Episode #188: What Blood Tests To Ask Your Doctor For When You Go In For Your Physical

In this podcast, what blood tests to ask your doctor for when you go in for your physical. Also, what is oil pulling? The Run Walk protocol Improving tendon and ligament strength Enhancing mobility for Olympic lifting Recovering from hamstring tears. A ketogenic diet for killing cancer cells. Compex Sport Elite for building strength, choosing types of flour, Hashimoto's and nightshades and C1 and C2 vertebrae misalign.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

All right everybody, here we go for another episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. It's a beautiful sunny spring day and I can't think of any better way to spend it than talking to my good buddy Ben. How's it going?

It's going well. I'm very limber this morning.

Nice.

I started off my day with a little bit of foam rolling and it's always a love hate relationship. I've got a rumble roller, but the way that I usually kind of set up my week when it comes to body care is I try to get a massage once a week. I've got this massage therapist, he's like a big Idaho redneck and he's got a really good touch and he reams all my muscles. He's actually been on the podcast before, Tim Gilrey, so I try to meet him once a week. And then I generally do some foam rolling a couple of times a week as well. And today, that was the day I started the way I started off my day. But usually, usually it's just get up in the morning, first thing I do is cold shower. Then I grab my mp3 player and usually listen to something kind of motivational.

You know, like music motivational, like something that pumps you up or more of an intellectual motivation, more of like spiritual motivation.

So I'll listen to typically some type of a spiritual uplifting talk while I am stretching and then I move on to the rest of my day. That's generally how every single morning looks is shower and meditate, stretch and then move on.

That sounds like a pretty nice way to start the day.

I highly recommend that folks think about starting off your day with something like that and it just, it puts you in the right state of mind going forward.

Yeah it's amazing how you can really set your day off in a completely wrong direction just by being in a hurry. First of all, like if you oversleep or don't get yourself prepared for the day, like the days that I don't set out my breakfast and lunch and snacks and stuff the night before, I'm always, it always takes me so much longer to get going and I'm never quite as on the ball for the rest of the day as I, I am on the days when I actually wake up and have time to think things through, relax a little bit, enjoy the morning.

Yep, exactly. And not to get too woo woo before we move on to the news flashes, but one of the best feelings or emotions that you can experience to set you up for having a really, really fantastic day is gratitude. So when you wake up, you find something to be grateful for. And if you're married, it's easy. You roll over and give your partner a hug and you know, tell her I love you and, or him or her and move on. But I mean, just finding something to be happy about and grateful for when you start off the day makes a huge difference. So preacher Ben will shut up now and let's go on to the news flash. Here we go.

News flashes.

Okay, so there are all kinds of things, things always happening@twitter.com BenGreenfield and also at Google. And this is our time when we spend a little bit of time going through them. And I've actually, I don't know if you noticed, but we've been getting some emails from people thanking us for going through all of these news flashes because they see the stuff pop up on the Twitter feed or on Google and they follow the links. And you know, I do the same thing. I'll click on the link, it'll take me to like PubMed or one of those sort of very technical websites. I'll read through the study and I'll understand it, but I won't gather all the information. So I want to thank you and also pass on the thanks from many of our listeners that have been enjoying you breaking down these studies for them.

I'm glad somebody's reading my sheets. I actually have a kind of a fun article I wanted to mention that I tweeted about earlier this week. It's called 10 Stubborn Exercise Myths that Won't Die. This was an article on Lifehacker, a website that I enjoy quite a bit for technical tips and life tips. And it went through 10 exercise myths and they were all spot on. It's Very rare that I read a list like that and agree with just about everything. Myth one was no pain, no gain, meaning that you can still benefit from a workout even if it's not making you sore the next day, which is very true. Myth number two is that soreness is caused by lactic acid, which we've actually known for over a decade is not true, but seems to just now be hitting the mainstream. But soreness is caused by inflammation from muscle tears, not by lactic acid, which disappears after about five to 10 minutes. Exercise is worthless if you can't do it regularly, and that's been debunked by noting that you can get away with as little as 20 minutes of exercise a week if it's high intensity interval training. In terms of getting some benefits, myth number four, which we've talked about quite a bit on this show, was you need a sport drink when you're exercising to replace your body's electrolytes and minerals. And this also was debunked. And I'm glad they mentioned that stretching before exercise will prevent injuries. And this is one that I think a lot of people still believe. But it is very true that even static stretching, dynamic stretching, whatever kind of stretching you want to discuss. You know, I mentioned that I wake up in the morning and stretch. I do it for the relaxation benefits, for the lowering of blood pressure, and for just kind of starting off the day with a, with a good habit of movement. I don't do it because I feel like it's going to make me less likely to get injured, though. So stretching before exercise will not prevent injury.

Yeah, go ahead. No, I was just going to say that's probably of the list so far, that is the most stubborn one is you always hear people like, oh, did you stretch first?

Did you stretch? Yeah, I have a good article coming out over at Get Fit Guy over@the quickanddirtytips.com website. Next week's podcast is all about kind of the perfect warmup. So good one to look into. Awesome. An alternative to static stretching. Myth number six, working out will only build muscle, not help me lose weight. And that, of course, is not true. One thing that they go into is, you know, the huge change in body composition that happens when you work out and the fact that even if the scale isn't moving, you're losing quite a bit of body fat.

I find that it's mostly women that believe that, or maybe it's just that women are more focused on getting smaller, so they're just so concerned about getting Bigger that they just.

They won't work out. Yeah, just watch your body in the mirror, not the scale, and it makes a huge difference. Myth number seven, exercise will help me lose weight quickly. This is an interesting one. They cited the fact that when you walk a mile, you'll burn about 100 calories, but if you just sit in a chair, you'll burn about 60 calories. So one thing to realize is that just moving around isn't necessarily going to help you to lose weight quickly. Things like weight training and high intensity cardiovascular intervals help you to lose weight a little bit more quickly. But ultimately, diet is a huge component there. So it's another one is that if you're just exercising, you may not lose weight as quickly as you think, especially if it's just walking. Myth number eight, you need to take supplements to build muscle. This was another one that was disproven. There have been many studies have shown folks to gain muscle from weight training without many changes in diet when it comes to supplementation. Myth number nine, if you don't exercise when you're young, it's dangerous to exercise when you get older. Even seniors who exercise or started exercise later in life improve their longevity significantly. In a study of over 1800 seniors that was cited, even if you're just getting started into exercise and you're older, you're gonna do more benefit than harm, for sure. And then working out at home. Working out of the gym is better than working out at home. Working out at the gym. And this basically was addressing some people think home gyms are better, some people think going to the gym is better. But basically a study that was done in the annals of behavioral medicine found that people with home gyms are more likely to begin to exercise, but people who have gym memberships are more likely to stick to exercise. I'm a big fan of just having both.

So, yeah, I've actually taken two. I've started working out in my office, though. Like, I'll do workouts at home sometimes. I do have a gym membership. I always go to the Y for swimming and stuff. But I've actually started bringing a resistance band to the office most days of the week. And I'll just like, grab. That is amazing the amount of stuff you can get done in the just standing in the office. I'll bring a pair of shorts, too, to change into so I don't get all stinky and sweaty in my work clothes and then go to a meeting right after. But it's, yeah, working out everywhere.

You can do it anywhere. I'M going to invent an exercise keyboard or just really, really hard to push the letters ergonomically fashionable.

Build up those fingers.

It for the news flashes. And there's a ton more on Twitter, but check out that article on Lifehacker.

Special Announcements okay, so we do have a few special announcements. Not a whole bunch of them this week, but there's a few things that you want to talk about that's going on. Where do you want to start?

Articles this week@BenGreenfieldFitness.com head over there and read the article that came out on Monday called the Hunger Games. Is being Hungry Bad? I addressed whether or not you're supposed to feel hungry, if it's right to feel hungry, if there's something wrong with you or your physiology, if you are hungry. So I highly recommend that you read that article. And another note is that on Friday, the day that we've been releasing special audio interviews, released an audio called 8 Ways to get yout Body Operating Like a Finely Tuned Engine. A few folks have kind of expressed a little bit of annoyance with the two podcasts a week that sometimes one podcast that comes out on Friday kind of overwrites the Wednesday podcast before before they get a chance to listen to the Wednesday podcast. Simple fix for that. If you're using itunes, which I know a lot of folks use to download the podcast, when it brings up the Wednesday podcast, just right click on that and click the do not auto delete. And then it won't auto delete when it downloads the Friday's podcast. So there you go.

I think there's a setting that says keep all new podcasts.

You can also do that or any podcast that you haven't listened to will keep. So just as far as other special announcements, main things are that we are still filling up the Thailand adventure that's going to take place this winter. Brock, myself and a group of other triathletes are going to go to a double triathlon over there. A few you know, I know Brock's bringing his girlfriend. My wife will probably swing down for at least part of the trip and you can join us this winter for the triathlon adventure of a lifetime. I'll put a link in the show notes to all the details, but it will be a hoot. You don't even have to speak Thai.

Awesome. Even better.

The next thing is that I mentioned last week that if you want to get a coach or a trainer, we're offering a 50% discount right now on coach Graham Turner, who is a coach at Pacific Elite fitness. And I'll put that discount code in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and that's episode number 188 if you want to get a 50% discount on your first month of coaching or training.

Graham's going to be in Thailand as well, isn't he?

Graham will be in Thailand as well. Yep. Along with a few athletes who he's coaching down in Australia.

So.

And then finally I, as I mentioned last week, have opened a mastermind group where I'll be teaching a lot of the principles that I use. I'll be essentially doing trainings on performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, brain sleep, sexual health and a lot of other parameters that are very, very important in terms of optimizing your body and your mind. And this is for coaches, for trainers, for people who want to really dig deep into the science of this stuff, learn how to apply it and get a system for working with their clients or their athletes. I'll be teaching all of this and it's to a group of 30 individuals. I have two slots left right now in that group and you can access it over@superhumancoach.com so check that out. And that's about it for the special announcements.

At first glance, triathletes appear to be a pretty fit group, at least with clothes on. But it's pretty common for triathletes to have tiny arms, a thin and weak neck, a stick like midsection and a body that's just too skinny. But just imagine if your arms were cut and defined, your chest and shoulders were ripped, your waistline was tapered like a V, your stomach was flat and hard and your legs were sleek and curvaceous. In other words, what if you had the ultimate triathlon body? Now you can learn how to swim, bike and run fast and look incredibly simple, sexy doing it. Go to try ripped.com to start today. That's try ripped.com. Listener Q&A.

All right. Last week I remember we complained a little bit that maybe the phones were broken or something was going on because nobody left any listener or any audio questions last week. But we've been, I guess you must have paid the phone bill or something.

Because we got tons of them. We fixed it or else we triggered a lot of people to pick up the phone. Yeah.

Which is great. This is awesome. And again, if you do want to call in, if you want to do an audio question rather than a text question, you can call 1-877-2099439 or you can Skype to Pacific Fit. And that's all in the show notes as well. So you don't have to remember that phone number. But let's get on with it here. The first audio question comes from Matt.

Hey, Ben and Brock, this is Matt from Boston calling. I have a question for the podcast. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about blood work and tests that could be run just in general. I've been training for a specific competition this season and my body has definitely favorably for that from working out and eating better and all that fun stuff. And I'm going in for my first annual physical in a while, in a couple of weeks. And my doctor is going to probably run through his typical lipid panel and cholesterol, but I want to talk to him about other tests to run just to see where I'm at. But I don't really know what to ask for. So I'll talk about it with him obviously. But I was wondering if you might have any recommendations on specific tests that I could ask to have run or things like that. I'm not looking for anything in particular, just looking for some general, you know, baseline type stuff that I can watch going forward. So if you have any opinions on that, I would love to hear them. Love the podcast.

Thanks a lot.

Bye.

All right, good question. What do you think?

Well, when you go in for your physical exam, it's usually going to include some routine blood test. So just the basic things that you're probably going to get that your doctor is going to order unless you specifically tell them not to, would be a complete blood count that's going to give you your red blood cells and your ability to carry oxygen through your body, your white blood cells, which are going to give you kind of a little bit of a snapshot of your immune system and your immune system health, your platelets, which are going to kind of show your blood clotting ability and the shapes and the sizes of all these different cells. So a complete blood count can help you identify anemia, systemic infection, stuff like that. And those are good parameters to test and those are good numbers to have. Usually they'll do a renal panel which will tell you how well your kidneys are functioning. So sodium, potassium, calcium, creatinine, just basically everything that indicates the health of your kidneys. I'd also do that one. Usually they'll include a liver panel which will measure your liver enzymes. If you're exercising a lot, those are typically going to be slightly elevated anyways, but that basically looks at the health and functioning of your organ. So that one also good to look at, good to discuss with your physician. If you see numbers that tend to be high, usually they'll do a lipid panel as well, which will measure your total cholesterol, your LDL cholesterol, your HDL cholesterol, and your triglycerides. Some doctors will include also in your lipid panel something called C reactive protein, which is a marker of inflammation that can indicate your cardiac risk. I would highly recommend that you tell your doc to include that C reactive protein in your lipid panel. If they're not, another one that's important. There is homocysteine, which detects the presence of an amino acid that's pretty well correlated with heart disease risk as well. So make sure that you tell your doctor and you can just jot this down. If you're listening in, have them measure your C reactive protein and have them measure your homocysteine. Those are two important ones on that lipid panel. The other important thing, if your doc is willing to do it, is to look at the actual size of the cholesterol particles because that's really a better indicator of your heart disease risk or the potential for plaque formation, things like that, than the other numbers that I mentioned. So you would ask for a fractionated LDL test, which will differentiate between the size of the LDL cholesterol particles, which is important because the small particles are not ideal.

The small ones that are the bad ones, the big fluffy ones, those are the ones you want.

The big fluffy teddy bear cholesterol particles, awesome. Those are the good ones. Blood glucose is another one they'll measure. It would require you to be in a fasted state. This, I think, is fairly useless because it's a snapshot. It's supposed to look at how well your body utilizes sugar. If in a fasted state, you get your blood glucose tested and it's high, that's certainly a red flag. But it's better to just swing by the pharmacy, grab a 15 to $20 blood glucose monitor, start to monitor your own blood glucose throughout the day. Identify the foods that cause you to have very, very high spikes in blood sugar or very, very large fluctuations in blood sugar and eliminate those foods. That's, in my opinion, a better way to go about things than getting a one time snapshot of blood glucose at the dock. So sometimes I'll do a urinalysis as well, which just looks for things like a little bit of blood in the urine, little red flags, but that's give or take. You're gonna see most of the issues there on the renal panel. So those are the basics and all that stuff is great. If I were going to go in and get a snapshot of everything though, there are a few extra things that I would do and I think a lot of people don't realize is you can work one on one with a lab. You don't have to go to a doctor to get some of these tests. For example, there's one website, it's only available in the U.S. unfortunately for our international listeners, but it's called direct labs@directlabs.com and what you do there is you go to the website and you either call them or you order a test online. And then they've got several thousand locations across the nation where you can go to one of their lab patient service centers and basically get the blood draw or the saliva or whatever else it is and get the test that you've ordered through directlabs.com so for example, they've got one that is a test for men where it will test in addition to the parameters that I've already mentioned, you'll also get your total and free testosterone measured. You can get your DHEA measured. That's another very, very important one. It's a hormone produced by your adrenal glands. It's a precursor to your sex hormones. Both guys and girls should be getting that checked out as part of a test. It'll measure your for guys, which is important for mat, your PSA or your prostate specific antigen, which is a protein that's made in your prostate gland. And it's a good measure of your prostate cancer risk. And there's also fibrinogen test that's included in that, which is important contributor to blood clotting. And so that's another indicator of inflammation. In addition to that C reactive protein and homocysteine that I talked about. And that's something that you can simply order as a complete package from Direct Labs. You print off the requisition form and the release and you bring that into your local lab and they just run the test for you. So that's another option that you could go with. So for example, they've got one test@directlabs.com that's just called the mail test. And it's just everything that you would want tested. If you're going to get tested yourself, it's like 300 bucks and you should be able to work with your insurance to cover much of that as well. And then you just go in and you get tested. In addition, for example, you could just use direct labs if you wanted to get like a snapshot of your hormones, like a hormone panel. You can do like a salivary hormone panel through then where you get, throughout the day, six saliva samples collected, which is the way you want to do it if you're going to collect hormones. And it'll do cortisol, dhea, testosterone. For women, you can look at like progesterone and estradiol. And again, you can just print that off and bring it in. So in addition to the blood test that I mentioned earlier, I would certainly be either asking your doctor to do like a hormone panel or going through a company like this to get a hormone panel. And then there are a few other things that aren't going to be addressed when you're going in for your physical exam. Let's say you're getting your blood tested via those standard blood panels, and then you're adding in some hormones and saliva testing. We've talked with Rick Cohen from Bioletics before about a couple other parameters that are especially important for athletes and people who are exercising a lot and want to optimize their performance. One would be your essential amino acid status, which tests basically the levels of your eight essential amino acids. And a deficiency in just one of those can cause fatigue and make you more prone to injury or leave you unable to build or maintain muscle mass. So that is a simple bloodstick test that you can do, and you can order that through a company like Bioletics. I'll put a link to them in the show notes. The other one, in addition to amino acids that Bioletics does, that's a good one, is an essential fatty acid test, which looks at kind of like your omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acid ratio, which is really, really important in terms of your potential for inflammation, your joint health, your ability to recover, even like, your mood and your brain function. So in addition to the amino acid status, the fatty acid status is another good one for them. They also have an interesting test called the antioxidant status, which is a urine test that allows you to see how well you're actually buffering antioxidants. So you could add in tests like those through Biolytics. Obviously, as I'm going through these, you may be seeing dollar signs floating around in your head, but to get all this stuff that I'm going through, you might be looking at right around 800 to $1,000 if you're doing this maybe like once a year to get a full body snapshot. I know, for a lot of folks who are buying $150 shoes and $4,000 bikes, that's relative to those investments, this is a good buy. Then the last thing I'd look at in addition to the things that I mentioned so far would be like your digestive health. There's a couple ways that you could go about doing that. One would be to talk to your doctor about Cyrex Labs test. And you can check that out@cyrexlabs.com I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. But through Cyrex Labs you can basically get a complete screen of your autoimmunity. If you're creating antigens against specific foods that you're consuming, if you're sensitive to specific foods, it's a very, very complete screen for antigen formation. An alternative to Cyrex Labs, which is a blood based test, would be a stool based test which in addition to looking at your potential for food intolerances or food allergies, would also test you for things like pathogenic bacteria in your gut, H. Pylori infection, yeast fungus infection, which are also, they tend to be issues in a lot of folks. And that's just basically a GI panel. There's a company called Metametrics that makes a really, really good GI panel and I'll link to that one in the show notes as well. So kind of like gold standard is you get your standard blood panel from the doc, you make sure they add in the homocysteine and the C reactive protein, you either through your doc or through a company like Direct Labs, add in the hormones, you go through a company like Bio Letics, look at your fatty acids, your amino acids, and then you go through like Cyrex Labs or the Metametrics labs and you look at your GI health, your food intolerances, stuff like that. But that would be the total snapshot. It sounds anal. It sounds like way too many parameters to look at. But I mean, if you really want a complete snapshot, that's what I do. And if you go to one of these super spendy longevity institutes or whatever, I mean really, those are the tests that they're ordering. And you can walk yourself through doing most of that at home for 1/30 of the cost you're going to pay at one of these spending institutes like Cenegenics or something like that.

The Canadian healthcare system is very different from the American health care system. And I think it be hard pressed to actually find a lot of these tests anywhere to Actually get these done without some sort of a medical reason. That's one of the problems with the socialized medicine medical system here in Canada.

Yeah, but you can like, I'm pretty sure you can do like the bioetics testing and stuff like that. Like anything that you order that you're taking care of through your home. Obviously shipping is going to be the killer on that, you know, because you're shipping back and forth between labs in the US But I think you could probably pull this off in Canada. I know we've got some Canadian listeners who, you know and international listeners worldwide. Obviously some of the stuff that I just went over is really, really kind of domestic US based. So I would say if you're an international listener, if you're maybe a physician, holistic medical practitioner, naturopathic doc, whatever, and you're ordering a lot of these tests or know ways that people can access them internationally, leave them as a comment on the show, notes of this podcast, podcast number 188. And we'll try and try and get folks who are international some resources in addition to the ones I just laid out for the domestic listeners.

That'd be awesome.

Yeah.

Cool. Well, let's move on to our next question then. Our next audio question comes from Dave.

Hey there, Ben and Brock. This is Dave in Oregon calling with a question for you about the topic of oil pulling. I had looked at kind of a top 20 list of things to do with coconut oil and oil pulling was on that list. And the further I delved into this one, it looks like an interesting curiosity. There's supposed benefits to this in your usual way. Ben, I was wondering if you could do some research on myth versus reality on this does sound like some possible benefits, but I kind of ranked this one up there with kombucha, which is an interesting curiosity as well. But all the health benefits are all unproven by the the Food and Drug Administration. But nevertheless, if the triathletes all say it's good, it's worth checking out. Thanks guys for taking my question.

I have to admit I'd never heard of oil pulling, so I had to Google it and I still am baffled.

Yeah, it's pretty simple. You're essentially just swishing oil around in your mouth similar to the way that you would use a mouthwash. So specifically they'll usually recommend like a sesame oil or a sunflower oil. And what you do is you get about a tablespoon of it and you rinse your mouth for about 15 to 20 minutes with this stuff. So you're trying to mix the oil really, really thoroughly with the saliva, and you're swishing it and rinsing it. And the way that you do it is you put the oil in your mouth with it, whatever, just like a spoon or whatever, and you tilt your chin up and then you swish and you suck and you try and pull it through your teeth. You clench your teeth and you just push it in and out. Many of us have done this before with water or juice or something like that, but, I mean, you're just doing the same thing with oil. And the oil kind of changes consistency and you're essentially pulling it back and forth through your teeth using the swishing action of your mouth. And then after you do that, you rinse your mouth really thoroughly with water. You can brush your teeth afterwards. And typically, this is something that you would do on a daily basis. Now, they've done a lot of studies on this. Most of the studies really have been done in India, because this is a more common practice there. But it has been shown to reduce the total count of bacteria in the teeth and to reduce the susceptibility to dental caries, cavities. And so it is certainly an alternative to something like mouthwash, for example. And whereas doing it on a daily basis might be pretty annoying, there's certainly not really going to be any risk to incorporating this maybe once a week if you're concerned about mouth bacteria or if you. You're more prone to cavities or dental caries. The only issue I have with this is if you've got a bunch of bacteria in your mouth, it's pretty indicative of an underlying issue, because bacteria in your mouth are what are used to convert carbohydrates like glucose or fructose, or most commonly like sucrose into acids. These carbohydrates essentially like ferment in your mouth. And basically, if acids are left in contact with your teeth, there's demineralization. And that demineralization is what eventually can cause enough mineral content to be lost where your tooth begins to disintegrate and it forms a cavity or a hole. And so having glucose and fructose and sucrose kind of stuck to your teeth a lot, and staying in there for long periods of time is going to cause this carbohydrate fermenting bacteria to be more prevalent in your mouth. So the issue is that while oil pulling will certainly help to remove a lot of that bacteria, the underlying issue is why the heck do your teeth have a bunch of sugar on them in the first place. This is actually one of the reasons, among other reasons, including just the expense that I don't really do a lot of gels and sports drinks and stuff like that in my training for triathlon. I really only use that stuff when I'm racing. And part of it is tooth health. I mean, when you're just shoving sugar in your mouth for five hours on a bike ride every weekend, that's not all that hot for your teeth. And the amount of bacteria that you can produce in your mouth, I'd much rather have half a can of coconut milk with some protein powder, half of and then halfway through the ride throw down a handful of nuts, which is totally doable. And as an aside to that, by the way, I'm getting a really great guy in the show next week to talk about how to train in a fat adapted state. We're going to really geek out on this stuff next week. But ultimately, here's the deal with the oil pulling. It's not going to hurt you. It's going to help remove some of the bacteria from your mouth and reduce your risk of cavities. But don't use oil pulling as an excuse to be consuming a lot of sugars, even if those sugars are just consumed during exercise. So it's just better for your teeth. And there are other benefits as well. But when it comes to your teeth, just think about that and what gels and sports drinks may be doing to them.

So go after the cause rather than treating the symptom.

Right? Exactly. Not to say that everyone isn't going to get a little bit of bacteria in their mouth, but I don't see reason to be oil pulling every day. This is something that if you want to try it out, experiment with it maybe once a week and make sure you're not eating a lot of fermentable carbohydrates.

I might give that a try. I'm curious to see if I could actually stay with it for 20 minutes. That's a long time to hold something in your mouth.

Yeah, I've never done it. I've had some clients that have experimented with it. And you know, as I mentioned on the show before, I use like a fluoride free charcoal toothpaste. It's actually a tooth powder. I haven't been to the dentist in 10 years. I don't really have any teeth problems. I just, I don't eat many carbohydrates and I brush my teeth with charcoal powder and that's about it.

I use that Same charcoal powder. And I did go to the dentist a couple weeks ago and I got read the riot act from the dentist when she said, oh, what kind of toothpaste do you use? I I told her and she, she and the hygienist laid into me and I just laid there, just closed my eyes like, okay, I know you have to do this, so just let you, let you go.

Tell you what, if you're a new listener and you're listening in, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for fluoride. My wife and I did a podcast on fluoride that I'd recommend you listen to and it's basically the reason why it doesn't go near our mouths. And then some dentists didn't like that podcast.

I don't suppose they did. All right, so yeah, I think that's it for the oil pulling. Let's move on to the next audio question from Jen.

Hi, Ben, this is Jen. I have a question for the podcast show which I love. Thank you very much. By the way. I love the show. I have been out of running for quite some time now due to an injury and am going to start again pretty soon. So I had a friend who had a coach who recommended for her when she stopped running for a while to do some walk runs for 20 minutes every day. So his idea for her was very frequent short runs to get her going again. And she did that for about four weeks. Then she went to 30 minute runs every day, straight through and then up from there. But for quite a period of time he had her doing a very frequent running, but short every day. As a matter of fact, she had some really great success. I mean, her technique was not the greatest in the world. And then after this regime, she ended up becoming a great runner. So I was wondering if that is a good approach for someone like me. I know you probably would have to know a little more information, but just in general, is that a good approach? Maybe after maybe a couple weeks of running a couple times or every other day, then going to that frequent running approach just to teach your body how to run properly and to run, to get back to running again. Thank you so much, Ben. I appreciate it and I really enjoy you being on the show. Brock as well too, thanks. Bye.

Yeah, the Rock run protocol, I like it. I like a walk run protocol. And really when I'm doing like an ironman race, I do walk. Basically the aid stations, I walk them very quickly. But walk breaks work because you use muscles in a different way than you use them when you're running. When a muscle group like your calf is used continuously during something like a marathon or a run, it fatigues pretty soon. And when the weak areas get overused, you slow down later on in something like a half marathon or a marathon or whatever. So you're shifting back and forth between your walking and you're running muscles. You're distributing the workload among a variety of different muscles and you can improve your ability to perform. I mean, there's people running or run walking, like 2 hour and 30 minute marathons. I mean, you can do this. I even had a guy in this show before. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for speed walking, he just walked a marathon in like three hours. There are run walk run ratios that can be used depending on how fast you want it to walk run a mile. Those ratios are going to range depending on whose system that you use. But there are two coaches that are kind of prevalent in terms of guys who have really looked into this whole run walk scenario quite a bit and generated some good suggestions or some good charts. One guy's name is Jeff Galloway. Another guy's name is Bobby McGee. They're both great running coaches, period. For example, Jeff Galloway has a chart where, for example, if you want to run a nine minute mile, you're doing a four minute run and a one minute walk. If you are doing like a 13 minute mile, it's more of like a one to one ratio of running to walking. I'll link to a good little article that Jeff Galloway wrote about taking walk breaks and kind of how to incorporate them in the show. Notes to episode number 188. But essentially what it comes down to is that the same strategy can be used if you're just getting back into running and trying to get fit again and get back into running without actually, you know, running as hard as you can for 10 minutes, just stopping because you're completely fatigued. A long time ago about, I guess it was like three years ago, I hurt my IT band and I quit running for, you know, several months. And when I got back into it, I certainly used run walk ratios all the way up until I was doing almost an hour of run walking. Now I was using a 4 to 1 ratio. I was jogging for about 4 minutes and then walking for 1 minute and then returning back to joggingrunning for 4 minutes and kind of going back and forth between the two. There are other suggestions that you use like a 10 minute running, 1 minute walking ratio. And that would be more like what Bobby McGee recommends. But if you're just getting back into things, essentially your run walk ratios are going to be closer and closer to being equal. And then as you get more and more fit, the amount of time you spend running goes up, the amount of time you spend walking goes down. So you would extend that from a 1 to 1 up to maybe like a 4 to 1 or 5 to 1. And then you could go all the way up to a 10 to 1 if you wanted to. I personally, after I got up to the point where I was running five minutes and then walking one minute, I just started to eliminate the walk breaks and just go into a straight up run. But there are some like, you know, Ironman triathletes and good runners who are continuing to do like a 10 minute running, 1 minute walking scenario in all the long runs leading up to something like an Ironman triathlon or a marathon. And then also using that same 10 minute running, 1 minute walking scenario even during something like the race. Super, super important thing, whether you're just getting fit or whether you're using this for performance, Single most important thing that you can remember to do if you're going to use a run walk strategy is you need to walk quickly, swinging your arms in the same way that you would swing them when you're running. Like elbows bent at 90 degrees, arms up, swinging. And what that does is it maintains the same type of neuromuscular activity that you're going to be using when you go back into running. And it keeps you from running slower once you actually do start running. So a run walk scenario involves more like, kind of like a speed walking. I think you know exactly what I'm talking about, Brock.

Yeah, I love watching those guys, super.

Super fast ladies or guys, you know, walking around your neighborhood. But that's how you should look when you're using a run walk scenario. Your walks should not be like these slow plods. It's like a fast stride rate and basically walking at a fairly fast pace before you go back into running. But that's enough to kind of get your core temperature down to shift you using some extra muscles, give the run muscles a break and then you start running again.

Yeah, that the 10 and 1 method is so popular in some of the races here in Canada. There's actually pace bunnies. You'll actually have to determine which pace bunny you're going to follow if it's the continuous pace bunny or the ten and one base bunny. Because there are just so many People doing the. The 10 and 1 run walk ratio.

Yep, yep. And you know, the. The most successful ones that I've seen in terms of the guys who are going the fastest with this, they'll use a 10:1 run walk ratio up until about the 20 mile mark and then the 20 mile mark, just finish up by running the whole thing like fast, like finishing out the last 10k running fast. So those of you who are maybe looking at using something like this for a competitive marathon, that's the way you do it.

Yeah. When you start to hurt, the last thing you want to do is take a walk break. Because you won't get going again.

Exactly.

Okay, cool. Well, let's move on to the next question from Jared.

My name is Jared. Looking to improve tendon and ligament strength, durability and improve the rate of healing. So I guess my question is, what is the best way to do that? And my assumption is that it would be multifold. Such as I started a stretching program before I even begin to exercise because I was told that ballet dancers never seem to get injured. Why? Because they warm up so much minutes before they even start activity. I started a good stretching program to get the hamstrings, knees, the calves, the plantar fasciae all loosened up. Then as well, supplementation, I started taking DNC Mega Man Joint Complex, which is a supplement partly multivitamin and partly has kosamine chondroitin. So I kind of wondered what your thoughts are on that supplement. Glucosamine, chondroitin, and specifically there's gnsc, Megaman Joint Complex. And then what about diet? My diet is mainly vegetarian, but I've also thrown in a little bit of fish and chicken and turkey just to make sure I get the necessary collagen in my body. So that's my question, is tendon and ligament strength, durability and healing, and how to best improve it. What your thoughts would be on that. Thanks. Talk to you later.

Bye. So this is a cool question, and I'll certainly give you some recommendations in terms of activity, diet and supplements. And really the first, most important thing is your activity. And strength training is going to be your first line of defense against attendant getting weak or connective tissue becoming weak. Strength training is going to improve your muscle, your bone, your tendon, your ligament strength, and it's going to prevent injury. Super important for that. In terms of the type of strength training that you're going to do, the sky's the limit. As long as you're loading the muscle and loading it from different Angles in different ways using a variety of different methods, tools like your own body weight or kettlebells or nut bells or medicine balls or barbells or whatever. It's going to really significantly help. So tendons connect your bones and muscles, and you use your bones and muscles when you're strength training as your levers. And so that's super important. When you're strength training, mobility is also going to be important. I believe we have a question about Olympic weight training later on, and I'll touch on mobility in greater detail when I respond to that. But mobility is going to improve your tissue and your muscle and your tendon extensibility. And I'm not talking about necessarily getting into yoga, but I'm talking about doing some type of preparation before your strength training and or follow up after your strength training, that is training your joints to move through at least a normal range of motion. That's more of the issue with ensuring that you're able to have your tendons have normal function recovery super important. Strength training is going to put a lot of stress. It's going to cause micro tears in your tendons. We mentioned that lactic acid isn't what causes you soreness. It's this inflammation from the micro tears. And so doing things like foam rolling, like massage, massage, like some timed ice therapy and things of that nature are going to help you to recover from these strength training sessions and ensure that these micro tears are not accumulating and causing or increasing risk of injury. So number one would be strength training. That should go without saying. Next. As far as your connective tissue is concerned, collagen is super important. You know, your bones and your skin, everything is composed primarily from connective tissue. When we're talking about this stuff, even organs have connective tissue, but tendons and ligaments are basically just connective tissue structures. And collagen is the most important type of fiber that's going to be found within connective tissue. When you're looking at collagen fibers, they're made from protein, and there's two specific amino acids that are really predominant in collagen fibers, and they're lysine and proline. So if you have inadequate levels of lysine or proline in your diet, then you're gonna have a tougher time promoting healthy collagen support. So first of all, animal foods, any animal food, sardines, fish, beef, bison, yak, chicken, turkey, whatever, all of those are going to have proline and lysine in them. So if meat is a part of your diet, Then you're definitely going to be giving yourself a step up when it comes to collagen support. There are some plants or more like vegan or vegetarian sources of proline or lysine as well. If you're like an ovo vegetarian or you're able to eat eggs, Eggs are a really, really great source of proline. And that would be one way to at least support the proline part of the collagen fibers. Another one is wheat germ. Wheat germ is really high in proline, but there's some other issues with wheat. I mean, we interviewed Dr. William Davis about some of the issues with wheat. Wheat, and those are still going to be inherent in something like wheat germs. So I wouldn't necessarily be relying on that for your proline content. Another plant food category that is high in amino acids, but is high in a different type of amino acid. The other type, the lysine, is legumes. Interestingly, peanuts are fairly high in lysine and that would be another option in terms of a non meat protein source. The issue with peanuts is a little bit higher in omega 6 fatty acids. Because they're an underground nut. They tend to have potential for being a little bit higher in a specific type of mold called aflatoxin. So if you're going to use a peanut, use like one that was grown in a dry or arid climate, like Arrowhead Mills makes a decent peanut butter. That's that way. Maranatha is another brand. But peanuts would be a decent source of the lysine from that perspective. One other important thing to think about when you're looking at getting your lysine and your proline to support your collagen formation is that proline or lysine need to be converted into their active forms in collagen. It's basically hydroxyproline and hydroxy lysine, respectively. Vitamin C is very, very important in that conversion. And so it would be ideal for you also to be getting a good source of vitamin C or even taking a whole food vitamin C source in your diet so that you're able to convert those proteins or those amino acids into their respective collagen components. So from a dietary standpoint, I would be including things like the animal foods, eggs, legumes, to a limited extent, just making sure that you're careful, you know, if you're using like beans to soak them and you know, peanuts to get the ones that are from like a dry arid climate. And then the other really, really important thing in terms of like a collagen building meal plan are specific phytonutrients which are plant components. And the two that are most important for collagen formation are catechins and anthocyanidins. So catechins, you're going to find these in pretty decent levels in green tea. So if you can drink green tea, use a green tea extract, maybe get some matcha green tea and use something like that on a daily basis. That's going to be a great collagen support food. Anthocyanidins are going to be found primarily in the really, really dark colored berries and dark colored fruits like cherries, blueberries, blackberries, stuff like that. Now here's the interesting thing about connective tissue and supporting connective tissue. Connective tissue weakness is one of the main reasons that like women get cellulite. And so all of the recommendations that I just gave, you know, egg whites, peanuts, dark berries, collagen, supporting foods rich in proline and lysine as well as strength training are all going to be really, really good at controlling cellulite as well as improving the tendon and connective tissues. So there you go. There's a little bonus for you, you ladies.

Now.

The listener, Jared, he's blanking on his name, also asked about supplements and mentioned that he's taken this G and C C Mega Men joint. There are certainly some supplements like glucosamine and chondroitin that may help to support your joint flexibility and also help to rebuild cartilage and preserve your joint function. I took a look at this stuff and it's basically glucosamine and chondroitin as well as fish oil and like a multivitamin complex that does have some vitamin C in it. Now there's always red flags when you're looking at the stuff that you're getting from like gnc because with all due respect, or I guess it's kind of disrespectful, most of it's just, it's crap in terms of the ingredients that they've sourced. So while the idea behind using fish oil, glucosamine, chondroitin and like a multivitamin complex that has a good dose of vitamin C in it makes sense when it comes to supplementation for your joints. This is the wrong way to go about it. So here's why. First of all, the fish oil that they use in that stuff is basically the cheap form of fish oil. It's called an ethyl ester form of fish oil. I've talked about this on the show before. But it's far less absorbed, far less bioavailable than when you use what's called a triglyceride based fish oil or just eat fish. I would recommend that you get your hands on. Pharmax is a good brand. Super essentials by Living Fuel. That's a good brand. Both of those are examples of a triglyceride based fish oil rather than an ethyl ester based fish oil. Glucosamine chondroitin that comes from basically like a collagen, that's like a cartilage, it's kind of ground up and some shellfish and stuff like that. I personally, especially when I'm injured, do use a form of glucosamine chondroitin, but it's formed from what's called a type 2 chicken collagen. And it comes from chickens that don't have any growth hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, insecticides, and it's a whole food concentrate form of collagen. Super important in terms of ensuring that you don't get an autoimmune reaction against the glucosamine chondroitin that you're consuming because ironically that can cause joint pain. So that's why I use a brand called Capreflex for that for my glucosamine chondroitin source. I'll put a link to Capreflex in the show notes, but that's what I recommend. Full disclosure on Caproflex. They're a sponsor of mine, they sponsor me for racing in triathlon. But regardless, it's fantastic in terms of actually offering you glucosamine chondroitin that isn't going to cause your body to mount an autoimmune reaction against what you're consuming. And then the last thing is the multivitamin component of this GNC men's megamin joint thing. You really want to be careful with multivitamins. In most commercial brands, which is what this is, they've done some things. Whether it allows the vitamin supplement to be produced easier and faster and cheaper, makes it more appealing to the eye in terms of the colorants that are added or easier to swallow in terms of the coatings that are added. Most of them have a lot of unnecessary additives and fillers. Hydrogenated oils you're going to find in these, like partially hydrogenated soybean oil is one of the major fillers in the vitamin rather than like a ground up whole food complex, which is what typically the higher quality multivitamins have. Usually you're going to get artificial colors and Those are typically derived from coal tar, which is fairly toxic. High, high levels of magnesium stearate, which essentially kind of coats your digestive tract and can limit absorption from any of the other nutrients you or foods that you're eating. And then an oxide of titanium called titanium oxide that basically your body treats as a heavy metal and it has some amount of toxicity as well. So the way that you get around that is you either use a liquid multivitamin or you use like a whole food multivitamin and a whole food multivitamin. Usually they're kind of annoying because you got to take a bunch of capsules of them. But there's a lot of brands out there that have a good quality whole food multivitamin. Now, I personally don't take multivitamin. I don't think that anybody except like kids and people who are pushing 70 plus years old, as the digestive absorption of nutrients declines, I don't really think that anybody other than that really need to take a multivitamin. My kids take a liquid multivitamin. And I also really like the idea of a liquid multivitamin for older individuals as well. But otherwise, if you're eating a healthy diet and kind of supplement with some of the things that people tend to be deficient in, like some extra vitamin D and some extra magnesium, you don't really need to take a multivitamin. So from a supplementation standpoint, you know, I just take something like the Capreflex and a good triglyceride based fish oil or just like include fish in your diet, you know, three, four times a week. And that's, that is how you would improve your tendon and ligament and connective tissue strength in addition to strength training and eating a lot of proline and lysine rich foods.

Okay, well, while we're on that train of thought, let's roll right into Bob's question because it's sort of along the same lines.

Hey, Ben and Rod, this is Bob calling from sunny Singapore and I've got a question about Olympic weightlifting. I am now as a 45 year old who is fairly in flexible, trying to learn the Olympic lifts, the snatch and the clean and jerk. And my question is this, what would your recommendations be from a mobility standpoint to get the required flexibility? The piece that I'm really struggling with is the overhead squat and being able to come on down into that full squat position below parallel that you need for the Olympic lifting. And I'm sure it's issues from probably my ankles up through my shoulder girdle. But would really value any opinions or recommendations that you have to get on the right track. Thanks very much and just can't say enough great things about the podcast.

Okay, so Olympic lifting, we've talked about it on the show before, but Olympic weightlifting is technically kind of two competition lifts. The snatch, which is where you lift a weight off the ground over your head, and it requires a great deal of shoulder mobility. But you're also in an overhead squat position, so there's a lot of hip and back flexibility required for that lift as well. And then the clean and jerk, where you're doing a similar motion as the snatch, you're picking a weight up off the ground, but you're bringing it up to your chest and then jerking it or pushing it overhead as you split your legs apart. So Olympic weightlifting requires a great deal of athleticism and mobility and flexibility. And so, you know, Bob's question is relevant and a lot of Olympic weightlifters need to work quite a bit on mobility. Now, Bob, I'm going to give you some recommendations, but as with anything I've discussed so far in the show, I'll put links to everything that I discuss in the episode for this podcast. Podcast number 188 over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com now, the main thing, the main reason I'm bringing that up is I'm going to put two videos in the show notes for you that are really, really good videos in terms of kind of showing you a few tips when it comes to mobility for Olympic weightlifting. But here are my recommendations. Now, I originally learned how to snatch, clean and jerk, do the Olympic weightlifts, and do a lot of powerlifting when I was working as an intern for the University of Idaho Strength and conditioning program. So for about two years I was working with the football teams and some of the track and field down there, basically kind of like helping to supervise weight room activities and working with the strength coach down there and the coaches that were pretty good at teaching me how to do a lot of these lifts that a lot of the players were doing. And so I got a chance to practice these quite a bit and kind of experience how it feels when you've got poor mobility and you're doing things like a snatch and a clean and jerk and how it feels when you've got good mobility. So here are some of the areas you want to work. First of all, your thoracic spine or your mid spine is super important. And anybody listening in who's doing any type of full body weight training is going to benefit from this stuff. But here's how you improve your thoracic spine mobility. Okay? You get a foam roller and you lie down on your back on the foam roller. You get into a bridging position, okay? So you're kind of like arching your back and you're rolling the foam roller up and down your back as your hips are lifted up off the ground, you know, 10, 20 times before you start your weight training. Now you're going to feel, if you're doing this right and you've got poor thoracic mobility, you'll kind of feel some pops along your spine as you're doing this. If you want to increase mobility even more and more, and you're not really feeling much of a stretch as you're rolling this foam roller up and down your back. You can put your arms up over your head, or you can even hold onto a bar, like the bar you're going to be lifting as you foam roll up and down your back with your arms held over your head. So that's a really, really good way to improve your thoracic spine mobility. I would certainly be doing that one before you lift. When you're doing this exercise that I mentioned called the clean and jerk, where you're lifting a weight off the ground and then kind of having it sit on your. On your shoulders or your collarbone area, you're also going to be in that same position when you're doing, like a front squat, when you're doing an overhead press with a barbell. But big, big issue with getting your elbows out in front of your body like that is your triceps flexibility. And, you know, adhesions in your triceps, immobile fascia or connective tissue in your triceps. And what you can do is a little bit of trigger point, deep tissue stuff for the back of your arms. Easy way to do this is you take that bar that you're going to be lifting, and assuming it's racked on a bench or racked somewhere, you can just put your triceps, like the back of your arms on that bar and kind of roll your triceps up and down that bar. You'll find some areas where they're really tight, really adhesive. This is a slightly uncomfortable exercise to do, but tight triceps can really decrease your shoulder mobility and keep you from getting your elbows out in front of your body. It's also a good move for swimmers to do is to make sure that you're doing a little bit of foam rolling or some type of trigger point on your triceps, you're going to find it helps you to really get your arms up past, and over your head. If you have trouble with that when you're swimming. Okay, the next big thing for Olympic lifting, as I mentioned, you got to be in kind of like that squat position. Biggest thing that's going to limit your ability to get into that squat position is your ankle mobility. Okay? That's a huge issue with runners as well. If you're a runner and you tend to, like. If you see pictures of you running and you tend to, like, throw your feet out to the side as you're running, big, big issue with that is typically ankle mobility. So there's a couple ways that you can improve your ankle mobility. One is to just get into a deep crouching position. Like, deep, deep crouching position. If you want to put a little bit more strain on yourself while you're in this position, you can take a light object like a PVC pipe and hold that overhead so you can actually work on your hip and your back flexibility while you're in a deep crouching position. But when you're in that deep crouching position, what you can do is you can actually, you can mobilize your ankle while it's in a position of restriction. And the way that you do that is you take, like, a band, like an elastic band or elastic tubing, and you put that around your ankle, like, around kind of the area just above your foot. And when you're in that deep crouch position, you try and push your ankle forward against that resistance, while at the same time, you're crouched so that the ankle is bent. And what you're going to find is that you'll feel almost like the connective tissue on the right and left side of your ankle getting pulled as you kind of move yourself around in that crouching position. And you can even, like, use your elbows against the insides and the outsides of your thighs to help to push your ankles in all directions. But that's a really, really good movement for improving your ankle mobility. And one that you could try for Olympic training or also for, like, just becoming a better runner with better ankle mobility. The other thing that can really help with your ankle mobility, and I do this quite a bit, is just a little bit of foam roller on, like, your lower Achilles tendon or your lower calf. That can help out a ton. You just put your leg on top of that foam roller and roll it up and down to improve your ankle mobility. Last thing Bob is, I would say, Your hip mobility. I wouldn't do this exercise before you do your Olympic weight training because any type of static stretching, like yoga, kind of as we alluded to in that Myths article that we referenced, it can kind of decrease the amount of force you can produce and decrease your performance when you're doing static stretching and stretch holds before you do something powerful or something that requires a lot of strength. But you can do basically a yoga stretch. It's called the pigeon. And for those of you who haven't seen this before, what it looks like is you, you get into like kind of a down dog position, almost like a push up position with your hips up. You take one of your knees and you just put it underneath your body and then you lay down on top of that leg. So you're using your own body weight to stretch out the side of your hips and where your IT band attaches to your hip. And that can help a ton in terms of, you know, when you get in that position and you hold it for 20 or 30 seconds, then you do the same thing for the other side. It can really help the you improve mobility in your hips so that you can do a better job getting into that deep squat position. So I'll put a couple videos in the show notes that walk you through some other mobility ideas for becoming a better Olympic weightlifter. But those are my recommendations in terms of working on your thoracic spine or your mid back mobility, your shoulder mobility, your ankle mobility, and your hip mobility.

The pigeon stretch is one of my favorite stretches. I absolutely love it. But why is it called a pigeon?

I haven't the slightest. I haven't been able to figure it out.

It doesn't look anything like a pigeon.

No, no.

Maybe a dead broken pigeon.

I have no clue. But those yoga exercises, you know, whatever, the flying monkey and the crouching frog and all that stuff, who knows? I am not the expert when it comes to that stuff.

You just made those two up. All right, our next question comes from Chuck.

Hey, Ben, this is Chuck Furyk and I have a question for the podcast next week. The first is I'm working with an athlete who's trying to make a comeback after an injury out of college and trying to get in the NBA. Is pretty much recovered from a hamstring tear, but just wondering if you had any exercise suggestions to make sure he doesn't reinjure it and to maintain its strength. The other is, and I apologize if you covered this in a future show because it seems familiar, but I'm not sure if it's just from all the research that I've been doing on it lately. But my grandma has cancer, lung cancer. We just found out about six months ago. And I've done a lot of research that says that a low carb ketogenic style diet can actually starve out the cancer because the glucose is removed, which would feed the cancer cells and thus being on that type of a diet would lead to killing the cells. Although it's not something that's really done here as much in America. Just wondering if you had any input on this and if so, or any other suggestions you have. I'll go short search on the website right after this call, but I'd really appreciate any feedback, especially on the ketogenic diet. So thanks a lot, Ben. Appreciate everything you guys do. You and Brock, way to go.

So actually, I guess it's really two questions that he's got here. One about a hamstring and one about a ketogenic diet for cancer. Do you want to tackle one first or.

Sure. The hamstring issue, it's pretty straightforward really. It totally depends on the grade of the hamstring tear. So you can get a grade one tear and that's just like a strain or a slight pull. I'm guessing that wasn't the case here. If Chuck's friend is coming back, he didn't say whether it was a full tear. I don't think if he did, I missed it. But typically that's just the same way you would treat any muscle. Little rest, little ice, you know, some compression, some elevation, you know, a little bit of active therapy, you know, light riding, that type of thing, light bicycle riding. In a grade two injury, there's going to be a lot more tearing that's occurred, but it's not a complete tear of the hamstring. And that typically requires, you know, at least three or four days of rest, keeping the injured leg elevated and just avoiding activity, you know, in sports for a good one to two weeks in terms of applying a lot of unpredictable force on the muscle. And then grade three, that would be like a pretty severe injury. A lot of times, you know, there's a surgery that's associated with that. It can take months to heal. You've got swelling, you've got usually some discoloration in the hamstring. And with that, you're going to want to talk to your physical therapist. I mean, I assume if it's a grade three hamstring tear, your friend has a physical therapists and I would be working with them because they're going to have modalities like ultrasound, like sport legs, which is going to combine compression and ice at the same time. On the hamstring, they're going to be able to do a lot of modalities that will speed up healing. A couple of things that you may want to consider with the hamstring. One thing in particular would be low level laser radiation. Dr. Jeff Spencer, who has been on this show, who worked with the Tour de France for the eight years with Lance Armstrong's team, pretty much every year that they won. He was their kind of like their team therapist, as well as Dr. David Minkoff, who's been on this show a few times. They're big into using these low level lasers to essentially use light and light waves to improve heat circulation and decrease pain and speed up healing in soft tissue injuries. And so if you can find a local practitioner in your area, a lot of chiropractic docs have these. But if you do some laser therapy on like a healing strain such as a hamstring, that can help out quite a bit. And the other thing that I would recommend that you do, because he's chock full of really good advice, is we've got a new segment over@EndurancePlanet.com which is Ask the Doctor with Dr. David Minkoff. And he seems like every episode he's been answering questions about these muscle strains and muscle tears. And he's got a lot of really cool things that he does, like injections with essentially like a sugar water complex.

Oh, the prolotherapy.

Prolotherapy, yep. And laser light therapy and a lot of stuff that may help you, in addition to some of the physical therapy modalities that you may see in physical therapy, which are also really good and clinically proven to speed up the injury healing time as well. So those are things that I would think about with the hamstring injury, but ultimately it really depends on the grade of the strain. And once you're back into activity, biggest thing I can tell you is to address what probably caused the hamstring issue in the first place, which is hip mobility, either making sure that your sacroiliac joint is moving properly, making sure that your lower spine is moving properly. That may mean that you actually meet with a chiropractic physician for some adjustments and then get a lot of foam rolling kind of done in the hip area and strengthen the butt a ton. Lots of kick outs, lots of side kick outs, lots of lateral lunges, things that are going to improve your glute strength and help to relieve some of the work that like the lower hip extensors and knee flexors, you know, the hamstrings, areas that tend to get torn more easily, will have to undergo. So. So those are my recommendations for that. And of course, the flip side of this question is a complete 180 from this answer, and that's ketogenic diet and cancer. I've talked about a ketogenic diet before on the show and how when you restrict your carbohydrate intake to anywhere from like 10 up to a maximum of about 40 grams a day, which is not that, that's a maximum of around like 250 calories from carbohydrate. What can happen is because your body does not really have glucose to burn as a fuel, it begins to use ketone bodies as a source of energy. And cancer cells basically metabolically rely upon glucose as energy. So except for leukemia cells, which actually are able to metabolize fat, most cancer cells are not going to be able to grow when your body is in a state of ketogenesis. Now remember that ketogenesis is not eating a high protein diet because it's very, very simple for your body through gluconeogenesis to make glucose out of protein. A ketogenic diet is typically a high fat, moderate to low protein, very low carbohydrate diet. And while restricting glucose is not necessarily going to kill existing cancer cells, cancer cells need very little glucose to stay alive. It could still prevent you from building more cancer cells. And there is quite a bit of evidence and research out there that suggests that a ketogenic diet regimen could prevent tumor growth, not necessarily kill cancer, but prevent growth. A lot of times you're going to see that a ketogenic diet is going to include quite a bit of supplementation with something like coconut oil or a medium chain triglyceride oil. One of the reasons for that is that unlike a lot of other sources of fat, coconut oil has medium chain triglycerides. And so these medium chain fats or medium chain triglycerides are a little bit easier for your body to metabolize and make it a little bit easier to be in a ketogenic state just because you're able to use those as a fuel source more readily. And so a lot of times you'll see a good amount of coconut oil or medium chain triglyceride oil as well, something that can be consumed and kind of keep your energy levels up on something like a ketogenic diet, especially when you're taking in as few carbohydrates as you're going to want to take in. If you're doing this to reduce cancer cell growth. There's another form of therapy that you may want to think about. And I've seen a little bit of research that's been done on this for lung cancer, but it's basically controlled amino acids therapy and is based off the fact that cancer cells require a few different types of amino acids, specifically serine, glycine, aspartic acid, and glutamic acid. They require those four types of amino acids to synthesize the DNA and to produce new blood vessels and to replicate the proteins for the cancer cell tumor growth. What controlled them amino acid therapy means is that you restrict your intake of those specific amino acids, so you really, really limit your daily intake of protein. But you make sure that you're still getting in the amino acids that are all the amino acids except for those specific amino acids. And you could like I could go into controlled amino acid therapy for the next hour, but just kind of jot that down or Google it for now if you want to, or use the Google scholar to look up some of the studies that have been done on it. But controlled amino acid therapy hand in hand with a ketogenic diet therapy would be something that I would certainly look into if this were my grandma. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a physician. I'm not qualified in any way to treat cancer. But I would, if I found out that my grandma had lung cancer, I would call her up on the phone and talk to her quite a bit about a ketogenic diet and some controlled amino acid therapy. So hopefully that points you in the right direction and gives you some stuff to work with.

Awesome. Great question, Chuck. Thanks. All right, our next question comes from John.

Hey, Ben. My name is John. I use my Compex Sport Elite primarily for recovery, using the active recovery, recovery plus and massage protocols. I was going to see if you recommended any of the other programs, such as the strength building programs for endurance building and strength building, and if so, what type of protocol you suggest for that. Thanks so much.

Compex Sport Elite, are you familiar with that one?

I own one.

Oh, there you go.

It's a muscle stimulator. It's a kind of expensive muscle stimulator because it's got a bunch of preset programs in it. So what that means is that you can choose a specific program. They've got endurance, strength, power, recovery, massage, there's a few others on there. I know, there's a total of nine. I don't remember what all of them are called, but you choose which program that you want. You place the electrodes on your muscles, following the instructions very carefully that come with the compex because it's important that the electrodes be placed properly over the muscles. And then once you've selected the actual program that you want, the frequency with which the electrical signals are delivered to the muscles and the intensity of those frequencies basically changes depending on what setting that you have selected and trains the specific muscle fibers that are associated with the program that you've chosen. So, like an endurance protocol is going to selectively stimulate a lot more of your slow twitch muscle fibers based on the frequency of the electrical muscle stimulation. The strength is going to cause more of like a fast twitch muscle fiber contraction, which by the way, is a little bit kind of uncomfortable and can be distressing if it's the first time that you've used electrical muscle stimulation because your muscles are really seriously contracting in a state that's almost like it's not painful, but you kind of associate with pain almost. And your brain isn't sending those contractions. It's this little handheld unit. So it's like your muscles are doing their own little thing apart from signals that your brain is sending to your muscles. And that's what electrical muscle stimulation is really based on. It's a way to get muscles to contract without actually requiring your brain to send the signal to contract or your bones to shorten or lengthen to cause the muscle to contract. So originally, electrical muscle stimulation was designed for rehabilitation, and actually a lot of research has shown that it works quite well to help you to maintain muscle mass when you're not able to move, or to help to improve blood flow to an area so that you recover a little bit faster. Now, as far as the actual strength gains in an already weight, well trained athlete who's out training and who maybe wants to use something like a muscle stimulation unit to, you know, as an extra workout, there's not as much evidence that that gets as great a benefit as what you can get for, you know, improving blood flow to an injured area or helping you to at least maintain some muscle when you're not able to move. But there is, there's one guy named Charlie Francis who is like a coach and trainer who works with a lot of good athletes, and he uses the electrical muscle stimulation quite a bit with athletes who are already doing other workouts and has found some success with that. I interviewed someone who specialized in Electrical muscle stimulation on this show before. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for EMS as an electrical muscle stimulation, you can listen in detail to this. But one of the things that I've mentioned since then is I was a little bit hesitant about using EMS for building strength, just because I was under the impression that it doesn't differentiate in terms of the order of activation of muscle fibers. Usually when your brain sends a message to your muscles to contract, it's going to recruit the smaller fibers and a lot of times, like the smaller slow twitch fibers. And then as your needs to produce more force increase, your brain is going to start to recruit more of the larger fast twitch fibers. And early research on electrical muscle stimulation that I had seen suggested that basically electrical muscle stimulation is just going to grab fast twitch fibers and slow twitch fibers and not really differentiate between anything. And so it's not the natural recruitment order that your brain is going to usually send to your muscles. And so it may actually kind of teach your muscles how to work improperly or not really replicate the muscles that the way that your muscles would work naturally. But research that I've seen since then in terms of motor unit activation by electrical stimulation has convinced me that electrical muscle stimulation can actually, based on the frequency of the electrical signal that you send into the muscle, it can do something like recruit the smaller slow twitch fibers and then move on to recruit the faster muscle fibers in the same way that muscles would be recruited during a normal voluntary contraction. So ultimately, it looks like electrical muscle stimulation could be used pretty effectively to do something like build strength or build power, or even help an already fit individual to become more fit. And there are programs like when you get the Compex sport, you could go to shopcompex.com, their website, and they have, for example, they have a recommended training program for triathletes or tennis players or swimmers. And it shows you which programs, which of their preset programs to do on specific days. And it's really kind of mindless. I mean, you put the electrodes where they show you to put the electrodes, you select the program, and it brings you through it pretty much automatically without you having to do much other than just sit there. And that's what you're paying for, really, because you can get electrical muscle stimulation units for like 100 bucks. When you're paying $1,000 for one of these things, you're paying so that you don't have to be sitting there for figuring out what frequency to use. And it just kind of is all preset and it just goes. I personally don't use my Compex for anything except recovery and massage. Those are the two settings that I use, recovery and massage. The main reason for that is because I like working out. And if I want to get stronger, I'm going to go do some squats and some deadlifts and some cleans. I just don't want to sit in my computer couch and get electrically stimulated to get stronger. That's not, in my opinion, a very good use of my time and I don't enjoy it that much. It's just basically like sitting there getting shocked. So I personally enjoy doing the recovery and the massage. But I mean, if you've got the time to kill to sit around and you want to try something new. Yeah, I mean you could get a Compex. You could use some of the recommended training programs that they have on their website and it will help your muscles to get stronger. It's just that for me it doesn't make me happy, so I don't really do it.

You could spend the time doing some oil pulling as well while you're stimulating your muscles.

You could oil pole and do EMS simultaneously and that would be a party.

That is what I call a Wednesday night. All right, well, that's the end of our audio questions. So we've got a couple more questions here to go through, some written ones and the first one comes from Kyoko. Kyoko says, can I select whatever type of flour I like or is there any important things I should look at?

Well, wheat flour would be out of the picture based off. I'm not going to go through wheat just because we did an entire podcast on it. So let's not tackle why wheat flour be out of the picture. But yeah, around here I'm actually working on a post that goes into everything that we did for my kids birthday party last week because we had an extremely healthy birthday party here at home with the kids and it was things like almond flour cake and coconut ice cream and just things that didn't cause a lot of the autoimmune and food sensitivity and blood sugar issues that a lot of other normal traditional meals can cause. So we use almond flour. That's basically where almonds are ground into like a flour or a meal. It's a plant based flour. It's pretty high in nutrients, it's gluten free, soy free, grain free. That's one option is to use almond flour. But there are a lot of other types of flours out there. Like a couple weeks ago, my wife made amaranth muffins from amaranth flower. That's like a green leafy vegetable. The amaranth plant is. Their seeds are really high in protein and you could use something like an amaranth flower as well. We didn't make that. My wife orders it. I think it's a company called King Arthur's Flower I believe is the name of the place. But you can, you can order this stuff online. Another good bulk source of flour like this would be Azure Standard. Azure Standard is another good place to order flowers. A lot of other types of flowers out there as well. You could use a brown rice flour that is just as it would sound like it's made from rice. I know that there are some folks out there who don't do grains at all. So they wouldn't be able to do like an amaranth flour or rice flour. You could use like a coconut flour and that's flour that's made from grounded up meat of the coconut plant. The nice thing about that kind of flour is it's got really, really good levels of fatty acids in it as well. And that's something that you can purchase. You could also learn to make yourself if you wanted to make your own coconut flour from coconut meat. Flax meal is another decent option. We actually have some flax meal that we keep in the refrigerator. You like to keep it cold just so it doesn't get rancid, doesn't go bad as easily, doesn't get as many free radicals in it. But a good flaxseed oil is going to be pretty rich in omega 3 fatty acids. And that would be another thing that you could use as a flour source. Quinoa flour kind of similar to amaranth flour. That would be another option. That's one that we use a little bit as well. It's a decent source of protein. It's going to be gluten free for people who are on a paleo diet. Amaranth flour, quinoa flour, those type of things would not technically be quote unquote allowed. But I'm certainly a fan of any of those type of flowers. Those are the basics. There's a lot of other flowers out there. You can make flowers from just about any potato, coconut grain, grass, etc. It's just ground up, you know, ground up vegetables. But those are some of the main ones. And we usually will use like an almond flour or a quinoa flour a lot of times as an alternative to a wheat Flour.

I'm no master baker by any means, but I know you can't just substitute these different flours for regular flour. So if you've got a. If you've got some sort of recipe that you're following, you can't just sort of swap in amaranth flour for regular whole wheat flour or something. So make sure you do some Googling and make sure you're not getting the ratios off.

Yeah. And as far as cookbooks go, I think I've mentioned this before. Probably the cookbook that we use the most around here is called Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. So good cookbook to kind of get you started.

Awesome. Okay, our next question comes from Pam. Pam says, I just got done listening to episode 180 where you mentioned that people with Hashimoto's should avoid nightshades. I am 37 and was diagnosed with hashis at 16. I feel pretty good for the most part, and I maintain an active lifestyle. I have good energy. And in all that I do, I treat my Hashis with a Synthroid and monitor the condition pretty much through blood work. I have a couple of questions regarding nightshade food. One, what exactly are the reasons they should be avoided? Two, how do I know if they're having negative effects on me? And three, should they be avoided if there's no noticeable effect?

Well, the main thing here, if we back up in terms of why you shouldn't be eating nightshades if you have Hashimoto's, is because Hashimoto's is an autoimmune disorder. It's the most common autoimmune disorder, really, that exists. It affects a lot of folks. So the main thing to understand here is that hypothyroidism is an autoimmune disease. And most of the treatments that are out there for Hashimoto's basically are treating the fact that when you have an autoimmune disease, your immune system destroys your own thyroid tissue to the point where you become hypothyroid and you have hypothyroidism. And so then you get a thyroid hormone replacement. And a lot of times, something like an autoimmune disorder that has destroyed thyroid tissue is also associated with the things like depression or insulin resistance. And so some of those drugs might get thrown in as well. But none of those really treat the underlying cause of the issue, which is the fact that for some reason your immune system is attacking your thyroid gland. And so this is a problem with the immune system, not with the thyroid gland. And the basic Underlying treatment or approach to something like Hashimoto's should be addressing immune dysfunction and not the thyroid. And that's super, super important to realize that if you're taking a thyroid medication for Hashimoto's, you shouldn't necessarily stop taking the thyroid medication because you probably do have low thyroid. But you should also be limiting a lot of the other issues in terms of removing autoimmune triggers. And you can also do some things that are going to help to improve your T cell function, which is going to help with your immunity, and also do some things that are going to help to remove inflammation. So, first of all, as far as removing triggers that are going to cause your autoimmune system to kind of go into overdrive and cause more damage to your thyroid or cause joint pain or cause a lot of the other issues that could be associated with Hashimoto's, One of the most important things is your diet, of course, which is where most issues with autoimmunity are caused. So an autoimmune healthy diet is going to eliminate any compounds that contain gluten, period. I mean, that includes, like, barbecue sauce, gum, hot dogs, salad dressings, creamers. Almost any processed or packaged food has some gluten in it. And these are not the type of recommendations that I give to the average person who just wants to kind of stay healthy and limit their amount of gluten when you have an autoimmune disorder. Like tiny, tiny amounts of gluten can really cause a cascade that results in a much, much bigger immune system reaction. So if you have Hashimoto's, you want to almost treat it the same way as you would treat, like, celiac disease in terms of the amount of attention that you pay to eliminating gluten. A lot of folks don't like to hear this, but you also need to get rid of alcohol and avoid alcohol, which can also be an immune system trigger. Beans and legumes would be out in terms of foods that can cause an autoimmune reaction. And dairy products would also be something to avoid as well. It sounds like a really strict diet, but when you're talking about basically removing the ability of your diet to cause an autoimmune reaction, these are really, really important steps to take if you're serious about healing yourself. On the flip side, there are some things that you can do to really kind of help to support your immune system from a dietary standpoint. One of those things would be, for example, to make sure that you include lots of essential fatty acids in your diet. And that would mean using a really, really, like I mentioned before, like a high quality, like a triglyceride based fish oil. That's not only going to help your immune system, but it will also help to reduce some of the inflammation that you may have present in your body. If you haven't really been eating a healthy diet that shuts down that autoimmune response. There are other foods that can help with this as well, like fermented foods like kimchi and kombucha, sauerkraut, all those type of things super useful in this case. And most like cruciferous based vegetables, really, really good as well, like broccoli and cabbage. And you're going to want to get like the organic kind of non toxic versions of those just because any environmental toxins, herbicides, pesticides, stuff like that. Way bigger issue if you've got autoimmune, but I would include those as well. And then also as I mentioned, your regulatory T cells are super important in terms of helping to turn off an autoimmune attack and to kind of help your immune system to function more properly. In terms of T cells, vitamin D, super important in helping to build up your regulatory T cells. Probiotics also really, really good for that. So like a good high quality probiotic capsule in addition to those fermented foods that I talked about, those would be two things to really focus on as well. As far as nightshades go, the reason that if you have autoimmune, you want to avoid nightshade specifically to address your question more specifically is that nightshades contain chemical substances called alkaloids. Alkaloids are natural pesticides. That's how a plant protects itself. But the type of alkaloid that's found in nightshade foods is basically a steroid based alkaloid that is associated with inflammation and highly associated with an autoimmune reaction, especially if you have Hashimoto's. And so that's why things like eggplants and tomatoes and potatoes, cayenne pepper, Tabasco sauce, basically any of those type of things you'd want to really be careful to avoid if you have Hashimoto's. That's why on my superhuman food pyramid, those foods are okay for most folks and really aren't an issue unless you have an autoimmune sensitivity issue, in which case those can be really, really difficult. Bigger picture, I want to recommend a book that I will link to in the show Notes, but that I would really highly recommend that anybody with Hashimoto's read It's called why Do I Still have Thyroid Symptoms When My Lab Tests are Normal. Okay, Pretty straightforward book, but whether you have hypothyroidism or whether you have Hashimoto's or of course both highly recommend you read this book. I'll put a link to it on Amazon. Pick it up. I think it's like 10 bucks. But I would really recommend you read why Do I Still have Thyroid Symptoms When My Lab Tests Are Normal? So hopefully that helps point you in the right direction when it comes to beginning to address Hashimoto's. But just big picture, go after your immune system and think of the thyroid as kind of like a secondary characteristic of Hashimoto's.

All right, very good. All right, well, this is our last question and it is a doozy. And it comes from Edgar. Edgar says there was a day basically out of boredom where I decided to go as hard as I could, could for as long as I could. I don't remember how long that was. Perhaps 20 to 30 minutes at full out gut busting pace until I could all but or until I all but collapsed on the floor, dizzy and on the verge of throwing up during the run. However, let's say three quarters of the way through, I literally felt a pop in my brain or somewhere not imagined. And though it was many years ago, I remember the feeling sensation very clearly. It was definitely some physical feeling that at age 15, I was essentially too dumb to worry about. After the run was finished, I was dizzy for a while, then I went home and the rest of the day was normal. Here's the unusual part. That weekend I went for a run with my normal team and was all of a sudden much fitter than everyone else and at what I now considered an effortless pace, was destroying all my teammates. I've tried since then to replicate this, this feeling, this pop I experienced, but have never been able to. I have also, in all my studies, conversations with specialists and psychologists and other experts never had an explanation of what this may have been and how it may have affected my fitness at the time. So immediately and dramatically now he's wondering if you have any ideas or thoughts. And he says, I doubt you have this question in your archives.

I don't think I do have this question in my archives. But when I saw this question immediately, I thought of what I would suspect it to be because I've had this same issue happen with me. However, for me, I did not experience the pop during physical activity. I experienced the pop when I was being adjusted. But either way pretty straightforward. Basically, you've got the very, very top vertebra of your spine. It's called C1, or your first cervical vertebra. Your skull sits on top of this vertebra. And this vertebra surrounds the lower extension of your brain or your brain stem. So if that particular vertebra, your first vertebra, is out of place or it's misaligned, it can pinch off the nerve supply that basically is going from your brain to the rest of your body. And that can inhibit your thought patterns, it can inhibit the ability of your muscles to contract properly. And that C1 is called your atlas. Many people may have heard of this before. Your atlas, your first vertebra. But it basically creates this domino effect down through the rest of your body. If the thing is out of place, the atlas sits on top of C2, your second cervical vertebra, which is called your axis. And between your atlas and your axis, when those move and those tilt, they kind of move and tilt and merge with the rest of your spine. And so when the atlas is out of place, it can affect the axis, and that can put a twist or curve in the whole spine, which creates this imbalanced, unlevel look in your hips, your shoulders, or your legs. It can pinch nerves along your spine and essentially affect your whole body. I've had, I mentioned my massage therapist before a couple times when he was doing my neck. He's like, well, you've got this kind of bump on the side of your neck. And for me, I've had, well, it was my third cervical vertebra one time and then another time, literally my absolute atlas that was out of place. And you can check the nerves at the base of your skull almost manually. If you're feeling around the back of your head, up above where your spine connects to your skull, and you're feeling these big bumps, or you've got any pain or tenderness in those areas, or you sense any type of discomfort, it's likely that there's some type of nerve interference going on because of a spinal miscellaneous alignment in your upper cervical vertebra. And that can be adjusted. I remember the first time I got that thing popped, it was like this rush of blood to my brain is the best way that I can describe it. Very, very similar to what Edgar is describing, that maybe somehow through stepping in a certain way as he was running, he somehow self adjusted his atlas, C1 or possibly C2. The other thing that can suggest this is out of place. If you're feeling up in your neck and your spine you're feeling that discomfort up kind of where your head connects to your spine, basically, and it's kind of this soft area in the back of your head. If you just look at your hip height, your leg length, look at yourself in the mirror, you're seeing any type of asymmetries a lot of times that can suggest that you've got basically slightly misaligned atlas that is affecting the alignment of your axis. That's kind of moving on down your spine and affecting your hip and your shoulders. Fairly common issue, I believe, just because, especially for me, I've found the thing out of place a handful of times and every time I've gotten it adjusted, it's just like night and day, the difference when you get the thing adjusted. So that's what I think is going on here. I'd go see a good Cairo and look into whether or not that atlas is displaced or misaligned.

I feel compelled to say, kids, don't try this at home. This is not something you should be fooling around with and try to do a self adjustment. These are very, very touchy parts. Like your brain stem is right there, so you don't want to go whaling on it on your own. Make sure you've got a qualified professional help.

Wailing on the brain stem is not a good idea.

No, that's what ends up. You show up in the hospital with symptoms of stroke, so you don't want to do that. So on that happy note, that wraps up our show for today. That was a long one.

Yes, it was. I reference a lot of stuff that I'll put links to in the show notes over@BenGreenvilleFitness.com podcast number 188. I would like to thank all of our listeners, not just the ones who called in. They get a big gold star for this week. But everybody, thanks for listening. Thanks for your support. Those of you who have donated to the podcast, new little convenient, handy dandy donation buttons over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com as of this week. Apparently the donation button really wasn't working aside from people being able to donate $1. Well, I know some of you found that terribly inconvenient, so there actually is the ability to donate 5 or 10 or even 20 if you're feeling super generous. But you can do that. You can leave us a ranking or a rating in itunes and that always helps the show. Link to everything else in the show notes. And again, if you have questions, comments, feedback, leave your comments over on podcast number one. And until next time. This is Ben and Brock signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com did you know you can.

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