How To Get Strong As A Bull (And Then Get Ripped), Cold Thermogenesis Quick Tips, How Often Should You Poop, And Much More.

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, how to get strong as a bull and then get ripped, how to get better results from cold thermogenesis, what to do about excessive sweating, how often should you poop, the best natural skin care strategies, and how to get rid of a bone spur without surgery.

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

I'm going to interrupt Brock before he even has a chance to say anything at all because he usually is the first person to talk in these episodes.

I do. I usually blurt something out.

But I gotta tell you, just, just to give you a little insider sneak peek of what goes on before we record, I so far have been filled in that Brock took a giant dump this morning. He has. He has almond skin in his teeth and he's drinking decaf coffee right now.

Yeah.

So. So just to paint a picture for you guys, that was nice that you.

Aired my shame for me.

Yes, no problem. Anytime, my friend. Anytime. Awkward silence in podcast. I guess that that was our. Our awkward silence moment. Speaking of awkward silence, I'm about There's.

Gonna be a serious awkward silence when Ben goes up into the wilderness to practice his zombie apocalypse skills.

That's right. I'm going total awol. So for all of you podcast listeners and folks who ask me questions online and stuff, you may notice some amount of absence on my part, especially from responding to personal emails because I'm going to a five day wilderness survival camp in the backwoods of Colorado, somewhere with no phone and no Internet and I'll come back out with squirrels growing out of my beard. I guess squirrels would be more appropriately living in my beard, not growing out of my beard.

I like the image of them growing out of your beard though. It just seems more like just sort of I can see their little arms pushing their faces out of your beard.

Giving my face giving birth to squirrels. So there's another intense visual for our listeners and we have a jam packed podcast this week because we're gonna just be doing a special episode next week. Considering the fact that I can't record too well when I'm living at Bear Cave or wherever I'll be so the.

Squirrels will bat at your microphone too.

Much, we'll be sure to give you a special report though, if I decide I want to return to post Industri America after I spend a few days in the trees.

Yeah. What if you never come back?

Could happen. Could happen.

Yeah, it could. I guess I'll take over.

Yep, you can.

You can knock out everybody. Bad advice coming every out everywhere.

Have my kids, you can have my wife, you can have my dog. And I will. I'll be out in the cabin in the woods somewhere. So there you go.

News flashes.

All right, go over to audiblepodcast.com Ben audiblepodcast.com Ben and you can sign up for your free Audible membership and get yourself a free book. And I know, Ben, you talked about this book over at Daily Apple.

Yeah, I did, I did. I recently wrote a blog post over at Mark's Daily Apple, which is a really good website. Mark's cool, patent pending. It's called Top 10 Rules for Becoming an Ancestral Athlete. And in that article, I talk about this book called Antifragile by Nassim Talib, who I actually Antifragile.

So that's strong, not fragile. It's an interesting way to phrase it.

It's. The subtitle is Things that Gain from Disorder and it's pretty cool. It just teach about how things like air conditioning and heat in modern living and health and biology and medicine and all of this stuff is basically making us weak and how to make yourself strong. Audiblepodcast.com Ben describes it as erudite and witty. And what does erudite mean again?

I think that word basically sums up making us weak.

Ah, wait, erudite does really?

Well, not really. Erudite is somebody who's well read, well.

Learned, very clever, and yes, well, erudite and witty. I'm not going even to pretend that I came up with that phrase. Talib's message is revolutionary. That's what. That's what Audible says about it. So either way, good listen for you. Check it out. It'll be a good book that will just blow your mind. And speaking of blowing your mind, an article came out, I think it was on the New York Times websites. Although I also saw.

Are we doing this in the wrong order? Did I jump into special announcements when I should have gone into news flashes?

You did. But you make mistakes. We all make mistakes.

You know, I'm glad now that you told everybody that I was drinking decaf coffee because that explains what's going on in my brain.

And I love how in today's podcast, I love how in today's podcast we're doing zero editing. We're just kind of like talking over all our mistakes. So maybe we'll just do that the whole time.

Sometimes we realize we're doing something wrong and we'll actually go back. But yeah, I don't think this week, this isn't one of those weeks.

Not gonna happen. I actually have to go to the doctor right after this podcast for that for a special heart scan.

Oh yeah, your stress test.

Yeah. I'm gonna go see what 10 years of extreme endurance exercise has done to my heart. So stay tuned for some feedback on that. But anyways, that means that we have to churn out this podcast in time for me to hop in my truck and drive to the doctor's office.

Okay, so let's go back to news flashes then and continue on as if I didn't put us into special announcements.

Meanwhile, chopping wood boosts your testosterone more than playing sports. And this was pretty cool study. A guy named Dr. Ben Trumbull studied a bunch of forager slash farmers in the Bolivian Amazon. I'm not really sure exactly what a forager farmer is, but I can only imagine. And they tested.

I'm sure he has squirrels growing out of his beard.

He must. They tested their, these guys saliva after they played soccer and then after they had chopped down trees while clearing the jungle to grow crops. And at that point I kind of realized while reading why they chose this group because how many people on the face of the planet both know how to play soccer?

Both of those things.

And chop down trees to clear jungle to grow crops.

Exactly.

Hence Bolivia. So what they found was that there was a significantly higher release of or concentration of salivary testosterone after chopping the wood. Specifically doing something that would kind of be considered providing for the family or something engaged in food or economic productivity versus simply playing sports. Both result in a spike in performance. But the, the, the spike in or the spike from chopping wood is higher.

So what they didn't mention was that they were playing soccer against 10 year old girls.

That's right. That's right. This, this actually inspired my workout last night though. And it's why I'm sore right now. I have one of those battle maces from on it which is designed to really give you a really good workout that's similar to what you get from like a kettlebell workout. But one of the exercises you can do with the giant battle mace is wood chopping against a giant rubber tire. And so I swing the battle mace up over my head while my five year old boy Stand there watching me and cheering me on. And I hit the big rubber tire as many times as I can. And that is a really, really good workout. I gotta tell you, if you're just gonna go out and do one thing and it's a little bit cathartic too, so I bet.

Do you switch sides like one side, One chop on the left, one chop on the right, back and forth.

I go five and five just to, just to kind of, kind of spread the workout through my, through my body evenly. And this is also why. And I'm, I'm actually in the process of building a home right now that's kind of out in the middle of nowhere on 10 acres more so in washing more hippie action from Ben. And I'm putting a wood stove into that home. And when I was at the Paleo FX conference last year, I listened into a really interesting discussion by a biohacker named Josh Whiten, who actually lives as ancestrally as possible, I think in the. Somewhere in like Brooklyn or somewhere in New York City. Ish.

That seems difficult.

He, he's a huge fan of these modern, traditional, modern, traditional, modern wood stoves where you're. Where air enters the burning chamber from multiple conduits that are kind of built throughout the stove and they have these panels that reflect heat back at the wood and into the room. They've got these tight fitting doors that keep particulates out of the air and you can put this intake into them that uses air that's piped in from the outdoors into a combustion chamber. So I at first didn't want to put wood stove in my home because they're really inefficient. And then once I listened to him talk and started to research this a little bit more and I'm going to put a link in the show notes for everybody listening in who's interested in this stuff. It turns out that wood burning stoves, like modern wood burning stoves can actually be really green and really efficient. Plus you get higher testosterone, so what's not to love?

Yeah, well, I guess if they can keep the soot out of the room, that's awesome because like my biggest problem with wood burning stuff is the smell and the dirt.

I actually want, I want soot and dirt all over my living room so that after I've chopped wood I can go in with my jacked up testosterone levels and just like roll around on, on the bare skins in my living room making love to my wife with my huge testosterone levels and then stroking my beard and sitting in front of the fire as it crackles away.

You're totally not coming back from this wilderness retreat. I just. I'm gonna be stuck with everything. Ah, geez.

Let's. Let'. All right, so let's. Let's move on and talk about high heels. There you go. I'll put a link to this in the show notes. What is this? Episode 255.

255.

So in the show notes to episode number 255, I'm gonna put a link to this really disturbing 3D scan of a female foot in high heels. And they have this new way to use a $340,000 scanner at an orthopedic hospital to do a 360 DE scan of somebody's foot in about 60 seconds. And so they're studying high heels now. And when you do the full scan with the high heels, it's really nasty what goes on with the foot. So that the toes get squashed inside the shoe, and the more stiletto shaped that the high heel is, the worse that is the toes get squashed, and then they become clawed, and the base of the big toe kind of becomes deviated outwards, which forms this bunion. And. And then the bones actually become rotated and drop out of position. And so you're not only looking at creating some serious foot problems when you wear high heels, especially if you're wearing them, you know, for like eight hours a day. But it's also. It creates a lot of upstream issues in your low back. It kind of turns off. Turns off your ability to use your glutes. It's just. It's bad news all around. And for any of you women who need more convincing that you should save high heels for situations in which you're preferably not putting much weight on your feet at all, and you're only gonna have them on any weight for a short period of time, go check out this scan. It's pretty nutso. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. And I'm sure Brock at this point has taken off his high heels.

I did. I threw them. I threw them out the window when we first started talking about this.

Moved on to skates or something.

Yeah, well, I'm always in hockey skates, really. It was just my high heel skates that I was wearing before.

Gotcha. Well, one more. One more article I'll link to that I put out on Twitter that I wanted to expl Explain a little bit more. And this was a study that they did in mice where they had these mice exercise for 90 minutes in a fasted state. And I've written articles before about how cellular death can be initiated when you exercise in a fasted state. And I think a lot of people get a sharp intake of breath and think that that's a bad thing. It's actually a good, good thing. It's called autophagy or cellular turnover or autophagy. Autophagy as they say in Canada, or as they say anywhere other than Ben Greenfield's head.

I believe you pronounced it autophagy once.

Which that was uncomfortable slightly on PC or cellular apoptosis. Anyways, we're talking about cell death and when you actually allow your cells to turn over a little bit more quickly, you clean up the trash in your body, so to speak, you remove a lot of cellular garbage. And so that's one of the benefits, it's why exercise in a fast, potentially longevity enhancing or I don't even know if that's a word, is longevity enhancing a word?

Why not?

Well, one word, we made it up. So it increases longevity and also improves the actual muscular response to the workout. You also get what's called increased mitochondrial fission, which means that you can improve your mitochondrial density or your ability to potentially use things like fatty acids to make ATP based energy more quickly when you are actually exercising in that, in that fasted state. A lot of people hear about this though, and then they go out and they're idiots. And I'm sorry, but when you look at the study, the mice were doing the equivalent of what basically comes out to a brisk walk in humans for 90 minutes and people see this research and then they go out and they head out to their CrossFit box or they grab their hardcore master swim workout for that morning or whatever and they go, just go do this stuff. Yeah, and then you do that day after day and it sends a message to your body that you are asking it to dip deep into its energy stores in basically a catabolic state. And you get muscle wasting and you get a huge amount of cortisol formed and you get a drop in your testosterone, you get a lot of nasty downstream metabolic issues. So when we're talking about exercise in a fasted state, like when I'm sitting down and writing down a fat loss workout for somebody, for example, I actually do in both males and females kind of use that, that fasted workout approach, but it's always easy stuff like it's 20 to 30 minutes of easy aerobics and I don't even flirt with that, with that 90 minute range more often than about once a week as far as like a, like a long fasted workout. And it's always aerobic and always easy so that there's not too much muscle deconstruction that's going on.

And we're talking about a real fasted state too. Not just like, not just haven't eaten for a couple hours, but actually ate dinner rather early, didn't eat anything again until, well, until after the workout the next morning kind of thing, right?

In the case of the mice, it was eight hours. So yeah, and I don't.

But I guess mice have tiny little stomachs and that's what I was thinking.

Perhaps that's the equivalent of 16 hours in humans. Who knows. But either way some some cool stuff about fasted workouts, about chopping wood to boost your testosterone levels and mice on treadmills and high heels. So there you go. Go chop wood and don't do it in high heels and be careful doing it fasted and you will have benefited from every news flash in today's episode.

Special Announcements I am not going to say anything about Audible because I already did. That's all I'll remind you to do is go to audiblepodcast.com Ben and that is all I'm going to say about.

They got their freaking time to shine so I am headed to to London after the wilderness trip I'll turn around and fly to London to speak at the Global Triathlon Conference.

And that's jolly old, isn't it? Not London, Ontario or Jolly or Arkansas.

As we mentioned earlier. There's a Facebook page though because I am to do a meetup in London while I am there for all the Ben Greenfield fitness listeners and we'll put a link in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 255 we're going to do a day of playing in the park followed by a nice healthy primal Paleo, whatever you want to call it, style dinner that is put on by a guy named Darrell Edwards who runs these fantastic primal workshops around the world. And he is the guy who also creates workouts@thefitnessexplorer.com which is a fantastic website. It's a ton of fun. He's offering this special early bird discount at the time of this podcast recording. The early bird discount is good for another about 48 hours or so for you to squeeze into that primal workshop where basically it's fun. We climb trees, we crawl around like animals, we do some parkour move nat style play basically and you evade a.

Bunch of bobbies that are chasing you through Hyde Park.

Evade those bobbies. That's right. So if you want.

Luckily they only have like nightsticks.

That's right.

You don't have to worry about getting shot.

Yeah. So you. No. No permanent risk of death or anything like that. Not there is any temporary form of death anyways. Bobby Evading. So if you want to enhance your Bobby Evading skills, check out the link in the show notes and come out to that. And then just a couple of other things. Everybody's asking about Ironman Canada and what went on with ketosis and my race report and everything published that on Monday a couple of days ago. Anyone who is part of our $10 a year premium podcast at BenGreenfieldFitness.com premium can grab that and run away with it all. The blood lab results, the nitty gritties of what happened with the nutrition, everything that shook up, far as whether or not ketosis actually worked, whether I plan on continuing that scenario for Ironman Hawaii, pretty much everything you'd ever want to know. I geeked out for about an hour and before Ironman Hawaii, for any of you who are part of the premium podcast, I will be doing it again, essentially kind of filling you in on, on all the little things that are that are getting added into the protocol and, and just some of the big takeaways for you, whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're wanting to experiment with with ketogenesis or blood work or biohacking or minimalist training protocols or any of that jazz. All of that's over at the premium.

And head over to YouTube and do a search for Ben Greenfield Fitness and you'll see there's a couple of videos that make great compendiums to that podcast episode that Ben did too.

That's right. Brock and I went nuts with the video camera because he was up there as well and I had nothing else.

To do but chase him around with.

A video camera, which is actually really.

Fun, to be honest.

We did shoot the next time that you listened to the podcast, stay tuned for a special URL that we're going to give you because we did actually shoot a cool little five minute workout video for you where Brock and I are messing around. So stay tuned for that. And last thing I wanted to throw into the special announcements here, just real quick, was that we did have one slot open up for Thailand for the Thailand Triathlon adventure that I'm taking Everybody on from November 15 to December 4 or November 21 through December 4, depending on when you decide to jump into the adventure. But we'll put a link in the show notes to that. It's gonna be a ton of fun and if you want to escape to Asia this winter and go race and train and do some clinics and stuff like that, definitely get in on that. We have one slot that opened up, so there you go.

At first glance, triathletes appear to be a pretty fit group, at least with clothes on. But it's pretty common for triathletes to have tiny arms, a thin and weak neck, a stick like midsection, and a body that's just too skinny. But just imagine if your arms were cut and defined, your chest and shoulders were ripped, your waistline was tapered like a V, your stomach was flat and hard, and your legs were sleek and curvaceous. In other words, what if you had the ultimate triathlon body? Now you can learn how to swim, bike and run fast and look incredibly sexy doing it. Go to tryript.com to start today. That's try rippd.com. Listener q&a.

Hey Ben, I was wondering if you were familiar with the strong lifts 5 by 5 program. I know the 555s have been around for a long time, but just for somebody who's wanting to strengthen up and bulk up a little bit, is it a good program and is it effective? I appreciate the work you do and look forward to hearing from you. Thanks.

Now, I've never heard of Stronglift 555. I'm hoping that you have, Ben.

555 is actually something that's been around since the 70s, to tell you the truth.

Maybe that's why I don't know about it.

So quick overview here for people who are wondering about five by five. So if you want to get strong and you want to get mass and you just want to make yourself strong like bolt, five by five is a good way to go.

Oh, is it five by five? Not five five, five?

Well this five five five workout is based on the original 5x5 training system and that was designed by a football strength coach back in the 70s who's this guy named Bill Starr. And five by five is just five sets of five repetitions of specific or specific exercises. So the original five by five program was published in this book called the Strongest Shall Survive and it was designed simply to bulk up football players to add mass and some amount of strength to football players. So the way that the 5x5 workout goes, and this is something that men or women can do who want to get strong fast. And I'll explain in a minute how this is actually very similar to something I'm personally going to be doing in the off season for my training this year. But each, each workout in the original 5x5 workout has three primary exercises that you do. And the three primary exercises are squats. So a basic barbell squat with the bar on your back, power cleans, which is kind of more of an Olympic weightlifting exercise. And then the bench press, which is actually an exercise that I hate and I think is a silly exercise. Anyways though, unless you want to add a bunch of mass to your mass to your chest. And it's not that bad. Yeah, silly bench press press. So these three exercises basically work every major muscle in your body once you actually put all three together. So when you do the 5 by 5 workout, the original 5 by 5 workout, what you do is each exercise is rotated so that one of the three exercises is performed with a maximum load each week, while the other exercises are performed with a sub maximal load. So let's say you were going to do your five by five on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and that's pretty typical. You're usually doing something like this three days a week and following it for around six weeks or so. So Monday you'd be doing really heavy squats, five sets of five squats, and then medium intensity power cleans and bench presses. But you'd also be doing five sets of five reps of those. And then like Wednesday squats you'd use a medium weight. Power cleans would be as heavy as you could go five by five and then bench press, you'd do five by five, but it'd be a little bit less intensity. And then on the last day, like a Friday, the bench press would be the heav exercise that you do now. It works really well for mass. There are a bunch of really cool variations of the 5x5 workout too. And one of the best books that I would point you towards if you want to see some really cool variations of the 5x5 workout, including a variation of the 5x5 workout called simple Strength, which is a variation that I'm actually going to be doing in the, in the triathlon offseason this year, to make myself strong and build mass and kind of, kind of get my body to the point where it's ready to start getting, you know, my goal is to put on a lot of muscle and I need to get strong first. So I'm going to use this, I.

Believe the number 30 pounds has been thrown around.

My plan is to put on 30 pounds of muscle during the first few months of 2014. Yeah. Anyways, though, the book Interventions by Dan John 1, it's called Interventions by Dan John. There are some really good variations of the 5x5 protocol in that book. And another very, very good book, if you're not accustomed to throwing around a barbell or you don't really know how to move a barbell. Right. And you don't necessarily have access to like a weightlifting coach to work with is the book Starting Strength by Mark Rippeto. If you were to read Starting Strength by Mark Rippeto and the book Interventions by Dan John, you would have access to all the information up inside your head that you need to get mass and get really strong really fast. I still think that a lot of folks need to get in touch with a personal trainer or a certified weightlifting coach and actually learn how to do specific moves properly if they're really going to seriously make some inroads into strength. Like the power clean. For example, in the original 5 by 5 workout, if you don't know how to do a power clean and you're trying to do five max reps or max weighted reps of power clean, you're going to screw yourself up fast. So that's why you need to be careful with this stuff now.

Yeah, books aren't very good at correcting your form.

Yeah, I mean I kind of got my chops doing a 12 month internship with the University of Idaho football team where we had two certified weightlifting coaches. And I was in the weight room three to four hours a day watching them teach and then assisting with the actual instruction for the football team and then also doing all of that myself. So, you know, I spent a year in the trenches learning this stuff and, and that helps a lot to hook up with an expert who knows how to move and to not just have your head in a book. But as far as some of the variation, some of the workouts, some of the programming, these books are really good. Intervention by Dan John and. And Starting Strength by Mark rippeto. So this 555 program that 555 asks about, they left themselves anonymous, didn't they?

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, I don't think it was on purpose. It was just so excited to ask the question. I think he forgot to say his name.

555 is very. It's a variation of the 5x5 program. It uses the lifts squat, bench press and barbell rows on one day of the week. And then it uses the exercises squat overhead, press and deadlift on the other day of the week. So it does eliminate the power clean, which can be one of the more kind of injury creating exercises in a traditional 5x5 protocol. But it's pretty much the 5x5, just a variation of it. So my issue with this 555 program and they've got a website for kind of a typical Internet sales website is it promises to get you ripped and burn off body fat. And that's, that's bowl five by five programs don't do that. They all they do is give you mass and make you strong. And if you've ever seen a football linebacker with their shirt off, most of them aren't ripped. They are. No, they're just kind of fat with a lot of, a lot of muscle and they're kind of puffy. So this would be something that you would do prior to launching into like a more traditional bodybuilding style program or launching into a more kind of Metcon style program like a Beachbody Insanity or a Crossfit or a P90X or something along those lines. Or you know, another really good one would be like an MMA style training routine. Like Martin Rooney has a good book called the Warrior, I believe it's called the Warrior Workouts, something like that. But. Or Cardio for Warriors I think. But anyways, you, you have to follow up a mass program like this. Like let's say you were going to do a five by five for six weeks or eight weeks or perhaps 12 weeks would be about as long as you, you' through something like this, you'd want to follow it up with another six months or nine months or even a year of just like specific metcon or bodybuilding style workouts to get you ripped after you put on the mass. So I'll put a link to the book Interventions by Dan John, the book Starting Strength by Mark Ripeto, a link to this Stronglift 5 by 5 program in the show notes. But then I'm also going to put a link to a nine month month men's muscle building program and it's one that women could use too. I designed it, I named it Men's Muscle Building Program just because I wanted to appeal to the dudes out there. But if you were a lady and you wanted to kind of get toned or ripped or whatever, you could use a program like this. It would be something that you'd follow up the starting strength or any 5x5 variation with. And if you were to follow that program, it's all programmed into TrainingPeaks, which is the online training software that I use to deliver workouts to the phone, to the email, whatever. It's all really specific. I spell out the exact exercises workouts to do. So a really cool scenario would be you pick your 5x5 variation, whether you're going to do this strong with 555 or simple strength or one of the variations in the book Interventions by Dan John. And then you follow it up with something like this nine month men's muscle building program. And that would be like if you're going to kind of Target 2014 to just turn yourself into a freak of nature during that year, that would be how to do it. That would be what I would do.

Hello Ben and Barack, I have a question regarding cold thermogenesis. I was hoping you could discuss or contrast the effects and benefits of pure cold exposure, all cold water, for example, versus a hot and cold alternate contrast. I'm inquiring specifically, as it pertains to a shower protocol, is one better off to use only cold water or to cycle between hot and cold water? Or is this dependent on one's goals? For example, for a recovery type goal, is it advisable to use the cycling of hot and cold water as opposed to a metabolic goal in which it would be advisable to use a purely cold shower? Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate you answering my question.

Bye now. There are a lot of different reasons to use cold therapy for very different things. And especially the difference between a contrast therapy, not necessarily just a shower, and just straight up chilling the bones. So, yeah, what's for what?

Or if you just what's for what? Want to make some good jokes in a Seinfeld episode? Cold thermogenesis comes in handy for that too.

I guess.

So I forget what the exact line is. Something like, I was cold. I don't remember, you know the episode I'm talking about, though.

You know, I never watched Seinfeld, okay, I'm one of those people, but I do know what you're referring to, like.

Some sort of shrinkage, one of those cold shrinkage jokes. So this is something that at the Become Superhuman live event, the world's expert on using cold thermogenesis to lose fat as quickly as possible talked about. And that guy's name is Ray Kronice. I have interviewed him. And also that entire talk that he gave at Become Superhuman is available inside the Ben Greenfield fitness phone app. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com app, you can actually watch the whole thing and grab the. Actually, I think the way that we have it set up is the you can listen to the whole thing. If you want to watch the video and grab the PDF and the slides, you would need to be on the premium version of the app Gap. But either way, like, you can, you can get access. Like, this first hour of his talk just blew my mind because he's talking about rates of weight loss in terms of like 15 to 25 pounds in a month using contrast methods of cold thermogenesis. So specifically, what Ray Kronice uses to get the body to burn fat as fast as possible is he drinks about a gallon of cold water in the morning. Morning. Sleeps without covers, does hot, cold contrast showers that are not done with super duper cold water, but fairly cold water. And then he takes mile long walks in the cold in a cold enough environment to where he's shivering. So I believe that he has a kind of a biohacked lab where he's doing those on the treadmill in a cold room. But you could also do them outdoors in the cold if that were something you had access to. Now, the hot, cold Contrast showers are five minute long showers that are 20 seconds of cold water followed by 10 seconds of hot water. 10 times warm water. Yeah, or warm water basically 10 times through. Okay. So you go cold water to warm water 10 times through 20 seconds of cold to 10 seconds of warmth. That is the actual protocol that is most effective for metabolic goals. When you're looking at fat loss, there's some amount of blood circulation. Right. Like vasodilation followed by vasoconstriction in your blood vessels when you're doing a hot, cold contrast shower like that, which is why you could also use it for recovery. So it's the reason that they'll have like hot tubs and cold tubs in athletic training rooms at professional training facilities. And athletes will go from the hot to the cold, cold to the hot to the cold. You get better recovery. You actually can really help with hangovers and detox and stuff like that too. You can actually feel like a million bucks after you do hot, cold contrast. I remember my wife and I did it for about 45 minutes when we were at this special sauna in Jamaica. And this was after a night where we'd been out on the town kind of doing the Margaritaville thing. And we did that hot, cold contrast for like 45 minutes and walked out of the sauna just feeling like a million bucks, like we hadn't touched a drop of alcohol. So there are, there are benefits that go above and beyond simply fat loss and, and muscle recovery. Anyways, though there are also other things that you can do. I'll put a link to a big article that I wrote about cold thermogenesis. It's called a cold thermogenesis how to and it talks about how you can do something like when you're sitting at your desk, use one of these, these vests that you can get from coolfatburner.com and these vests from coolfatburner.com wrap around your collarbone and your back and the areas where you tend to have a lot of brown adipose tissue and they cause that brown adipose tissue to burn calories to create heat to keep your body warm. You can also get compression tights like the 110% compression tights and put ice sleeves into those if you want to do a similar thing for your lower body body. With the added advantage that when you combine compression with ice, you actually enhance recovery and you stop a lot of potential what, what's called a backflow of some of your lymph fluid when you are icing and you're not compressing at the same time. So a lot of, a lot of kind of ways that you can use cool temperature. But to answer Jenna's question about like which one's better for recovery and which one's better for fat loss loss, the contrast showers are better for fat loss and they're more comfortable and they're more doable too, like one in the morning and one in the evening. The cold water immersion I've personally found to work better for recovery in terms of lowering inflammation and lowering post workout soreness. And also something that I'll use a lot of times during or before a workout to pre cool the body, especially before a hot workout out. So the, the issue is that that is a total N equals one statement because the evidence goes back and forth about whether or not cold water immersion really truly does work to enhance soreness or if it's kind of all up in your head, reduce soreness. Yeah, to, to, yeah, to reduce soreness or to enhance recovery. So you, you kind of have to go out and try it. And I know that's kind of a cop out answer, but I've personally found that cold thermogenesis in terms of cold water immersion, for me, when you compare it to hot cold contrast showers or like putting ice on an area or even using compression tights with ice in them, nothing for me beats going out and going out shoulder deep down into the cold Spokane river behind my house and just like standing there for 15 or 20 minutes or treading some water, nothing I have found beats that when it comes to my muscles feeling more recovered. So there's that. Hi, Ben.

Big fan of your shows.

44 years old.

Worked out my whole life the last 10 years. It seems like I react differently to humidity when it's really hot and humid. I sweat. I sweat a lot, whether I'm working out or not. It's obviously very embarrassing social situations. I just feel like it looks like I've come out of the pool and wonder if you can kind of help me out, give me ideas on any way to tolerate the heat better other than shutting the air conditioning off when I'm inside. It's just embarrassing. It's inconvenient. And, you know, I think half the time I tell people I just finished a workout like, 15, 20 minutes before. So if they ask or I'll get a lot of comments like, oh, it's really hot out, you know, so any way I can deal with that better, let me know. Maybe take out the sweat glands.

Help. Now, this is again, every time somebody brings up the excessive sweating, I'm always all ears because I am a very heavy sweater. And I like the way Mike is thinking here some way to shut it down by always being hot. Would that help?

But.

Which is going completely against what Jenna asked. But Mike said that he should he shut off his air conditioning. Yeah, I'm thinking, yeah, maybe just getting more conditioned to the heat.

Heat acclimation actually causes you to sweat more. It makes you more efficient at sweating, unfortunately.

That's right. It increases the blood volume and stuff, doesn't it? So you can sweat more efficiently.

It's actually a biohack that I use before. Like that. For example, for the. The next month before Ironman Hawaii, I will be using this product called Sweet sweat that I could put on my skin. And it increases the temperature of your skin. It's got cayenne pepper and a bunch of essential oils in it. And then you go sit in a sauna after you put this.

So it's a marinade.

It's a marinade. A juicy, juicy marinade. You put it on your skin, you go sit in a sauna, and it jacks up your body temperature, or your skin temperature specifically, even higher than you'd get if you weren't wearing it. And so you just, you. You pour buckets of sweat, and it really amps up your body temp. But what you find is that you You. You start to pit out and sweat more because your body just gets so efficient at cooling itself that the sweat flows even more. So in Mike's case, if he's a heavy sweater already, heat acclimation protocols would probably not be such a. Such a hot idea, pun intended for him. Hyperhidrosis is something we've talked about on the podcast before, though. And hyperhidrosis is a condition characterized by abnormally increased sweating or perspiration, if you're a lady. Since ladies don't sweat, as we all know, they simply perspire. They glow. So hyperhidrosis, it could be something that's caused by genetics, so it could be congenital, it could be acquired. And I'll explain in a second what I mean by acquired. But either way, you. You sweat more, and there is part of it is increased nervous system activity, like sympathetic fight or flight nervous system activity. Part of it is greater density of sweat glands. Some of it can be exacerbated by nervousness or excitement. And I really tried not to butcher saying the word exacerbate right there, because I almost turned it into a different word. And foods and drinks and caffeine and smoking and even different kinds of smells can trigger this hyperhidrotic response of excessive sweating in many, many, many people. What I have found to be the issue, when it's something that kind of pops up at some point in your life and you really weren't a heavy sweater before, typically it's because you have gone through a period of stress in your life that has created a little bit of an autoimmune situation. Meaning that, for example, someone who I, who I know very closely, went through a personal relationship issue, kind of a divorce type of scenario, and within several weeks, they were allergic or intolerant to a variety of foods that they would normally have been able to consume just fine in the past. And for this person, it manifested in skin hives, rashes, sweating, some gut issues, bloating, constipation, things of that nature. But this is a situation that can be brought about by stress, increased sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight activity from that stress, and then increased gut permeability and kind of an imbalance in the neurotransmitters produced by the gut. And some of the issues we talked all about in episode 154, when we talked about just like how gut issues can be the precursor to a lot of other issues. So autoimmune protocol, and I'll put a link to the autoimmune protocol, the autoimmune ebook that I'm a fan of. It's a four to eight week autoimmune protocol that you could use to see if your high amount of sweating is indeed due to an autoimmune reaction. And it just cuts out common autoimmune triggers like soy and wheat and dairy, but actually provides you with some meals that allow you to do something other than just like, I don't know, sip.

A chew on cardboard.

Yeah, chew on cardboard. Or just eat ices from 711 or whatever. So you've got that. That autoimmune protocol is something that you can definitely try. But there are some other natural kind of home remedies, for example, excessive sweating that you can also try. So some of the things that are effective natural remedies for hyperhidrosis include, number one, using apple cider vinegar and actually consuming it about three times a day on an empty stomach. Apple cider vinegar. You can also soak some cotton balls in apple cider vinegar and you can rub it into your underarms to get rid of some of the odor that's produced from excessive stomach sweat. Coconut oil, incidentally, also works very well for that. But as far as.

Actually, that doesn't sound like it would smell better though, putting apple cider vinegar in your armpits, like that's not going to smell good.

Well, it has an antibacterial action. Remember that. That sweat doesn't stink. It's the bacteria that are in your armpits metabolizing sweat.

I'm just saying that the vinegar itself smells like. Even when you clean your kitchen with vinegar, it smells like vinegar for a few hours. So you wipe that on your armpits, ensure you're not getting bo. But you got vo.

Similar to cleaning a house, though, you could wipe it on your armpits and then just do like a soap and water cleanse afterwards if you wanted to get rid of the vinegar smell. So you could do that.

Good point.

Coconut oil would also work. Another thing that may help in a similar manner. And this would just be basically a way to kind of shut down a little bit of sympathetic nervous system activity in a similar way that eating vinegar on an empty stomach would, would be to have a glass of tomato juice juice and you can just do a fresh glass of tomato juice, preferably not the V8 stuff, but just like regular old tomato juice several times a day. And that's another thing that has traditionally been used as a home remedy for excessive sweating. So that's another thing. There are a couple of herbs. One is witch hazel. The Other is sage. And both witch hazel and sage tea can help to get rid of excessive sweating. They help to reduce the sweat gland activity. They'll activate the parasympathetic nervous system a little bit to reduce underarm sweating. So that's something else that you could, that you could try is an herbal tea made with like sage or witch hazel. Those would be kind of two traditional herbs. As far as some other things that you could try that go above and beyond. Just like an autoimmune protocol. Sometimes iodine rich foods can aggravate sweating. And that would be specifically some of your cruciferous kind of stinky foods like broccoli or asparagus or onions. Those would be some things that you could be careful with. And some of those can, can kind of cause sweating and also cause sweat to stink a little bit more. The other things that can cause that would be foods that are rich in nitrogen traits or foods that are also rich in purine based proteins. So having a lot of like beef and liver and dark poultry meat and stuff like that can also aggravate the issue. And I know that this stuff is just kind of like, you know, it might be tricky for some people to eliminate. But if you're trying to get rid of sweating and you just wanted to try out a few things, these are the things that are traditionally used as like natural remedies if you didn't want to go in for surgery to have your sweat glands cut out. So last thing is wheatgrass and wheatgrass juice can actually be an effective home remedy for excessive sweating. We actually grow wheatjaz wheat, wheatjas, wheatgrass on our counter.

And I thought that was something new and fancy I hadn't heard of before.

Wheat jazz. Wheat jazz juice. Anyways, wheat grass juice. We grow wheat grass and just drop it into smoothies. You can, you can just cut it with scissors after it's grown on your counter and toss it into a smoothie or just, you know, I guess you could eat it if you wanted to. You could blend it to make wheatgrass. But having a glass of wheatgrass a day, similar to like having a glass of tomato juice a day or drinking some of this herbal tea or using the apple cider vinegar, all of those are things that you can definitely try for excessive sweating if you don't just want to go in and get the sweat glass glands snipped, so to speak.

So is that really a thing?

That really is a thing. Sweat gland removal or destruction is a surgical option.

I've heard of getting the Botox hydrosis.

Yeah, Botox is another one. But it's, it's very similar to like liposuction with a laser. It's called laser sweat ablation. And you can also use a similar technique that you would use for liposuction or sucking fat out. And it's called sweat gland sucking.

So I just worry that keeping all that sweat inside, you just explode at some point.

At some point your head is just gonna like, swell up and you explode in one nasty, stinky pile of sweat.

Exactly.

I'm sure that they have looked into that and they did a little bit of research before the, the surgical procedure was approved by the FDA or whatnot. So there you go.

I'd be the first.

How many times do you poop in a day?

Well, that was short and to the point. It's right to the point. I like it. Speaking of stuff building up inside of you and exploding.

No.

So how many times should you poop in a day? Well, I can go right out there and tell you how many times I poop in a day, and it's once. So I have one big bowel movement in the morning where I'm typically, I. I sit on my squatty potty and I sip my cup of coffee and usually I read my Kindle for a few minutes and do my big bowel movement for the day, and that's it. And I really don't go back to the toilets other than to pee after that. So I'm a one a dayer. And I used to be more of like a two or three a dayer until I decided that I wanted to be a one a day. And so I just kind of stay in there in the bathroom until I kind of eliminate everything in the morning. And then I just don't go back in the rest of the day. I've kind of trained my body to just go once in the morning, and that works out pretty well for me. How about you, Brock?

I'm extremely similar. I did the same thing a few years ago, actually, when I started racing. It was when I started started doing marathons that I just decided, okay, well, this is. I, I've got my protocol down. I have my big glass of water, I get my cup of coffee, have a couple sips of that, and bada bing, bada bang, it's all done.

Your parasympathetic nervous system is pretty active in the morning, and it's a really conducive time to just get everything out if you're able to. If you have the luxury of not waking up and being in a stressed hectic rush to get to work and skip a morning trip to the bathroom and that kind of thing. If you can make some time in the morning morning, you can actually train your body to get into this kind of one a day scenario. And if you, if you need some help getting that along, you should listen to my my podcast episode I did with a guy named Troy, case expert, the poop expert who's also a male model. He's a male model and a poop expert. So there, there are two unique populations that we've discussed. The soccer playing wood choppers and the male model poop expert in today's episode. I will link to that one in the show notes. But he's got Troy has what's called his better pooping regimen, which is a combination of something called Dr. Schultz's intestinal formula clay, literally the edible earth clay, and then a high fiber herbal colon cleanse. And I think Troy and I talk about this in the episode, but I talked to Troy a little bit about how I feel like the high fiber cleanses cause more potential damage to, to the small intestine and long term buildup in the gut rather than really helping you to poop long term. And actually there was an article that came out today, Brock and I were talking about it before the show about how too much fiber may also be bad for your sexual performance. So I'm not a huge fan of high fiber supplements. I personally recommend if you want to kind of get your body into a state where it initiates that bowel movement a little bit more easily in the morning morning. Two things that I like. One is called mag 07 and that is like an oxygenated magnesium. And compared to all of the other forms of magnesium out there, this is the stuff that I think has the most potent stool softening effect. So that would be one and then the other one is called the colorectal recovery program. And if you have a lot of issues with your colon and your pooping mechanics and all that jet as it may be due to some kind of a bacterial imbalance in your, in your large intestine or something that needs to be addressed from like a fatty acid or a mineral standpoint in your colon. And the colorectal recovery program is something that I successfully used when I got pretty severely constipated after a bout of antibiotics. And this kind of rescued me. So I talk about all of those and link to all of those, both Troy's better pooping regimens regimen and also Ben's better pooping regimen in the how to poop episode. So I will link to the how to poop episode in my response to. To her. But yeah, I'm a. I'm a one a dayer. And it's just a combination of the squatty potty and just kind of waking up in the morning. And I don't even use a any anymore. I don't use a stool softener or anything like that in the evening. I just kind of get up and go. But initially, when I was. When I was poop training myself, so to speak, I started off by using some of those evening stool softeners. And occasionally if I've had something that I know constipates me, such as too much alcohol, I'll still do that.

I remember the guys who invented the specific carbohydrate diet, the scd, when they were on the show, they were talking about how, especially the one fellow, I can't remember his name, he was having like, well, basically what we refer to as poomergencies quite often during the day. And he cured that basically while he was inventing the specific carbohydrate diet. So isn't it often, like, people who do have to go more than once a day, it's likely because there's something going on that isn't quite right and they need to sort of figure that out a little bit.

Yeah, it can be infections, irritable bowel syndrome. It can be like an allergic reaction, like an autoimmune issue. Anytime you're going more than three times a day. A day. That would be a case where you should definitely look into using something like the specific carbohydrate diet, eliminating what are called FODMAPs, which you could go to a search for at BenGreenfieldFitness.com because I've talked about them before. They're just fermentable foods that can cause issues with going to the bathroom too much or becoming constipated. And yes, going less than once a day or going like three, three plus times a day are both issues that you may need to address some kind of a bacterial imbalance or kind of dig a little deeper when it comes to figuring out what's going on. Interestingly, the other thing that you need to pay attention to is color. And there's something called a Bristol stool scale, which shows you the proper texture that poop is supposed to be. But there are also charts out there that that show you different colors of what an ideal stool should be. And you'll Notice a lot of times in athletes that the color of poo is more brown, sometimes a little bit even borderline black. And that's because of bilirubin, which is this pigment that's generated when you break down red blood cells. A lot of times, once you start exercising or during a period of time when you're exercising heavily, your poo gets darker. And that's something I've noticed because my kids forget to flush a lot, is that their, their poop is like really light colored compared to mine, which is very dark. And it's because of my levels of exercise and that bilirubin formed by the breakdown of red blood cells. So all sorts of interesting things that you can delve into. And we could probably talk about poop for a really long time, but ultimately, one a day is, in my opinion, a really convenient way to train your body to go. And then if you're, if you're not even going once a day or you're going more than three times a day, something is probably up. And I'd get that checked out.

And as Dr. Kellogg used to say, never resist the urge to defecate.

Never resist the urge. That's actually really good advice. You should, if you need to poo, go poo. Because when you resist the urge, it actually can damage the nerves that are up inside of the you. And it can also cause some impact and some, some issues with straining hemorrhoids, stuff like that. So when the urge to poo happens, go poo. So, that being said, I'll be right back. No, I'm just kidding.

Hi, Ben. Hi, Brock. This is Kelsey calling. Since I have been listening to your podcast and reading some of these great articles that you've written and doing the superhuman coaching thing, I've gotten kind of into checking the ingredients on everything, especially like cosmetics and skin care products. So anyways, there's a company that I've been buying skincare products from for years. It's called Hydron. And so I was reading the ingredients list and they were using BHA as a preservative in one of their products that I really love. So I sent them an email, you know, with my concerns. They sent me an email back saying, well, you know, we really need our products to be shelf stable and vitamin E and rosemary oil would probably cut down the time that these products would stay fresh. So I sent her another email with a link to a couple of articles. One was about a new preservation preservative called Rosa Mox, made from rosemary that is good for skin care products. And anyways, to make a long story short, she sent me an email back and she said thank you for the great articles. I'm forward these, forwarding these articles on to our chemist. And she said because of your email, we are going to start testing this Rosa Mox prop in our products. You know, maybe we'll see if we can, we can't switch over and get rid of the BHA in our products. So that was just really cool to get that email to actually make a difference to a company and that a company would actually listen to me was pretty cool. Anyways, thanks for everything you do.

So that's a really great story. And you know, there isn't really a question in what Kelsey said, but I decided that we should put it in the, in the show anyway because I sort of have the question now. After hearing her story of successful successfully getting this company to actually look into switching to something else. Is that actually better? Is Rosemox going to be better than the bha?

Sure. They're just both antioxidants. So BHA is something that gets added to a lot of foods and supplements and skin care products because it's a fat preservative. So we all know that like fish oil, if you get fish oil and it's not packaged with an antioxidant and it's not cold processed and it's not in its triglyceride base form, it's doing more harm to your body than good to consume that fish oil. But if the antioxidant that they add to that fish oil is say a BHA derivative antioxidant, then that also turns that fish oil into something that is potentially carcinogenic and something that has more, more oxidative stress producing properties, potentially, because that is a synthetic chemical, that bha. So what you're seeing the better companies doing now are choosing natural antioxidants that preserve fats in both supplements and nutraceuticals and skin products using natural antioxidants that are extracted using a different form of chemistry. Specifically in the case of this Rozimax stuff, it's extracted using supercritical carbon dioxide. And that's totally solvent free, it's green, it's sustainable, and it results in an end product and an antioxidant that actually doesn't have those same type of carcinogenic properties and chemical properties as traditional bha. So that's fantastic that a company would choose to use something like Rosmax instead of bha. And this is something that I've kind of had my head into recently anyways, because as I think I've mentioned on this show before, I am in the process of developing a supplement line that I that's specifically designed for kind of like hard charging people who want to get the most out of their bodies and out of their minds. And I've had to look a ton into the actual ingredients that are used. And you know how we can, we can generate a formulation that allows you to have just one pill bottle in your fridge and kind of get everything done in one fell swoop. And yeah, so I, I'm subscribing right now to all these natural supplement Insider magazines. It's mind blowing and mind boggling how many different labs and ingredient source materials are out there that you could use. And I'm sure that there are many, many companies out there making these decisions based solely on price and not on long term effects. So yeah, you certainly got to be careful. Now my wife actually has done some webinars inside the Ben Greenfield Fitness inner circle where she not only talks about how to make your own sunscreen and your own natural skin protectants, but she talks about how to protect your skin by avoiding chemicals, how to choose the right product. She's got a bunch of videos in there, like the lotion that she uses and everything. I talked to her last night though, and I actually asked her, you know, if I, if I wanted to tell, tell the listeners to the podcast tomorrow, some of the little things that you do. Can you tell me? And so some of the things that she does is she dry brushes her whole body every day. And we don't have a lot of time today to get into what dry brushing is, but essentially it's kind of the removal of a lot of dead skin cells. And you could go Google dry brushing and you.

It kind of is exactly what it sounds like.

Yeah, it is.

So there's not a lot of mystery there.

Yeah. So she dry brushes every day. She uses a mineral based makeup made by a company called Faro that's F E R R O. She, she washes her face with a very hypo allergenic soap and it's a goat milk soap. And I believe she gets that goat milk soap from the local health health food store. And then she also uses coconut oil, a coconut oil rinse, as an oil cleansing method to cleanse like bacteria and stuff off of her skin. Once a week, she scrubs her skin with baking soda for about five to 10 minutes and she doesn't do that any more often than once. A week because it can really be very drying to the skin to use baking soda too often. And she used to really have to deal quite significantly with acne. And actually that's one of the things that initially kind of tuned us into some of this, you know, kind of Weston A. Price ancestral Paleo primal eating was kind of figuring out how to get rid of some of her acne about six or seven years ago or so. And we bought one of Lauren Cordain's books called, it was called something like the Dietary Cure for Acne Acne. And she picked up a lot of kind of natural dietary tips from that. But she has great skin now. If she does get a breakout, she does a honey mask. She makes a honey mask. And that's another thing that you could look into using again, something we won't get into on this show. She does talk about her recipes though, inside the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle. And when she gets kind of like a freak pimple, she dabs just like a baking soda based toothpaste on it over night to draw out the infection. And then she makes most of her own stuff, aside from the mineral based makeup, and puts all those recipes into the Inner Circle. So we've got a lot of listeners. I know. I think we have about 800 listeners who are Inner Circle members. So for those of you who are Inner Circle members, I'll just kind of put the link to the two webinars. If you don't want to go search for them in the Inner Circle. I'll link to them straight from the show Notes for this episode, episode number 255. And if you're not an inner circle member, it's ten bucks a month. So it's pretty cool. We actually just did a webinar two nights ago called Dieting Sucks where we talked about why dieting sucks, why we don't diet, and how you too can not diet. So there's that shameless commercial for the Inner Circle. And yeah, that's what I've got for you.

That's interesting though, that Jessa had, had had skin problems before because having just spent like four days straight with you guys, she has really great skin now. Yeah, I saw her first thing in the morning and she looked great.

And, and let me say this too. I, and don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I, I personally get a lot of compliments about my skin, about the color of my skin, the, the texture of my skin, and when I don't have my, my squirrel flowing beard, essentially the Youthfulness of my skin. And what I use on a daily basis is I use olive oil as my moisturizer. Just a regular, extra virgin olive oil, which is chock full of helpful skin protectants and polyphenols. I take about 6 milligrams of astaxanthin per day, and that's a natural skin protectant. I don't even use sunscreen. I didn't put a single drop of sunscreen on during something like Ironman Canada. And I just used Super Essentials fish oil, which has astaxanthin packaged along with it. Another really good source of astaxanthin is from the Big island down in Kona. I forget the brand, but it's called, like, Kona or Big Island Astaxanthin or Hawaii Astaxanthin or something like that. And then the only other things I do is I use all natural personal care products. Products. So I use a hair pomade that's made out of coconut oil and hemp oil. I only use Dr. Bronner's liquid soap, which is, again, hemp oil and I think olive oil and a few other natural antibacterials. I use Dr. Bronner's shaving cream for my shaving cream, and that's again, just made from natural oils. You could literally eat the stuff and you'd be just fine. Doesn't hurt you. And then I use a little bit of coconut oil oil occasionally in my armpits as a deodorant. And that is about the extent of my own personal care product line. And so essentially, my. My rule for what I use on my face is if I could eat it without dying or if I could eat it without getting sick or getting a tummy ache, then it's probably okay to put on my face or on my skin. So that's the rule that I follow. Just recently put out a video over@YouTube.com BenGreenfield Fitness about that, too. So that's how Jessa and I go about our own care for our skin. And hopefully that gives you listeners some ideas as well.

Yeah, pretty much the first thing that people ask me when they find out that I work with you is, first they ask, how old is Ben? And then the second thing they ask is, how much money does he make? So, of course, I answer, well, he's 67 years old, and I think he makes about one old years.

Hundred.

Hey, guys, I'm Bob from Wildwood, New Jersey. I'm a longtime listener and show supporter. My question today. Regards, bone spurs. I Have a serious bone spur near my big toe and it just keeps getting worse with every run. I'm hoping to learn of some magic bend treatment or recommendation to fix it. Obviously I know surgery is inevitable, but I had to reach out. I'm curious on what causes bone spurs and is there any non surgical fixes that you could recommend? Thanks and keep up the great work. I look forward to hearing from you.

You know, Bob needs to just go over to the website and do a search for bone healing or what else could he look for? We've talked a lot about how to heal broken bones or fractures and stuff like that. I'm assuming it's going to be a similar type of answer here.

Well, specifically with bone spurs though, the problem with bone spurs is that's an actual physical spur. I mean, a lot of times we've talked about stress fractures and how you can use like lactoferrin and electromagnetic stimulation and you know, glucosamine, chondroitin from something like cap reflex and like ways you could heal stress fractures or even broken bones more quickly. But a spur is actually a literal growth. I mean it's an osteophyte. It's a bony growth that typically forms on the back of your heel or on the front of your toes in response to stress in that area. And it's, you know, it's kind of a different situation. Right, because it's not something that needs to be melded or welded or fixed. It's something that almost needs to be kind of like broken down or removed. So.

Interesting. I always thought the bone spur was actually part of the bone. Bone had sort of broken, not completely off, but it just sort of separated and was sort of sticking out like a, like a spur. But it's actually a growth, eh?

It's an actual growth. So if you look at like everybody's got the little bump on the front of their knees. And I thought this was really interesting in anatomy back in university. When we look at the bones in specific places where tendons that you use a lot attach to bones or where ligaments attach to bones and pull on those bones. Bones, you have bumps. That's why you have that bump on the front of your knee. It's because of where the patellar tendon attaches and in areas where bone is stressed, it responds by growing. And in some places where there's repetitive injury or repetitive stress, such as, you know, in runners who are putting repetitive stress on their heel or repetitive stress on their toes, you actually, you know, you can observe these, these Osteoarts forming and pain develops eventually from these spurs. So if you just wanted to control the pain, you just use a natural pain killing anti inflammatory. And a lot of people that's enough. Like you can use something like a high dose curcumin extract like I use phenocaine. So phenocaine is a turmeric, it's nattokinase, it's phenylalanine. It's a bunch of stuff that works in my opinion just as well as ibuprofen or Advil with zero side effects. Now phenocaine is something I'll use for hangovers. It's something I'll use for muscle pain. I used about eight a day for a week after Ironman to reduce my risk of blood clotting.

I took a bunch of them before I went to the dentist once because I knew it was going to be a painful procedure.

Yeah, so curcumin is a pretty potent brain anti inflammatory as well. So anytime you have brain fog, interestingly it can kind of help to clear that up too. But that's what I would use for the pain killing part of this. If I personally ever get a bone spur though, I can tell you the very first thing that I would personally do before I even consider going in for surgery. For surgery to have it surgically removed. Which, which is an option. It's a viable option. You can have it removed and that's not a dangerous surgery. I would consider using pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. So you've perhaps heard me talk about that earth pulse device that I place underneath my mattress. It, it's like grounding or like earthing on steroids. Meaning that it amplifies the natural frequency emitted by the planet earth while you're sleeping and you basically soak up all those beneficial frequencies into your body. Very, very low frequencies. Very different from like a cell phone or microwave or something like that as you're sleeping now.

And if you shrink your testicles down to the size of your.

No it won't. And if it does, you can.

So it's not like steroids that way.

If it does, you can just go out and chop some wood anyways though you can also take, it's a magnet. So you can take the north end pole of a pulsed electromagnetic frequency device like the earth pulse and you can place it against an injured area and it can enhance blood flow to that area. Now in the case of a bone spur there is actually, there's a really interesting study online that shows some of the PEMRT F results on breaking down areas of excessive osteophyte formation. But there's a really interesting X ray where within six months of this PEMF treatment, there's near elimination of a bone spur that's, that's almost penetrating the spinal cord in somebody's back. So it's, it's essentially a frequency that kind of breaks down a little bit of that bone. So what you do is you'd hold it against the area where the spur is for about 15 to 20 minutes a day. North End pole would go up against the bone. Don't worry. It doesn't like break down bone in that when you hold it against your bone, you're gonna like make a bunch of weak bones in your foot. It doesn't work that way. It's just essentially working on that area of excessive osteophyte formation. It's a, it's a frequency that's emitted by the PEMF device. Fortunately, it also has a little bit of a pain killing effect. So that's what I would use at least for a little while. You know, I would use it for a good couple of months. And then if nothing's happening, then go in and schedule your surgery and just get the bone spur removed and you know, go do a search on BenGreenfieldFitness.com for surgery. So you know about all the ways to bounce back faster, like using proteolytic enzymes and all that jazz. But that's what I would do is I would use phenocaine, I would use pulse electromagnetic field therapy. And if you are a runner or a jumper or somebody who's concerned about a potential for a heel spur or a toe spur formation, the best recommendation that I could give to you would be to a strength train so that you are training your body to not have to put excessive stress on a joint, but instead training your body how to, how to weight bear a little bit more evenly. And then b, make sure that you're using footwear that's really designed very, very properly for your specific foot. And, and this is actually a blog post that I'm working on because I just personally had some custom fitted cycling shoes designed and they're, they're really cool. And I'm working on a blog post about, they're kind of like the closest thing that you can get to barefoot running for cyclists. They're made by a company called R Rocket 7. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna be writing an article.

Soundwear sounds like a good idea.

What's that?

That it Just seems sort of counterintuitive to want to be. Why would you want to be barefoot on your bike?

Well, no, they've got like a carbon foot plate and everything. Like, the power transfer is fine. I mean, they were developed by a professional cyclist, but they. They're literally molded to your foot. Like, you do a casting of your foot, you send it into this company, you put on the ship shoe, and you can't tell you're wearing a shoe when you're riding your bike, but you still get all the power transfer and everything. So it's not like using those cheesy barefoot plates. I actually raced the. The Wildflower Triathlon in those once. The. I forget what they call, but they're. They're not cycling pedals. They're actual platforms. Like, I think they're called pyro platforms and.

Oh, that snap into your. Into where your clips would go.

Not a good idea. Idea they are. My transition during the triathlon was like five minutes long and my feet were killing me for like a week. So, yeah, true. Traditional barefoot cycling, I don't recommend, but using custom fitted cycling shoes. Holy cow. If you plan on being a cyclist long term. Awesome, awesome stuff. So. So that those are made by. By Rocket seven.

Awesome. Well, maybe you can get some branded with. With the BG Fitness logo.

That's right. I've got my name on mine. They say. They say B. Greenfield because I don't think Ben Greenfield would fit along the entire. I'm just glad they didn't write Ben Green.

Yeah, so I was just actually joking about that because I wanted to find a way to segue into asking you if you have your Ben Greenfield fitness swag all lined up to give away to our awesome itunes review.

You and your tricky Segways. No, no, I don't. But I'm still. I'm still sending out cool care packages for the reviews. I should have that swag in by about mid September. So I'll have hats and I'll have water bottles and I'll have shirts. Like, not crappy cotton shirts that look like tents, but actually like nice fitting tech T shirts for all. All of our muscly ripped listeners.

Other people who do silly bags.

That's right, all you silly, silly bench pressers. So if you want to leave a review in itunes, what we do is if we read your review on the show, then you can let us know that you heard your review being read and give us your address. And we send you a care package. So it might be a can of Campbell's soup. Or maybe some crackers.

Some of those Oreo cookies with the double stuffing everybody was all upset about lately.

That's right. Or perhaps if you get me this week a survival kit, maybe I'll send you some beef jerky and some, oh.

Maybe one of your homegrown squirrels astronaut.

Capsules that you add water to to get a turkey dinner. Anyways though, today's review is left on itunes by Tribute who only gave our podcast four stars, not five stars. I have no clue why, but anyways, I'm gonna read it anyways.

Tribuda not cool. Tribuda not cool.

But he says a great kick in the pants. So Tributa says don't give him a.

Kick in the pants.

Four stars worth Ben and Brock do a fantastic job each week bringing you everything you need to know about health, fitness, nutrition and holistic living. His tips and tricks on how to hack healthy living motivate and inform me on how to live a better life. It is one of the few podcasts that actually bases all their recommendations on actual science and not tin hat conspiracy theories. Even the poop discussions have a Ready for this nugget of truth? Try Buddha. You are such a kick in the pants. And because you only left four stars, I think I may actually just send you a nugget, if you catch my meaning. Anyways, a dark bill of Ruben colored nugget. So there you have it. So anyways, yeah, so if you want to leave your review, go over to itunes. And of course if you want a special website that allows you to give the gift of Ben Greenfield Fitness to your friends, your family, your loved ones, or your extremely annoyed co workers. Workers go to BenGreenfieldFitness.comlove and at BenGreenfieldFitness.com love you can share the wealth. And at BenGreenfieldFitness.Com 255 you can get the show notes for this episode. If you're lucky, I might actually show up next week. Or in a couple of weeks. If not. Goodbye everyone. It was nice knowing you.

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