EVOAthlete-BenGreenfield.mp3

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. A few weeks ago, I actually put a blog post up@BenGreenfieldFitness.com in which I talked about an experience that I had at a conference down in San Francisco. It was called the Bulletproof Biohacking Conference. And a big, big part of that conference was a couple of days spent with two fellas who actually work with a bunch of professional athletes and use some very cutting edge systems to be able to enhance the body and improve performance and decrease injuries at a much faster rate than what you'd get with kind of typical conventional training. Jay Schroeder and Charles maca were the two guys who presented at that conference from evoathlete.com as in evolutionathlete.com and Jay is on the call with me today. I was able to convince him to come on and share with you some of these cutting edge concepts that he uses and how you can actually use them in your training. Because some of the stuff blew my mind, especially when it comes to you endurance athletes out there. And I know a lot of you listening to this show, but also those of you who are power strength athletes, who maybe aren't athletes at all, but who are trying to get over an injury or relearn a new movement pattern. So we're going to delve into some of this stuff. And Jay, thank you for coming on the call today.

Yeah, Ben, thank you. I'm happy to be here and excited to answer some questions.

Well, you have a really unique story in terms of getting started into the field of human performance and kind of the type of coaching approach that you have now. So can you talk about how you got in, into this field and the type of training techniques that you're using now?

Yeah. Going through high school and college, I played football and had the dreams like everyone else of going to the NFL and having a career. But unfortunately, I probably wasn't good enough in the first place. Then I was in a motorcycle accident and sustained some injuries that didn't allow me to move. And I went through a process of investigating, why did this happen to me? What's wrong with me? What's going on? And once I got over that, I had from the osteopathic physician that was working with me. Basically I was at home for some unknown reason. They put me in traction. So I was in traction, you know, all day long.

So basically that's just like bedridden.

Yeah, I was bedridden. Yeah. You know, my girlfriend would come over and tutor me and, you know, keep up on Some schoolwork and, you know, just have some activity. But I had a shelf built above where I could place books and with a pointer, move them and read. And basically the books that the osteopath gave me were translated Soviet training journals.

Nice.

Yeah, yeah, they were in English, so, you know, not that I read Russian.

Right.

You know, I read through them and I really couldn't figure out why he gave them to me, because they were just about training. And then after reading the same one many times over, I started to get an idea of how this might help me in my situation. Because what I got from this was that no matter what level you're at, whether you're already making millions of dollars participating in sport or. Or you're just a weekend performer or anywhere that falls in between, we're all trying to get to the same place. We're trying to move efficiently at high speed, injury resistant. And if you can create a situation neurologically, then these things can easily be displayed. So what I started doing was exercising. People say, well, in your imagination or whatever, but in reality it was really inside me. I could feel, after a period of time, I could feel all these things happening inside, which is totally different than what we're used to feeling. We ride a bike, we lift weights, we jump, we run, we swim, whatever it may be. And we comment about, well, we feel tired. Well, my heart rate was this. Well, my blood pressure was this. Well, my blood lactate was this. But what they really miss out on is all of that energy and the feeling of it moving through your body and what effects it has everywhere that it reaches. And that's what I got the experience to do. I think that now I was really fortunate at the time. It's not always fun to be in an accident and sustain injury, whatever level it may be. But I look back and obviously God had another plan for me. I certainly wasn't going to be a good enough football player to go where I wanted, but yet something was seen. And maybe I could communicate this to others. And that's the basis of the whole system. I took it. And then over many, many dreams, I calculated and formulated the system as it exists today. Evolutionary training people shortened it to evo. And a lot of people think of it as evil. But the basis is to feel what's happening inside, not worry about what's happening on the outside. Oh, you know, I felt my foot here. Okay, well, what happened inside that allowed you to feel your foot there?

Now, I, of course, was subjected to what you may be considered evil. And I think There's a photo of me over on Dave Asprey's side. I think I may have posted on my site where I was talking about that biohacking conference where I've got electrodes all over my abs and I'm more or less as crude a term as it may be to describe this, getting the hell shocked out of my abs. And this is kind of part of these Russian training techniques that you talk about. I know that we're going to get a chance to delve into here in just a second, but before we even get into the nitty gritty and some of the specifics of some of these training methods that you use. You've worked with endurance athletes, and you actually told a couple of cool stories about a swimmer that you worked with, as well as an older female marathoner that you worked with and utilized some of these training methods with. Can you delve into some of your experiences with those athletes and endurance?

Yeah, yeah. Again, all humans are looking for the same thing. Move at high velocity, be able to remain in position that's biomechanically efficient so that you're resistant to injury and be able to do it as many times as you wish. The weakness of endurance athletes certainly isn't aerobic capacity. However they want to measure it. That's not really the weakness. The weakness is the inability to remain in position, to allow muscles to be eccentrically contracted so that they can create and absorb as much force as is necessary and or beyond. So, you know, obviously I was more into the strength aspect because to me, that was appealing. But when I was first queried by some individuals as to, you know, can you help me do this or can you help me do that? And the first one was a swimmer. He was injured many times. He was injured. When I met him, he was told his career was over. And I don't remember his age exactly, but I'm going to say he was 18 or 19. And that's no reason to have your career end at 18 or 19. I mean, that's crazy. Within a week, we had him back in the water, and he was swimming as efficient or more efficiently than he did beforehand. A few people asked, you know, what did you do? What's going on? Because he had been to a lot of specialists and doctors and different types of therapy, and nothing really seemed to work. It was the basic shoulder injuries, rotator cuff, elbow problems that almost all swimmers experience at some time or another and end up having to take a break. Well, a period of time passed because he had another part of his life to live. And he contacted me after a couple years and said, I'd like to begin swimming competitively. I'd like to go to the Olympics, and I'd like you to train me. I know, Pretty wild, huh? And I said, look, I don't know anything about swimming. He goes, I know swimming. You know how to train?

Yeah. I was going to say, you're kind of built like a linebacker.

Well, yeah, not a swimmer, somewhat. In my younger years, I was even more so. At the time, I was, you know, I'm a five, ten and a half, five, ten and three quarters depending on the day. And I weighed around 252, 253, you know, and people would look at me and go, well, what could you do to help him? But let me get to what we did. He. He was a distant swimmer, and I told him that he was not a distance swimmer based on what he displayed. And once I convinced him that it was okay to train for something other than 400 meters and beyond, he said, all right, let's get started with this. Well, we ended up having around six and a half, seven months to get ready for the Olympic trials. And his favorite event was the butterfly. So we began and we predicted what it would take to not only qualify for the US Team, which, I mean, the US Is always loaded in swimmers, especially flyers. And we determined what time that would be. We went out and measured how long he could actually maintain that velocity. 4. And when we first started, it was less than 10 meters that he could maintain it before a compensation pattern occurred. So what we did is we devised a plan where we went out there and swam 10 meters in position until he couldn't maintain that position any longer.

10 meters.

10 meters. That was it.

Which is not very far.

No, the swim club that we trained at, they were housing, at the time, quite a few of the American sprinters and this gentleman's old coach. And we would be out there and we were like their free entertainment. We'd show up, we would do a few things with an electrical modality, and then he'd get in the water and we'd swim 10 meters, which, as you all know, is not very far, get out of the pool, measure for our recovery parameters, and then if it were okay, back in and swim 10 meters again. And, yeah, I mean, we were gawked at and laughed at, and we were the joke. We were their entertainment. Well, long story short, this 10 meters became 15 meters, 17 meters, 20 meters, 50 meters. We actually worked our way up to 75 meters during this time. And we were swimming at world class speed. At the end of this long battle, you know, we had to qualify. We were in meets where, I mean, he was 41st out of 42 people, not going very far. And then all of a sudden we start coming on the scene and we get faster and faster and it's always the same people at all these meets. And a couple coaches then from some top universities looked at him and said, what are you doing? Because your progress is really amazing because you were terrible when you started. What are you doing? And he said, well, I don't really know. You'd have to ask my coach. And every time they'd come over and they'd look at me, they'd go, well, this guy obviously doesn't swim, you know, and it's like, well, what did you do? Well, I started at 10 meters. Wait, wait, wait, it's a hundred meter race. How can you start at 10? You know, and, you know, we gained a lot of interest, to say the least. And on our last day, we were getting interviewed by the local newspaper and the coach from this club out there came over afterwards and said, you know, I've coached this guy for many years, since he was 3 or 4 years old. And I thought you were going to ruin him for life. And I've watched you turn him into a real athlete, and we're really impressed. We wish you well. Well, we went to the Olympic trials, we made it through to the finals and we lost. But we were right there with the best in the world for 75 meters exactly the way our plan went. We just ran out of time. And what we essentially did was prepare his muscles to stay at length, prepare his nervous system to understand the information, to be able to maintain this eccentrically contracted position while in the water.

Jay, for people who are listening in, when you use a term like eccentrically contracted position, what exactly do you mean when you use a term like that?

Well, muscles contract in one of two ways. They either shorten concentrically or they lengthen eccentrically. Okay, muscles, you can't stretch them, you can't do anything else with them. They either lengthen to shorten or. Excuse me, they contract to shorten or they contract to lengthen. When they're in their lengthened state, they can absorb and create. I mean, our current research indicates 10 times in reality, when I've measured, when muscles eccentrically are contracted, we can absorb sometimes up to 100 times. I measure with a V scope. So we can measure the force at any angle in any Position, any range we're looking at. But, you know, a hundred times sounds kind of crazy and ridiculous. So, you know, 10 times sounds a little more believable and understandable. But when we're in a position where we can absorb force and create force, we're energetically efficient and we don't fatigue. And that simply happens because. Let's just use hamstring and quad. And obviously there's many muscles involved in the quad, but we'll just refer to it as a quad. Right now, if my quad contracts to a thousand pounds of force in one tenth of a second for three seconds, my hamstring must eccentrically contract to those same parameters. If not, then I'm going to have two muscles competing for energy, and I'm going to be very inefficient. And rather than using muscles to propel myself or displace myself each direction, I'm going to be spending a lot of time resisting into a position. Gotcha. Okay. That's what we did. Whether it's with this gentleman in the water. For the woman you're talking about, she's very special to our business because she's a great friend. Not because of anything else, but she's just a great human being. She got to be a really good friend. Mainly, I wrote everything, and Charles implemented it. And that's the way Charles and I work together. Charles gathers data, and he's expert at gathering data and providing accurate data. With that, then I can make decisions on what positions we should be in whenever we want to execute different protocols. And this woman, she had a tough time in her life. Multiple forms of cancer, brain surgeries. She was told right before we met her that she needed to get her life in order. She did not have much time, and they were hoping she could get prepared for the death process. Basically, rather than do that, she decided, and this tells you a lot about this woman, she decided to do something productive, and she was going to run because she loved running. Never really got a chance to do a lot with it. She was a nurse and, you know, a public speaker, and very successful in the world. In every endeavor she involved herself. So she decided she wanted to run, and she wanted to run across the United States. She chose the southern route, which in the summer, no one had completed because of the heat. Well, she trained with us, and I don't remember the exact number of days, but it was between six and seven months. She ran a mile to a mile and a half a week. Everything else was done in our facility. When she joined us, she had A bad back. She had a bad shoulder, she had a bad knee, and her feet gave her problems also. In addition to the cancers and the brain surgery and everything else she was going through, which these were ultimately minor compared to the cancer. But we prepared her in the exact same way that I described preparing this swimmer. We knew the distance she needed to go. We knew how far she wanted to run each day, because her plan was to run and stop every day and go to the local hospital and speak to the cancer patients and explain that it isn't a death sentence, it's a life sentence. It's a chance to explore something new in your life and become maybe something great or do something great, you know, and that's what she wanted to do. She was raising money for cancer and just trying to bring awareness that it doesn't mean death, it means life. And she ended up running from Southern California to North Carolina. She set the all time record. Wow. For crossing the United States. The only one to cross the southern United States at that time. I don't know if anybody's done it since. She ran a marathon every day for 93 days in a row. Now, keep in mind, Ben, she didn't run more than a mile and a half in a week. Okay. Wow. Yeah. Amazing.

I mean, I've always been. I've always been a quality over quantity kind of guy who's into minimalist training, but that's. That's really, really minimalist. So you were using. I mean, obviously you weren't just using running a mile a week. You were also incorporating some of these other training techniques. Well, we'll get into some of them here in a second, but basically, yeah, that's pretty minimalist.

It is, it is. And keep in mind, also, at the same time, we were getting over a knee problem, a back problem, and shoulder problems. Okay. Which I don't know if you've experienced any injuries or limitations in your career, Ben, but many of the listeners out there will have, and that's not an easy thing to do. Overcome just one of those. But all three in order to run across the United States. I mean, you can't afford anything to go wrong, you know, otherwise it ends. So she outlasted three drivers, actually, you know, they. They had to return to the start because, you know, they were. They were fatigued from all the driving. I know, I know. And, you know, since that time, she's been running still. I believe her next endeavor is to run from Canada to Mexico and set a record and bring attention. And the reason setting a record is important because that causes people to listen. If you just go out and you run. Well, not everybody listens, even though the message may be extremely important to your life. But setting a record or doing something unique causes people to take notice. And just for the listeners. Now, she had a couple other types of cancer come into play over the past few months, but yet she's still running, she's still speaking, she still does everything that she desires. If you go on evoathlete.com you can read her story. Her name is Helene, and she's written several books now. And she's just a great human being. She should be what we all want to be as a goal. Not. You know, I watched part of the super bowl this weekend, and everybody's talking about, oh, my God, these are tremendous athletes. But when you look what they accomplish compared to what Helene did, it's nothing. It's really nothing. You know, Ben, I think one of the things that we talked about a lot, actually, when we were at this bulletproof conference was that humans are miracles. We're a miracle from the moment we're conceived through birth, through death, and death itself is a miracle because many things will happen after that. But to give ourselves the opportunity to live as a miracle is what we really need to prepare for. That's what we try and do in our training. Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting. Well, let's delve into that, because these are fascinating stories, and I want to teach people now how you do this stuff. There were some different concepts that you went over when we were at the conference, and in one particular scenario, you had us all basically down in this lunging position that I think was called something like extreme isometrics. How can this type of training, if it's isometric training or this kind of super, super slow training. Well, first of all, what is it? I mean, how does it work? And second of all, how would that benefit somebody who is, like, running long distances or riding long or long distances or a swimmer or endurance athlete or someone like that, you know, much, much less a soccer player or a basketball player or something.

Good question. First of all, let me preface the answer by saying that while I was reading these Soviet training journals, the Soviets never created anything they perfected. You know, if you want a Rolex watch, but you don't want to pay the money, buy one of the old Soviet watches, because they copied Rolexes and they perfected it. They could build these things for, you know, 1% of the cost that we buy them for. And when I was reading through there, they investigated isometrics they investigated what was called at the time dynamic isometrics and every type of training. And it's where I first got exposed to learning about other training systems of the world, because they talked about the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, and what they did to prepare and, or to compete and. Or to recover afterwards. And what they noticed was, is that every system throughout the world at any time was looking for high volume, high load, high velocity. The other thing they noticed when they were investigating this was that was the point when you would reach that high load, high volume and high velocity that, oh, we call it burnout. And injuries or an increased propensity for injuries occurred. So while I was reading, I thought, damn, all I really have to do is find a way to be able to maintain that. Well, one of the things that they had really looked at, I believe the gentleman's name was in the United States here. I think he was up in Oregon, Pat o', Shea, but I'm not positive on that, but I believe that was his name. He was investigating isometrics, and he was looking at dynamic isometrics and the old Bob Hoffman isocage and things. And he determined that it was somewhat successful, but it was difficult to maintain and keep up. And there were other areas of human performance that would have suffered. Well, the Russians decided to take dynamic isometrics to another level, and they used heavy loads and they would move a heavy load at high speed to an isometric position. And it had its flaws also, and they ended up dropping that as part of the training system. But I got real intrigued by it because while I was visioning these things and feeling them inside myself, I found myself continually moving while I was doing this isometric, or I sensed myself continually moving while I was doing this. And that's where I came up with what I call ISO Extreme. And the only reason the name ISO is on there is because of what I read. And obviously I got to live, and I'm still living a wonderful life, moving around where I couldn't before. And I owed it to reading these journals and the Soviets and, you know, whether that's true or not, it's at least the way I felt. So I put this name ISO on there because that was the context of most everything I was reading in this first manual. But in reality, it's not an isometric at all. It's an extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely slow, concentric. And there's some very interesting things that happen when you move. Extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely. I don't know how many extremelys I Need to put on there to just.

Real quick when you say extremely. Like if I were going to go out and do an extreme isometric squat, how long would it take?

Yeah, a minimum of five minutes.

Wow, that's a long rep.

Yes, it is. And it's continuous movement. You see, Ben, if you stop during that, well, we have to start all over again. And, you know, I'm older, so I have a lot of stories, but I'll tell you another story in a second here. But you see, the interesting thing that happens when you move extremely slow is that everything to support that inside is moving at high velocity. Because the control it takes to move at these very small speeds is the exact same control that it takes to move at high speed. The mistakes you make during what I term ISO extreme, these extremely, extremely slow, concentric movements are exactly the same mistakes that you'll make when you're out there moving at high speed. What happens is this. We get out of position. When we're out of position, muscles shorten because they're doing a job they're not designed to do. They can't be fed properly by the energy systems, or at least in the order the energy systems are supposed to work. So we create what's called compensation patterns of movement that aren't normal. Now, again, we're miracles as humans, so we can still accomplish the task. But the idea is to accomplish the task, to achieve the highest level of performance. Not one time, not 10 times, but any time, Ben, that you want to do it anytime in your life. And that's the goal of this system. To do it whenever, however many times that you would like, injury resistant, energetically efficient. Because then we're going to do it over and over because we get enjoyment from it. And that's the whole point. You know, Ben, I know you compete in triathlons and the way you look, you obviously compete in many other types of events also. But there are times where I'm sure you wish, man, I wish I could just do this every day. I wish I could run this, this mile and this time or cycle at 32 miles an hour for 12 minutes instead of 11 minutes or whatever it is. Because that then is what drives us and allows us to create and learn new things, not only about ourselves, but about life, to make everything more enjoyable.

Gotcha. So extreme isometrics, when you're doing these, I know people are going to ask, how is it that physiologically you're doing something like helping out your VO2 max or your endurance capacity, or your ability to buffer lactic acid or something like that when you're doing something like a slow five minute squat.

Yeah. Another good question, Ben. I'm going to answer it this way. As I said, high velocity movements are really what's taking place. That means all of the support mechanisms, all of the ancillary muscles that have to become involved and the energy systems and the endocrine system and every organ of the body has to go into support because it's traumatic, it's chaotic to the brain. It then gets the support it needs. I mean, we take people. I'm going to use my son as an example. He, you know, I like fixed gear bicycles. I mainly got interested in them because I wanted additional hamstring work and I wanted to see how efficient they were. So I love fixies, okay. And I did some velodrome racing and playing around. It's just an awesome experience. So my son, needless to say, you know, got into riding a bicycle and so he wanted to train with me. Basically, here's how we train. We did a total of 200 meters in sprints every day. Now, we may go 10 meters, 20 meters. Very rarely did we go more than 30 or 40 meters at any one time because we had to maintain a certain velocity in proper position. And if we couldn't maintain that after 10 or 20 meters at speed, we were done. We would fully recover heart rate, respirations, body temperature, and then we'd do it again until we totaled our 200 meters. Now, I have a very good friend who coached some top cyclists in the world. He's a great endurance athlete himself. I think he's near 80 years old now. He's still in the gym training. And he liked the way Colin pedaled a bicycle. So he wanted to take my son out with him and ride. And they would go on 40, 50, 60 mile rides. And not only could my son complete them, but he finished right up in the front with Colin Lang. Another Colin. Okay. And it was like, wow, how do you do this? What are you doing with your dad? We're only out there for like 20 minutes, you know, and then we're in. You know, I don't even really get tired, to be honest with you. Wow. We then went over to the velodrome in San Diego and I was doing my training and I took Collins bike out there for him and he wanted to ride around, you know, because velodromes are really fun, really cool high banking, you know, all fun stuff. And he made friends with seven or eight gentlemen out there. All I'd say at least in their 40s and beyond. And they were out there and they were going to ride for two or three hours. Well, Colin rode the whole time with them and kept up with them. They again were intrigued and said, wow, how many miles a week do you ride? He said, I don't know. I'd have to ask my dad, but he's right over there, I'll ask him. His Colin was like 11, 12 years old at the time. And so he came over and said, dad, how many miles a week do we ride? I asked him why. I said, well, these guys want to know. And I said, well, basically we ride about 3 1/2 kilometers a week at most. So he went over there and told them three and a half kilometers. And they just started laughing, you know. So then they said, well, let's go ride some more. So they took him out there and he was able to ride with them again. Now, you see, if we train ourselves to move at high velocity by remaining in position, eliminating compensation patterns, keeping muscles eccentrically contracted, agonist and antagonist doing their rhythmic dance in order to allow this to happen. Then we recover, Ben, at the exact same time we're working. That's part of the miracle of the human. We can recover at the same time we're working. Not unlike what we did with the POV that you had attached to your abs. Out there, you work, you contract at extremely high velocity, but the information that's sent from that modality tells the muscles to eccentrically contract immediately after this concentric contraction allows you to remain in position and allows you to recover afterwards. That's what we're after. All the protocols that I've created, rebounds, altitudes, ISO extreme, as I term it, tangos and manual overspeeds, they're nothing more than ways for us to apply velocity and remain in position. When we do that, Energy systems developed, endocrine system develops, and it's a whole lot less wear and tear, not mainly on your body, but on your brain. Because, Ben, I'm sure you would be the first to admit that when you go out there and you train and you have a challenging day, no matter how wonderful it feels at that time, that expenditure of emotional participation and intellectual participation wreaks havoc with you. Another day down the line.

Yeah, it can be mind numbing.

Yes.

You know, after that we finished the conference. One of the things that. One of the workouts that I did shortly thereafter was actually even before I left San Francisco and it was just in my hotel room, was I did a series of very, very long. And it took A lot of focus, and you could feel an intense burn. But very long squats, lunges, push ups. And then I had a suspension trainer in my hotel room. So I also did single arm rows, basically hanging on one arm, taking about three to four minutes to bring myself up and down on the other arm. And I felt as though I had completed a hard endurance workout. You could feel a similar amount of lactic acid kind of building up, and the body felt as though it was being trained to buffer this stuff. So it's super interesting. And you just rattled off a bunch of other unique training methods that you use. And I'm hoping to be able to open up the listeners to some of your other training methods as well that I plan on incorporating in my program. But there were a couple that I wanted to be sure to hit on just so we can give people a flavor of a couple of other things. And you just mentioned one of them, manual overspeed. Overspeed is something that sounds silly to a lot of endurance athletes because we aren't moving very fast. Our legs or our arms aren't moving very fast. When, say, we're a triathlete and we're swimming and cycling and running. How in the heck do you use overspeed training? What do you mean when you say overspeed, first of all? And how does that actually benefit the endurance athlete?

All right, I'm going to regress very briefly, Ben, because you were talking about buffering lactic acid. You see, that's not what we do at all. We allow ourselves to use lactic acid as a fuel source. You got me by doing all of those things. That's one of the reasons that ISO extremes become so effective. Okay, so now we'll get to your question. How does overspeed or manual overspeed or whatever type of increasing the velocity one is moving at apply to endurance athletes? Well, it's really simple. Again, remember, if we don't already know this, that muscles to work in the appropriate order, need to move at high velocity. The slower you move, the more compensation patterns you have. We're stimulated for each muscle to work as designed by moving at high speed. Humans move at thousands of degrees per second, yet we allow ourselves to move at hundreds of degrees per second. And we test when we come back from injuries at hundreds of degrees per second and then pronounce ourselves fit. Yet they go out there and injure, you know, more catastrophically or the same injury over and over and over again. We prepare you to move at high velocity. Then the more we do that, going back to the example of 10 meters at a time, 5 meters at a time, 20 meters at a time, whatever that distance is that we can move, the energy systems begin to work in the order that we were designed to work in. So that as we progress through this 10 to 100 to 300 to half mile, whatever distance we're looking at, our energy systems have been continuously prepared. One of the things that I've learned over all these years in researching, whether it's myself or others or we have research programs going on in Europe, is that, and this is a very important fact that everyone listening will really want to take note of, your brain will not allow you to do anything you can't recover from. It doesn't want you to get hurt. So if we prepare you to absorb 10,000 pounds of force 100,000 times, your brain will allow it to be displayed. If we have energy systems that can supply you energy to do this, then you're going to go out and you'll do it. You know, I've dabbled in the world of triathlons. You know, I've done some team triathlons. You know, it isn't my cup of tea, but I wanted to see, you know, how I would fare in these things. And I, you know, I usually did the cycling, sometimes I did the running, but I was going out there and I was £250 running alongside, cycling alongside 140 pound individuals, 170 pound individuals, and they're looking at me like the football field's over there and yet we get on a hill, uphill, downhill, and I'm accelerating past them and it's like, how can you do this? You know, in some of the bicycle races I was in, these guys were, you know, 5 foot 6, 140 pounds, and you know, I'm not quite double their weight, but 80% over their weight and I'm sprinting at the same speed or faster. Well, who's really in the best shape? Ben? It wasn't the little guy. Now imagine if the smaller individual brought their capabilities up to this level, what they could truly display.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's very cool. Now, I've had some triathletes and they were younger, and this is, well, 22, 23, 24 years ago, and we trained, you know, they would run a mile and a half to two and a half miles a week. They would bike about eight or ten miles a week and they would swim about three to 500 yards a week. Everything else was done in the weight room. And these guys would go out there and just blow their competition away. Now, interestingly, Ben, after very successful competitions over a couple of years, they stopped doing it because it didn't fit the mold of a triathlete. Right. They were getting grief because they weren't putting in mile after mile after mile. They were getting grief, Ben, because they weren't hurt. They didn't have the basic overuse injuries, and they were being put down for it. Unreal.

Yeah, it's crazy.

I changed my focus. I got to tell you, when I met you over there was quite interesting because, you know, you have a belief in your abilities, and you look like your belief in your abilities, and yet you were open, and you kind of caused me to take an interest again. And that's why we're doing this podcast.

It's something that I've.

The ability, if you.

I've written manuals on quality over quantity, what I would term minimalist style triathlon training. You know, I've written about how to train less, how to have more time, how to optimize your results by using a lot of minimalist strategies. But what you were revealing down in San Francisco went way over and above the stuff that I've looked into. Like when. When I say overspeed training to a triathlete, I'm talking about, like, getting on a bike and doing, you know, 10 by 30 seconds at 100 RPM, maybe a little more than 100 RPM. What are you talking about when you say overspeed?

Well, the best way to do that is to tell you about what we did for a runner. And I had a. A van at the time, and off of the hitch, I made a handle that went right into the tow hitch, came up at a. I think it was a 37 and a half degree angle to the outside of the van with a handle. And you would hold on to this handle, and then I would tow you in the van. We would tow until we heard the sound of slapping feet on the ground. Then I would slow down until it became quiet, or as close to quiet as possible, and we would tow at that speed. What were those speeds? Well, they were anywhere from 22 to 32 miles an hour. Now, it's hard enough to run that way, never mind not using your arms. And I would tow individuals for four or five miles at a time at those speeds. So we're talking massive overspeed. Yes. If anyone's interested, I did have one accident. I was following alongside another individual was driving the van and this gentleman who happened to be a football player, and.

We were working on speed and his ability to maintain it so he could do it 10th game of the year, as opposed to just the first quarter of the first game of the year. And I made this really, really big mistake that I know better than. And I said, don't let go before we slow that van down to under five miles an hour. Well, guess what he did. He let go around 15 miles an hour. Well, imagine all of a sudden having to move your arms in sync with your legs at that speed.

Yeah, well, you know, he rubbed a.

Half an inch at least, off his nose.

That's.

That's the only thing that happened. And he had a few pavement burns.

So folks may be a little bit.

Wary of when we're doing overspeeds on a bench press, what I call manual overspeed. I've had people.

Well, yeah, I mean, it can be.

Intimidating, but, you know, how does that saying go? You must be willing to forego the good in order to obtain the great.

Mm. And.

That means you have to sacrifice, Ben. That means you have to challenge yourself. And again, if you believe such as I do that humans are miracles, then all you have to do is allow your mind to be open to doing it, and you'll be able to do it. How else did Helene run across the United States with all of these problems?

You know, I didn't tell you that when she got to the end, she wanted to run back, but she had to get back quickly for a wedding, I believe it was. But when she came back, she didn't feel real well. It turns out she had thyroid cancer. Wow.

Now, there was no fluctuation in her weight at all, Ben, this whole time.

Most of the time, people will lose weight when they do this. Running a marathon. Never mind 93 fricking marathons in 93 days. And go to the hospital and visit and talk to all the patients and go to the local malls. Because she liked to shop and go eat ice cream. Because she liked to eat ice cream and eat a diet that was laden with meat.

Right.

She didn't eat carb rich foods, I guess, the ice cream.

But it was high protein because that's what it takes to sustain this high velocity movement, this ability to move that fast.

We overspeed people regularly on a bench press. And overspeed is relative to the speed that you can move, Ben and I can move, and every one of the people listening can move. So I'll just create an example here that if you can bench £300 in half a second, I'm going to overload at least 25% on that bar. And I'm going to move you so you complete that movement. And we're looking at the concentric phase, the pressing to completion in a third of a second. We may do 100 of those, 150 of those, 200 of those in a day. Because remember, one very important thing is that if you move at max velocity. Now, when I say max velocity, I'm not so ridiculous to believe that we can just move maximally every moment of everything, every day. But it's 93% or greater. Anything less than 93%, we found in our research, allowed for compensation patterns because muscles would not work in the appropriate order. They wouldn't make the appropriate contraction at the appropriate time, which in turn created compensation compensatory movement. So we're talking 93% or more. So we would move, okay, 60% faster, typically. And we would do that until you could no longer maintain that. And that was the end of a training day. Now you can imagine that it might be one today, might be one for 20, 30 days in a row. And then all of a sudden, you see, when the energy systems and the endocrine system and all of the organs understand their role in recovery, then you all of a sudden can do 10, 15, 20, 30, 50, 100. You can do them all day, every day. We might do five or six thousand in a day. We have a platform bend that we drop from. Well, depends on the machine you're using, but anywhere from 42 inches to 64 inches, not only do we drop it, but we throw it down on the individual. Measured with a V scope, it's up to £10,000 of force that's created upon impact. Now, you imagine if you're a runner, Ben, or a cyclist, and you can absorb 10,000 pounds of force, 1,000 times, what is three, four times your body weight on a running stride. You talking, you know, if you're 200 pounds, I think you're around 180 to 200. You're a big guy.

Yeah, I'm personally about 175, but yeah, I have competed at. I used to be a bodybuilder, so I have competed as high as 210.

So that explains the good looks of your body. I was wondering if it all came from triathlons, because I was thinking, you know something others don't when I saw you. But imagine Even if it's six times your body weight on one leg, that's only 1,200 pounds of force. Imagine if you're prepared to do 10,000, 1,000 times how easily will you be able to pedal your bicycle? How easily will you be able to maintain your stride uphill, downhill, put on burst, ending up with your lower leg in the appropriate position so your foot contacts the ground appropriately so compensatory action doesn't take place so you don't have muscles. Competing for the same finite amount of energy. How the hell much faster are you going to go, Ben?

Hopefully significantly faster.

Exactly. But it takes preparation. Yeah. You know, for a problem.

You know, the thing is, a lot of endurance athletes, this is my hypothesis, are lazy because it's a lot easier to go out and just turn your brain off and pound the pavement for two hours. You know what I'm saying?

Absolutely. And that's why people do that. Because emotionally and intellectually and psychologically is not the same cost as benching 1000, squatting 2000, running a 4 flat 40. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but in my world it accelerates the death process. And I all for whatever you want to compete at, I think is awesome because it furthers the development of human beings and your own personal self and your own personal growth in your life to allow you to do what you want to do at the same quality your whole life. But on the other hand, there's something we haven't talked about yet, and you eluded to this when you were talking about going back to your hotel room. And that was the focus that it took. You see, there's really only one focus that should ever come into play and that's for Ben and Jay and every other listener out there to see and feel the ultimate end performance, whatever that means to you. And if you keep that in mind, then you'll never mind doing an ISO extreme lunge for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. You know, when we started we went up to 30 minutes because I needed to find out what was the ideal length of time. Well, it came to be five minutes. About 10, 12 years ago. We had some research being done. Unbeknownst to us, a group in Europe of swimmers that they called long duration isometrics is what they called my dreams. And what they found was they increased their ability to perform the more often they did these. Even though swimmer perceived themselves as being tired, when they went out there and tested immediately afterwards, they were performing at a higher level. If they did three sessions a day, they improved every single time, every single day. There was no break ever needed. They determined that it was 5 minutes and 11 seconds was the ideal amount of time. With all their sophisticated equipment I was pretty accurate with my five minutes and just using my brain, my eyes, and all my senses, notice position. So that's where velocity comes in. Ben, long answer to the question. But velocity compensatory action, which means we're better using our finite amount of energy, we're better utilizing our muscles because they aren't going to concentrically contract, which then does not allow us to absorb force, which creates a propensity for injury.

Gotcha, gotcha.

Comes in.

So there's. There's obviously a ton more that we could talk about, and I want to make sure that we. That we have time to squeeze this. This additional thing in. And for listeners who are just wanting more and screaming for more, don't worry. Jay and I are talking, and we're going to try and figure out a way to. To. To show you how some of this stuff would work into something like an Ironman training protocol. But with the time that we have left, we should definitely mention this whole electrical muscle stimulation thing, because I know that that's probably got some eyebrows raised at it by folks who are listening in, who are wondering where that fits in and how electrical muscle stimulation can be used to enhance endurance as well. So can you touch on that?

Absolutely, Ben. And again, you're very good at this. Great question. Okay. The POV is nothing more than another tool to send information.

And what's the fortunate. I was a POV just for people who don't know what that is.

POV stands for force velocity. About 17 years ago, I was fortunate enough to meet my partner, Dennis Thompson. He saw me on ESPN working with some athletes using an Electrostim 182i. And there may be many listeners out there who know what that crude piece of equipment is, but that's the modality I was using at the time. And he saw me using it in a way that shouldn't have been possible to be done, because, you see, most electrical modalities only allow for concentric contraction. And then they turn the power down. Like when you go to your chiropractor or your therapist, they turn the power up, muscles contract, they turn it down. Okay, well, I figured out a way to allow myself to maintain eccentric elongation and be able to get out of it what I needed. I did that by communicating from other parts of the body. And that's a topic for another podcast. Anyhow, we met, we talked about what I did, how I did, why I did, and he said, I think you'd be interested in this machine that I have. And it was Called at the time an ARP trainer, since it's grown because of technology to an RX100. And it's a therapeutic modality. And Dennis Thompson, my partner, created this modality, or he had it created for him. And we perfected its use by using protocols to allow for all these things that I'm talking about here in the therapeutic side of life. And then I was provided an opportunity to create a modality based on the RX100. Not create it, but tell the engineers what I needed for specific training. Now, this modality is designed to send information with a biphasic waveform. It has a neurological waveform and a physiological waveform very uniquely. When they enter your body, they never modulate. They maintain their own integrity, which really allows for us to contract agonist and antagonist eccentrically at the same time. Unbelievable. And that's what really allows for quick increases and changes in performance, whatever it may be. Ben, if we're talking about cycling, swimming, biking, or just thinking throughout the day, your ability to focus longer without fatigue, because you see, fatigue is nothing more than a compensation pattern. You breathed inappropriately, you were sitting inappropriately, used energy inefficiently. Okay, Just another compensation. So this sends information that's easily duplicatable and replicatable every single time it's turned on. So your brain receives the exact same stimulus every time it gets there so fast, 240 times, 245 times per second, where we can send information, typically 2 times per second, our own self, every second it's doing this. So we're getting, what, 122 times the normal amount of work every second.

Wow.

It allows us to create these results. And I found out that it took just like research says, four to seven years to create an elite athlete. Well, I can do it now in just over a year. Unbelievable. Because that means you can be doing what you love doing at a high level sooner and or longer. Now, what we do with this modality is we find out which muscles turn on and turn off appropriately, which ones do not. And then we create protocols to send information via the electrodes that are placed on your body to the other areas of your body. We need to respond appropriately, and hence you have efficient movement. You can think of it as well. You know, you don't make very good circles when you're pedaling. You know, you're dropping your heel too soon, or you're not pulling with your hamstring or whatever it may be. You see, we can remedy that quite quickly because we can tell the brain it's okay for the hamstring to work, there's nothing keeping it from doing what, you know, it needs to do. And when we do that, well, then performance is increased. Then, Ben, it's up to guys like you and I to create training protocols to support that.

Yep. Yeah. And this use of electrical stimulation is yet another way that we're talking about getting more bang for your buck. Because trust me, like we talked about me, you know, getting my abs shocked or whatever, we're not talking. I wasn't sitting on the couch sipping a Coke watching a cartoon. I mean, this was focus. This was not some of what you see on the made for TV electrostimias where folks are just sitting around with their legs up undergoing a little bit of mild shock therapy. Anyways, though, I know that we're going to get a lot of questions about the stuff that we've talked about so far. And folks, if you listened in and you have questions, then please, please, please feel free to leave them in the show notes for this episode over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and I will do my best to hunt down an answer for you. In addition, Jay and I are in discussion about how we might be able to roll some of this stuff out to the Ironman triathlon population and potentially use guys like me as a guinea pig, so to speak, for really showing how powerful this stuff can be. So stay tuned for some of that information as well. If this is the type of stuff that intrigues you, we'll definitely be able to deliver you more. In the meantime, check out Jay's website over at. It's evoathlete, right, Jay?

Yes, sir.

Okay. It's evoathlete. And I'll link to that in the show notes for everyone. And Jay, any last things that you wanted to mention before we go?

Yeah, Ben, there is one thing. There's a protocol technique that my partner created about 30 years ago with this POV. We simply call it loosening. Within a 16th of a second of the application of this modality at a certain frequency, power level and placement, your muscles are commanded to eccentrically contract. You can increase performance for up to three hours by 10 to 180%. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I just like to leave them with that because that itself.

Loosening.

It's called loosening. Yes. It's awesome. We use it, Ben. We use it for athletes. My partner Dennis would make a living go into the combine mainly working with linemen, because if a lineman could run five flat or faster, and we're talking 360380 pound guys. Okay. Normally if they're fast they're 515 2. But if you could get into the 4.849 range, well now you're talking about multi million dollar swing. And it only took two minutes to do this. And these guys would go out there and run at these speeds because why their muscles were prepared to absorb up to 10 times more force by being lengthened. Eccentric contraction. And that's what we can do for all the triathletes and any other person. And Ben, I plan on having you cycle run and swim with this modality on. So get ready big guy.

It's going to be super interesting. And folks, stay tuned for more. So in the meantime, Jay, thank you so much for your time today and for just delving into some of this with us. I know we've only scratched the surface but for people listening in, we'll be able to get you more and you can leave your questions on the show notes for this episode. So Jay, thanks.

Thank you, Ben.