Episode #195: Can Coffee Really Make You Live Longer?

In this can coffee really make you live longer? Also, panic attacks in open water, Bathroom issues during your morning run. Preparing for an endurance weekend. Hypermobility syndrome, Water filtration pain while swimming with scoliosis. Are veggie straws healthy? Staying strong while recovering from injury, C sections and tummy tucks and building bigger arms while losing weight.

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Welcome everybody to another episode episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. It's a beautiful sunny day and I went for a first, my first open water swim of the year. Ben, what do you think about that?

How cold is it up there?

It's, it's actually really, really nice. I don't know what it is in Fahrenheit, but it was 29 degrees Celsius on Monday when I went for the swim. The water, on the other hand in Lake Ontario was not 29 degrees Celsius.

Nice. It's about 48, 49 degrees Fahrenheit in my river. So I can go, I've been like going out and tooling around, but it's one of those deals where it's so cold that you get a headache. And so I've been using it for a little like, you know, kind of like cold adaptation and some soaks after workouts and stuff like that. But you can't actually full on swim in it.

So I need to get one of those Fahrenheit Celsius calculator things on my iPhone. So during the show I can be like calculating things on the fly because I don't, I don't know if 4 degrees, that sounds cold, but I'm not sure.

Yeah, yeah, it's suffice it to say there is some shrinkage.

So definitely suffice to say.

Yeah, by the way, I wanted, wanted to mention because you were, you were talking as we were getting ready to record here, Brock, about how you sometimes get hungry during the podcast. And I've been kind of experimenting a little bit with breakfast and blood sugar fluctuations and maybe kind of trying out some twists on the usual breakfast that I do, which is usually some soaked oats with some protein powder and almond butter and coconut milk and everything else.

Yeah, and you've been Having that steady for years now, haven't you?

Yeah, basically.

That's been your fallback.

Exactly. So when I travel, though, I don't really eat oatmeal. I'm usually just having literally, like, protein powder or a protein bar for breakfast in most cases. And I kind of noticed a little bit better energy, more stabilized energy, when I've been traveling between breakfast and lunch. And I don't know whether or not it's the blood sugar fluctuation caused by oats or possibly the higher levels of the lectins and the phytic acid in oats that might be causing a little bit of inhibition of. Of nutrient absorption, blocking minerals, that type of thing. Anyways, though, I've eliminated oatmeal just for this week. I'm just trying it out. So I've been having chocolate pudding every morning for breakfast. No, seriously.

I believe you. It's just. It doesn't seem like a Get out.

My magic bullet blender. Magic bullet blender. About a quarter can of full fat coconut milk. You add a couple teaspoons of, like, a cocoa powder and a couple tablespoons of protein powder and an avocado, about half a banana, a sprinkle of cinnamon. And then I blend that all up. It makes a chocolate pudding, like, texture. And then I sprinkle some chia seeds on there for a crunch, and it's actually really good.

That sounds delicious. See, that's what I was waiting for. When you said chocolate pudding. I was, like, waiting. It can't just be chocolate pudding out of a little package. It's not jello brand. It's, of course, it's got avocados, it's got coconut, it's got healthy fats, it's got protein.

Yep. Well, let's. Let's hurry up and do this podcast so I can go eat my chocolate pudding.

Sounds good.

News flashes.

All right. Google and twitter.com BenGreenfield is the place to get all the interesting news flashes every week. Almost every day. Probably. Probably close to every day. But this is the time that we take to highlight a few of those. What do you want to start with?

Yeah, pretty multiple times a day, really. I actually read an interesting article by a guy named Seth Godin this week where he was talking about Twitter blindness, where there's so many people just tweeting now that you almost kind of tend to get blind to tweets and links and clicking on links and stuff like that. But just for you folks listening, and I do promise to keep my tweets relevant. I try and put out good, good tweets each week that link to relevant research that you can't get other places when it comes to what I'm talking about. For example, over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com but one study that came out last week that reverberated across the news was this study about coffee and how coffee makes you live longer and coffee drinkers have lower risk of overall death. And basically it's going to save the world. Yeah, all of these screams about coffee, coffee kind of being like the best thing since sliced bread or maybe even better. And the interesting thing is there was an article that came out on CBC News website, and thanks to Barack, who actually made me aware of this article. But it went into how they actually conducted the research study that they used to report this lower risk of death in folks who drank coffee. Specifically a 10% lower risk of death in men who drank two or more cups a day, and 15% lower risk of death for women. And the study was pretty weird.

It's really weird.

Before they even conducted the study, they excluded anyone from the study who had cancer, heart disease, stroke, who ate a lot of calories, who ate low number of calories. Pretty much they tried to pick and choose every single healthy person that they could. And this was from about 500,000American seniors. And then they based all the data on a questionnaire about how much coffee up till this point that people were drinking. And then they tracked them to find out who died and who didn't. So they're working with this healthy kind of skewed population, and then they're basing this question or this questionnaire off of from someone who's age 50, it might be 20 years from the time that they filled this questionnaire before they die, or 30 years or 40 years. And so you have no clue if maybe they quit drinking coffee or they started drinking more coffee or they switched to tea or anything else. They did not make a distinction between caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee, organic coffee, non organic coffee. Essentially the entire study itself was a big mess. So as we've mentioned before on the podcast, be careful. I mean, the only thing that this study shows is that coffee may not make you die earlier than someone who doesn't drink coffee. And that's really about all you can conclude from the research.

Yeah, I found part of the most interesting thing about the entire way that this was handled was that in the research itself, and even the researcher himself said there's a modest association between coffee and mortality, but somehow that Turned all the headlines were like, drinking coffee extends life and coffee will make you live longer. It doesn't actually say that anywhere. It was just a matter of the media really spinning this into something that it absolutely wasn't.

Yeah, and I personally limit coffee because coffee is a central nervous system stimulant and it does stimulate the, you know, the adrenal glands sitting on top of your kidneys. And you need to be careful, especially when you're already exercising and working your sympathetic nervous system quite a bit. You get to a where you can exhaust yourself from overstimulation of your nervous system using stimulants. And so I'm always careful with coffee. And the harder I'm training, the more careful I am because I know that coffee can mask the signs of fatigue and push you through a workout that you may not normally do unless you're caffeinated. So I personally do 8 ounces of like a dark roast French press every morning, black. And that's my coffee intake.

That sounds pretty good.

Another thing I wanted to mention was a study that came out, that was a report actually from the United States Department of Agriculture, who we all know and love, but it was actually pretty good. It looked into whether or not healthy foods are really more expensive than packaged foods, because that's what you hear from a lot of people is that they can't eat healthy because it's more expensive. And so what they did was they compared the prices of healthy and less healthy food. And when we're talking about less healthy food, we're looking at foods that are in the research higher in processed fats, higher in added refined sugars, and higher in sodium, which is usually a pretty good sign that something is like a packaged food. They looked at the price per calorie, they looked at the price per weight, and they looked at the price for an average portion and for all of the things that they measured except the price per calorie. Healthy food, vegetables, fruits, food in kind of its raw, unrefined form was less expensive. And the only time that junk food per se was less expensive was in the case of price per calorie in terms of if you're just looking for pure calories and yeah, buy a jar of freaking hydrogenated fat filled peanut butter and it's going to be cheaper price per calorie than buying bananas. But ultimately, interesting study kind of debunks the idea that you can't eat healthy because it's expensive when in reality, especially when you look at produce. That was the most glaring part of the study was the produce was so much cheaper than junk food across the board.

Awesome.

So there you go. Of course, one of the things to bear in mind, I think this stops a lot of people more than the price is when you're buying foods in their unprocessed raw form. There is that opportunity cost, that time, cost of preparation. And I think that's what holds a lot of people back, is the fact that, yeah, even if packaged foods may end up being more expensive, they're easier and more accessible to eat quickly. And, you know, that's where I think really getting into the whole slow food, Enjoy your food. Food prep, learn to cook. Type of movement is super important for people.

Isn't there a lot of people that talk about the availability as well, like the inner city, where there tends to be sort of a lower income type of, type of family or type of individual, that there actually isn't the opportunity or the availability of that kind of food, like, whether it's more expensive or not, it doesn't really matter if it's not there.

Yeah. And if I was in that situation, I just, I'd buy a gun and start shooting pigeons.

There's a solution to everything.

Special announcements.

Okay, there's all kinds of cool stuff going on@BenGreenfieldFitness.com especially. I actually, I don't think I've ever seen so many comments on a post as there has been on the Be Honest with Me post. It's at 140 right now.

I won't dwell on that too much, but I threw up a post over@Ben greenfieldfitness.com just kind of getting a feel for what kind of content that people would like for me to provide. Basically, it kind of sort of turned into a what annoys me about Ben Greenfield type of comment thread. But actually, it's really good data. And just so folks know, I appreciate the brutal honesty and I'm definitely going to make some adjustments in the way that I present information and the price that I put on products and everything else. And of course, this podcast isn't a podcast where we're going to spend too much time talking about marketing and pricing and everything else. But what it comes down to is that we run a membership website called the Inner Circle, where we kind of get into nitty gritty details of a lot of the stuff that we talk about on Ben Greenfield Fitness and do a lot of group coaching and help folks out on a forum. And I was basically just kind of getting a feel for the people who were members. What they liked what they didn't like and for the people who weren't members, why they weren't members. And so I'll definitely make some changes based off the feedback that I got. So if you want some good entertainment, go read the comment threads, grab a beer and go read the comments. The other article that came out last week was how to run Barefoot. Highly recommend if you've ever thought about switching to minimalist or running shoes that you go read that article because it will keep you from getting that stress fracture, Achilles tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, all the other issues that happen when you start running barefoot. So check that out.

Yeah, listen to you released the Get Fit Guy. You did a little podcast about that as well. So if you're, if you're not into reading and want to listen, you can go over to the Get Fit Guy and hear the same good information.

Yeah. Now something important for people to know. There is no podcast next week. No I'm heading down to Hawaii.

Sorry, I'm not sure what that reaction was. I was upset and excited in the same way.

I just got to figure out what I'm going to do with my whole Wednesday morning now and why am I not in Hawaii.

Damn it.

So Hawaii. I'm heading down there this Sunday and it's a high volume training camp. Or not high volume, but moderate, moderate volume training camp. I mean, first day I'm there, we're riding the entire Ironman Hawaii bike course. We're going to be doing multiple, you know, 50 to 115 mile rides all week long. You know, bunch of open water swims, some runs, and the week culminates or ends really in the Hawaii 70.3 Half Ironman Triathlon. So a lot of volume on what would typically, you know, be a taper week, like a low volume week. So it should. I've never done something like that before a race, so I'll be interested to kind of self experiment and see how the body handles that type of load going into a race. So basically this entire week I'm going very easy, not doing much exercise just to kind of make sure I go into that week fresh. That being said, what I'm going to do for folks, because I won't be doing the podcast is on Monday of next week and on Wednesday of next week I will be doing a live Google video hangout for any of the folks who are following the Ben Greenfield Fitness Google page. And we'll be sure we put a link to that in the show notes for this episode. Episode 195 specifically what I'm going to be talking about is the type of are the type of recovery methods you use during a big training week like that, how to eat and how to hydrate and where electrolytes and minerals come in during a big training week like this in Hawaii. Kind of how you get ready. And I may throw in an extra episode after the race too to take on more Q and A. But if you just want a chance to kind of sit down fireside type of chat with me Video Hangout on Google if you're following me on Google, what I'll do is the day before or the morning of the video hangout I'm going to do, I'll just put a link out for folks and you'll get that coming across your Google Google feed and you can come and join me. And those will be recorded also and put on the Ben Greentel Fitness YouTube page if you're not available for the live chat and you just want to watch the video later on. So we'll be doing that in lieu of next week's podcast.

That's a very awesome idea. I like that.

This weekend I'll also be releasing a really, really good interview about water and chlorine and how people who swim can protect themselves better against the chlorine.

That's fantastic. That came up last week when we were answering some questions about the thick phlegm that happens sometimes when you're swimming a long time, especially in chlorinated water. I'm excited to hear that one.

Yeah, it'll be excellent. And then not to drag this special announcements on for too long, but a couple other quick things. First of all, for any people who are US customers who order things like nutrition supplements, books, the gear that I recommend, et cetera, over at Pacific Elite Fitness we've added kind of like an Amazon prime style shipping there where you join as a Prime member and you get free shipping for the year after you join. So I'll put a link in the show notes. A lot of people who order supplements can spend, I did the math, can spend sometimes 300 to $400 on shipping over the course of an entire year. So this for people who order supplements a lot and stuff like that kind of knocks that cost down. And then finally, last quick thing is we've got a ton of content@BenGreenfieldFitness. Lots of articles, lots of podcasts and lots of videos. One of my projects for the next month is to begin to sub categorize all the content we've done Podcasts on nutrition. We've done podcasts on sports nutrition, on digestion and nutrition, on fat loss and nutrition, and so on and so forth. And what I need is for somebody who really knows how to use WordPress, knows how to use categories to kind of help me categorize the content. Preferably someone who's geeked out a little bit on fitness and health and nutrition anyways, kind of understands and maybe listens to the podcast or reads the blog and knows what I do, who wants to kind of help categorize stuff so we can make the website easier for people to find content when they arrive.

You need a fitness librarian.

That is the role that I'm looking for. Fitness librarian. Email me ben greenfieldfitness.com I'll put that email address in the show notes too and hopefully we can work something out.

Did you know you can get personalized nutrition and fitness consulting from Ben Greenfield? No matter who you are, if you want to run a triathlon, lose a few pounds, reinvent your diet, or have Ben create a training program or nutrition plan that's customized to you, here's what you need to do. Visit visit tinyurl.com helpfromben that's tinyurl.com help from Ben. Ben will personally contact you within 48 hours. What are you waiting for? Visit tinyurl.com helpfrombentoday and get the body and results you've always wanted.

Listener Q and A okay, as usual, tons of awesome questions and a few audio questions to start out with. And here is one from John.

Hey Ben, this is John. It's a question for your podcast. I just completed a spin triathlon and I've been swimming all winter and spring. Feeling really good about the swimming but had a panic attack in the water and just could not catch my breath. End up hanging on to a canoe for the first time in my life. So just looking to see if you have any advice or guidance on how to avoid panic attacks or calm your mind during the swim. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you.

I can completely relate to John. Like I mentioned earlier, I went for my first open water swim of the year and there's always that adjustment period of just sort of getting used to. There's waves, there's no seeable bottom, there's no lines on the on the ground. All that stuff can be pretty freaky.

Yeah, and there's lots of sharks. No, I'm just kidding.

Giant squid.

That ought to help basically. Yeah, me too. Same thing. First I remember first triathlon I did over in Coeur d', Alene, kind of the first open water made it, gosh, like 100 yards out. All of a sudden, breathing constricted. I wanted to rip my wetsuit off, you know, from the chest and just it open and climb out of it and came up and started treading water. And I'm like, this sucks. I'm like, you know, and of course, you think that you're the only person feeling that as you're out there treading water, having this complete panic attack. If I would have looked around me, I'm sure I would have seen a dozen other people doing the same thing. But, yeah, it's that combination of it being black, of you being in high exertion mode, of it sometimes being a little bit cold, and all these things come together and it's almost like having an anxiety attack or a panic attack. And the very, very first thing I want to mention, I'll just get this out of the way early, is make sure that your wetsuit fits you correctly. In many, many cases, people put on their wetsuits and there's too much wetsuit rubber down around the legs and the hips and not enough pulled up around to the chest. And that in and of itself can cause this claustrophobic chest tightness feeling. You always want to make sure that you pull your wetsuit when you're swimming in the open water all the way up as far as you can past the hips. Good wetsuit is going to take you five to 10 minutes to put on. You just can't put on a wetsuit quickly, and you're going to find that you're always more comfortable when you make sure you've pulled up the leg sleeves, the arm sleeves, and really spent a long time making sure that there's not a lot of fabric collected, especially down in the quads, hamstrings and hip area, and you're pulling all that up into the chest and the shoulders. So that's the first thing. The next thing is that acclimation to the water prior to the race beginning is incredibly important. Of course, it should go without saying that if you have the opportunity to do any open water swimming leading up to the race, you should, but before the actual race, try and get to your triathlon a little bit early so that you have time to arrive at the water's edge a good 15, 20 minutes prior to the actual race start. And give yourself a few minutes to wade in really gradually, and then give yourself a couple more minutes to kind of practice dunking yourself under and recovering by breathing after each time, you dunk yourself under. And then what you do is just swim nice and slow. You know, take about 30, 40 strokes nice and slow away from shore and then back towards shore. And you should feel okay at that point because you're not really exerting yourself too much. You're not in a hurry. You're trying to keep yourself nice and calm. And basically you do that again. You swim away from shore and then back to shore, but this time you swim a little bit harder and you start to practice sighting and looking up a little bit, and then do it a third time. And this time, swim at more of a race pace, like, real, real hard. Get your heart rate up there. And again, just like 30 to 40 strokes out, 30 to 40 strokes back. And if you've got the time at that point, you can kind of tread water a little bit, dunk your face a few more times, look around, familiarize yourself with landmarks. So you can kind of pick some things. Sight off during the race, and then go line up for the start. And you want to line up for the start generally about anywhere from four to five minutes prior to that gun going off. And when the race actually starts, if you really don't want to get this panic feeling, try to resist that urge to go out as hard as a lot of the crowd does for the first 300 to 500 yards, and instead, just take your time. Understand that you may lose, like, 30 or 60 seconds if you don't go out as hard as everybody else. And in the whole scheme of things, in terms of your comfort and your enjoyment of the day, that's not super important. So I definitely do that. And the other thing that I would do, and this is something that I learned back when I was playing tennis to kind of help myself get relaxed when I was starting to. To freak out during a match that I was losing, or when I started to get anxious or full of tension, is this concept called progressive muscular relaxation. What you do with that is it's this technique that a lot of athletes and teams use, but it reduces anxiety by basically what you do is you lie down on the ground, or you find a really, really easy place for you to relax, and you tense your muscles up really tight, and then you relax them. And it works best when you start at your feet and you work your way up, all the way up to your forehead muscles, tensing and relaxing each muscle group as you go. And you're going to find that once you reach the very, very top of your head, you're kind of in this state of extreme mental relaxation. And at that point, you envision. Basically the best way to do it is to envision a color. Like, for me, it was blue is my color of relaxation. It could be yellow, it could be orange, whatever. And then you finish up progressive relaxation session, and you kind of sit up and you let yourself kind of, you know, come back into the world. And then when you do find yourself in a situation where you're totally stressed out, you basically visualize that color or say that color to yourself, and that just kind of helps you go back to that feeling of relaxation that you had before. So whereas you don't want to do this type of relaxation, like, right before, say, a race, because it's almost going to leave you too relaxed. What you do is you just use this every once in a while, like before a workout or after a workout, and you kind of get to the point where you can grab that color out of your head and use it to relax yourself. And obviously, there's probably like a dozen different stress relaxation and muscle relaxation techniques out there, but that one worked really well for me and still does. So that's another option.

Yeah, I think I've mentioned before on the show, I'm sure I've mentioned before on the show that I. I did a thing called cognitive behavior therapy. I used to have a lot of problems with panic attacks. And not just like doing a triathlon or in open water, but sitting on the couch at home alone, I'd have panic attacks. And two of the things that I found that worked the best for me, one of them was to actually rationalize what the fears were and really identify them, rather than just being this amorphous glob of. I'm scared to really picture and figure out what everything was and then put it through a rationale of why do I think this is actually going to happen? So, like, in the open water, if you're afraid of, let's say, getting a cramp, you can think through it and think, okay, well, why do I think I'm going to get a cramp? Have I ever gotten a cramp before? If I have gotten a cramp before, did it mean I drowned and died, or did it mean I just had to stop and massage it out? Really working through the logistics of that kind of the actual problems and breaking them down. And the second thing is to actually, like, make yourself aware of things outside of your body, because it's really easy to get when you start to get panicky, Everything moves inside. Everything is just inside your own head. So if you start spotting things like a piece of seaweed, I'm aware of that piece of seaweed over there. I'm aware of somebody swimming next to me. I'm aware that the water is slowly leaking into the top of my left goggle. Any of that kind of stuff that takes you out of your own head, you'll just all of a sudden forget about your panic, you'll forget about what's going on, and you'll actually be aware of what's really happening, not what you think is going to be happening. So those are my two little tricks.

Yeah, I love it. Great suggestion. And then for the sharks, chainmail, I would say, is probably the best option.

Yeah. Especially around the vital organs.

Yep.

Okay, so our next audio question comes from Terry.

Hi, Ben, my name is Terry and this is probably not going to make it to your podcast, but I'm going to go ahead and do it for the future. I am doing a half marathon over Memorial Weekend and have been training my issues regarding the morning training runs. I have severe bowel bathroom issues. When I do my long morning runs, I go to the bathroom after breakfast. An hour later, I walk the dogs to loosen up and do dynamic stretching. I then have to go again, usually four miles in two, my long run again and then eight miles again. It zaps my strength. My stomach won't tolerate water and then I end up with the walk run and out of strength and cramping. I'm very hydrated. Before I leave, I drink, drink a lot of water. I eat high protein, berries, yogurt, apples, bananas, sweet potatoes, quinoa, brown rice, no wheat, except occasionally sourdough bread, only coconut or almond milk. Breakfast is living peel superberry, one scoop and living berry, one scoop of protein with coconut milk and one slice of Ezekiel toast with almond butter. Supplements are fish oil, digestive enzymes, K2, vitamin D, only two super green capsules per day and one magnesium capsule. I am so totally psyched out in even doing the half, but I have worked hard. Can you help at all? I have no problems with my afternoon and evening runs. Any help you can give me, I would so very much appreciate it. Bye.

Bye. Interesting. And this is just based off of really kind of the complexity of the circadian rhythm. I mean, if you step back and look at it and consider what happens to your body before you wake up every morning, this is really all part of that. So. So at night your body is secreting melatonin and that's just something that is helping a lot of the repair and the Recovery and the body temperature and everything to basically be where it's supposed to be at when you're sleeping. But right around an hour or so before you wake up is when that melatonin secretion really significantly is decreased. And at that point, in combination with the production of light, in many cases, you start to produce a lot of cortisol. That's what wakes you up and pulls you out of bed. And your body temperature goes up and your gastrointestinal tract starts moving again, and your cellular metabolism goes up. And usually anywhere from like an hour or two after that or about an hour or two after that, what happens is your. What's called your colonic motility starts to increase, and you generally are stimulated to have a bowel movement. And that's just, you know, it's the reason why at some point in the morning, most people take a dump. And it's why a lot of times, if you are running or exercising in the morning, you can sometimes have a little bit more gastrointestinal discomfort than if you're doing it later on in the day after you've already kind of mobilized what you've got in there out of the system. So a big, big part of this is the circadian rhythm. And based on that, if you're going to be going for a run or a workout in the morning, you're either going to need to figure out a way to get stuff out of the system earlier or figure out a way to kind of wake up your body a little bit earlier and get that cortisol going earlier so that you increase the gastrointestinal motility a little bit better. So that might be something as simple as being exposed to light for a longer period of time in the morning to heading out for your workout. Natural sunlight works best, but you could also, you can buy these light boxes off Amazon that you set on your kitchen table during breakfast, and they amp up a bunch of light in your face and kind of bring your cortisol levels up and help to wake your body up or reset your circadian rhythm. You can try and use something at night before you go to bed so that you have a little bit more gastrointestinal motility or that stuff basically slips out a little bit easier in the morning. I like a liquid trace minerals for something like that, or a natural calm magnesium that can help out quite a bit what I use when I'm traveling, because jet lag throws off your circadian rhythm, and that's why you get constipated a lot of times. If you're traveling is because your morning gastrointestinal motility is based on your circadian rhythm, not only dark cycles, but also where you're at in terms of where you're used to being. Because in addition to light and dark, there's another component of the circadian rhythm. It's called nitric oxide synthase or nos. And in addition to our circadian rhythms kind of being linked with the light dark cycles, they can also be linked to the production of this nitric oxide synthase or synthetase. And so either one of these can be kind of influenced by where we're at in terms of where we're used to being as far as our time cycles are concerned. And so when you're traveling and you're jet lagged a lot of times you do have constipation and reduced gastrointestinal motility. So I'll use like a high fiber. I use like Capricleanse when I'm traveling three in the morning and three in the evening. And I get stuff moving super quick in the morning because that's for a while. That was one of the worst times for me to work out was in the morning when I was traveling especially because it just seems like it takes stuff so much longer to get out of your system in the morning when you're, you know, when you're, you know, four or five time zones away from where you're used to being. So that's another thing that I would look into would be the, you know, the ability of you to just push stuff out a little bit earlier in the morning. But yeah, it's really, really interesting how the circadian rhythm kind of works when it comes to regulating the activity of your stomach and your colon. And basically there are specific neurons that kind of line your gastrointestinal tract that are super sensitive when it comes to the light dark cycles. And there's actually research, there's a few different research studies that have looked at folks who work night shifts, for example, or people who have a lot of disruptions in their natural circadian rhythms. And you see increased risk for colon cancer and increased gastrointestinal symptoms like constipation and diarrhea, well established in the research in these folks. And a big, big part of that is disruption of the circadian rhythm due to either a change in the light dark cycles or simply a change in kind of like the normal day night rhythm, you know, staying up for three days and sleeping for two and that type of thing. So yeah, these are definitely yoked The GI tract and the circadian rhythm. And the best thing that you can do is to simply try and get stuff moving earlier, get a little bit more light exposure earlier in the day to try and get the cortisol surging a little bit, or else just start exercising in the afternoon or the early evening.

So I guess there's. I have two thoughts after that. So the Capra cleanse stuff that you use, that's really, that's just a high fiber, is it?

It's a lot of different stuff. It's got a liver cleanse in there. It's got like a whole food high fiber blend in there. It's got some essential oils in it. It's got some digestive enzymes, it's got some probiotics. It's just kind of like a full on. I don't want to say gastrointestinal nuke, because that sounds bad, but what it does is it just keeps stuff moving along. So the times that I use it are, like I said, when I'm traveling and then if I am using pharmaceuticals, I will make sure that I get on this stuff for the liver cleansing properties, because the liver is having to detox to a greater extent when you're using pharmaceutical drugs or antibiotics or anything like that. Then the other time that I'll use it is if I've been drinking alcohol because alcohol also is tough on the liver and it also tends to constipate you a little bit. So that's. I just, I just keep a bottle in my fridge and those are the three times that I use it. Three in the morning and three in the evening. And it'll help out quite a bit.

So would there be any problem for say like a shift worker of some sort? Like you were saying, the people who are switching, switching schedules quite often, would there be any problem with them sort of taking that constantly or if they wanted to take something like that, should they just take it on the days when they're doing night shift or when the schedule is shifting or something like that?

Well, sure, you could take it constantly, but I mean, still, that would just be a band aid. Just because circadian biology is super critical to your health. And it's the way that we've kind of, from an ancestral health standpoint, lived for a very, very long period of time. And there's a, there is a big, big link not only between your gastrointestinal health and your gastrointestinal motility and the circadian rhythm, but also the proper function of your DNA. For example, a lot of cell Cycling and gene regulation occurs during the deep sleep cycles that you experience in kind of a proper circadian rhythm. And so defects in circadian biology are linked to things like, like cancer and chronic disease because of that. So, I mean, unfortunately, and I know somebody who's working a night shift probably doesn't want to hear this, but you really are fighting biology when you're in that situation. And yes, if you've got GI issues, the Capricleans is going to help, but it's only a band aid.

Gotcha. So to help you cope, but it's certainly no replacement.

Yeah, I mean, if you really want ideal function, you get on a proper light, dark sleep cycle.

Gotcha. All right, well, let's, let's move on to the next question that comes from Abe.

Hi Ben, my name is Dave Grinley and I am a member of your Rockstar Academy. I have a question for the podcast or just any way you'd like to get back to me. I have an endurance weekend race coming up that will include a 5k run on Friday night, a sprint triathlon Saturday morning, 500 swim, 13 mile bike and 3 mile run, immediately followed by a time trial on the same course. The 13 mile time trial course, roughly three to four hour break, and then a 25 mile road race later that afternoon, and then a crit on Sunday morning. I'm a triathlete by trade, not a cyclist necessarily. And this will be in August in Mississippi, so needless to say, it will be very hot and very humid. I would love your advice for what your training would be for the week going into the race and more importantly, what your fueling and recovery attack would be during the race, post race between different disciplines. Just how you would handle that weekend in between the different races, fueling wise and recovery wise. Thanks again Ben and keep up all the good work.

Now, first of all, do you know what a crit is?

Yeah, a criterium, like a cycling crit.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Which is usually like multiple laps around a specific section. Like a lot of times they'll have these in downtown cities. You'll be doing a loop, a high intensity, super fast bike ride race. It's fun stuff. A lot of changes in pace and typically a few crashes here and there. And yeah, they're fun. So this endurance weekend sounds awesome. So we've got rattle this off again for folks who didn't get it. 5k run on Friday and then you wake up the next morning you have a sprint triathlon that's immediately Followed by a 15 mile time trial on the bike and then you get a little break and then you have a 25 mile road race on the bike and then you wake up the next morning and you do this crit. So we're talking about a lot of this isn't like a three day long bike ride. This is a bunch of really high intensity, high carbohydrate utilizing and muscle tearing type of activities performed three days in a row. Whereas if this was like a long steady effort, I would be really prescribing or recommending higher fat intake, some solid intake of whole amino acids from good protein sources like beef and fish and stuff like that and that type of thing. This is completely different. So we're looking at trying to dose carbs accordingly. And remember that while I do not believe that carbohydrates and high sugar intake is healthy for you, it is definitely a great ergogenic drug to be used in situations like this to really amp up your energy levels. So what I would do is start off by understanding that you're going to want to keep your muscles as much as possible from cannibalizing or becoming catabolic during efforts like this. So I would get your hands on a good pre digested amino acid supplement, like an amino acids capsule or an amino acids powder. Because you're not going to have to require your gastrointestinal system to digest a whole protein and to put out the energy necessary to digest a whole protein when you're using like a pre digested amino acid. So right before pretty much on any of these efforts, you're gonna take those 30 to 60 minutes prior, you know, 5 to 10 grams of a good amino acid supplement. If you can't afford a whole amino acid supplement, at least get like a branched chain amino acid supplement which is cheaper and is still gonna allow, you know, some of that, that staving off of muscle degradation. So you do that right before. And then, so Starting with your 5k run on Friday, basically you have a little bit of carbohydrate directly before your 5k run, like half a banana or an energy gel or anything of that nature. Now immediately after your 5k run, and I'm looking at this based off of, you know, if you're going to run anywhere from like a, I don't, I don't know how fast Abe is, but you know, anywhere from like a 15 to a 30 minute 5K or a little bit more, you might burn anywhere from 400 to 600 calories during that effort. And it's going to be primarily carbohydrate based calories. So immediately after the 5k run, when our bodies are going to be most able to kind of uptake and restore muscle glycogen levels, you eat about 400 to 600 calories of an easy to digest carbohydrate. So we're talking about some sweet potatoes or yams or white rice or brown rice, maybe some quinoa, some fruit, something of that nature. But we're looking for 400, 600 calories of carbohydrates immediately after. And if you've done amino acids before, you don't have to eat a ton of protein right after. Eat your regular food the rest of the day. You have kind of like my standby pre race dinner the night before, you know, a little bit of easy to digest protein, like some fish with some greens, like, you know, steamed spinach or something like that, a little bit of potato or some rice. With dinner on Friday night, and then you wake up in the morning before your sprint triathlon, two to three hours before that race, you want to have breakfast. Normally I would say it doesn't really matter if you have breakfast before sprint triathlon, but since you are right after that sprint triathlon going straight into a 15 mile time trial and then you got a break and another big race after that, eat breakfast so that you're not dipping too much into your storage muscle glycogen. So usually for breakfast before sprint triathlon, you're going to be topping off your liver stores, glycogen stores, and that's gonna be again, about 400 to 600 calories of an easy to digest carbohydrate, about two to three hours before your sprint triathlon in the morning. So like again, you know, I'd be, if I were you, I'd just be throwing a ton of sweet potatoes in the oven before this thing and just taking, wrapping those in aluminum foil and taking them with you because that's my favorite standby carb. So you eat that before breakfast or eat that for breakfast two to three hours before the race. And then same thing, you do some amino acids 30 to 60 minutes prior to the sprint triathlon, you do the sprint triathlon. And just like the 5K, you try and top off your glycogen that you burnt through with another 400, 600 calories of an easy to digest carbohydrate. After you finish that sprint triathlon time trial effort. And because you're going to be racing for kind of a longer period of time than an hour, try and take in about 250 calories per hour during an event like that. And then right after that event, because you're gonna have a three to four hour break before you start your next event, you again do, you could probably guess it, 400, 600 calories of carbohydrate before you go into your 25 mile road race. And then you can pretty much do dinner the same way as you did it on Friday night. Little fish with some easy to digest carbohydrate and some greens. You wake up Sunday morning, you treat that the same as you did with Saturday breakfast. You again do some amino acids right before the effort and you go out and you race. Now a bunch of people might be scratching their head and saying, well Ben, I thought you said that post workout nutrition wasn't important and that it was blown out of proportion by people who are trying to get you to eat within one or two hours after workout when really you don't need to. This is true except in situations where you're working out and then you're going to be working out again within four hours or you're doing like two a days within pretty close proximity of one another. And they're both intense. In a situation like that, post workout nutrition becomes important and post workout carbohydrates become important. Most people, you know, day to day lives, they're working out once during the day. And so all this description that I just went through of pre and post workout, you know, amino acids, carbohydrates, all this type of stuff isn't that important because you tend to top off your energy levels just with your normal day to day eating. When you get in a situation like this, multiple workouts, 2A days, that type of thing, that's where this comes in much, much handier. And this is the same way I'd treat, you know, something like a training camp, like a week long training camp. Because you're doing multiple training sessions, you know, multiple days, pre and post workout nutrition comes in much, much handier. So as far as a few other things, you know, recovery is important. I'd be using like a, like a topical transdermal magnesium, like a spray on magnesium after every effort, after every one of these races. That can help recovery quite a bit. I would be kind of living in compression gear, compression tights, compression socks, that type of thing. Between each event, every evening I'd be doing an ice bath or a cold shower to kind of shut down inflammation a little bit along with some foam roller to make sure that you're not Getting super stiff between these events. And then I'd make sure you really prioritize deep sleep by again, doing something like using magnesium or using some melatonin or something to help you get into real, real good, solid sleep before you go to bed at night in between these. So that's, that's what I do. Sounds like a fun weekend.

It does. It sounds like a really fun weekend. Um, just a word to the word of caution. If you're going to do the magnesium spray and oral magnesium to help you sleep, make sure that you don't take more than you're used to because it could ruin your weekend. You could spend the weekend on the toilet instead of running your races and riding your races.

Yeah. So a good rule of thumb is, is for most people, once you get above about 500 grams or soI'm sorry, 500 milligrams of magnesium, sometimes it can give you some loose stool. Really depends. I've had some people go over 1,000. But if you're using the spray on magnesium, usually each spray is going to give you about 10 milligrams. So think of it that way. So if you're doing 250 milligrams of magnesium before you go to bed at night, you could still get another 25 sprays or so of a topical magnesium before you get to that point where you might be getting so much magnesium that you're basically the minerals are attracting some extra water into your colon. You can get loose stool.

And which magnesium should they look for in the spray? There was one that absorbs a lot better than the other one.

The one that I use is ancient minerals, magnesium oil, and that one. You can usually find it at a lot of health food stores and most websites are going to have it. I'll put a link to it in the show notes, but that's the stuff I use.

Cool. All right, next audio question comes from another John.

Hi, Ben. This is Jonathan from Florida. I'm considering running the ing New York City Marathon in November and I would greatly appreciate your advice as to whether or not it would be a smart move on my part.

Part.

I'm currently 27 years old. I'm about 5 foot 7 and I weigh around 145 pounds. I've run two half marathons over the last two years and I'm going to the gym usually around four times a week, doing cardio and lifting weights. I'm generally in pretty good shape, although I could lose maybe five pounds off my stomach. A few years back, I actually weighed about 185 and ended up losing all of that over the last two or three years. For each of the half marathons I've trained using mostly high intensity interval training plus one long run per week. While training for the last half marathon, which I ran in March, I injured my right knee trying to run a five minute mile on a 5% incline on the treadmill. There was fairly intense pain directly above and below my kneecap whenever I walked. So I went to the physical therapist and they told me that I have a slight case of hypermobility syndrome, which they said basically means that my joints move a little bit further than they should because the ligaments and tendons are slightly too loose all throughout my body. I've always noticed my knees and elbows bent a little bit beyond 180 degrees, but I never really thought anything of it and I kind of assumed that's how everyone was. After each of the half marathons I did, I could not really walk for a few days due to intense pain on both the tops and bottoms of my feet due to the tendons being strained, which the foot doctor told me after a few days the pain pretty much went away and after a week or so I could run again. I've always wanted to run a marathon and I feel like it's sort of now or never because I'm pretty much in the best shape of my life. However, I obviously don't want to do it if there's any real chance of seriously hurting myself given my condition and the past experience with the other half marathons. Any advice, including a brief training regimen, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot and I love your show.

Cool.

If you do do the New York City Marathon, Ben will be there.

That's what I was just going to say. I'm going to be there. So shout out to John, but don't do it. John. No, I'm just kidding.

He doesn't want you to beat him.

So I need every advantage I can get here. It's a couple weeks after Ironman Hawaii, so I know it's going to be a rough marathon.

It's going to hurt.

Yeah. Anyways, though, hypermobility syndrome, or hypermobility in any joint typically can really be improved through strengthening the connective tissue, the ligaments, the tendons, and the muscles around that joint with weight training. And I'm a huge, huge fan of strength training for helping hypermobility. I personally have fairly mobile shoulders and elbows and I can hyperextend both my elbows instantly. I've injured both of them snowboarding for that reason. But you can really decrease a lot of these issues that you're having, whether it be hypermobile knees or hypermobile joints anywhere really, with weight training. And it's the reason why in most of the marathon training programs that I write, the average person is only running anywhere from three up to a maximum of five times a week. But strength training a good two to three times a week. In terms of the type of strength training that you do for something like training for a marathon, I mean, you know, full body, three times a week is a perfect place to start. You know, the type of strength training program that you could, that you do is going to vary from person to person based off of what you have access to. But, you know, you take something like hypermobility syndrome in your knee, a lot of times that simply means that the patella, the kneecap, is tracking laterally, tracking off to the side of the knee, because the muscles on the inside of the quadriceps tend to naturally be a little bit weaker and the ligaments on the outside of your leg to naturally be a little bit tighter. And I mean, so you, you adjust something like that by doing a lot of strength training kind of for the, for the inside of the quads. The VMO muscle, it's called the vastus medialis, which would be like, you know, straight leg raises and leg extensions and stuff like that, while making sure that you, you maintain range of motion in the outside of the leg by doing something like, you know, foam rolling on the outside of your leg. And you can, you can just kind of go through your whole body, you know, that way, doing full body weight training, making sure you do some foam rolling for any tight spots. And you know, not to, not to blow off this answer, because I know that, you know, this type of pain and the type of injuries that John is experiencing can be extremely frustrating. But I mean, really, I would just start weight training and I would be really focusing on a high quality weight training session. And John, I know you're saying that you go to the gym, I think you said four times a week. But a lot of times, and I noticed especially runners tend to be even more prone to this. There's really not enough heavy lifting going on to really cause the type of strength that's necessary to adjust for something like hypermobility. So I would be going heavy, doing 6, 8, 10 reps. In terms of your rep range, using a weight that really challenges you and maybe even makes you rest for a little while in between reps requires that maybe you have A spotter or if you can afford it a few times, just like a personal trainer to help you learn how much weight you actually can lift and really focus on the strength component. Runners tend to have this propensity to focus on muscular endurance when they go to the gym and doing high rep, low weight, cardiovascular work. Work. Think like a weightlifter when you go to the gym and that'll really help you in terms of building up the type of strength necessary to help with something like hypermobility. You know, marathon training program that I wrote over@marathondominator.com I put that together with a running coach from Seattle and that's a solid program. We've got a lot of injury prevention stuff, strength training, minimalist running approach. And that that'd be a good one for you to use for New York City marathons. Or you could even, you could go to the New York City Marathon webpage where they have training programs written out and you could merge that with like three times a week full body heavy strength training program. And that's really what I'd be doing in this situation. And I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to run the marathon as long as you get your body strong.

That race isn't until November, is it?

Right. Yes, there's a lot.

So it's. There's lots of time, plenty of time to get this taken care of. Cool. All right, so our next question comes from Greg and Sharon and they ask, we noticed in one of your videos at home you have a water filtering system. I don't remember the name of it, but we looked at it about two years ago and wondered about it and even contacted the company with the question. When the water is filtered through all the layers, it stays in your container with the filter. Filter, Right. In other words, you just spend the whole night filtering water, but the filter stays up in the middle of the water after it's filtered, where do the impurities from the water go? So it's a little bit of a confusing question, but I think I understand it that the idea is like the water is being filtered, but nothing's coming out of the filter other than the water you're drinking.

Right. Well, what I had, and I thought this question was so interesting because I literally got a new water filter put into my home last night. So I thought this was an interesting and very relevant question. But up until last night, what I used was an activated carbon filter, which basically what carbon does is carbon removes certain sizes of particles from the water prior to it actually ending up in your faucet or in your shower. And, and carbon is incredibly absorbent. It's basically like charcoal. And so one pound of carbon can absorb thousands and thousands of different chemicals. And the way that this filter is designed is the carbon absorbs the contaminants that are in the water and the actual water that you're drinking doesn't then pass, pass through those contaminants a second time. So that's why this question kind of kind of confused me because it's just like the way the filter is built. Carbon removes the contaminants from the water. And the way that it does that is it attracts negatively charged ions to the positively charged carbon. And then when those pass through the carbon, they're removed. And so they kind of almost, if you think of it this way, they like stick to the carbon and they can't kind of end up in your water after they've already passed through the carbon. And activated carbon filters are pretty good because they'll take out pesticides, herbicides, chlorine, benzene, a lot of the man made chemicals that you're going to find in tap water. And they'll remove some heavy metals. Unfortunately, like a lot of filters do, they will remove a good portion of minerals as well. So there are some things from the water that you're not going to get. Although some minerals do actually pass through a carbon filter. Carbon isn't going to do much for bacteria and viruses. It isn't going to do anything for fluoride, isn't going to do anything for nitrates. And unfortunately for people who have iron in their water, carbon is pretty useless in terms of filtering iron too. But I mean, it's a decent way to go going with an activated carbon filter filter. The person who I interviewed about protecting yourself from the effects of chlorine and even like, you know, drinking chlorinated water goes into water filtration a little bit in this weekend's podcast. So I won't really, really geek out on the type of water filters that are out there too much, but that's kind of how the carbon filter worked that I had in my home until last night. And then at the risk of scaring everyone away with woo woo science, I've had that entire water unit replaced with what's called a structured water unit. And basically what a structured water unit does is it actually affects the molecular structure of the water. So water is actually passing through what's called a vortex, like a series of glass beads. And what that does is, is it actually affects the formation of all of these different water molecules, these different H2O molecules that are stuck together, and it affects the way that these cluster together and basically creates water molecules that are clustered quite regularly or in a very organized fashion. And that can help out in terms of lowering the surface tension of the water. And it improves the extent to which the water is able to hydrate your cells. It can improve the ability of, like the plants growing in our backyard to be able to absorb the water a little bit better. It kind of redefines what's called the atomic vibration of the actual atoms that make up the hydrogen and oxygen molecules within the water. And it basically affects the way that things like toxins and herbicides and pesticides are actually in the water. And it kind of separates those from the water via like, almost like a sediment type of action. So you're still getting all of the minerals from the water, but it's a structured water. It hydrates a little bit more completely, passes out a lot of this stuff through sedimentation. The reason I have it put in my house is because my dad is basically in the process of building a business right now where he's really trying to help farmers get better yield from crops and get better vegetables, better fruits, stuff like that throughout the. The type of water that they use on crops. And he proposed to me that he wanted to put one of these in my house. So I studied it up a little bit and I said, okay, this looks good and we'll do it. So it's in my house now. And, you know, I've literally had maybe one glass of water since I had it put in, but that's what I use now.

In terms of the filter, the coolest part of this new filter is that it actually will transport you to an alternate dimension as well through the vortex.

It's actually pretty cool. I've been traveling all over the world for my special new vortex installed in my bathroom closet.

All right, our next question comes from Scott. And Scott says, my daughter is a competitive high school swimmer and also has scoliosis with a 27% curvature. This has been a great activity for her for the past 12 years and has really helped her body stay strong. However, this season, this spring season, she's developed a sharp pain on exhaling forcefully or on impact, like diving or pushing off a wall. She's never scratched a race before, but now she's unable to compete even a 100, I guess, 100 meter backstroke or breaststroke. The pain is located on her left side, the low side of her spinal curvature below the scapula in her rhomboid. She's been icing, stretching, using ibuprofen and electrostim. Do you have any suggestions on how to rehab the injury and any special considerations for rehab and training given her scoliosis?

Yeah. Let me start by saying that I'm not a doctor and I certainly don't specialize in things like scoliosis. I mean, I've talked about kind of the type of weight training sessions that you can do with mild scoliosis and how to be a little bit more comfortable weight training. But, but when it comes to scoliosis, one of the issues, especially with kids, is that your body changes as you get older. And specifically if you've got this side to side curve in your spine, that curve can progress with gravity and with activity and with basically what we do as we age. And as that progresses, the spine can begin to rotate. And since each one of your ribs are attached to your spine, your ribs can start to shift as well. So the ribs on kind of the common concave side of the curve start to get crowded together. And the ribs on the convex side of the curve that's rotating the other way, those start to splay apart. And it can create this type of discomfort, this type of pain, especially in a swimmer who's trying to kind of stretch out with each stroke, it can create this pain because it begins to crowd the lungs, it begins to crowd the heart. You know, these ribs as they shift and as they change, it's. So it's kind of a tough call in this case because we're talking about pain management to a certain extent, but that kind of being like a temporary bandaid over the need for potentially a more aggressive type of treatment for something like this. For example, they have what are called rib thoracoplasties, which is an actual surgical technique to help out with, with this type of rib shifting that takes place. And you could go to the website, for example, for the National Scoliosis foundation and you could read up on a rib thoracoplasty to help out with something like this. There's also a really good book out there that was written by someone with scoliosis that's really, really, it's fairly thorough in terms of outlining the type of shifts that occur when you have scoliosis and some of the surgical and medical options that are available for those. That book, which I'll link to in the show notes for you for this episode, episode number 195 is called stopping Scoliosis. And you could read that book as well to help you out a little bit. I know that's probably not what you want to hear is to go read a book. But I just want you to understand that sometimes this is stuff that can't be fixed by stretching and weightlifting because it's an actual physical shift in the ribs. I do know that a lot of chiropractic physicians listen into this show and they certainly get exposed to some of this structural change type of information a little bit more than I do. And so if Cairo is listening and you may want to leave a comment on the show notes as well. As far as pain management, from all the evidence that I've seen, ibuprofen doesn't work work quite as well as kind of seeing a doc and seeing if you can get a prescription for something like a low dose naltrexone for pain management. Just until you can get to the point where you get this sorted in terms of kind of seeing if there is going to need to be a little bit of surgery that takes place. Unfortunately, you bounce back from a surgery like that super fast. It's a pretty quick surgery with anywhere from a one to a three month recovery. The other thing you could look at is they're developing a lot of these newer nighttime braces for scoliosis that are designed to be fitted to the body and worn just while you're sleeping at night, so you don't have to go through, I guess, almost the embarrassment or the discomfort of wearing them during the day. But they're designed to increase flexibility and to induce some structural changes while you're asleep at night. And you could look into these type of nighttime braces for scoliosis as well to see if that helps out a little bit too. So, you know, I know that that's not really a fix as much as just kind of giving you more information to act on, but those are some of the things that I would look into.

I think that's. Those are all great suggestions. All right, our next question comes from Janelle. And Janelle says. Now, I know this may come off as a weird question.

Come on.

This is the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast, unless it pertains to poo.

Well, okay, yeah, we've talked about oversized nipples and poop on this show, so I think we've covered the weird questions.

Absolutely. And we will again. And this isn't one of them. But anyway, she wants to know what is your take on veggie straws? By sensible portions, they seem to be healthy and are all natural with no preservative but I have my guard up, so to speak, on them because at times what seems healthy for you really isn't. If you could provide your feedback on this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Veggie straws by sensible portions. You've probably seen these before. It's like this bag and they're like, they're literally like straws and they're in different colors and there's a lot of kind of commercials for them.

And.

And they're advertised as being like the alternative to potato chips that are cholesterol free and have no preservatives. And it is true, they're a little bit lower in preservatives and oils and trans fats than any of the leading potato chip brands out there. But they're basically like potato flour, sunflower oil and cornstarch. And they've added like, like some spinach powder and tomato puree to them in order to be able to call them vegetable chips. And some salt and some sugar and some turmeric. Okay. There are definitely worse things on the planet that you could be snacking on, but these are not going to do you any favors nutritionally. They've got like 0% of your vitamin A and like 2% of your vitamin C and like a 1 gram of fiber, which is basically like nothing. If you've got nothing else to snack on and you want to grab one of these to satiate your appetite, it's not that big of a deal. They're not going to kill you. They don't have a ton of added ingredients in them like many of the processed snacks out there do. But there are better options out there. I mean, like, for example, it's so easy to make something like kale chips with some oil and some really, really mineral and nutrient rich kale. And you just wash kale and you literally can like spray it with olive oil, like, right. Not extra virgin olive oil, like regular olive oil, which is fairly heat stable. And then you just toss them in the oven for anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes, depending how crunchy you want them. And we have those all the time during the summer. They're super easy to make. You can make a big batch on them. Keep them in a bowl on your kitchen counter, and they're really good. Sprinkle them with a little sea salt when they come out of the oven, and that's a great recipe. I'll link to a recipe for kale chips in the show notes. But I mean, it's that easy. You literally just have the kale you cut it into pieces, you lay it on a baking pan, you spray it with olive oil, or you sprinkle it with olive oil, or you can even put it in a bowl and just stir it up with some olive oil and you throw them in the oven. I'm not really against the veggie straws. It's just like I would go for kale chips. And we do the same thing with nori chips as well. Like the sheets of seaweed that you can get, you can do really, really similar thing as kale chips with those. This stuff is so easy to make at home, and it's so much better when you make it at home that I don't see why you wouldn't do that.

And as the old saying goes, if you're not hungry enough to eat kale chips, you're probably not that hungry.

That is a saying I've never heard in my life before. Brock. I just made it up.

I did just make it up. And Julia says I'm recovering from a fracture to my tibial plateau and recently bruised sternum. Got a little stupid using a poorly adjusted upright rower at the gym. I can't. I'm trying to picture how, how and why. Can you figure out how she did this?

I was thinking maybe she like got underneath the actual rowing machine itself and was trying to like, like drag it across the gym with her chest.

That maybe. Yeah, I don't know, somebody was throwing it at her and she didn't catch it.

That's, that's. Yeah, that's possible.

Anyway, obviously chest and weight bearing exercise is contrary indicated. Do you have any creative exercises to share, particularly ones that strengthen my lower body in some way?

Well, kind of just step back and look at this from a bigger perspective. You know, I get injured, folks I train get injured. Everybody who works out kind of gets injured. And yeah, there's certainly like strategies that you can use to stay fit when you're injured. And typically a gym membership comes in really, really handy just because gyms have machines that isolate body parts, parts and that can allow you to get a decent weight training, strength training workout without hurting an injured joint. Because part of a joint's healing is a little bit of rest and protection of that particular joint. Whereas I'm not normally a fan of using weight machines at the gym, when I'm working with somebody who's injured or kind of giving advice to somebody who's injured, they really can be a good way to isolate an area, keep you strong, give you a little bit of a cardiovascular workout. If you Turn it into a weight training circuit and I'll link to an article that I just released over@everymantry.com, but it just kind of goes through common injuries and how you can stay fit with certain injuries, like if you hurt your ankle and your foot. I've got a workout on there where you're doing a lot of what are called open chain exercises where your feet aren't in contact with the ground, where you're doing like machine leg extensions, machine leg curls incline dumbbell chest press, lat pull down stability ball push up, single arm dumbbell row and then some hanging leg raises. Doing that as a circuit and kind of going through it several times through knee injury. Similar thing where you're just doing a circuit one day where it's all kind of like upper body cables, a circuit another day where it's a lot of core work work, but again kind of done as a circuit, back to back, minimal rest between exercises, keeping you in cardiovascular condition and still strength training you without actually working the legs. Similar thing for a shoulder injury. You can do a lot of metabolic work on the bike, on the elliptical, on the treadmill. You can combine that with some jumps with some single side work for the opposite unaffected shoulder. And I mean, there's so many different ways that you can take an injury that when you've got one body part that's injured, you just use that as the opportunity to find some ways to isolate the other body parts and strengthen those instead. So I'll link to that article in the show notes. But in this case, if you hurt your chest and you also have a fractured tibial plateau, which is basically down in your leg, my recommendation would be you're doing a workout where you are primarily targeting your core and you're targeting the unaffected leg and you're doing some exercises that aren't really pulling your sternum and your ribs in too much, like some curls and some triceps extensions and things like that. And generally what I'll do if I'm really beat up, and I've had bike crashes before where it's like three or four different muscle groups are hurt, I'll just find as many different exercises as I can that leave those muscle groups out of the equation, I'll string those exercises together in a circuit and just go to the gym and do that circuit every other day. And you combine that with a little low intensity, non weight bearing like water workouts like aqua jogging or some swimming or something like that, and you can usually string yourself through an injury and Stay relatively fast fit.

Yeah, it sounds like actually aqua jogging would be a great way to get some cardio with these particular injuries right here that she's talking about.

Yeah. Fractured tibial plateau. Depending on the extent of the fracture, something like aqua jogging could work. Something like single leg strengthening for the unaffected leg can also work single leg, leg extensions, leg curls, cable kicks forward, cable kicks back, that type of thing.

Yeah, I know there'd be. Previously, to my man, it's probably like 20 or 30 episodes ago, you actually talked about how the affected. If you're exercising one leg, let's say you're doing leg raises with your left leg, your right leg is actually getting a workout as well. There's some sort of neuromuscular connection between the two.

Yep. Yeah, you get that contralateral training effect, so. Yep, absolutely. That's. That's why when one side is injured, you should work the other side.

Yeah, I think I've always been worried that I wouldn't. I should always keep it even. Like, if you're doing 20 curls on one side, you're doing 20 curls on the other side as well, but it's not so. Okay, so our next question comes from Carla. And Carla says I am very lean. Normal BMI, body fat percentage, mother of three. I exercise five times a week, cardio weights, plyometrics, high intensity intervals, etc. But after three C sections, my abs are not responding and I can't get rid of the excess skin in the lower part of my abs. I'm considering a tummy tuck. Is there any other way?

Just throwing this out there. Guys don't really mind C sections too much. And I think that women a lot of times are their worst critics. You know, I know my wife has occasionally complained about her stomach or whatever, and honestly, like, I don't even notice it. So don't beat yourself up too much. If you had a C section and your tummy shows it, it's just part of life. First of all, I don't want to kind of, you know, make you think that your body's got to be perfect. And I personally, I don't mind the C section look at all. It just shows that you've, you know, you've lived.

So even the first part of the first part of the question really points to being there. Doesn't seem like there's anything wrong. I'm very lean, normal BMI and body fat percentage doesn't sound like there's a problem.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times when you're seeing a magazine cover model who's had a baby and you know they've had a C section. There's a lot of times some airbrushing that's going on there. So first of all, I wouldn't let it bother you too much. I mean, really, it's not that big of a deal. And you can get a tummy tuck to get rid of loose skin and it is fairly effective at getting rid of excess skin. You can also just try to take care of the skin as much as possible. Try to nourish and care for the skin, get as much circulation going to the skin so that you're really increasing collagen and elastin formation. There are skin tightening creams out there that have herbal formulas and ingredients like aloe vera and hyaluronic acid and vitamin C and vitamin E and vitamin A. And all of that stuff can actually help out quite a bit. Whether you've lost a bunch of weight and you've got loose skin, or whether you've had a C section and you have loose skin. Collagen and elastin can really, really help to restore the integrity of skin. Even though in some cases it means using these creams for a good six to 12 months before you notice a really significant difference. Making sure that you're getting adequate protein, of course, is also really, really important to make sure that you've got the amino amino acids on board to help to form the collagen and elastin and kind of keep the skin nice and plump and hydrated and elastic. Plump probably being the wrong word to use when we're talking about the tummy. But aside from plump, I'd say just basically having a little bit of tightness to the skin. So making sure that you're getting adequate protein about about around 0.5 to 0.7 grams per pound is generally what I like to see for protein intake. That's good as well as of course, attending to your hydration needs since water is a really critical component for maintaining your skin's elasticity. As far as getting skin tightening cream stuff like that, a new website I recently discovered is called green cupboard greencupboards.com they've got a lot of really good kind of like body care, personal healthcare type of creams and lotions and stuff like that. I'll link to that in the show notes for you. But ultimately, aside from a skin firming cream, getting enough protein in your diet and making sure to stay hydrated, just including lots of good ab exercises can especially help as well. Kind of keeping the underlying Muscle nice and toned. And it sounds like you're already doing cardio weights and plyometrics and high intensity interval training, so you're probably okay. But I'll also link in the show notes in 195 for you to an exercise article I wrote about ab exercises for pregnancy and these same type of ab exercises for pregnancy. There's 14 of them that I put there can also be done post pregnancy, post C section, and can really help to firm the tummy a little bit in that situation too. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Oh, geez. I'm drinking some kombucha. This ginger kombucha. And you know when you get to the bottom and there's all that sediment, it's like the kombucha sediment, but it's also like really, really intense ginger, and it's burning the heck out of the back of my throat.

Carla, I'll apologize in advance. Dance for Brock's ginger kombucha consumption distracting you from the answer to your question?

Yeah, sorry about that.

You'll be okay, champ. Woo.

That's good stuff. I hope it's doing some good on the inside. Okay.

And not burning away the lining of your esophagus.

Yeah, I'm back next week, though. You know, the kombucha got me. All right. Okay. Our final question comes from Gregory. I'll try and hold it together. I weigh 250 pounds and I'm 31. I want to get bigger arms, but I also want to lose weight. How do I go about doing this without using small weights? I was told that I should just do a bunch of cardio to drop the weight and then start lifting. Others have suggested that I do a circuit with a high heart rate. Like do some heavy weights and then light weights at high rep and then some quick cardio. So how am I supposed to get maintain big muscles and trim down to like 225 or 230?

So this is something we mentioned last week in the intro about. I think it was last week about the new studies, a couple of them, that have come out in recent years, that shows that it doesn't matter if your goal is to get nice big muscles in a specific body part, like in this case, bigger arms. Doesn't matter if you lift heavy or if you lift light. All that matters is that you work a muscle to exhaustion or to failure, and at that point the muscle will get bigger. Now, if you're trying to get stronger, if you're trying to get more Powerful, yes, you do need to lift heavy weight weights, but if all you're trying to do is get a muscle bigger, like get your arms bigger, then it doesn't matter if you do 50 pound curls or, you know, or 300 pound deadlifts, or you do 25 pound curls and 150 pound deadlifts, as long as you're lifting to exhaustion, you'll be able to get a specific muscle part bigger. So if you're trying to lose weight and get big muscles at the same time, first of all, what you should know is that weight training is just as good as cardio is for fat loss. So what that means is that the calorie burn, the hormonal response for fat loss, all of that is just as good, if not more superior when you're weight training. And so especially when someone comes to me and they want to get good looking muscles and they also want to burn fat simultaneously. One of the things that I try to avoid in those type of folks is chronic cardio is doing lots of time on the treadmill, lots of time on the bike, lots of metabolic work at a lower intensity. Just because that tends to have a catabolic kind of muscle wasting type of effect. Yes, that's necessary for someone who is going to need to go for long periods of time due to the rigors of their sport, like a triathlete or a marathoner. But there's always going to be some sacrifice of muscle when something like that takes place. So when somebody who wants to build muscle and lose fat at the same time, I'm a huge fan of relying primarily on the weight training to burn the fat. And the best type of workout for burning fat and building muscle at the same time is to do a weight training set. And in this case, I would recommend slightly higher reps, slightly lower resistance, so you're getting a little bit of that cardiovascular effect followed by a quick cardio boost. So you're going to take, for example, five different exercises that when strung together, work your entire body. So we're going to go chest press, we're going to go pull up, we're going to go shoulder press, we're going to go row and we're going to go squat. And you're going to do three sets for each of those exercises. But after each set that you do, you're going to do a quick burst of high intensity cardio, like 30 seconds, as hard as you can go on the bike. And when you get to the end of that circuit of exercises, you're going to Go back to the beginning so that you're going through a circuit three times through hitting each muscle group three times. That's an example of a really good workout for building muscle and burning fat simultaneously. And then you're gonna move on and you're gonna take that one muscle section that you're really wanting to focus on as a vanity section, like your, your arms in this case, and you're just gonna work them to exhaustion. So you're gonna finish up that workout with like cable curls or dumbbell curls. You can do one set to exhaustion, you can do several sets to exhaustion. Bigger arms typically mean you're working both your biceps and your triceps. So you could work back and forth, biceps and triceps, both to exhaustion. But that's the way that I would put together a training program for something like this. And you know, and if you're overweight, there are other, there are other things that you can make sure that you do just to make sure you're keeping your body in really, really good fat burning capacity as much as possible. Getting adequate sleep, staying active when you're not at the gym. So you're kind of keeping your body in fat burning mode, getting adequate recovery between workouts, all the kind of stuff that kind of sort of goes without saying. But don't just beat yourself up at the gym and then go live a crappy lifestyle the rest of the time. You got to make sure that you really take care of yourself on a sleep recovery and overall physical activity standpoint if you really want to vastly improve your results. But you know, that's, that's kind of the, the standpoint that I'd come from when it comes to something like this.

That sounds really good. And that also concludes this week's questions.

All right, good work. Let's go do our dumbbell curls.

I'm already doing them.

Yeah. And I know I used, I know I use dumbbell curls as an example a lot in that, my answer to that question, but honestly, I'm not a, I'm not a huge fan of dumbbell curls. I mean, if you want to get guns do deadlifts and pull ups, that's, that's the way to do it. I've got a, I've got a pull up bar installed on the door to my office. Every time I go in my office or out of my office, my rule is I have to do five pull.

Ups underhand or overhand.

It's the perfect pull up bar. So when you do the pull up, it kind of rotates as you pull up. So it like starts off overhand but kind of almost goes underhand as you pull yourself up and it saves your shoulders a little bit that way. But yeah, I mean the bar is like, you know, 19 bucks and installed it in the, in the door of my office. It's super solid. And honestly, just by doing five pull ups probably a good 15 times a day, I'm doing five pull ups. I can now jump onto a pull up bar at the gym and easily rip out 2530 bodyweight pull ups, no problem.

Awesome.

Yeah, yeah. And my dad could beat up your dad.

I. Yeah, I won't go there. Anyway, if anybody has any questions for the podcast, make sure you you can do it two ways or three ways actually. You can call toll free to 1-877-209-9439 and you don't have to memorize that it's on the website. If you go to episode 195, you can also Skype to Pacific Fit or you can go again to the website, scroll down to the bottom of any of the podcasts posts and there's a form right there that's Ask Ben form so you can fill in that boom.

And then remember to go to the show notes for this episode, episode number 195. We'll have a link to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Google page and you'll be able to join me multiple times next week for a video hangout. And again, I want to keep the questions and the topics for that video hangout really focused on on kind of the hydration, electrolyte and recovery during a big training week type of scenario. So if you're interested in any of that stuff, come and join. If you've got some other question, that's fine too. But really, I want to focus on that stuff.

I'm going to be really disappointed if you're not wearing a grass skirt and holding some sort of a fancy drink with an umbrella in it and a coconut brush. You can wear that if you like. I'm not making that a stipulation.

All right folks. Well, this is Ben Greenfield and Brock signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a great week.

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