Hypoxia For Fat Loss, How To Fix Golfer's Elbow or Climber's Elbow, Creatine Water Retention & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, Hypoxia for fat loss, how to fix golfer's elbow or climber's elbow, how to keep from retaining water with creatine, can your fascia store toxins, urinary testing for hormones, and much more.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, brain and hormone optimization. So whether you an ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Welcome back, Ben.

Feels good to be back, dude. We've had, we've. We've almost had a complete withdrawal of any of our formal Q A episodes whatsoever for like a month.

I know. I started to get emails. Are you okay? Is everything all right? What happened? Did you guys break up?

We did. And I got some withdrawal headaches, but it's all good now.

I just got. I got indigestion and diarrhea. Is that from that same thing?

No, that's. That's probably the fact that since we're not talking, your diet has likely slipped.

That's true.

You don't have me there to hold you accountable on podcasts.

I went straight to McDonald's.

Yeah, McDonald's sprinkled and sprinkled with. With gluten powder.

Extra gluten.

Extra. So can you do that at McDonald's, by the way? Can you tell them to order extra gluten? Oh, yeah, Gluten size you super gluten. Mm. Hey, so one thing I've been doing, Brock, that I haven't had a chance to tell you much about is I got a brand new toy in my garage.

A new motorbike.

I actually got two new toys. One Corvette not going to talk about because I'm working on an article about it. But the other is an incline treadmill. Have you ever seen an incline treadmill? Like it goes up to like 40%.

Oh, okay, so it's not stuck in incline. It just has a larger range of motion.

Oh, thank God it's not stuck in incline because if you've ever been on an incline at 40%, it is nuts.

So I can't even imagine 40%. Like most of them go to like 12.

If I am at 2.0 miles per hour and 40%, it feels close to like a, like an all out pace on the treadmill.

So you're like pushing on your knees with your hands like that sort of hiking kind of incline practically.

So I've been doing everything from putting on a heavy backpack and doing like uphill walking to doing like. Yesterday's session was eight minutes at 20%, eight minutes at 30%, eight minutes at 40%, then back down to 30, then back down to 20. And there's two reasons I'm doing this. First, as I mentioned in a few podcast episodes, I have a coach now who's prescribing me training sess.

Who's sadistic.

Who is sadistic. And then the other reason is that the cool thing about an incline treadmill is that you get all the benefits of going up without any of the joint and the potential for tissue damage and overtraining that happens when you get the pounding of going down. So you pretty much have like this never ending mountain in your garage. So I got the NordicTrack X11, the NordicTrack X11 incline trainer. So for any of you other sadomasochistic hill climbing sherpas out there, check it out. It's kind of cool.

I hear the X11A comes with a puke bucket that you can hang from the front of it.

Nice.

In between dry heaving off the edge of his incline treadmill, Ben's been tweeting out all kinds of stuff like normal@twitter.com BenGreenfield and now we're going to talk about all those cool things.

All those cool things. So one thing I've been doing quite a bit of when I'm not walking on the treadmill is nature walks. And I have made it a goal to actually learn every plant that's on my property. And you don't have to necessarily know them by name. Well, know that. Hey, Bob.

Hey, Susan.

Yeah, exactly.

Morning, Ben.

Know they're right neighborly of you, their usage, their, their edible characteristics, their medicinal characteristics, what you can do with the root, what you can do with the leaves, what you can do with the stems. And I've been making my kids a part of this where we'll walk out and we'll find plants that we can identify. And one thing that I ran into was that it's a real pain to actually use like a reverse Google image search or even, you know, even any of these apps out there like Plantsnap or Google Goggles, like none of them seem to work all that well because they're purely, they're automated. Google Goggles is actually an app that you can use. If you Google Google Goggles, you'll find it say that 10 times fast.

I know.

So anyways, what I have been using is this app. And I tweeted out about this. It's called the Flower Checker app and it's a free app that allows you to identify plants. But the unique part about it is there's a live botanist or a team of live botanists. I highly doubt it's just one single live botanist, although it may be just a morbidly obese, overworked dude botanist who sits on the couch and is overworked. But what they do is they review within 24 hours the photos of the leaves, the stem and the plant, et cetera. You have your location settings turned on when you upload it, so it also identifies where you are. And then they give you the plant, they give you the Wikipedia page for the plant as well as some other links to find out interesting things about the plants where you're at. So I have, I have identified, every single day, I've identified a plant. Some of the cool ones that are around me is, one is yarrow, which you can use very similarly to like mint or chamomile. Another one that I have is wormwood or absinthe, which you can use for everything from mind altering drinks to kind of a mild detox. I've got mullein and organ grape and one called ocean Spray, which you can actually use. You can use the sticks to make things like arrows because they're extremely, extremely straight and rigid. All sorts of plants. You know, Canadian spear thistle. And I found out that you can kind of like shave the edges off of that and eat it almost like celery as a water source. And you can eat the little purple flowerettes. You can cook them up like artichokes. It's very, very cool. It's a great way to get in touch with nature and it's a good way to do it without wasting all your time taking a picture and then holding it up in some field guide the way that they would have done it back in the day before the Internets. But if the Lewis and Clark expedition had flower checker, probably fewer of them would have died or they would have at least had less. Less of a propensity to eat one another. So there's that or the Donner party. So another thing that I tweeted out was a new study about gluten intolerance and the fact that there's an enzyme, it's derived from something called Aspergillus niger. And what it does is it digests gluten in the stomach of what they describe as healthy volunteers. And these healthy volunteers were actually given a meal that contained about 4 grams of gluten, which is a pretty significant portion of gluten. And what they found was that when the gluten was accompanied by this unique new gluten digesting enzyme, that there were no deleterious GI effects. And these folks were able to completely digest the gluten, this storage protein that's present in things like wheat and barley and rye. And it was able to take take what would normally be a gluten peptide that is resistant to digestion and causes all the things like inflammation and bloating and a lot of the things that people who are gluten intolerant associate with gluten consumption. And it was able to allow these folks to actually digest the gluten. So.

So I can finally go back to McDonald's and get my super gluten meal.

That's right. Wonder Bread is back in business.

Hooray.

No reason to avoid gluten because we now that's what we always wanted to biohack gluten. Interestingly, there were no other deleterious GI effects, no explosive diarrhea or anything else that seemed to occur at least during the length of time of the study. I'm not quite sure of any long term studies that have been done on the use of this enzyme that efficiently degrades gluten, but the abbreviation for the enzyme, if you want to look this up on Amazon or wherever else you tend to your local friendly supplement purveyor, it's anp, which stands for Aspergillus Niger Prolyl endoprotease.

Holy crap.

And I found some capsules, et cetera, of these gluten digesting enzymes on Amazon. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 319 if you want to experiment with this, maybe have a meal comprised of bread, beer. What else? Maybe some soy sauce, some pasta. Anything else that you've been avoiding because of its gluten content? Knock yourself out, go to town, have a gluten party. So that was actually an interesting study.

So they didn't mention anything about the cognitive effects of eating gluten. They're just talking sheerlier specifically about gut issues.

Watson, keen observation. Yes, gluten can have neurotoxic effects that are completely separate from any type of gastrointestinal effect. And this is why a lot of times people who use gluten or take in gluten who happen to have an intolerance to it will have problems with everything from brain fog to stuttering to not being able to grab words, the right words that they need. When. And this is because of the neurotoxicity, and you are absolutely correct, the enzyme does not. Excuse me, excuse you. Does not diminish the neurotoxic effect. So there is that. But, you know, let's say you're whatever, you know, you're at a party, you have a couple of beers and maybe in a little Ziploc bag in your pocket, you have a couple of gluten digesting enzymes to help you out a little bit. So there's that. So another thing that I tweeted out, the last study that I, that I wanted to mention was one that appeared in Clinical Physiology and Functional Imaging. Odd journal for this one to appear in, but it looked into the effects of exercise training under hypoxia. And what they actually found was that when you exercise in a state of hypoxia, meaning low oxygen availability, which would be everything from the U7 altitude chamber to one of these like resistance training masks, to like hypoxic underwater training sessions, it actually triggers a release of adiponectin. Adiponectin is a hormone that mobilizes fats specifically from adipose tissue and allows you to burn those fatty acids for energy. And what they found was that circulating adiponectin levels significantly increased when exercise was performed under hypoxic conditions. And in this case it was aquatic exercise. So pool based exercise like swimming and aqua aerobics with a little dorky foam, dumbbells, that type of thing. Ultimately though, you know, hypoxia and hypoxic training sessions is something that I do quite a bit of. You know, at least a couple of times a week I'm in the pool going back and forth underwater while holding my breath. And actually on a recent trip to Arizona, I, with a group of three other guys wound up doing a couple sessions like this where we would do things like drag dumbbells underneath the water, back and forth through the pool while holding our breath. And not only is it a fantastic workout for your lungs, it's great for stress resilience and focus. But turns out it also burns more fat too. So I'll link to that in these other studies if you want to peruse them over in the shownotes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 319 and there was one last thing I wanted to mention since it's been a little while since we've had a podcast. I had two posts that kind of went viral that if you're listening to this episode and you haven't had a chance to check out yet, you may want to check out. And they both involve what would be considered sin substances. So one post was on how to get all of the effects of weed from a 100% healthy and non addictive alternative to weed called cannabidiol. And quite a monster of a post.

Going into oh man, that took me days to get through that thing.

All the effects of CBD but one to send to your Kindle or to check out because it's certainly something that using quite a bit of these days you don't get some of the potential for some of the gray matter damage and the things like that that can occur with weed, with edibles, with things that contain thc. And you get all the anti anxiety and anti inflammatory effects when you use this CBD component and also the anti going to jail and the anti going to jail depending on where you're at. Plus kids can use it completely safely as well, which is nice. And then the other one was on booze and I'm now drinking a wine that is lower in sugar and the same in alcohol. That's a must for me. I refuse to drink any wine that has a lower than normal amount of alcohol in it. But this wine also has enhanced amounts of flavanols and polyphenols and resveratrol, some of the active antioxidant components in wine. It's called Fitvine Wine. But I wrote the article not just on this Fitvine wine, but on wine in general and what kind of things to look for in wine, how to control like this, the sulfite and the amine based headaches. You know, some some little biohacks, how to biohack your wine and all sorts of interesting things like that when it comes to booze and specifically wine. So I'll link to both of those articles as well in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 319 so now you can go enjoy your weed and your booze party.

Listener Q and A hey Ben, Derek here. I developed a soreness on my inside my elbow. Not tennis elbow, but I guess they call it golfer's elbow and I believe it is from Kettlebell Cleaning. I was wondering what you recommend to help heal this off. It's only my right arm but I believe it's from the kettlebell. Clean as you're coming up. Feels like that muscle and it's not going away. It's A slight pain, but I never had tennis elbow, but now I have golfer's elbow. So any tips on how to get better? Thanks.

Well, you may hear a dog barking in the background there, Brock. That's my sister in law's dog that we're watching.

If my ears don't mistake me, it sounds like a fat dachshund.

Yes, it's a fat little wiener dog that frankly, I'm not a huge fan of and I would love to just like eat it for dinner. I don't. I hope she doesn't listen into this podcast, but the dog is not among my favorites. I like big majestic wolf like dogs, not little, not little dogs that have been bred to fit into purses. But that's just me. Anyways though, to turn to Eric's question about the elbow, this is actually a problem that I've been running into quite a bit with folks who are doing obstacle racing, spartan racing, American Ninja warrior style stuff, CrossFit. With all the pull ups, you get pain and you get pain not in the outside of your elbow where folks would traditionally get pain associated with like tennis elbow, what's also called lateral epicondylitis, but you instead get it on the medial, on the inside of the elbow. And it's basically a tendinosis of the medial epicondyle of the elbow.

So let's get the placement. So if I'm standing there with my hands turned so my palms are facing forward.

Yeah, it's on the inside.

The part closest to my ribs is.

Where the pain is exactly on the inside, not the outside of the elbow. So it's also referred to as climber's elbow. Sometimes it's called pitcher's elbow, in this case, kettlebell elbow. Kettlebell elbow, golfer's elbow, of course, like I mentioned. And it's actually, it's associated with anything where you are gripping and pulling simultaneously. And so you see it a lot in grip intensive sports. And it's actually something that's very difficult to manage and to get rid of. And the reason that it's so much more difficult than even like a lateral epicondylitis or like a tennis elbow to get rid of is because it's an area where there's a little less blood flow. And it's also an area that tends to be aggravated quite a bit by activities that we commonly do in our day to day lives these days. Specifically texting and typing causes these little tendons that run over that medial epicondyle to stay inflamed. And it can be really, really tough you know, normally you'll see all of the recommendations that you tend to see for injuries out there. Recommended to manage this like you know, non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs or even natural anti inflammatories like you know, curcumin or fish oil. You'll see heat. Recommended. You'll see, see ice. Recommended. You'll see like these elbow straps or counterforce braces that actually work really, really well for tennis elbow. These little braces that you wear above the elbow, they don't work that well for like a, like a golfer's elbow, even like a full on sleeve over the elbow or like this, you know, like the kinesio tape that folks will tape themselves up with a lot of times. None of this stuff works for like a golfer's elbow or a climber's elbow. And it can be very, very frustrating and painful because every time you pull or you grip it, it just hurts. So I've, I've had this injury before. I've gotten rid of it and I've walked a few people through it. And what I recommend is the following. First of all, you got to do some really intensive like forearm and deep tissue work. And it can be hard. If you've ever tried to like fit foam roll your arm, it's pretty hard to do. It's also pretty hard to use like a lacrosse ball on your arm. You know, like the Becoming a Supple Leopard book would go into like there's not a lot for like the elbow and the forearm there, but what you can do is you can pin your arm between two surfaces that allow you to almost like roll it as it's pinned. And there's a device out there that is specifically designed for climbers, for golfers, for grippers, for typ, for people who do things that aggravate that medial epicondyle. It's called the arm aid. The arm aid.

And it's like there's a video about that, don't you?

This giant claw. Yeah, because I own one and I've used it just because I've been doing so much more climbing for like Spartan racing and stuff like that. And also I do a lot of gripping now with the bow. Shooting the bow.

Oh yeah, I bet.

Yeah. And then of course I'm also typing a lot and so it's reared its ugly head on me a few times and I use this arm aid and, and just use it the same way as I would a foam roller. So there's deep tissue work and if you have this as a chronic condition this medial epicondylitis or this inflammation in your elbow, you would want to do this every day the same way as you'd foam roll, say, like your IT band. If you had it band friction syndrome, you'd want to work that deep tissue every single day. So it's called the arm aid. So that's number one. Number two is I went through a bunch of the different books and ebooks and online manuals and YouTube videos that are out there for golfer's elbow and climber's elbow. And there was one that I found that's like this systematic thing that you do every day. It involves like holding onto a wooden dowel or you can even use like a, like a hammer just because it has a little weight on the end of it and a handle that you hold onto. You can use nothing and just go through the rotation. But it involves a series of rotations that you do with both your elbow bent and your elbow straight, along with a series of resisted hand opening exercises where you'll like, use a rubber band that's wrapped around your hand and you'll open your hand and extend and then close it and open it and close it. Almost like grip training. And this thing, when I went through that program combined with daily deep tissue work using the arm aid, I got rid of this elbow pain almost right away after doing everything from like prolotherapy and platelet rich plasma injections and the anti inflammatories and the topical anti inflammatories and the ice and the heat and the electrostim and the vibration and the cold laser and nothing held a candle to just using the arm aid and then going through this program. It's called Golfer's Elbow Cure Super Cheesy Program. It's like this little ebook with crappy, grainy photos and it's one of those online books that's all hyped up with a sales page and everything, but it actually works. So that is the next thing that I'd recommend. That's number two. And then number three, if you don't want this problem to come back and you climb a lot or you golf a lot and you get pain on the inside of your elbow. You have to make sure that you're typing if you use a computer, that most of your typing is done not with the elbows bent, but with the elbows more extended than bent. Which means if your desk or your workstation sets you up in a position where your elbows are bent as you're typing every time your little fingers move, what happens is all the tendons rub over that, that inner and outer elbow. Whereas if your arm is extended, you get a lot less of that type of. That type of movement, that type of rubbing over the bony condyles in the elbow. So essentially what you want to do is get yourself in a position where your arms are kind of extended as you're typing. Now, the catch 22 is that sometimes there can be like a vision or an eyesight issue. Like if you have poor vision or poor eyesight by typing with your arms more extended, that by definition means your screen is gonna be farther away from you. So that can throw some people for a loop and I don't know, get. Get bifocals or something like that, or bigger monitor. Yeah, but, but basically you want to avoid typing with the elbows really bent or hunched over. So you would want to. Like, if you're. Have you ever typed like on an airplane with your computer on the tray in front of your.

It's basically like at your belly button.

That is the exact opposite of the position you'd want to be in when typing. So you want to tweak your workstation or tweak your typing setup so your arms are extended as you type. So those are the three things I would do the armade. I would use this little ebook and I'll link to it in the show notes called the Golfer's Elbow Cure. And then I would make sure that I adjust any type of typing biomechanics. And you can definitely get rid of this soreness, but it's a tough one. It's one of the tougher injuries. Kind of like it Band syndrome. It's one of the tougher injuries, injuries to get rid of.

Do you think Eric might be doing something wrong or some weird technique with his kettlebell cleans that might be causing the problem?

It's possible, but honestly, a lot of times what happens is you get this inflammation, right? And the inflammation could be from typing, it could be from gripping, it could be from over training, it could be from lack of deep tissue work or fascial adhesions, which I know we're going to talk about a little bit later on the podcast. This whole concept of fascia. And then what happens is no matter how good your form is, it just continues to aggravate the area. It's, you know, it's just working out with an injury. And of course, you definitely do want to make sure that you're using good form on the cleans. But assuming that the clean form is proper, it's one of those deals where you have to, you have to do some of these other things that I mentioned to actually heal it up before returning back to the cleans.

Hey guys. I've been using creatine monohydrate for mental performance since you guys have been talking about that and over the past couple weeks I seem to have gained some water weight. So I was wondering if you have any thoughts on how to prevent that or minimize that when supplementing with creatine. Love to hear what you have to say. Thanks.

Sounds like Brandon's getting fat.

Getting fat from creatine. So yeah, the water retention can be an issue with creatine. I actually did a podcast with Onnit about this. We had a brief little 15 minute podcast on creatine and the fact that most of the water retention issues with creatine arise from following the old school recommendations of loading with creatine. And by loading with creatine, you're typically taking anywhere from 15 to 20 grams of creatine and you're using that amount daily during a loading protocol that lasts anywhere from one to two weeks. It's pretty rare that I've seen anybody be able to handle that amount of creatine without getting water retention. And some of the cramping that's associated with creatine and what you can do and what I do with creatine when I start using it or when I stop using it and then I start back into it is I just take 5 grams daily. So 5 grams of creatine is the amount of creatine you'd want to use to actually get all of the strength and the power. And I'll talk about some of the cognitive benefits of creatine here in a second. But that's the amount that you'd use. And by skipping the loading period, it does take a little bit longer for the benefits of creatine to set in. Takes about two to three weeks to really start to feel the effects of creatine. If you start into 5 grams of creatine versus doing a loading protocol of like 20 grams. But you avoid the water retention issue with creatine when you do that. And I used to do a lot of this, like creatine loading and deloading and I'd get those cramping issues all the time. And now that I just take a small amount each day, day, it's not an issue. So in terms of the cognitive effect, it actually really is very interesting. So first of all, they've found that in vegans and vegetarians, who are typically in a state of chronic creatine deficiency, that creatine, specifically using this 5 grams per day dose, has been shown to increase memory, increase learning and increase cognitive performance. And that's specifically in vegetarians and vegans. And this has also been shown to work in other populations who tend to have low creatine levels. And that's specifically people who are sleep deprived and elderly people. So the cognitive benefits seem to set in most in people who are prone to creatine deficiency. They've found that in omnivores or in people who tend to eat meat on a regular basis, that the cognitive benefits of creatine are not as pronounced and that you don't notice quite as much in terms of creatine if you are getting enough meat in your diet, if you're not sleep deprived, if you're not elderly. So ultimately, I know that I've talked about creatine and cognitive performance before, but it appears to have most of its cognitive benefit if you are someone who is creatine deficient, not eating much meat, sleep deprived or elderly. In other cases, you're probably getting enough creatine just from meat intake to be able to avoid any of the type of cognitive deficits that arise from creatine deficiencies. However, if you're listening in and you're like vegan or vegetarian, I definitely recommend creatine supplementation. And also, and this was a very recent study in terms of elderly people and spatial recall and long term memory, it appears to significantly enhance what's called executive working memory in the elderly. And so as I age and I look, look at the things that I might use as like an anti aging or longevity supplement, Creatine would definitely be something that I'd use. Creatine is also something to stack with, say like a smart drug or a neurotropic if you're ever operating on a day in which you're sleep deprived.

So I was going to say, is creatine sort of along the lines of like B vitamins then where it's not necessarily giving you like an advantage or like a superhuman boost, it's just bringing you back up to baseline.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Now the only caveat there, the only exception to that is there was one study that they did on people who were eating an omnivorous diet, and in this case it was adolescents, and they did find a slight increase in reaction speed when supplementing with creatine. And you could certainly argue that reaction speed is a cognitive performance gain. And the other thing that I should mention is that regardless of the cognitive benefits, creatine has been demonstrably proven whether or not your creatine deficits efficient to improve strength, power, speed, explosiveness, et cetera. So in that case you don't have to be vegan or vegetarian or elderly. You're sleep deprived to benefit from creatine. If you're a strength athlete or a power athlete or someone who wants to crank out a few more reps in the weight room, creatine is one of the most researched and the safest supplements to use. In most cases, just a basic creatine monohydrate works just fine. Now I do use something that's slightly fancier than that. I use something called CRE O2. It's made by this company called Millennium Sports. And one of the main reasons that I use that is because it's what's called enteric coated, which means that it's stomach stable. It bypasses any type of destruction in the acidic environment of the stomach. And because I take so little creatine, I want to make sure that I absorb as much of it as possible. And I've found zero cramping or water retention effects with that. I like it. It's convenient for me. It's more convenient than like a creatine monohydrate powder. It is more expensive, right? So I take three to four tablets of that in the morning and I take that almost year round. Now. So it's a little bit more expensive. But at the same time you can take less of it because there's no destruction during the digestion and the assimilation process. Because it's very, very stomach stable. It's just basically like a time release tablet. But you are going to pay more than you'd pay for just like a basic creatine monohydrate powder. And that stuff has some other things. It's got like rhodiola and cordyceps and some of these other things in it. And frankly I don't take it for those reasons. I just take it for the creatine and the stomach stable creatine. But that one's called CREO2 CREO2 and I have a 50% discount on that stuff. I'll throw in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 319 if you want to use that stuff.

A couple of times you mentioned cramping. What do you mean by cramping? Like stomach cramps or muscle cramps?

Oh, with creatine, muscle cramps. Although if you take a lot, if you take 20 plus grams, it can result in a little bit of a dumb and dumber toilet mold almond type of effect that, that some people actually do have issues with. But that's typically either A, because you just started taking creatine and you took way too much and you use like this 20 plus gram loading protocol, or B, because you didn't take it with sufficient water. You typically have to take creatine with 12 plus ounces of water if you're using like that, that higher dosage. So yeah, usually it's muscle cramping, but if you take a really, really high dose, it can also be go way beyond muscle.

That's interesting. I have been experiencing some weird muscle cramps over the last few weeks. Like just while I'm doing yoga or I was taking my wetsuit off the other day and I got wicked cramps in my abs. And I'm now thinking maybe it's because I've been taking creatine really consistently for about two months now.

How much have you been using?

Just five grams.

Interesting. Well, you want to make sure that you're taking it with enough water and that would be the biggie because what's going to happen is because creatine is going to enhance both your glycogen storage as well as your creatine storage on the muscular level. You simply need more water, period, because you've got more stuff in your muscle that needs to be saturated with water. So if you're not stepping up your water intake at the same time that you start into a creatine protocol, you need to be, or else you are going to have those little twitches and cramps when you, when you're taking off your wetsuit, as we all hate to experience when we're taking off our wetsuits.

Awesome. Well, Brandon and I both learned something today.

Most therapists I talk to believe that toxins are often trapped in myofascial adhesions. This comes up in post treatment discussions. For example, they say, drink a lot of water today after they give you some kind of myofascial treatment. But I never hear it discussed as a prevention preventive measure. So does detoxification and avoidance of toxic substances help prevent the buildup of adhesions? Is it an effective adjunct to the various myofascial release therapies? I would love to hear Ben's opinion on this.

Thanks.

I've had this too. You know when you leave the yoga studio or you're leaving like you're leaving the massage and they're like, oh, make sure you Drink a lot of water, make sure you stay hydrated.

Yep, exactly. And I actually used to do hip and knee surgical sales back in the day when I, when I was first out of college. And a lot of times. When you were selling body parts, I was selling body parts, specifically implants. But when an orthopedic surgeon, during surgery, cuts through some of the areas of thickened fascia, like especially like around the hips or really, really thick fascia during, in the, in the knees, it actually spurts like nasty stuff, literally, like, like pus, like deposits of white blood cells. And a lot of times you'll see like thickened, hardened, like calcification, like deposits within this fascia. And a lot of people who, I mean, just imagine if someone lifts weights a lot or runs a lot and you know, beats up their fascia. You know, this, this sheath that surrounds your connective tissue and your muscles, and they never, they never massage that. They never focus on releasing some of the tension or working out some of the cross fibers in that tissue. Just imagine the areas of like calcification and pus and white blood cells. Yeah, it's awful. It's pretty crazy. And I mean, you talk to a lot of people who are like constantly tight or constantly get injured, and a big, big part of that could just be due to like the stickiness in these adhesions. So what an adhesion is, is it's just a type of, of scarring or scar tissue that can accumulate specifically in the fascia that surrounds your muscles. And you know what's happening there is you get like this stickiness or this glue, like consistency in a sheath that's supposed to slide a little bit over the muscles as it moves. And once that sliding doesn't occur, you get tissues and even, even organs that can become a little bit glued together because they're not moving freely. Now it doesn't just have to be exercise based trauma that can cause these type of adhesions. So for example, mineral imbalances can predispose you to soft tissue adhesions. One of those would be something that we talked about on the podcast with Dr. Wendy Myers, and that is specifically copper toxicity, which is a pretty serious issue these days. It's one of the heavy metals that tends to be one of the more notorious ones in our, in our industrial era for accumulating in the body imbalances in other heavy metals or presence of other heavy metals, and specifically things like iron, manganese, aluminum, nickel, boron, things like that, that can also cause soft tissue adhesion. So basically, if you play with a lot of Chinese toys, you might be in trouble when it comes to adhesions.

Or if you have a lot of tattoos.

Exactly. Or if you're like a car mechanic. So inflammation is of course, something that can cause these adhesions. And it's one of the things that we're more aware of. And typically it's inflammation from exercise, from over training or from overusing specific muscle groups, especially allowing metabolic waste to accumulate that you don't work out with like a foam roller, with cold, with heat, with inversion, with a lot of the recovery modalities that are smart to include in your training. Now, infections from bacteria, viruses, parasites, even fungi and mold, that can actually affect the tissues as well. And there is such a thing as infection caused adhesions, which is likely what you see when you see pus and tissue drainage occur when someone cuts into an area of fascia. So what happens though, once you get these fascia is a, like I mentioned, you get a restrictive direction of physical movements. So that can be everything from like structural imbalances in the spine, like scoliosis or kyphosis. It can lead to like bone deformities. It can lead to, you know, sacroiliac joint syndrome, where a lot of the fascia around the hips, you know, it causes like stickiness and glue, like adhesions in there. So, you know, when people say they have a bad back or bad knees, a lot of times it's not joint. It's not not. It's not collagen. It's not the tissue within the joint. It's more the fascia that surrounds the joint and the muscles that are around that joint. When you look at, like Chinese medicine and the flow of meridian energy and like these acupuncture meridians that you'd put needles into, a lot of times what you look at when you have areas of fascial adhesions is a restriction of actual energy flow, which I know, and for many people that's more of a woo woo concept. But it is true that we actually have a flow of key, a flow of energy throughout the meridians in our body. And soft tissue adhesions can interfere with that as well. It can keep tissues from draining properly. Because when you look at adhesions, you're causing tissues to become more squeezed and more restricted. And that can cause metabolic byproducts to accumulate in the tissue. It can cause toxins to build up. You might have things like urine not flowing out of your kidneys adequately or your bladder not emptying properly or even your liver cells less able to eliminate a lot of the toxins that can accumulate in the liver. So a lot of your normal detoxification is kind of impaired. And then you also get a restriction of circulation of your blood vessels and your lymph vessels because it's harder for those vessels to feed into areas where there's cross linking and adhesions. And that of course can restrict hormones from reaching cells. It can interfere with everything from insulin to glucose to fatty acid delivery to just the basic movement of chemicals around your body. So yeah, it certainly can be an issue. And of course, me describing it pretty much tells you what to do about it. One would be to, like I mentioned, look into the metal issue. Every year I do a 30 day metal detox where I just get rid of heavy metals in my body. I use this spray called metal Free. It's like an amino acid based spray that chelates metals and helps the body to remove them. You can look of course, into deep tissue work for the more structural component. And like this morning I foam rolled for a half hour. Okay. And I do that one to two times a week. I feel like a million bucks afterwards. And I look at that as an anti aging protocol. There's this book called why Does Olga Run? It's about this like 90 some year old track and field star and one of her protocols is she. And she does this actually when she wakes up at night. There's this myth around that, this idea that you're supposed to sleep through the entire night and have an uninterrupted eight hours of sleep, when in fact it's completely normal. And our ancestors probably would have woken up for things like sex and movement and dancing and chatting around the fire and that type of thing. And she would wake up every night like clockwork and she actually used a wine bottle and she would just knead her tissue and work out all these fascial adhesions with a wine bottle as she lay in bed. And I look on this my one to two times per week foam roller sessions. I look on it as not just a structural movement protocol to assist me with exercise and sports performance performance, but also as like an anti aging protocol to keep myself from building up a lot of these toxins and the buildup of metabolic waste that can occur when you've got fascia that's just never getting worked, that's never getting moved around, or these adhesions, these cross linkings that are never getting removed. So that's another thing to do is just the structural work and the book Becoming a Supple Leopard and I'll link to that in the show notes is fantastic when it comes to that. You can also make sure that you're getting adequate substances necessary for assisting with the integrity of fascia into your diet. Omega 3 fatty acids and fish oils are one. A lot of these things that you tend to see as natural anti inflammatories, tart cherry juice, glucosamine, chondroitin, turmeric minerals that come from things like, like chicken cartilage or like the ground up bones and cartilage of animals. These can actually help out quite a bit. You know, for example, one of the things that's in my fridge is nature flex and that is, it's a joint and cartilage support compound. And you know, that's, that's, you know, one of total, what do you call it, total transparency, full disclosure. Like that is, that is a green filled supplement, right? Like it's like a Greenfield Fitness System supplement. But it's one of my flagship supplements because I put everything in there that a joint would ever need for repair and recovery, whether it's from an injury or whether it's due to fascial adhesion. So that's something else that I use quite a bit of is this nature flex stuff. And then of course just structural work. If you're really, really messed up, you may actually need to work with an osteopathic or a chiropractic doc or a role for, or a massage therapist to kind of like jump start you into maintaining what they've done by doing foam roller. And so for a very long time I used to get massages a couple of times a week. And that was just, you know, for me I had the convenience that my personal training office I shared with the massage office. And so I would just do like trades with the massage therapist. And now I'm just kind of on cruise control with the foam roller. But every once in a while when I visit Thailand, I'll get a massage every day, twice a day for two weeks and kind of reinitiate that intense soft tissue work where I'm getting extremely pliable. And then the last thing as far as detoxification and avoiding the buildup of minerals and a lot of these other things that can cause adhesions. Infrared, infrared sauna therapy, especially doing infrared sauna prior to a massage session. And I, I know I said I was going to talk about this perhaps in the future, but I'll talk about it now. Toys. I mentioned that I just got A new toy being that incline treadmill. But the other toy, something I'm building right now in my gym and writing an article on kind of like how to biohack and make hotter and reduce the electromagnetic radiation. And it's an infrared sauna that I'm building. And once that's done, I'll get in that infrared sauna and I got a specific type of that's big enough for me to do foam rolling in, and I'll do my foam rolling while I'm getting exposed to this infrared. So I get both the detoxification as well as the structural work all at the same time.

Cool.

So for me, it's not about being a funny biohacker. Right. It's about anti aging and longevity and feeling really good from doing this stuff. So ultimately, that's the deal with fascia. So yes, it can. Can cause toxin buildup. And yes, drinking a lot of water and moving around a lot is good, but a lot of times you got to do a lot more than that when it comes to adhesions. So I'll put a link to some of this stuff that I've recommended. Everything from the Becoming a Supple Leopard book to I'll link to the metal spray that I use and the nature flex and the fish oils and all that jazz over in the show notes if you want to check them out.

Actually, just so happens that I posted the Chapter 18 of Beyond Training audiobook on, on the app today. So that's the chapter that actually covers all the detoxification and avoiding toxic substances and all that good stuff.

Yeah, we're releasing my book Beyond Training, chapter by chapter right now inside of our. Our premium podcast, we have another podcast we don't talk about a lot, but we release extra audios and stuff in there. It's over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and yeah, you know, each. Each chapter takes me like an hour, hour and a half to record. But this one was, yeah, it was all about toxins, detoxing your home, detoxing your bathroom cabinet, detoxing your. Your household cleaning chemicals. And yeah, that'd be. That'd be certainly a good one to listen into if you really want to geek out on this stuff.

Hi, Ben and Brock. I absolutely love your podcast. First is about a test called Dutch Dried, your test for comprehensive hormones. It's, from what I understand, the new sort of gold standard for cortisol testing. And I was just wondering if you've heard of it. It's by Precision Analytical. I have done salivary and blood hormone testing before. But I came across this test and I was wondering if you know anything about it and if you feel feel that it is indeed worth getting. Thanks so much.

To me, the word dry urine, I.

Know I can't help but imagine just somebody peeing on something and leaving it in the sun.

Right, right.

Which you do.

Yeah. Urine is wet, it's not dry. So just the vernacular dry urine seems a little bit strange. So there are a few different ways that you can take test your hormones and of course probably the most standard way and the way that most people get it tested, just because it typically comes along with other tests that you do, is a blood test or a serum test. And the problem with that as a hormonal panel is that it's a snapshot. Right. So when I go in and I get a performance panel and a full test from a company like WellnessFX, it certainly includes hormones by. But the hormonal part of that is a snapshot of say like my morning cortisol. And it doesn't tell me, let's say my morning cortisol is low, right? Which is technically not bad for it to be a little bit low. Even though you want morning cortisol to be a little bit higher than cortisol at some other points during the day. Because when sunlight hits your body and you wake up in the morning, you want a little bit of a surge of cortisol to wake you up. But let's say that I were to repeat that blood test multiple times during the day, I would want to see a fluctuation, right? Like I'd want to see a drop between morning and noon and then a slight rise from noon to the afternoon and another drop from the afternoon to the time that I go to bed. And by using a blood corollary for hormones, that's pretty difficult to do unless you want to be bleeding out a lot.

That's a lot of getting stabbed in one.

And that's where saliva comes in. Saliva being probably the more popular way to test hormones for people who want a running value, who want to get like twice a day, a three times a day or even a four time a day cortisol or DHEA or testosterone measurement and probably the most popular measurement for this is the adrenal stress index or the asi. And it really is a very simple salivary hormone panel that you can order to your house house that gives you a very, very good image of your running values of hormone. And it's something that I've talked about before in previous podcasts is a great way to check in and see if you're over trained or overreached if you're in stage two or stage three or stage four. Adrenal fatigue. Each of those different stages of adrenal fatigue has a different adrenal stress index pattern associated with with it, specifically in terms of cortisol DHEA ratios. So hormones via saliva are probably at this point the most popular best way to test for hormones in terms of what most people are talking about and what most physicians are using. Now. Hair is a third way. And hair is an interesting choice because it's very stable and a lot of times it is used in studies on your hair is stable and over traction training. And there's some pretty good peer reviewed scientific literature on the use of hair as a measurement of hormones. But the problem with hair is it takes a really long time and you gotta, of course, you know, cut your hair to get it measured. And it's just, it's probably the least researched of the different hormonal measuring tools, but it certainly is something that you can get hormonal data from, from. And then finally there is this dry urine test or a urine test, and I've recommended many times, especially to women, this concept of a 24 hour urine sex steroid test. And I've done my own 24 hour urine sex steroid test when I did the faster study, which was the high fat, low carb performance study over at University of Connecticut for Jeff Volek's lab. And you literally do come collect all of your urine into this orange jug as you walk around during the day. And it's done for a full 24 hours. So it's definitely, probably even less convenient than getting four different blood panels really when it comes to just walking around with a giant orange canister full of your piss all day long. But it's how this 24 hour urine test is done and this Dutch test, which stands for the dried urine test for comprehensive hormones, is something that assesses everything from your first morning void of urine and then gives you over a 24 hour collection period, your entire cycle of hormones for every time that you basically take a piss during the day. And so it's very, very good. You know, you can measure estradiol and all your estrogens, your progesterone, your testosterone, your cortisol, you can measure dhea, all your anabolic, all of your catabolic hormones, hormones, and you can get a ton of data from a urinary panel. And I know that you're familiar with Chris Kresser, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. With him at Paleofx this year.

Yeah, he's a pretty well known, he's not a physician, he's like a licensed acupuncturist, but he's well known in the alternative medical or the functional medical community. And the 24 hour urine test is actually his test of choice because. Because what he says is that it combines the advantages of saliva testing with the ability to measure what are called androgen and glucocorticoid metabolites in addition to just the hormones. And all that means is you're not just testing hormones, but you're also testing a lot of the precursors used to make those hormones. So it's a very, very thorough test, tests LBi inconvenient, but it does show you not just the hormones, but a lot of what are called the sex hormone metabolites. Now, I know that on other podcasts and in some of my writings, I have recommended the online lab testing service Direct Labs as like a wholesale way to order tests. And I looked into it and they actually do not carry this Dutch test. It's made by a company called Precision Analytical. However, what I found out was that a company called Genova, which you actually can order from Direct Labs, Genova has something called a Complete Hormone Kit. And this Complete hormone kit is, it's a urinary panel, very, very similar to this dry urine test for comprehensive hormones. And I'll link to that in the show notes. But basically it's the same as this Precision Analytical test for all intents and purposes. So that one's called the Complete Hormone.

Kit by Chinchilla, just because I know we're going to get a bunch of emails about that. Do you know if that's available outside of the usa?

Probably not. Although what I typically do with my Canadian clients who I recommend lab tests to and you know, this brock is I'll send you the test that I recommend and then have you go to a local functional medical doc or your local medical facility, show them the test and see what similar tests that they have. As a corollary, because it is frankly in the US that, you know, we live in one of the few spots where it's very, very simple to order home tests for this stuff. And I know that in other countries that's not the case. So in this case you'd go to the Direct Labs website. If you don't live in the US you'd print off that test, you'd bring it into your doc or your medical facility and you'd tell them you'd like to get something as close as possible to that test. And frankly, I don't have every country memorized in terms of which countries offer which tests and the names of the different tests in different countries because I am not a rocket scientist. Actually, I am based on the review that we're about to read in idiot savant. So yes. Really? Yes. And so that's probably a great segue to this week's review. So that does about wrap up the Q and A. And of course we'll link to everything that we talked about over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 319. But we always like to end the show by being our own little Santa Claus and sending little gifts to the boys and girls across the world. And in this case, if you've left a review and a nice star rating on itunes and you hear us read your review on the show, all you got to do is email Geergreenfieldfitnesssystems.com and when you email GeergreenfieldfitnessSystems.com that's not gear like Richard gear, but gear like G e a r. Gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.com we'll include your T shirt size and we'll send you a T shirt BPA free water bottle that's not going to disrupt your hormones or cause fascial adhesions or explosive diarrhea. And we'll send you a cool tech T shirt that makes you look fantastic whether you're a guy or a girl. Girl. If you're a guy, it'll give you a six pack and wide shoulders. If you're a girl, it'll give you.

It'll give you a six pack and wide shoulders.

That's right. Give you a boob job. So anyways, we have a review, a five star review from Tabiki Man. And it the title is Ben isn't.

Do you think it's Tabiki man or Thai Bike man?

Oh, yeah, it's probably Thai bike Man.

It's always hard. It's like those like vanity license plates where you're like.

So it's. Yeah, it says Ben is an idiot. So what do you think, Brock? You want to take this one?

All right. Ben is an idiot. An idiot savant that is. Okay, maybe not. But he does provide a ton of great info and isn't afraid to challenge conventional wisdom. I found myself on a similar path to Ben over the past several years, moving away from the extreme endurance events fueled by processed car carbs to a Diet dominated by real food and striving for a balance between fitness and health. I've enjoyed Ben's insights along the way and have.

That was quite a sentence, by the way.

It was. Yeah. It was actually really fun to read because there was no place to stop and take a breath. I've enjoyed Ben's insights along the way and have implemented many of his suggestions during the podcast. He provides answers to tough questions and overviews of recent research. Research. Ben and Brock keep things entertaining while they educate. Highly recommended. Exclamation point.

You know, the idiot savant thing is interesting because my first exposure to that term was a documentary that I watched when I was a kid where there was this, like. It was. He was for all intents and purposes, just like a, you know, a drooling mental. Pardon the expression. But he was really, really good at playing the piano. And he would like, get up and play the piano like in the middle of the night. And he had like this horrible singing voice. He was like. But his piano playing was absolutely amazing. And so when you call me an idiot savant, that's just the image that's coming to mind for me is a drooling idiot who is good at a musical instrument. So anyways, just thought I'd explain my feelings about that. So little idiot savant thing, but thank you, I think. So that being said, that's going to wrap up this show. And we do have a podcast coming out this weekend.

Do we?

We do have a podcast coming out this weekend, as we do every weekend. This weekend's podcast is actually with this brilliant guy named James Heathers, and we're going to be talking about heart rate variability. I know in the past I've done some HRV episodes with the Galaxy from Sweet Beat, but James has an entirely different perspective and he's this brilliant dude. So if you're into like self quantification or you want to learn even more about HRV than you currently know so you can impress even more of your friends at cocktail parties. Stay tuned for this weekend's podcast with James Heathers. So that's awesome.

I'm excited about that. I've heard so many podcasts about hrv, but it's generally been Rhonda Collier from so this is gonna be cool to hear something else.

No, James is pretty badass. This is a good one. So check that out. Thanks for listening in. Have a healthy week. Check out the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 319 and I'm gonna go. I don't know, run a treadmill or sit in a sauna or something.

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