Foam Rolling 101, Collagen Confusion, Germs on Water Fountains And More!

Ben Greenfield Fitness Episode 287 what is the best way to eat eggs, gelatin versus collagen, better sleep for new mothers, foam rolling 101 germs on water fountains, and much more.

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So this week has been pretty cool workout wise for me. How about for you?

Well, Brock, I'm quaking in my boots this morning because I've got. Well, Wednesdays now are the day where I have my toughest workout of the week. Meaning you're quaking in your boots. I'm quaking in my boots. That's the nice way to say crapping.

My pants and freaking out on the inside.

Anticipation of this afternoon's workout.

So what is it?

Well, I'm now down to about a month and a half before I shove off to California to go do the Kokoro Camp and SEAL Fit Academy with Commander Mark Devine. And Mark has guaranteed me that he's going to give me special treatment, meaning that they're going to focus on trying to break me as much as possible. So I'm now doing at least one.

That's not cool.

I'm now doing at least one seal fit wad each week. What's called an operator wad. And these are designed to kind of just make you a little bit more mentally and physically tough. And so today's workout is called Curtis. And the way that Curtis goes is I load up a barbell to 135 pounds. So not a ton of weight, but basically 45 pound weight plate on either side. And then Curtis is 100 reps of a power clean up to my shoulders, racking on my shoulders, and then left lunge, just like basically a left reverse lunge to a right reverse lunge to a overhead push press. And I do that a hundred times. And that's the workout.

Wow.

Without stopping, I will probably maybe get about 20 in and then I'll break it into tens and then I'll break it into fives, then threes, then twos and ones, then whatever it takes to get to a hundred. So there's no way strength is going.

To be the issue.

Yeah, there's no way I could do it all at once. So yeah, that's, that's, that's today's fun.

Wow.

Yeah, that definitely. There's a lot of physical issues with that, but mentally, that's going to be really tough.

Yes. And whoever, whoever Curtis is, I'm sure that I will be cursing Curtis by this evening.

That makes my workout seem like a sort of skipping through the daisies on a lovely spring morning. All I did was a. A whole bunch of plank exercises and some wall sits and some lunges and lunge jumps and then went for a fast run, you wuss.

News flashes.

Tons and tons of news flashes each and every day on twitter.com BenGreenfield and now we're gonna show you the three best.

That's right. Put your propeller hats on because we're gonna dig into a study. So today's study that we're going to talk about is from the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. And this is one that I tweeted out over@twitter.com BenGreenfield and what I actually told you in that tweet was that you may actually want to run behind the person in front of you in your next triathlon or 5k or 10k.

Or marathon instead of running in front of the person behind you in front of them.

Of course, there is the exception that if they have given gas or if they're doing the whole shotgun as they run, that maybe not rockets not to run behind them. However, this study actually looked into drafting and found that when you run close to the person behind you, you not only finish and in this case, the.

Person in front of you.

The person in front of you. That's right, you draft off of them the same way as you would draft off of someone on a bicycle. So not only they found that the runners were able to finish a 3,000 meter run, which is a significant amount of difference in 9 minutes and 4 seconds versus 9 minutes and 13 seconds when they drafted off of a runner in front of them. And they also found that when they told them to rate how hard they worked on a 1 to 20 scale, even though they ran faster, they rated the drafting effort as a 13, whereas when they weren't drafting, it was rated as a 20. So basically, they ran faster at a lower rating of perceived exertion when they were running behind somebody. So maybe it's that the person was breaking the wind not in the way that you think, but literally breaking the wind for them. Or it may be, and the researchers talk about this in the study, the fact that you're simply able to. Who pace a little bit better when you're trying to keep up with the person in front of you, but ultimately kind of getting close up to the person who's in front of you and literally running with them almost step per step just a couple of feet behind them can actually be a pretty good strategy in a competitive running event or a triathlon or any other effort for which you want to keep up with somebody. Or lower your rating of perceived exertion.

Or run faster and especially if you've got a killer headwind.

That's right.

That makes it more comfortable as well.

And speaking of running, I'm going to link to one of the funniest things that I've seen this week on the Internet when it comes to running. And that is the Oatmeals do's and don'ts of running your first marathon. Nice.

I love the Oatmeal.

The Oatmeal is one of my favorite websites for comics. It's at the oatmeal.com and I'll link to this specific cartoon. But it's all of the do's and don'ts and uh, they're, they're pretty funny. Like this one. Do let those pre race jitters fly. Start out at a completely impractical pace. This will demoralize other runners into quitting early and you will be crowded marathon champion at mile two.

Let me that's happened to me several times.

Here's a good one. Do delude yourself into thinking there's anything enjoyable about eating energy gels. And then it shows a guy eating an energy gel and saying this tastes like boob milk from a cyborg. Here's another good one that we'll all be able to empathize with if we've ever run a triathlon or Marathon or 5K. Do not stop running when getting a drink at an aid station. By enduring the sprint choke, you could shave three, possibly four seconds off your five plus hour finish time. Marathon success does not come from training or perseverance. It comes from waterboarding yourself at aid stations. And I love what they say at the end. Here's a good one that we've all seen. Also do end on a high note when you see the finish line. Start sprinting like a coked out orangutan. No one will ever suspect that you walked jogged the previous 25, 26 miles. I love it. And it goes on and on. There's a lot of really good ones in there. But if you want a good chuckle today, go check out the Oatmeals Do's and don'ts. We'll link to that over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com we should.

Probably give a little bit of explicit warning. If you're easily offended by language, you may not want to go and see it. It's not super foul, but the oatmeal does get a little blue sometimes.

It does tend to have colorful language, so. And then finally, an interesting article to flip a complete 180 and delve back into science. Biohacksblog.com had a really interesting article on how something called resistan starch can not only help to kind of repopulate your gut flora and help to stabilize your appetite and slow blood sugar release. And we're talking about things like green bananas and potato starch and plantains and things of that nature, but it may actually also make you smarter. And the reason for that. And this is going to get a little bit geeky, so my apologies in advance. Time to put our propeller hats back on and maybe even our white lab coats. And what's the thing that you put in your white lab coat pocket that makes you.

The pencil protector.

Yes, pocket protector. The pocket protector. Let's put our pocket protectors on. So basically, butyrate is a short chain fatty acid, and it's a short chain fatty acid that gets increased in your gut when you consume these things like half ripe bananas, you know, like green bananas, or like potato starch or potatoes that have been cooked and then cooled. And what happens is that butyrate inhibits something called histone diacetylatase. That's hdac. We'll abbreviate it as. And what that is is that's an enzyme that has a specific action of removing acetyl group groups from histones. So I warned you we were going to get geeky on this one.

I'm scratching my head.

But basically, in short, what that does is when that HDAC activity goes up, you get increased expression of what are called neuroplasticity genes in your brain, which are going to enhance your ability to learn and enhance cognitive performance. But there's also evidence that when you inhibit hdac, there is reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease and the formation of a lot of these neurofibrillary tangles that can cause alzh Alzheimer's. So what this means is that the consumption of resistant starches or the inclusion of resistant starches in the diet by increasing butyrate in the gut can actually make you smarter. Now you can also, if you don't like the gas that you may experience when you consume resistant starches. There are other things out there and this article@BioHacksBlog.com that we'll link to in the show notes goes into them. But there are things like sodium butyrate and acetyl l carnitine and some other things that you can actually get in supplemental form and perhaps experiment with to see if you notice an improvement in cognitive performance from this formation of butyrate in your gut. Now the other thing that you can get butyrate from of course is butter. So you can include some grass fed butter in your diet as well. I'm personally a fan of kind of taking the natural approach and I eat small amounts of fiber throughout the day. I eat a lot of green vegetables. I do some potato starches and rice based starches occasionally with dinner after a workout. But I'm not a huge fan of doing something unnatural. Like we talked about the potato diet last week and sure it's a biohack or whatever, but it's just one of those things that's just exhausting when it comes to trying to follow this strict diet to enhance cognitive performance versus just say working vegetable based fibers and maybe a little bit of unripe fruit here and there into your diet. I think you can still get some, some pretty good butyrate and gut flora expression that can, that can help with cognitive performance.

So you know, unknowingly I made myself a, a little bit of a thing like this for breakfast this morning. I chopped up a green banana, fried it up in some butter, some grass fed butter with a couple eggs.

I actually that, that is, that's a perfect example of a way that you could increase butyrate. You can increase or get a lot of the benefits of eggs which we'll talk about later in this podcast. When it comes to cognitive performance. And that's natural, right? You're not like and delicious cooking and cooling a potato and you know, having five potatoes for breakfast or something like that. So yeah, I love that green banana fried in butter with a little bit of eggs. Perfect. Thank you Bronk. Listener.

Q and A.

Hi Ben, how you doing? My name's Andrew and I'm a big fan of your podcasts and listen regularly in the uk. A quick question please regarding eggs and specifically the healthy cooking of eggs. I'm on a hypertrophy diet and eat four eggs every day for breakfast, usually fried in coconut oil. I prefer to eat my eggs scrambled, but I'm reading and hearing a lot that scrambling introduces oxygen, which in conjunction with the heat of cooking oxidizes the cholesterol, leaving free radicals detrimental to health. What are your views, please? All the best.

So first of all, we should probably address what is a hypertrophied diet.

A hypertrophy diet is a diet that I'm guessing is designed for hypertrophy, so.

Specifically targeting the growth of muscles.

The growth of muscle. That's right. So a muscle growth diet. And incidentally, not to put Andrew on the spot here, but I should note that you don't need to eat a high protein diet to build muscle. And there is zero evidence that eating anything more than 0.7 grams per pound of body weight of protein is going to help you build any additional amount of muscle. So what that means is once you exceed about 30% or so of your daily total calorie intake from protein, you're not going to get any extra muscle building effect and you're probably just going to make your kidneys have to work a little bit harder to deal with all the metabolic byproduct of protein breakdown.

And I'm guessing that unless Andrew is like the size of Andre the Giant, he probably doesn't need four eggs every single day.

Well, maybe. I mean, it depends how much protein you're eating the rest of the day. If you're having fish, fish with lunch and steak with dinner, then four eggs in the morning might be a little much. I personally have about 20 grams or so of whey protein with breakfast in my green smoothie. And so, you know, he's, he's having a little bit more than that. He's probably having closer to 30, 35 grams from four eggs. But still that's, you know, of depends on your protein intake the rest of the day. Good. But onto Andrew's question. What is the best way to eat eggs? I personally like to crack them against my head and let the yolk run down my face and then kind of, kind of lick it off my face as it runs down. Like to leave that stickiness on there for a little while too.

It's good for your hair right here. You crack it on the top of your head and just let it roll through your hair.

Shiny hair gives me that, that Pantene shampoo look as I, as I shake my hair around in the morning.

Who needs mousse when you've got eggs in your hair?

Smile slyly at the camera. You like those eggs, don't you? So the best way to eat eggs, first of all, as far as this oxidation of cholesterol in eggs, it doesn't harm Eggs to scramble eggs or cook eggs that does not oxidize the cholesterol. That has become a concern among folks who are studying up on eggs is the fact that it is possible to oxidize the cholesterol and eggs. But that happens when you powderize eggs during commercial processing, when eggs get forced out of a tiny hole at high temperatures and high pressure to create the kind of powdered egg products that say, like a cafeteria might use or a hotel might use, you know, like the, the actual powdered eggs. That is the type of process that will oxidize the cholesterol in eggs. It's highly unlikely that just heating eggs naturally during like a scrambling process is going to do much in terms of oxidation. Now, let's just say that lipid oxidation and damaging of the fats would occur when you subject something like an egg yolk to heat. Well, what you need to consider is that egg yolks have a lot of vitamin E in them and vitamin E is there to prevent oxidation and vitamin E is very good at preventing oxidation. So that's just a reason to, if you are going to eat eggs, get pastured eggs. Because the yolks of pastured eggs have about four times the amount of vitamin E that you're going to find in standard egg yolks. So use a pastured egg. The vitamin E in that is going to help with oxidation anyways. And, and ultimately, don't worry too much. I, I like to cook my eggs on low to medium heat just to play things on the safe side. The, the powdered egg products where, you know, eggs are getting spray dried and forced through tiny holes at obscenely high temperatures and pressures in factories to powderize them for processed foods. Like, that's where you have to worry about oxidation of cholesterol from eggs.

Then you have to worry about all the stuff that it's being mixed with when it's reconstituted as well.

Yep, yep, exactly.

Some kind of vegetable oil.

Yeah, yeah. So as far as eggs go, I'm definitely a fan of eggs. There are some people that think that they're allergic to E. And I think that in most cases that's bull. And the reason for that is that they've done a study that found that anybody who took one of these popular IGG allergy tests and found that they were sensitive to eggs, and specifically that means that they tested positive for what's called the albumin specific IGG level, which is the type of protein that you find in egg whites. Well, what they found was that every single subject that they put into this study tested positive for, for this, this IGG level for egg whites, whether they had active allergies, whether they had resolved egg allergies, or whether they had no egg allergies at all. And what the the paper concluded was that IgG responses to egg whites are probably just a completely normal physiological response to a protein that you are frequently ingesting. So basically, if you eat eggs a lot, if you take one of these food allergy tests, it'll tell you that you're allergic to eggs. So the only time that you might not test positive to an IGG test for eggs would be if you just don't really eat eggs much at all. So the, the only thing that would convince me that someone who tested positive for an egg allergy was actually allergic to eggs was if it was accompanied by inflammation. So if you test, for example, C reactive protein or what's called hscrp, or you test, there's another test that you can do for cytokines, inflammatory cytokines, or you get like acne or achy joints or a bunch of GI upset and bloating and all of these indicators.

When I was a little kid, if I got some egg whites, it would make my face swell up like a potato. Like you couldn't even see my eyes.

Yeah. And my nephew has to go to the hospital if he eats eggs. That's an egg allergy. That's an egg intolerance. Just a basic blood test that tells you you've got allergens circulating in your bloodstream against egg whites. All that can mean is that you're just eating a lot of eggs and that's not an issue. So first of all, as far as egg allergies go, I just wanted to mention that while we're talking about sort.

Of went off topic there, but that interesting but really good. Andrew asked.

Eggs are extremely micronutrient dense. I'm a huge fan of eating them. As far as the best way to eat them, first of all, if you're gon them or fry them, I wouldn't use coconut oil. Especially if you're using a good extra virgin unrefined coconut oil, which is what I recommend because coconut oil actually has a pretty low smoke point. We cook our eggs typically in an avocado oil, sometimes in a little bit of butter or bacon fat, but that's actually much better than coconut oil. Another really good one that you can cook eggs in is macadamia oil or olive oil. Both of those also have higher smoke points than coconut oil. Now, I know coconut oil tastes fantastic. Yeah. Not extra virgin olive oil, just regular olive oil. So olive oil, macadamia nut oil, or avocado oil would all be better choices or just bacon fat for cooking your eggs in. So I wouldn't use coconut oil if you're going to scramble it or fry it. Now, you can also simply drop an egg into a smoothie and you can use a raw egg if you do something like that, and that's not that big of an issue, you've got a bigger risk of dying in a plane crash than you do of getting salmonella for raw egg. And if you're really concerned about it, just rinse the outside of the egg before you crack it with a little bit of oregano or vinegar and water solution, because that's where a lot of the potential contaminants might be playing around is on the outside of the egg, not the inside of the egg. Now, the other thing is that when you eat a raw egg white, you find a lot of information floating around out there that raw egg whites might bind the biotin, which is the valuable component that's found in egg yolk, and prevent the absorption of that. Well, biotin begins to break down as an egg is cooked. So if you're very worried about that, then don't eat the raw eggs just to switch to cooking the eggs if you're really worried about biotin. But I would, and it's not a huge, huge concern of mine at all. Finally, what I should mention is that I've been seeing a lot of recipes out there for egg coffee. Have you seen this, Brock?

I have, yeah. Yeah. Mark Sisson had a good one.

Yeah. Basically, you take coffee and you mix it up. They recommend just mixing up with egg yolks rather than the egg whites, since the egg yolks is where most of the good micronutrients reside anyways. But basically, yeah, you, you make coffee and then you, you add scrambled egg yolks, like some cinnamon, some turmeric, some vanilla, a little bit of butter in there, and you just basically mix it all up. And you can throw that in a little blender and it makes like this frothy egg yolk mixture. But it's supposed to actually be pretty good. I haven't personally tried it, have you?

I haven't, no. I've been tempted to, but I just. I like mine cooked the way I like them.

Yeah, yeah. So scramble them, toss them raw in smoothies.

Make some ice cream out of it. Coconut milk.

Yeah. Put them in coffee. Honestly, Andrew I don't really care how you eat your eggs. I just wouldn't eat them powdered. And I'd choose something other than coconut oil to cook them in.

Hey, Ben and Brock. I'm trying to consider strategies for healing gut permeability besides bone broth, and I'm mainly wanting to compare three products. There's the Great Lakes Gelatin, Great Lakes hydrolyzed Collagen, and Dave Asprey's upgraded collagen. So for the purpose of healing gut permeability, is it much better to take Great Lakes gelatin or Great Lakes hydrolyzed collagen? What would be the differences here, if there are any? Also, Dave states that unlike gelatin, which is damaged by heat processing, his collagen leaves the peptides intact and provides more collagen than bone broth. Do you think that the upgraded collagen will provide much more of a benefit? Thanks for any help you guys can provide.

Well, you know what the ultimate question is here, Brock?

What's that?

Which is better for getting nice supple lips if you're going to get plastic surgery, Gelatin or collagen?

Yeah, the big kissable Angelina Jolie kind of lips.

I love those. Those huge lips. Yeah, sure.

Looks like a duck face all the time.

Eggs dripping down your face, your big whips. Gelatin versus collagen.

This is an attractive moment of the entire podcast, ladies and gentlemen.

I think this is kind of confusing to some folks. So first of all, the main difference when you look at gelatin versus collagen is just the processing. So we've talked about Great Lakes gelatin before, which is the brand of gelatin you can get off Amazon. It's got like the red label on it. And then they've also got Great Lakes has this one with a green label that's called just collagen. And you'll notice if you've used these that the collagen will tend to basically dissolve in even a cold liquid pretty easily. So you can mix it in drinks and shakes and smoothies or ice cream, or, you know, put a tablespoon pretty much anywhere and it dissolves and it doesn't clump or produce this gelatinized effect. Whereas gelatin, unless you're putting it into something hot, generally what happens is as soon as it cools down, it makes a jello like effect. Hence why they call it gelatin.

Does it taste like strawberries?

E, L, L, O taste like from a qualitative standpoint, that's what they are. But basically the difference is that when you're making collagen. Let's look at Great Lakes, for example. So what Great Lakes does is they use grass fed beef and they actually source grass fed beef hides for their raw material, for their gelatin products. And the way that gelatin and collagen is made is you split the hides. And the hides is the area of an animal that's under the hair where all the collagen is. And I know this sounds really nasty, but for any of you who use collagen, whether it's Dave Asprey's upgraded collagen or Great Lakes collagen or whatever, that's where it's coming from. So if you're eating, if you're vegan or vegetarian, just know that it's an animal hide. And what happens is, for something like Great Lakes gelatin, what they do is they put that hide into what's called an alkaline solution, and they keep it in there for a number of days. And that helps the material to get broken down into smaller pieces of skin, which is, again, kind of gross to think about. So now we've got all this animal skin and it gets acid washed and then put in these little cooking kettles, and that separates the tallow from the skin from the collagen. And then what happens is they filter the collagen and they put it through what's called a vacuum evaporator. And that's actually a pretty delicate process. It's a little bit above 200 degr that it goes through this vacuum evaporator. And then after the collagen evaporates, they actually put it through this sanitation process at about 240, 250 degrees to kill off any bacteria. And at that point, that is pure collagen. And then what they do from there is they'll take the collagen and they'll turn it into what's called collagen hydrolysate. And collagen hydrolysate gets heated to even higher temperatures with this process to reduce what's called the molecular weight. And that cleaves the amino acid bonds. That's called hydrolysis. So we're using water at a high temperature to cleave all these bonds. And then it's spray dried, just like the eggs we were talking about earlier, at really high temperatures and pressures to be made into a dry powder. Now, if you want to go on and you want to have it become gelatin instead of collagen, rather than putting it through that entire process that I just described, the hydrolysis and the cleaving and the spray drying instead, what happens is it gets sent into called a votator. You ever heard of a votator before?

I have not.

A votator is one of the most commonly used food apparatuses in the US and it's kind of standard equipment in a lot of food labs. And it's basically, it allows for something to emulsify and kind of agitates it. It's basically almost like a, like a very fancy way to stir things up. So it's like one of those paint shakers kind of kind of similar. That kind of looks like that too. But basically what happens is the collagen gets sent to a votator. It's chilled, it's solidif, it's pumped onto a drying belt. And that's gelatin. So that's the difference between gelatin and hydrolysate. The primary difference being that that collagen, rather than getting broken down via hydrolysis and heat and spray drying, it just gets cooled. So technically, the gelatin undergoes a lot less processing than the hydrolysate. When we're looking at something like Great Lakes, for example, as, as a, as a product, and when you're looking at something like the upgraded collagen, Dave Asprey's upgraded collagen, well, it actually is true that that stuff is a little. It's more expensive, but it's a little bit healthier for you than the Great Lakes collagen hydrolysate. Because the upgraded collagen is broken down via an enzymatic process, they use enzymes rather than using a high amount of heat in that process that I talked about for hydrolysis. So technically, you get a product that has a little less oxidation and it's gone through a little less heat damaging. So you get a little bit better protein in that sense. And the whole reason that you'd want to use any of this stuff anyways is because of what we talked about in last week's podcast. You could go back and listen to podcast number 286, but we talked about glycine and how so many of the proteins that we eat these days, such as just basic meat from steak, it doesn't include the high amounts of, of glycine and lysine and proline that you get in collagen and gelatin and things like bone broth and bone marrow. And of course, if you can, you should eat bone broth or bone marrow as a staple of your diet rather than collagen or gelatin, just because it doesn't have Any of the processing. It doesn't need to go through this enzymatic processing, hydrolysis, any amount of heating whatsoever, et cetera. But you can't exactly put a vat of bone broth into your luggage when you hop on a plane flight to Florida. And it is sometimes not something that you might be able to go out of your way to make on a Sunday evening. And so, you know, if you just need to throw something or stir something into your smoothie really quickly to allow for benefits for your hair or your skin or your muscle or your cartilage or your ligaments or your blood cells, all of which collagen can help with, that's where it can come in handy to just add a, you know, add some collagen powder, like some collagen hydrolysate powder to a smoothie or a shake or if you want to, you know, like, my wife will make little popsicles and stuff for the kids using gelatin. So that's where these, these powders would come in handy. And I'd say, honestly, if you wanted to really choose the least processed form of collagen hydrolysate, go with upgraded collagen. If you don't want to go with that and you don't mind having the gelatin that clumps at lower temperatures, then get that Great Lakes unflavored gelatin stuff. And we'll put, we'll put links to both of those in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 287. But of course, I can't emphasize enough that the best thing that you can do for your body ultimately is to just make your own homemade bone broth. I think there's a website too, where you can order bone broth. It's like, I think it's TheBrothery.com.

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah. To me, that sounds like a porn site or something. The brothery.com. let me check here. It's important. Maybe thebrothery.com they ship anywhere in the continental United States. States. And it's homemade bone broth. So There you go. Thebrothery.com.

Hi, Ben. My name is Jen. I had a baby at the end of May. He's six weeks old now. So you can imagine I am up every three hours feeding him, whether it's day or night. So I was wondering if there's anything I can do or supplements I can take to help the little sleep that I do get to be more restorative. And likewise, if there's anything I can do or take during the day to have more energy. I also have a two year old, so taking naps while the baby naps is really not an option. Thanks for your help. Love the show, Jen.

Just sleep. Children are very hardy. They will survive when left alone for long periods of time. Babies will actually, they'll become more tough, more resilient when you just leave them alone. So go, go get your sleep, Lock yourself in your room, put your white noise app on, let your baby cry.

If you're wondering what I'm doing, I'm phoning child services right now with the other hand.

No, seriously. Even though I'm definitely a fan of the whole unstructured free play with kids, there is a serious amount of very valuable attachment that occurs when children are young, young and you do need to get up and take care of them at multiple times and it is exhausting. And the problem with of course being a new mother is that when you look at a lot of the, let's say the hacks that we talk about in this podcast like passion flower and magnesium and herbs and pulsed electromagnetic field therapy and all these things that you can do. Well, first of all, there is limited research on a lot of those things in breast milk and how much of that actually winds up in there for some of these hacks like pulse electromagnetic fields and stuff like that. You know, not a lot of evidence on that type of thing and its effect on babies. So what I think that, that Jen should focus on are natural ways to get more sleep and have more energy. And I will put a link in the show notes to the two part article series that I've written on getting better sleep, beating insomnia, managing jet lags. I've written pretty extensively about that on the podcast and I would definitely check that out if I were, if I. But a few of the things that you can do just to ensure you know whether you're a new mom or not. If you just want to use natural means without pulling out supplements or fancy biohacks to get better sleep or to have more energy, I'll give you some of my best tips.

This doesn't include quaaludes and red wine, then no.

Damn, no benzodiazepines or Phenibut. By the way, have you ever tried Phenibut for sleep?

No. Yeah, I actually don't know what that is.

It's a sleep aid that's actually used a lot of times in military situations where you got to get quick periods of deep sleep, wake up and be able to operate at a high capacity. And I actually experimented with it a couple of times this month. It's very interesting. You get this deep lucid dreaming and you wake up and you just pop out of bed and you're good to go. The problem is it's highly addictive and some, some people report beginning to experience significant mental disturbances during sleep at night, like disturbed lucid dreaming with long term use. But I experimented a couple of times with about 500 milligrams of phenibut and I did definitely sleep like a rock. Take about an hour or two before you go to bed at night, but careful with that stuff.

I want to try some of that hemp oil.

And Jen, don't take phenibut or feed it to your baby. Although hemp oil, that's another interesting one. Yeah, listen to the podcast that we did. If you're listening in, listen to the podcast that we did on, on hemp oil extract, not marijuana per se, with the mind altering effects of marijuana, which I don't have anything against. It's just something that may not need it for children or for new mothers. But yeah, check out that episode. It's interesting. So off that Segway now and back to Jen. First of all, Jen, some of the big tips I can give you. Get the room cool that you're sleeping in. The ideal range for the human body for adequate deep sleep is 65 to 70 degrees. That's one of the first things that I do when I travel and I want deep sleep. I walk into my hotel room and I turn down the temperature to 66. That's my perfect sleeping temp. And if it won't go lower than 66, I call downstairs and they send engineering up to adjust my, my thermometer because some hotels just to save on money will keep it from going lower than like 68 to 70. And it's just a quick fix like a turn of the screwdriver and they, they make it it able to go down lower than that. So I keep the room at 66 for nice cool sleeping. The next thing is if you're able to use your bedroom for sleep and sex only, that's ideal. So eliminate TVs, laptops, electronics, clutter, all of that stuff. It's just basic sleep hygiene. And I know that this might sound like boring and easy stuff, but it does make a big, big difference when make that decision not to take your laptop into your bedroom or only to allow your phone in your bedroom if it's in airplane mode. It's those Little things that add up when it comes to natural sleep and deeper amounts of sleep. Now, of course, Jen doesn't have to worry about alcohol and caffeine, but of course both of those can affect sleep as well or keep sleep from being more restorative. So be careful with that. Get yourself a nice. I like the sleep mattress sleep mask because it covers both your ears and your eyes. Keep things completely dark and you would put that on while you're asleep, Jen. And then when you have to get up and you need to take care of the baby or open the refrigerator or tool around with the lights on in the house, do two things. First of all, wear some blue light blocking glasses. Easy to find on a website like low blue lights or like the Gunnar glasses. You can get off of the Gunnar website. There's any number of blue light blocking glasses that you can get. But then also consider in your room or the light that you use as you're up and around during the night using primarily light from the red light wave spectrum. So you can get red light bulbs, you can get red light flashlights, you can get red light infrared light therapy devices, things like this off of Amazon. And you can use those as the heat or not the heat source, but the light source that you're using at night. And that's what I use. I've got a little red light bulb cost me $10 off of Amazon that I keep next to my bed at night when I need to get up during the night, use the bathroom, you know, need to get a few things done. I'm reading in my bed before I go to sleep at night. It's only red light. I don't have the, the light in my bedroom on at all. I just flip that little external red light on. And then if I need to get up and go into the kitchen or I don't have that red light or I need to open the refrigerator to have my, my midnight snack of ice cream cream. I wear my blue light blocking glasses.

You don't carry a little candle with you like Ebenezer Scrooge shuffling along in your scissors?

No, I use the blue light glasses because those actually remove all the calories from the ice cream. I think people are aware of that little biohack. Okay. A few other things that I'd recommend to you as far as sleep goes. Little things like deep breathing, breathing or meditation as well as journaling all those little woo woo things. Those can definitely help relax you more quickly and get you into deep sleep more quickly. And so something as simple as Closing your eyes and doing some box breathing, like a nice four count in, four count, hold four count out for a couple of minutes after you've gotten up.

And box breathing does not involve a box.

But by the way, no, you do not need to sit inside a little cardboard box as you do this.

Don't hold a box in front of your face.

Yes. Or anything like that. And then as far as energy goes during the day, a few of the just super duper natural things that you can do. One would be cold water. I'm a big fan of a huge glass of cold water when you wake up in the morning. And then if you need a, you know, even if you aren't able to say, like, jump into a cold shower, splash cold water on your face, which are two great ways to get rid of lethargy or being groggy. You can just drink a big glass of ice cold water. And I'm a big fan of that for naturally boosting your energy. The other thing is sunlight or blue light exposure at some point during the day can help out quite a bit. So you can just like you can get red light devices, you can get blue light devices that emit blue light at certain points throughout the day, such as in the morning when you get up. If you live in a gray area like Seattle or Portland or Siberia or Alaska or something. When I. Winnipeg or Winnipeg. And then the other thing that you could do is get out in the sunlight when, when you are up, let's say you've, let's say you've gotten four hours of sleep because you've been up and down with the baby. You wake up, it's whatever, let's say it, you know, it's, it's 6:30am, you're tired, but you got to get on with your day. You got to take care of that two year old. You need to get up and, and get ready to take care of the baby once they wake up. Get out in the sunlight, just go outside, stand out there in your bare feet for a few minutes as you drink your glass of cold water. And you can skip the coffee, you can skip the caffeine, skip the energy drinks, skip the smart drugs and just use some of those natural techniques. And I know that we talk about the herbs and the drugs and the electronics and stuff like that on this podcast, but I mean some of those things, just keeping the room cool, relaxing, de stressing, having good sleep, hygiene, drinking some cold water water, getting some sunlight exposure, those are some natural ways that you can get better sleep and have more energy. And those are great too, because they're not going to affect your kids. They're not going to affect your breast milk. So those are some of the things that I do.

Hey, Ben, I have a question. I have a new personal trainer. He's suggesting I use the foam roller thing, and it hurts when I foam a roll. But he says after a while it won't hurt anymore. And that's benefit will outweigh the pain I'm going through from rolling with the foam roller. So I wanted your opinion on it.

Thank you, Joe. It does get easier.

It does get easier, Joe.

It really, really does. It gets worse before it gets easier, before it gets better. It does get better.

It'll hurt like a mother before it gets easier, Joe.

And you look like an idiot while you're getting used to it, too, because you're spazzing out on the floor, falling off your leg.

Yeah. As you grimace and hump that foam roll roller. So foam rolling is something that I personally do at least twice a week. Brock is one of the athletes that I coach. He knows that foam rolling appears as a requirement on his schedule at least a couple of times a week. And that's typically a full body foam rolling session. We don't even mess around with those foam rollers that you see at the gym. We go straight to this one called the rumble roller, which has all these sharp pointy ridges coming off it, which just make it all the more masochistic.

It's actually made of ice iron. It's not foam at all. It's an iron roller.

Yeah. And if you push the little button on the side, little needles come out of the ridges just to enhance that effect, make you all the more tough. So basically it starts with trigger points. Trigger points are these knots that form in your muscles, and a common example of that would be like your IT band on the outside of your leg. If you have a trigger point in that muscle and you're foam rolling your IT band, it causes this pain and discomfort to kind of radiate up your hip or, or even all the way down your leg while you're. While you're rolling. You know, it'll sometimes radiate literally like down to your feet. And the reason that you're doing the foam rolling is to get rid of a lot of these trigger points to release them. Now when you just stretch, that doesn't release muscle tightness. It doesn't release trigger points. And if you imagine like a rope with a knot tied into it, and then you stretch that Rope. Rope. All it does is it creates tension and it makes that knot even tighter. So what foam rolling does is it breaks up muscle knots with direct pressure and with direct tension. So you get a. It resumes basic normal blood flow, oxygen delivery, nutrient delivery that would normally be interrupted to a muscle tissue, as well as allowing for increased range of motion that you normally wouldn't get because of the formation of those knots. Knots. So when you compress something, it's basically just like tenderizing meat. Just like taking out a steak and hitting it with a hammer, rolling it with a rolling pin, it's going to be more tender and more supple. But that process does hurt because trigger points are these knotted areas of connective tissue and fascial adhesions. And there's nerve fibers that are getting hit, and there's pressure. Your body. Your body interprets pressure in a very similar way as it interprets pain. These nociceptors are stimulated along with pressure receptors in very similar ways. So you can feel pain and pressure as the same sensation often. And so you know, the more foam rolling that you do, and this is going to sound really simple, but the fewer trigger points you're going to have, the more connective tissue suppleness you're going to have, and the less it's going to hurt as time goes on. But you will have periods of time that you go through in your life where no matter how much you foam roll, you'll finish a long run and you're going to have fascial adhesions, you're going to have knots, you're going to have triggers, trigger points that simply are going to hurt no matter what. And I have certain areas of my body that I know even though I foam roll twice a week, if I've done a tough workout, they're always going to hurt. Usually it's the outside of my hips, my piriformis on the. On the front of my leg a little bit, sometimes the underside of my armpit if I've been swimming a lot.

But it's not even a hard workout. Like, after a day of sitting at a desk, working on a computer, it really hurts to roll out my shoulders and my neck.

Yep, exactly. And you also need to consider that this is something that you need to be in for the long run, because it can take literally a year and a half to two years to realign connective tissue and realign fascia. That's why, for example, if you start weight training and you stop your weight training program, or you stop certain exercises, you're never going to get very good at those specific movements. Movements especially things like deadlifts and squats and overhead presses. You have to have done those consistently in your workout routine for a year and a half or two before your body actually starts to become extremely efficient at those movements. And it's the same with, with something like fascial adhesions or fascial quality. It takes a long time for fascia to realign. And the longer you've been beating up your body with things like running or cycling or poor posture on your computer at work, the longer it's going to take to realign and retrain that fascia. So foam rolling is something that you'll be in for the long haul. But yes, it eventually does start to get a little bit easier to move over and around a foam roller. And eventually the general pain and general hurt the whole time is replaced by a little bit more of a therapeutic feeling with a few little grimaces here and there as you hit certain knots. So ultimately, what I do, if you go to YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness you will be able to type in foam roller and you'll see some of my key foam rolling exercises, me demonstrating them, the specific moves that I like to do as kind of like staples in my program. So, you know, my protocol is pretty much I foam roll twice a week for 15 to 20 minutes. When I travel, I travel with a lacrosse ball. And because I travel about one to two weeks for any given month, I will use that period of time to hit deeper areas or areas that the foam roller can't get. And then when I get back home, I get back into the foam rolling process. Practice. But I just used basically those two methods of deep tissue therapy. The reason it hurts is because you're releasing fascia and you're hitting some of those knots. And it does get easier.

This is KJ from nj. What is more sanitary, the water fountain or the water faucet at the gym? I've heard a lot of people say you shouldn't drink out of the water fountain. I'm wondering if I were to use the water from the water faucet in the locker room, whether that would be better from a sanitation standpoint. Love your show. Look forward to your reply. Thanks.

KJ is definitely one of those guys who doesn't put his mouth right on the water fountain. I'm guessing I do.

I literally get right down to that water. I like them. I like the metallic taste.

I like to pretend it's a nipple.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, that's a little messed up. There may be some Freudian issues going on there that you need to work.

I shouldn't have said that.

So they've actually looked at the sanitation and the amounts of bacteria on water fountains and come up with some shocking amounts of bacteria. Like more bacteria than the surface of a toilet seat when you're looking at like the spigot of some of these fountains. So what they actually did in one study was back in 2005, the National Sanitation foundation tested various areas around two different elementary schools for bacteria content. And they found that the most bacteria laden area in the entire school wasn't the bathroom, but the water fountain. So the water fountain had 2.7 million bacteria cells per square inch, which was like thousands more than any other area they tested. And that came in number one. Toilet, incidentally, came in number eight. I'm not sure what all was in between the water fountain and the toilet. I'm sure maybe other children or books or the floor were probably mixed in there somewhere. But ultimately, water fountain ruled as number one. And then there was a more informal study that kind of hit the news a few years ago. This was actually back in 2007, where this elementary school student tested four different water fountains and one toilet around the school using cotton swabs and petri dishes. Dishes. And it kind of backed up the results from the National Sanitation Foundation. It showed that the fountains had way more bacteria than the toilets. And the toilets were actually surprisingly clean. So then there was one other study that was done where they looked at supermarkets and looked at the floors of supermarkets, and they also tested parks and park sandboxes. And what they found was that water fountains in both parks as well as supermarkets had more bacteria than the floors and these sandboxes boxes. So the interesting thing here is that when you look at the actual water itself and you test the water coming out of the fountain, it's relatively free of bacteria because the water comes out of that spout in like this arc, and that prevents it from actually touching the spigot. When you look at a water cooler where the water goes straight down, down, and they've tested the water from water coolers, that actually has a higher bacterial content because typically people put their water bottles or their glasses right up against that spigot, which is pouring downwards and is actually probably cleaned less than the spigot of a water fountain. And you get the most bacteria in the actual water that you're drinking from like an office water cooler than you would from an upward spouting. Water filter fountain. So ultimately I drink from the water fountain at the gym. I don't use that little water cooler that pours down into my water bottle that a lot of gyms have nowadays. I use the water fountain. I don't wrap my wrap mouth around the metallic spigot. I make sure I let the water run for about five seconds before I start to drink from the, from the, the spout of water that's coming out. And ultimately, ultimately, like, I don't worry about it too, too much. You know, there is this whole healthy hygiene hypothesis too, to where if we live life in a bubble, we're never getting exposed to bacteria and our immune systems are never going to develop. But ultimately, even the water fountains do have a lot of germs on them. The actual water itself is not that big of a deal. And you know what's more annoying to me? This is like my pet peeve at the water. So we've got two water fountains at a our gym. We've got the normal one and the one that's low, like the one that's kind of sorta for kids. I don't know for kids or short people or whatever. And I will walk up to the water fountain and there will be a line of people waiting for the water fountain that's at normal height. And nobody wants to bend down. Reminder, this is at the fricking gym. Nobody wants to bend down and drink from the short water fountain. Nobody wants to squat down at the gym and drink from the lower water fountain. So I always go up to the.

Water fountain elevator at the gym.

Gym. Yeah, it's. It's nuts. That's my, that's my big pet peeve. I'm just like. Or, or I'll be drinking from the tall water fountain because I'll walk up and if I have a choice, I'll go for the tall one if there's nobody in line there and people will start to stand up in line behind me and give me these looks like hurry up when the short water fountain is sitting right there. So yeah, it's my pet peeve. It's my rant for the day. Drink from the. Drink from the short fountain people.

I get way more angry with the people who push the handicapped wheelchair button on the door doors.

Yeah.

When they're clearly not handicapped or have any issues at all. That's the ultimate lazy move.

That too. Although I do ashamed of themselves. I, I use the handicap bathroom at airports because I go into those bathrooms and, and squat. I do workouts in Them. And I am that guy who is using the handicap bathroom for workouts.

And that's okay, as long as there's no handicap. People waiting.

There has been one crossing their legs.

And dancing where I walked out of.

The bathroom after doing my. My push ups and my squats and my jumping jacks. And there was a lady there with her two kids in the stroller crying, giving me this. This really annoyed look as I came out of the bathroom and was obviously a. A young, fit dude using the handicap bathroom at the airport. And I felt bad for a little while, but I still do it.

I'm sure you and the lady both got over it quite quickly.

Yes. Anyway, speaking of the handicapped bathroom, at airports, we have swag to give out for people.

Yes. And that's very related.

No clue how that sedgeway actually works.

But by the way, we got two emails now wanting to correct you. It's pronounced segue.

Segue. What did I say?

Sedgwe.

That's because I read. I don't actually talk to people. I just read. So I pronounce words in my head for the time we get. For the longest time. For the longest time, when I. When I was reading, I would read the word misled as miseled. And I talked to people when I was in high school. For the longest time, I would use this word mizled. I'd be like, he totally miseled us. Like, what do you mean miseled? And eventually I learned that it is actually pronounced misled. But that's. That's how bad I am with reading words versus saying them.

This is the danger of being antisocial.

Yeah. Okay, so segue. First of all, gear. You can support this podcast if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com gear and for $47, you get this awesome tech T shirt that's not this big cotton tent, but an actual cool exercise T shirt that looks good on you. It makes your body looks better. You actually don't need to exercise, by the way, if you wear the Ben Greenfield Fitness T shirt, you just put on the T shirt.

Extremely slimming.

Exactly. You can put on the T shirt over a bikini and people will tell you you have an awesome body. It even does that. So you also get a guilt free bpa. Free Ben Greenfield fitness water bottle that you can drink eggs from. And you get a sweet beanie. We bypassed the hat and we went straight to the beanie, which looks awesome.

Which you can store eggs in.

That's right. So you can get all that over@bengreedlefitness.com get gear and support the show. When you do that, and it does indeed support the show. We gotta pay for bandwidth, we gotta pay for hosting fees. And for $47 you get that pack and you get awesome swag and you support the show. But you also can get free swag just sent to you if you leave a review on itunes and we read your review on the podcast. So we have some swag to give away right now to somebody who left us a review on on itunes. So you want to dig in, Brock?

Yeah, it's an incredibly short but sweet review this week by Peggle Pack.

Peggle Pack says almost named my kids Peggle Pack. My wife calls me Peggle Pack. Come here, Peggle Pack.

Anyway, very informative podcast. I really like how he takes the time to create a special webpage for each podcast with with links, notes and Q and A answers.

Yeah, well, Brock and I actually tag team that. I'd like to take all the credit for that. But you know what, that's what a lot of people I think if you're listening in, you may not realize this, but we go through painstakingly long efforts to create enormously helpful show notes for you. And we link to each of those show notes with the number for the podcast. So like right now, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/287, I've got everything from some of the collagen links to the foam roller, to my two part series on getting better sleep, to all the studies that we talked about, to the cartoon on running like we let you be super lazy. You just go there and click away. Just click, click, click, click, click.

Just click until your heart's content clicking frenzy.

And that's all over on the show notes.

And what's even better, if you wait a couple of weeks after the show has been around for a while, you can go to the those same show notes and click on a link to a transcript of everything that we said.

That's right. We take care of you, our valued listeners. So check that out and thank you, Pago pack. Email Ben greenfieldfitness.com and we'll get a pack of swag out for you to pickle Pack of Swag Pack along with your Peggles. I pack an impressive Peggle as long.

As they're gluten free. Peggles.

Mm, that's right. So the last thing that I wanted to mention other than that is I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, but I'm going to mention it again because it's a podcast. I've been digging quite a bit recently. I don't talk about a lot of other podcasts on this show because of course ours is the best, but there's another podcast that's a close second. It's my friend Jordan's Art of Charm podcast. And it's not just about seducing women. Women. Although I'm sure you could probably find a little bit of information on there about seducing women. Sorry, my apologies to the ladies listening in. I'm kind of joking. It actually doesn't have any of that kind of stuff on it at all, despite the name. It's about how both men and women can be more charming. And it's got a bunch of resources and practical tips and drills to do things like manage relationships and network and take your life to the next level in pretty much every area except for health. That's where I come in. So go check out the Art of Charm podcast. It's somewhere on itunes. I'll let you take it from there. But I'm. I'll bet you can hunt it down with the information I've just given you. So, Art of Charm. Check that out and go have some eggs.

Definitely. I need some more eggs.

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