everything else. So check it out, you know, start to set aside a few bucks and it is well worth the trip. So I'll put a link in the show notes.

I'm trying to use your justification of you only live once to spend the money on it because it sounds so cool.

It would be cool to have Brock along in Thailand then. The last thing is, if you are a coach of any sport or you are a personal trainer or you work with people to enhance their performance, then send me your email address. I'll put my email address in the show notes to this podcast, but it is BenGreenfieldFitness.com I have something I want to mail to you. I am going to be, over the course of this year, teaching others to do what I do, teaching some of the modules that will make you an expert when it comes to enhancing human performance. And I'll be taking on a small group of folks to teach that to. And the first people that write me in, I've essentially got 50 postcards sitting here on my desk. So the first 50 mailing addresses I get are the first 50 people that are that are going to get into this thing. So that's it. Those are all the special announcements.

That is more than enough. What are you drinking?

Kombucha.

Me too.

Nice.

News flashes. Okay, so twitter.com BenGreenfield is, as usual, very active and exciting. What do you want to highlight?

Well, the first, I actually have three tweets that I wanted to bring up that I tweeted this week that I think folks would find valuable. The first is that it turns out that even though hydration experts will tell you that you're pretty much screwed during something like a run or a marathon or endurance event, if you lose 3% or more of your body weight, I came across an article that verifies that you can indeed lose up to about 10% of your body weight and still do something like win a marathon. This was actually a study that the marathon runner who won Hayley.

Helped me out.

Yes, he lost 10% of his body mass due to dehydration during his world record marathon running. And this is about three times more or more than three times more what people say that you should be able to lose in terms of your body mass due to dehydration. And he still did just fine. And if you look at Ironman champions, marathon champions, people around the globe who are doing very well in endurance events, they're finishing dehydrated now. I personally did this sweat sodium test in which they measured the amount of salt that I lost and they measured the amount of fluid that I lost. And I lose about 2 liters of fluid per hour and about 2 grams of sodium per hour. And I was advised by the researcher to drink 2 liters of water an hour to replace what I was losing so that I didn't lose body mass and my jawbout dropped that this would be recommended to me. But what it comes out to folks, and I'll be writing an article, a more comprehensive article about this over at my Get Fit Guy website, what this comes out to is that no matter what you find out, when it comes to how much you're losing in terms of water or how much you're losing in terms of salt, you really don't need to worry about replacing all of that during exercise. Even during something like a marathon, you can finish in what might be considered to be a very dehydrated state, you're still alright. And one of the mechanisms that's proposed for that being the case is that basically your body can compensate for the reduction in blood volume that happens when you lose water. And essentially what happens is your veins can constrict or contract and that shortens the actual loop that blood has to travel through when it's going from the heart to to your muscles. You can get by on less blood. As your blood volume drops, your body has this compensatory mechanism. And so in just the same way that when you are sweating a lot of sodium, your kidneys will release hormones that cause you to retain more sodium, lose less in your urine and kind of conserve sodium stores. Your body also has a mechanism to keep you relatively safe when you're getting into a dehydrated state during exercise. So it's just something I wanted to alert people to that, you know, when you see me out there doing sweat sodium tests and fluid loss tests and sodium loss tests, it doesn't mean that I'm trying to find that out so that I can replace everything I'm losing. For me, it was just an interesting.

Scientific experiment that is really interesting. And when Geb finished that huge marathon win, he didn't look any worse for wear either. It wasn't like he crossed the finish line and immediately started guzzling like tons and tons of water or anything. He actually celebrated for quite a while and looked absolutely fine.

Granted, he's a very small person, but yeah, he is. Yeah, Lifehacker had a great article this week on how to hack your brain to use cravings to your advantage. Because I know that people struggle with things like carbohydrate cravings, food cravings, and the like. Because I've had many questions come into the show about that. I thought this was a good article. And the article starts off by explaining where cravings originate from and how they're tied to the reward processing center in your brain, and then goes into some very good, in my opinion, recommendations for controlling those cravings. Basically, what happens is when you're craving something, your reward system in your brain identifies the target that you're craving and causes the brain to release dopamine. And when that happens and you don't give yourself the thing that's causing the dopamine release, your body releases stress hormones and those make you feel discomfort or pain. And that basically tricks your body into thinking that the only way to stay safe is to succumb to the craving. And so the solution for that, kind of laid out in the article, which I do recommend that you go read in detail, is that you kind of re hardwire your brain to convince your brain that the thing that you're craving is actually dangerous or is going to be more of a hassle for you to access. And what that can do is not only reduce the amount of dopamine that your brain is going to release, but it's also going to reduce the stress response that your body has when it can't get that thing that you're craving. The article goes into much more detail about changing your environment or altering your environment to remove some of the craving triggers, to replace some of the craving triggers with things that may train your body to have a dopamine release instead of the thing that you're craving. Even something as simple as replacing Pop Tarts in your pantry with fruit. But essentially it teaches you how to alter your reward system. I will link to that article in the Show Notes. I link to it in the tweet that I put out earlier this week, but I recommend that you read it. And it's actually related to the other article that I wanted to talk about, which is that sugar basically, or fruit. Sugar from fruit doesn't make you fat. And this was an article which was on wholehealthsource.blogspot.com and it went into how the issue with foods that have sugar in them is not necessarily the calories in the sugar or some magical biochemical thing that the sugar does in your body, but rather it's the issue of the sugar being highly palatable, having the propensity to cause that dopamine release. And that's kind of the biggest issue when it comes to consuming sugar based foods. And if you're able to control your access to or control your reward response to sugar, and it's really not going to be as much of an issue whether it's from food based sources or sugar based sources when it comes to your actual weight. The other little gem that I found in that article was that even though fructose intake, which is kind of a form of sugar from things like soda and food, wasn't really associated with total body fatness or your body weight, there are other things going on above and beyond weight, like a redistribution of body fat to your visceral belly fat, which is the stuff that makes you most prone to chronic disease, insulin resistance, increased inflammation, higher blood pressure, all the things that would normally be associated with metabolic syndrome. So while it may be that sugar doesn't make you fat per se, there are certainly a lot of other issues to consider that go above and beyond fatness.

So, and so it was the study differentiating between the, I missed the, the connection between the fruit and like the sodas and stuff. Was it saying that the, the fruit was okay? It didn't actually contribute to that, that.

Overall, yeah, there's a big difference between fruit and soda. Even though both have fructose. Soda is the only item that's actually been directly linked to creating a lot of these kind of metabolic syndrome issues.

Gotcha.

Yeah. So an interesting read. Obviously going over it quickly in a news flash doesn't quite do the article justice. So I'll link to it@BenGreenfieldFitness.com but those are the things that you should check out this week. And that's it. So what do you think? Q and A?

Definitely.

Listen listener.

Q and A. Okay, so we've got almost an entire show of audio questions. People are really getting on the bandwagon and, and calling. And remember, if you do want to leave an audio question, you can call toll free to 1-877-209-9439 or you can Skype to Pacific Fit, just like all these people have starting.

We love to hear your voices.

We do because we get tired of hearing our own voices. And the first voice we're going to hear is Joe Ben Brock.

Love the show. Guys, this is Joe again. Have another question for you. It concerns the fact that recently there's been a lot of subject matter out there about whether or not red wine glass every night is good for you or bad for you. My girlfriend's family has a history of heart issues, so we've been trying to do that over the past month. Now we've been also trying to vary, throwing in different drinks in there, whether or not it's red wine, white wine, cordials, beer. I was curious, what are your thoughts on alcohol during training and racing season? How much. How often would I stay away from just general questions like that? Thanks, Ben. Have a great day, guys.

Okay. And this question actually goes really hand in hand with a question from Brendan, who wanted to know specifically more about beer and said he only drinks on weekends and he's looking for a safe number per day. So I think you can probably mix this question all into one big answer.

Yeah, apparently we have a lot of boozers that listen in, and I put.

Them first because I'm curious, too.

Let me start by saying that I personally do drink. I typically average about two drinks per week. For me, it is usually wine. I do not really like beer. I am not a big fan of the fact that most beer is derived from wheat either, because that's something I've been trying. Trying to reduce in my life. But when it comes to alcohol in general, there's a couple things you need to understand. First of all, from a body weight standpoint, alcohol reduces your lipid oxidation, your fat oxidation, by about 70%. And the way that it does this is when you consume alcohol, it passes through your stomach and into your intestines and into your bloodstream, and it goes to the liver. And in the liver, there's an enzyme, and it's called alcohol dehydrogenase. And that converts alcohol into a molecule called acetaldehyde. And acetaldehyde is converted to another compound called acetate. Now, what happens is that that acetate is preferentially burnt as a fuel over and above fats, carbs, et cetera. So essentially, you shut down any fat oxidation that's going on as your body preferentially begins to burn acetate instead. Now, in conjunction with that, you need to realize that alcohol is very dense calorically. So at the same time that you're shutting down fat oxidation, you're bumping up the amount of calories that you consume. Alcohol is about 7 calories per gram, okay? In contrast to that, protein is about 4 calories per gram. Carbohydrate is about 4 calories per gram, and fat is higher. Fat is 9 calories per gram. But you generally don't drink fat, at least not if you're a normal person. So the issue is that alcohol is very, very easy to consume high amounts of because it is something that you drink, and you need to understand that it is nearly twice as many calories per volume than protein or carbohydrate, and it shuts down your oxidation of fats. From a weight loss standpoint, which is directly tied to performance, if we're looking at power to weight ratio and the amount of fat that you're carrying around in your body, that's one issue with alcohol. In addition to that, alcohol would be considered fairly empty calories. We could certainly say that something like red wine has nutrients in it, has some antioxidants in it, and even those, as we know from the recent scandal that happened last year, that turns out that red wine isn't all that it's cracked up to be in terms of its therapeutic effects. There are lower calorie ways to get that nutrient density than by drinking alcohol. So if you're drinking alcohol for the pure antioxidant effect, there are much, much better ways to get antioxidants into your system. Alcohol actually can lower your protein synthesis by about 20% when you're consuming alcohol. One of the reasons for that is it can dehydrate your muscle cells. The hydration of a muscle cell is directly tied to its anabolic potential, its potential to actually grow or help to make you stronger. So because your cells aren't holding as much water, it can get harder for you to build muscle. It can also get harder for you to properly absorb many of the nutrients that are keys to a muscle contraction, like calcium and phosphorus and magnesium and iron and potassium, and all these things that are crucial to ideal performance. So alcohol is going to kind of come at you that way as well. Alcohol can lower testosterone, and it can increase estrogen. So the way that it does that is we've talked before on the show about how testosterone can get converted into estrogen through a process called aromatization. And alcohol can increase the rate at which that occurs. There have been studies that have shown when blood alcohol levels are at their highest, testosterone levels are at their lowest. And where a lot of that testosterone is going is it's getting aromatized into estrogens. That's why a lot of times you'll see that, especially like males who do a lot of drinking, they get gynecomastia. They get man boobs over a period of time. And that's directly linked to alcohol consumption. And you know, there are other things we talked about in the previous episode that can cause that, but alcohol is a big issue. So the other thing about alcohol is it can reduce insulin like growth factor, which is another kind of anabolic muscle building recovery type of hormone. So you reduce your insulin like growth factor and you inhibit your ability to recover properly, to synthesize protein and to repair muscles. So there are of course positive benefits of alcohol. There are.

I was just going to say, dude, you're killing me. There's got to be something good about this.

Sure. There's positive social benefits. There is the relaxation benefit. Both of those are tied to longevity and happiness. Those are certainly important parts of life. If you're always kind of towards the pointy end of the competition, a marathon or a 5K or a triathlon, but you really aren't enjoying your life because you're never getting out and not hanging out with friends or that type of thing, then yeah, that's something to consider. The other thing is that when I'm saying these things about alcohol, generally talking about something that goes above and beyond moderate consumption. So for example, a glass of beer or a glass of wine or even a shot, if you're having maybe a little bit of a shot of your favorite whiskey on the rocks, that's really not going to be an issue if you're doing that once or twice a week. I wouldn't do it the night before a very, very important workout just because it does have effects. We're looking for every advantage possible. But ultimately the issue with alcohol becomes when you're engaging in something like a bender every couple of weeks, where you're out partying late into the night, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, or even doing what I know a lot of people do when I'm going through people's food logs or doing a nutritional analysis. And that's even something like in many cases, two or three glasses of wine four to five times a week. More people do that than you would think. And in my opinion, that is a consumption of alcohol. That's a level that could cause some of these issues that I talked about. So in terms of total amount of alcohol that I would recommend that you consume when you're in training or in racing season, somewhere in the range of about two maximum, around four drinks a week would be reasonable and really not cause a lot of the issues that I just talked about, especially if you're spreading those out. So four Drinks all at once? No. But a glass of wine on maybe a Wednesday night and again on Saturday and Sunday, not an issue.

I know a lot of the runners that I've coached in the last few years use sort of a big training day like their long, slow distance run on Saturday or Sunday as an excuse to actually have a bit of a celebration and have a few drinks. Is there a reason why you shouldn't do that? Is it actually, like, is it going to take away from the big workout that you just did?

From a purely physical point, it will inhibit your performance. But we need to be realistic here and understand that life goes above and beyond the purely physical standpoint. And the social enjoyment, the dopamine release, the mental satisfaction that you may get from sitting back and enjoying a couple of beers after a nice hard run may outweigh any positive physical benefits when it comes to your total happiness and longevity. So that's what it comes down to. But yes, if you want to get every performance advantage possible, then yeah, you do kind of live like a monk and completely avoid alcohol. And that's just a completely honest question. I'm not saying that you should do that. I personally don't. But if you really wanted every advantage possible, you would.

Fair enough. Okay. Our next question is another audio question and it comes from an anonymous listener.

Hi Ben. This is a message for the podcast. I'm calling in to inquire about quick and healthy options for refueling post a running race. My most common distance that I run is a 5k, and I've been developing the propensity of getting very nauseous and faint post these running races. And I can typically alleviate these ailments by eating potato chips and some banana and sports drink. But I'm looking for a healthier option because I typically follow a more whole foods diet and don't eat such processed foods. Now, pertinent to this question may also be that I am topping off my glycogen stores the night before with sweet potatoes and such. And the day of the race, I'm typically eating a piece of 12 grain toast with peanut butter, banana and some water before. Other details may be that I'm about a 16 minute 5k runner. I'm 29 years old. I'm a male, 140 pounds, about 5'6. I have about 5% body fat. And one thing that may be pertinent is I do have Crohn's disease. All right, thank you very much. Have a good one, guys. Bye.

You know, I think this is an interesting question, especially because of the mention of the celiac issue and then going on to describe how there's peanut butter and banana and toast being consumed prior to the actual workout or prior to the actual race. I'm assuming if celiac disease is present that this would still maybe like a gluten free toast or something of that nature. But there are better things that you could fuel with prior to an event if you have celiac disease. And for example, something like a potato based starch would burn a lot cleaner and have lower amounts of fats and proteins just because of that peanut butter that you're getting. So it's gonna digest more quickly. Little less blood in the gut, probably a little less propensity for feeling nauseous and faint. But I would look at this on a little deeper level, especially if celiac disease is present, and look at whether or not the gut is actually in a state where it's properly absorbing the foods that you're eating, or whether or not the gut is in a state where it is not digesting properly and causing some undigested food particles to cross through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream, cause some inflammation and some of the things that would actually cause you to feel nauseous or faint after a heart event. So you may want to go on to a dietary protocol that could help to heal your gut. Probably the most popular protocol for something like this is something called the GAPS diet. GAPS G A P S stands for Gut and Psychology syndrome. And this was a diet created by a physician named Natasha Campbell McBride. And it's a style of eating that enhances your digestive healing, especially if you've been eating the wrong type of foods. Maybe you have celiac disease, but you've noticed been eating super duper clean. And so there is some digestive damage that's occurred that needs to be healed. Basically, the GAPS diet kind of starts off with eliminating a lot of the things that are going to be an issue. Gluten, wheat, things of that nature. But more specifically, there are certain supplements that you take on that diet as well. For example, you take a very effective, like a therapeutic strength probiotic. So really, really high quality probiotic that has as many different bacterial strains in it as possible. For example, folks on this show or who listen to this show may have heard me before recommend the probiotic made by Mount Capra. That's one example of one that would fall into this category. They're Caprobiotics. Plus that's a mixture of strains from a bunch of different forms or a bunch of different groups of probiotic bacteria. So that's the first thing that you'd want to do. In addition to making sure that you're eliminating gluten and wheat and kind of adhering to the list of recommended foods in something like the GAPS diet is taking a really effective therapeutic strength probiotic. Another thing that is recommended on the GAPS diet is an essential fatty acid. This can also help to heal the gut. Generally you'll want to use like a really, really good fish oil technically with a really high rate of EPA to dha. So this is usually going to be a triglyceride based fish oil. Brands I like are Pharmax. Another brand is Super Essentials. And this is advice that anyone can use who's having gut issues, digestive issues, ulcer issues, irritable bowel syndrome, that type of thing. But getting in essential fatty acids in your diet, really focusing on reducing a lot of like the roasted seeds and nuts, vegetable oils, things with high amounts of omega 6s, and choosing more along the lines of the omega 3s, fish based oils, fish capsules, fish oil capsules, things of that nature. And then also a good high quality cod liver oil. I'm a fan of like the Nordic naturals cod liver oil to give you not only your EPA and dha, which are those essential fatty acids that can help to heal your gut, but also vitamin A and vitamin D. Because a vitamin A deficiency can cause digestive problems and cod liver oil can help out with that. So typically leaky gut and not being able to absorb foods very well are the result of a vitamin A deficiency. And so just taking about three to four tablespoons or so of a cod liver oil on a daily basis can help out quite a bit with that. Pancreatic enzymes or what are called digestive enzymes, you'd want to start into those. You can do literally two before every meal of the day. Similar to the probiotics that I recommend, I like the digestive enzymes made by Mount Capra. They're called Caprazymes. Really, really good spectrum of digestive enzymes. So you can take those in a healthy digestive tract. The pancreas is going to naturally produce those. But a lot of people, including myself, I was recently tested, tend to be deficient in digestive enzymes. As I belch.

As you're belching up some kombucha, aren't you?

Yeah, exactly. Excuse me, but. But basically taking a digestive enzyme can really help. And hand in hand with that, you may have a little bit of an issue with a normal stomach acidity So a lot of times combining a digestive enzyme with something like a hydrochloric acid supplement can give a really, really good one, two punch in terms of your ability to digest foods more efficiently, which can indirectly assist with gut healing. And then the last thing you'd want to look into is that your gut contains the greatest surface area of your body that is exposed to things like toxins. And I would really recommend that you be careful eating processed foods, packaged foods that have been exposed to plastics, trying to keep your house as chemical free as possible. So kind of avoiding lots of new carpets, paints, stuff like that, getting some good plants in your house. Those are really, really good at reducing toxic air. They consume a lot of toxic gases and basically just put out oxygen. So I would look at some lifestyle changes that kind of detox what's around you as well. And all those things put together could help to heal your gut. I know it's a lot probably different than maybe what you expected for me to say just like eating extra gel before the race. But the fact that you mentioned that you have celiac, that definitely suggests to me that there may be deeper issues going on than just like low blood sugar.

Yeah. Feeling nauseous and faint after a hard effort is not an unusual thing. But some of the things that he mentioned all put together do sort of point to something a little bit different than just that was a really hard effort.

Right. Exactly.

Okay, cool. Our next audio question comes from Andrea.

Hey, Ben and Brock, this is Andrea from Denver. I'm calling for some advice on an event I have coming up in a couple weeks. So hopefully you can get to this in time. It's a 5K pump and run where you have to bench press a percentage of your weight and then run a 5k race for every rep up to 30 reps, you get 30 seconds off your 5k time. So it's actually possible to take off 15 minutes on the day of the event. They have an athlete weigh in and the bench press between 7 and 9am and then the race is at 10:30. So my question is about nutrition. I feel like I'd want to be as light as I could for the weigh in without compromising strength. I know that leading up to competition, bodybuilders often will go really low carb, but I wasn't sure how much of that was for the look more so than for the actual weight. And then of course, I want to make sure that I have the right fuel for a fast 5k time. So I'm curious what you would Suggest. Thanks, guys.

I thought this event sounded pretty cool because, yeah, I mean, if you can get 30 seconds taken off your 5k time for every rep of bench press that you do, I mean, really prioritizing the bench press is way, way more important, in my opinion, on this test. And I assume that the bench press, the amount of bench press that you do is based off of your body weight, obviously, if you're, if you're weighing in. So first of all, to answer Andrea's question about bodybuilders, yes, bodybuilders do have to weigh in, and then they have, you know, kind of a short period of time to be looking really good posing on stage. So one of the things that bodybuilders do, or people who are maybe going to pose on the COVID of a magazine or even just want to look good with their shirt off at the beach would be that you can go on basically a very, very low carbohydrate diet. And what that does is it kind of flushes a lot of your muscle storage glycogen out. And since glycogen or storage carbohydrate carries up to four times its weight in water, you lose a lot of water weight as well. And you can enhance even more the amount of water weight that you lose by doing something like taking a diuretic like dandelion root ext, or this is another strategy that can be used by drinking a whole bunch of water for about three to four days, up to 48 hours prior to your event, and then lowering water intake. And what happens is when you're drinking a whole bunch of water, your kidneys learn to excrete a whole bunch of water. And when you stop drinking as much water, your kidneys continue to excrete as much water. So essentially what you're doing is you're draining your body of carbohydrate. You're draining your body of water and arriving at the water in with as little carbohydrate, as little water on your body as possible. And then the trick is that you have to replace all that because it does kind of give your muscles an empty look. So then you have to eat a whole bunch of carbohydrates or your muscles fill up and drink a bunch of water so your weight goes back up. And in a bodybuilding competition, you typically have, it depends on the competition, but sometimes you've got a couple hours, sometimes you have the entire day to do that. So a lot of times bodybuilders will have a weigh in in the morning and Then go, you know, eat pizza and bread all day to get as much glycogen into the muscles as possible. You know, come back, drink a little wine, eat some chocolate so that you get that vasodilation effect. Those are two things you'll see a lot of times in the, in the backstage of a bodybuilding show is people drinking wine and eating dark chocolate. And then, you know, you go out on stage, you got the carbs and the water filling up your muscle, you've got the vasodilation from the chocolate and wine, and, you know, it makes you look pretty good. The issue with using the strategy of dehydration and low carbohydrate intake before a bench press is that there may not be enough time for you to actually restore your muscle, you know, your muscle glycogen to a high enough level to where you'd have a really good performance. In the bench press. You could probably do it by the time you get to the race later on. But since the bench press is so important here, I wouldn't really focus too much on dehydrating yourself and going on the low carb diet for the bench press. I think that it's going to hurt you more than it helps you to be focusing on the weight aspect of this, just because the two things that you can do to reduce your weight, lowering the carbohydrate and lowering the water intake, also reduces the muscle contractile potential. So instead I would just eat normally, I would take care of your body. I would have a couple sweet potatoes or yams two hours before. Make sure that you're not overeating in the days leading up, but that you're also making sure that you eat adequately, that you take care of your body and then focus on doing things that are going to help you to bench press a ton of weight, or not a ton of weight, but really a decent amount of weight as many times as possible. So first of all, you'll want to warm up well before that bench press. So about 10 minutes before, do some push ups. If you have access to a bench, do some light bench pressing. You want to finish all this up about four to five minutes prior to your actual bench press event, so that your muscles have a period of time to be able to restore creatine and restore some of the glycogen. But you do want to warm up. Don't go into that bench press event cold, don't do like static stretching because that will reduce the potential of the muscle to produce a force. But you can do Some arm swings, some arm circles. Do some push ups. Do some light bench pressing. Get some blood flow into that chest when you get down on the bench. To do your bench press, plant your feet firmly against the ground. Because being able to push your feet against the ground is going to be able to help you bench more. Don't put your feet up on the bench. Don't let your feet rest lightly on the ground. Really plant them into the ground when you grip the bar. Grip the bar hard and Brock, you may have heard this before, I don't know if you have. When you shake somebody's hand, if you kind of make a fist with your other hand, it helps you have a more firm handshake.

I haven't heard that.

It's a trick you can use for a lot of stuff. The tighter you grip your hands, the more force you're able to produce with other parts of your body. So grip the bar really hard, like white knuckle it. And in terms of where to grab that bar, here's a simple rule for you. When you're grabbing the bar to bench press, line your thumbs up above your shoulders. Extend your thumbs. So make sure that your thumbs aren't tucked in like fists, but extend your thumbs and the end of your thumbs should line up with the end of your shoulder with the outside of your shoulders. So essentially what you're doing is you're putting each hand about a thumb's length to the outside of each shoulder. That's going to put you in about the width of holding the bar. That's going to allow you to produce the most force. Now, here's another trick, and this is stuff like when I interned at University of Idaho in the strength conditioning program and also did an internship with the NFL. One of the things for the combine is to bench press £225 as many times as possible. So this is a trick that a lot of players would use. You breathe in and out deeply several times really fast right before liftoff, so that saturates your lungs with oxygen and allows you to hold your breath for a longer period of time. Because even though you're not supposed to hold your breath or make it a habit of holding your breath during exercise, it helps out quite a bit with the bench press. So you're going to breathe in and out several times really fast, and then you're going to hold your breath and you're going to take the biggest breath possible, unrack the weight, and then start doing your reps as fast and explosively as possible. So that that bar is bouncing out your chest, and you're literally. You have your breath held the whole time, and you're just lifting and lifting and lifting and lifting and lifting as many reps as you can possibly do until you're blue in the face. Sounds kind of dangerous. It is slightly dangerous. I mean, this isn't something you want to do every day at the gym, but you should be able to take so many 30 seconds off of your 5k time that you just rock the thing. Okay? So don't focus on the weight. Focus on your bench press. Form on taking care of your body so your muscles aren't all weak and noodley from dehydration and low carbohydrate when you go to the bench press. And then just max out the bench press as soon as you finish. Have some more carbs, you know, have some gel or sports drink, and, you know, that'll top off your glycogen stores. You can have another gel right before you start that 5K. But that's. That's what I would do if I were doing this pump and run and.

Make sure you let us know how it goes.

I'm totally thrilled to have. Yeah, I would love to have her comment find out.

Yeah. So please leave us a. Leave us a note when the event's over.

By the way, what podcast episode is this? Brock, just so we know, this is number 184. Okay, cool. So anything we talk about, folks, we'll put a link to in podcast number 184.

Okay, so on to the next audio question that comes from Chuck.

Hey, Ben, this is Chuck. Lately I've been hearing a lot about MCT oil, and I know that's what's found in coconut oil, and I know you're a big fan of it, as am I, for all the health benefits that it has. But I wanted to find out a little bit more about strictly MCT oil, like, I guess would be a derivative of coconut oil. What I've heard is that it's only some of the medium chain triglyceride strands that are found in coconut oil and can be used for the body, used as energy for the body, quicker and get more readily absorbed than coming from just the coconut oil itself. I was wondering if you could talk about this a little bit and explain if using MCT oil would be worth it or if coconut oil is just fine. And if you do recommend MCT oil, is it something that you could cook with, like a coconut oil, or is it something, you know, you'd want to Just take as a supplement and not cook with. So just wanted to get your opinion on that and I really appreciate any feedback. And also the podcast, it's awesome. I recommend it to all my family and friends. So I hope you keep it up, man, and hope you're doing well. Thanks.

MCT Oil. It's interesting stuff. And Chuck wants to know if it's different than coconut oil. And it is a little bit different than coconut oil. Basically, coconut oil is a mix of different chains of fats. You've got everything from lauric acid, which is one of the prime components of coconut oil. That's the one that has the really great kind of antiviral effect. Capric acid, caprylic acid. And each of these different acids are fatty acids. And they have different lengths, they're made up of different chains. And the longer the chain of fatty acid, the harder it is for the body to absorb that actual fatty acid. So the longer period of time it's going to take for your body to actually take it and convert it into usable energy. Now, what you can do is you can fractionate coconut oil, which means that you take the long chain fraction, which would be the lauric acid, and you remove that, you basically fractionate the coconut oil, and you leave just the medium chain acids, which is the caprylic and capric acids, and those make up the bulk of the oil. And that's what medium chain triglyceride oil is. Is. It's fractionated coconut oil. And what happens when you remove the lauric acid is you do remove some of the health effects of the coconut oil because you don't have as much of kind of like the antiviral benefit that coconut oil actually has. That's one of the benefits of the lauric acid. But you do increase the metabolic availability of the fats that are in the coconut oil. And so technically, studies have shown that when you replace vegetable oils with like a medium chain triglyceride type of oil, it does satiate appetite and allow people to lose weight more quickly. It also increases levels of what are called adenopectin, which is a hormone that's released by your fat cells that is associated with increased ability to lose weight. So we've got these medium chain triglycerides, since they're separated from the long chain fatty acids. The longer chain fatty acids in coconut oil kind of going directly into the cell wall and being available as kind of a fast, easy energy source, something you could use before a workout, that type of thing. So you do lose some of the health benefits of coconut oil, but you increase some of the energy benefits. And this would be, for example, if you were, before a long bike ride, going to choose between a coconut oil or a medium chain triglyceride oil. While technically the medium chain triglyceride oil is going to sit in your stomach a little less long, get absorbed, and be available more quickly as energy. The benefits, though, not only haven't been studied in terms of performance benefits of medium chain triglyceride oil versus coconut oil, but you're also paying way more for the medium chain triglyceride oil, in my opinion, so much more that it's not even worth any slightly extra advantage you might get. So medium chain triglyceride oil is going to be. It depends where you get it, but it can be about four to five times more expensive than coconut oil it has because the chains in it are slightly shorter, it has a slightly lower smoke point, and you could cook with it, and it'd still be a fairly stable oil. But the stuff costs so much that I really wouldn't recommend that you use it for cooking. So ultimately, I think that the benefits of it are blown out of proportion, unless you're somebody who's using coconut oil to fuel your workouts, in which case you get a little bit better digestive tolerance with using a medium chain triglyceride oil. But I think it's a moot point. I think this stuff is kind of blown out of proportion in terms of its benefit, especially with its expense. Hmm.

All right.

But coconut mana. Oh, man, I love that stuff. Did I mention coconut man? I believe you did.

I think I'm gonna go and find some of that stuff. So are you still satiated? Are you still hungry?

No, I'm fine. I feel great.

All right, we'll see how you're doing by the end of the show.

Yep. If you hear packages start to open on this end and me stirring things, or you hear, like, the microwave turn on or something like that, that's a sign that I'm giving in.

All right. Okay, on to the next question from Jean Luc.

Hi, Ben. The question for your podcast, Jean Luc from Montreal. I've read the transcript regarding the run art versus run long, and I was wondering if there's any easy formula to translate long run interval hard run in training that feasible or advisable to convert many long runs into hard and shorter runs. Thank you. Bye bye.

So an easy formula to translate short and fast intervals to long and slow. I know Jean Luc was a little hard to understand there, but basically what he's asking is we know that interval training is really beneficial. It makes you fit really fast. But how much faster does it make you fit? How much shorter of a period of time can you work out if you're doing high intensity interval training versus if you're doing a long slow distance session? This has been studied. For example, there was a study, it was in the Journal of Physiology and what it found was that two and a half hours of sprint interval training on a weekly basis produced similar biochemical changes in the muscle to ten and a half hours of endurance training, along with similar performance benefits as you would have gotten from 10 and a half hours of endurance training. Now that figure puts us at about 25%. What that would mean when you flesh it out is that, for example, a 30 minute session of high intensity interval training, you know, like 60 second sprints on the treadmill separated by full recovery periods for 30 minutes is going to be just as good as going out and doing a two hour long slow run. There were other studies. One study that was done by Tabata, who came up with, with the Tabata protocol, if you may know of that, as like the 4 minutes of 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy. Another study by a guy named Tremblay. And both of those found comparable advantages in terms of you needing a significantly less and about four times less effort or volume spent with interval training versus aerobic training to get similar benefits. So the answer is about 25%. But one thing you do need to bear in mind is that we're just talking about muscle changes and endurance changes. We're not talking about bone. And that's something that in my opinion is somewhat neglected when you talk about training for a marathon or training for an ironman or something like that, using just high intensity interval training. Because, because pounding the pavement for two and a half or three hours is much, much different on your bone than doing like 30 minutes of intervals on the treadmill. And I think that during the event you could be at a significantly increased risk of something like a stress fracture or a bony joint injury if you've never actually gone anything close to the distance that you're going to be doing during the event. So my recommendation is to use high intensity interval training, you know, during the lead up to something like say a marathon. But you're still going to want to do one of those long slow efforts, you know, once every seven to 14 days. I would be doing something where, you know, you're getting anywhere from 50 to 100% of the total distance that you Plan on traveling during the actual event.

Cool.

And by the way, did I tell you I signed up for the New York Marathon?

He didn't mention it, but I did see that on Twitter or somewhere like that. I did the New York Marathon a couple years ago. It's quite a thing.

It's for me, a few weeks after Ironman Hawaii. So I'm not planning on doing anything except shuffling through, but I think it'll be fun.

It will be fun. All right, our next question comes from John.

Hi, Ben Jonassen here. Hope you're doing well. I've been diagnosed with patellofemoral syndrome and have some pain at the side of my left side, of my knee, of my left knee. So it's the lateral side. I haven't been able to swim or bike or even doing the weights and stuff like that. Even actually climbing stairs seems to hurt it. So I've essentially stopped everything until I find out how to fix it without injuring myself further. I've had a physiotherapist actually tape and it feels as though there's nothing wrong with it at all, which has been really great. And I've also ordered a more permanent brace, the Core Flex Neo Tracker, to deal with the basic stuff. But I have two questions for you. Do you have any suggestions on trying to heal this faster? Physio has had me doing some exercises, but I'm not really too confident with him as he. During the initial assessment, he wanted me to do some pretty deep squats. But if you can have any ideas on how to heal this up, that would be great. And just, I guess if you're going to suggest some exercises, would I actually wear the brace while I'm doing the exercise, or should I give it a little bit of a workout? I'm not really sure what I should be doing here.

Oh, good old runner's knee.

Yeah. And I'm glad that John was able to get it taped with Kinesio tape because that stuff can do a really good job at keeping the knee tracking properly. Because it sounds like in John's case, and this is often the case in patellofemoral syndrome, is that the knee doesn't track properly in the femoral groove. It'll either go too far to the outside of the knee, which is more common, or sometimes too far to the inside of the knee, but that results in rubbing of the patella against cartilage or kind of a bone on bone type of effect, and that results in the pain. So the taping is certainly a temporary way to alleviate the issue and keep the knee tracking properly. The brace is kind of like taping on steroids. It just, you know, covers the entire knee and really keeps the knee tracking properly. But these are really temporary fixes. Now John did mention the different type of tape and he mentioned rock tape. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. But that is the type of tape that he would be able to put on and swim with. As long as when you put the tape on, you rub it, which warms the glue that connects the tape to the skin, it'll stay on and you'll see a lot of folks, for example, doing an Ironman triathlon and doing the swim portion of it and having kinesio tape or tape on certain sections of their body to kind of keep injured joints in place. And a lot of times they're using, for example, the rock tape. So I'll link to an interview that I did with the guy who invented rock tape. But again, it's kind of a temporary solution. And what I would do to speed up healing and decrease some of the inflammation is in addition to what you're already doing, light levels of physical activity and some physical therapy, I would certainly use an oral kind of like a bone healing anti inflammatory supplement. I personally would use something like Caproflex. That's one I've talked about before on the show before. It would be something you do like three in the morning, three in the afternoon and three in the evening. Caproflex has a bunch of really good anti inflammatory and bone building compounds in it. I would also, when you sleep, get something that's going to increase blood flow as you're sleeping, which can enhance healing a little bit. I would recommend either a magnetic wrap around your knee or an infrared wrap. Either of those can increase your circulation. So infrared or magnet, easy to get your hands on one of those and you can just wrap it around your knee and sleep with it around your knee. The most important thing here though is going to be strengthening the muscles around your knee to improve tracking and you're going to be wanting to do those type of exercises. You asked about this, John, with or without the brace? Without the brace, you want your muscles to be learning how to work properly to stabilize the knee without the help of the bracelet. So some of my favorite VMO style exercises or vastus medialis exercises which are going to strengthen the muscles around the knee would be, for example, a straight leg cable kick where you're standing on one leg and just kicking straight forward with one ankle attached to the Cable or an elastic band for resistance. Another one would be just sitting on the ground and with your leg stretched out in front of you, lifting one leg, keeping it completely straight with toes pointed towards the ceiling as many times as possible. You know, maybe 50 to 100 reps. Walking uphill with relatively straight legs can actually really help strengthen the quads as well. That's another exercise that I like. You can also do some things that are going to keep your legs strong or your cardiovascular fitness up without actually bending and extending the knee. And one of my favorite things for that would be to do like straight leg Frankenstein style walking in the pool. So basically aqua jogging with straight legs, it's called cross country skiing or Frankenstein walking. That works really, really well and typically won't aggravate like patellofemoral syndrome. And then when you swim, if the bending of the knee when you're swimming hurts, just use a pull buoy. And again, great way to keep your cardiovascular fitness elevated when you're swimming and keep the knee from bending. So those are things I would do. I'll link in the show notes for you to rock tape and also to cap reflex.

Do you think that does the cap reflex? Would it cause any GI problems?

Cap reflex could potentially cause a little bit of irritation when you first take it. It is high fiber. It can cause a little bit of bloating if you're not used to the amount of fiber in it. That's probably the biggest thing to be careful of when you start taking it. But ultimately that will go away after about a week or two.

Okay. Yeah, it sounded like that you were recommending taking what sounded like a lot of it. So it sort of concerned me. For anybody who's doing any sort of events that could be upset, I have.

Seen a ton of really good results with doing nine a day. But I mean, if you would want to do that the day that you're gonna go run a marathon or something, just like you wouldn't want to take any supplement that has a lot of fiber in it. But just for healing, I assume John's not gonna be running a marathon right away. I do highly recommend it.

Good point. Okay, our next audio question comes from Tim.

Hey, Ben, how you doing? My name's Tim from Brooklyn, New York, and I just had a question for the podcast. I was wondering what you think of seitan as a protein source with all the about wheat coming out and how it's not the best thing for us. I'm a vegan athlete and try to limit the amount of soy that I consume other than tempeh, so obviously my choices for protein are limited other than supplements. I'd just like to hear what your take is on that. Thanks for all the good work.

A protein named seitan.

Let's just call it seitan. This is something that you'll find a lot in vegetarian based foods as a protein substitute and something that you may find instead of a textured vegetable protein that would be made from soy, the way that the seitan is named. And you are going to find it by a number of other names as well, like wheat gluten, gluten meat, or even wheat meat. It's made from wheat gluten and you start with the wheat flour and you mix that with water until you get dough. And then while you're kneading the dough, you put the dough under water, under running water, and this washes away the starch in the dough and basically just leaves you with plain old wheat gluten, which is a protein and it's a meat free protein. So that's why a lot of times you'll see it added to vegetarian based foods as a meat substitute or even around Thanksgiving as an option or an alternative to the tofurky. The issue, of course, is that we've talked about gluten on the show before. And even if you don't have something like a gluten allergy or like celiac disease, there are a number of autoimmune and neurological issues that arise when you consume gluten. And there are multiple studies that have shown that these type of neurological and autoimmune issues, the ability of gluten not only to irritate the digestive tract, but also to affect your gut brain connection, are all over the place. You can find a ton of studies that look at gluten consumption in people with non celiac disease. Doing things like causing an elevated immune response or causing gut distress or irritable bowel syndrome or causing an effect on the neurological level. So I personally would steer very clear of this stuff and put it right up there with just taking spoonfuls of pure gluten, which is basically what you're doing when you consume it.

Yeah, it doesn't sound like a good idea at.

Yeah. And it's, it's. I think it was developed in Japan and so it originated as an Asian food, which may be why it's. It's named what it's named. I think maybe, maybe seitan is an. Is an Asian name.

I'm not sure that's something for another show. But right now we're gonna move on to the question from Tom.

Hey Ben, this is Tom Mueller. Ben, here's my question. I'm pretty active, 55 year old endurance athlete. I, I train most every day, 10 mile runs, I go to the gym, I do mountain cycling up here in the mountains of North Carolina. But I have an almost vegan diet. My food's real non processed and clean, but my problem's high blood pressure. I take my blood pressure every morning and evening. My Last average over 15 days was 145 over 84 which is still quite high. I'm taking garlic CoQ, Omega 3, 6 9, Hawthorn Berry. Try to mix a lot of things together that I've read about, but my blood pressure really doesn't seem to be coming down. I do consume caffeine, but even when I've gone off caffeine, it doesn't seem to have much of an effect on my blood pressure. FYI, I do not have any family history to lean on or learn about. So do you have any suggestions other than having to take, you know, BP meds the rest of my life? Thanks a lot, Ben.

Bye bye.

So it's good that Tom is doing some of the things that he's already doing for high blood pressure, but you know, you can go above and beyond a lot of these, you know, these natural supplements like you know, Tom is taking, you know, I think he said garlic and hawthorn berry and fish oil and a lot of the things that you will see recommended for high blood pressure as kind of natural treatments. But there are other things that can cause high blood pressure. So first of all, the biggies that you would think of right away would be first of all being overweight. I don't know if Tom is at a healthy weight, but one thing that you can look at is just your overall weight. And could that be an issue with increasing your blood pressure? Because a lot of times even if you're doing everything right, but you weigh more than would be your ideal weight weight, then that can increase blood pressure and you can find your ideal weight. You can go to Google and just google ideal weight calculator and find a calculator that's based off of your body frame and your ideal weight. The best ideal weight calculators do kind of figure out first what your body frame is by having you do things like measure your elbow width or your hand size and then you put in your age and your height and everything like that and you get an approximation of what you may want to shoot for in terms of Weight, so kind of obvious, but weight can certainly affect blood pressure. We talked about alcohol before, but alcohol can increase blood pressure. Frequent alcohol intake that can be associated with increased blood pressure. So you may want to be careful with that. If you have something like a magnesium deficiency or a potassium deficiency, you would think that eating salts, which is technically what those kind of are, would increase your blood pressure. But as a matter of fact, a deficiency of those can increase your blood pressure just because they are cofactors for sodium and for calcium. So I would look into including some magnesium, and you can get a test to find out if you're deficient in magnesium or potassium. But most people, frankly are especially active individuals. So you could just start taking something like a natural calm magnesium before you go to bed at night, like about 250 to 500 grams of something like that. A lot of times your overall dietary intake, especially in terms of starches or sugars, can affect your blood pressure. Because insulin resistance or becoming resistant to constantly high levels of circulating insulin that can be caused by sugar or starch consumption, that can cause your kidneys to retain sodium. And so many times, even if you're eating a low sodium diet and taking supplements or medications that lower blood pressure, if you haven't adjusted your diet from a carbohydrate standpoint, that could increase your blood pressure. So do something like go to BenGreenfoldFitness.com and grab my superhuman food pyramid, which is one example of a diet that is going to really limit the amount of insulin that's forced to be released by your pancreas and limit your carbohydrate intake. Stress is a biggie as well. And removing stressors from your life and also learning how to consciously de stress is incredibly important. Now, of course, meditation and yoga and breathing exercises are all ways that you can de stress. But one thing that I've been using on a daily basis now is biofeedback. I've been using a heart rate variability testing unit. It's called the EM wave and I will put a link to it in the show notes. But basically you hook one little end of it up to your ear and the other end to computer and it tracks your heart rate and specifically the period of time between your heartbeats. And it actually has trainings on there that train you how to not only lower your heart rate, but also lower your heart rate variability. And both of those can be directly correlated with lowering your actual blood pressure. And so you can literally just do five to 10 minutes of self biofeedback, a day using a unit like this, I think it's about 150 bucks or so. And that would be something that could really help with the blood pressure. So I would certainly try out the heart rate variability as well. So, yeah, heart rate variability. Make sure you're really lowering or moderating alcohol intake, looking at your overall body weight, taking some magnesium, preferably lowering some of the carbohydrate in your diet. And those are some of the things in addition to just popping supplements that can help with blood pressure.

I'm going to jump in once again with the non technical sort of approach. But you did mention that you're getting your blood pressure checked by a machine at a drugstore. And you know, those are notoriously out of whack. They don't get checked a lot or recalibrated. So make sure you're getting your, your blood pressure checked by somebody who really knows what they're doing and is able to, to really measure it correctly because you don't want to be basing it off of something that may be miscalibrated.

Yeah, that's true. Gosh, I remember playing with those blood pressure cuffs all the time when I was a kid at the grocery store. Those things were so cool.

Yeah, exactly. So you've got all these kids like just wailing on it like all the time and it's not going to stay calibrated correctly very long.

Good point, Brock.

All right, so on to the next question from Clay.

Hi Ben, my name is Clay and I've got a question for you in reference to sports induced or athletic exercise induced asthma. A couple years ago when I was training for marathons, I ended up completing three in seven months and couldn't determine why. Outside of my plantar fasciitis issues that I was suffering from, I kept going slower and slower and finally come to realize after a bunch of testing and my own self diagnosis that I have a sports enthusiasm. I'm just wondering once I can stretch out my legs enough to not work about another ball up of plantar fasciitis. I'm wondering if there's any. What kind of things you would do to help enhance my performance in relation to the normal inhaler I take, if there's anything that I can take orally or should I consistently try to push for longer runs if I run marathons and things like that. I was wondering if there's anything that you could prescribe for somebody that just doesn't seem to be able to push through the normal inhaler performance wise and part of it's, I'm sure in my head. But the other side is, I was just wondering if you could touch on some of the things that I can intake or that I can attempt to try to increase my. Decrease my times and increase my fitness level. Thank you so much.

So the first thing that I thought about when I heard Clay's question was the fact that my wife used to think that she had exercise induced asthma and would wheeze and cough and have difficulty when we go out on bike rides and stuff. And it turned out that she had something that's often confused with asthma and something that can cause airflow obstruction and simulate a lot of the symptoms of exercise induced asthma. And that is vocal cord dysfunction. And that's a condition that affects your vocal cords, typically caused by a partial vocal fold closure that obviously, because your vocal cords are right there in your breathing tubes, can decrease the amount of air that you're able to breathe in or breathe out. So, you know, I don't know if you've already looked at this, Clay, but I would certainly just check into the vocal cord dysfunction thing. There's a test that you can get, it's called a nasal endoscopy test. And a clinician can actually see whether or not your vocal folds are moving properly and determine whether or not there's an actual abnormality present. If there is, that can be typically treated through speech therapy. Sometimes, believe it or not, you can get like a Botox injection into your vocal folds that can help with this as well. But I just wanted to throw that out there because I know that there are in many cases conditions that are thought to be exercise induced asthma that are instead this, this vocal cord dysfunction issue. But if this is indeed exercise induced asthma, yeah, there are things that you can do as an alternative to or in addition to like a steroidal inhaler. One thing that folks have found some success with is using a steam room. And basically a steam room or a steam bath can help to open up the airways a little bit. Sometimes if you combine that with like a eucalyptus base that you can kind of pour over the steam rocks in something like a steam or like a sauna, that can help as well. But that's. It kind of goes back and forth. It might help a little bit with nasal stuffiness. It may help to vasodilate or bronchodilate a little bit, but it's not the best substitute. Garlic would be one thing. Garlic has a lot of really good anti inflammatory properties. And you can use garlic frequently. Keep Fresh garlic cloves on your counter. We get the big thing of crushed garlic from Costco and you can even take garlic pills. And that may help to relieve asthma symptoms, as can another popular anti inflammatory, which is ginger. And cooking a lot with ginger, using like a ginger root to make tea or drinking ginger tea, even eating ginger, like the candied ginger, you can actually wash the sugar off of that to kind of lower the calories and make it a little less. Less unhealthy. And you can eat ginger. I actually like to use ginger before workout. It really helps to open up the arteries and the airways. Echinacea would be another one that can help out a little bit. And you can just use an echinacea tea or an echinacea herb. Licorice root would be another potential anti inflammatory. It's interesting that a lot of the things that are considered popular anti inflammatories can also help with asthma. Tumeric or a curry or a cumin extract can be the same way. It's a popular anti inflammatory. It can also have some anti allergy properties. So it can directly act by lowering some of the histamines that can cause the constriction of the airways. Now, honey, and specifically raw honey from a local source, if your asthma is related to allergies or to pollen, honey can help out quite a bit. Literally, like drinking some tea that has some raw honey that you've gotten from a local source, like some local raw pollinated honey can help out with asthma symptoms. And then the last thing which is good for a lot of health conditions actually would be to use a good high quality fish oil. Fish oil is great at treating or helping to prevent heart disease, but it can also decrease airway inflammation and help to boost lung function. So I would certainly be taking some fish oil as well. So those are some of the things that I would be doing.

Yeah. If you're running in cold weather too, make sure you cover up your nose and your mouth with like a scarf or something. Or I have a neoprene neck warmer that I just pull up over my nose and mouth. And that sort of cuts down on the amount of cold air that's getting directly into your throat. And I find that really helps as well.

Yeah, exactly. Man. Here in Spokane, I've been swearing by a scarf during my workouts just because it's been so cold.

Cool. Okay, so we've got a real. Not an audio question, one that I actually have to do some effort on from Kyle. Kyle says this is a totally serious question. I saw this mentioned in a discussion about over training. Is there any basis behind the theory of nocturnal penile tumescence being an indicator or not of testosterone level and possibly being overtrained?

In short, yes. And nocturnal penile tumescence, as you can probably guess by the name, if you can break that down, that's basically just an erection during sleep or when you're waking up. And most people who don't have erectile dysfunction, most men who don't have erectile dysfunction experience such a thing about a handful of times during the night. But if you have a testosterone deficiency or an androgen imbalance, for example, your testosterone's like we talked about earlier, for example, with excessive alcohol consumption, testosterone getting converted into estrogens, then what can happen is that this doesn't happen. And so you can, you can assess the effectiveness of, for example, efforts that you're making to increase your testosterone levels or assess whether or not maybe you are overtrained and have a drop in testosterone or a really, really low testosterone to cortisol ratio by the presence of or lack of this phenomenon. Now, the other thing I would throw in there is that. But there are other things that can cause this in addition to having your testosterone levels elevated. And specifically that would be a full bladder, and that's referred to as a reflex erection. And if you just have to go to the bathroom, it can cause that. So know that there are other things that are associated with this. But yes, studies have shown that there is a direct link between testosterone levels and nocturnal penile tumes. So, yeah, I would say that if you are trying to increase your testosterone and you're noticing that that is happening, it is probably your efforts are probably successful.

Okay. All right, well, our last question comes from Ian, and Ian wants to know how effective are Curves women's gyms from both a weight loss and fitness point of view? My wife's main goal is weight loss at the moment, and so she wants to know if she'd be better off hitting a gym that has a pool, treadmill, bike classes, all that kind of stuff, and getting rid of her Curves membership. So I'm guessing Curves doesn't have all of that stuff. Maybe it's more of a limited gym.

Yeah, Curves is a really, really specific gym. It's a bunch of machines that are typically set up in a circle to encourage both ease of moving through the circuit as well as some social interaction among the women who are using the machines. And, and they're hydraulic based exercise machines, so hydraulic resistance and basically a full body Workout. And hydraulic resistance means that there's a really low impact with the workout. So the hydraulic weight machines use an oil filled cylinder to provide the resistance. So the harder you push against a hydraulic machine, the weight doesn't move faster. So it just moves at an even pace throughout the. And the flip side to that is that there's no negative part of the lift, there's no what's called eccentric part of the lift. So as the weight comes back, it moves very, very slowly as well. So the benefits of that is that it really lowers risk of injury and it provides a very safe, low impact workout. The problem is that a muscle actually responds best in terms of producing fat loss hormones and getting torn up a little bit and bouncing back by growing stronger through that eccentric contraction or through that strain that happens as you're lowering the weight. So you aren't getting that with Curves. But on the flip side, it is safer. You're guaranteed that you're going to get kind of a full body workout because each of the machines is set up to work your upper body, your lower body and your core muscles. And you typically go through a circuit over the course of about 30 minutes. Studies have shown, granted, studies that have been funded by Curves, but nonetheless, studies have shown that Curves is effective as a weight loss program. The only issue is that similar to caution that I throw out there for folks who are, say, following a diet that restricts you to eating only certain foods, like say the cabbage soup diet, I would put this into that same category. You're only doing one form of exercise. So because you're only working out on machines using hydraulic resistance, you're not doing cardiovascular intervals, you're not doing impact based training, which by the way can also increase bone density faster. You're not using free weights, you're not working on balance or flexibility or kind of functional fitness. You're kind of hitting only one aspect of the fitness spectrum when you're working out at Curves. So there's absolutely no problem with using machine based circuit training, using hydraulic resistance equipment to achieve results. But I would include something like doing some running and maybe some yoga or some balance work on the side in addition to curves, or maybe throwing in a day where you go to the gym and do some heavier strength training with barbells or dumbbells. So fill in the holes when you're using something like Curves, and yet it can work just fine. But I wouldn't rely on Curves on its own to provide you with functional, lifelong fitness.

All right, well, there you go. That's it for this week. We've got through all the questions. I guess it's not just for this week, but also last week too. So keep your questions coming. Be aware we do have a lot of questions in the queue. I'm not trying to say don't send your questions in, do send them in, but don't be surprised if it takes a few weeks for us to get to them. And remember that you can always hire Ben for a private consultation if you do have a question that's really pressing that you just want to get answered right away.

Or you can do a search@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and a lot of times you'll find that if you search for the keyword, we've got a really, really good search engine over there, you'll find that we've addressed some aspect of your questions that can help you out a little bit as you sit back and wait the several weeks that may take to get your question answered. So episode number 184, that's in the books, Brock. So we'll put links to everything in the show notes and thanks for listening folks. Thanks for your support. Go to itunes, leave a ranking your donations donating the dollar by going to the podcast Show Notes and clicking on the donate button. That helps out tremendously as well. So this podcast is enabled by you, the listener, so we appreciate you listening in. And this Friday, stay tuned for a really, really great discussion about Chinese herbs and what they can do for you. So that'll be coming out this Friday. Get the Inside Edge from Ben Greenfield.

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