Float Tanks, Strobe Goggles, Hacking The Vagus Nerve, Natural Marathon Fueling, How To Know When You're Recovered From Adrenal Fatigue & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. Float tanks, strobe goggles, hacking the vagus nerve, natural fueling for a marathon, how to know when you recovered from adrenal fatigue and much more.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Know what that was, Rachel?

It sounded like the sound of a can opening Bud Light.

It's actually a Zevia. Zevia cream soda.

Fancy.

I, I got home from my hunting trip in Hawaii to discover that my wife, for some reason, she's on like a Zevia kick. So, like, our refrigerator is just full of Zevia. Now, I don't know about you, but when the refrigerator is full of something, and I think this is why Costco makes people fat, I just have to basically make whatever's in the refrigerator that there's lots of disappear.

Totally. Jake. My partner is the same. What's your favorite stevia flavor?

Whichever one I happen to be drinking at 10 in the morning.

Wow.

No, I actually like. I don't know if you've ever done this. You take the ginger root beer flavor of Zevia, which, by the way, for those of you listening and have never.

Heard of this rocks.

It's like stevia. You should get them as a sponsor for the podcast. It's stevia flavored soda. Yeah, it's pop, but I'll take the ginger root beer stuff and mix it with vanilla flavored coconut ice cream.

Oh, my gosh.

Healthy hippie root beer float.

That sounds delicious.

It's amazing. It's amazing. For people who, who are vegan though, you may want to shut your ears and go la la, la, la la, right now.

How did you get hunting trip?

I was gonna say not because Zev is full of meat, but because I just went on a meat a palooza down in Kona, Hawaii. Which, by the way, I, you know, in the past, Rachel, whenever I've gone to Kona, it's been to race the Ironman triathlon.

Right.

I had no clue. It was like a hunting and hunting and spearfishing fricking Mecca, especially for bow hunting. I, over the past, I Was looking at the data from my ring. I wear this ring that just collects every little thing that I do when I poop, what my body temperature does at 2am and of course, how many steps I take. And I covered almost 60 miles. I covered 57 miles and hard miles, bear crawling and sprinting and lunging and crawling over logs and rocks way up in the, in kind of like the higher country of Kona below the base of the volcano, which is pretty cool by the way. Hunting at the base of a volcano, going after sheep, goat, pig, turkey, wow, Pigeon and dove. And then we also put in a couple of days of spearfishing. Actually, it wasn't. Wasn't a couple days, it was one, one full day of, of spear fishing where we caught like, you know, parrot fish and all these other fish that I can't even pronounce the name of. Sturgeon and parrotfish are the only two I could name. Parrotfish tastes like lobster, by the way.

Oh, yummy.

The whole trip was amazing. I have this huge cooler full of my meat, a palooza coming back to my house from the big island.

What did you catch in meat?

So for meat and again, say la la la and shut your ears if you're vegan. I got a nice sheep. I was going to a very, very big sheep called a, called a poly, which tastes really good. It's like a mix of like a. It's almost like a genetically mutated ram that caught the bad side of the lottery in life and has like kind of effed up horns and it's. They're like really ugly, but their meat is amazing. So the closest I got within sight of one was 68 yards, which I don't. I'm not comfortable shooting an animal with a bow at 68 yards. So I wound up. I wound up shooting a sheep and got a lot of like sheep back strap. And my guide gave me a weird look because when we were field dressing it, I went into the gut and went after the liver and the kidneys and the heart. And he, he'd rarely seen that before. Someone actually wanting to harvest all these useless pieces of the sheep. But I wanted it all, so grabbed all that, I shot two turkeys, bowhunting turkeys, kind of like towards the evening. So got some, some turkey meat coming back. Some wild turkey meat, which is wild turkey meat, tends to be kind of tough, but you can like soak it in raw milk or lemon and then like slow crock pot. It tastes pretty good. And yeah, a whole bunch of fish and some pigeon and Dove.

I didn't. I didn't actually know that people ate pigeon and dove.

They do now. Now that. Now that they've been given the stamp of approval on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. Yeah, they're. They're. They're perfectly fine to eat. Absolutely. Yeah. A lot. A lot of. A lot of animals that we consider not to be good to eat. I recently read a book about this. I'm getting the guy on the podcast. He even does as much as to go out and eat roadkill if it is still potable. Potable. Potable is what you say for water. What do you say for animals?

Animals. I'm not sure.

Edible.

Edible.

Edible. So, anyways, yeah, it was really good. I was down there with Aubrey Marcus, the guy who runs the company, on it, and his girlfriend Whitney, who's kind of like a jiu jitsu, like a. Like a professional. And I don't know if she's like a UFC announcer or like a martial arts announcer, but, yeah, very cool. We're working on a book together, so it was kind of nice. Fun to hang out, do some. Do. Well, it was kind of cool. You. You hunt by day, and you eat pokey and drink kava by night. So if anybody's listening in and you are interested in hunting on the Big island of Hawaii or Molokai or Maui or any of these other islands, then leave a comment on the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 366 and I'll hook you up with my guide. I'll give you the insider scoop, hook you up with the guy who will get you turkeys and pigeon and dove and sheep and goat and parrot. Fish on your table.

Sounds fun.

How about you, Rachel? Did you do anything interesting over the. Over the weekend?

I actually had one of the most interesting weekends, I think, of my life last weekend. My partner and I.

Did you go to the. Go to the fair?

No, we did not go to the fair. We went to a kind of fair, I guess, but my partner and I, Jake, we have been dabbling in deepening our intimacy. We've been together for four years, and, yeah, we kind of just acknowledged that we would like a deep, intimate connection. And so we found this course. It's called the Art of Feeling.

Did you go to a nudie bar?

No, no. It wasn't anything that crazy. I'm pretty. I'm.

Those are nasty, by the way. I've been to those. The Adam and Eve bar in Key West. My wife and I stumbled in there, and it was basically Hairy hippies, naked, brushing up against you.

Oh, my goodness. That doesn't seem to burn it out.

Of my memory, but I interrupted you.

Well, no, that's fine. And so we went to this course, and I had no idea what to expect. And we went through the weekend, and it was so. It was on sexual polarity and intimacy, and these were two areas I've never.

Explored before, and sexual polarity.

Yeah. So it works with the. It works with the masculine and the feminine. So there's a book, a really popular book called the Way of the Superior man by David Data and actually Kim Enami, who you've had on the podcast. Most of her work is this kind of stuff as well. And.

Yeah, she's like the vaginal weightlifting coach.

Yeah. And she does it for men and she does it for couples. And so I really wanted to go and do it in person, though. And so I went to this course. I had no idea what to expect. And I honestly spent the whole weekend triggered in a good way and challenged. And I just had this, like, huge tension, and there was just a lot going on, and it was just me and my partner, and it was really deep, and there was lots of crying, and it was really intense. And what I wanted to say was really, at the end of it, you know, we talked about how I did San Pedro a couple of months ago, and it was just this, like, deep, really deep, opening, expansive experience. And. Yeah, and what I got out of this was actually 10 times what I got out of San Pedro. And I have this tendency to want to be more working with organic things rather than things that I take, you know, And I didn't imagine that I could experience the things that I experienced on San Pedro naturally. And this work just, like, absolutely blew me open. Like, I just. In. In every way you could possibly imagine. I was just the most expansive and the most surrendered and the most just full experience of my whole life. So.

So not to overstep my boundaries, but do you. At a course like this, are you actually, like, having sex?

No, no, no.

Okay.

No, I mean sexual. I had the most sex this weekend that I think I have had again after. After the course. Yeah, but just because the chemistry with your. With your partner. Only with my partner. You guys, come on. No, I mean, that's. That stuff is the stuff that you explore as well, but it's just like this. It's just. It's. The energy of it is just huge. And I think it was just so awesome to know that this kind of stuff can be generated organically.

You know, where was this?

It was San Francisco.

What was it? What was it called?

The. The course is called the Art of Fearless Intimacy. But if you wanted to get started just in the work, I would suggest reading David Data, the Way of the Superior Man. Truthfully, his writing did not land awesomely for me, but also Kim and Army. These are ways that you can do it without actually having to travel to San Francisco. But I would strongly recommend if you. You don't have to be in a partnership. There was tons of single people there. If you wanted to really explore deepening intimacy, then go and do a course like this because it's powerful.

So while I was out harvesting mutton, you were. You were having lots of sex. Basically, you were learning how to bang better.

Yeah, I think I had a better weekend than you, Nate.

Nice. It does sound like more fun. Possibly.

News flashes.

News flashes, News flashes.

I'm excited. What have you got this week?

I feel like I should talk like Guy Smiley from Sesame street when I do the news flashes. Well, as of course, our good friends who listening to this podcast know I tweet a ton of research articles. I spend every morning just like looking through research when I'm. When I'm not doing coffee enemas. And I tweet them@twitter.com BenGreenfield and here's some of the best ones from this week. Steph Curry. You know who Steph Curry is?

Love Steph Curry.

So the Golden State warriors, really good basketball team. They have this guy named Steph Curry who plays for them. And I've talked before about how the Golden State warriors use something called td. You may have seen all the magazines, the fitness magazines these days. There's this new thing you wear in your head called a halo.

Yep.

And I interviewed them on the show, I think. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Halo is where you can listen to that. And it's a device. You wear it on your head and it stimulates your motor cortex and it allows for you to, for example, decrease the rating of perceived exertion, decrease how hard a workout is, or increase your ability for skill acquisition in anything from sports like tennis or basketball to music to video gaming and beyond. It's kind of like cheating your way to improving performance by amplifying the activity in your motor cortex. So I knew already that the Golden State warriors were kind of nerded out on this stuff. But this article that I'll link to in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 366 it goes into how Curry is kind of taking this stuff to the next level. He wears these goggles. They're strobe goggles called synaptec S, E N A P T E C. And what they actually do is they light up over and over again. And your eyes have like 130 million different receptors in them, sensory receptors with millions of different nerve fibers that feed into your eye, which means that basically your eyes get the equivalent of about 109 gigabytes of data, which is a lot of data your way around computers every second. And what these goggles do is, is they train your body how to be able to process that visual information even faster. And so what he does is he wears the goggles, and then he combines these goggles that cause these lighting strobes to get released in front of your eyes over and over again so you can process stuff faster. He combines those with doing, like, shooting drills. So he's actually wearing the goggles because you can see stuff when you're wearing the goggles and he's doing shooting drills as he's wearing them. So super interesting. I looked into these goggles. I was thinking about buying some. I haven't yet. If anybody is listening and you've found, like, a consumer version of these goggles, let me know because I'd find it super interesting. I like to get the developers on a podcast. But then he'll also do complete sensory deprivation, right? So that's like sensory enhancement. Then he's big time into these float tanks, right? The big tubs with the skin temperature, water and £1,000 Epsom salts. Yeah. And he floats not only to decompress his spine and to ease out muscle tension and soothe sore muscles with the magnesium in the Epsom salts, but he uses it almost for meditation, right? To reach, like, his peak meditative state, to do, like, his visualization, right, of like, shooting the basketball under the hoop, that type of thing. Total, total biohacker, though. Yeah, it's interesting, really interesting article that.

He'S overloading his senses and then he's completely depriving them. Is that something that you do?

Oh, I totally believe in that. It makes sense, right? You have to step away. You have to be with yourself, right? You have to shut off everything and just go inside your own head. Because otherwise, if you're constantly distracting yourself with. With music and binaural beats and whatever, TDCs and lights and everything else, you know, in addition to just social life and work in general, you can get to the point where you never learn how to listen to Your body signals or perhaps even more importantly, listen to your spirit signals.

Right?

Like, yeah, like have a deeper connection with yourself or with a higher power. And so, yeah, I, I certainly, you know, just this morning I did my nasal walk, right, where I just, I turn off everything. No MP3 player, anything. And I go for a walk. I have this little farm road near my house. I go 15 minutes down and 15 minutes back. And the whole time I do like box breathing, right? Like, like nasal breathing where you're doing four count in, four count hold, four count out, four count hold. And I just do that for a half hour walk. And it's like a form of moving meditation. So it's definitely something I endorse heavily. Wow, so cool article. So check that one out. And then speaking of wearing strobe goggles, there was another really interesting article on light and the fact that pop culture is kind of finally catching onto this concept of biological lighting. If the New York Times is considered pop culture, I suppose. So the New York Times published this article and I thought it was cool because I started reading the article and they're talking about all these lights that I actually have in my house. They're made by this company called Lighting Science, they're called biological LED bulbs. And the article goes into how families are now putting these in their home. Like for baby's rooms you can get the sleepy time bulb. Or for like right now in my office, above my head while we're talking, I've got three of these awake and alert bulbs which just generate copious amounts of blue light, right? Whereas like the good night bulb depletes the blue spectrum light to help you sleep better. So you can kind of like pick and pick your poison when it comes to the type of lighting that you want to put into your home. And it goes into all these different new lighting technologies. Like one that people have probably heard of before is the Philips hue, which connects with a wireless network, which is why I don't have that system in my house, because I don't have any WI fi in my house, but allows you to go from like, you know, whatever reddish glow to a blue glow depending on the mood that you want. You know, you can control your, your light from far away if you want to like, you know, freak out your family while you're out on a trip. You can change the lighting in a room.

And while we know the impact on circadian rhythm. Are you able to feel different when in the room at the time?

Yeah, yeah. The light not only interacts with your eyes, but Also the photoreceptors on your skin. And so, yeah, it's really interesting. And you know, I'm very into lighting. I even have in my bag now. I don't know if you read that article that I wrote. I reviewed Dave Asprey's new book Headstrong on the website. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com you can read all the articles that I've written. And one of the things that I talk about in that book, that I discovered in that book, Headstrong, are these little LED blocking lights which I purchased just off of Amazon. They came in incredibly handy because I've been traveling for the past two weeks, so I've been in and out of hotel rooms. And you walk into a hotel room, if you flip up the lights in a hotel room, it's like all these little things are blinking and glowing everywhere, right? The alarm clock and the TV and the router. And you take these little stickers, they're like LED blocking stickers, and you can put them over any of these lights in the room, which might sound like orthorexic and excessive, but there's some really interesting studies that show that even if you're, let's say, like wearing an eye mask or whatever and you've closed the curtains in the room, all these tiny little lights can actually interfere with melatonin production.

So yeah. And would you recommend doing that for people who already who don't have trouble sleeping? Well, like, I don't really have trouble. Kind of like going from overkill, right?

So, so this is why I tell my wife, right, because she just hits the sack and goes to sleep and she doesn't wear a sleep mask. And you know, sometimes she'll be like looking at her phone while she sleeps or before she sleeps, right, Without. Without wearing her blue light blocking glasses.

Y.

God forbid. And my kids, right, I'll go into my kids room and they'll set up these elaborate like Christmas lighting displays over their bed just because they think it looks cool. And I explain to them, even if you still sleep, you might not get the optimal sleep that you want, right? Like you might have a night of sleep, but not reach your deep sleep stages quite as effectively where a lot of like memory consolidation occurs or where dreaming occurs, which is super important for getting rid of a lot of negative energies and negative emotions that build up during the day. I just finished a really good book called the 24 Hour Mind that talks about this, like how important dreaming is to put you in a better mood. The next day. So you can lose out on a lot of that stuff. Even if you sleep, it might not be the best sleep. So it's an interesting article, one worth reading if you want to familiarize yourself in layman's terms with light bulbs that help you sleep. So check that one out. Another one that I recently tweeted was one of the best articles on bone broth that I've ever read. Because bone broth, even though it's very sexy these days and a lot of people are aware of it, the research goes back and forth or I guess the, the controversy goes back and forth on, you know, are we, are we just being like fooled by all these bone broth companies? Does it really do what it, what, what the claims are that it actually does? And it turns out Chris Kresser wrote this article where he goes into bone broth and, and highlights some, some great research on the components in bone broth.

It is a very comprehensive article.

Yeah, yeah. Like he gets into the hyaluronic acid in it, which we already know is pretty good for the joints, but he goes into how that protects against UV induced skin damage. So it's almost like internal sunscreen that you consume. And I've talked in the past before about this thing called astaxanthin. It's like what salmon eat, for example, makes the salmon's flesh all red and how that's like internal sunscreen. So I used to load with astaxanthink speaking of Hawaii before I'd raced the Ironman in Hawaii. Right. Like, I'd take a bunch of acids at them to help myself fight off all that UVA and UVB based skin damage that can happen when you're exposed to copious amounts of sunlight. But it turns out that the hyaluronic acid and some of the other components in bone broth, particularly the collagenous components, can help out quite significantly with your ability to be able to bounce back from the sun if you don't want to look like the, the grandma from Something about Mary. So it has that going for it. He goes into something else I hadn't really thought about before. The fact that the glycine in bone broth increases your levels of creatine, stimulates the secretion of human growth hormone, so it can enhance muscle repair and basically can activate this pathway called the MTOR pathway, which allows you to get enhanced muscle protein synthesis. So there's a big benefit there going on from a muscular standpoint. And recent research that just came out last month shows that when you combine bone broth with vitamin C, Right, like lemon juice or some other form of vitamin C, you actually increase that collagen delivery even more. So that was another interesting thing that I found in that one. And then finally, I mean, even though the list goes on and on, I mean, it's a very long article about all the different things that bone broth can do. Another interesting one that I found was that there's been a lot of concern about the lead toxicity in bone broth and how bone broth might be high in lead. But it turns out that the glycine in bone broth stimulates a copious amount. That is the third time I realized I've used the term copious on today's podcast.

That's a great word.

Try and find a substitute soon. Anyways, it causes a whole bunch of glutathione production, which is your body's master antioxidant. And it can also improve survival after liver transplants, protect liver cells against hypoxia, protect you against alcohol induced fatty liver disease. So it turns out that, like, even if bone broth has metals in it, it also has all the stuff in it that helps protect you against metals. Kind of like how fish can have a lot of metals in it, but the selenium in fish can help to protect you a lot from. From a lot of those metals.

How would you rate bone broth on your priority list of things you should have every day?

I drink it every day.

Yeah, it's up there.

Yeah.

One of the things you need to.

Do, I mean, I don't, I don't like. I know a lot of people are like, oh, Ben, you don't do everything every day that you talk about on podcasts, but it's quite simple. I have a smoothie every day. I really do. When I'm home, I have a smoothie every day. And what I've been doing is I go half and half for like the, you know, you need liquid to make the smoothie blend. So I use about half bone broth, and then I use half of that, that bark tea I've talked about on the podcast before, that I don't have time to get into right now.

Yeah.

But basically, because I'm putting in my smoothie every day. I have it pretty much every day. And a lot of times I'll throw in like a cup in the afternoon or the evening, have a cup of bone broth sitting by the fire wearing my Christmas sweater.

Sounds delicious. Actually.

Speaking of delicious, let's talk terpenes Another article that I, that I tweeted out was about terpenes, what's called the entourage effect. You know what the entourage effect is?

No. I'm about to learn, though.

All right, earmuffs. Kids are going to talk about drugs. So the idea here is that let's take cbd, for example. You can synthesize like single molecule cannabidiol, which is like the active component of weed or hemp, but that doesn't touch the active ingredients that you would find in 100 milligrams of like the whole plant extract. And that's because of these things called terpenes, which are these, these molecules that you'll find in the plants that when you isolate all the other components out of the plants, you miss. So you take like, you've heard of, like how black pepper makes things more bioavailable. Like mix black pepper or turmeric in with things. It's because you have a lot of what's called beta caraophyllene in black pepper. And oregano is another one. And a lot of dark leafy green vegetables have this same component in them. And it allows for anything that you blend them with to get absorbed a lot better. Because the terpenes have this entourage effect. They basically magnify the effect of, in this case, let's say cannabis, right? Or cbd. If you were to blend them with cbd. It's why in any good blend, you have as many terpenes as you can possibly get. So I'm going to link to an article on this entourage effect, but the reason I bring this up is because I've been messing around with this essential oil called copaiba oil. C O, P, A, I, B, A. Have you heard of this before?

No.

Okay. It has massive levels. I bought it and I bought black pepper oil from this company called Young Living. These two essential oils, when I, when I talk about that beta carophylline that we'll call it bcp from here on out, it's like, it's like the most potent terpene known to man, meaning anything you mix it with becomes more, more bioabsorbable to, to a very high extent. So you can take these essential oils and put a few drops of them in anything like, like in a tea, in a smoothie. If you were to like be making an edible with cannabis, or let's say you're somebody who, who vapes, or say you use CBD capsules or something like that, anything that you combine this stuff with, you put a few drops on your tongue or you put a few drops in a smoothie blender jar. Or you could for example, even just smear some over, let's say if you were going to eat an edible or something like that. Massive increase in absorptability. It's like a way to hack anything that you consume. And it doesn't have to be CBD or thc. It could be any plant based molecule. So this is, it's called Copaiba oil.

Do you know what, what is copaiba? I've never heard of it before.

I don't know what it's extracted from exactly. You've put me on the spot. It's some kind of a plant based extract.

Okay.

And it's just a whole bunch of terpenes. And the black pepper extract of course comes from black pepper, peppercorns. But the idea is that not only does it enhance the effect of things like cbd, but it actually acts very, very similar to like a synthetic cannabinoid, meaning it gives you all the anti inflammatory effects that a cannabinoid can. So if you're in a pinch and you live somewhere where like CBD isn't legal or you have a really hard time getting your hands on it, it turns out this Copaiba oil offers you a very, very similar benefits. So something to check out. I think it's kind of cool. I love when I discover like new little oils that make life better. I'm an essential oil junkie.

Especially from plants you've never heard of.

Yeah, yeah, copaiba. If anybody knows where copaiba oil comes from in the comment in the show notes. Okay, the last one. I know this is dragging on, but I got one more news flash. It's called the neurobiology of grace under pressure. We talk a lot about the vagus nerve on this show and about the importance of taking care of your vagus nerve because it snakes throughout your entire body and is really the, the most important connection between your gut and your brain. You know, vagus means wandering and it's the wandering nerve because it, it diverges from like the, the stems in your, in your brain stem, your cerebellum in your brain stem and goes all the way down to the lowest, lowest part of your abdomen. So it's constantly sending messages from your brain to your gut and vice versa. And we've talked before about how things like heart rate variability training and cold water immersion and singing and gargling and chanting and all sorts of things can help of the tone of your vagus nerve, which can assist you with everything from like Adrenal fatigue to enhancing your reaction time to increasing your resilience to stress. So many benefits. And this article goes into things we haven't talked about before on the show when it comes to ways to enhance the health of your vagus nerve. And some of it's a little woo woo. Like for example, simply visualizing your vagus nerve appears to enhance the coordination of your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system.

Okay.

Meaning if you're. Go ahead.

Well, I was. I thought that was kind of woo woo too. But then I saw this picture that they have because I have actually never seen a full picture of the vagus nerve. And it is crazy. I did not know it was that dramatic, you know, and so it's huge.

Dissected out from the entire body. It's like this massive tree.

Yeah, it is exactly. Massive tree. And so then I actually started visualizing it and I thought, I can see how that works.

So you can visualize it and like imagine it snaking through your body. You need to look at it. You need to go to the show notes and click through and read this article. Like see what the vagus nerve looks like. But the simple act of visualizing it, like snaking throughout your body can actually increase the health of the nerve. So that was one interesting tip within the article. Another one was generating positive emotions and optimism. And this is something that I've been focusing quite a bit on lately. I realize that for those of you who just like to whatever, put butter in your coffee and lift barbells, that this sounds woo woo, but there actually is a big, big link between healthy vagal to and what's called the neuroplasticity of the vagus nerve and positive emotions. So you know what my three favorite positive emotions are, Rachel? That I'll just say to myself sometimes through the day and that I have a screensaver that pops up on my computer.

Nice.

What they are. And there's actually a book written by David Hawkins called Surrender. The Pathway of Surrender, Letting Go, I think is the name of the book. And he talks about how there's an actual vibrational frequency associated with these three emotions and they are in order of importance and vibrational frequency. Number one, peace. Number two, love. And number three, joy. So if you're constantly saying or thinking peace, love and joy, that actually increases the tone of your vagus nerve. And those are like my three favorite words. It's like Sesame street words of the day.

You can almost tell by whether they elicit a calm feeling. Is that Kind of how you know if it's affecting your vagus nerve, you know that.

And then you also can watch people around you. And when I am, when I am saying those words a lot and in a very intense state, especially of peace, like, people will come up to me in an airport and randomly just talk to me, right? Because, because I'm approachable, because I'm not, I'm not projecting negative emotions. I've found that. And this is something new. I've only been doing this for like the past three or four months. Really, really focusing on just saying words and engaging in poses that cause more positive emotions. Rather than slouching, rather than thinking anxious thoughts. It makes a profound difference in one's life. Another one, the last one I'll mention here, even though there's a lot more in the article, is that you need to, Speaking of the ability of one person's mood to affect another, you need to actually avoid anxious people as much as you can. Anxious or nervous people have actually been shown to affect the vagus nerve, specifically by decreasing your hrv. Because we can pick up the electrical signal of the heart and the brain of people standing around us. And you can also even experience a different vibrational energy from them. In terms of, there's a, if you look into quantum physics, there's an actual difference between, in the vibration of protons when you're around those people. And you can feel it. You can often feel it even if.

You can't see them. Yeah, that has been my lived experience. Definitely.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so just like staying away from losers, basically. Good idea. If you want to enhance your, your vagal nerve tone or at least anxious and nervous people or people who are in anxious or nervous state. Now, of course, I, I, I should throw this in there. I think it's better rather than staying away from them, to overpower them with your own.

I think so. Because then the goodness, like, extends to them and you can actually calm down. I believe if you have a strong enough energy and presence and peace that it calms them down.

Don't say you suck and walk away. Give them a hug.

Stop being nervous. You're annoying. Don't say that.

That's right. Hugs, not drugs. So check it out. BenGreenfieldFitness.com 366 I'll link to all of these studies and everything that we just talked about.

Listener q and a.

Hi Ben. My name is Ozzy from Perth in Western Australia. Love the show, love the content. My question is regarding simulated altitude training and the benefits and drawbacks to simulated altitude training. Love to know your thoughts regarding training. High living, low rest periods. From block of altitude training to let's say a race or a triathlon. Benefits for weight loss and benefits for type 2 diabetes. Yeah, once again, mate, Love the show. Thanks.

So his name's Aussie and he's from Australia.

I think. I think I am the one with the Australian accent that does it best here. His name is Ozzy and he's from Australia.

You're a poser.

That is. That is kind of ironic that his name is Aussie and he's from Australia.

Do you think his real name is Ozzy?

I think we love a good nickname in Australia and maybe it's his nickname.

I don't think me naming my kid Yankee.

Yes, exactly. It's super weird. But thanks for calling in, Ozzy.

Thank you for calling in. It's really interesting. You know, first of all, let me start here. I'm not aware of any benefits for type 2 diabetes from simulated altitude training, but there are a crapole of benefits to it. Probably my funnest exposure to simulated altitude training was when I was in London. And I'm coming back to London in May. I'm speaking in London in May at this thing called the Interview Infinite man event. Maybe we should have said that in the special announcements. I think it's like May 26th through the 28th. It's for like guys to learn how to be better guys, Whatever that means. Yeah, it's called the Infinite man event now. I'll probably go back to this place and I'm over there. It's the altitude center in London. And what they do is there's like a whole bunch of bikes and rowing machines and treadmills in this big chamber and they suck all the air out of it and then like give you a big workout up on a big screen TV and you do the workout at whatever altitude you know. Let's say like you know, 3,000 meters or you know, 6,000ft or whatever they decide to put the room at. So you do the whole workout, but rather than you wearing like an annoying mask and being hooked up to like a hypoxic air generator, which would be one way to do simulated altitude training. You're instead in just like a giant room with all the air sucked out of it.

And do you know if the altitude centers exist around the world or is the only one that you've ever found in London?

No, I've. I've seen other ones. I know there some gyms in the US have Them. This one's called the altitude center. It's just that sometimes I only go cool places when I'm traveling, and then when I'm at home, I just hang out walking in the trees anyways, though. So altitude training we'll get into to simulate altitude train. But altitude training in general is actually pretty dang beneficial for the body. So the idea is that most of the world's population lives at low altitude, meaning below 500 meters. And, you know, that has a really good atmospheric pressure and good oxygen concentration for human body functioning. That's why most of the world's population has naturally settled into low areas rather than living in the mountains. But as you go up, as you ascend in altitude, the air volume expands. So atmospheric pressure goes down and the air volume expands. That reduces the amount of oxygen that's available to the muscles, that drop in oxygen concentration. And the drop of oxygen in your arterial blood basically decreases the ability to extract oxygen for your working muscles. It reduces your oxygen uptake. And when that happens, some pretty cool physiological effects occur. So, for example, when you get a decrease in kidney oxygenation, that stimulates the synthesis and the release of erythropoietin, or what's known as epo, which is this hormone that's produced in your kidneys and that stimulates what's called erythropoiesis in your red bone marrow. And when you stimulate erythropoiesis in your red bone marrow, then you increase the concentration of your red blood cells and your hemoglobin production. And over a period of time, those changes improve your aerobic performance, your ability to deliver oxygen to working muscles, your ability of the muscles to be able to use oxygen. So there's a mitochondrial effect as well. But whether you stay at altitude or whether you go back down out of altitude, that can actually help you significantly from both a health and a performance standpoint. So that, in my opinion, is one of the biggest effects that takes place. But there are other things too. At a genetic level, it's really interesting. So there's this transcription factor that's in every cell in your body, and it's called hypoxia inducible factor. It's also known as hif, and that's normally pretty low when you're just at sea or not at altitude. But when you go under hypoxic conditions, that HIF actually increases. And when it increases, your cells transcribe specific genes. So specifically, what happens in your cells is they will transcribe genes responsible for even more epo. Production genes responsible for producing transferrin. Go ahead.

What does transcribe mean? How does that work?

It means that basically you're up regulating the activity of genes that are going to cause certain proteins to be produced or certain physiological effects that take place. And HIF does a whole bunch of things. So it stimulates angiogenesis, which is like the production of new capillaries and new blood vessels. It stimulates what are called cell glucose transporters, which, again, even though no studies that I'm aware of have been done on the effect of altitude on diabetes, anytime you increase the number of glucose transporters that you have, that's that much less insulin that your pancreas has to release, because your body's better able to use glucose transporters to transport circulating carbohydrates into muscle or into liver or other organs. And so theoretically, you could actually, through altitude training, upregulate glucose transporter activity and potentially decreased some issues with, like insulin insensitivity or dysregulated blood glucose. That's kind of a far leap because I haven't seen any actual research on altitude training in diabetes, but it is something that it could be helpful for. You get an increased expression of the genes responsible for metabolizing lactic acid, which is really important for everything from defying the burn that occurs during exercise to decreasing some of the issues that could potentially cause cancer. Because cancer is simply the rampant production of lactic acid and the switch of a cell to go into complete glycolysis. You increase a whole bunch of your vasodilating type of gene, specifically the one that causes an increase in the production of nitric oxide. So it's kind of like cold thermogenesis has all these different effects on health. Altitude does something similar. As a matter of fact, when I was attending the Ancestral Health symposium in Colorado this year, one of the main talks given there was how when you compare populations that live at higher altitude to populations that live at lower altitude, even though it can be tough on the body to constantly be in a state of low oxygen availability, there is a significant difference in longevity, meaning that people who are at higher altitudes, like the city of Boulder, Colorado, has significantly higher amount of longevity than a lower altitude. But similar, similar, like, you know, let's compare two cities that have like, similar keen interests in health, right? Like Austin, Texas and Boulder, Colorado. Boulder has a higher level of long living people or higher concentration of long living people. And so there is this, independent of other factors, an increase in longevity associated with elder altitude training as well. But like I mentioned it can be tough to live all the time at altitude because your body doesn't recover as fast.

Yeah.

A lot of people who live in Boulder and exercise frequently, they'll get like over trained or get a little bit of adrenal fatigue. Because when you're sleeping at altitude and training at altitude and living at altitude, which is called live high, train high, it can be hard on the body versus this other concept. And this is something Aussie alluded to, simulated altitude training, which is live low, train high.

Yeah. So what is the impact then if you live low and train high and how frequently do you need to train high? If you live low?

Yeah. You get the best of both worlds. So you're supposed, if you train high, it's supposed to be about every two to three days to maintain the effects of altitude training. And the cool thing is that when you are living low, let's say you're training high by using an altitude training test or one of these like gyms in London that I talked about, or an altitude training mass hooked up to one of these hypoxic air generator, you know, which would be something like the company Hypoxico makes one of those. There's another company called a Higher Peak that makes one. But whenever you're doing that, you're able to train at high altitude, get all those benefits from EPA production to glucose transporter activity, to nitric oxide production. But then as soon as you take yourself out, out of that simulated altitude experience, you're able to recover more quickly because you have that greater oxygen availability at the low altitude that you might be, say, sleeping in. So a lot of different ways that you can do simulated altitude training, right? There's altitude training tents, there's altitude training chambers. What I have in my garage is this unit made by a company called Hypoxico. That is this little air generator that I have next to a treadmill. I could also drag my bike out there and I can do what's called intermittent hypoxic training, or iht, where you can, for example, you put the little mask on and you go hard for five minutes. Then you take it off and you recover for five minutes. Then you go hard again for five minutes, take it off for five minutes. You do that like three times through for a 30 minute IHT workout. That's an example of a way I can cause my kidneys to upregulate EPO production. I can cause the, the release of some of this HIF factor that I talked about that hypoxia inducible factor. And I can get all those benefits without necessarily getting like, the sleep decrements and the lack of recovery and some of that stuff that would happen if I just decided to, like, move to the Himalayas. So. So yeah, live low, train high works really well. Some people will also do the opposite. They'll, they'll live high and train low. Right. So, so in that situation, while you're living high, you're getting a whole bunch of the benefits of altitude exposure. But then when you go train low, you're able to push yourself harder. And some people like that approach too, but that's obviously a little tougher logistically to pull off. Yeah, you have to like, live on a mountain and then go off the mountain to go train and come back or just like, I guess you could turn your whole house into an altitude chamber. Should be a cool experiment anyways, though. So that's the skinny on simulated altitude training. And the idea in terms of what you're supposed to do is you can get these fingertip pulse oximeters off of a website like Amazon. I'll put a link in the show notes too. Just the basic, pretty decent pulse oximeter you can get off of Amazon. And you can use that to collect oxygen information while you sleep or while you train. And you're looking for, in order to ensure that you simulated altitude training is actually working, you're looking for, for a pretty significant drop in pulse oxygenation. Right. So when I'm doing that hypoxico session and I first hop on the treadmill, my oxygenation, my pulse oxygenation is good, it's like 95 up to 100, which is a good level to be at. But during the training session, it'll drop by 20 to 30%. Right. So I'll drop down into the 60s to 70s, which is generally what you're going to want to look for. It's like a 20 to 30 not percent, but a 20, 30 point drop in your oxygenation. And when that happens, that is an indicator that you're actually getting a lot of the physiological effects necessary to get the benefits out of simulated altitude training. And you're going to find that's very difficult to get that if you're just doing like, you know, breathing through your nose or holding your breath or something like that. But the pulse oximeter is simply used. It tells you what's called your SpO2, the percentage of oxygen in your bloodstream. And as soon as that drops low, that's the signal to your body to create epo. So do you go ahead I was just gonna say, you want to use one if you're gonna do simulated altitude training.

Do you recommend simulated altitude training for people who are, like, not athletes who are doing it just for longevity? And what about weight loss and all that kind of stuff?

Not for weight loss, because technically you're not able to exercise as hard when you're doing it, so you're not gonna burn as many calories. But for general health, you know, going through periods of restricted oxygen availability, there's a really good book about this called the Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McCowan. He goes into the concept of just how focusing on nasal breathing, focusing on not processing as much oxygen. In the same way that there are longevity benefits associated with restriction of calories, there are longevity benefits associated with restriction of oxygen. Like, not constantly deep breathing. And that's one of those conundrums that people will say about people who exercise. They're like, well, if you're constantly breathing hard during exercise and your heart rate's high, aren't you just exhausting your body's battery so that you die earlier? But the idea is that for that one hour that you're, say, exercising during the day, for the other 23 hours, your heart rate's lower and your oxygen consumption is lower. So it adds up to it being beneficial in the long run. Does that make sense?

That makes sense, yeah. Really, really interesting stuff.

Yeah. And then the last resource that I'm going to put in the show notes for you is a really interesting podcast that I did with this guy named Craig Dinkel who produces this supplement called Biotropic. And it works really well hand in hand with simulated altitude training. And it's a combination of beetroot, which is really good for vasodilation, and then liver anhydrate, which can help out with the EPO production. Cordyceps, which can actually help out with lung activation during the simulated altitude training. Blue Green Algae, which allows for delivery of more oxygen to the bloodstream. And then also echinacea, which kind of flies under the radar as something that increases EPO. But Echinacea can increase EPO by over 30%. So if you, like, combine supplementation with those type of nutrients along with simulated altitude training, you'll get even more benefit out of it. So I will link to you a couple of podcasts I did with the guy that formulates that particular supplement, because I like that one to tuck away for when you're taking a trip to the mountains or you're stepping into your altitude training tent. I'll also link to some cool altitude training devices and altitude tents and things like that on Amazon with a final word of warning. If you buy one of these altitude sleeping chambers, then your significant other is highly unlikely to want to do you ever in that chamber. So I have one of those.

It's an unsexy chamber.

Jessa refuses to ever hop into one of those with me. So I simply don't use it because my love life is just as important to me as my altitude life.

Hey Ben.

Hey Rachel. Really big fans of the show. It's Leanne Spencer calling from from London in the uk. Thanks for the great content you put out. I've got a question for you about the marathon or marathon training. So we're training for the London Marathon over here. I'd like to know what you would recommend for nutrition, both for preparation and recovery, both before long training runs. So we're hitting sort of 12 miles upwards at this stage in training, but also for after training. What are the best foods, drinks? What would you recommend for recovery protocols, goals and also during the marathon itself or during the really long training runs, what would you recommend we take as snacks? Keep our energy stores going. I really want to avoid glucose and all the sugary stuff and be as natural as possible. Really welcome your thoughts. Thanks Ben.

Bye bye. This is a timely question. I just got back from speaking down in your neck of the woods actually.

Rachel.

Yeah, in Portland I spoke at the Nutritional Therapy association conference, which was a really good conference and I spoke on how to fuel things like triathlons and Spartan races and marathons and 10Ks et cetera, naturally, like how to not swallow the Gatorade, Sports Science Institute and Power Bar agenda hardcore. So some of the things that I got into during that talk were like whole food or real food ish options that one could use during something like a marathon. And sure, if you were to go do like a Google search for whole food options for a marathon, you're going to come up with a bunch of stuff either written by a dyed in the wool nutritionist trained to prescribe people 60 to 70% carb based diets because that's all you can burn during exercise, right? Glucose. God forbid you'd be able to burn your own fats during exercise. And then the other thing that you'll find are a lot of like impractical foods like they'll recommend like, like oh, eat mashed sweet potatoes during your marathon. You ever tried to put like mashed sweet potato in a zipper, like like sandwich bag and try and suck that down while you're out on a run.

It's like, no, I haven't, but yeah, it sounds challenging.

It's like the babies that you see sitting at the table with their faces covered in mashed potato and Gerber baby food, running down and dribbling down onto their chest and neck and exploding in your bicycling jersey pocket, like that kind of stuff doesn't work. Or you'll see people say, oh, you know, eat some low fat bagel chips and bring a bunch of pretzels out there with you or stuff your pocket full of banana. And by the way, any, any nutritionist who has to go on a two hour training run for a marathon with a couple of bananas has not experienced the brown mushiness that occurs after about 30 minutes of pounding the pavement. So, just saying, impractical. Understand that some of this advice that you read on websites, like I won't call anybody out by name but one rhymes with Tunner's world. They're not necessarily practical advice written by people who have ever tried taking real food out with them on a training run. So some of the things that I've found that can work for avoiding a lot of the gut rot and the fermentation that can occur with some of these more carbohydrate content, concentrated sports nutrition compounds, right? Like most of them are blends of, say, fructose and maltodextrin, two extremely fermentable, what are called fodmaps, right? They can cause a lot of gut rot and gut irritation, gastric distress in athletes. And as a matter of fact, this is a story I was telling when I was speaking down in Portland. A lot of these gel packs, in addition to just being fructose and maltodextrin gut bombs, they also contain copious amounts. That's the fourth time I said copious, by the way, of caffeine. And so when I was following traditional sports fueling recommendations and consuming 3 to 4 of those an hour over the course of a 9 to 10 hour Ironman, that means I've got 30 to 40 energy gels in my system. You know, caffeine and sugar flowing through my bloodstream at the end of one of these races, you would think, right, Rachel, that you would just like collapse and sleep for a day after crossing the finish line of an ironman. But I would instead find myself laying, running around staring at the ceiling, my toes twitching from all that caffeine, my eyes bugging out my head. And frankly, I was going to use the word copious, but I'm going to instead use the word massive amounts of gas coming out my butthole from all of the fermentable sugars. And I actually got to the point where I would pop 2 to 3 Valium after I had finished the race once I got into bed at night so that I could actually fall asleep.

That is just insane. It's insanity.

There's some Valium in there on top of the sugar and the caffeine.

Is that common in marathon racing?

It's very common. People are popping ibuprofen and Advil and Valium and Ambien. Like it's going out of style. Yeah. So it's like you shut down the pain during the day and then you shut down the pain even more during the night. So it's just a constant sledgehammer to the body. So if you want to avoid that, a few of my recommendations, for example, I have an article called how to get into ketosis. And even if you don't want to do like the whole ketosis thing, some of my recommendations there in that article include recommendations for compounds out there that allow you to just naturally burn your own fat as a fuel while you're out there racing. So one recommendation that I make is you take a little bit of a carbohydrate, but not a lot of it, like a quarter of what would normally be recommended. There are some, what are called clustered potato starch based fuels out there that are extremely digestible and that allow you to kind of get a slow bleed of carbohydrates into your bloodstream. And you can take about 100 calories or so of that and you can put it into like a blender. So you're gonna like blend this and pour it into flasks for your marathon that you can wear in one of those running belts. So instead of having a flask that's chock full of, let's say, concentrated glucose, it's instead full of something that is a little less concentrated in terms of carbohydrate. And you blend that along with, for example, a teaspoon of some MCT oil, which is gonna bypass digestion and get shuttled straight to the liver, where it's converted quite readily into ketones, which your liver and your heart and your diaphragm and your brain. And a lot of these organs that you use during an endurance event, they can readily rely upon these ketones as a fuel. And then in addition to that, you can put some electrolytes in there, like an electrolyte powder, which can actually Enhance your ability to be able to burn your own fats as a fuel and get into ketosis even more. And then you could put some amino acids in there, because amino acids will stave off some of what's called tryptophan from crossing your blood brain barrier and making you sleepy during exercise. And then you can finally, if you want to put a, in addition to the electrolytes, the amino acids, the MCT oil and a little bit of carbohydrates, you can put like just a touch of something that will flavor it up in there, like some lemon juice and some stevia, for example. And that would be something you could easily use in a bike water bottle during an ironman, or you could use in a flask during something like a marathon. Sure it sounds like a bunch of engineered super fuels, but all you're doing is you're putting just enough in your body to be able to shift your body, to be able to rely upon its own energy stores, the hundreds of thousands of calories of fat that it has available to it, rather than to rely upon frequent fluctuations in blood sugar. Now, if you wanted to go more of a natural route, there are companies out there, and I've written an article about this that I'll also link to in the show notes, like fat based energy gels. And I have a whole article reviewing these little Justin's nut butter packets, which are just nut butter. And I will warn you that unless you are in sight of an aid station that has water or you have access to a water bottle, this stuff will stick to the roof of your mouth like crazy. And are you doing this thing while you're out running? So you want water along with it, along with any of these gels. But there are other companies that instead of doing like a nut fuel based gel, will use, for example, a chia seed. So there's a company called Huma that makes a chia seed based gel, which is just what it sounds like, you know, chock full of amino acids and fatty acids from chia seeds rather than sugar. Another company called Huma makes a chia cell. So Huma and chia Surge, those are two examples of chia seed based gels. The company Hammer, they make a gel that rather than using a lot of maltodextrin and fructose, uses dextrose, which is a little bit more digestible, less fermentable carbohydrate, and they blend that with a lot of fats and amino acids like their peanut butter flavor. There's a company called Chocolate Agave that just uses like, like cacao in this really dense, buttery based form that's almost like chewing on chocolate while you're out running, which is actually a really good, almost like superfood to gnaw on while you run. There's another company called Yum Butter that will mix nut butters with superfoods like goji berries and hemp seeds, chia seeds and sunflower seeds and things like that. So there's a lot of options out there. And I'll link to this article that I wrote in the show notes. But what were you saying, Rachel?

And do you use a variety of different ones or do you kind of use the same one for per race, but a lot of the same one.

You could use a variety for. For example, during like an Ironman triathlon, I'll do the trick I talked about earlier where there'll be like ketones and a little bit of MCT oil, some amino acids and some electrolytes and just a touch of like a potato starch based carbohydrate in a water bottle. And I'll drink that all during the bike ride of something like an Ironman triathlon with something nat. Like at the end, I'll get myself a carrot at the end of a stick, right? Like have like a, a natural energy bar, like a hammer bar, like a lactose or gluten free energy bar right at the end of each hour. And then when I shift to the run, that's when I'll start consuming like a chia seed based gel or a nut butter based gel or a gel that's not going to give me a bunch of, of of sugar. So by the end of the race, you know, I've consumed barely any sugar and it's all just like these natural fats for example.

So do you go anywhere in. Do you go specifically through exactly what you would take at each part of the marathon beforehand? I mean, do you have that written down every anywhere? Is that in a training plan?

The way that I do it during a race is I go to the website and I print off the map of the race course and then I mark which parts of the race course, course where, where I'd want to make sure that I eat what. So I have a basic idea now during something like a spartan event where there's a whole bunch of unknowns and you don't know what's going to be where. And a lot of times they don't even publish the map until race day, I'll just go out to a Race like that with a pocket full of like a natural gel. Because research has shown that liquids or gels digest far better than solids like bars. When you're running, when you're biking or when you're rowing or anything non impact that's not the case. But when you're running, you're drawing your body, it is the case. So I'll just have a pocket full of energy gels or a little belt. Like I use this thing called a spy belt spi belt that has like a little zipper in it that'll hold, you know, six gels or so. So I can, I can go out there for four hours and use like a nut butter based gel or use one of these chia seed based gels and they digest really well. The other thing that I'll do if I'm. If I just want a premixed thing that I can put into a flask ask is there's this company called My Natural Force and they make like a powder that instead of it being a sugar based powder, is a chia seed based powder that you can mix into like a gel or you can mix it in into like more of like a liquid like to put in a water bottle. And it's basically chia seeds royal jelly. It's sweetened stevia rather than with sugar alcohols. It's kind of expensive, right? It's like I think 40 bucks for like a little canister of it, which is going to give you, I would say you probably get about 10 servings out of that. So I guess it's not that bad. But you can use something like that as kind of like a quasi whole food option. Yeah, it's packaged powder. But any, you know, like I mentioned sweet potatoes and bananas and stuff like that, like those just don't freaking work when it comes to practically being able to carry things while you're out there doing something like a marathon. But there is. The last thing I would recommend to you is there is a book. It's like a cookbook for on the go food for athletes. And it is kind of cool in that it teaches you how to make savory rice cakes out of sushi rice and put bacon and eggs on top of those, spread them in a baking pan, cut them into squares and have these little rice cakes that you can take out with you that actually do work pretty well for a run or a bike ride or something like that. They're written by a guy who has actually worked for professional cycling teams, Alan Lim. And the name of that book I'LL link to it in the show notes too. It's called Feed Zone Portables. Feed Zone Portables. And it's just a bunch of portable foods that you can take out with you on the go. And it kind of, you know, some of the recipes are just like wheat and gluten bombs, but some of the ones that are more rice based actually aren't bad. So that'd be another option for you. So between like my little water bottle concoction and some of those fat based energy gels, that book and then that is Gate Endurance, which is made by the company Natural Force. Those are some options that you could go with as far as fueling somewhat more naturally or at least avoiding the fructose maltodextrin sugary caffeinated gut bombs that one would normally consume during during a marathon. So there you go, Leanne. I just saved you from having a bunch of gas and having to take Valium.

Hey, Ben and Rachel, huge fan of the show. Really appreciate all the work you guys do. My name is Ray and I had a question on adrenal fatigue. I know you guys have covered most of this in the past, but I was wondering, when about 80% of the time you're feeling good and the other 20%, the symptoms are still present, what would be your take on how to get rid of these last few hurdles? I've seen that whenever I work out super hard the next day, I have a longer period of time where I'm not feeling great. Is this because my body still should not be pushing it this hard, or is it because I'm doing other things wrong, such as supplementation and other areas that I could be focusing on. Thanks so much.

Well, I know this podcast has been going a little while, so I'm lots.

Of very valuable information.

Okay, well good. Then we'll keep going. So a few things that I would mention to Ray. How to know that your body is recovered. There are certain things that you can pay attention to to know if you should go. Hard to know if you're recovered. Not that there isn't some benefit to what's called super compensation. What that means is you get yourself really close to being in a complete training hole. I'll do this sometimes. Like I'll train since I know I'm taking my family to the Bahamas next week where most of my exercise will be like spearfishing and walking on the beach with my kids and maybe a couple of runs here and there. But I'll train really hard this week. I'll get my heart Rate variability low. All of workouts where I get dehydrated, I'll do back to back weight training workouts. I'll get myself in what's called an overreached state and then I'll super compensate, I'll bounce back even stronger while I'm off vacationing. So the trick is not to be in a perfectly recovered state all the time. The trick is to dig yourself into a little bit of a hole and then recover and then dig yourself into that hole again and recover. And that's actually how you build fitness in leaps and bounds all year long rather than just kind of keep yourself at a, at a baseline level of fitness all year.

Question, question, already if, do you still recommend that even if you know that you had adrenal fatigue and you're trying to, to recover from it?

No. Ifif you're trying to recover from adrenal fatigue, you have to be more careful digging yourself into a hole. So, yeah, that's where you need to be careful. But some people just live their whole lives thinking they're in a state of adrenal fatigue, when in fact all they need to do is work in those times of the year when they just get full recovery so that they're not just in that state where they're kinda sorta beat up all the time. Right?

Yeah. Dr.

So they feel like they're in adrenal fatigue when in fact all they need to do is like, you know, know five day hard, two day easy, or typically for me, it's like a, it's, it's like a ten day hard, you know, seven day easy type of scenario. Because those seven days I'm traveling and I'm on airplanes and I'm in hotel rooms, then I come back home and I train really hard, then I go travel again. Right. Like that's typically how it works for me. So anyways, though, a few of the things that I highly recommend that you pay attention to to see if your body is truly recovered. One would be the resting heart rate and specifically the resting heart rate during the night. So like I mentioned, I wear this ring, the OURA ring. And what it will do is it will keep track of the lowest heart rate that I achieve during the night and the point at which that lowest heart rate occurs. And if my lowest heart rate is occurring at say 4am instead of 2am or my heart rate is 42 all night long instead of say 38, that is a definite sign. And I've, I've found this from correlating it with Some of the other variables I'll mention in a moment, that's a definite sign that you're potentially pushing it too hard or you're on the brink of being too under recovered or too over trained. It can also mean that you just ate a big ass meal before you went to bed and your digestion is working really hard. So you need to take into account some other variable sometimes or might mean like the room you're sleeping in is hotter than usual. Right. So your heart rate's a little bit higher than usual to cool the body. But assuming you're keeping all variables constant, a slightly higher than normal heart rate that's occurring all night while you sleep, or your peak lowest heart rate occurring late in the night, like 4:00am instead of 2:00am, that's a really good sign that you might be under recovered or that you, you might be needing to pay a little bit more attention to recovery. Another one would be your actual sleep cycles. So sleep latency, how long it takes you to fall asleep, as well as the amount of time that you particularly spend in your rapid eye movement sleep, like your dreaming phases, over training and under recovery has been shown to decrease the amount of time that particularly you spend in your REM sleep cycles. So if you've got one of these sleep tracking devices like a motion X or a beddit or a ring or you know, anything else that's tracking your sleep, if you're noticing that your REM sleep is starting to get lower and lower in terms of the percentage of time that you're in REM sleep, that can be a sign that you are under recovered and that you're pushing it. A lot of times these things happen before you feel it in like a scratchy throat or extreme soreness of the muscles. A lot of times these precede those more obvious signs by two to three days. So if you can nip it in the bud, a lot of times you'll avoid injury or illness.

Yeah.

Heart rate variability, I've talked about quite a bit on the show before, but a steep drop in your heart rate variability, which is not your heart rate, but instead the amount of time in between each heartbeat, that's a definite sign that you can be under recovered or over trained. That's something I personally measure each morning. That's kind of like my go to variable. I pay more attention to that than I do to like heart rate and sleep and anything else is what my heart rate variability looks like in the morning. So that's another really important one to pay attention to. Those are three, there are over 20 others that I have discussed in an article that I wrote about how to test your blood for recovery, how to test things like your heart variability and your heart rate, where I go into like mood, where I go into how to get like pee strips to test your urine for excess protein. I mean, if you really wanted to like, like hack the heck out of checking your recovery, you could with this article that I wrote. So I'll link to that in the shownotes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 366 but if I were to highlight anything else, probably the gold standard test that I would get. If you wanted to actually get a test that will be a lot more accurate than the traditional test, which is like a salivary test for measuring your cortisol, your testosterone, something else called your dhea. These, when they're low, can all be signs that you're in a state of excessive fatigue, but the salivary test will not tell you the metabolites. So what I mean by that is, for example, you can test and you can have really low cortisol, but it's not because your adrenal glands are exhausted and you're not making enough cortisol. It's because that cortisol is getting broken down very quickly, in which case it's not as much of an issue. You wouldn't know that though, from a salivary test. You can only tell that type of thing from a urine test. So there's a really good test called the Dutch test. D U, T, C H. And that's. It stands for dried urine test. That's the one that I would get if you kind of want like the gold standard test to see if there are any hormonal issues that would be causing you to be under recovered or over fatigued. The other thing that I should note is that the number one thing in people who maybe aren't over trained, who are doing everything right, but they're still not having enough energy. And perhaps this will kind of bleed into our next question, because I know we have a question about fasting is simply in the evening, ignoring all that trickle down advice from sedentary people who are telling you about ketosis, but who are maybe exercising 20 minutes a day, they're telling you to eat 20 to 40 grams of carbohydrates a day to limit blood glucose, et cetera. Most of the athletes who I work with were easily consuming 150 to 200 grams of carbohydrates at the end of each day. Sweet potatoes Yams, white rice, dark chocolate, red wine, all these things. And you wake up and perform like a rock star. The next day. You get all the benefits of being a fat burning machine all day long. You reload the body with carbs at the end of the day. And 90% of the time, that completely gets rid of all the fatigue, all the lack of the ability to push, all the drop in energy levels, cramping, all sorts of issues that anybody listening in who's like one of these low carb keto athletes will often experience. So sometimes you just have to freaking carb stuff your face in the evenings. I case in point two nights ago. I slept like crap, right? Like, like, I just had a horrible night of sleep. And so I started to think about. I'm not one of those guys who, like, writes down my diet every day. I just. I find that sucks, the enjoyment right out of eating when I gotta jot it down a notepad or log it in my phone. But I did realize I didn't have any carbohydrates at all for dinner. Like, I had a salad and a bunch of pork and very, very small glass of red wine, right? And that was it. And when I do that, I don't sleep well, right? And the next day I don't perform well. If I'd have thrown in like a giant sweet potato with that meal or a couple of slices of Jess's homemade sourdough bread, guarantee I would have slept better and had a better workout the next day. But it's. It's one of those silly and stupid things you don't think about. And it's one of the biggest things I've noted among athletes who don't feel recovered the next day is they just need to eat more carbs at night.

And is there any downside to it? Like, why isn't any. Isn't everybody doing carb refeeding because they.

Think they're supposed to be in ketosis or it's going to make them fat or give them cancer or diabetes, when in fact, any active athlete who's exercising, like the crossfitters, the triathletes, the Spartan racers, I know a lot of people listening to this show do a lot of those type of sports. I mean, Terry Walls, bless her heart, has a great book on ketosis. It's the Walls Protocol. I know a lot of people follow that, but it's like, if you're eating, I think, more than 40 grams of carbs per day, then you're a sinner. And that, again, lovely woman extremely smart, but she's not a guarantee. Doing a CrossFit wad every day, which puts you in a whole different scenario. So you can't take trickle down advice from people who are basically there's a difference difference between nutritional ketosis and therapeutic ketosis. Right? And nutritional ketosis. You can just kind of like eat relatively low carbohydrate most of the day, do a carb refeed at the end of the day with 100 to 200 grams of carbohydrates, and you're going to do a lot better when it comes to sports performance and avoiding a lot of these fatigue issues. But I have many, many more resources for you, Ray, or anybody else listening. In particularly that article I wrote about how to know if your body is recovered. So be sure to check that one out.

Ben, I want to thank you for years of great podcasts. I so appreciate your filtering of health and wellness research as I want to lose some weight I am interested in doing intermittent fasting, but I am a bit hesitant due to some research of how it messes with females hormones. I am postmenopausal, so my hormones hormones are already low, but my morning cortisol is 24, which is high. What are your recommendations for pre and postmenopausal females in regards to intermittent fasting and would you suggest it for me with an elevated AM cortisol?

Janelle first of all, elevated morning cortisol. I know that you mentioned that you were concerned about that. So your cortisol levels are generally high in the morning, and when you wake from a prolonged period of sleep, you get an increase of up to 50% just 20 to 30 minutes after you wake up. There's a name for it. It's called the cortisol awakening response. It's the way that your body naturally mobilizes a little bit of sugar. It's called glycogenolysis. You release cortisol and then your liver releases some sugar just to help wake you up and get you going during the day. So that's normal. That's why the best cortisol measurement system you're testing multiple times. Like that Dutch test that I mentioned just a moment ago. That's a better way to kind of see if there really are cortisol issues. So know that it's pretty natural for cortisol to be high in the morning anyways. But that's not to say that there aren't some issues when it comes to intermittent fasting, particularly for females, because some women who try intermittent fasting they'll get missed periods, they'll get metabolic disturbances. We've even seen early onset menopause in female population who does intermittent fasting. And there's a reason for that. And I'll explain the physiology behind this. Because hormones that regulate key functions like ovulation in females, those are really sensitive to energy intake. So in both men and in women, you have this thing called a hypothalamic pituitary, gonadal axis, the HPG axis. So it's kind of like an air traffic controller for your three endocrine glands, like your hypothalamus, your pituitary and your gonads. Those are the three glands that will release a lot of your endocrine hormones. So your hypothalamus releases this thing called gonadotropin releasing hormone, and that tells your pituitary to release things called luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone, or LH and fsh, which you may have heard before in high school biology when you learned about why you get your period. And then LH and FSH act on your gonads, either guy's testes or women's ovaries, and that triggers, for example, women to produce estrogen and progesterone, which helps with normal, healthy fertility, all sorts of other important metabolic functions in women. Now, the pulses of that gonadotropin releasing hormone, that GnRH, that's gonna cause your pituitary to release LH and FSH, which is then going to cause your gonads to release things like estrogen and progesterone. Even short term fasting or intermittent fasting, can significantly alter that hormonal pulse, specifically in women. And there's a reason for that. So it's called kisspeptin. So kisspeptin is this protein like molecule that your neurons use to communicate with each other. And kisspeptin stimulates gnrh production in both males and females. And it's extremely sensitive to appetite regulating hormones, particularly leptin and insulin and ghrelin. Those are three of your primary hormones that regulate and react to things like hunger and fasting and whether or not a meal they'll produce satiety, that type of thing. Now, females have way more kisspeptin than males do. And what that means, because they have more kisspeptin neurons, they have greater sensitivity to any changes in energy balance. And that's a reason why fasting, particularly in women, causes their GNRH production to decrease and decrease much more significantly than it can in males. And they've actually, they, they've studied this and found that in women who fast, kisspeptin levels can tend to plummet and GNRH can tend to plummet. And the problem with that is when estrogen and progesterone are decreased, metabolism also decreases because you have estrogen receptors through your whole body, like your brains, your GI tract, your bones. So if you change your estrogen balance, you change your metabolic function all over your cognition, your mood, your digestion, your recovery, your protein turnover, your bone formation. So we're not just talking about like missing your period from excessive intermittent fasting. We're talking about a full body physiological effect when that happens. And so it doesn't seem fair, but it's just the fact that females have more of these kisspeptin neurons, probably because they're equipped to produce babies. And, and that's just a reason that intermittent fasting seems to affect women far more significantly than males. So low energy diets in general, but even intermittent fasting or periods of time without consuming calories can reduce fertility in women and can cause imbalances in these estrogen progesterone ratios, drops in progesterones, drops in gonadotropin releasing hormones. And generally that can cause a whole bunch of issues like your menstrual cycle stops or becomes irregular, or you have problems falling asleep or your hair gets a little dry or starts to fall out. You don't recover from your workouts as quickly. You notice your heart kind of starts to feel a little funny. It starts to pitter patter here and there. In a weird way, sometimes libido decreases, digestion decreases. You feel a little bit colder than usual. And a lot of times that can be fixed, not just by eating more calories, but specifically by not subjecting your body to like these long 12 to 16 hour periods of time without eating. And. Go ahead. I can tell you want to say.

Something because I can hear you breathing. So if you aren't experiencing any of these symptoms, is it safe to say that it's not? Intermittent fasting, if you're a female is not impacting you?

Yeah, I mean, if you feel great, then go for it. I mean, if you feel good, then you're probably okay. But I should touch on a study that just came out this week, and it's kind of interesting. It looks at the reduction in energy expenditure and what happens when you have this reduction in energy expenditure. And specifically it shows that it has a pretty significant effect on what are called melanocortin 4 receptors. These actually respond to cortisol and you see a decrease in melanocortin 4 receptor activity in a state where calories are not present. When that happens, the body downregulates its metabolism and you burn fewer calories at both rest and during exercise. And females, again, see this response more significantly when they are intermittent fasting or restricting calories. Now, this particular study goes into the fact that two components that you can put into your diet can actually restore some of that melanocortin activity and increase metabolism even in the face of restricted calories, and they are caffeine and nicotine. So if anything, you could intermittent fast, have a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, and reverse at least some of these effects. But I think it'd be more prudent to maybe just like, you know, if you go to bed, let's say you quit eating at dinner and you go to bed at 10, and maybe you had dinner at 8, it's okay to wake up in the morning and have some freaking breakfast, Especially if you're a female because it turns out that your body does better with those signals from food and those frequent signals from food, at least in moderation compared to especially men. Again, doesn't seem fair, but in my opinion, it's actually more fair that a woman can wake up and have a big slice of quiche and justify that by saying that you don't want to affect your kisspeptin. So if anybody's trying to just make you drink coffee every morning and go copious amounts of time biting the insides of your cheek until lunch, just tell them you're taking care of your kisspeptin, baby.

All right?

So that all being said, I think we should give some crap away. Rachel, what do you think?

Yes. My favorite pot.

Giving crap away. So here's how this works. If you want to spread the good karma, you want to help this show out, increase our ranking in itunes, blah, blah, blah, Go leave us a rating in itunes. And if we read your review on the show and then you email geergreenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.Com we'll send you some cool crap, like a cool t shirt, water bottle, beanie, you name it. And today we have a five star review with a crapola, not to overuse that word, along with copious, a copious crapola of exclamation marks. It says over the top, amazing exclamation mark, exclamation mark times five. Five stars by click. Chick 888. And Rachel, you Want to take this one away? And you can just skip the exclamation marks because they're like half of the review.

Ben Greenfield is the absolute best podcast ever. He is funny, extremely intelligent, curious, creative, slightly crazy inquisitive, and he's such an excellent interviewer.

Oh, my head just got big.

If anyone is even slightly curious about their health, Ben is a must listen to podcast. That was in caps. I never miss a single one. I am a definite Greenfield groupie. I highly, highly, highly recommend you give him a listen. I guarantee you will be hooked. The only downside is now is that now all the other podcasts are unlistenable.

Oh, that's not.

Keep up the amazing work, Ben. I am a huge, huge fan. Wow. You know, unlistenable.

No, I have a favorite part. You know, my favorite podcast is right now.

What?

The TED Radio Hour. Oh, that sounds just like a bunch of Ted. It's four TED Talks. And then they break them down and they interview like the. The talkers, the presenters, and kind of like get the background story behind the talks. Like TED Talks Radio Hour. You can definitely listen to that one. Click chick.

Yeah. And also On Being, On Being is my favorite. Have you listened to that one?

What's that?

On Being? The On Being podcast. Oh, God, it's brilliant. It's like very deep. It's philosophical and spiritual and interesting and it's all about having like a very full life. It's also a good one. But the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast is much better.

Let's check it out. All right, cool. Well, if you, if you, if you want to spread the good karma again, go leave a review. We always appreciate it. We'll always keep coming back if you do. But in the meantime, for all the goodness on simulated altitude training, natural marathon fueling, the adrenal fatigue, tips, fasting, all those articles I talked about what parts of the globe I'm going to be racing Spartans at that conference@Ben Atlanta.com and oh, so much more. You just go to the show notes BenGreenfieldFitness.com 366. Check it out. Thanks for listening. And in the meantime, Rachel, Ben, have a nice week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.