How To Reverse Eye Aging, Get A Better Butt, And Use Hot Baths For Performance and Fat Loss.

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, how to use hot baths for performance, natural remedies for dry eyes, how to enhance vision, how your feet affect your butt, high heart rates on a ketogenic diet, strength training for trail runners, and how your ears affect your muscles.

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 nation. 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.

Well, it's a beautiful sunny day here in Toronto. What's going on in your world, Ben?

Home day for us. The smell of bacon and eggs is emanating from the kitchen because the kids would normally be off at tennis camp this morning, but the rain has shut it down.

Well, I guess you're making the best of a rainy day. That's all right.

We are. We've got a guest over at the house right now, a Kiwi. It's Ironman. Coeur d' Alene is here in town this weekend. So I've got a New Zealander pro triathlete sleeping on the couch, Brian Rhodes. He's actually, he was one of the very, very first guests on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. I remember, like, it was like, whatever four years ago. I should call him in, but I think he's stuffing his face with bacon and coffee right now.

And Vegemite probably too.

Yes. So if you hear children screaming and dogs barking and bacon cooking and people from New Zealand shouting, it's just the typical morning in the, in the Greenfield house. So, yeah, though that's, that's about it. Not a whole lot else going on. I've settled in from racing in Japan and I'm personally getting ready to head up to Ironman Canada and, and, and do that event. And I've been doing, still been doing the whole ketogenic thing. I'm doing my, my metronome, my breath tubes. So you just breathe into these tubes and if they turn purple, you're in ketosis. And I've been doing a pretty good job, you know, drinking the bulletproof coffee every morning and doing the ketogenic kale shakes and keeping myself in that geeked out state of ketosis. And yeah, now that all our listeners are asleep after hearing about my exciting life, mine's not much more exciting.

I'm still, I'm recovering from. I Did a sprint triathlon on the weekend. And you know, we talked about a couple of weeks ago on the show, we actually talked about a fellow rode in and did two back to back marathons at a very, very low pace. And we were talking about how that doesn't beat your body up as much sometimes as doing something really full out. And I can really attest to that right now. Like a sprint triathlon. I did it on Saturday. It's Wednesday now. I'm still really tired and sore. Yeah, it's not, it's horrible but it's, it took it out of me.

You know, this whole, this relates to an article. And you know what? I actually want to link to this article in the show Notes for folks. But it was over at a cool website that I like. It's gokaleo.com not gopaleo.com, gokaleo.com is written by this chick who started off overweight and basically just ate a lot of food, like a lot of really good nutrient dense food, lifted weights and just got this banging body. Sorry for that description. You women out there, I did not mean to paint you as objects.

He's not objectifying. It's, it's a, that is a qualification.

But I mean check out the website. It's pretty amazing. Gokaleo and she has a guest article on there this week about low intensity steady state cardio and how it's gotten such a bad rap lately. And I've even been guilty of kind of jumping on the, you know, endurance sports can be bad for you bandwagon. But in particular there was a guy named John Keefer. He is the author of the carb backloading program that some people might be familiar with. And he wrote an article that eats.

Cherry danishes all night.

Exactly. So he wrote an article called why women should not run. And we talked about all of kind of the issues with that article a few weeks ago about how it blames low thyroid and everything else on low intensity steady state carts and just has a bunch of errors in the way the article was written in terms of citation errors. And she has a guest article on her website that digs into it even more and really rips that whole endurance sports is bad for women theory to pieces. And it's an interesting article. I'm going to link to it because it's really long and folks can go read it. But ultimately one takeaway and you talking about sprint triathlons made me think about this is that they talk about how while high intensity interval training and high Intensity cardio in many studies has been shown to have just as big a, quote, unquote, detrimental effect on your hormones and your thyroid and everything else as low intensity steady state cardio. And the one thing, the one link that kind of makes both of these bad for you is them being done in the presence of calorie restriction. And that was something that I talked about. I actually wrote my race report for Ironman Japan that I just got back from. And in that race report, somebody said, well, what'd you do to PR in the half marathon? And my answer basically was, I ate more and ran less. And what it comes down to in many cases when we're talking about whether doing a sprint triathlon would be bad for you or harmful to your body or doing lots of low intensity steady state cardio would be bad for you is that in most cases, most of the hormonal deficits and the inflammation and all this stuff that shows that this stuff beats you up really is only proven to be that significant if you're simultaneously restricting calories. So what it comes down to is when you're working out and when you're racing, when you're beating up your body, eat. Just go enjoy some food.

I think we've talked about that before. Prioritizing your weight loss in the off season and then prioritizing your training on the on season. Don't try and do them at the same time.

Yeah, yeah. So. And you know, knock on wood, I've. I've actually been stuffing my face the more I see studies like this. And I'm really not gaining weight, I'm working out, I'm eating food, my body composition is great, I feel fantastic. And. Yeah, so. So don't fear food. There you go.

News flashes.

Okay, I think we already covered one of the news flashes, but we've got a few more coming up. And if you want to find all the links, make sure to go over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com244 and we'll have links to all of the studies that we're about to go through here.

That's right. So studies, articles. I always want to share with you guys some of the cool or slightly nerdy things that I run across.

Slightly nerdy.

Here's a study by our friend Alex Hu Hutchinson, or not a study, but an article. He writes for the Globe and Mail, does some fantastic articles. And he actually.

And he's darn fast, too.

Is he?

Yeah.

Is he a runner?

Yeah, yeah, he did. I think it was the London Marathon. He did a Marathon just recently and did extremely well.

Well, he may have been electrocuting himself because what he reported on in this article, and I'll link to it in the show notes, is a study that they recently published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine where they use this non invasive form of BRE stimulation. It's called transcranial direct current stimulation. And what they did was they applied this small electrical current to targeted areas of the brain. And when you do that, it causes these little changes in how neurons communicate with each other. And they did this on cyclists who were doing all out cycling tests after getting either 20 minutes of real brain electrical stimulation or fake brain electrical stimulation, meaning the electrodes are hooked up, but there wasn't actually any, you know, stimulation going on. Now after.

I guess you wouldn't. I was just thinking like, you should be able to tell the difference between that, but you don't really have those kind of receptors in your brain, so.

You don't really know. You don't. When I went down and did, I went down to Dave Asprey's biohacking conference in San Francisco and I did a bunch of neurofeedback and I was hooked up to electrodes for an hour at one point. And the only difference I noticed was every once in a while you'd hear almost like a little bit of static in your ears. But aside from that, you just couldn't tell. I mean, it's not, it's very different than stimulating muscles with your.

Yeah, it's not like being hooked up to the compex and watching your calf freak out.

Exactly. So after the brain electrical stimulation, the cyclists who were getting stimulated with the electricity, they had lower heart rates, they had a lower increase in perceived exertion, meaning they felt like they were working less hard. And they produced 4% more power in the cycling test, which in research for cyclists, for anybody who studies cycling research research and wattage and stuff, that's huge. Four percent is a big boost in power. Now they actually explored where this boost came from. And that was a little bit tougher to explain in the research. They thought that it was related to the role of something called your insular cortex in your brain, which helps to control your heart rate and your blood pressure. And what seemed to be going on was that that was being somehow kind of regulated in a way that the stimulation to the brain was causing the same section of your brain that gets turned on when pleasant feelings occur, like happy voices or pleasant music or something like that. Those are getting turned on by the stimulation. It Was down regulating heart rate and blood pressure down regulating rating of perceived exertion. So you know, almost, almost giving these people, you know, the feeling like they smoked a joint prior to exercise but somehow increased power at the same by modulating neuronal activity. And it was really, really interesting. I mean and I could totally see somebody coming up with some kind of a device that you could like put in your bike helmet, put into a hat or a helmet. Totally not, not kidding here. And super interesting stuff. So you know, and then of course it opens up the whole ethical can of worms about, you know, is that any different than, you know, putting. Putting Andro and injects a full of Android in your right butt cheek. But yeah, I guess so. Interesting study. I'll link to that one in the show notes.

It sounds really similar to the stuff that they' for, for like severe depression too. Like people who aren't responsive to any other sort of treatments for depression. They actually pass a current through parts of your brain and it, it gives the same sort of. Well, not the same, but a similar sort of response. Yeah. I wonder if that's how they discovered it. Like all these people went from being depressed to being like super fast and powerful.

Yeah. So if you're, if you're, if you're a depressed cyclist, all the better. So yeah, yeah, if you're a cyclist from Seattle.

Win win.

Eggs A study on eggs where they compared egg whites with regular eggs. And I think that with as much of an emphasis we've placed on the benefits of healthy fats, the benefits of cholesterol, the benefits of a specific enzyme called lecithin found in egg yolks that helps you to kind of break down fats. I think we've established on this podcast before that egg yolks are probably better for you than egg whites. But in this study they actually. And tastier. That's right. But they found that the regular consumption of whole eggs every day compared to the use of an egg substitute, a yolk free egg substitute resulted in increased ability of hdl, your good cholesterol to. Even though LDL isn't bad cholesterol. But you know, just, just for semantics sake, your hdl, your good cholesterol enhanced its ability to carry fat out of macrophages. And macrophages are basically your pro atherogenic. They allow the formation of these foam cells and plaque formation in the coronary arteries. And so HDL had an enhanced ability to be able to carry lipids out of this area, carry potential for plaque formation out of this Area in the presence of whole eggs, but not in the presence of egg whites. And as a matter of fact, when egg whites were consumed, the HDL tended to have a higher. What's called a triglycerid. Triglyceride content, which is actually the more triglyceride you've got in a lipid like hgl, the worse your cholesterol profile is. So ultimately, and I thought about this last night as I was driving home from dropping the truck off at the airport, or I was biking home from dropping the truck off at the airport, I rode by the McDonald's offering their brand new egg white McMuffin, you know, which they're branding as their brand new healthy pair. Yeah. So ultimately, eggs, whole eggs with the egg yolks. Beat out the egg whites and don't.

Wrap them in white. What do they call them? English muffins.

Exactly. Flour English muffin or dump sucralose on them. Because there was another study that came out at the Washington University School of Medicine where they found out that sucralose. So they tested sucralose. They had people eat Splenda.

It's artificial sweetener sucralose, like the stuff that people dump in their coffee all the time.

Sucralose, Splenda, the little. I think that's the yellow one, isn't it? Oh, I believe it's the yellow one. I don't know.

I'm colorblind. I actually have no idea.

Pink, yellow, whatever. They found that insulin levels rose about 20% after the consumption of sucralose, meaning that there is a response of what's called your incretin hormones, your gut hormones, in response to an artificial sweetener. There's not supposed to be. Right. It's just artificial. Like there shouldn't be anything going on. But this is why, in my opinion, people who consume diet beverages have a higher risk for obesity and overweight. This is why you tend to get appetite cravings after you consume a food that has an artificial sweetener versus a food that has real calories is because you're telling your gut and your pancreas to churn out all of these hormones responsible for. For causing food to be shoved into the cells for energy or to be digested, but there's no actual calories present. And this study backs up that idea that artificial sweeteners, and in this case sucralose, does indeed have a very significant effect on gut metabolism, meaning you do get a significant insulin release in response.

To its consumption, and that's on top of it. Being a neurotoxin and destroying part of the gut bacteria in your body as well.

That's right. That's right.

Win, win, win.

At least in rats, which we all know are little people.

They're little humans.

Yeah. A couple other things I wanted to mention real quick. We're coming up on Ramadan, and there was an interesting study that looked into fasting and intermittent fasting. Specifically, this was in the Mashad University of Medical Science from the University of Nak.

And Ramadan is when you can't eat anything between sunrise and sunset, right?

That's right. And I have no idea where the hell University of Nicosia is.

Sounds fancy, though.

It does sound fancy. So Ramadan, basically what they found was that during this, this, this fasting window of Ramadan, young men and older men experienced improvements in body composition, drop in body fat percentage, and some pretty good physiological adaptations to allow them to increase their burning of fatty acids. But in women, there was not a similar response in terms of a change in body composition or in terms of an improvement in fatty acid utilization. And this kind of returns to something that I've talked about on this podcast before, and that is that, like with the clients that I coach and train for, for, for fat loss or for, for, for sports, I use fasting protocols far less often for the women that I train compared to the guys that I work with, because women tend to get pretty messed up with frequent fasting and they just do better with. With more regular energy intake. And, and part of that might be due to the fact that women are pretty good at fatty acid utilization anyways and don't need an extra, you know, kick in the pants, so to speak. But this was interesting, and I'll link to the study in the show notes. So there was increased fat oxidation during Ramadan in men, but you didn't see the same change in body composition or fat oxidation in women. And of course, we also know that in women, intermittent fasting, especially combined with exercise, like we kind of touched on at the beginning of this podcast, has a pretty nasty effect on your. On your thyroid hormones, specifically your T3 as well. So just for you women listening in, you know, once, once again, I actually don't know if we have any female listeners, but I think you've scared them.

Off with your objectifying them at the beginning of the podcast.

That's right. That's right. Those of you who are still hanging around after I described your body as banging, banging, the intermittent fasting thing, not that great of an idea. And then the very last thing I wanted to mention, and I promise I'll be done geeking out is this whole idea of grounding or earthing. And a lot of people are into these grounding mats or these earthing mats for recovery. And it's something that we actually talked about on this podcast years ago. I had Jeff Spencer, who's the team physician for it was at the time Team Radio Shack, I believe he talked about how these professional cyclists would sleep on these grounding mats or earthing mats. And I believe they every night during.

The Tour de France they lay on these things.

Yeah. And they make full on mattresses and everything too. And they plug into the wall. And the problem with them is, and I'm going to link to a full on podcast where they talk about this in detail. But the problem is that when you plug those mats in the US at least into the wall, they plug into the grounding outlet so they're grounded. And in the US about 70% of the power that's going to our homes and our buildings and everything travels back to the substation, not through the wires, but through the ground. And the earth in the US is literally electrified with power traveling back to the substation. So you're essentially introducing extra electrical pollution and extra electromagnetic frequencies into your bed or wherever you happen to be sleeping or standing on this grounding mat when you use grounding and earthing mats in the US So I recommend unless you live in Europe, and again, I don't know if we have any female listeners or any European listeners, I think that most of our listeners are just red blooded American males and pickup trucks. Yeehaw. Or Canadians. But if you, if you do happen to, to be looking into the grounding or earthing thing, I recommend you, you use, there's, there's one called the Biomat. Super expensive, but it's actually like this magnetically infused mat that still releases that, that Schumann frequency, which is the natural frequency of the planet Earth that's supposed to help quite with sleep and with health and with cellular metabolism and stuff like that. Or else use one of these earth pulse devices which are, it's like a magnetic device that you place underneath your mattress that doesn't get grounded in the same way as a grounding or an earthing mat does. But I'm not a fan of these grounding or earthing mats and I know that they're popular and they're sexy or whatever and a lot of people are using them. But you know, and I'm going to link in the show notes to the podcast that explains This a lot better than it's over at the website. It's rainmaking time, which gets kind of fringe sometimes in its podcast, but heck, that puts them in the same category as us, right?

I guess so.

In our aluminum tinfoil hats.

I'm not.

Crap.

I'm not wearing my hat.

Go put your hat on and let's do the special announcements.

Okay.

Special announcements.

All right.

So you're gonna give everybody a helping hand in their race this weekend.

That's right. So for anyone you're running in front.

Of them and just like hold your hand out. Come on, you can do it.

That's illegal. Actually, in triathlons, you're not supposed to give people any aid at all. Or hold hands. Yeah, one of my friends got disqualified from doing Ironman Hawaii for life when he accepted a beer from a. From a participant because he was blowing to pieces during the race. And he started walking and was just like pretty much ready to just call it quits. And one of the spectators was just like, well, here, have a beer. So he took the beer and was sipping the beer and he's a pro. And it got caught on television coverage and he got banned for life from doing Ironman Hawaii. Anyways, though, here in town where I'm at Ironman Coeur d' Alene Triathlon on is this.

And we'll be passing out beers, and.

I'll be passing out beers to the pros. No gluten free beer, of course, but no. Basically I'm gonna be over there on Saturday. That's. That's this Saturday, whatever it is, the 22nd or 23rd or whatever it comes out.

Sounds about right.

But at noon over kind of where the race starts on what's called independent stairs over in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho, I will be lecturing, which sounds really boring. I'll be doing. I'll be doing a Q and A, basically. And I'll be doing a Q and A kind of on a last minute nutrition pacing for everybody who knows that it's a really good idea the day before the race. Yeah. The day before change to change your plan. But for anybody who actually does want to change their plan completely, I'll be doing a Q and A. Or if you just want to come over and hang out. Noon over in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho, for those of you who are in town for Ironman Coeur d'. Alene. And then also I wanted to mention, because I do know that we have a lot of triathlete listeners, the 2013 Thailand Triathlon Adventure.

Is it filling up like crazy?

It's filling up like crazy. We still have a few spots left, but what I really wanted to emphasize was this kind of thing we're doing from November 17th through November 21st before our actual adventure starts. And it's going to be out at this health resort where we're going to be teaching people a ton about nutrition and healthy living and also, you know, doing things like swimming and cycling and running efficiency and economy and drills. But just a really unique training camp where we're going to teach people how to have better lives, how to move better, move more efficiently. Not one of those triathlon camps where you go and get. Get beat up and just, like, you know, swim and bike and run your ass off. It's gonna be. I'm, you know, I'm bringing in some cool guest lecturers, some pro triathletes. Latest one I talked to was Tamsen Lewis, who's a. Who's a physician and a professional triathlete. She'll be there and she'll do a guest lecture, and it's just gonna be a really, really cool experience for people who, who want to come along who have nothing better to do this winter than go to Thailand for. For one week or two weeks or three weeks. Kind of some options in there, but email, you got to email at this point because it's filling up. I don't. I'm not sure if you can even use the register link anymore, but if you want to get in, you got to email me. Ben Greenfield Fitness.com the races are sold out, but I can still get you in. I'm getting discounted hotel room blocks. Lots of cool stuff. I actually bought my plane tickets last week. So anyways, that's. So email Ben greenfieldfitness.com if you want to go party and live and have fun in Thailand this winter. It's going to be a blast.

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Okay, so before we get completely out of the news flash mode, although I guess we kind of have, I think this first question relates to a news flash we had last week where you talked about taking a 20 minute hot bath 48 hours before doing a hard effort like a race or a really hard workout. And so Michael wanted to know, he's training for an iron distance triathlon. So every Saturday is a long ride followed by a transition run, and then Sunday is a long run. And he wants to know if he soaks every Thursday, would that be too much?

So basically he's trying to time it so that he's doing some hard workouts. And every single Thursday before he starts his hard weekend, he wants to do a hot back bath.

Yeah, it seems that makes sense.

What basically this study found was that you'd recover from your workouts faster if you took this hot bath 48 hours prior. So 20 minutes of hot bathing led to the statistically significant decrease in exercise induced muscle damage when the workout was done 48 hours after. And there was basically an upregulation of the satellite cells that are responsible for repairing mus and also some immune cell infiltration, at least in mice and rats, which once again, we all know are.

Little furry humans, little people.

That would be a fun study. Just giving a mouse a nice little hot bath, give it a, you know, get out a loofah and kind of, you know, some nice bubble bath.

That's cute.

Fun study. Anyways, though, you know, there's nothing to say that it wouldn't happen.

Help.

You could try it out. But honestly, this is one of those questions where, you know, this, this is all blue sky stuff. It's like, yeah, it might help. I mean, heck, like, like I mentioned when we talked about this last week, I love to get some. I, I get these magnesium flakes from a company called Ancient Minerals. I dump about a half pound of those into a nice warm bath. And, man, I mean, you feel magical when you get out of that thing, incidentally, by the way, if you're constipated, it also initiates a bowel move within about 30 minutes. Delightful. Magnesium soak is awesome for this stuff. And I use these magnesium flakes. But interestingly, in the same way that they make these cool fat burner vests that we've talked about before in the podcast, where they're basically ice packing vests that you wear, you put them over your collarbone Bulletproof vest, but it's got.

Ice packs instead of Kevlar in it.

Yeah. So it steps up the activation of your brown adipose tissue. So you burn fat to generate heat. Basically. And by the way, the guy who owns that company, the coolfatburner.com company, he wrote me two days ago and told me that he's developing a cool fat burner, like a weight belt, where you could wear this around your waist and step up the activation of brown adipose tissue on your waistline, too, and burn extra fat that way.

So I'll tell you, that's like a icy cumberbund.

Yeah, yeah. So your little icy cummerbund that you can wear to promote. But they also. I found this clothing company called spartsy, and it's spartsy.com, s p a R-T-Z-Y.com and what they do is they make this special fabric that's a heated fabric. And the idea behind this heated fabric, they call it a TX fabric material, is it warms your muscles and by warming your muscles, it increases blood flow to the muscle and can step up metabolic rate in an area of localized blood flow. And research has indeed shown that local heating that increases skeletal muscle blood flow can also amplify fat oxidation. It can amplify carbohydrate oxidation. So basically, overall metabolism in whatever area is being heated. And there's a few different studies that have actually looked into what's called a hemodynamic response to heat stress in leg muscles and arms muscles and found that there, there is indeed higher muscle metabolism. When you heat up an area in that way, it's different than a response to cold. So when you're doing something like cold thermogenesis, you're getting activation of brown adipose tissue to generate heat to keep you warm. And when you warm a muscle, you're getting that increase in blood flow that steps up fat oxidation and carbohydrate oxidation just because of an increase in localized metabolism. And this is probably why something like the protocol that we talked about at the, at the Become Superhuman conference a few months ago that we did, where a guy named Ray Kronice was there, a NASA materials engineer, and he was talking about how you get better fat loss results. If you're going to use temperature for fat loss, you get better results. Alternating hot and cold water while you're like taking a shower, you know, 20 seconds cold to 10 seconds hot 10 times through. For example, example for a, for a five minute shower, you get better fat loss results. From doing something like that than if you were to do just a cold shower. Because you're giving yourself the best of both worlds, right? The increased blood flow and then also the activation of the brown adipose tissue. So ultimately you know, this, this whole like hot bath thing, especially if maybe you were to follow it with like a cold shower, you could do that. You could also do something like wear one of these, you know, cool fat burner vests at work and then you know, maybe put on some of the, this, this spartsy fabric and you know, warm the muscle back up. So you know, a few different ways you could play around with temperature in that sense. But you know, it's, it's kind of funny just because like you know, some people will do all this stuff and then just go, you know, whatever, eat a hamburger for lunch and skip their workout for the day. And it's like we're talking about the extra like 5% here. You know, Granted in the case of, of Ray Cronice he did show some data that indicated that even in the absence of ex doing these hot cold contrast showers twice a day for five to 10 minutes, he was actually inducing 20 to 30 pound weight loss in some of the folks that he was working with.

But again, I think there was a lot of diet restriction involved.

There was, there was a lot, they were basically in his case they were doing full on vegan diets I believe. And so there were some pretty severe calorie restriction going on, which long term is not all that great for your brain and your nervous system. But for short term, you know, really, really high fat loss, you know, it definitely, you know, by the research that he showed had a significant effect. So ultimately, you know, that was my really long way of saying I have no freaking clue.

But it's not going to hurt you.

Yeah, it's not going to hurt you.

You know, take Michael, give it a try.

Light your candles, your romantic candles and get your lavender out and take your bubble bath and then go work out and let us all know how it goes.

Hi Ben, this is Jenny. I've had a problem with my eyes being really dry and I experimented for about five months with just putting, making sure I put drops in my eyes over the counter drops. And I also increased my amount of omega 3s that I was taking but it just wasn't working and it got really bad. And my doctor said that I needed to start using Restasis, which is a prescription eye drop. And she said that I'll need to be on that for the rest of my life. And I never liked to hear somebody telling me that I'm going to be needing to do something like that for the rest of my life. It got to the point where I couldn't see as well as I normally do. And she said it's a hereditary condition. She called it chronic dry eye. So anyways, I just wanted to see if you have any thoughts on how to improve this condition without me having to be committed to using these prescription drugs drops forever. Thanks a lot, Ben. I really appreciate it. Bye.

Yeah, man. Have you ever had dry eyes?

I get dry eyes quite a lot, I have to admit. So this question has great interest for me.

So I have not been wearing glasses or sunglasses or eyewear when I ride my bike, and I've been getting a little bit of dry eye myself, but that's typically due to me going downhill, drying your eyes, going down Hills at 30 miles an hour and essentially with your eyes wide open, shoving a blow dryer in my face. But yeah, dry eye syndrome, you know, it goes by a bunch of different names if you really want to get scientific. The lacrimal, lacrimal, cara to conjunctivitis, whatever. Evaporative tear deficiency. You could. I like that better than saying dry eyes. I have a tear deficiency.

Yeah.

I think that just sounds much more impressive, aggressive.

It sounds kind of heartbreaking.

It sounds like, yeah, a tear deficiency would elicit much greater compassion from someone you were telling about your issue compared to dry eyes. So Jenny's tear deficiency. But yeah, basically dry eye syndrome is kind of an issue because it can eventually lead to damage in your cornea and loss of vision. And there are a bunch of different things that can cause it. Antihistamines and nasal decongestants are probably the biggest, biggest too. But a lot of women don't realize that birth control pills can. Can dry your eyes. Antidepressants can be a big issue. A lot of blood pressure meds can do it, too. Hormone replacement therapy is another big, big issue when it comes to dry eyes. And there are more, more physiological and hormonal reasons for why some of this stuff happens than I care to get into at this point in the podcast. But also all that stuff can cause dry eyes. As can, of course, just allergies, infrequent blinking because you've been staring at a computer or a video screen for a long period of time, or even using contact lenses. Long term use of contact lenses can cause this as well. And I think we do have a question about glasses and contact lenses. And I do have some thoughts about how to avoid, avoid using those. But as far as standard treatment for dry eye syndrome, usually there's going to be some kind of an anti inflammatory medication that you could get prescribed. There are devices that they make that kind of plug the holes where tears drain from your eyes so you essentially retain your tears. Tear retention devices.

That doesn't sound good.

Cool idea. And you can get surgery to permanently close your eyes. Drainage holes. If it's a big issue and your head explodes. I'm never a huge fan of closing any of the body's drainage holes. The corking fix is not a favorite of mine.

So they do that for excessive sweaters sometimes too. Like not sweaters that you wear, but.

People who sweat a lot, right? Yeah.

That just sounds painful.

Yes. Eye plugs, butt plugs, whatever. Don't plug your butt. I'm not a fan of plug plugging. So preliminary research that I've seen as well as a couple of fairly conclusive studies have shown that omega 3 fatty acids have real, real promise as a natural approach to dry eye relief. And that's where I'd start.

Is that taken orally or taken that. What would that be?

Ocularly dumping a fish oil capsule into your eye? No, that would be taken orally in supplement form. So salmon mackerel, you could do like some flaxseed or chia seed. You obviously get less absorption with something like that. But specifically in one really impressive study where they purposefully induced dry eye syndrome in rats, I have no clue how they did that. Possibly by putting them blue on them. Putting them on, putting them on bicycles. Putting him on little bicycles and having him ride downhills at high speeds in a wind tunnel with little helmets that I bet they were at the wind tunnel. Yeah. But they gave him a combination of gamma linoleic acid and the ecosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid, the DHA and the epa. And that led to a significant reduction in dry eye symptoms. And they were able to replicate that study in mice later on on. Some people have anecdotally reported it. So I'm, I'm a fan of fish oil anyways, as long as it's a good high quality fish oil, preferably packaged with antioxidants, cold process. So you're not getting a lot of the free radical formation. I'm up to eight a day that I use. So I'm. Which comes out, I think it comes out to about 6 grams per day of fish oil that I use.

I was going to say Because Jenny said that she, she did try increasing her omega 3s but maybe she didn't increase them enough.

Yeah, so I would bump yourself up. You don't necessarily need to do the whole mega dose. There's guys like Charles Poliquin out there recommending 40 grams or whatever. But you could step up from the standard standard. A lot of people are doing 1 to 3 grams and I'd bump that up 6, 8 grams around in there, make sure it's a good, A bad fish oil is really worse for you than not taking fish oil at all.

All.

So I'll put a link to the one that I take. It's the super essentials fish oil. It's the best fish oil on the face of the planet that I've found. Just because it does include, you know, the astaxanthin antioxidant, the vitamin E, the natural cold processed triglyceride form. It's just, it's pretty magical fish oil. So that's the one that I'd use. And then also the other thing that you could try is like moisture when you're sleeping. Like one of these humidifiers. I actually bought a couple of these for travel after I read about them and I think it was Tim Ferriss did an article on them. But they're these little humidifiers that you just take a standard plastic size water bottle and you attach it to this very small portable device and it humidifies the air next to your bed and it can help you sleep a little bit better. It could definitely help with dry eyes, dry throat if you're congested, stuff like that, that. But they're just these little. I wish I could remember the name of them. I'll write a note to myself here to look up our, our Amazon link for these little, little humidifiers. But I mean they're, they're like 20 bucks or something like that and you.

Just plug it into a socket somewhere and it just.

Yeah, yeah, but it's like a very small portable humidifier. So. And that, you know, especially if you travel a lot that can, that can help out. So that's something else I would consider. And yeah, and of course, you know, duh, stay hydrated. That's, that's a big one. But I assume you're already doing that, so. So yeah, those are some of the things that I would, I would try.

Okay, so following on the heels of that, we've got a question from Benjamin who wrote in and said, I just found out that from my optometrist that I may need vision Correction. And of course, they're recommending correct contacts or prescription glasses. But I'm interested in whether there are some natural ways to enhance eyesight without using glasses or contact lenses.

Yeah, we've talked about before in the podcast, I believe, this whole Bates Method.

Yeah, yeah, I think we talked about that probably a month or two ago. Yeah, it's been a while.

And this is the method that kind of flies under the radar. I think I had mentioned it. It's like the thing that I do if I wanted to improve my eye, eyesight naturally. And it's a series of techniques like palming and visualization and ocular muscle movements, like literally eye muscle training. And there's also, interestingly, even sunning that's involved in that protocol, which is literally exposure to sunlight. And there are some people that swear by that. And probably the person most famous for saying that it really helped with their vision was this eldest Huck Huxley guy.

You remember the, the writer Aldous Huxley?

Brave New World. Yeah. Yep. And. And he actually wrote a book called the Art of Seeing where he talked about how he used the Bates Method to, to help him. I don't believe that he actually got himself off of, of glasses or prescription lenses, but he got to the point where he really, like, couldn't read it all without a magnifying glass, to the point where he could read as long as he was in good condition. So, you know, it's pretty darn good.

Especially in the 1920s or 30s or whenever that was.

Yeah. And you know, I have zero, like, my eyesight is fine. I have zero experience with this Bates Method, but in the past I've said that that is something that I would try before turning to contact lenses or glasses if I, if my vision started to suffer. Now I've also. And I'm waiting for my glasses to arrive, but I did a four hour session with what's called an Erlen practitioner. And Erlen syndrome is a kind of syndrome where when you're reading, the words bounce around a little bit and you have poor visual acuity. And an Erlan practitioner basically does a session with you where you spend hours reading and looking at objects and tracking visual acuity and comparing. Comparing how well your eyes do with different colors of lenses. So we went through like 30 different color combinations and everything. And actually it turns out that like this light purple lens with a little bit of like an amber kind of blue light reduction type of lens placed on top of that actually really improves, personally for me, my visual acuity and my reading Speed. Like, we actually tracked how quickly I was able to go through pages and paragraphs. And so I ordered some Oakley prescription frames and my, my Erlen lenses aren't here yet. This is a process I've been going through the past couple of months. And they're going to put them in the, the lenses in the frames and then send those to me. And I'll wear those when I'm playing tennis, when I'm reading, when I'm writing, not only to, to block blue light and glare from coming from the computer screen, but also to, to enhance my visual acuity.

So, so would you describe those lenses as being rose colored?

They're. No, they're purple. Like, they're literally like a light purple. And I'll take a picture of rose colored glasses. No, they're not rose colored glasses, Brock.

But that's unfortunate.

We're able to see the world through rose colored glasses. I'm sure that I would, I would be even happier than purple colored glasses. Exactly. There is. Did you listen to the podcast that I did with Eric Kyle Dob, the guy from Z Health, and he talked about. Z Health is a really, really cool program. And I'll put a link to the podcast that I did with him in the show Notes. But he talked about basically enhancing your performance and your health through the use of training your nerves like your vestibular system and your eyes, your ears, your back balance. And rather than just focusing on lifting weights and strengthening muscles, it really focuses on a lot of these cranial nerves and really just training the nervous system, making your nervous system bulletproof, so to speak. So Z Health is the name of that company. But they recently, literally, I think in the past two weeks, they came out with this program called the Vision Gene Gym. And the Vision Gym is. I like that. Yeah, it's a very, very markety name. But what it is is it's almost like a modernized version of this Bates method where you learn how to do like eye isometrics and circles and spirals. They teach you like this blinking routine that resets your visual system. They teach you how to warm up your eyes using like this, this fingertip warm up and method. And it's like 10 to 20 minutes each day of exercises that you do and it literally realigns your vision. And so they've got people that they're working with like pro boxers and Olympians. They've got some folks in the MLB and the NBA who are using these. And like, it's, it's not just for. If your eyes are Suffering like it's actually to. Meant to, to be an ergogenic aid, like to enhance your sports performance if you just want better peripheral vision or better visual acuity. But a bunch of stuff that they teach you in this, I think, I mean, it's, it's not cheap. It's like, I think it's like a 90. It's one of those like Internet marketing 9777 type of programs that you download or whatever. But I mean, still, compared to like doing contact lenses or glasses, you can.

Pay like a thousand dollars for a pair of glasses.

Yeah. And it just came out. I haven't tried it yet. It's on my list of things to do. I want to get these Erlen glasses dialed in and then I'm going to try it because I love to experiment with this stuff. But I mean, heck, if you can fix your eyes and also improve like your hand, eye body coordination and your peripheral vision and everything, this thing might be worth a go as well. And so I'll put a link to that vision gym thing in the show. Notes. Notes. I'll put a link to the previous podcast that we do with the people from Z Health as well. And then I'll keep all of our listeners posted and send you a photo of me with my geeky purple lenses when those things arrive. But those are some of the things I'd look into.

We've got a question later in the show from Troy. I think he'd really benefit from the Zed Health stuff as well.

Cool.

You like how I call it? Zed Health?

I like. That was very European.

It's because I'm Canadian.

Oh, yeah.

Hello, Ben and everyone else. My name's Jim, an endurance athlete from Florida, and I mainly focus on the Xterra triathlon. I took your advice on the golf ball on my feet and definitely an interesting kind of way to break up all the junk in my feet. But I'm curious because later that day, this is kind of. I'm on downtime. I'm recovering after some pretty hard racing and pretty hard training. And so I had a bit of work to do and I golf balled both feet. And later that day I ended up doing some yard work and it sent my left glute area into spasm and my right as well. Not, not as much. But I'm curious, like, did I break up that much stuff and it just send my, my body into spasm or what? It was definitely not a muscle pull and I was able to switch stop and I rolled it out on a foam roller, which helped tremendously. And now today, the day after, I'm not feeling as much tenderness, but it really, it shut me down almost to the point of not being able to walk. So if you can give any insight into that, I'd be really appreciate it. Love the advice. Keep up the podcasts.

You know, I like any excuse to say something about your butt in the podcast and especially.

But, but spasms, especially. If I were going to start a band today, I would probably call it the Butt Spasms.

Ben Greenfield and the Butt Spasms.

Yeah, I mean, assuming you haven't been sitting on the golf ball gym. I actually keep a golf ball under my desk and I do that because you can roll your feet out with a golf ball and it's really, really great. I actually have, have this, this routine called a fast foot mobility routine. You know, for those of you who have been listening to this podcast for a while, I coach Brock and we're going to try and get Brock to qualify for the Boston Marathon. And one of the things that Brock's. I don't even know if he knows this yet, but I did it yesterday.

For the first time and I actually went so hard that I think I bruised the bottom one of my.

Yeah, it's called my fast foot mobility routine. And it's just this routine where you roll a golf ball ball around your feet and underneath your feet and all over the place for about five to ten minutes per foot. And it really helps with mobility in your feet. Poor foot mobility is one of the biggest issues in terms of creating kind of up the chain injuries like knee injuries and ankle injuries and hip injuries in folks who have poor foot mobility due to using overbuilt shoes or sitting too much and not spending enough time on your feet or just have having weak feet in general, spending your entire.

Childhood in ballet slippers, or for those.

Of us who have spent our entire childhood in ballet slippers like Brock. But the idea behind using golf balls is great. So I'm glad Jim is using the golf balls. But the problem is that once you reinvent the feet, just like switching to minimalist shoes or whatever, you tend to start to use the muscles that you're supposed to be be using. You get up the chain. Positive benefits. But if those muscles up the chain aren't used to being activated, then you start to get issues. So for example, when you look at the glutes.

I love to look at the glutes.

I do like to look at some glutes. Yes. Banging, banging glutes. Glute imbalances are really common. So by nature, humans are pretty asymmetrical. And you'll find that you tend to, when you're sitting, you tend to shift to one side, or when you're standing for a long time, you'll tend to shift to one side or the other. And because of those asymmetrical patterns, we tend to have kind of, kind of stronger glutes on one side than we do on the other side. And when you combine that with inhibiting the glutes through long periods of time, sitting in a car or at a desk, or with these shortened hip flexors, and that's one of the best ways, by the way, to turn off your glutes, is to shorten your hip flexors. That, combined with these natural asymmetries, tends to create some real glute issues. And if you have ever in your life sprained your ankle or stubbed your toe or pulled a hamstring, fell and landed on your tailbone, any of these things have all been proven in research to inhibit the gluten glutes neurally. And the glutes will stay inhibited until you fix them, until you turn them back on. And because those are your go muscles, those are your propulsion muscles, your glutes, a lot of folks, because of asymmetry and sitting and a previous injury, have glutes that need to be re educated. So when we're talking about getting a better body, but whether it's filling out a pair of fitted jeans or whether it's running faster, you gotta be able to turn on your glutes. And we talked about this a little bit in the interview that I did with Kelly Starrett. I think about how a lot of people have weak glutes. And his book, the Becoming a Supple Leopard book, certainly teaches you how to mobilize your glutes and how to do a lot of the soft tissue work that is going to allow you to use your glutes properly. You know, a lot of the same type of soft tissue work that Jim is already doing on his feet. But, you know, this would be more of, you know, rather than taking a golf ball to the foot, kind of taking a lacrosse ball to the glutes, but you need to be doing glute exercises as well. I mean, if you want to get a better butt or you want to activate your glutes, best place to start is just with simple isometric contractions. So you're keeping your butt squeezed when you're driving in your car, when you're Standing. Standing, when you're, when you're sitting on an airplane, when you're, you know, whatever, pretty much anything.

Whenever you think about it, don't do.

It when you're going to the bathroom because that would be about the equivalent of using one of these butt plugs that we talked about. So aside from contracting your glutes when you're, when you're taking a poo, though, doing a lot of isometric glute contractions and then also doing all these different exercises, body weight exercises that activate your, your glutes are a good place to start. Things like clam shells, fire hydrants, what are called quadruped exercises. Google any of these if you want to see pictures of them. So again, clamshells, fire hydrants, quadrupeds, any of those three would be really, really good. Those are just body weight glute exercises. And then of course, once you've got your glutes turned on, doing those type of things, things, that's where you would progress to doing, like, bilateral movements with these, like, mini bands that you can use to attach your feet together. Like side to side movements. You know, side to side shuffles. Yeah, exactly. Forwards, monster walks, backwards monster walks. A lot of people go straight into the squats, the deadlifts, the, you know, the dumbbell lunges, stuff like that. But if you haven't taught your glutes how to be activated with some of these smaller bodyweight exercises or some of these elastic band exercises, that's all for naught because you're just going to use your, your low back, you'll use your knee joints. But really, if you haven't learned how to turn on your glutes with easier exercises first, some of these bigger moves are kind of a waste of your time. But once you do get to the point where you've turned on your glutes by doing, preferably every single day, some kind of glute activation exercise, and you've learned how to kind of keep your glutes turned on while you're sitting, while you're standing. That's where you progress into making sure that at least once a week, preferably a few times a week, you're working in, you know, squats and single leg squats, deadlifts and single leg deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, reverse lunges, side lunges, front lunges. You know, I work my butt in the weight room at least once a week and I work my butt in terms of keeping it activated at least once a week with, with like elastic band Type of exercises, injury prevention type of moves. And then of course, I just kind of keep my butt squeezed a lot just because I like to walk around looking like I'm, I'm constipated. So. But no, seriously though, like, glute activation issues are a big deal. And by fixing your feet, you may find that, that you simply kind of magnify an issue higher up with a, you know, with a glue issue or, you know, a lot of times, like weak knees. Quad issues are another area where you'll tend to see manifested. But, you know, it's, it's all fixable. So what I'll do, there's a pretty good article by a guy named Brett Contreras who's a really good strength conditioning coach. He's got glute training programs. He's got like a glute ebook and he's, he's kind of known as the gluten guy. I'll put a link to a good article that he has on how to fix glute imbalances in the show notes for anybody who wants a better butt or for anybody who's doing a lot of golf ball rolling to read. So.

So I want to be known as the glute guy.

I would like to be known as the glute guy. That's true. But there's probably. How about we just. We'll give you something else. Like how about the butt. The. The. But the baron of the butt. The butt bastard. The butt bastard. Yeah, we'll say the butt buddy. How about the butt buddy? You can launch the buttbutt buddy dot com. So but anyway, no, seriously, I'll put a link to that gluten balances article by Brett Contreras in the show notes. So there you go.

I am eating a ketogenic diet testing blood ketone heart rate in the morning, usually in the mid to low 50s, sometimes in my upper 40s. But lately when I'm doing anything interval workouts, whether it be run or the bike, my heart rate just goes bonkers. I mean, there was a run where it was in the 180s. I look down, it's normally in the 140s and I'm running out of gas. Maybe it's what I'm doing right before typically happens when I work out later in the day afternoon. Maybe that's my issue. I'm just not getting enough carbohydrate before a run or a bike that takes me out of zone two. So I'll be interested to hear your thoughts and appreciate everything you Do?

Well, there was this whole ketogenic diet thing. First of all, before I say anything, anything like Brock and I did this huge monster podcast for the Jimmy Moore Show, Jimmy Moore's Living La Vida Low carb show. And we talked about ketogenesis the whole time, like basically how to do it, why to do it and like all the practical. So we'll link to that in the show notes because we spent like an hour geeking out on that stuff. But this, this question from, from Keto man about whether or not like a ketogenic diet could cause your heart rate to go bonkers. There was an interesting study actually last night. Graham Turner, who's been on this podcast before, he emailed Brock and I this link to a study that has yet to be released in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research. But they looked at the effects of a short term carb restricted diet on strength, strength and power performance. And that's always something people get nervous about. It's like, right, if I'm carb depleted, if I go into a state of ketogenesis, how the heck am I going to produce power, produce strength, go to a CrossFit workout or go to a track intervals, anything that requires that big.

Burst, like sudden burst of energy and power.

Exactly. Because the whole thinking behind that is that you're going to be glycogen depleted during a carbohydrate restricted diet. And so your body won't have the glucose to rely on for those fast contractions, those fast twitch muscle contractions. And in this particular study, what they did was they took folks and they switched them from their habitual diet to a carbohydrate restricted diet. And literally they did that over a course of seven days. So they, they ate their regular diet for seven days, days. And then they switched to a carbohydrate restricted diet that only had, I believe about 5% carbs for seven days. So a really, really low carbohydrate diet. And they tested their maximum repetition bench press. They tested their 32nd anaerobic, what's called a wingate power test in the bike, which is actually a really hard test. They tested their vertical jump, their 1 rep mat shot max bench press, their 1 rep max squat hand grip dynamometry, which is basically your hand grip strength. And what they found was that the folks who switched to the carbohydrate restricted diet, as expected, they experienced a significant drop in body mass. So they were losing water weight and carb weight and probably some sodium retention as well. And despite that decrease in body mass mass, they retained strength output and power output completely after this carbohydrate restricted diet. So it didn't have any issue at all for them. Which has implications for people who are either trying to cut weight, like wrestlers or fighters, but also has implications for people who are switching to a ketogenic or low carb diet and who are concerned about being able to maintain strength and, and power efforts. And this is something that also Brock and I talk about in that podcast. But basically with, with only protein and only fat intake, you're able to maintain your glycogen stores at up around 70%, up around 70% of their peak storage capacity. And so if we're looking at being able to store away like let's say a really, really generous number of 2,000 calories, let's say of storage carbohydrate, well, you know, 70% of those carbohydrates are what would come out to what, like 1400 calories of those carbohydrates you can literally fill with just protein getting converted into glucose and also the, what's called the glycerol backbone of fats getting converted into glucose. And that gives you pretty good stores of glyco glycogen to rely upon for hard efforts or for training the other 30%. Yeah, I mean, maybe you're eating 400 to 600 calories worth of carbohydrates, you know, 100 to 200 grams of carbohydrates on a daily basis if you're training pretty hard and that's going to take care of the rest of your glycogen stores. Or maybe you're doing less than that, you know, whatever, 25, 50, 75 grams of carbs every day. But you're throwing in a refeed day where you're getting a little bit extra, like 200 grams of carbs or something like that. You know, that's another option. But ultimately, the reason that I'm kind of laying all this out is to say that there's no reason that your heart rate should be going bonkers due to like carbohydrate depletion or something like that. The only issue would be that because carbohydrates can allow you to retain water, can allow you to retain sodium and retain electrolytes, this may be related to more of an electrolyte deficiency and a sodium deficiency, which is also why people get dizzy when they switch to a low carb or ketogenic diet. In a case like that, you just, you know, you start using some nice, you know, Himalayan sea salt, you know, and there are guys like, you know, Dave Asprey, the bulletproof exec. He does, like, six teaspoons of Himalayan sea salt on a. On a daily basis. There are, you know, guys like me. I'm doing low carb. I do about 2 servings of liquid trace minerals. I use the natural life liquid trace minerals every morning. And I also use Himalayan sea salt and salt my food quite liberally. There are guys like Peter Attia, who has been on this podcast before, who follows a ketogenic diet, and he does 1-2 kg of chicken bully in a day. You know, and kind of along those same lines, like, bone broth is another good way to get minerals and electrolytes in your diet. So it could be an issue with electrolytes, and then the last thing it could be an issue with. And this is something that I had to deal with with an athlete recently who I coach, who we were seeing crazy heart rates with. During his workouts. It turned out that he was using one of these wireless heart rate monitors. And the heart rate monitor monitor was. Was just producing a heart rate dropout and a heart rate spike. And that's really common with these newer heart rate monitors that are soft straps that have the little wireless device that plugs onto the front of them. Here's the cool thing, though, and one of my friends, DC Rainmaker, he runs a really cool website where he does product reviews of. Of fitness equipment.

I didn't know you knew that guy. Yeah, yeah, that's a great website.

Rain man met him down at Galveston, and it was kind of interesting because we went on a run and his heart rate monitor wasn't working, and so he actually, he dropped out of the run. But D.C. rain. Dcrainmaker.com cool, cool website. If you're into, like, fitness technology and heart rate monitors and stuff like that. Like that. But he. He compared a bunch of different wireless heart rate transmitters, and he found that in most cases, when your heart rate transmitter is the issue with you having heart rate spikes, and it's not really your heart rate, it's just your transmitter that you're using, all you have to replace is the soft strap that came with the heart rate monitor, which is like 17 bucks, and not the entire transmitter, which is like, you know, 70, 80, 90 bucks. So you may want to just try getting a new soft strap, which is the part of the strap that goes around your chest. Not the whole transmitter, not the whole heart rate strap. You can save that little transmitter. It comes off the straps with with little buttons. So you take that off, you get a replacement strap off of Amazon or whatever, which is like again, like 15, 17 bucks. And just see if it, you know, maybe it's the heart rate monitor too. Or if you really want to go caveman and get down with your bad self, just put your hand on your neck and take your heart rate. Or put your hand on your wrist and take your heart rate. And it's kind of magical. A lot of people don't realize this in an era of technology, but you can, with your fingers, actually feel your heart rate. I'm being facetious. I'm being facetious.

No, you can't.

You can try it. So. Or put your hand over your heart and you can feel your heart rate. Amazing.

I can actually, if I'm laying in a, in a quiet room, I can hear my heartbeat.

You don't need an iPhone or a heart rate strap or anything. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, incredible. Amazing.

But my girlfriend's ER nurse, I've seen her just like grab somebody's wrist and she can assess their heart rate in like 10 seconds.

Yeah, exactly.

It's an art form.

Yeah. So. So anyways, make sure that's not your heart rate monitor strap too. But ultimately, look at electrolytes, look at sodium, make sure your heart rate monitor strap is good to go. But don't freak out about being like a, like a carb issue, because it's probably not carbs or a lack of carbs. More likely lack of electrolytes or sodium. Or a technology fart.

So did you just call him a technology fart?

No, I said it could be.

Hi, Ben. I have a question in regards to a workout plan I can present to my 17 year old year old son. He has always been the jock in the family. He's gone through a baseball phase, an archery phase, and now it's looking pretty serious for cross country running. And he's on the team at school. And this morning he pleasantly surprised me by saying he wants to tag along with me to the gym and work out with me. By the way, as a father, that's always a great thing to hear. Anyway, I consider myself very savvy on working the search engines on the Internet, but boy, after about an hour, I found a paltry offering of information on what a young man can do in the gym to improve his cross country performance. So I'm coming to you. What have you got? Thanks.

Okay, Terry, first, kudos. When I was 17 years old, I didn't want to do anything with my dad.

Yeah, When I was 17, I was.

One of those jerk teenagers.

I didn't know what trail running was, was. I was more into bench pressing and how fast I could serve a tennis ball.

But I actually smoking behind the school looking badass.

I love to trail run now. I mean like I, I actually trail running for me, like that's 99 of what I do. Like I, I stay off concrete, I stay off the roads when I run. I want nature, I want a trail. So yeah, like I'm almost always ducking down to this park called Sakani park down by my house or just like hitting the trail along the river. And yeah, I love freaking love trail running.

Now if I do that around my house, I have to dodge all the homeless people, which actually is good practice.

Lots of trails going under bridges near your place. Yeah, nice.

Dodging the needles.

Hurdle the cardboard boxes. There was an interesting article they did on active.com where they interviewed a bunch of elite trail runners on the type of core and strength training programs that they do. And frankly most of them really emphasize the amount of body weight strength training that they did. Single leg squats and hip hikes and a lot of body weight core work and standing on one leg and doing t layout lunges and just a lot of stuff that really wasn't done in the gym but was more things that they could do after they'd finished a trail run or while they were out there on the trail. And part of that might be because a lot of trail runners are ultra runners and they kind of have limited time and just don't spend a lot of time in the gym. But that, you know, it really is a good point. You don't have to go to a gym to get strong ankles and feet for trail running. You know, you do a little golf ball mobility work like we talked about. You do some glute activation exercises. And I'm really not convinced that you got to step into a gym too often to, you know, to be a good trail run runner. But that being said, if you are going to go to the gym, you know, I, I would definitely be doing a lot of, of unilateral work, meaning I'd be doing a lot of, of single leg deadlifts, loaded or unloaded, single leg squats. I'd be doing a lot of lateral work, lateral lunges, you know, side steps, side step ups, front step step ups, reverse lunges. I actually have a whole program that I wrote out. It's called the Trail Running Terror Plan. And this was, I, I created this for The Endurance Planet listeners. Because if you, if you subscribe to the Endurance Planet newsletter over@EndurancePlanet.com I put in like, I think you get like a 10 discount code on this plan or whatever. But what it specifically focuses on is ankle stability, strength, change of direction and a lot of kind of fartlek, which is basically random speed style training to allow you to become a really successful kind of lean, mean trail running machine. It's a 12 week program. Again it's called Trail Running Terror. And basically what it allows you to do is that the final, final two weeks of the program work you up to a race. It's essentially designed for anybody who's doing from a 10k up to a 40k trail running race. So there are some distance adjustments in the program based off of how long you're going to run. But most of the strength training exercises that I prescribe in that program, the Trail Running Terror one, are same thing. Single leg layout, lunges, single leg deadlifts, single leg square watts. There's really nothing magical here. And you can, you can see how to do most of this stuff over at, you know, YouTube.com BenGreenfield Fitness in that trail running plan and I'll link to it in the show notes. You know, it does cost money. It's like, I think it's like 90 bucks, something like that. Use the discount code, it's 80 or whatever, but it walks you through. You know, I've got videos on how to do all this, the stuff, but you know, I'd just start with that stuff. You know, nothing, nothing magical, just lots of, lots of single leg, you know, unilateral work, some, some side to side motion and you know, stuff that replicates the same type of conditions you're gonna, you're gonna see out there on the trail.

So, so it sounded like Terry was concerned by his son's age. Should he be worried at all about his, about his son being 17 and, and doing this kind of stuff?

Usually if you're looking at like somebody going through puberty where you've still got the formation of the growth plates, that's where you want to be careful with excessive loading. And typically in, in strength conditioning research that would mean anything below about a 12 rep weight, meaning that you shouldn't be using a weight if you're going through puberty that, that is so heavy that you can't do up to 12 reps of that weight. And in, in the case of a 17 year old, I would hope that he's gone through puberty. If not, I'm sorry, assuming your balls have dropped and your voice is lowered and all that good stuff, not an issue at all. I mean really like you can, you can lift heavy and you know, obviously high school football players across the nation are lifting heavy and that's giving them quite a bit of an advantage. No, I'm a, I'm a big fan of post pubertal males. Pubertal doing strength training for sure. Heavy strength training is fine. So not an issue there at all. Unless for some reason and you're a super duper late bloomer and you know, your growth plates haven't fully fused. But yeah, heavy weight training for a 17 year old male, not an issue at all. Even though for trail running, you know, heavy weight training isn't really necessary, but it's, you know, something you could do. I'm actually a, I'm a bigger fan of heavy squats, heavy deadlifts, heavier lunges, stuff like that. Bigger fan based off the research that I've seen of D doing that stuff for cyclists than I am doing it for runners. For runners you're going to get a little bit more mileage out of core work, single leg work and plyometrics if you really had to prioritize your time.

Hey, Ben and Brock, it's Troy. In Canada. For years my massage therapists have told me that my left side is extremely tight. One even referred to it as massaging a brick. We don't really know why it's that much tighter than my right. I'm right handed. I work on the computer all day, but I stretch and I'm pretty active. I'm a triathlete and so I'm also mostly deaf in my left ear. I have been for years and it wasn't until I read your article the other day on becoming a balanced ninja that it came to me that maybe there's a correlation there. Maybe, maybe, maybe there's something connected that my left ear isn't working. So I'm somehow compensating for that. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you.

This is the question. I was thinking that the, that would go well with that interview that you did with Eric. What's his name? From completely forgetting his name.

What'd you say?

I'm sorry, the Zed Health would help this one as well.

What's that? I'm sorry, I can't hear you. No, I'm just kidding.

Move your headphone to the other side.

Yeah, so the link between the ears and the muscles. Yeah, like I Mentioned the vestibular system earlier and your whole, what's called your vestibular balance system, which is based off this idea that sensory information about where your body is at in space is provided by what's called your vestibular apparatus. And your vestibular apparatus, which actually sounds like something that could impress someone at a bar. If you were bragging about the vestibular apparatus. Vestibular apparatus capacity, the size of your vestibular apparatus. Is that your vestibular apparatus or are you just happy to see see me? But anyways, the vestibular apparatus is part of your ear that includes three different little semicircular canals and then these sacs basically that detect gravity. And they're these fluid filled sacs. And so when you move front to back or side to side, the fluid in these sacs detects that movement and they slosh around, so to speak, until you're your head, where your body's at in space and vice versa. And then these semicircular canals that are near to those same sacs, those detect rotational movement, like rotating side to side. So we've got this whole system that detects front to back movement, side to side movement, rotational movement. And so anytime your head rotates, you've got these receptors that are sending impulses to your brain that are telling you what kind of movement is happening with your head and with your body. And you can actually train these vestibular apparati in the way that you take care of your body and with specific movements that you do. I talk about this in an article that I wrote for my book on how to increase balance and specifically some of the neglected areas that a lot of athletes kind of forget to train. It relates to that Z Health program is well and again, go listen to that interview that I did with Eric Cobb because we talk about this stuff too. But yeah, if you've got issues with your ears, it can affect your muscles for sure based off of this neural link between your vestibular system and your musculoskeletal system. So you've got these, what are called projection pathways starting from your vestibular nuclei on either side of your brain, brain. And those are going to send signals to your spinal cord, to your thalamus, to a lot of your cranial nerves. And so yeah, all this stuff is linked. So some of the recommendations that I gave in that article that I wrote to improve specifically your vestibular balance, one would be to just be really careful with loud music and loud sounds and something that a lot of People don't think about electromagnetic field radiation from your skin, cell phone held next to your head. I recommend using an ear tube headset or using the, the speakerphone setting on your, on your cell phone. So never, ever, ever. You know, my wife and I are, we, we've just got this rule of thumb where we pay attention to each other and if either of us ever sees each other holding a phone up to our ear, we remind each other, not knock it out of their hands. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So a few other things that can train your vestibular system would be to go unshod as much as possible or use minimalist footwear, because big, supportive, built up shoes do a lot of the balance work for you. And if you have no feel for the ground and you're spending your day in these, you know, moon boots essentially, then you're not getting a lot of those tiny little micro motions, those tiny little movement patterns in your feet that feed directly into your vestibular system. So that's another way that you can kind of train your vestibular system. You know, single leg balance stuff like we've already talked about, as well as doing stuff like, you know, on the Ben Greenfield fitness phone app, we have this big interview with Daryl Edwards, the fitness explorer guy, and we talk about fitness exploring and including in your workouts, you know, balancing on fences and rail posts and rocks and fire hydrants, you know, working some of this fun stuff into runs and into outdoor workouts that can also help out quite a bit with literally trust training your vestibular system. So those are some things to think about. You know, if you're, if you're deaf in one ear, there's, I don't know of any method. You know, we talked about this visual gym, you know, this vision gym and this Bates method for the eyes. I don't know of anything similar for the ears. You know, it might exist, but I don't really know of a way to reverse deafness in your ear. So what I would be focusing on is a little lot of this balanced stuff, you know, minimalist footwear and barefoot stuff, you know, being careful with the electromagnetic radiation as far as like foods and supplements go. I think that one thing that really flies under the radar when it comes to your vestibulocochlear system specifically, and the health of your ears would be folate. And there was actually a study that they did at the, the American Academy of Otolorean. I don't know even how to pronounce that. You know, the study of the ears. Basically, the OTO doctors and they found that men over 60 who have a high intake of foods and supplements high in folates had a 20% decrease in the risk of developing hearing loss. So folate is actually a really, really good way to, from a supplementation standpoint, enhance the health of your ears, so to speak.

And if you happen to get pregnant while you're taking it, that's even better.

Yeah. Yep, exactly. So you can. You can have good hearing and babies, and folic acid is what you're going to find a lot of vitamins. I'm not a big fan of that. It is usually oxidized. It's usually synthetic. There are some issues with folic acid that I. I don't really have time to get into right now. But if you're looking at increasing your folate intake, I do not recommend folic acid supplements. I recommend you get your folates from food. And the best sources of dietary folate are going to be your leafy greens, your cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, beets are a good source of folate if you soak them so that you're decreasing a lot of the lectin content. Lentils are also a good source of folate. And then if you, of course, want to get a little bit more adventurous, you can do liver, you know, liver pate, calves, liver, chicken liver. All of those are really, really excellent folate sources as well. So that from, like, a food supplementation standpoint, would be something to look into, would be. Be the folate for. For kind of enhancing your ears. So a lot of talk about the ears and the eyes today. So.

Yeah, yeah, I like it.

It's good stuff.

We usually concentrate on arms and legs. Today's ears and eyes.

Today is the. Today we talk all about your vestibular apparatus. Was that the last question?

That is the last question.

Sweet. Well, should we read a review?

Absolutely.

Because.

Oh, I was gonna have my banjo handy. Wait a second. I'm gonna get my guitar.

Okay, well, you're grabbing that. While you're grabbing that. Just this morning, I actually sent out a couple of pair. Care pack pair packages. Care packages to people who. Who left a review on itunes. I sent you some books, I sent you some. Some supplements, but I sent all these care packages out this morning. So if you leave a review in itunes, then if we read your review on the show. So as we're about to do for one of our lucky listeners, and you hear your review written and you let us know that you heard your review written on the show, you send us your address over to Ben greenfieldfitness.com we'll send you some cool shiz bang in the mail to your home. Shiz bang. So here is today's review. It's called Taking us to School is the name of the review and it was written by all damn day 28. Here's what all damn day 28 has to say. Hola, thank you so much for kicking this knowledge right to my dome. It's great to get very insightful, healthy, long living material from your podcast. You guys keep it smart, healthy and funny at the same time. This is the ultimate Steve Jobs flow. J o Steve Martin podcast. Boom. So all damn day 28, send us your address and you'll get a care package in the mail for that kick ass review. So and for anybody else, leave, leave a review, leave a ranking. Go to what's the URL they can go to? Brock bengreenfieldfitness.com244 and also bengreenfieldfitness.Com love if you want to, if you want to share that share, share the wealth. So check all that out. Grab the phone app. If you didn't grab the phone app yet@BenGreenfieldFitness.com app. Yes, app. Ton of extra interviews in there as well. A bunch of stuff. So check all that out. And yeah, man, I think that wraps up this, this week. And, and let's wrap it up. Let's, let's wrap it up. Play us out, Brock.

Nice.

Cool.

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