How the LA Lakers, The Boston Red Sox & Over 104 Other Professional Teams Are Maximizing Recovery.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And a few weeks ago I heard about this new device that could do things like generate new blood vessels and remove waste from muscles more efficiently, maximize flow of your lymph fluid throughout your body to help out your immune system and train your muscle fibers to actually fire with really kind of laser like precision. So when I got my hands on this device that does this, which is called a Mark Pro, I decided I needed to actually do a podcast about it. So what I have or who I have on the call is the president of markpro to explain to us exactly what this thing is, how it works, how this type of electrical muscle stimulation device is different than some of the other things that we've talked about before on the podcast and how exactly it is that you can use it. So Ryan Haney is my guest today and Ryan, thanks for coming on the call.

Yeah, you're welcome. Happy to be here, Ben.

So, Ryan, let's go ahead and start here. What exactly is the story behind this Mark Pro device?

Well, our background was really in the medical field and my family had actually started the business many years ago and had seen a lot of success in a lot of different medical areas. But sports medicine had been a big part of that. And a lot of the pro athletes using the device for injuries and things like post op rehab started reporting back to us that they weren't just waiting till they were hurt, they weren't just waiting for those serious issues like post operative situations, but were using it just to feel good afterwards on the buses, on the plane ride home, in the hotel rooms. And that pushed us to consider developing a new product and a whole new division and a new company. And in 2011, we started Mark Pro and launched the product that is solely focused on sports performance, recovery, conditioning. It's not intended to be used as a medical device or a replacement for what an orthopedic surgeon is going to do, but can have a lot of success with anywhere from a recreational athlete to, again, the pro athlete.

Got it. So walk me through this, what is it and how does it work? Because I've actually got it sitting here in front of me and it's like this handheld controller and you've got some wires you attach to it. But what exactly is it?

Yeah, it's certainly a form of electrical stimulation. And there's wires that go to the electrodes that stick on your skin. And no doubt the device comes with an instruction booklet that really gives some guidelines on where to put the electrodes for all different parts of the body. But at simplest form, you're saying, hey, what are the muscles that are tired, sore, fatigued? What's my weak link? An area that I really want to improve. I want it to be able to last longer before it starts to give out and break down. And you really put the electrodes on that area and turn the dial on and go. The application is really simple.

Gotcha.

As far as what the device is doing, it's using muscle activation, muscle contractions to get the circulatory system going to bring in oxygenated blood and nourishment. And that same muscle activation is getting the lymphatic system going to remove the waste, the garbage. All the byproduct that you don't want there. That's of course causing some of the tightness, soreness, and also slowing down recovery.

So are there any effects that you've seen or that you guys have studied on elements like performance or strength, or is this just basically to increase blood flow and lymph flow and kind of stop there?

Yeah, good question. No doubt the basis of recovery is the movement of nourishment waste. I mean, that, you know, Mark Pro isn't mystically or magically doing anything. That's how your body recovers. It slowly gets rid of the waste, brings in nourishment, the oxygenated blood that your body needs to recover. We just greatly speed that up. Now, are we going to make you stronger directly? No, we're not one of those devices that's claiming to give you six pack abs while you're sitting on the couch or build muscle. Now with that said, okay, I'm going.

To hang up right now. Then.

With that said, there was a study published in the Journal of Exercise Physiology and it took folks that were doing strength training, weight training programs, and gave half of them Marc Pro. Half of them did not have Marc Pro. And they were all doing identical strength training programs. Same amount of time, same, you know, instruction, same everything. The groups were randomized and the people who had Marc Pro actually got significantly greater strength gains than the people that did not have Marc Pro. And the people had MarcPro were using it, I think two or three nights a week, and then they were training two or three times a week. Week. And we certainly are not going to sit there and believe or even try to pitch that Mark Pro made him stronger. But what happened is when you don't fully recover between your trainings, your results are compromised. When you're lifting weights, training, you're breaking everything down you get, you actually gain the strength during the recovery phase.

Yeah.

So because these folks that had the Mark Pro could more fully recover between their trainings, it allowed their trainings to be more successful and therefore they did have better strength gains. So indirectly, it can certainly be a valuable tool, but it's certainly not gonna bulk you up or build strength with it on.

Okay, so you say that MARC stands for Muscle Activated Recovery Cascade. Can you explain from kind of like a physiological standpoint what that means and how it works?

Sure. We wanted to to know what Mark Pro is doing. With our background in medical devices, we certainly know that science matters and people want to know why something's working. So we actually went and did the research. Wake Forest University did a number of studies on the mechanisms. What is it actually doing to the body? And when we did that, we kind of found and proved that when you apply the stimulation, it's somehow affecting nitric oxide, the neurotransmitter that's then causing blood vessels in the region to dilate. That then in turn is causing significantly increased blood flow. Also, the muscle activation then is going to be causing the lymphatic system to get going as well. And then when used regularly in the research, it was for a few weeks, five days a week. When used regularly, there was measured formation, significant formation of additional new blood vessels. So we just kind of saw that as a series of things that happens, or we call that a cascading series of things that happened when you start using marcpro. And that's where the acronym came from. So it all starts with muscle activation or muscle contraction. So a muscle activated recovery cascade, or the cascading series of events that occur when you use marcpro.

Got it. Okay. So when I first got this, I've used other electrical muscle stimulation devices in the past, and I was having a really hard time kind of wrapping my head around why this would be any different than any other form of electrical muscle stimulation. But the way that I understand it is that there are different ways that you can actually stimulate a muscle. Can you kind of go into the different ways that EMS works and what exactly is used in the Mark Pro, as far as the specific waveforms used to contract the muscle?

Sure. Even though it's not technically muscle stimulation. I'll just quickly throw up the TENS thing, because so many people know about tens, chiropractors or therapists and tens.

You mean like the pain control devices?

Exactly. Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation is a TENS device. And they're the most common, cheapest devices out there. And you know, real quickly, those are intended simply to send an electrical signal through the skin to block or mask pain signals. There's no rehabilitative benefits. There's no recovery benefits. There's nothing happening except masking the pain signal. And obviously that's not what Mark Pro wants to do. And athletes typically don't want to mask pain because that's just going to lead to potentially more injury because you have no guarding ability. When you jump over to muscle stimulators. Traditional muscle stimulators, especially the types that therapists use and kind of in the medical field, which is most of the products out there, are really based on those medical muscle stimulators. They were all really designed for muscle reeducation primarily. So people who were immobilized because of injury or casting, whatever it may be, their muscles atrophied, deteriorated, and then you're trying to use a muscle stimulator to help bring back that muscle tone. And there's detailed things that therapists are doing with patients to help use a muscle stimulator in that regard. And it works for that. It's good for that. The problem is those muscle stimulators all create a relatively harsh muscle contraction. It really grabs a muscle. We use the word ketonize, which is kind of like cramping the muscle. It fully contracts it and holds it at that full contraction for a certain amount of time, releases it, and it's rather harsh. It could be rather uncomfortable. And after a relatively short period of time, it starts to fatigue the muscle. Now, that's not bad at all. When you're trying to do muscle reeducation, or if you are trying to help bring muscle tone back, you actually want that similar to weight training, you want to break the muscle down. It needs to get fatigued to build it back up. But if you're talking about recovery or to improve conditioning, that's kind of a little contrary to what you want to accomplish. If you're really fatigued and you put a traditional muscle stimulator later on, you're going to be more fatigued afterwards. You're not going to feel refreshed. So what makes Mark Pro really unique is the ability to get still Very, very strong muscle contractions, but do that without any energy requirements, without any stress, very comfortably and with no fatigue whatsoever.

And how exactly does that work? Like, how is it different?

And it's a different set of electrical parameters. And there are, to be fair too, there are some recovery devices out there that have gotten closer to that regard, that do have recovery modes that won't fatigue in the short run. And they are better than the medical muscle stimulators out there. But their root technology, and this is going to answer your question, is still kind of based on that medical technology, and it still has a relatively harsh signal.

Is that the signal that's called the static square waveform signal?

That's really the root of it, the part of it most devices kind of have just this very kind of old school waveform. The signal is either completely on or completely off at any moment. So the signal turns on, stays on for a certain amount of time, and then instantly turns off.

So as far as the actual muscle is concerned, what does that mean for the muscle?

Well, it in itself isn't everything. It does mean that it's a bit harsh. It grabs that muscle, it fully contracts it, it holds it for some amount of time and then it instantly goes off. And just to compare that, when you use the waveform of MachPro, which we call dynamic waveform or an exponentially decaying waveform, is it, it contracts, it grabs a muscle, and the second it hits its kind of peak energy, it immediately and instantly starts a smooth exponential decay down to zero. And just kind of intuitively you can kind of just envision that and say, gosh, that just sounds more relaxing and nicer to contract the muscle and slowly release it, contract again and kind of slowly let it go as opposed to that harsh on, off. But maybe more than that. The waveform allowed other parameters to be tinkered with. And really the biggest is one called pulse duration. And that's when the signal goes on. How long is it on for? And, and these are small numbers, but they make big differences. And our pulse duration, Mark Prose Pulse duration is really, really, really long. There's not a single device, whether it's in the medical field or out of the medical field, that uses a pulse duration as long as ours and what that allows for. If you're trying to contract muscle, you want to get the best recruitment possible. You want to get those really difficult muscle fibers to contract, those little small muscle fibers that surround the lymphatic vessel that of course you're trying to stimulate, to pump that waste out not just a superficial contraction. It might look really big, but is it really getting all the different types of fibers you want? And the longer that pulse duration is, that means you're getting more energy through the skin into that tissue and a greater level of recruitment. And the waveform kind of allows for that, as opposed to being forced to use high voltage and frequency, which is traditionally how devices get power. We use really long or high pulse durations and allows us to get a lot of power, but without the harshness that comes with high voltage.

So how would you actually use it? Let's say I go out for a workout, run, bike ride, weight training session, whatever. Do you hook it up right after? Is this something that you would use the next day? I mean, what's kind of the best practice to get the most bang for your buck out of this thing?

The best time is as soon as possible. You know, when you build up waste and congestion over time, it just kind of gets to keep it conceptual thicker, even though that might not be a technical term. So it's easier to get rid of it sooner, but you don't have to. No doubt you could wake up the next morning and realize you're really sore and hook it up at that time. But the best time would be as soon as you can after working out. A lot of times it's that evening. You want to do it when you're relaxed, you know, when you're sitting on the couch, maybe reading or watching TV or doing your computer work is a great time. So that evening.

Okay, gotcha. And do you generally leave it on for like 15, 20, 30? I mean, because that's one thing I notice is there's not necessarily a specific time frame when I turn it on.

And that's something we, you know, some devices have those kind of cookie cutter programs and they make us laugh a little bit because, you know, recovery can't happen, let's say in 22 minutes. That's unrealistic. And it can't always be 22 minutes. You know, if you're really out of shape and you did something huge, you might need hours to recover. If you're an elite athlete and you didn't do something that was that big of a deal that day, you might recover in 15 minutes. And it's impractical to think it's some cookie cutter formula, but generally speaking, we say a 30 to 60 minute session can get really noticeable results and is reasonable. It's not asking a lot now, no doubt, though, it's if you are really trashed after A really tough workout, you might use it two hours if you're sitting down watching a two hour movie anyway, you might as well keep it on. It'll only help more. It never hits a point where it becomes fatiguing or stressful to the body. You can keep it on for hours straight if it needs to, but you typically wouldn't need to do it that often.

So who's using this thing in terms of athletes or teams?

Gosh, I think we're over now 100 teams in the four major sports. I think there's only four major league baseball teams that don't use it and then over half the teams, the NFL, NHL and NBA. So no doubt that's a big niche. And then we have a lot of athletes in a lot of other sports, a lot of elite crossfitters, a lot of the riders of UnitedHealthcare Pro Cycling are using it. We have a, a top amateur team, the Mark Pro Strava team, our own cycling team that uses it. And you know, everything from Louis Vito, the pro snowboarder to Apollo Ono, who now is kind of phasing out but still doing his speed skating and everyone in between.

Yeah, that's what kind of actually impressed me when I went over your website was the number of folks that are actually using it. And I've experimented with a lot of electrical muscle stimulation devices. I've used devices for everything from strength and power to recovery. And even though this thing doesn't deliver that huge pack of electrical stimulation that you'd use for a strength training session, for example, you definitely feel, I guess it must be the difference in the waveform between it and some of the other devices as far as it doesn't feel uncomfortable at all for your muscles as you put it on. So if you're kind of iffy about getting into electrical muscle stimulation, I think this is a good one as well.

So yeah, no doubt by not trying to do any of the strength stuff because we just believe in the end resistance exercise is going to be the best for that. But that root technology really just is focused on being what's the very best thing for moving, nourishment and weight. And that is so key to recovery. And there's also those other sides that I didn't necessarily hit on. But you know, that's also what you want to use for a warm up. When you want to warm up a muscle, you want to get it activating, you want to, you want to move nourishment, waste, bring in that oxygen without of course causing any fatigue because it's pre training or pre competition. So Marcro has often used. I know a number of our pro baseball pitchers use it as part of their warm up regimen. And then we didn't fully talk about it. But conditioning, it's not just about recovery. We don't necessarily want to wait until you're sore and then use MarkPro to make you feel better if you know you have a weak link. I've definitely had runners who say, I just know my knees at five miles, they start to bother me or my hamstring tightens up at mile seven. It could be your traps, could be your low back, could be anywhere. You don't want to wait until it gets really sore and use MarkPro to recover. You want to say, hey, can I proactively address this? Let me use MyMarkPro three times a week on that weak link, whatever that may be. And by improving the vascularity, the number of vessels in that region. Once you do that, which will happen with regular use now, that region of the body has more capacity. It has the capacity and ability to bring in more nourishment, more oxygenated blood, which means that region, those muscles can do more before they break down.

So you could technically use it just to like increase muscle awareness for a muscle that's, that's not working properly or that needs to be trained.

Certainly, certainly. And you know, a lot of times a runner would say, I have tons of vessels. Obviously, when you start running or whatever sport you do, you're going to create tons of angiogenesis all on your own. So why do I need Mark Pro to create more? Well, the challenge is if you have this weak link, this trouble spot, you can't say, well, I'm going to run more or ride more or ski more or whatever sport it may be to get more conditioning because that's putting too much stress on your body, you'll end up getting hurt. So that's the kind of beauty and the uniqueness of Mark Pro is it can keep shoving more oxygenated blood into that area, moving the waste. Tell your body to kind of spur the conditioning effect, which is increased vascularity. But do all of that without any stress in the body, without any fatigue, without any energy requirements.

Gotcha. Now, can you wear this or use it while you're working out? Could I put it on or are people doing this? Put it on my legs, for example, and do a set of squats to enhance muscle utilization. Or if I've got a hamstring quad imbalance and my hammies are too strong Could I put it on my vastus medialis on my inner quad muscles and have those firing while I'm doing a lunge hold or a squat hold or something like that?

Yeah, that's not something that marcpro is really set up for. I mean you probably could do that and there's people that I think have tinkered with that, but generally speaking, no, it's really meant to be used as a recovery conditioning, warm up tool in a relaxed position because as soon as you start resisting against the contraction. So like if you're not relaxed or if you're moving around standing with it on and it's contracting your legs by resisting against that contraction, now your muscles are doing work. So again, if you were trying to use it as a strength building tool, you know, sure, it might add extra resistance if you were doing physical movements with it on.

I was thinking about like increasing muscle awareness during an exercise, like that type of thing.

That's not something it's typically been used for, but you will end up having some degree of fatigue if you are resisting the contraction.

Gotcha.

And that's certainly not the core goal. If you want to increase vascularity, if you want to get rid of waste for recovery, if you want to warm up during all those things, you're not really looking to cause muscle fatigue.

Okay.

And that's why we would generally recommend doing it in a real relaxed position.

Okay, cool. Well what I'm going to do for folks who want to check this out more is I know that you got are giving our listeners a discount, specifically a $32 discount on the Mark Pro at markpro.com if you use the discount code. Ben. Now the other thing I notice is you guys have a payment plan because like a base device is what for the, for the total cost?

Yeah. The retail price is 650. So if you use the discount code ends up being $617.

Okay. And you can pay like 50 bucks a month or something like that.

And that's what's great, $54 a month or it turns into about 50, $51 a month, which just makes it really easy and reasonable. And there's a money back guarantee too, whether you buy it all at once or whether you make payments if for some reason you're not happy. You know, we want people to be satisfied and be seeing results with the product.

Got it. Alright, awesome. So the discount code is Ben saves you 32 bucks on this thing over@markpro.com I'll put some more resources in the show notes too to previous podcasts that we've done on electrical muscle stimulation if you want to learn a little bit more about it. So that being said, Ryan, thanks for coming on the call today, man.

Thank you, Ben. Really appreciate it.

All right, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Ryan from markpro.com signing out.

From BenGreenfieldFitness.com visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

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