How To Switch Off Pain, Exercise During Cold Thermogenesis, How To Use D-Ribose and More!

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, should you exercise during cold thermogenesis? How to use D ribose, what is a withing scale, how to turn off pain should you run if you have epilepsy and what is a bad heart rate variability score.

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I can't believe it's coming out on Tuesday.

It's coming on Tuesday.

I'm so excited.

That's right. And it's not just the new movies that get released on Redbox on Tuesday, which is also another good reason to look forward to Tuesdays.

That's an exciting day. But not as exciting as next Tuesday will be.

That's right. It's actually been a long time since I've watched it. An actual like real movie. I just watch stuff on Hulu nowadays. MasterChef and, well, now the office is over. I'm not really watching that anymore. Modern Family, that's another one.

We don't, we can't get Hulu in Canada. Yeah, it's Geo blocked.

Well, what happens to us is like at about 9:30pm when our kids finally like get shut into their bedroom and we lock the door with chain and padlock. My wife and I collapse on the couch and just like fall down in a, in a heap of exhaustion and put on whatever happens to be on. But yeah, next Tuesday, the app that.

Has nothing to do with Hulu, it's nothing to do with the Redbox. It has everything to do with a new smartphone. Apple.

Yeah, the, the Ben Greenfield fitness app. We've been developing it with our, our crack team of awesome developers for the past month. Wizards. And it's, it's pretty sick, as I like to say. It's got a ton of extra insider exclusive audios in it. I'm putting interviews in there that you don't get access to on the regular podcast. The app is free, but by the way, totally free. Bunch of videos.

I still don't know how we're going to get rich when you keep making things free. You really don't get it.

No, I'll tell you why. And I'll share this with the listeners too. Here's my plan to take over the world Folks. So the app is free, right? And it's got, like, a bunch of videos with Brock. Brock, what are the product reviews you're.

Doing in there so far in there? If you were to get it on lunch day there, I reviewed Tailwind Nutrition.

And also just a horrible name for it.

It is.

Yeah.

It's a good product, but a terrible.

I don't think I'd eat anything that said Tailwind, but I'm curious to see. I haven't actually watched your video yet, but.

So of course you have to wait till the. Till the app comes out on Tuesday.

Yeah.

I also did Intelliskin shirts, and with any luck before the launch, I'll also do a review on Skora shoes, because I love those things.

There you go. There you go. You could do all three at the same time. Intelliskin with Tailwind. While you're wearing the scores, you might need some Intelliskin underwear if you're drinking Tailwind fuel.

Just fit all in there.

Got how to use an inversion table video, Half Ironman triathlon fueling setup, Olympic distance fueling setup, Specials with Monica Rheinagle, Dave Asprey, Ray Kronice. Bunch of stuff in there. Insider naked truth episodes with Jessa and myself, along with video. And we'll play a little preview of that for you.

Yeah, we've got a little teaser.

It's coming up in between the special announcements and the Q and A listen in, because we'll have a little teaser there for you. And yeah, as far as why and the ultimate evil plan on how to actually make money off of having a phone app, because we're not actually selling advertising on it. You can. If you get the phone app and you decide that you want access to even more, like, a bunch of inside videos and stuff that I'm doing. There's actually an option on the app to upgrade to premium, and it's super expensive. It's $9.99 a year. And anyway, so that's our plan to take over the world again.

How are we going to get rich like this?

I've already. I've already bought my Mercedes, so people better. People better buy that 9.99 a year. I'm telling you what. And then I'm also. I'm on top of the world right now because I just sucked down my ketogenic kale shake. Mmm. Delicious.

Delicious.

I don't know if folks were over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com recently, but I wrote a Mondo article about how I'm spending the next 12 weeks in a full state of ketogenesis, full on low carb high blood ketone bodies, measuring it with breath ketone monitors, measuring my blood every week and staying in full ketogenesis for all 12 weeks leading up to Ironman Cancer Canada. And I'm going to see what happens to your body when you do that. And the whole thing is sponsored by Talking20. Who's doing the blood measurements by Metron, who's doing the breath ketone measurements by Dave Asprey and the bulletproof coffee. So I'm doing either bulletproof coffee every morning with tons of MCT oil or else I'm doing this ketogenic kale shake. And the ketogenic kale shake is essentially, there's a few extra ingredients in it and you can watch the video I just put up on YouTube if you want the full ingredient label or ingredient list. But it's basically kale. And the kale is washed and then mixed with calcium to rinse all the oxalic acid off it. And you just do that in the blender. And then it's got protein, like grass fed protein. It's got collagen, it's got a little apple cider vinegar, some sea salt, some Brazil nuts, some coconut milk and some cinnamon. And I think that's close to about it. I literally just like put the last spoonful of it into my gaping maw right before we started podcasting. And I am a happy full man right now.

That sounds very similar to your sexy time shake.

It is. But I left out anything remotely resembling carbohydrates at all. And also left out the avocado because frankly, when you add all that MCT oil and if you put an avocado into, we're talking north of like 1500 calories in a shake. So it starts to get a little redonkulous. So. So there you go. Try out the ketogenic kale shake. The video is on YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness.

News flashes. Go over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 242 to find the links to all of these news flashes right here. Taking you away to all the beautiful new discoveries that the scientists are bringing.

To us on our crazy scientists.

They're just doing crazy, weird stuff all the time.

Those bastards. They are constantly throwing stuff at us that we have to tell you about. So we just got done talking about ketogenesis. Here's a cool thing that came across my radar. They did a study on ketogenic diets and thermal pain in rats.

Thermal pain. So like setting them on fire, something along.

I'm guessing it was more of like a cattle prod type of thermal pain. Regardless the type of study you can't do in humans, but you can do in rats. And what they found was that rats that were fed a high fat, low carbohydrate ketogenic diet developed reduction to pain, specifically reduction to heat based pain and thermal pain, sensitivity to thermal pain. And this red pain tended to develop about 10 days into the ketogenic diet. And I have no clue who thought up this study about feeding rats a high fat, low carb diet and then hitting them with a cattle prod until, you know, and seeing which day they actually started to not respond.

That's just sadistic.

Yeah, it is a little sadistic. But regardless, I think it's interesting on a couple levels. First of all, it's interesting that when you switch to a high fat diet, it usually takes about 10, up to 14 days for you to really make that metabolic switch for you to like you're not. You don't have this feeling of blah. You know, I just want to pass out all the time. And it's interesting that it was about day 10 where the rats actually started to experience these interesting adaptations to ketogenesis. The other thing that I thought was interesting for me is that since I've started doing the kind of the more low carb ketogenic approach when I'm doing triathlons and races in hot weather, I actually feel better and I haven't had to do as much heat acclimation. And I have no clue if, you know, a cattle prod has much carryover to, you know, exercising in the heat of Hawaii, you know, doing an Ironman triathlon in a lava field. But I suspect that ketogenic diet on low carb diet may be one of the reasons that I actually perform better in the heat the past couple of years.

So interesting.

So yeah, I thought that was an interesting study.

And you should sneak one of your kids a cattle prod and just get them to like surprise you at some point and see, see how it feels.

That would get out of hand. That would be like the, the electroshock therapy in the south park cartoon where Cartman is. Oh, with a V Chip Cartman is having to sing oh Holy Night and get, get shocked every time that he, that he sings it. Holy night, you guys. Alright, so moving on.

That's pretty good.

By the way, I do have a special song I'm gonna play for folks at the very, very end of this episode. And I'll fill you in towards the end. But we do have a special song, not sung by me, but sung by someone close to me at the end of this episode. So you always gotta stay tuned for the end of these episodes, folks, because we put in some cool stuff. So anyways, pain management and ketogenesis may go hand in hand. The next thing is there was a study that was done by a bunch of Danish students, and this was a biology project that a bunch of grade Danish girls did. And what they did was they got cress, which is, you know, kind of like water cress, essentially. And they. They grew cress. And they observed and measured and weighed and took pictures of cress for 12 days because the stuff actually grows pretty rapidly. So. So they had six trays of cress seeds, and six trays of cress seeds were put into a room without a WI fi router. And then another six trays of crests were put into a room next to two WI fi routers. And these routers broadcast the same kind of radiation as an ordinary mobile phone would or as an ordinary WI fi router in your home might.

So 2.4 GHz signal that just went.

Way over my head. Dude, I do not know gigahertz megahertz. Anyways, though the effects were shocking. I'm going to link to this in the show notes because pictures tell a thousand words on this. But the crest in the non WI fi room grew and was this rich green color and was like growing off the plate and flourishing. The crests in the WI fi room was literally like dead brown, shriveled and shrunken.

I was hoping you were going to say the opposite. And it was going to be sort of like the Hulk sort of thing where exposure to radiation made it stronger and bigger and greener.

Well, you know, Jack Cruz. I've got a podcast coming, coming out with Jack Cruz here this Saturday, and he and I talk a little bit about EMF and what it does to your cells. And also, you know, we delve into a bunch of stuff. We delve into what he calls the pentose phosphate pathway and enhancing performance and what makes your cells leaky. And it's going to be a cool podcast. But regardless, this is one of the reasons that I don't even have the WI FI router on in my home anymore. I hardwire into the cable modem whenever I want to access the Internet. And my phone, for the most part, stays in airplane mode unless I have times of the day I want to turn it on to communicate with folks. So if you. The, the less you can expose yourself to these wi fi signals, the better. I know that sounds kind of tinfoil hattish, but you got to check out these watercress photos. We'll link to them in the show notes.

So what you're saying is Marvel comics got it completely wrong.

What did Marvel Comics do?

Just everybody who's exposed to radiation in comic books gets like superhuman.

Yes, exactly the opposite. You will shrink and shrivel. There was also a study that was released in the medicine and science and sports and exercise journal. And this was really interesting. And what it did, was it purposefully over trained people or actually got them close to over training. So they had two groups of well trained triathletes and one group spent a week doing regular training and then for the next three weeks continued regular training. Well, the other group did a week of regular training, but then for the next three weeks they ramped up their training by 40%. And then for the very last week, both of the groups tapered before they did this final performance test. So the goal was to push the group that increased their training by 40% up into what's called functional overreaching. And they took heart rate data, they took heart rate variability data, which is that amount of time between, you know, your heartbeats and it's the measure of your, of your nervous system health. What they found was that sure enough, as you might expect, heart rate variability tended to drop more in the group that was, quote, unquote, overreached or close to being over trained. Morning resting heart rate tended to fluctuate and actually got higher in the group that was reaching the overreach state. And although things tended to fluctuate quite a bit from day to day, when you actually looked at the seven day average of both heart rate variability and heart rate, you tended to see some really telling patterns. Now here's the interesting thing. The overtraining group got steadily worse and worse and worse as that three week over training period went on compared to the control group. But remember, they put in a one week taper between the three weeks of training and the actual performance test. Well, the group that was overreached or close to being over trained, I have to be careful saying over trained because technically overtraining is like really, really serious, whereas overreaching is pushing yourself close to the edge. But this overreach group, during the taper period, they began to see massive improvements in performance. And by the time the performance test rolled around, they kicked the ass of the people in the control group. So what this goes to show you is that if you are, if you're tracking things like heart rate, like heart rate variability, et cetera, expect it to get a little worse as you're getting close to your event, as you're getting close to the end of whatever you call it, your build phase or you know, your big ramp up to the race. Allow enough time for a taper. And I like around, you know, it depends. I like a two to four week taper for an ironman and a one to two week taper for a half ironman and most, you know, age group or triathletes for example. And you know, trust your body, know that it's going to kind of suck towards the end of that build period. But man, if you taper, that's where you get the gains over and above the folks who maybe just train the same thing day in, day out all the way up to the race.

So, so I assume the taper period was the same sort of protocol for both of the groups.

The taper period was the same, but one group was really, really beat up going into the taper period. One group wasn't, and the group that was more beat up did better. So it's kind of this whole overreaching stair step effect. It's the whole basis in sports science we call it functional overreaching where you put yourself into this slightly high risk state and you risk those extreme benefits that you're going to get if you push yourself to that point.

So it's all about timing at that point, just making sure that you push just hard enough at the right time and then cut it off. Otherwise it could all go to hell.

I've had races where I didn't, I started my taper too late. I got to the race, had a crappy race, and then like three days later I was Superman. And you know, it's because I, you know, I didn't time that taper right. So it is really important. You know, that's one of the, that's one of the reasons to work with a coach or use a training program if you're getting ready for a big race. The last thing that I wanted to mention, and usually I only talk about three studies, but I wanted to throw in one more here because fish oil has come under attack recently. There's been lots and lots of talk about how fish oil does not indeed reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease based off of these big studies, starting with one that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association a few months ago. And this Big study that was published in the Journal of the American Medical association basically showed that a modest daily intake of fish oil did not actually result in any statistically significant association with a reduction in cardiovascular risk disease. Which is why a lot of people take fish oil to just make their heart stronger and their vessels better. That's my highly scientific term. Making your vessels better.

Make their vessels better.

Make your vessels better. But anyways, the Journal of the American Medical association study had some serious flaws. First of all, here's something that they don't tell you, that the entire study and all the studies that they looked at were done on people with cardiac disease, people who had already become victims of accelerated atherosclerotic plaque formation and people who they were, who they were feeding, generally about half as much fish oil as is necessary to be an efficacious dose to. So these people were not getting enough fish oil. And furthermore, they were already experienced significant cardiac damage. So, you know, it's kind of like saying that, you know, you use fish oil as a preventive measure, not to reverse heart disease. So if you're.

Yeah, it's not a cure, it's a prevention.

Exactly. And Life Extension magazine did a great article on this. I'll link to it in the show notes. But, you know, the analogy that they use was, let's say you're barbecuing outdoors and you accidentally light a bush on fire that's next to your house and you turn your garden hose on full blast and you put out the fire. And so based on that experience, you can say that garden hoses are effective in preventing houses from burning down. And then in a different scenario, let's say you come home and your entire house is engulfed in flames and you take your garden hose and you turn it on and you turn only halfway on, since they only gave people about half dose of fish oil, but your house burns to the ground anyways. And so at that point you say that garden hoses are completely useless in preventing houses from being destroyed by fire. So, you know, and the fish oil is analogous to that garden hose in that, yeah, fish oil is going to work if you're in a healthy state and if you're taking enough of it. But if you've already messed up your body, you know, the only thing this Journal of the American Medical association study or meta analysis shows is that fish oil isn't going to reverse cardiovascular disease. And that's about it.

Which is a valuable thing to note.

Oh, sure, it's a valuable thing to note that you can't just pop a pill to reverse a hole that you've dug yourself into. But I think that for those of us taking fish oil for prehab for prevention, I personally plan on continuing to take fish oil. I was talking to Casey Kreischy, the guy that develops the super essentials fish oil that I take and that you get over at Pacific Elite Fitness. And I talk to him sometimes and he gives me some advice in terms of supplementation and proper use of products and stuff like that. He does like the Super Greens and the Living Fuel and stuff like that. And he said he takes 14 of these fish oil capsules per day. The super essentials fish oil capsules. Yeah, I only do about four to six, but that's a, you know, it's definitely something you notice a difference in from a cognitive performance standpoint to a joint standpoint, you know, and you gotta, you kinda gotta keep your fingers crossed from the cardiovascular standpoint, unless you're literally going in and doing like a calcium score analysis on yourself or something. But yeah, there you go. Fish oil. Good stuff, not bad stuff.

Special announcements. If you want to get yourself a free audiobook, go to audiblepodcast.com Ben that's audiblepodcast.com Ben and sign up right then and there and you will become a gold standard, gold premier member. I can't remember what it's called. Some kind of awesome member. Get yourself a free book.

Titanium Warrior member. I don't know what it is. I'm looking at the top book in parenting right now, which is a topic close to my heart. The top book in parenting, actually. I can't tell if it's a. Yeah, it is a book, but it's got whisper sync for voice on it. That means they read it to you and then you can pick up right where you left off.

They just whisper to you.

Yeah, they read it to you really quietly trying to suppress a sneeze. Here, hold on. Go do it. I'm good.

Do it. Come on.

I'm good. I went running just as it was about to rain yesterday and I was wearing one of these breathe right strips and practicing like my deep nasal breathing. And I think I must have sucked some pollen up into my nose because I never ever get sniffles. And I've got sniffles this morning. Anyways, though. Yeah. This book is called dad is Fat by Jim Gaffigan. He's a stand up comedian and he talks about his five kids and everything from cousins who he calls celebrities for little kids to toddlers communication skills. He describes toddlers as they always sound like they have traveled by horseback for hours to deliver important news. That's true.

Daddy, you're never gonna When I saw.

To the eating habits of four year old, there's no difference between a four year old eating a taco and throwing a taco on the floor. So anyways, though, he's a funny guy. I kind of like comedians talking about kids and, you know, it's relatively clean stuff. So check out dad is Fat by Jim Gaffigan. And you can get that@audiblepodcast.com Ben beautiful.

And what else is going on? Hey, you're doing a USAT webinar tomorrow. If you're tuning in right away, it is May 29th and the webinar is tomorrow May 30th.

Yep. It's speaking of kids, about balancing work and family and life while you are training for a triathlon. And yeah, it's a USAT webinar. So if you're a coach, you get CEUs and all that good stuff. And we'll put a link in the show notes and that one, that one actually does cost money to attend. But, but check it out. Scrape some coin together if you want to learn how to get your life together and you're, you know, training for Iron man or something like that, it'll be a good webinar. Well, I'll knock your pants off with my PowerPoint. So there you go. Check that out.

That is if you're wearing pants.

That's right.

Speaking of, I'm watching webinars.

Why.

Why wear pants?

Speaking of not wearing pants. The Thailand's triathlon adventure is coming up in this winter. We've got, I think we have 11 people signed up for it right now. We'll put a link in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 242 but here's the way that I look at opportunities like this, right? 20 years from now, 20 years from now, you're gonna regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did do. And this is one of those bucket list trips. It's the complete adventure of a lifetime. If you are a triathlete or you're married to a triathlete, this is one of those things you just should totally step up and just go, like, I'm literally, like, I talked to Jessa. We're just, we're literally moving to Thailand for three weeks. We're taking our family over there. We're doing the races. We're hanging out in the, you know, we got hotels and, you know, you do have to be somebody who's able to get that time off or be like me and be, you know, chained to your laptop and working from your computer. But if you're one of those people who has the flexibility to take off this November and December and come over to Thailand, we've got some options. You can. You can go for two weeks or three weeks or even one week. But the link is in the show notes. It is going to be a complete blast and the adventure of a lifetime. Trips to Riley Bay and rock climbing and sea kayaking and triathlons and elephant rides. It'll be. It'll be pretty fun. So check it out.

Just a word to the wise. If Ben starts running off down the beach and says, I'll see you back at the hotel, don't let him get out of your sight, or you may get lost in the jungle for a good couple hours like I did.

Yeah, that was my bad. Sorry about that, Brock.

That's right. I survived and I saw some awesome monkeys. But I did have those moments of this is how people never get seen again.

Horrible, suppressed memories of Canadian man lost in Raleigh Bay monkeys chasing you through Thailand. And I think that about. Oh, one last thing. This Saturday for anybody who lives down near Sacramento, California, I'm hopping on a plane on Friday, and I'm coming down to speak at an event. It's actually in Folsom, which is right by Sacramento, but it's called the Health and Wellness Celebration. So check that out.

Here's what we're at the prison.

Folsom Prison. Yeah, we're gonna go celebrate health and wellness at Folsom Prison. No, but it's like all afternoon. It's like a bunch of food and partying and talks by health and wellness experts. And they invited me to come down, and I kind of had to come down that way anyways. So there I am in Sacramento at the Health and Wellness Celebration. Check it out. And are we gonna play that little app preview for folks?

Yes. If you have delicate ears, you may want to turn away the preview of the app.

For me, cheating is probably in mine, which I partook of both tonight. To me, though, that that's not really cheating.

And, you know, the boys will have one or two servings or whatever, and I'll just have, like, a couple of huge ass, like, Jessa and Jessa's seen me jacked before and, like, big and like.

And I'm. I know for myself, I'm tempted by stuff like that. I love.

I grew up on It So I usually bring a steak in my pocket too, and chew on that. Okay. I've done it several times and never have.

Listener Q and A.

Hey Ben, this is Casey from Oroville, California. I had an idea to incorporate cold thermogenesis with the Litvinov training protocol by substituting the run with a 400 meter swim in an icy cold river that I live nearby. I was just wondering your take on combining these two things and if there's any health issues involved. I mainly want to make sure my heart doesn't explode while in the middle of the 400 meter swim.

Yes, Casey, nobody wants your heart to explode.

Do you know what Litnevov training is?

I have looked over your training protocol and I think you incorporate some of those crazy combinations of a blasting anaerobic exercise and then pumping iron and then.

Yeah, it's like you do 8 reps or so. You could do up to 30 reps if you're doing like burpees or something. But you do some good solid reps of the full body move, like a dumbbell swing or kettlebell swing or a burpee or front squat or whatever. And then as soon as you finish that lift, you know, whatever number of reps you're doing for that lift, you take off in an all out, full on sprint for about anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds. And then you recover back to the bar or the kettlebell were lifting and you do it again. So should you combine something like this with cold thermogenesis or was he gonna swim or is he just gonna soak in water?

No, he was gonna swim. He was gonna do a 400 meter swim in the icy water.

So he's not just like dipping in and out of the water between sets?

No, that was sort of confusing because can you actually do cold thermogenesis if you're working that hard, Let me tell ya, do it.

So pre cooling before workout. This is something that we saw like way back as early as the, the Olympic games, like back in the 90s. I remember they had photos on TV or videos on TV of athletes wearing ice vests. Ah, the 1990s, the 1990 ice vests, those retro ice vests, neon pink and neon green with the mohawks. Maybe that was the 80s. I don't remember leather pants. Anyways, though, multiple studies have shown that a cold shower or a bath or even an ice pac before a workout helps to cool your skin and reduce your core body temperature. And you know, there was one study that was in the European Journal of Physiology that Showed that in the instance after you're submerged in cold water and not super cold, but about 50 to 55 degrees, water groups who were in this experiment had a lower heart rate while they're exercising after that cold exposure compared to those whose muscles hadn't been treated to the cold water bath. And you know, there was a good article about this, I think it was in Outside magazine about all of these professional cyclists and also professional triathletes like Craig Alexander is a perfect example, who are using pre cooling, literally pre soaking in cold baths or even using like a cooling vest to actually lower the heart rate before going out and exercising in hot conditions. Now, I've personally found from my own N equals one experimentation that if I do get a chance to do a nice long cold shower or a little bit of a cold soak down in the river by my house earlier in the day before I go for a run or a hard bike ride or something like that, I do actually have a better workout. And you know, I also, when I raced in Las Vegas a couple of years ago, wrote an article for Lava magazine where I, during the race was wearing an ice vest and had one of these palm cooling devices and even one of those xylitol infused hats that when you put water on it, it cools and then the xylitol infused arm sleeves and it, you know, it felt good. I kept cool, but ultimately I just felt like a total nerd and inspector gadget running down the highway. So I just didn't enjoy it. So for me it's all about kind of being happy too. And I just wasn't happy with this vest on and hat and all this jazz. So anyways though, returning to the topic at hand here and doing cold thermogenesis by swimming in a cold environment and then moving on and doing a weight training protocol, a few things that you need to know. First of all, they have studied the effect of exercise training in the cold on thermogenesis. And what they found is that and this was in mice, and we can't necessarily say that mice are little men, but we can make some approximation. The regular mice had a much, much higher calorie burn from non shivering based thermogenesis, meaning that their brown adipose tissue actually burnt a lot more calories when they exercised in a cold environment versus exercising not in a cold environment. So when you're exercising in the cold or when you're jumping into a cold river or cold water and swimming, you're going to burn a lot more calories. And this is something that Ray Cronice actually talked about in the Become Superhuman event. How like one of the best fat burning exercises you can do is swimming in a cold pool or swimming in a cold river, assuming you're able to control the huge appetite increase you get after you finish something like that. Interestingly, in the older mice, older mice seem to have reduced ability to actually produce a lot of heat through the activation of that brown adipose tissue. And in those mice it was actually shivering that that caused them to burn more calories. But regardless, both groups were burning extra calories. The older group through shivering and the younger group through through brown adipose tissue heat generation. So exercising in cold, doing a cold thermogenesis type of swim is actually going to give you bigger calorie bang for the buck compared to just sitting in the water. Now here's the kicker. For anybody who's done cold thermogenesis, who has swam in sufficiently cold water to actually get your brown adipose tissue activated, what you get is a little bit of a, kind of a neural down regulation when you're in the cold, Meaning that movement patterns become a little bit more difficult to sustain and proper biomechanics becomes hard. Anybody who's done a cold soak and then gotten out and tried to run, for example, you feel like Bambi on ice when you're running. You know, when I'm riding my bike and I stop and I do a cold soak in the river or cold swim and then keep riding, I just, my pedaling mechanics are off and I don't feel quite as fluid on the bike. I mean, there are some definite physiological benefits, but there are some biomechanical drawbacks. Now those biomechanical drawbacks are not a big issue if you're running or cycling because you tend to warm up after a little while and you know, those first five to ten minutes are a little funky and then you're, you're good to go. But if you're lifting a heavy weight and you're cold and your biomechanics are crappy, then you could really danger. Yeah, you could hurt yourself. So me personally, because I know my own body and I know that I move like a, like a freaking spastic after I get out of cold water. I wouldn't be hoisting a dumbbell over my head or doing any of these like lit navad type of protocols. You know, I suppose like a bodyweight exercise that's a little less risky, you know, like a burpee or some push ups or bodyweight squats or something like that. You know, you could probably get away with something like that, but I'd, I'd leave weights and extreme joint torque out of the equation on this one.

Yeah, I'd be worried about like snapping an Achilles tendon or something too. And you get your muscles all good and taut and then throw them into a burpee and that's just, that's asking for a ripped muscle or torn tendon or something as well.

Yeah. So the correct way to use pre cooling would be like before you go on a bike ride, you sit in a cold bath or take a nice long cold shower and then accept the fact that it's going to take you a little while to warm up into your bike ride. So ultimately I wouldn't be doing this, especially if you're using weights. Hi Ben and Brock. I'm taking D Ribose from now products. The website says I should take one and a half level teaspoons daily prior to exercise. But it also says serious, serious athletes may want to double the dosage during training. I don't know if I'm a serious athlete and I also don't know if I take too much, is it going to cause problems? Thanks.

Yeah.

How do you define whether you're a serious athlete or not? It's a weird way to term it.

You know, I think a lot of people get the impression that only serious athletes listen to this show and like I've, I've seen demographics from Alexa and these websites that give you demographics graphics of what your visitors look like and the people who listen to Ben Greenfield Fitness and visit the website, generally, not all of them, but generally fall into the 40 to 60 year old demographic of slightly more males than females. Like 60% males, 40% females and serious elite athletes, pro athletes, I know they listen in, but they're not the majority. Anyways though, as far as dosage of D Ribose, I'll tell you what I would recommend as far as dosage, but let's dig into what D Ribose is first because it's cool stuff. I literally just started using D Ribose this year and it's pretty cool, especially if you're a low carbohydrate or like doing ketogenesis. The reason for this is D Ribose is this special sugar and unlike a lot of other sugars, it actually has a negative value on the glycemic index. So it doesn't spike your blood glucose, your blood sugar at all and you can't even find it in food. Your body actually makes it itself. So D Ribose either has to be formulated like in a lab or else made by your own body and it has a negative value on the glycemic index. Now you know what ATP is. ATP is the energy storage unit for everything. And what your body uses D Ribose specifically for is to rapidly generate ATP. Rapidly generate ATP. So normally you'd use like carbs and proteins and fats and stuff like this to go through all of their energy creating scenarios and finally downstream create ATP. D Ribose bypasses all of that and it's used by what's called your total adenine nucleotide pool, which is basically like your precursor for building cells and everything like that. The total adenine nucleotide pool eats up D Ribose and uses it to produce ATP extremely rapidly. So usually after you've done exhausted exercise, it can take a good three days for you to replenish your ATP stores. And so a lot of athletes who are exercising on a consistent basis or anyone who's exercising every day consistently is walking around with consistently depleted ATP stores. But if you saturate your body with D Ribose and you basically load with D Ribose prior to like a hard event, or even use it on a daily basis at about the same time every day, it has a really, really cool effect. So I'm a, I'm a fan of D Ribose. It's kind of like my new darling supplement. Most studies show a loading phase of about 3 to 4 grams of it is sufficient. And then once your muscles get saturated with D Ribose, you can maintain that with about 6 to 9 grams a day. And actually those 3 to 4 grams, you take it multiple times a day. So actually closer to 12 to 15 grams a day for your initial loading period and then 6 to 9 grams a day after that.

How long was the loading period? A week?

About a week. Yep, yep, exactly. So I started loading with it prior to races. Now it's something I'm using every day. I use the, the X2 performance stuff and that's actually the new, kind of surprisingly one of the official drinks of Ironman Triathlon now. And that's something I was actually quite happy to see. It's the first time I've ever seen a product that's sponsored Ironman that I actually agree with the formulation. You know, it's not just like complete sugar filled, chemical filled crap. This stuff's pretty impressive. It's got a bunch of other stuff in it like disodium ATP and pinitol and trace doses of caffeine and basically a bunch of stuff. And I don't know if they did this on purpose, but it's everything that a low carb or ketogenic athlete would need to actually massively improve ATP regeneration in the absence of carbs without spiking blood sugar. So it's pretty cool stuff. And this x2 performance stuff just comes in like a shot. You drink it down and yeah, you do that like a half hour before your workout or your race or whatever and it's literally like drinking ATP. So that's D Ribose. The only side effects I've seen with it, and I've looked all over the place for side effects was that if you overdose on it, we're Talking about like 60 gram doses, you can get a little bit of diarrhea and also because it's negative on the glycemic index, you can also get hypoglycemia if you overdose with it. But ultimately the, the benefits of the stuff far outweigh the, the risks in my opinion.

And, and you'd have to get really carried away to get the negative effects here.

You would have to have like a, like a crack cocaine booze induced D ribose party and just do like a bender of D ribose for a week to, to overdose. But yeah, check out the stuff if you get a chance to try out the X2 performance. I think, think I'm checking to see because I know we have a discount code for it where you get like 10 bucks off or something like that. Yeah, it's, it's Greenfield use code. Greenfield. You get 10 bucks off x2performance.com. Check it out. Best way to get D ribos in my opinion.

And I'm enjoying your, your superhuman DVD seminar. They bought on DVDs. They're pretty excellent. But I was listening to Ray Kronite and he mentioned a scale. He mentioned it twice but I couldn't, I couldn't find it in any of the show notes. Do you know what kind of scale he was talking about? I think it said it, it measures the resting metabolic rate possibly. It seemed like he said it was like a Y Rain or Y Wayne something scale. And I tried to google it and I couldn't find it. So I was wondering if you knew what kind of scale it was. And two, if you had a website to where I could visit it so I could get more information on it.

Thanks.

You know, I actually have a memory of people asking this same question during the conference. I was manning the live feed that was going out to the to all the people who were watching at home. And I remember the question coming up.

Yeah, it's, it's.

What was Ray talking about?

It's the sexiest scale on the planet. And I'm not a fan of scales, by the way. I, I do not use a scale. I haven't stepped on a scale in a really long time. I did a promo video a couple years ago for a scale that, that I was sent to, to analyze and it was cool and everything. It was one of those body fat tracking scales that hooks up to your computer and stuff. But I just, I think I got burnt out on scales when I was bodybuilding and I was having to like make weight and stuff. And now I just, I just go by the way I feel. And occasionally I, I pinch the little bit of fat that's right above your, your hip bone. And that's usually how I can tell if I'm eating too much, is if I can get a big old pinch of fat. I usually dial back on how much I'm eating. And that's like right above your hip.

Bone, front or right on the sides?

In the front. In the front.

So not back fat?

No, not back fat. Right in the front of your hip, kind of. So that's, that's where I pinch. And if I can get a big old pinch, then. And that's just my qualitative way to measure my body fat. Super scientific.

Totally.

Anyways, though, it's a Withings scale. W I T H I N G S A Withings scale. And I believe the one that Ray uses is called the Smart Body Analyzer. So you step on the scale, it gives you your heart rate and it gives you your body fat. I believe it gives you your water saturation value use. It actually checks the indoor air quality through temperature and carbon dioxide measurements and builds a CO2 level graph that shows you the air quality of where you're at or the air quality of your home, which I'm not really sure how practical that is because you can't like move your home. No, but anyways, it shows you that.

It'S really, really bad.

You might consider it, I guess, put a plant in your bedroom. It hooks up to a bunch of different apps like the Run Keeper app and you know, all these apps that you can use to pair it with so you can keep track of your, your body fat and your weight and everything. That way, you know, if you're, if you're a data nerd. I think it's, it's kind of cool. For me, I'M kind of a data nerd, but because I travel so much, I have to use data that I can take with me and I can't really. I guess I could put a scale in my carry on, but you know, I don't. But anyways, it's a Withing scale. We'll put our handy dandy Amazon link to it in the show notes. So you can put a few dollars in our hat if you go buy a Withing scale following the link in the show notes. But that's what it is, the Withings scale.

I hate to ask how much one of those things would cost.

I think it's like 200 bucks. I want to say. No, it's 149.

Awesome.

Here we go. The one stop health tracking scale. The smart body analyzer WS50. My ludium Q46 explosive space modulator. So you can grab the. The Withing scale and. And I'll also put a link to those DVDs because I think we've got like I want to say right around 30 DVD sets left from the Superhuman conference. Those get shipped to your house. They're. They're like 27 bucks, I think. So we'll put a link in the show notes if you want to snag some DVDs for whatever watching during the summer. Hey, Ben.

My name is Michael. I'm a combat rescue pilot. Fly the HH60. It's a Paveh helicopter. And during this previous deployment about two weeks ago, I got a herniated disc between the L4, L5 series. So I had to come home because there's nothing they can do for me there. I'm starting physical therapy next week with a guy who's part of the Ironman network. He does art, dry needling, decompressions, manipulation, stuff like that. So he's going to be a good guy. I have a hundred miler in September I'm doing followed by Ironman Florida in November and a few other races after that. Just curious what your suggestions are that I could do on my own, such as exercise supplements that might be able to help get through it. The pain's not too severe. I'm still out running 8 to 10 miles in the morning and still running bike and able to lift weights and whatnot. Just while sitting down for long periods of time is when I get the most amount of pain. So any of your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Okay, herniated disc doesn't sound like fun.

Yeah. And Michael is the combat rescue pilot who actually sent me a flag from one of his missions. I've got a big flag actually in my living room, and it's, it's the one that Michael sent. So what's up, Michael? Very cool. Thanks again for, for sending that over. And we're recording this after Memorial Day. But again, huge, huge thanks, huge amount of gratitude for all the servicemen and women who are out there protecting us and securing our freedom.

So we throw you a salute.

A salute. What do you do in Canada? Salute? Or do you guys do like a.

Like we moon each other.

A drop kick. You just moon each other. Okay, so you're doing a lot of the right stuff, Michael. I mean, you know, active release therapy and dry needling and, you know, decompression. We actually talked about decompression and Dr. Ho's decompression belt in podcast episode 224 and we'll link to that in the show notes because decompression belts along with inversion tables can actually help out quite a bit in a situation like this. But what we're talking about is kind of like temporary alleviation of pain. Right? And you know, taking the pressure off of a herniated disc versus healing the actual area. So I've got a few other band aid ideas for you. One would be to go and listen also to podcast episode number 235, where Brock and I talk quite a bit about getting rid of nerve pain. And we specifically talk about the type of compounds that you can include in your diet that are going to help either with nerve pain or help to heal nerves. One was a high omega 3 fatty acid and gamma linoleic acid intake and making sure to include what's called borage oil with that. So you could use like a really good high quality fish oil. So there's, there's fish oils cameo once again in this podcast, but that good, high quality fish oil. Also natural painkillers. I'm a big, big fan of, of phenocaine for this. That's kind of my natural recommendation as an alternative to ibuprofen. And phenocaine is basically a mix of curcumin, which is the active ingredient in turmeric. It's got boswellia in it, which is a COX2 inhibitor, meaning it down regulates the amount of pain producing prostaglandins that you make. It's got some DLPA in it, that's DL phenylalaniline, and that has the ability to help your body maintain higher levels of serotonin. So it churns out more of the brain's feel good hormone and it's also got nattokinase in it which has some blood clot dissolving abilities. Again, that's a band aid, but it's something that I've had people pop right around four to eight every couple of hours during a hard event. And it can at least control pain without literally kicking your liver and your kidneys and causing endotoxemia and all this stuff that ibuprofen or Advil can create when you're out exercising and trying to control pain. So that's another thing that I'd consider would be using phenocaine. Resveratrol has some, some good efficacy as well in controlling nerve pain in a situation like this. Like a high dose. Resveratrol and glutathione would be the last one that, that you may find handy. Glutathione is something that your body can make itself if you're using like a good, like cold processed natural whey protein. You can also get glutathione like the bulletproof exec they make like a liposomal glutathione that you can spray under your tongue. None of this stuff is going to stop the pain though, right? Or heal the issue. It's all going to be a band aid. And I'll certainly put a link to all of these band aids in the show notes. You know, if you've got a race coming up and you just need to nip stuff in the bud and you know, minimize pain as quickly as possible from something like back pain or an injury. This is all stuff that can work to stop nerve pain and kind of turn off pain. But there are some other things that I would, that I'd recommend. The first is if you're trying to heal this thing. You know, David Minkoff, who's been on this podcast multiple times, I'll put a link to the episode that he did with us on how to stop chronic pain. But he runs the LifeWorks Wellness center down in Florida and he has a lot of different protocols that he does at the wellness center down there. But one of them is stem cell therapy. And when I say stem cell therapy, I'm not talking about the traditional use of stem cells that involves actual surgery, but they're actually, there are oral kind of stem cell precursors that you can use. So stem cell implantations are medical procedures that are administered by doctors. And it's like injections of stem cells and cell precursors into injured areas to massively increase healing in an area. But you know, it's Expensive and kind of hard to get access to in some situations, I would imagine, especially if you're a combat pilot and you're overseas or something like that. Cell therapy is usually administered via injectables or encapsulated in like soft gels. And what cell therapy is, is basically mixes of stuff that enhances your body's own ability to heal itself via the same mechanism that stem cells would. The one that Dr. Minkoff recommended, and this was another one at the Superhuman conference. A bunch of people were like, what did he say? What did he say? And I wrote it down. It's called Cellergen C E L E R G E N. It's a cellular marine complex that's mixed with collagen and what's called a hydropeptide. And marine complexes actually can be extremely protective against cellular oxidative damage, but have some pretty potent healing properties too. And when you combine that with collagen, which helps to reinforce connective tissue hydration and elasticity, and peptide, which plays a critical role in the regeneration of cartilage, this stuff can be pretty efficacious. I have never personally bought it it. I don't know where to get it. I'm just kind of pointing you in the right direction. But it's called celargen. I'll put a link to Dr. David Minkoff's LifeWorks Wellness center in the show notes if you want to maybe try and hunt him down and see if you can get a link to it or, you know, I don't know if you need a prescription for it or much about it, but it's basically like oral stem cell therapy. So that would be one thing that you could look into as a way of shutting off pain. Now if you did want to go, you know, if you get the chance at some point in your life and you just put your foot down, you're like, I want to get rid this forever. That's where I would start to look into something like a minimally invasive spine surgery technique that uses stem cell therapy. The one that I'm aware of is called Regenadisc, and that's R e g e n a disc.com and it's a combination of low level laser spinal decompression of the disc along with regenerative stem cell therapy in a surgical setting. And that's supposed to be extremely efficacious. It's much more common over in Europe. You can get it in the States. But it's something that if you just want kind of more permanent healing, not Just a band aid I'd highly recommend that you look into. So that'd be one to check out as well. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes. The last thing that you should consider would be more of a mental approach. And there's this technique out there that's really, really cool. It's called neuro linguistic programming and you can use it for pain relief. There are pain receptors in your brain and if you can manage your brain, it's possible for you to reduce and eliminate pain temporarily in certain sections of your body when you need to just shut off pain. So you learn with neuro linguistic programming how to communicate with certain body parts. So you, you have the psychological parts of your body that actually form the pain. So if your shoulder is experiencing pain, then you can learn how to communicate with that pain using the link between your brain and your shoulder. And I know this stuff sounds woo woo. Don't worry, I'm going to tell you how you can learn more in a second and you can get extreme stress relief and tension relief and you can actually use this stuff to massively improve sports performance as well. Now here's the deal, here's what I'm going to do because I've gotten some questions, questions about this from listeners. It seems like we're always dealing with pain and pain management. So I am actually going to personally this Friday meet with one of the top neuro linguistic programmers on the face of the planet. His name is Andy Murphy. He works with high, high level athletes, professional athletes, CEOs, multimillionaire business owners and world champion MMA stars and trauma survivors. The Royal family, like this guy is at the top level for nlp.

That's awesome. The Royal Family's in that list of people.

Hey, you know what we know that they like. Well the Royal Family likes to throw money at the best, right? So this guy is good.

And he also engage in massive fights, occasionally beat the shit out of each other.

I'm just saying. I'm just saying. So dude, we, we got to be careful. We can't mark this podcast as explicit or I'll bleep. It's all our family listeners.

Sorry mom.

Anyways though, his name is Andy Murphy. Andymurphyconsulting.com But I approached him and he agreed to do a video recorded NLP session with me. So I'm gonna record the whole thing. It may involve some hypnosis, It'll definitely involve some neuro linguistic programming. It will involve if anything a high entertainment level. As you, as you Laugh at me being neuro linguistically programmed. And I'm gonna release it because I'm actually gonna be on an airplane to Japan next week. Next week's special podcast episode is going to be me getting the hell neuro linguistically programmed out of me, so you can get a chance to check that out.

So the only thing I'd worry about, especially for, like, Michael, who's got a herniated disc, if he ignores the pain or masks the pain or makes the pain disappear, is he going to put himself at risk of doing some worse damage?

Mm, he is.

Straight up, yes.

Yeah, but, I mean, you know, how many of us have been signed up for a marathon or an ironman or whatever and realize that we're not going to be at 100% going in? And there does come a time when you just got to kind of hack the pain, figure out a way to switch it off, figure out a way to mask a little bit, figure out a way to be able to push through the discomfort. And, yeah, you wind up sometimes in a worse condition than you were when you started. But, you know, if that's part.

If it's important enough to you, if.

It'S part of the adventure that you call life and you're willing to, you know, take. Take one really, really fun step forward or really, really engaging or challenging or fulfilling step forward, and, you know, it might mean you take two steps steps back. You know, if that's what makes you happy. You know, I. I don't have a real problem with it as long as you're not hurting anybody except for yourself.

So I guess I just. I just worry when it's something like your spine more so than if it's like your big toe.

Yeah, I mean, it's not like it's a fractured vertebra that's, you know, gonna, like, cut off his spinal cord or make him paralyzed or something like that. If anything, he's just gonna have a lot more pain, and at some point, he's probably gonna need surgery if he to tried tries to push through 100 miler with back pain. So, yeah, I mean, I'm glad you were the person that brought it up and not me, Brock, but. Yeah, I mean, there always is that option, too, of just, like, take the year off and heal your body and then get back into it.

Luckily, the race isn't until September, so you've got some time. Kick that thing, Michael.

There you go. Stem cell the heck out of it. Hi. I'm just wondering if there's any concerns about training For a marathon, when you have epilepsy in relation to maybe exertion or nutrition, any help would be great. Thanks. Bye. Well, you could. This is an interesting question because exercise can certainly help to control epilepsy and aerobic exercise specifically has been shown to clearly benefit people with epilepsy. Just. Oh, we're going to edit that out.

It's only 20 minutes later, but the sneeze came.

It was a delay. I warned you. That took you by surprise. So epilepsy, yes, it's definitely. Multiple studies have shown it to not exasperate. Exasperate.

Exasperate.

You say that seizures, but the only issue is that if you did happen to have an epileptic incident while you were running, it becomes an issue with falling, you know, on, on the hard pavement or, or, you know, it's not, you know, the same risk as like skydiving or rock climbing or scuba diving or something like that, or even, you know, swimming. It's like if, you know, if you fall and you're running, you're probably not going to die, but you could definitely get a head injury or, you know, injure a wrist or a knee or something like that. So, you know, there's a little bit of risk involved, but walking and jogging and running are relatively safe if you have epilepsy. I'd be careful on something like a treadmill, just because the motion of the treadmill, along with all the bright lights in the gym and the TV and stuff like that, can potentially trigger something. But ultimately the benefits outweigh the risks. Now, I couldn't respond to a question about epilepsy without noting that something we've already mentioned in this podcast, the ketogenic diet is something that's shown to control seizures in people with epilepsy. And if I were going to be training for a marathon with epilepsy, I would really be considering liberal use of medium chain triglyceride oil and coconut oil, limiting carbohydrates, potentially even using a medium chain triglyceride oil derivative in your actual sport fuel to control epilepsy, things of that nature. It's interesting because there is some underground talk about how Tour de France cyclists right now, a lot of them are experimenting with ketone pills full on ketone fuels and kind of tapping into this enhanced aerobic efficiency that comes with, with shifting your body into ketogenesis. And obviously when you have a hammer, all the world looks like a nail or however that phrase goes. But basically for me, because I'm very intensively studying ketogenesis and in ketogenesis right now I'm seeing a lot of the benefits of it, but with epilepsy, it really, really is something that's been studied quite a bit for epilepsy. So the running is not an issue. From a nutrition standpoint, I would really consider ketogenesis. From an exertion standpoint. I would recommend that you try and keep things aerobic and there's no reason that you can't, you know, kind of find out what your threshold heart rate is and do most of your training sessions at, you know, that threshold heart rate minus 20 beats. You can use a little bit more of like a Mathotone type of training approach or aerobic training approach. And you know, whereas I'm not a huge fan of that approach, if you're time crunched or if you want to get the most bang for your buck from a, from a time standpoint, you know, if you, if you got the time to do it, you can do like a, you know, an aerobic test, a Maffetone aerobic test every four weeks or so to keep your aerobic heart rate identified and continually monitor your improvements in speed at that aerobic heart rate. You know, it's certainly an efficacious way to train. It's, it's helped a lot of folks. And Endurance planet over@EndurancePlanet.com, one of the podcasting networks that I own, recently did a two and a half hour interview with Phil Maffetone that I listened to over the past couple days and it was friggin fantastic.

So yeah, I listened to that too the other day. I didn't realize it was that long. It was that interesting that it just didn't seem like it was two and a half hours.

Yeah, he's a cool dude. He's a cool dude. He's on the, he has a presentation on the super human DVDs as well. But yeah, that's the type of training that I'd do if you were gonna do this.

Hi, Ben, John from Toronto. I just have a quick question on. Actually two questions. One on training effect. I'm not sure I understand it correctly because either that or it's not working correctly on my Garmin. What happens is I can run in my zone three for like an hour and a half and get a, you know, 4.5 training effect and then I can walk when it's cold outside and get a training effect of 5, which is overreaching. So I'm not sure I understand it or if it's really just bunk. Second thing is I thought I actually have the sweet beets. I do. My heart rate variability, I noticed actually the other day when you said that your heart rate variability was up around 90 and you should really, you know, that that's something you want to be working on is around 90. Mine is on average 60. And I'm wondering if it's based upon who you are or maybe it's something I should be really looking into to say, you know, that maybe this should be significantly higher. Anyway, just appreciate the show. You and Brock do a great job and thanks a lot.

Yeah, I've noticed the training effect on my Garmin is often questionable.

As a team Timex athlete, I would get shot if I ever put on a Garmin again. So I can't say that I've noticed the training effect on my Garmin. But the, the training effect is just a, it's an algorithm that your, your Garmin uses to measure what's called your excess post exercise oxygen consumption. So as you exercise during a workout, you reach a state where you're using oxygen more quickly than you can actually replace it through ventilation. And there is a correlation between excess post exercise oxygen consumption or in this case oxygen consumption during the actual workout, predicting what your post exercise oxygen debt will be. And you can correlate that to heart rate. So that's all the training effect does, is the garment is keeping track of your heartbeat measurements, it's correlating that to oxygen consumption and then based off of your approximation of oxygen consumption, it's kicking out a training effect number. Meaning that the higher the training effect effect, the higher the likelihood that it's going to enhance your cardiorespiratory fitness. Just because you are going to have to replace all that oxygen after you finished working out and you're stressing your ventilatory muscles and your cardiovascular system more during a training effect. You know, there's a variety of different ways you can monitor the, the intensity of a workout. You could use this training effect, which is a one to five scale. You could use, use, you know, what's called an intensity factor, which is more common if you're using like training peaks. You could use a training stress score, which is kind of a combination of your heart rate and your speed and the time that you spent training. You could use just your, your breath scale and your own perceived rating of exertion. I mean, ultimately, like there's so many different ways that you can track intensity out there. And I gotta be honest with you, like lately, and I've got access to, like, every. Every timepiece that Timex has ever made. Like, I've got everything. I've got a run trainer and a cycle trainer and their $300 watches and everything. Ever since I read that book by Bud Coates, the Running on Air, I've basically just been doing two things. When I'm out running. I either use that aerobic three, two breathing pattern, meaning three breaths in, or, I'm sorry, one breath in for three count. Oh, gosh, I'm messing it up. I'm closing my eyes, imagining myself running. So I'm trying to remember how it's done, because I'm. Now I'm having a hard time describing it. Okay, so you're trying to breathe out more when your foot hits the ground. So you take a breath in for three foot strikes and a breath out for two foot strikes and a breath in for three foot strikes. A breath out for two foot strikes. It's really awkward when you start doing it. And now I just do it naturally. So that's your aerobic pace. And then if you want to go a little bit harder, it's one breath in for every two foot strikes and one breath out for one foot strike. So it's two in, one out. And then if you really, really want to go hard, it's two in, one out, One in, one out. And that's, like, I have not been using my watch or like, all I'm doing is working with that breathing. And for me, it's just relaxing. Like when I finish a long day of work and I just don't want to strap a heart rate monitor and all that jazz on. I just go out and just run and listen to my breath, and it's quite relaxing. And combining that book, that Running on Air book with the John Douyard's Body, Mind and Sport book, has really changed my workouts pretty significantly. I think I mentioned this in the last podcast episode, but combining rhythmic breathing with deep nasal breathing, I'm planning on doing that all during Ironman, frankly, for Ironman Canada. I'm going to try and keep that nasal breathing protocol all the way up till the final 10k, at which I'll, you know, pull the rip cord and go to the pain cave. But, yeah, it's cool stuff. So very cool. And then.

So then the second half of the question was about the sweet Beat heart rate variability.

Yeah.

So, like, you keep yours around 90, and if it drops too much lower, you get kind of concerned about that.

Well, well, Sweet Beat, which is the app that I use to measure My heart rate variability every morning. They recently refined their heart rate variability calculation because myself and some other athletes who were doing it, we were maxing out their heart rate variability reading. So it was like always at 100. Just because the nervous system of an athlete tends to be more tuned than the nervous system of the average population. And their algorithm was based on. On the general population. So they redid their algorithm. And I actually got emails from a bunch of folks. Some of the athletes who I work with who are tracking hrv, some folks who are using the sweep measurement, they're all freaking out because all of a.

Sudden, all of a sudden they dropped.

Their scores, all dropped because they redid the calculation. So what you need to do, if you were using that and you noticed that you need to redo your baseline heart rate variability measurement and then know that it's going to be a lot harder to reach 100. Like, since they redid that calculation, I never reach a hundred. What I've found in myself, as well as watching athletes who I'm working with, who are doing those daily measurements and sending me their values, and then we can. We can track things like injury, illness, how they feel, how they perform, what their workout looks like for that day in terms of speed and power and heart rate. What you'll find in most cases is once your heart rate variability is dropping consistently below 80, that's a pretty good sign that you need to be really careful with hard training, like anaerobic training, things of that nature. And if I have any days where I go below 80, that's kind of like my new 90 with the. With the new sweet beat measurement. So if I drop below 80 on any day, that is a sign of concern to me. And I'm very careful with my training that day. Or else I do a lot of yoga and meditation and kind of see if I can bring that heart rate variability back up. And sometimes I can. Like this morning I tested at 73, and so I felt great. But I was kind of wondering why I tested at 73. And I think it's because I was checking my email during the test. Like, I was on. I had it hooked up to my phone, but I was scrolling through emails on my phone. So I put my phone down and I just closed my eyes and leaned back into the pillow and started doing nasal breathing and did a retest, and I was at 84 after five minutes. So sometimes, you know, it's just. It's not you being beat up, it's just like you in the moment being stressed out. So kind of be aware of that. But yeah, 60 is too low. Like, in my opinion, you shouldn't be beating up your body unless you're 80 or higher. And otherwise, you need to fix your nervous system, you know, do some relaxation and then. Then retest. So that's my recommendation for that.

That's a good recommendation.

We are just chock full of recommendations. So I want to read a review. We get a review.

It's time to read a review from itunes. If you haven't left a review or a ranking, you don't even have to write something. You can just click on the little stars and give us five, please.

Nah, Bol, bol. You gotta write something.

Okay.

Gotta write something.

I was trying to be forgiving, but if you do write something and it's really cool, then Ben will read it in a funny voice.

Yeah, well, fit Brit mom wrote to me. She's the gal whose review we read in our English cockney Australian accent last week. She was super, super, actually. Sent her. I sent her a book and a bunch of supplements yesterday. So, yeah, everybody who leaves a review if we read it on here, I send you a care package. They're usually like 40, 50 bucks worth of just free stuff. So anyway, so what I picked today was a review by James Skilo. I think his name is James Skilo. And James says a wealth of knowledge. Star, star, star, star, star. Five stars. Boom. He says there's no way I could keep up with all the research on fitness and nutrition. But Ben does. This is a great way to become educated on fitness, science, and practical applications. Here's what I like. He says, the podcasts are fairly long, so I listen at 1.5 times speed. So, Barack, I have a special request. Can you. Can you play what it would sound like for us to be at 1.5 times speed for the listeners, just us talking right now.

Just for the. For the rest of the episode, I'll.

Do it at one and a half times so we sound like chipmunks or little mice.

I'll do it.

So sweet.

All right, so that's getting close to the end. Be sure to go to BenGreenfieldFitness. I do have one other thing for you, by the way. But first. Oh, yeah, you've got the song. That's right. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com love if you want to spread the love, spread the love however you would like in a safe and clean manner. And you can also go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com242 to check out the show notes for this episode and also the handy dandy. My list that we create for each episode which is just like clickable links, resources, stuff like that for people who don't like to read and just want to look at pretty pictures. Who like pictures. And then. Yeah, the last thing is that when I was sitting around with my kids at dinner last. Was it last night? No, it was two nights ago. They wanted to go see Iron Man 3 and their five year old twin boys, river and Taryn. And so I told them that they could go if they could basically raise money for their own movie tickets.

They're five.

They're five. And so they wanted to draw pictures and record songs and sell them. So right after dinner they recorded a very short but sweet album called the Clowny that they came up with that name the Clownies. I like it. And it's $1.99 and it's, it's four different audio tracks that you can download. But Taran has a song that he sang and we're gonna play it for you right now. And if you, if you like this sample of the Clownies, you can go get the whole album all. I think it's probably about three minutes worth of songs for $1.99. And teach my boys a nice lesson about entrepreneurship so. And send them to see Iron Man 3. And there you go. So here's Taran with wishing on a star.

And trying to believe but even though it's four, it still's Christmas Eve I guess that seemed as busy Cause he's never come around I think of him that Christmas comes comes to town the best time of the year when everyone comes home and all this Christmas cheer It's hard to be alone Putting up the Christmas trees and friends who come around it's so much fun When Christmas comes to town Presents for the children Wrapped in red and green all the things I heard about but never really seen no one will be sleeping on the night of Christmas Eve Hoping Santa's on his way When Santa's sleigh bells ring I listen all around the herald angels sing I never hear a sound all the dreams of children and love that will be found it's so much fun When Christmas comes to town that's all I want When Christmas comes to town.

Ben, I completed my first Ironman Ironman Texas a week ago. And your book Holistic Fueling for Ironman, your blog and your advice made it a success for me. From fueling with Eucan Energy 28, the amino acids supplements to your advice on acclimating a couple weeks before the race in the steam room to the recovery on the ice stop were fantastic. I'm thrilled about this. I know I could have done it with all your help. Thank you so much. Visit BenGreenfield Fitness.com for even more cutting.

Edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

Sam.