Episode #202: Which Is Better: High Protein, Low Carb or High Fat, Low Carb?

In this podcast, which is better, high protein, low carb or high fat low carb? Also, what is hip dysplasia? How to deal with a baker's cyst, how carbs are listed on packaged food troubles? Sleeping after an evening workout? What type of milk is best? Hub Wetsuits should you use over the counter testosterone creams? How does muscle activation technique work and what is ENG3?

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

Hey, hey everybody. Welcome to episode 202, the episode where Ben's going to tell us about the inside of every porta potty in Spain. And I'm going to tell you how to grab an eel unexpectedly while swimming in a lake.

Oh boy, this should be fun.

It's going to be a good one.

Yeah. I'm literally like, I just got in last night from, well, we had a 24 hour layover in Paris that was actually my fault for misreading a ticket. And it's usually not a big deal, but I happen to be traveling with my wife and it always makes it that much more embarrassing when you miss a flight. And it's not just you that's suffering from it. But anyways, got to spend a romantic night in Paris.

I was going to say it's hard to call it suffering when you're in.

Paris in the airport hotel. But I did get my workout in. I did stairwell sprints. It was a 10 story hotel, so I got some stairway sprints. And the way that I did my workout in the Paris hotel, I thought I'd share this with listeners because I was doing it and I was like, I got to tell my listeners about this workout because it worked out pretty well. I went into the stairwell, which nobody uses anyways. Everybody uses the elevator. And what you do is you sprint to each landing of each floor. And every time you get to a landing you do 10 push ups. So you start at the bottom, you sprint to one floor, drop and do 10. Sprint to the next floor, drop and do 10. And you alternate in between pushups by taking two stairs at a time and then one stair at a time.

And it's actually quick feats for one and then like bigger sort of lungy steps for the Next.

And then I had an espresso and a bar of dark chocolate and got in the plane. So that sounds perfect, but actually the. The race that I was at was the IT World championships over in Spain, and I just put a link to my race report over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I gotta say.

I read the race report and I actually got stomach pains on your behalf.

Yeah, yeah. And you know what it comes down to. I'm writing an article right now on this for Lava magazine, but for the past four to six months or so, I've been doing. Pretty much have worked most of the gliadin proteins out of my diet, which is that protein molecule you find in things like wheat and rye and barley. And the thing is that when you worked gliadin out of your diet and then you bring it back in, the inflammatory reaction in your bowel and the effect on the mucosal lining of your small intestine is pretty dang significant.

So more significant than it would have been had you just continued to eat.

Right, Right. Basically, if you're kind of gluten free, gliadin free, and then you get some trace exposures, which happened to me during race week, when you're really trying to operate 100% intensity, it can mess you up a little bit. And I ended up, basically, for the last hour of that 75 mile bike that I was hammering pretty hard, I ended up not being able to really eat anything at all because it was just kind of coming back up and it really came back to bite me on the run in terms of hypoglycemia and all that jazz. So, yeah, everything from nutrient loss to malabsorption of nutrients to indigestion to leaky gut syndrome, to fat malabsorption to aggravating lactose intolerance, all of these things are issues with gliadin exposure after you've dropped it out of your diet. I'm working on a big article on that right now for Lava magazine. But essentially what happened was I had some tapas here and there and a few exposures to wheat in some of the dinners that we had. And it was one of those deals where you don't really realize how even a little bit can come back to bite you until you're standing there on the starting line and you're really trying to get everything you can out of your body and it's just not happening. So it was a big eye opener. And yeah, if you want to check out the article I'm writing about it, you can go over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and link over to the race report and read a little bit. And then check out the upcoming issue of Lava magazine for more on that fun porta potty filled experience. What's the deal with the eels, dude?

I was just. I was swimming in Lake Ontario last weekend, just doing my regular workout and I was just. During one of the strokes, I felt this weird thing in my hand and it was like, I felt like muscle and it sort of shook and disappeared out of my hand and I was like, I didn't actually see it, but it was just sort of. It was alarming and shocking. And there's a lot of lifeguards all floating around in boats and stuff nearby. And when I got close to one of them, I just popped up for a second and said, what would you say the chances are of me actually having just grabbed a fish? And she looked at me and said, well, it's probably an eel. Like, as if it was no big deal. But yeah, apparently Lake Ontario's got tons and tons of American eels and they sort of go into different areas and the area I was swimming in had had tons of them. So, I mean, they're absolutely harmless. They're just like fish, like they're not going to bite you, they're not going to sting you or anything. But so I wasn't worried. I continued to swim and that's the spot I've been swimming in for a while. I'll go back, but it was just. If I had actually tried to grab an eel on purpose, there's no way I would have done it. But I actually did it by accident.

You need to go swimming with barbecue sauce and that way you got yourself some unagi.

Apparently they are delicious. So, yeah, I should have kept my hand closed and swam to shore.

But alas, I love unagi.

News flashes.

Okay, twitter.com BenGreenfield and of course Google have all kinds of interesting stories almost every day, if not every second day, sometimes multiple times a day. And this is the time when Ben's gonna highlight a couple of a few of his favorites.

Always keeping my eye open at some of the things that are floating around out there in terms of studies that can help folks. And one of the things I saw was something that came out on Echinacea, specifically on echinacea supplementation. Improving running economy and maximum oxygen consumption after you use an oral echinacea supplement for about four weeks. And echinacea is something that a lot of folks have kind of turned to as a way to boost the immune system to potentially decrease the duration of a cold or an upper respiratory tract infection, Although there's not much research to back back that up. But this study was pretty statistically significant in terms of four weeks of echinacea supplementation and its ability to increase the manufacture of red blood cells. Which is the same reason that the guys in the Tour de France dope. Of course they don't dope. That's all rumor. Or try to get their EPO up. Pretty amazing though, the extent to which echinacea almost like parallels the effect of doping in terms of its ability to increase red blood cells.

Really, it's that significant?

It's pretty dang significant. But I mean, we're talking 8,000 milligrams, 8 grams of echinacea for 8 grams extended period of time. And that's a lot of echinacea. That is the average pill. I think if you were to get like echinacea capsules, it's something like 100, 200 milligrams around in there. So you're looking at almost 80 of those per day. There may eventually, I would imagine, come to market some type of concentrated liquid echinacea supplement. I'm definitely keeping my eye on this one. The mechanism of action is not something that I completely understand, but there's definitely effect in terms of the ability to produce more of those oxygen transporting red blood cells. And I just wanted to mention it as something interesting and something that I'll certainly keep my eye on in terms of research and the availability of a high dose concentrated echinacea extract and whether or not something like that is safe and even doable without gastric distress. For example, I should mix that with.

Some beet juice and make this superhuman formula.

A little tequila.

A little tequila.

Of course, the other thing that I noted for you dudes out there, speaking of tequila, is that this is what I actually tweeted was that sugary drinks when you're out at the bar or any other time that you are pre sex may affect your bedroom performance and not from the alcohol per se. And the reason that I tweeted this was a study that showed that glucose ingestion acutely lowered testosterone secretion in men. Meaning that they did a study where they fed healthy men glucose and then measured concentrations of testosterone for the first 120 minutes following glucose ingestion. And there was a significant drop off in testosterone. It was right around 12 to 20% in terms of the decrease for those two hours after consuming an oral glucose solution. So, you know, when I first tweeted this, I thought it was pretty significant. But then I looked at the study a little bit more closely and basically when they tested these men following glucose ingestion, it was between about 8 and 12pm during the day. Now, what happens, and you may have heard me talk about this on the show before, is it's usually around between like 8 and 10am that your testosterone levels peak due to your morning cortisol release and they'll gradually kind of start to decrease from that point during the day. Given time during the day, when you get your testosterone levels measured, they're going to fluctuate. And you can see, for example, from early to mid morning into noon, a significant decrease that would have paralleled what they were noting in this study from the glucose ingestion. So, big question mark here, whether or not the drop off in testosterone was due to the sugar consumption or just the natural decrease in testosterone that happens based on your circadian rhythm. So even though I tweeted it, after I tweeted it, I started to look into the study a little bit more and thought part of this could just be, and this is something listeners should be aware of if they're testing testosterone levels, is that they do naturally fluctuate a little bit.

But the study was showing that the decrease was more significant in the people who were ingesting the glucose over the people who weren't.

Yes, you did see a little bit from the glucose ingestion.

So it's not completely reliant on the time of day because there was an increase, but it does parallel what's going on in your body anyway.

Yeah, yeah. And I would say that if you want that natural testosterone high, that you should be sticking to some of the higher fat foods anyways. And beer, Brazil nuts and red meats and of course beer, which we all know is a very high fat food.

And boosts your testosterone through the roof.

That's right. Another way to boost your testosterone, and this is something else that I tweeted is your rest interval. Specifically, I tweeted to quit sitting around at the gym and linked to a study that looked at the influence of rest interval length on acute testosterone. And what was found was that when the rest period between strength training sets was decreased from 90 seconds seconds down to 60 seconds, there was a significant increase in total testosterone. And the reason that I tweeted to quit sitting around the gym was because I think that in a lot of situations you see too many people sitting around for long periods of time, when in reality, unless you're lifting for large amounts of strength and power and doing some really heavy, complex sets, you don't need to be resting for over a long period of time at the gym. And this study showed that by decreasing your rest period, you can actually increase your testosterone response to a workout. So I thought that was good to know. Yeah.

And get done in a less amount of time and back to whatever it is that you are doing.

Yeah. So two ways to bump up that testosterone. Don't eat a lot of sugar and don't rest as long in between sets. Jim so a couple other things that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com since our last podcast, because it has been a couple of weeks since our last podcast post on algae and specifically spirulina and chlorella, I talked about some of the benefits of it, some of the sources of it, and it's an interesting article. You should check it out. So that's over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com about everything you need to know on how to use a slimy green plant, low aging, decrease cravings and recover faster. And it is pretty cool. There's this stuff called chlorella growth factor that you can get in algae extract. One of the ways that chlorella massively multiplies based on this kind of cocktail of nucleic acids, RNA and DNA that it has in it. And you can get some of those benefits when you supplement with it. So I wrote an article on that, posted kind of a Healthy Travel how to video posted that straight out from the inner circle, actually. So you can check that out and you want to get kind of a glimpse into the world of the of the type of things my wife and I teach to our private inner circle members. You can check that out and then, yeah, couple of posts on whether weight training counts as cardio and how to do a swim run workout.

Yeah, I like that one. That was some really inventive, interesting kinds of procedures there.

Yeah. Yeah. So I love swim run workouts and posted some great workout ideas for you. So that's about it in terms of the news flashes for this week.

Special announcements.

Okay, so I guess we can, why don't we start off with the Audible Audiobooks is a sponsor of this particular episode of Ben Greenfield Fitness. And if you want to cash in on that Audible free audio book, you can go to audiblepodcast.com Ben audiblepodcast.com Ben don't just go to audible.com because you'll miss out on the well, helping out the show and also getting a free audiobook.

Yeah, and I've got a good one for you. All right. Movie I watched on the plane, the Hunger Games totally sucked. I thought because I read the book, the movie totally sucks compared to the book. Just a big warning for you folks out there. If you've seen the movie and you think the movie's good, freaking read the book or listen to it. Because you can listen to it over@AudiblePodcast.com Ben it's one of the top selling books on Audible. I don't know who reads it, not sure who narrates it, but I enjoyed the book immensely and thought the movie was just kind of dumb. There's too much character development in the book to be able to squeeze it all into the movie. And I really kind of lost my attention after about an hour or so.

But that's often the case though. Any story that relies heavily on character development, you can't do it in two hours.

Yeah, the movie is rarely better than the book. But yeah, check out the hunger games over audiblepodcast.com Ben you don't have to be a 13 year old teenage girl to enjoy it, but it helps myself. But it apparently does help quite a bit. Another thing that I wanted to mention was WellnessFX and I am working on a Mondo blog post I actually have. After our call today, I've got a call with my WellnessFX practitioner. Basically WellnessFX, what you do is I'll put a link to it in the show notes, but basically you get baseline measurements of it's pretty big. You look at total cholesterol, hdl, ldl, your triglycerides and then reflections of your LDL particle size. Basically what's called LPA and apob, which is a better marker of whether or not higher cholesterol is an issue compared to just measuring like ldl. You test inflammation with what's called an HSCRP test. You test your metabolism and your hormone status through glucose test, A1C test and some thyroid measurements. You test your liver and your kidney health through a bunch of different measurements like like albumin and creatinine, blood urea, nitrogen, stuff like that, vitamin D, all of your electrolytes. And then what happens is all of this is graphed for you on your own dashboard and then you work with a health practitioner. Most of the docs in there are either naturopaths or Maryland PhDs or MDs who have a lot of kind of like integrative medicine experience who are very into using things like nutrition and supplements rather than pharmaceutical drugs, and they work on you to get your numbers better. The other cool thing is that as you retest, you can track the numbers and how they vary from test to test. Anyways, I've been really geeking out on it. Like I said, I'm working on a blog post about it, but for now, I'll put a link to that in the show notes for folks, if you want to go through WellnessFX to get all of your health markers tested, I'm really liking it. Not because you can't go out and get these tests from a place like, say, like Direct Labs, which you've heard me talk about on a show before, but if you want a really convenient dashboard to be able to actually track all of this stuff and to be able to kind of visually see what's going on with your scores and also to be able to have doctors actually be able to look at your scores as well and have phone calls with you. And so I think the whole telemedicine thing is pretty dang cool. And this thing's at the cutting edge of it.

That is dang cool. Did you say the whole thing they do from a saliva test?

It's some saliva and some blood. Oh, okay.

I thought that's amazing if they're getting that all from your saliva.

Yeah, that's a lot of drooling. And then. Yeah. The last thing I wanted to mention, of course, is the upcoming Thailand trip. Brock and I are going to be in Thailand, a bunch of other folks. We're doing kind of an adventure. Two triathlons over there, some fun stays out in cottages in Railay Bay in the middle of nowhere. It's going to be a blast. We've still got a couple of slots available for that trip, so we'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's coming up in end of November, beginning of December. You only live once, and this is a real, real fun trip.

I can already taste the food.

Yeah. And it's like, if you're thinking, oh, whatever, I can't get that time off work, I can't afford it. Thailand seems away. Hey, you know what? You don't want to be lying on your deathbed wishing that you'd traveled the world and seen some new things and experience life a little bit. And this is a great way to do it. I've never had any regrets when I've gone to Thailand, so you should never.

Had any regrets when I've done any.

Travel Nah, it's all. It's all good, no matter what happens. Obviously, travel can be stressful to one extent. Like me, I got in late, late last night after having literally, like, been on planes, trains and automobiles and flight delays and all this jazz getting back. But I'd go do it again in a heartbeat. I mean, it's living, so it's fun stuff.

Finally, a solution for healthy living that actually makes sense. Ben Greenfield and his wife Jessa have cracked the code on healthy living and revealed their entire system inside the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle, where you'll get Instant access to 24. 7Forum interaction with Ben and Jessa, a live monthly webinar, meal plans, videos, Ben's Body Transformation Club archives, and much, much more. If you or your family want to learn how to achieve the ultimate healthy lifestyle on a budget, then the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle is for you. Get four free videos to get you started and full access to the inner circle@bengreenfieldfitness.com inner circle. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com inner circle. We'll see you inside. Listener Q and A.

All right, we've got some great questions, as usual, and let's start it off with an audio question from Jenny.

Hi, Ben and Brock. My name is Jenny and I am a triathlete. And I have hip dysplasia. It's not severe, but it definitely affects my training. And my problem is it's on my left, primarily on my left side is I feel like a pinching in the front of my hip. And I really have to avoid a lot of motions that are like, say, a squat deeper than 90 degrees and things like that. And it's something that affects me all the time, where sitting too long is a problem. And it just kind of. It actually is somewhat unpredictable at times. I'll have a rest day and still I'll feel it. So it's very frustrating. And I was just wondering if, Ben, if you had any ideas on any particular stretches or exercises that you recommend to deal with this? I do the hip flexor stretch quite a bit, and that helps. And I use a rumble roller, which is awesome and also kind of scary at times. But anyways, any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thank you so much. Bye.

Hip dysplasia. That does not sound comfortable.

Yeah, hip dysplasia is. It's not something that it's not like it band friction syndrome, where you get it from training too much. I mean, it is literally a condition that you can be born with or that can develop like when you're a baby, interestingly, a lot of times you can actually affect the hip angle and the way that the hip attaches to the socket in babies. Based off of, like, swaddling a baby too tightly or essentially caring for a baby incorrectly in terms of the way that it sleeps or the way that you carry it, you can affect a baby's hips. And I mean, like, hip dysplasia is something that can develop in babies just based on the way that you carry for them. And that would be like, developmental dysplasia of the hip that can exist kind of those first few weeks or months of a baby's life. You can also have a congenital hip dysplasia, which would mean that your hip socket is too shallow or your femur is kind of in the wrong place. And when that happens, it can really affect your comfort and your range of motion in your hips. When you've got this congenital hip dysplasia, where hip socket is too shallow and it can be on one side, it can be on both sides, but it can do a lot of things. It can affect the ability of that hip or the propensity of that hip to dislocate. It can change the way that the muscles around the hip are forced to work. If you're trying to run and you're running with a hip angle that's a little bit different, it can definitely affect things like, like knee comfort and lower back comfort. And so, yeah, hip dysplasia is something that can certainly make something like chronic repetitive motion, like running, a fairly uncomfortable thing. You can get grinding in your hips and pain in the thighs and the butts, and it's definitely something that can affect you quite a bit. Surgery is obviously one option. You can literally get the hip socket reshaped. That's something that's better done, better tolerated in younger people. A lot of times in older patients who get surgery for hip dysplasia, they'll reposition the actual hip socket but not really change its shape. So it's a little bit less invasive, a little bit less dramatic. But in either case, if you didn't want to actually go in and get your hips off, operated on, one of the most important things that you can do is to make sure that you're keeping your hips as mobile as possible, getting a lot of massage and fascia work and bodywork done around the hip area. So you're doing, as Jenny mentioned, the foam rolling, preferably having a massage therapist work on your glutes, like your glute Medius, your butt, your hamstrings, your piriformis, hip flexors, basically just trying to improve range of motion of the hip. That can help out quite a bit. I don't know how much Jenny weighs, but weight loss can actually help out quite a bit. Just because your hip joint, if you take your body weight, you want to multiply that by about three and that's the amount of force that your hip joint gets exposed to when you're stepping or landing. So weight loss can certainly help out.

Even when you're walking.

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty significant the amount of stress hip joint has to take on when you are overweight. So when you're running, it's actually a lot more than that because you have to take into account the momentum and the braking action of the hips. But about three times the amount of force relative to body weight is how many pounds the hips have to deal with just in day to day weight bearing pounds. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Pounds abounding.

A natural anti inflammatory, like I've talked about cap reflex before, which is like a blend of glucosamine, chondroitin, ginger, garlic, turmeric, those type of things that can help out a little bit with the type of joint pain that you can get with hip dysplasia, as can an anti inflammatory diet. Diet meaning you're eating a lot of like, you know, fish and fish oil supplements, you know, dark leafy greens, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, you know, all of these natural anti inflammatories. And then you're avoiding things that tend to be more inflammatory. Processed sugar, alcohol, caffeine. A lot of times with joint pain, foods in the nightshade family can be an issue too. It's like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and red peppers. If you do get a lot of joint pain, getting those out of the diet can actually help out. You're gonna find that like cortisone shots or steroid shots are recommended in some cases these days. A lot of times you can get the same type of effect in terms of painkilling effect from what's called prolotherapy, which is still an injection into the joint area, but it's not injection of a corticosteroid, it's injection of usually like a sugar water type of supplement. Still increases inflammation, but doesn't cause that same huge spike in cortisol or injection of the corticosteroids or what's called the side effect of the cortisone flare, which is something that becomes quite painful for a day or two is that injected cortisone kind of crystallizes and it can potentially weaken tendons, soften cartilage around the area a little bit. So you want to be careful with corticosteroid injections. Those are some of the things that I would suggest. I mean, you're still going to be fighting an uphill battle with hip dysplasia, but you may be able to control things with the strengthening of the hips and the core, working on the soft tissue areas, continuing the foam rolling that you're doing, but also preferably getting a massage therapist to dig into those glutes, especially in the piriformis, a little bit more, which are hard to hit with a foam roller. And then looking into some of the natural anti inflammatories and an anti inflammatory diet, it.

And don't be afraid of the rumble roller. Just don't be scared.

That's right, the rumble roller, for those of you scratching your heads, Brock uses one, I use one. We should put a link to it in the show notes. But basically it's like a foam roller with ridges on it with big ridges that kind of dig into your muscles a little bit more. And they're really, really firm compared to the average foam roller. So they're much more efficacious, in my opinion.

I'm trying not to say anything like.

Ribbed for your pleasure. Yeah, yeah, I won't say that. I've got an oversized foam roller called Magnum.

Okay, our next question comes from Andre.

Hi, Ben, My name is Andre from Orlando, Florida, and I got a question for you about knee pain. I have left knee pain and it's mild knee pain around my joint. Now, I ran an ultramarathon back in February and ever since then the pain has subsided, but it hasn't gone completely away. I've done an Ironman, I've done a couple half Ironmans and I've run a bunch of marathons, But I've never had pain like this before. I do have a tight left IT band. It's chronically tight. And I was just really concerned about the knee pain. So I had an MRI done and the only thing that came back on the MRI was that I had a tiny Baker cyst. There was no swelling of the joint or anything like that. But the thing is that I know to strengthen the leg you got to do squats and lunges and those types of exercises. But whenever I do anything, even without weight, the knee gets swollen, it gets flared up. So I haven't been able to do any lunges or anything like that. I'm a little bit concerned because every time I do a hard effort, like on sprint race, like this weekend I had a sprint race and I jumped off the bike and I ran pretty good. I ran a six minute mile pace. And like today my knee's killing me and today's Wednesday, so I'm a little concerned because I do have like 2/2 ironmans coming up this week. I mean, this year and at the end of the year I'm doing Ironman Arizona. I want to be in the best possible condition I can be, but this knee pain is just slightly holding me back. And I was just wondering, what are your thoughts on that? I appreciate any input and I love your podcast. So thank you very much.

Wow, lots of injured listeners today.

Yeah, folks, take it easy, everybody. Might be a podcast effect, but you know, folks, folks put on the podcast and they go run for two hours. Listen to the podcast. That's why we got so many injured listeners. You know, the first thing is listening to Andre's question. You know, he's doing sprints, half ironman triathlons, getting ready for an ironman. This is something that you see a lot, not just with, with knee injuries and little flare ups like this, but just injuries in general. It's like you're signed up for an event and you just want to go, go, go and not quit. And a lot of times these nagging injuries that you're kind of fighting through end up turning into full blown issues after a while. So you need to be careful and I definitely want you to be open minded to maybe, you know, stepping back and maybe you're not doing the chronic repetitive motion training, the end sports until you get this issue taken care of. I mean, I've always seen the best results in terms of healing up injuries quickly when the athlete just stops the chronic repetitive motion, the running, the cycling, and just returns to basic strength training and basic mobility work for a good four to eight weeks before jumping back in. But I know that's very, very hard, especially when you're signed up for events, not only because you don't get your money back in most cases, but because you've signed up, you've told your friends on Facebook and your family and everybody that you're going to do this event. And so to a certain extent, there's this pressure to push through the injury. Baker's cyst, that's something that usually arises due to some type of an underlying injury in the knee. Usually there's a little bit of a meniscal tear, there can be a little bit of cartilage wearing and you get this Baker cyst that arises, which is this little swelling inside the bursa that's behind your knee joint. Sometimes it can be in the membrane that surrounds your knee, but it's essentially just like a cyst, an area of swelling. A lot of times with simple rest and a little bit of ice and some elevation, and the basic way that you'd manage a lot of these strain and sprain type of injuries, Baker cysts can go way. If they're really big, you can get them literally like drained or surgically removed. And a sports medicine physician in many cases can do that sometimes, just like a general practitioner can do that. But I know, like when I worked for a few years in the same office as a sports medicine doc, he'd see a lot of cysts and he would a lot of times either aspirate them to reduce their size, and then I sometimes like inject them with cortisone to decrease the inflammation after aspiration.

And aspiration is when they stick the needle in and actually pull the fluid out, right?

Yep, exactly. But like I mentioned, a lot of times there's something else that's causing the problem of this swelling, and usually it's some kind of arthritis or meniscal tear. You know, if you've got an MRI and none of that type of stuff is showing up, it could just be that you've got this, this anchor cyst that isn't caused by some other disorder in the knee. I mentioned prolotherapy earlier, and that's where you inject some type of like a non pharmacological or non corticosteroid based solution into the area and it irritates, reinitiates an inflammatory process. And when you reinitiate the inflammatory process, that can help to decrease the pain and swelling. Long term, you get a little bit of short term discomfort, but you can definitely speed up healing. And there have been a few studies that have shown Baker's cyst to be fairly responsive to prolotherapy. So that's something that you could look into. But like I mentioned, a lot of times these things respond pretty well to just like ice and compression and some rest and some elevation. You know, if it were me in my case, and I were signed up for a half ironman or an ironman, what I would do is I would go in for the prolotherapy and then I would also be doing the ice, the compression and the elevation, and Taking anywhere from five days up to a couple of weeks off in conjunction with that prolotherapy and just working on some strength training and maybe a little bit of aqua jogging to maintain that cardiovascular capacity. But you know, I'd. I'd get in it right away rather than stringing this thing along and continuing to race and train on it. Because it, you know, Bakersys can turn into full blown issues and get bigger and bigger if you just try and push through them.

And remember, you're the only one who's really going to worry about whether or not you canceled a race or not. Most people are so busy. Well, everybody's so busy with their own lives that when you tell them you had to cancel an Ironman because of an injury, they're going to say, oh but bummer. And then they're gonna move on. They're not really gonna dwell on it or go around telling. Well, unless they're a total jerk, I guess. They're not gonna go around telling their friends, oh, so and so didn't signed up for an Ironman and bailed out.

Yeah, that's the thing is it's always bigger in your own head. So, you know, it's. Yeah, it's a. That's a good point, Brock, for sure.

So if you need to take the time, take the time. And bear in mind that Ben didn't save four weeks of laying on the couch.

Right. Yeah, you can definitely still go do stuff. Go listen to the episode we did with Doug McGuff on how weight training can be cardio. I mean, you go do that protocol a few times a week and you're definitely going to feel like you've done an Ironman.

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

Hey, Ben, I'm a new listener. My name is Ty. And I was wondering. Actually I have a few questions about carbohydrates. I was wondering on the ingredients list, how do you differentiate between a simple and a complex carbohydrate? I'm actually trying to figure this out, but I can't find any answers to it. So if you could answer this question, it'd be great. Thanks and keep up the good work.

So the simple sugars versus the complex sugars on a food label. This gets confusing because when you look at a label and I'm sure you've done this broadcast and you look at the total carbohydrate content on the label, a lot of times the actual number of the amount of sugar that's listed on there doesn't add up to the total amount of carbohydrates that are kind of listed on the back of the label, right?

Yeah.

So basically the reason for this is that the total carbohydrate content they're going to show on the label of a food is the total grams of or not what they're going to show on the label, but the total carbohydrate content that's in the food is the total grams of sugar, the total grams of fiber, and the total grams of starch that are combined. So basically, if you look at the label and it says that it's got, say, like whatever, let's say 40 grams of total carbohydrates and it's showing that it has 3 grams of fiber and 1 gram of sugar. So that means that there's 36 grams that are unaccounted for, and that means that it has 36 grams of starch. Starch being anything from like a maltodextrin to a dextrose to any number of kind of like longer chain sugar that could potentially be classified as like a complex or a more complex carbohydrate than the actual sugar that's added. So in most cases, you take the total carbohydrates, you subtract the sugar, you subtract the fiber that are shown on the nutrition label, and that gives you the amount of more complex carbohydrates. The issue is that when you look at a complex carbohydrate, a lot of times it's going to spike your blood sugar just as high as most of the these simple sugars. I mean, the amount to which, for example, wheat can spike your blood sugar is just as much as white bread is just as much as table sugar. So in many cases a carbohydrate is a carbohydrate. It's when the carbohydrate is mixed with protein and mixed with fat that you tend to see the greater amount of benefit of the carbohydrate not spiking the blood sugar quite as highly. If you're just looking at complex versus simple, a lot of times it really doesn't matter. So having a carbohydrate with a protein or fat is always going to be better than just like looking at the label and trying to have the carbohydrate that shows lower amounts of sugar on the label. Because even if it shows lower amounts of actual sugar on the label, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have really, really high amounts of starch.

Just the idea that you're actually looking at an ingredient list on a label is probably enough to make it not really worth worrying about whether it's simple or complex. Really get away from the labels, get away from the packaged foods, and that's where you're going to see the bigger difference between a simple and a complex.

Yeah. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you do a search for packaged, packaged foods, I actually take you through my kitchen and I show you the packaged foods that I keep around my house. There's not that many of them, but there's a few, you know, like olives. Coconut milk is another example. There's so few. There's the only two I can think of off the top of my head. Almond butter is another example. But there's, you know, most of the foods don't have labels because they're, you know, they're like peppers and bananas and kale and, you know, things that you don't necessarily turn over and look at the label. So. So that is a really good point that if you get away from the label in the first place, you're going to have to worry a lot less about this stuff anyways.

Okay, our next question comes from Eve, who is a monthly donator. Thank you very much, Eve. It's really nice that you are interested in keeping the podcast going. And her question is. I train for and DO Olympic and 5150 triathlons. I seem to do well with Olympics hard, with hard training efforts over lunch. But if I do a track interval training in the evening for 50 or 60 minutes, or even in swim intervals, I often mess up my sleep. Elevated heart rate, chest pain and restlessness during the night. Not chest pain. That's.

Yeah, that doesn't sound fun.

She continues. I'm assuming I have an unfavorable hormone response, a T3 crash, adrenaline to mobilize glycogen, etc. I love group training, track and swim in the evening. But if I cannot get sleep because of this, the sleep issues sorted out, I have to get back to my morning and lunch training. Do you have any ideas how I can increase my tolerance for an evening training other than lowering the intensity?

Yeah, I mean, if you're training in the evening and you're doing an intense training session prior to bed, a lot of times the inability can sleep or the inability to sleep can often simply be from increased body temperature just because you usually sleep a little bit better when you're a little bit colder and that can be something as simple as cold shower or cold bath post workout. But in many cases, there are bigger issues going on, especially in Eve's case where she mentions that she has been on a thyroid supplement before for low T3. It's possible that this is more of a cortisol issue. And when you're looking at laying awake in bed, you know, with this elevated heart rate, chest pain, restlessness during the night, a lot of times that can be related to elevated cortisol. Many times you get what's going, or what's referred to as a pregnenolone steal, which means that pregnenolone, which is a hormonal precursor that is a precursor to everything from estrogen to testosterone to, you know, a lot, a lot of these, most of the hormones that are created in your body, when you're shuttling that towards cortisol production, you tend to get this drop in T3, this drop in thyroid hormone, lack of ability to recover properly from your workouts. And that is usually due to, due to higher cortisol levels. So part of this is probably cortisol related and, you know, a few other issues that are kind of red flags is that chest pain that she experiences during the night, if that's notif it's not related to her cardiovascular health, which I kind of doubt that it is, usually there's some type of a food intolerance issue going on or even a lack of the ability to produce adequate stomach acid, which is also related to increased stress. And, you know, a lot of these issues can be fixed with supplementation or I should say band aided with supplementation. Like, she could take a hydrochloric acid supplement before her meals, along with the digestive enzyme, and she could take a Chinese adaptogenic herb to work on the cortisol issues a little bit. But what this comes out to ultimately is that there's going to need to be, and I know that I just mentioned this to Andre after his question, there's going to need to be some kind of a rest that takes place typically to really try and decrease these cortisol levels and bring your body back into a place where it doesn't have this big, big surge after workouts or this hyper cortisol response post workout. And a lot of times that does mean kind of backing off of like the triathlon style training, the track interval training in the evening, the swim intervals, and just taking. Sometimes it can be as little as a week, week of just reduced activity. Sometimes it can be longer than that. It can be four to eight weeks, it depends. But basically backing off on that and allowing your body to kind of bounce back from that hypercortisolism can help out quite a bit because you eventually get to the place where you can get adrenal exhaustion, which then cortisol drops off the map and you're just tired all the time. And rather than that elevated heart rate and, and heart rate and chest pain and restlessness during the night, you're just a zombie. And you're just like. All you do is sleep. So I would definitely make sure that you nip this in the bud before that happens. And what I would do is in conjunction with a good period of rest until you actually feel like you're able to get out and train hard. And you can test it out in a couple sessions that you, you back off, you get the rest. You get onto a good Chinese adaptogenic herb complex like TNT is a good one. You get on some digestive enzymes, get on an HCL type of supplement before your meals. And then as far as the chest pain goes, I can't really hear somebody write in and say that without telling you. You may want to go see a licensed medical professional, get on an EEG stress test to make sure that you don't have any heart abdome going on. That would certainly be prudent. For sure.

Yeah. I have a long history of bad sleep patterns. I'm one of those people that doesn't sleep very well. But I've really found the combination of taking a nice cold bath a couple hours before going to bed, not right before going to bed, and then magnesium. Those two things have really, really helped me with my sleep. I fall asleep and I stay asleep a lot longer and a lot more solid than I ever have in my life. As long as I get those two things in and I don't have to do it every single night, but like every second night or three times a week kind of thing.

Yeah. And that was one of the issues that I dealt with before my triathlon was lack of sleep. But when I travel internationally, I travel with my Earth Pulse, which is the pulse electromagnetic frequency device. And I travel with magnesium and melatonin. And I usually don't have any issues with sleep when I'm traveling internationally. But what happens is when you create a net inflammatory state, which can be done through training or it can be done through diet, which is what happened in my case, that can massively enhance the cortisol response. And so that's another issue here, is that if there's any food tolerances food intolerance is going on, particularly gluten or gliadin exposure. That can certainly amp up the cortisol levels even more. And that, of course, can affect your sleep. So that's something else to look into is just what you're actually eating. But yeah, Brock, the magnesium certainly helps out a lot in terms of relaxing you when you combine that with like cold shower, cold bath, Absolutely.

All right, well, let's continue on with our injured listeners here. And Kate's got a. She's got some pain in her hips and her knees. She recently visited a sports therapist to get to the bottom of things. And he used muscle activation techniques technique to reduce the tension in her body. And she says, I could definitely see an improvement after just an hour. But I found this technique very strange as he worked on an area of my neck to activate muscles in my leg. I was wondering whether you have much experience with MAT and what your thoughts are on the technique.

Yeah, we interviewed a muscle activation technique practitioner in the past.

Year ago.

Yeah, he was in Tim Ferriss four Hour body book and he came onto our podcast and talked about muscle activation techniques and how it works. So we'll certainly put a link for Kate to that podcast. But the basics is that it's abbreviated mat. And the whole theory behind MAT is that when you have a muscle that becomes very, very tight, or in muscle activation technique, what they call hypertonic, or a muscle that becomes too weak or inhibited, it affects the range of motion of the joint that that muscle crosses. And so kind of the principle behind MAT is that muscle tightness that forms is a way that the body is trying to protect itself. And if a muscle remains stuck or in that tight or shortened position, it changes the ability of the muscle to produce force or to decelerate or break force. And that leads to kind of a change in your joint range of motion and sets you up for injury. It's basically the idea like imagine if you were trying to walk on ice. When you're trying to walk on ice, you walk with this really kind of short, restricted range of motion. And a lot of times that's because your muscles are all tightened up and so your joints are moving through the proper range of motion because you're trying not to fall on the ice. And you can picture an injury that is treated with muscle activation technique similarly to where you're trying to get rid of the tightness or the apprehension in that muscle, which a lot of times can be due to a preexisting injury. Ankle strain, sprain, spur, Knee things of that nature that basically sets up that muscle to be tight or in this state, spasm. So when that happens, that tight muscle shuts down a lot of the range of motion. You don't get a lot of the right sensory motor feedback from your nervous system, which means that some of the other muscles around that muscle can change or become overworked as well, and essentially creates this area of injury and reduced force potential. What the muscle activation technique is designed to do is to kind of restore the balance and restore the function of that muscle, typically through specific pressure that's placed in the muscle area. And a lot of times it's kind of uncomfortable and it hurts a little bit. But what can happen is that when you get this muscle activation technique, pressure in an area, it can help out quite a bit in terms of reducing a lot of that inhibition that occurs. Now, as far as working on, say, like, your. What did she say? The neck, to affect the leg muscle in the leg, Yeah. A lot of times that's related to your fascia. And just the fact that you have this entire fascial lining that's basically from your toes up to the top of your head, that if it's tight in one spot, can certainly affect function somewhere else. I didn't mention this. I keep referring to things that I experienced last week or this week while I was traveling, but when I was in Spain and saw a massage therapist, and this was this guy, just like up in this hole in a wall apartment, you know, it took me about an hour to find his place, but he was recommended to me by a pretty decent runner over there in Spain. And the guy, he's an osteopathic physician and massage therapist. And he was basically looking at my neck and shoulders, which were a little bit tight when I was in the aero position on the bike. He completely fixed my neck and shoulders by doing some mobilization of my sacroiliac joint, simply because of the way that the movement of the spine affects your neck and your shoulders. So by freeing up my SI joint, he was able to restore mobility to my hips, which restored mobility to my spine, which restored mobility to my neck and my shoulders. And so sometimes it's not fascia related as much as it is spinal column related. But in any case, certainly by working on a muscle in one area of the body, you can affect another area of the body. And usually it's a case like that where the hips are affecting the neck and the shoulders or vice versa. Like you have an atlas or an axis out in your neck and that's affecting the movement of your hips or sometimes it can be a fascial issue where by freeing up some of the fascia in the hips and the IT band you affect the mobility of the knees or of the animals ankles. But I would certainly go and listen to that muscle activation technique interview that we did. That's the basics of it. That's why tightness from one muscle can affect a lot of other muscles that surround that joint and alter the joint range of motion. It's basically like a guarding function.

Awesome. Well, our next question comes from Ben and it's a very quick, straight to the point kind of question. What type of milk would you recommend for a child and would that recommendation change, change based off age? I'm curious about raw milk versus goat's milk versus almond milk versus coconut milk. A cage match all the milks versus.

The other milks to the death. You know the deal with milk is because it has, you know, an animal milk has a lot of these insulin like growth factors and hormones in it. An animal milk is always going to enhance the ability of a growing child, child's bones and muscles to get as big as possible versus a plant based milk like an almond milk or a coconut milk. It's the reason that breastfed babies are less likely to suffer from things like diarrhea or GI issues, pneumonia, ear infections, flus, any of these issues. It's simply that human milk was designed to have complete nutritional superiority compared to with animal milks and plant based milks like almond milk or coconut milk. But you certainly get to a point where from a social perspective, especially in America and westernized societies, kids are pretty much done breastfeeding at a fairly early age and switched over to animal milk. I suspect that some of the cultures where kids breastfeed just a little bit longer have got it right. Just because, you know, breast milk is so, so much more superior in terms of the bioavailability of the proteins and.

What'S, sorry, by a little bit longer. How long do you mean?

I mean, you know, until kids like, you know, in between like three and four years old, right around in there, I mean for quite a while. But I don't remember how long we did breastfeeding before we switched to goat's milk, which is what we switched to. And now our kids do a raw cow's milk just because we can't really get our hands on a raw goat's milk right now. But human milk first of all is higher fat percentage in it. It's about four and a half percent fat. And that's higher than goat milk, it's higher than cow milk. A lot of that fat is long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids like DHA or arachidonic acid as well. And those are really, really important to nervous system formation, brain formation, brain growth, eye growth, or proper formation of the nervous system components responsible for vision. And you're going to find all that stuff in very, very good quantities in human milk, which is another reason that the breast milk is superior. You find a higher lactose concentration in human milk and usually you a little bit better tolerance to lactose sugars in kids who are breastfed. And there's actually less protein in human milk. And even though there's less protein, the size of the proteins in human milk, they're more balanced, they're easier to digest, they're smaller. You tend to get a lot less of an allergenic reaction to them because they're all very, very well digested. And that also is very, very good for a baby or a small child because it's, it protects the kidneys from having to have to filter a lot of the waste products of protein. And like I mentioned, it makes a lot less allergenic. One of the issues with like a cow's milk is it's got a lot of what's called beta lactoglobulin in it. And that is a protein that tends to be something that creates more of an allergenic reaction among the people who are drinking animal milk. So human milk is going to have a higher amount of, of all of these things like the enzymes, the growth factors, the immunoglobulins to support the immune system, pretty much everything that a child would need or a baby would need. When you look at goat's milk versus cow's milk versus almond milk versus coconut milk, the milk that would be the most like the milk that I just described, breast milk or human milk, would be goat milk. And that's simply because of the size of the goat. It's closer to the size of a human. Yeah, it's still lower in a lot of these long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. It's still slightly higher in that. Beta lactoglobulin, which can be a protein that is a little less tolerated by human. But if you're going to do any of these to get a child to grow the goat milk would be the better choice. Especially when a child is really small. Small, like a raw cow's milk is not too bad. Like I mentioned, that's what our Kids drink now. It's just like an unpasteurized, unhomogenized cow's milk from a local farm. We're part of a share of about five or six families take turns driving to the farm to get it. It's about an hour or so from now. Interestingly, that's actually where my wife is right now, driving over to get the milk. But that's compared to a coconut milk or an almond milk. In terms of the growth factors, the proteins, the things that are going to help our kids in terms of muscle, fat, everything else, it's really not too bad. When we were doing the goat's milk, we did the powdered goat's milk from Mount Cash. That's also not too bad. But our kids tend to like the raw goat's milk a lot better than the raw cow's milk, better than the powdered goat's milk. And at this point that's what we're giving them, they still get coconut milk, they still get almond milk. But in terms of the protein content of those, the growth factors in those, the type of things in those that are going to help a growing animal to get bigger, they're just, they don't hold a candle up to, up to goat's milk or cow's milk. So the other important thing is colostrum. You're not going to find colostrum in coconut milk or in almond milk. And colostrum is something that really helps a growing child's gut, the lining of a growing child's gut to form properly and to keep a kid from growing up with leaky gut syndrome or something like that. That cow's milk, goat's milk, you tend to see a lot more of the colostrum, like in the winter and the early spring, you'll see a little bit less of it, like in the summer. But ultimately at any time, human milk, cow's milk, goat's milk is always going to have higher trace levels of that colostrum compared to like a plant based milk. So order that I would go in for a kid would be goat's milk. If you can get like, just like a raw natural version from a goat's farm. Powdered goat's milk is also an option. Like I mentioned, Mount Capra makes that. Then cow's milk, if it's like a raw milk, and then your almond milk or your coconut milk would come after that.

I think it's important to remember that almond milk, rice milk, coconut milk, all of those are only milk in that they are a white opaque liquid. They're not really, really milk. They're not coming from any sort of biological process that's making them into milk. They're really a beverage.

Yes. They're not being milked from the teat of the coconut. Exactly. Or the teat of the almond.

So as much as we sort of treat them as interchangeable, they're not really the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point.

Okay, our next question comes from Natalie. And Natalie, you went into great detail and that's fantastic. I'm going to do my best to sort of summarize what you're, what you're asking here. Okay. She says, I've been trying to follow a low carb, high protein diet in order to lose weight and been unsuccessful thus far. I did a four mile run race, running race this morning and noticed my breath began to really smell during it. And afterwards my husband commented that I needed to brush my teeth.

Nice guy.

Reading. Actually, I guess that's pretty polite way of saying it. Okay, reading up on it. It seems that it could be either dehydration, ketosis, or someone told her that if your body doesn't burn fat well and is burning protein instead, could get that smell. So often I get shaky during long rides as well, and I feel that whatever I eat is not being absorbed by my body. I've noticed as I've switched to a higher protein or switch to protein from carbs that I get less shaky and I'm also less hungry on the long rides. So my body is shifting, but I'm not sure how or whether it's shifting in the right direction and if I should be more patient with the fat loss.

Well, the issue is the low carb high protein diet. You know, that's, that's kind of like the, the typical type of, type of Atkins diet. Anytime you're, you're getting an ammonia smell when you're exercising, whether in your sweat or in your breath or anything else, what's happening is you get a combination of muscle glycogen depletion, which is depletion of your body's storage carbohydrate stored in your liver and in your muscles with protein breakdown typically either protein breakdown from your skeletal muscle itself or breakdown of the branched chain amino acids within the free amino amino acid pool circulating in your bloodstream. You get that ammonia smell due to the breakdown of ATP to ADP and AMP and ammonia. And it does indicate that you've got a lot of proteins being burnt as a primary fuel, which can mean that you're Breaking down your body's own skeletal muscle tissue, or you've just got kind of like too much protein in your diet. In a healthy ketogenic state, you're not going to get much of that ammonia smell in the sweat or in the breath, because you are burning primarily fats as a fuel or ketone bodies as a fuel and not actual protein as a fuel. You still will get some of what's called acetone, which is released from your breath and from your urine. That has kind of this fruity smell. But that's a little bit different than the ammonia that you're producing from the protein breakdown in skeletal muscle or in the amino acids that are circulating in your bloodstream. So what this comes down to is that if you're gonna go low carb, you need to go high fat. Kind of a typical ketogenic diet. It kind of depends on the version of the ketogenic diet diet that you use. Kind of the classic ketogenic diet that would be like. Lyle MacDonald was one of the main researchers that first came out with the ketogenic diet. In terms of percentage of fat to protein to carbs, that's about 60% fat, 35% protein, 5% carbon carbs. There's another ketogenic diet you could do. It's closer to 70% fat, 15% protein, 15% carbs. But either way, you're looking at 60 to 70% fat, anywhere from 15 up to about 35% protein and 5 to 15% carbohydrate. Whereas if you're doing like an Atkins type of high protein, low carb diet, that's closer to 60 to 70% protein. And then you get 10 to 20% fat and fibrous to 15% carbohydrates. So that's the issue, and that's the mistake a lot of people make. That's the reason you get this kind of blah feeling. And it's ultimately not that healthy for your kidney or your livers. Is going high protein, low carb rather than high fat, low carb with moderate amounts of protein. So I'm definitely a fan of being in a state of ketosis just because it can improve your mental focus. It can really help to promote the loss of body fat. It can vastly improve loss of body fat. It can help with type 2 diabetes. It can potentially be very, very useful in treatment of Alzheimer's and various cancers. It promotes cardiovascular health compared to being high protein, low carb Ketogenesis in a high fat, low carb situation helps to preserve your lean body mass. Better helps you to keep you from break down skeletal muscle more when you're in that ketogenic state, especially if you're going low calorie. So lot of benefits to it, but you just need to make sure that you do it right and stay high fat rather than high protein.

Cool. All right, our next questions all come from Kenny, and Kenny actually says he asked two questions, but he kind of asked three. So which. What do you want to go for here? Do you want to talk about Hub weight wetsuits?

Sure. Yeah.

Do you know much about those?

Well, I'm currently wearing a blue 70 wetsuit, and one of the guys involved in the design of those was Dean Jackson. Pretty cool dude. But he's not with Blue 70 anymore. He's now with this Hub wetsuit company, and he actually designed these wetsuits in conjunction with the guys over at Swim Smooth. And Paul Newsom over at Swim Smooth is my swim coach right now. I send him swim videos, and he tells me what to do. And I mean, like, you know, I swam my Ironman. My fastest Ironman that I've swam was 56 minutes. And that race that I did this past Sunday, you know, Ironman is 2.4 miles. This race was 2.8 miles, and I swam it in an hour, which would have given me an Ironman swim split of 54 minutes. So it was, you know, I'm definitely getting faster in the water. So, you know, these guys know what they're doing over at Swim Smooth. And the idea behind this Hub wetsuit is they've designed two varieties of a wetsuit. One is for swimmers who swim naturally, and one is for swimmers who have legs that sink when they swim. So a lot of triathletes, specifically, they have poor body position in the water. Over at Swimsmith, they call it sinking leg syndrome. That's because we've got these lean, muscular legs and really poor hip flexibility and poor ankle flexibility. And you get a lot of drag when you kick because the legs are sinking. They're kicking a little bit too much. There's a lot of bend at the knees. One of the things that they did with this wetsuit that they designed was to basically give you more buoyancy in your legs based on the placement of the buoyancy panels. And then they've got another wetsuit that is designed for people who kind of kick properly. So they designed a wetsuit that has a couple different options based off of your swim type. And there are some aspects of the suits what they call an exoskeleton for added buoyancy. They have kind of this arm crossover deal on it to help your arm properly position in the water and to keep you from snaking your arm too much through the water. There's a calf release on there to help with blood circulation your lower leg. If you get like calf cramping, your foot cramping in your wetsuit while you're swimming in the open water. You know a lot of the aspects of the suit and this may be because the same guy who designed the blue 70 suit that I swim in designed this suit. You know, it's like the, the breakaway zipper for faster transitions and the type of stretch and flexibility in the shoulders. A lot of those things are pretty similar to a blue 70 type of wetsuit. But if you really have a very inefficient kick, I would say this might be a wetsuit for you. If you want to try a wetsuit that's got a lot of different size options, they've got quite a few different size options for this. They have two different buoyancy profiles based again, if you're, if you're that sinking leg type of kicker versus a good kicker. There's I think it's two different types of wetsuits that they have. I'm not sure, they might have more than that. But you know, everything that I've seen of it, I like it. But honestly I've never, I mean, I don't even know if Dean listens to this podcast. If he does, he needs to send me one so I can try it out.

Send two?

Yeah, send someone for Brock to try. I don't think they're cheap, that's for sure.

No, that's what I was gonna say. These are. These, from what I know the, the Hub wetsuits are very, very spendy.

But there's one there. Tyr makes a wetsuit called the Tyr Freak of Nature and that's like a, that's the one Lance Armstrong wore. I think it's like a fifteen hundred dollar wetsuit. Yeah, but I don't think these are that much. But either way, yeah, I mean, I haven't seen anything wrong with a wetsuit. Everything I've seen about it looks, looks like it's pretty intriguing. And again, everybody who's behind its design I'm a fan of. So yeah, I'd try it out if you want to get it. I don't see anything wrong with it.

Okay, so Kenny's second of three questions is I'm a 42 year old male and my levels slightly below nine normal. Testosterone levels slightly below normal. There I got myself confused. If I take an over the counter cream or supplement, is this going to give me more energy, make me stronger, and is it considered cheating in my training?

Over the counter testosterone creams, I wouldn't touch them. You want to work with a compounding pharmacist to make sure that when you're using a testosterone cream to get your testosterone levels up and it will get your testosterone levels up or like therapeutic injection would. The issue is that you want to make sure that you're titrating properly and that you're dosing properly and not just randomly like smearing testosterone cream around your body. This stuff is super dangerous. If it gets on your kids, it can cause things like early growth of their gonads and early onset of puberty. And if you're taking too much, it can increase your risk of cancer. It can cause some real mood issues. Shoes. Read the book Doper Next Door. I mean, just go read that book. It'll take you a few days to read. It's not super long. The name of the book is Doper Next Door. It's about a guy who used testosterone creams and testosterone injections. He's a bike racer, just like an age group bike racer. Just to see what it would do for him. He worked with a compounding pharmacist on what's called a Wiley practitioner. Wiley practitioners are able to kind of advise you. They're, they're doctors who have this Wiley certification for women. They're able to prescribe and accurately adjust dosage of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. And for guys who are getting on a testosterone cream, same thing. In order to be able to use one legally to do something like a race, like say you want to go out and do whatever, a triathlon or something like that, you need to have a therapeutic use examination exemption, which means that you filed with the corporation that puts on the races that you're racing in. You filed for a therapeutic use exemption based on a note from your physician and an explanation from your physician that you have been diagnosed with clinical hypogonadism and very, very low testosterone. That'd be the only way you can get away with going out and competing, eating and doing so legally. And all that would mean is that your testosterone is so low that this cream or this lotion that you're on is getting it high enough to where it's at least in laboratory normal values and not spiked way higher than it should be or spiked higher enough to an extent where you'd have an unfair advantage. But yeah, I mean, you're playing with fire. If you're just going out and getting testosterone cream or even, even like injections, patches, like an androderm patch is a little bit more safe because those kind of automatically titrate the dosage. But yeah, you got to be careful with this stuff. And I check out that book doper next door. I'm personally a bigger fan of just using natural methods to enhance testosterone like grass fed meat, Brazil nuts, cod liver oil, vitamin D. You can do a little bit of D. Aspartic acid tribulus is not too bad. There are methods out there that are completely legal and natural to enhance testosterone and that also aren't going to make your body have to rely on exogenous testosterone, which shuts down your endogenous production. Meaning that once you get off the stuff, you feel like crap because your body has quit making its own testosterone because it's become reliant on the crop. The cream or the injection. I'm a bigger fan of addressing the underlying issues that would accompany low testosterone. Rather than going straight to the injection.

Or the cream, getting it in your diet is so much more delicious too.

Yeah, yeah. Those creams don't taste very good.

No, not at all. All right. Sorry, what?

I said, can you imagine eating a testosterone cream? I'm not sure what would happen. I'm sure that like the sublingual absorption would, would probably put you over the top. Yeah. And gotta be careful with that stuff. So. Yeah.

Okay. Well, let's move along to Paige's question. Paige says is it possible to cycle ketogenic periods? For example, fasting all night, exercising and then waiting until dinner to break your keto state? If so, would it be beneficial or would you benefit just as much from a fasted workout? Would this kind of cycle cause fat? Oh yeah. Would this kind of cycle cause fat gain since you are eating an increased amount during the keto state? Also, how can you monitor to know when you're in this state? Would the strips be enough or should you monitor other things as well?

Yeah, I mean, you know, the whole deal with ketogenesis and really this could be an hour long podcast where we give you kind of the crash course on a ketogenic diet. But standard ketogenic diet, what you would want to do is you take your weight, let's say you weigh whatever, 200 pounds and you find out your, your approximate amount of lean body mass, which means that you find out your body fat, let's Say you find out your body fat is 20%. So if you weigh 200 pounds and your body fat is 20%, that means that you've got 160 pounds of muscle and you eat 1 gram per pound of protein per day. So in a case where you have 160 pounds of lean body mass, you'd have 160 grams per day over protein. So that's how you figure out your protein needs on a ketogenic diet. It's going to come out to anywhere from like 25 to 35%. So again, you take your weight, you multiply that, or you take your total body weight, you find out your body fat percentage. Once you find out your body fat percentage, you know what percent of you is fat, what percent of you is muscle. Once you find out what percent of you is muscle, you multiply that by one, and that's how much protein you eat in terms of grams per day. And then after that, you would basically everything else would be fat except for about 5%, and that would be the carbohydrate, and that's it. Okay, so once you figure out how much fat, how much protein, and how much carbohydrate that you need to be in ketogenesis, you want to get yourself into a ketogenic state, and you want to stay in that ketogenic state for anywhere from about two to three weeks. Weeks, and the first few days of that are very uncomfortable. Anywhere from the first five to 10 days, you can be tired, sluggish, moody, irritable, lightheaded, and that means that your body is beginning to burn more fats as a fuel and rely on ketones for energy. Once those symptoms disappear, that's a pretty good sign that you've become fat adapted. And usually, usually you'll be fully fat adapted after about two or three weeks. I don't really recommend you do a lot of refeeds, refeeding days, carbohydrate refeeds, stuff like that, until you've gotten into that ketogenic state. Once you're into the ketogenic state, you can start doing the type of stuff that you're proposing in your question, like getting into a place where you do what's called breaking your ketogenic state. I recommend that, especially in people who are exercising a lot, you just take your highest activity days of the week, and that's where you break your ketogenic state and you actually have a higher carbohydrate intake. Like 30 to 40% of your total daily intake is carbohydrate. And that's just for anywhere from a 24 to a 48 hour carbohydrate load period. And then you get back into ketogenesis. That's what's called a cycle cyclic ketogenic diet. So you start out with a standard ketogenic diet to get yourself into a fat burning state for two to three weeks and from there you can go into a cyclic ketogenic diet. The question here about basically what exactly does Paige want to know? Brock?

So basically she wanted to know if she's going to get as much benefit from that as just doing a fasted workout.

The issue with doing a fasted workout rather than having some amount of energy on board from maybe doing some coconut milk with a little bit of protein powder and a handful of nuts before your workout, is that you're going to feel pretty blah during the workout, kind of dead, unable to dig it. In many cases, especially if we're talking about an intense workout or a weight training workout, you're always going to do a little bit better with a meal beforehand, even if you're staying in a ketogenic state, than if you're doing waiting all day long or all night long and doing a fasted workout to really get a good workout. In most cases, pre workout fueling whether or not you're keeping yourself in a state of keto ketosis is going to work out better. And you can monitor everything that I just mentioned with just like keto sticks. So Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance is a great book for this that's written by Dr. Volek and Dr. Finney. I'd check out that book for sure. If you're a triathlete and you're doing this, read my book over@lowcarbtriathlete.com and either of those would be good resources for you.

That interview that you did with Dr. Peter Attia was really very informative too.

Yeah. And listen to the interview we did with Peter Attia.

For sure, he talked a lot about the, well, not a lot, but he mentioned a few times about how it was very uncomfortable getting into that ketogenic state, how his wife tried to convince him to bail out on it because it was becoming unbearable.

Yep, exactly. And one of the things he mentioned was minerals, making sure that you get adequate sodium, adequate electrolytes. Electrolytes and all that jazz. Speaking of which, I'm going to actually, I may even release an interview, but I'll be with Dr. Attia. I actually wanted to interview him and Gary Taubes So I'm going to be with them and a whole bunch of other folks as well over at the Ancestral Health Symposium next weekend over in Boston. It's at Harvard and that's a three day event dedicated to ancestral health and really a lot of the topics that we geek out on this show. So that should be interesting. And I'll probably be bringing you some live podcasts, a little bit of audio feed from there from that event. So any of our listeners who are going to be over there, be sure and stop by and say hi to me.

Okay, well, let's move on to our final question that comes from Jim. And Jim says, I have a question about a machine a friend uses the ENG3. His friend swear by it, says it helps their lungs and recovery time. But when I look looked it up, I don't really know what to make of it except that it's expensive. If you have any info, that would be great. They said I could give it a try, but I always like to know what I'm up to before I jump in.

Yeah, it's one of those weird Russian technologies. It's basically single oxygen therapy. You've heard about making water more energetic. This is kind of the same type of concept, except for any air. So the way that it works is you take air and you pass it through water using a machine. So it's basically saturated with water vapor. And then what happens is you get a red LED light that shines on a specific compound that they mix the water vapor with in this machine. And the end product is that it catalyzes regular hydrogen oxygen from the atmosphere that would be going in this machine in the first place and creates really, really reactive what's called singlet oxygen. And single oxygen is super dangerous. I mean, like that's ozone. That's the stuff that basically the American Lung association has definitely identified as a lung irritant and extremely carcinogenic. The EPA verifies that it's bad news. I mean, ozone reacts with organic matter both inside and outside your body to basically create some really, really nasty issues in terms of lung damage and increased risk for cancer and all this jazz. So you're not actually breathing in these singlet oxygen species that are being created in this machine. They're extremely, extremely reactive, like the most reactive free radical you can get exposed to. But what happens is because it's so energetic, the single oxygen, what it does is it essentially donates its energy to this water vapor. And so you're creating kind of like this activated water that you're Then essentially breathing in through a nasal cannula into your lungs or into your airway. And it's basically giving you like this boost in energy from breathing activated water vapor. So it's very, very similar really to the concept of like drinking structured water, for example. Not a whole lot of studies on the stuff. You know, I was able to find one that was done at the Fitness Clinic of Health Center, Helsinki, Finland that did find some pretty good physiological effects of breathing this singlet oxygen activated air. Again, realize that you're not breathing in singlet oxygen per se. That would be the same as breathing in ozone, which would not be a good idea. But it's activated air or activated water vapor that's used singlet oxygen to actually activate it. And in that case they found increased power in some cyclists from breathing this stuff. Not like during the cycling session, but they do a pre exposure and then go out and do the cycling session. And they did find some pretty decent effects. They also found an increase in 2,3 diphosphoglyceride content in red blood cells, which would allow a greater ability of the red blood cell to have an affinity for oxygen. So this stuff is the machine itself super expensive like Jim says, versus doing something. You know, what I should mention is that this weekend I'm going to release an interview about water, about structured water versus using something like structured water to get that same energetic advantage. I'm not convinced that this thing would be worth the price. I've personally been kind of experimenting with structured water water basically with like this. It's a few drops of structured water that you put into regular water to structure the water. I've also got a series of glass beads installed in a water filter in my home that structures the water that I drink in my home. So I've been geeking out on structured water for a little while now and compared to breathing structured water VAP vapor, it's a lot more affordable. So I would say that yeah, from what I've seen, breathing singlet oxygen activated air could give you benefit. But I'm not sure that it's anything better than what you could get from just drinking structured water.

So yeah, that's one of the craziest things I've ever heard.

Yeah, those darn Russians, they're so smart.

Crazy Russians.

So smart and crazy.

And that actually wraps it up. That is the end of episode 202.

Awesome. Well, yeah, like I mentioned this weekend, got an interview coming out next weekend. I'll be over at the Ancestral Health Symposium, but we'll definitely be bringing a podcast to you and be sure to check out the show notes. Which episode is Brock 202202 so go over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com check out the episode 202 for links to everything that we've talked about. And be sure to, of course, check out audiblepodcast.com Ben whether you want to read the Hunger Games or anything else we've mentioned in previous episodes, like How We Get Fat and what to Do about it by Gary Tao or the Steve Martin book that Brock so highly recommends.

I actually noticed that Born to run by Christopher McDougall is also on Audible, so if you haven't read that book yet, this is a good way to read that one.

That's a good one too. It's a good one too. You could go out for a barefoot run and listen to Born to Run while you're running barefoot. Perfect. That would be a trip. Alright. Well, speaking of a trip trip, I want to go eat breakfast.

Do it.

All right, until next week, folks. Have a great week. And this is Ben and Brock signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com did you know you.

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