Muscle Cramping, Calorie & Carb Cycling, Gene Splicing, Fixing Altitude Sickness & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, everything that you need to know about muscle cramping, calorie and carb cycling, gene splicing, fixing altitude sickness, and much more.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer, and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Rachel, I'm very excited right now.

Why are you excited?

Well, I just ordered the dream herb.

The dream herb, Ben, it's called a herb.

The dream. The dream herb. Now, I actually, typically when I wake up in the morning, I have half a dozen to a dozen or more text messages on my phone from all manner of physicians and biohackers and friends in the fitness and nutrition industry. And one of my friends, Ollie, who's a, he's a doctor over in Finland, he sent me this brand new article on something called Kalia Zakatekichi.

That is quite mouthful.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing this correctly. It's also known as kaliaz. So this is also called the dream herb, not herb, which promotes meaningful, vivid dreams and potential for lucid dream. So I dug into this thing and I did just order the tea leaves on Amazon. You can get these tea leaves on Amazon. You're supposed to drink this tea before bed. And the claims here are it has little or no effect on waking consciousness, so you don't feel anything if you're awake. However, it intensifies and prolongs your dreams on an epic level, creates vivid dreams even in those who never remember, while not increasing the likelihood of sleep paralysis as some other things such as high dose cannabidiol or something like that would do when it comes to getting you into a lucid dream state. So if you're someone who wants to dream vividly, apparently this stuff works and I have no personal experience. All I know is that right before we got on the podcast today, I pressed the order button on Amazon, so I have some coming my way.

And what's your dream state like currently? Do you lose a dream or remember your dreams or anything?

I do, but I don't use dream tea. And this dream tea off of Amazon, I mean, it Literally on the COVID of the label, right? It comes in this little brown bag and it says medicated tea dream. Lucid dreaming. Soothing and calming. Composition of rainforest botanicals known to hold properties which enhance deep dreaming and lucidity in the mind.

Fascinating.

I'm gonna try some too, see what happens. What's that movie about dreaming?

Inception. I love that film. Let's do it.

News flashes.

So speaking of hardcore science, and this is the part of the show where we talk all about science, there was a new study that I thought was kind of interesting for me personally, because I'm out there competing in races quite often, and I always wonder when I'm out there on a race, why is it that I push myself so much harder when I'm racing than I do when I'm training, even when I'm training with other people sometimes? And they actually did a study where they looked into this, and I'll link to this article. It's called why do you race faster than you train?

Brilliant study.

Brilliant. So it involves cyclists. They had these cyclists do a pair of four kilometer time trials, which is just a total pain cave effort. And they did it once by themselves and then they did it again with a virtual competitor. So I suppose this is one of those computer programs where you have like a, you know, like another virtual cyclist kind of like in front of you that you're trying to keep up with or. Or beat. And not surprisingly, all the cyclists were able to go faster when they were pitted against a virtual competitor. So they. They completed the time trial in an average of 6 minutes and 22 seconds when they had a competitor they were going against versus six minutes and 33 seconds when they weren't, which doesn't sound like much, but it is.

So what's the deal with it? Why are they doing that? Is it just an ego thing?

Okay, so here's, here's what they did. No, it's. It's much more sciency than that, Richard. Much more sciencey than ego. So what they did was before and after each of these efforts, they had the cyclists do what's called a maximum voluntary contract of their leg muscles. And then during that maximal voluntary contraction, they used electrical muscle stimulation to see how much extra force they could basically shock out of the muscle. And what this allowed them to do was to calculate what's called peripheral fatigue, which is how much weaker the muscle was after the time trial, and central fatigue, which is how much weaker the signal from the brain to the muscle was after the time trial. Because there's a Difference between, like, your muscle getting tired from lactic acid buildup and neuronal fatigue and all these issues versus central fatigue, which is just basically your brain telling your muscles, hey, I'm crapped out. Please stop. We're gonna die. So what they showed was that in both of these trials, whether you were, like, working by yourself or whether you were working against a virtual competitor, the central fatigue was the same, meaning that the message that the brain sends to the muscles to shut down before you die or have a heart is the same whether you're racing as a competitor or whether you're. You're, you know, just out there on your own. What they found was that peripheral fatigue was much, much higher, Meaning somehow when we are competing against other people, all those things that build up in our muscles, like lactic acid and hydrogen ions, which create acidity in the muscle, and like, depletion of ATP, your body's energy currency, we somehow have the ability to be able to tolerate much, much higher levels of that, you know, which is basically just pain during exercise. When we are competing against someone versus when we're just out there by ourselves, we're actually able to tolerate more, what would be called localized muscle pain.

Well, it makes sense, doesn't it? Everyone always races better on race day.

It makes sense. And, of course, like, the takeaway message, like, okay, that's great. What do we do about it? The takeaway message for me is that, okay, so if peripheral fatigue is something that we're able to tolerate higher and higher amounts of when we're out there competing in events, what are things that we could do to our bodies to help to elevate that peripheral fatigue ceiling even higher?

Right.

Can we, you know, and this is where we turn to, you know, like, better living through science. Could we take something that helps to buffer lactic acid, Right, like sodium bicarbonate or baking soda? Could we use at use things that help to shuttle things out of tissue more quickly? Things we've talked about on the podcast before, like oxaloacetate to convert lactic acid into glucose more quickly. But the idea here is that it turns out it's more peripheral fatigue than central fatigue. And if you're a geek and you want to read the article, we'll link to it in the news flashes. Where can we find the news flashes?

BenGreenfieldFitness.com 358.

358. Cool. I wasn't quite sure of our number. We have so freaking many podcasts.

So many.

The numbers are just dizzying.

All right, what else we got.

Okay, so here's another interesting one. CRISPR technology. I was just speaking at the Ancestral Health Symposium, also known as ahs, and if you want to go see my talk, by the way, which was about striking a balance between natural living and biohacking, you can, you can find that video. If you just were to. You know what, we'll put a link to it in the show notes. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 358Rachel, jot that down.

Jot it down.

Well, we'll put a link to that video in the show notes. But I was there and I was having dinner with this girl who works as a gene researcher. And I don't know if she's listening in, but she was such a geek on gene researcher that the earrings that she was wearing were DNA earrings. The actual DNA strand.

I love it.

So she was into it and she was telling me, she's like, well, did you know that the Chinese are gene splicing themselves to be resistant to hiv? And I'm like, what? And she said, yes. So there's this thing called crispr and crispr, a lot of people have probably heard of this, but CRISPR is a technology that allows you to actually edit cells to edit your genes.

That's so mind blowing.

And apparently the Chinese scientists are altering the genes susceptibility to hiv. But what this article that I just read, it just came out last week, is that they're actually editing what are called T cells. So T cells are your immune system cells. And what they're doing is they're removing T cells from your blood, right? So you take the T cell out of the blood and then they're using this CRISPR technology, which is the gene editing technology, and they're deleting a gene for a molecule called PD1. And the reason that that's important is because a lot of tumors produce molecules that slip into PD1 and turn off the T cell, Right. Basically make you susceptible to cancer or to HIV or to anything that that T cell would normally allow you to fight against. And so what they're doing is they're taking the PD1 gene out of the T cell. And that would cause the T cell to, rather than ignore a tumor, to actually attack a tumor. And this is one of the first cases in which they're actually not taking DNA and altering it. They're editing the human genome.

Wow.

Apparently. And this article also goes into this for those who want to go in and read it, for those of you who are conspiracy theorists. Apparently over in China, they're already doing this type of genome editing technology, not just on blood, but like in human embryos and sperm and eggs. And they're actually trying to create designer babies. So I'm not surprised. They could be really racking up the gold medals in the Olympics. I would say like maybe 12 years.

From now, every American's worst nightmare when.

All these gene edited babies come along. But really fascinating because we talk a lot on this show about getting your genes tested and for example, finding out if you have a lot of fast twitch versus a lot of slow twitch muscles so that you know, if you're a power responder when it comes to exercise versus an endurance responder, or taking your genetic data from something like 23andMe and exporting it to a website like Prometheus is a popular one. And you can actually figure out whether you respond better to like a low carb, high fat diet or a high carb, low fat diet. But it's turning out that, you know, if all this gene editing technology takes off, that might not even matter. You could be like, okay, well I really enjoy rice, so turn me into a high carver baby.

What do you think about it being the ultimate of better living through science?

You know, it could be, it could also just create a bunch of genetic freaks. And then there's, there's, there's that ethical question or happiness question too. It's like, can you be happy with who you are and how you were born versus just like going in and changing your body and altering your genes? And of course, for me, I want to see a lot of people do this and a lot of rodents do this and a lot of fruit flies do it. Before I would jump into doing this myself, I think playing with your DNA could be dangerous.

Definitely.

Kids don't do this at home. And then something else that's really interesting. The growing global epidemic of something called myopia. Have you seen this?

I have, I have. It's crazy. Yeah.

It's this idea that half the planet is going to need glasses by 2050 because of screens.

Yeah.

And it's this global prevalence of something called myopia, which is basically short sightedness. And this article goes into the fact that they have traced this directly to the fact that most of our time during the day is spent focusing on objects that are anywhere from, you know, whatever six inches to about two feet ahead of us. And this is obviously not rocket science when it comes to you figuring out what to do about it. The article itself just verifies what you know, I personally, and you probably, and I would imagine many of our listeners, Rachel, have suspected that maybe looking at screens all day isn't good for us. But the myth. Is that the myth, or the misunderstanding, whatever you call it, is when you're focusing on something far off in the distance that you're straining your eyes. And it's the opposite. Your eye muscles actually strain and contract when you're looking at something close. When you look at something far. The way that the eye works is the muscles around the eye actually relax when you're looking at something far off in the distance. And so the key here, and this is something that I'm very careful to do, and I have a giant picture window in front of me right now that as you and I are talking, I'm not looking at my computer. I'm looking way off into the forest, and I'm looking at trees that are 10ft away and mountains that are a mile away and rocks that are, I'd say, about 50 yards or so away. But the idea is that you want to. I mean, you could use the pomodoro technique or any other technique that you want for. For eye breaks, but you want to focus your eyes on objects far off in the distance frequently throughout the day. All the more so if you're like a typist or, you know, a blogger or an author or somebody on the computer all day.

So what. What are people going to do if they don't have a beautiful big window looking out into the mountains?

It's not rocket science, is it? Like, you know, go outside and look at a bus that's driving away or, yeah, look at a skyscraper. Often that anything that allows you to take your eyes off your screen, there's a really cool. There's a guy I'm actually getting on the podcast, as a matter of fact. He runs a website called Iris Tech. So I've. I've really been geeking out on monitors, like the backlighting of monitors, for example. The monitor that I use is called an Izo E I Z O. And the backlighting of that monitor was actually designed to be more compatible with the human eyes. It's less harsh. But that monitor also has the ability to do things like decrease the power, change up the color frequencies, do all these things that make it more natural. But then this guy at Iris Tech, who, again, I'm going to be interviewing him very soon, he's developed technology that not only adjusts the lighting and the resolution of that monitor throughout the day based on where the sun is setting or rising, depending on what area of the world that you're in. But then he's also got little tweaks that will like change the font of a website that you're looking at to turn it from like a serif based font into an arial based font so it's easier on the eyes to read. Or he's got a little feature where every 25 minutes or every 55 minutes it'll pop up on the computer and tell you, take your eyes off the screen, look away, off into the distance. So. So stay tuned for a podcast with him. But yeah, it's really interesting that they're saying how many people in the world are going to need glasses at some point in the future because of these screens?

Yeah, it's crazy. It's currently apparently at 34% of the population and it's going to double in 30 years.

Have you heard of Vision Gym?

I haven't.

Yeah, I interviewed the folks from a website called Z Health in the past and we talked about this thing called Vision Gym that they created and it's basically just a series of eye exercises that you do. I'm writing a note to myself and I will put a link to this Vision Gym program. I have it. I bought it for my wife who, bless her heart, never did it because the shoemaker's wife wears no shoes. But it's a series of exercises designed to retrain the eyes and to wean you off of things like contact lenses and glasses. And a lot of it does involve diversion and conversion, meaning focusing on objects far off in the distance and gradually objects closer to you. And it's this whole kind of like done for you program that you go to. But we'll link to that one too in the show notes.

I'm do that one. I have recently been diagnosed with short sightedness.

Yes. Okay, I'll send you a link to this Vision Gym too. Or find the podcast that we did because we've interviewed them. So check out that and everything else along with the herb for lucid dreaming over@bengreenfieldfitness.com 358 listener Q&A.

Hey Ben, this is Jenny from Indianapolis. I'm a fit and active 52 year old woman who lives and works about 500ft above sea level. My husband and I are planning a backpacking trip through Yellowstone this fall and we will be hiking about 6 to 6,000 to 8,000ft above sea level. My concern is elevation sickness. We've snow skied out west before and I've Experienced that horrible headache, nausea, feeling that comes with it. And I was wondering if you have any tips on how to avoid acclimating and getting used to working out at elevation. Thanks again.

A topic near and dear to my heart. You know, why?

Well, I would say you live at altitude, but you don't.

I don't? No. I was, I was, I was just hacking up a lung competing in the Train to Hunt national Championships over in Park City, Utah. Hacking up along, I think we were at about 8, 300ft. It was one of those competitions where I, I got about halfway through. And it, I mean, day one, we were out orienteering and GPS wayfinding at 11pm at night. So they basically wanted to start the thing off with just four hours of orienteering and wayfinding. And then you wake up the next morning and you've got five hours of shooting competition. And then after that, a four mile race with, depending on which division you're in, anywhere from 50 to £100 on your pack. And then you, you hit the sack, you collapse, you wake up the next morning and you have obstacle racing with weapons for the next several hours. So it's a brutal event. I literally just flew back from it last night. So I am, I am just now in the, in the land of oxygen once again. So I always ask myself though, why did I not do more altitude training?

Right? And if you were going to do altitude training, what would you do?

Well, you know, we've actually, to be frank, we've talked about altitude training a lot before on the show, but what we haven't talked about is this whole concept of like altitude sickness, elevation sickness. A lot of the things that can be done for elevation sickness can also be done for altitude training. I mean, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com, you do a search for altitude training. We have actually two really good podcasts and articles on it. But when it comes to altitude sickness, there's this pathological effect of high altitude on humans caused by that acute exposure to low partial pressure of oxygen. And it's similar to what you, how you'd feel if you had the flu or carbon monoxide poisoning or a hangover, for example. And the reason for this is, of course, the, the lack of oxygen in the air. And different people have different susceptibilities to it. But it generally doesn't start to happen until you get to about a little over 6,000ft, about 6,500ft or so above sea level. And interestingly, by the way, for those of you who wonder if you should altitude train for an event or not, you don't really need to unless it is indeed above 6,000ft. That's like the magic mark at which not only altitude sickness sets in, but also the magic mark where if you're going to compete at altitude, you need to be doing altitude training. If you're going to be above 6,000ft and you don't want to like me, hack up along during competition or go get blue lips. So, you know, you'll get headache, fatigue, stomach illness, dizziness, sleep disturbances, you know, all these different issues and you know, the typical kind of like allopathic response to this. You know, the modern medical responses. There are certain medications that they'll prescribe. One common one is called Diamox. That's a trade name for this supplement. It's called acetazolamide is the approximate name for it. But they'll give this to folks who are, for example, at Everest base camp and who are climbing. And the reason for this is that's a diuretic. It stimulates your kidneys to secrete more bicarbonate and that actually acidifies your blood. It's really interesting. When you acidify the blood, that change in ph will increase the depth of respiration and the frequency of respiration and it speeds up the natural acclimatization process. It's really interesting. You can actually acidify your blood and it works. It's not that healthy. It's processed by the liver. I think that there are other more natural things that you can do that we'll talk about in a second. But I think it's really interesting how blood acidification is actually how medicine pulls off eliminating altitude sickness. And I suppose if it were a last ditch effort and you were climbing Everest, this would work. The interesting thing is the other pharmaceutical that can work for this is sildena. Do you know what sildenafil is?

No idea.

That's the active ingredient in Viagra.

Oh, wow.

You can take your boner pills up to the mountains and that may also help you a little bit. Complete aside, that's banned by USADA and the World Anti Doping association, etc, so don't do that if you're, for example, going to be competing in the Spartan World Championships in Lake Tahoe or something like that. But anyways, it's interesting. Now if you look at the indigenous peoples of South America, this is really interesting. One of the things that they did quite a bit and still do is they chew coca leaves to alleviate the symptoms of altitude sickness. Have you ever chewed coca?

I haven't.

Okay, you can get some forms of coca leaves, for example, on Amazon, and I'll link to that in the show notes. I personally, I'm not going to pretend I've used them because I haven't. I have actually not ever used coca leaves. They're one of those things that I hear are great. Pick me up on my list of things to experiment with. But that's one thing is the chewing of coca leaves to alleviate the symptoms of altitude sickness. So that would be one more natural method. Now, if you look at Asia, a really popular therapy over in Asia is rhodiola, which is a Chinese adaptogenic herb. And that's actually one that's a little bit easier to get your hands on. What I use when I go to altitude, I'm spending long periods of time at altitude. And I actually didn't take it with me to this train to hunt national championships because, well, the. I guess I'll just tell you the long story. So I usually use this stuff called Tian Qi. So Tian Qi is this blend of some of the most potent adaptogenic herbs on the face of the planet. So rhodiola is one of the ones that's in there, and it's considered to be one of the most treasured herbs in Chinese medicine. It's good for blood purifying, it's good for cognitive function, it's good for oxygenation, and it's good for altitude. And there's a bunch of other stuff in there that also works really well at altitude. Cordyceps and ashwagandha and Rishi mushroom and something called schizandra, which is really good for the lungs and it's potent stuff. Anyways, though, my wife used all my Tianchi.

Oh, she did. Because I didn't even know she took Tianchi.

She did that iridology, that iridology exam. And it turns out that she needed some help with blood purification. So I said, here's my box of Tianchi. Take this every day. And she did. I know I just said the shoemaker wears no shoes a little bit ago, but this was a case where she actually took my advice and took my TNT and also screwed me over completely because I didn't have any. But that stuff has a really, really good form of rhodiola in it. And rhodiola in general would be good, but that Tian Qi stuff has rhodiola. And then some of these stuff in.

There work similar to the pharmaceuticals or do they work in a completely different way?

Completely different way. They work more similar to like coca leaves or rhodiola. They don't acidify the blood.

What do they do?

So rhodiola, for example, actually it causes what's called adrenal activation of lung tissue. It works in your adrenal glands and increases stimulus to your lungs via your adrenal glands is the way that that would work. It also increases the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. But that one's like a cocktail because there's like 40 different herbs in Tianchi, right? Yeah, it's like 99 bucks for a box. There's 30 packets in a box. Right. So it's. So it's, you know, you're paying three bucks a serving, really. But in my opinion, it's, it's worth it. It's like, you know, because you can use it as a smart drug. You can use it as a, you know, stress relief, pre performance aid, etc. Yeah, stress relief, you name it. So anyways, there's that, that would be another one. So rhodiola and coca leaves and Viagra, of course. And then there, there are, there are some other good natural fixes for altitude sickness. Ginkgo biloba. They've done some good studies. One really good study at the Memorial Sloan Kettering center, which is a great research center, and they found that ginkgo could absolutely and significantly decrease the intensity of altitude illness. So that's one. Ginger is another. So just a basic ginger extract, ginger root, ginger tea. Very, very good, of course for digestion and for nausea, but it also works for altitude sickness. So that would be another one that you could bring with you to altitude. Anything that thins the blood. Anything that thins the blood can help. Now most of us know that fish oil can thin the blood, so that one would certainly fall in there. But two other things that can thin the blood, one that I actually ate copious amounts of. So I had the worst airplane meal ever yesterday. I stopped off at Whole Foods on my way to the airport and I made myself a little salad that I could bring onto the airport in my little paper bag. And my salad was full of cruciferous vegetables, because cruciferous vegetables are really full of sulfur based antioxidants. And you actually get exposed to a lot of radiation and oxidation when you're flying. And things like broccoli and cauliflower and stinky things like garlic and eggs. Those can help out a lot with jet lag and with the damage that can accrue in your body from frequent flying. So My salad that. I apologize to the person who was sitting next to me on the plane.

If you're a podcast listener, because it got really stinky.

It was basically roasted vegetables, right? Like, I went to. I love going to the salad bar at Whole Foods and getting all those roast. Like, they roast eggplant and zucchini and red peppers and green peppers, and I'll put a bunch of those over, like, a bed of kale. And then. Then I put some salt and pepper on that. But then I throw cruciferous vegetables on top of. So I had. And then.

Were they in your backpack, like, the whole afternoon?

No, I had broccoli, I had cauliflower, and I had, I swear, like, eight tablespoons of that roasted garlic that they have at the Whole Foods. I love that stuff. And then I bought. So the problem with the whole food salad bar is there's not really good sources of protein. Even the. You know, most of the. Most of the proteins are cooked in canola oil. So I try to avoid those, you know, at the hot food bar at Whole Foods. Instead, I migrate over to the Asian section and I grab myself a can of either Wild Planet or Bella sardines, both of which are sardines from really good, sustainable, wild, caught sources. And then I open the can of sardines, and I put that on my salad. So I basically had sardines and garlic on the plane, and that's just the worst plain meal ever. But it was really tasty, and my apologies. Anyways, garlic thins the blood, and so garlic can work for altitude sickness. Cloves work very similarly. So garlic and cloves, just don't be me and eat it on the plane. Wait until you get to the mountains. But garlic and cloves, and interestingly, sardines, because they are a source of fish oil, would also be fine. So eat a very stinky salad is what I'm saying. And then there's also essential oils. Lavender is a very good herbal treatment that can help with sleep, and it has a good sedative or sedative relaxing property. But it also is really, really good at decreasing the symptoms of altitude sickness, like smearing lavender on your upper lip or on your chest or anywhere else where you're gonna smell it. That can work out quite well also. So that would be another one, and then the final two that I would throw at you. One would be water. Really good water. And I've said this before on the podcast, whenever I land anywhere, whether it's at altitude or not, one of the first Things I do is I go to the grocery store. It doesn't have to be a hole. Whole paycheck, Whole foods, it can be just a regular old grocery store and find yourself glass bottled water. Glass bottled water doesn't have a lot of the plastics floating around in it. It tends to be higher in minerals. It tends to be a little bit cleaner source of water and get really well hydrated with good glass bottled water. Because you'll find when you get to altitude, you start peeing yellow and even like orangish yellow, drinking as much water as you normally drink at non altitude or sea level. And so lots of water, that's another one. And good water. And then finally this is something a lot of people don't know. But I think that the listeners who are listening in, who are like doing ketosis and low carb diets and all that jazz, your body shifts from fatty acid utilization to more carbohydrate utilization. This value called your respiratory quotient. Your RQ goes up when you are at altitude and when your RQ goes up, that means that you're generating more carbon dioxide because you're burning more carbohydrates as a fuel. So you may actually need to tweak your carbohydrate intake up just slightly because your blood sugar levels are going to fall more quickly because you're burning carbohydrate more readily at altitude and burning fats less readily. So you may also need to increase your carbohydrate intake a little bit. So yeah, you get, get, get yourself over to an Italian restaurant and, and get some pasta and pizza into your system.

And is there anything that people can do prior to actually getting up there to avoid altitude sickness?

Well, I mean, you know, altitude training, you could do, you know, anything from sauna to increase your, your blood volume and your production of erythropoietin or red blood cell precursors. They have some good studies showing that sauna can help out quite a bit with altitude acclimation they make. And this refers back to the podcast that we've done on altitude training. Things like hypox companies like Hypoxico make altitude generators that you can put next to a treadmill or a bicycle. And you put the mask on your face and you work out and it decreases the partial pressure of oxygen in the air while you're exercising. So that's another example. You can even use things like static apnea tables. There are apps that you can download to your phone that have you hold your breath for a certain amount of time and then breathe and then hold your breath, and it puts you through intervals where you gradually increase your ability to be able to tolerate carbon dioxide. So, yeah, there's lots of things that you can do leading up to actually heading to altitude. And what I'd recommend that you do for that is just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for altitude training. Because while this is probably one of the few times we've talked about altitude sickness specifically on the show, we have some pretty good shows that we've done on all these different biohacks that are out there for altitude training. So go check those out and. Yeah, and that would be it. And by the way, last thing would be, if you're listening in and you have experimented much with coca leaves, let us know in the comments section, because that's actually something that I'm looking for a good source for and that I want to try myself, and I'm sure some listeners want to try that, too. So if you've got a good source for coca leaves, let us know in the. In the podcast, because that's something that I'm. I'm certainly interested in, and I know, Rachel, you probably are, too, right?

Absolutely.

Coca, baby. All right, there you have it.

Hi, Ben and Rachel, another Rachel here from Sydney, Australia. I. First off, I love listening to your podcast and reading your material, so thank you very much from over here. My question relates to muscle cramps. My husband gets terrible cramps and they can occur at any time, typically at nighttime, though. Also runs during. Runs over 12k during the day, but as I said, mostly at night time. And they can be anywhere on the body. Body. He takes magnesium and cramped bark formula in tablet form, two a day, and magnesium forked. We've tried so many things, but nothing seems to work. He rolls, stretches, he doesn't relax. His mum had this issue and they both have blue feet, so it's really annoying for him and me. I may well have missed something that you've already posted regarding this, but I haven't found it. So sorry in advance, but thank you also in advance. Thanks, bye.

A Rachel from Australia.

Yeah, but she's from Sydney. We're very different people. No, I'm just kidding. Rachel.

Let's deal with Sydney.

No, there's nothing wrong with Sydney. It's just I'm from. Well, not from Melbourne, but I lived in Melbourne, and Sydney and Melbourne are kind of like. They're kind of like America and Canada in a way.

Is that like saying, like. Like when somebody calls in From Hawaii. And you say they're American, but they're Hawaiian, right?

No, it's. I mean, similar but different. Same. Same, but different.

Interesting. As I insult everybody from Hawaii. Interesting. Okay, so. So. Cramps. Cramps. Cramps. Cramps. We've talked about this a little bit before on the show, but there are, there are some things that I definitely want to go over here when it comes to cramping, because I know it's a topic near and dear to many people's hearts. So first of all, a lot of people think that of course cramping is due to electrolyte or water loss. With the common explanation or argument being when you exercise, you sweat, you release water and electrolytes like sodium and potassium and magnesium and calcium and chloride. And as you lose more and more of that, your body gets depleted. And because electrolytes help to conduct nerve impulses through your body, which causes your muscles to contract, when you lose enough water or you lose enough electrolytes, the nerve impulses from your brain to your muscles get all deranged. And that makes your muscles cramp. Right. That is how companies like Gatorade have made a lot of money. Is that argument. The problem with that and the reason why losing electrolytes and losing water probably doesn't cause, or at least isn't the primary cause of muscle cramps is because first of all, sweat contains more water than it does electrolytes. When you get dehydrated, your blood levels of electrolytes, and they've actually studied this, they actually go up or they stay about the same. We don't see a big drop in plasma electrolytes unless someone has been out exercising for more than 24 hours. So unless we're talking about a multi day adventure race, the whole electrolyte argument really doesn't hold up that well. They've also done studies in which they've looked at athletes who get muscle cramps and they have about the same level of electrolytes and the same level of dehydration as athletes who don't cramp. And so no studies have found a relation between an athlete's electrolyte levels and their risk of cramping. And by the way, one of those same studies found that drinking Gatorade did not prevent people from cramping at all.

Well, I was thinking that would probably be an easy fix, you know, because you just drink more water and take more electrolytes and then it would e fix the cramping or it wouldn't. But there's lots of people that write in saying that it hasn't helped. So it makes sense.

Well, the other thing is, if cramps are caused by losing too many electrolytes, then all or most of your muscles should cramp, not just some of them. Okay, so when people get a real electrolyte deficiency, when you actually look at blood electrolyte levels, virtually all of the muscles go into spasms. So we're talking about my leg, my arm, my elbow, my jaw. Everything's cramping. That's a true electrolyte deficiency. In most cases, if it's just your calves or if it's just your biceps or something like that, that's not a true electrolyte deficiency. And the other thing is that if it is an electrolyte deficiency, then taking electrolyte should make the cramp go away. Swallowing electrolytes should make the cramp go away. Drinking a bunch of water should make the cramp go away. And that doesn't actually happen.

Right.

So when we look at what really causes muscle cramps, the most scientifically supported theory is that muscle cramps are caused by premature fatigue. Basically, you get tired, your muscles, reflex control gets dysfunctional, and instead of contracting and relaxing like it's supposed to, the muscle simply keeps on firing. It gets twitchy, it can't stop contracting. And that theory is actually supported by many lines of evidence. So, for example, the muscles that you use most during your workouts are the ones that usually cramp. And the muscles that cross multiple joints are more likely to cramp than other muscles because those muscles generally have more activity. You're more likely to cramp during competition or during a race than you are in training when you're pushing that muscle harder than you would normally, even at the same level of hydration and the same level of electrolyte status. And then finally, we've seen that athletes who have more muscle damage, who are less tapered going into a race or competition, they actually tend to cramp more because that muscle becomes more susceptible to fatigue. So based on this, the number one thing that you can do if you're someone who gets cramping during exercises, such as, you know, races or very hard workouts, is a begin to push that muscle just as hard during training sessions as you plan on doing during races, which is one big mistake that people make. They simply don't push as hard in training as they as they're going to push in. It sounds simple and stupid, but it's true.

Yeah.

Number two would be foam roll and do deep tissue work a ton before a Race or an event in which you are susceptible to cramping. So if your calves cramp a lot or your biceps crap a lot, you want to do, like, lacrosse ball, foam rolling, deep tissue work, massage as much as you can to actually decrease that muscle's susceptibility to cramp, to become tight, and to fatigue. And then finally, you would, of course, want to taper going into an event in which cramping has been an issue for you in the past. You want to take those muscles that are susceptible to fatigue and follow that rule that it's better to take them into an event. 1% over trained versus, you know, or even 10. I'm sorry, 10% under trained versus 1% over trained, if that makes sense.

Yes.

So. So that's one. One really important consideration here when it comes to cramping that I wanted to point out is that the electrolyte and the hydration status is not as important as the soft tissue integrity and the training status of the muscle and the relaxation of the muscle.

So what about. So he's cramping at nighttime, and he's already doing all of those things. What else could it be?

I want to get into this issue with night cramps in a second. But before I do, I should also point out two other things to folks. There was a recent study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research that looked into the best predictions of calf cramping, and they found that when it comes to calf cramping, which is probably one of the more common forms of cramping that people experience, again, hydration was not a predicting factor. Electrolytes were not a predicting factor. The two predicting factors for propensity to cramp, especially in the calves during exercise, were. Drumroll, please. Low back pain and age. Wow. Now, in the case of the former low back pain, it's probably because low back pain is heavily correlated with poor mobility, poor muscle tone, and muscular imbalances. Okay. People who have low back pain tend to have poor biomechanics. Okay. So that's probably why that is. And then when it comes to age, we know that aging can result in more muscle adhesions, more scar tissue, and less quality of muscle fiber, which we could work on with deep tissue work. Right. Like foam rolling and massage therapy and some of those things I was talking about earlier. But it's really interesting. If you can get rid of low back pain and you can get rid of muscle adhesions and scarce scar tissue and poor movement capacity of a muscle, then once again, you're putting yourself into A status where you're far less likely to cramp. So I thought that was really interesting was that recent study in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research.

Very interesting.

And then the other thing I was going to mention was I also have about an hour long podcast that I did called Beyond Dehydration, why cramping really happens and what you can do about it. It. And in that particular podcast, we geek out on cramping at an extremely deep level when it comes to like the neurological reason that cramps occur. So go listen to that podcast and if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 358 I'll link to that in the show notes. So now we get to this issue with this night cramp thing. Now another name for this can be restless leg syndrome or rls. Have you heard of this before, Ricky?

I have, yes. Yep.

Yeah, it's a neurological disorder and they estimate that about 12 million people in America have it. And it happens when you're lying in bed at night and you get this tingling or aching or itching or cramping or tugging kind of like deep below the skin of your legs. And sometimes it happens in the thighs and the feet and the hands and the arms too. And there are a variety of things that they've looked into that can actually help with this type of issue at night. One that they found is cutting out any stimulants starting from noon on caffeine, nicotine, anything that would be considered a stimulant, crack cocaine and hookers, anything that's getting you all excited before bedtime, get rid of it, okay? Substitute decaffeinated varieties, use white teas instead of coffees, things like that. So that's another one that they found can actually increase susceptibility to night cramps. They have found that stress can actually cause it. And including simple techniques like breathing and meditation and yoga and simply not working too close to bedtime can help out quite a bit with these night cramps too. Sounds simple and stupid, but it can actually work in many cases. Calcium magnesium imbalances and the use of topical like transdermal magnesium, like smearing magnesium on those tissues that are susceptible to cramping, especially if this is a nighttime leg cramp issue, that can help out quite a bit as well. That's another one that they found can help. Compression socks, wearing compression gear, compression tights, compression leggings, compression socks. Maybe not the sexiest thing to wear to bed, but that can actually help out quite a bit as well. Unfortunately, that flies in the Face of something we talked about. I don't know if you remember this, Rachel. When we talked about how they found that when your feet are cold at night, when you're sleeping, you sleep more deeply.

I do remember that. Yes.

And you can stick your feet out from underneath the covers or even get one of these, these, what do they call them? The chili pad devices that allow your bed to be more cool.

It was because it decreased your core body temperature. Right. So you could technically wear the compression socks and then sleep in like a super cold room.

And it's exactly. Sleep naked just wearing compression socks. Sexiest.

It's tricky.

Yeah. So that's another one. Acupuncture. They found that acupuncture can actually help quite a bit with restless leg syndrome from. And so that would be another one that you could look into is the use of acupuncture. Obviously that's a little bit less convenient because you have to go to a practitioner to do it. And then finally there is this concept that the taste of something extremely like a gag reflex, type of bitter, salty, can actually decrease what's called the alpha motor neuron reflex that causes your body to go into protective spasm. This is one of the reasons why if I'm in a long race, like I'm going to be racing the Ultra Beast in Lake Tahoe in October and that's, that's like the Spartan beast, the 13 mile Spartan beast, except times two. Meaning you, you get to the finish line and unfortunately you like take a loving long glance at the finish line and then run right past it and keep going to do lap.

Sounds like hell.

It is gonna be hell.

But you're gonna drink something that stimulates your gag reflex and that's gonna stop you from getting muscle cramps. Right.

I'm doing it because doing something that you're fearful of or that's scary or that's uncomfortable is one of the most character building things that you can do. Plus, it allows me to help inspire our listeners to keep on pushing themselves. Plus, I learn a lot about nutrition and biohacking and training and stuff when I'm out doing the. Like if I was just sitting in my mom's basement answering questions on a podcast. I don't think that these podcasts would be very well informed or at least they'd be full of a lot more BS rather than in the trenches.

Absolutely.

So we digress. So the idea is, and I've gotten a lot of questions about this, like there's this new. Have you heard about this stuff called Hot Shot?

No.

Okay, so this company developed this, they called a proprietary formulation of organic spice extracts. But basically it's like lime juice concentrate and. And cayenne. And they've got some stevia in there and a whole bunch of little things that are like, salty bitter. And the reason for that is when you even taste this stuff, you don't need to swallow it, you just taste it, right? Like it hits your tongue and it causes that alpha motor neuron to relax. Now, a lot of people have asked me about Hotshot, and if anybody from Hotshot is listening in, and my apologies, but it's basically like expensive pickle juice or stuff you can make, expensive cayenne pepper. What I tell people is if you're going to a race, stop in at the truck stop on your way and grab a few mustard packets from the hot dog stand and you can just open those and dump them in your mouth and that will reverse a cramp. When it happens when you're out racing.

Have you tried this? Have you ever gotten muscle cramps?

Yeah, it happened to me at the. The Spartan World Championship last year. And so, and this is what I was talking about when I was starting to talk about that ultra beast is I carry a little Ziploc bag with electrolyte capsules in it. Like, I just, I'm not brand specific. Just like any salt capsule. However, I don't swallow the capsule because they've. Again, like I mentioned earlier, your electrolyte status isn't going to affect your cramping unless you're severely electrolyte depleted. Instead, I break open the capsule and I dump it on my tongue and it's an extremely. Ugh, salty, horrible taste. But within a second, that cramp goes away.

Wow.

And it's not anywhere near enough time for those salts to actually make their way into muscle tissue. It's because the taste of something salty, or the taste of something extremely spicy, or the taste of something pickle juicy, all of that actually stimulates sensory nerves that will get rid of that, that motor neuron reflex, that protective reflex that the muscle goes into. And so that's another thing that you can do is, you know, if you get night cramps, just keep, you know, a mustard packet or some pickle juice or something extremely salty. You know, your own little salt lick next to your bed stand. And that, that taste, that bitter, salty, spicy taste can actually decrease cramping. So, anyways, also go listen to this podcast, though, that, that big, long podcast that I did on muscle cramping, that might help too. And we'll put a link to that. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 358 and I'll link to that one in the show notes also.

Hey, Ben, this is Jeff. Quick question about fat burn and calorie deficit. I generally stay in fat burn and eat pretty healthy. And I was wondering if we work out every day and we're anywhere between five hundred and fifty thousand calorie deficit, is that safe and okay to do? How long of a time period can you go that way? You know, only have like maybe 5, 10 more pounds to lose, but really working on endurance, muscle strength and so forth. So I'd love to hear what you think. Thanks.

Rachel, are you familiar with this, this concept of cycling calories or cycling carbohydrates?

No, I just eat food.

Okay, you just eat food.

Did I fail? Was that a big cross next to my name?

No, I like your food. For those of you who have not tuned into. What is it? BenGreenfieldFitness.com Snapchat Rachel and I actually had a wonderful food. We actually had a great. We know how to party.

We do, don't we?

I was over in Seattle. No, I was over in Portland for the, for the Spartan race. I did the four hour hurricane heat and then the Portland Spartan sprint. And Rachel and I met up afterwards because she's over in Portland. And we did 60 minutes of hot, cold contrast at the Russian sauna. And then we did what, Ginger shots. Ginger shots and a giant bowl full of like, what, kale and seaweed and yeah, all this superfoods. Lots of good food. Yeah, we party in style. So I, I, I do like, I do like Rachel's palette. Even though I, I have to add tasty meat, which she does.

You do have to add tasty meat. You need tasty meat. And also I spent most of my time just kind of sitting on the, the bench reading while you did the crazy hot sauce.

I saw that I was taking a five minute cold shower while you were.

Reading and I was kind of like shying away, lazy.

Okay, so carb cycling, let's start here because what we're really talking about is this idea that if you stay at a caloric deficit for too long, you could potentially develop. It's an overused term, but this whole concept of starvation syndrome or downregulation of thyroid hormone production from being at a consistent calorie deficit, even downregulation of a lot of fertility based hormones, because our bodies, from an evolutionary ancestral standpoint, don't want us to make babies when food is not, you know, present in adequate quantities. We don't want to have little babies that starve and die. It's a morbid thought, but it's, it's an, it's an ancestral mechanism. So in its most basic format, carb cycling, and this is related to calorie cycling too, which I'll get into. Not just carb cycling, but it's a planned alteration of your carbohydrate intake to prevent a fat loss plateau and also to prevent a drop in, in metabolism when you are restricting calories or when you are restricting carbohydrates. So the idea here is the body actually handles short term deprivation of calories or short term deprivation of carbohydrates very, very well. And brief and relatively infrequent periods of fasting or like 24 hour plus fasts or a carbohydrate restriction can be really advantageous for losing fat and for health and longevity in general. There was one study in the American Journal of Cardiology that noted that bouts of fasting spread throughout the year actually improve markers of cardiovascular disease. And these are 24 hour fasts. This is one reason why, you know, my wife does a 24 hour fast almost every week. I do one just about once a month. You know, I train so much that it's harder for me to do a full on fast. A guy who I was just staying with down in Park City, a really good kind of like anti aging and health doc who I interviewed for next week's podcast when I was there, his daughter was doing a five day fast because she was about to head off to college and she just wanted to do like a full on detox of her body. So she was just doing a five day water fast. The thing is though, restricting calories or carbohydrates for really long periods of time can have some negative metabolic effects because of what's called the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access. You know, your body's kind of like mission control for hormones that can actually, in response to long term calorie restriction or long term carbohydrate restriction, cause things like reduced metabolic rate and reduced thyroid hormone output and reduced sympathetic fight and flight nervous system activity. So a CrossFit workout or a high intensity training session becomes more difficult. Difficult. It can result in lower amounts of the appetite regulating hormone leptin. It can result in lower amounts of reproductive hormone output, which I referred to earlier. And this has been shown over and over again in studies. You know, it can bring fat loss to a standstill and also lower the metabolic rate. You know, it's a metabolic response to extreme carbohydrate restriction or extreme calorie restriction. This has been proven over and over again in studies how long term energy reduction can kind of come back and bite you in the butt if you're not careful. So this is where planned manipulation and planned variation of your calorie intake and your carbohydrate intake can come in very handy.

Right, so what's a good number?

Well, let's get into that. So basically what they found in multiple studies is that in a state of a negative energy balance, negative calorie intake, intake, having certain days in which you increase carbohydrate intake and or increase calorie intake actually increases thyroid output and controls hunger and can keep a lot of these reproductive hormones elevated. In addition, when you have planned refeeds of carbohydrate, whether it's dinners or meals throughout the week, you get an insulin release, which a lot of people freak out about, because high levels of chronically elevated insulin can keep fat cells from mobilizing fatty acids into tissue. But insulin is very anabolic as well. So if you're trying to gain muscle and lose fat simultaneously, having certain periods of time where you actually experience an insulin surge can help out quite a bit with that whole gain muscle, lose fat type of approach. So a refeed, which is what you'd want to do is basically planned increase in calorie intake or a planned increase in carbohydrate intake that is typically either one meal or a full 8 to 12 hour day, and typically consists of a big increase in carbohydrates or a big increase in calories, or both. So an example of this would be you're following a strict diet of let's say 1500 calories five days a week, let's say each of the weekdays and then on the weekend you're doing 500 to 1,000 calories more than that, like 25, 500 calories of slightly more carbohydrates and slightly increased calories. That would be, one approach would be that five days of dieting, two days of not, I wouldn't say cheating, but just, you know, higher calorie or higher carbohydrate intake. Another example, because they've looked at a lot of different examples in literature, one would be simply having one day of higher carbohydrate intake about every two weeks. Weeks. And the reasoning behind that is that it takes about four weeks for the Metabolism to really begin to downregulate things like thyroid hormone and reproductive hormone output when you are restricting calories or restricting carbohydrates. So you nip that in the bud by having that one Saturday every two weeks where you're just basically eating ad libitum or eating a higher amount of calories or a higher amount of carbohydrates in very active people, and this would include myself. You can even do a carbohydrate or a calorie refeed once a day. And what I mean by that is I will go the entire day eating almost zero carbohydrates. And at the very end of the day, after I've worked out when my muscles are very receptive to taking in that carbohydrate and storing it away as muscle glycogen, or the liver to store it away as liver glycogen, that's when I'll eat anywhere from 100 to 200 grams of carbohydrates. So a lot of different kind of refeed cycles out there. But ultimately, the idea, to answer Jeff's question specifically, is that if you're at a 500 to a 1000 calorie deficit, you can, on paper go four weeks at a daily deficit of that level without doing metabolic damage for long term muscle gain and fat loss. It is prudent, though, to do a refeed. One, to do days of the week and then have your other 5 days be lower calorie. Or if you're really wanting to be restrictive, once every two weeks, do a, do a refeed. And when I say refeed, generally the best way to go about that is you figure out what your metabolic rate is. There's a lot of different equations out there for metabolic rate. I have a website called getfitguy.com and on that website at getfitguy.com, i have a bunch of metabolic rate calculators that allow you to figure out your metabolic rate, like how many calories that you're burning throughout the day. And what you do is you actually figure out how many calories that you're burning, you figure out what your metabolic rate is, and you over and above that by about 500 to 1,000 calories. So if it turns out that you're burning naturally 2,500 calories a day, you have that one day of the week where you eat 3,500 calories, or that one day every two weeks where you eat 3,500 calories. And furthermore, if you're normally eating, let's say 20% carbohydrate intake, like restricting carbohydrates on that day, you might up your carb intake to 30 or 40%. So there again in literature there are so many different variations of a calorie refeeding or a calorie cycling or a carbohydrate cycling diet that I can't say that there's like one way that's best. But for very active people, I like once a day having that carbohydrate refeed and then once a week having a day of the week, preferably your most active day of the week, where you just eat ad libitum or even slightly more than what your body needs. And then for less active people, just once every two weeks or once every four weeks, have that refeed day or that big refeed cheat meal where you go to whatever. I don't know why Olive Garden comes to my head because I freaking hate the Olive Garden. It's the fakest Italian food on the planet. But you go to Whole Foods and you make yourself a nice big ass salad and you put a sardine on there, can of sardines on there.

So does a calorie deficit or cycling carbs or calories impact women and men differently?

That's a good question. Women respond more deleteriously to long term calorie restriction or fat fasting. We've talked about this on the podcast due to a hormone called Kisspeptin, which will basically cause it'll get decreased in response to long term calorie restriction or carbohydrate restriction in women. And when that happens, you begin to stop producing luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone. So you start to lose your period and drop bone density and you lose some of your libido, etc. Women seem to do better with higher amounts of fat intake, higher amounts of fat stores and less frequent fasting than men do. But I haven't seen any studies that have shown men versus women in a calorie cycling comparison. But I would say if anything, women benefit from more frequent refeeds or at least less calorie restriction or less frequent fasting than men do.

Right.

So yeah, good to know. Yeah. So anyways, Jeff, my recommendation is look into the wide wonderful world of calorie cycling and carbohydrate cycling. And that's where I'd start. Man.

Hey Ben, love your show. Listen to it all the time. Just a quick question. I'm a police officer here in Albury, New South Wales. In Australia, I'm looking to start reading some more books on strength and functional strength for policing to get my power and strength going a bit more. Just wondering what books you would suggest for that. Love the podcast. Listen to it all the time.

Alright, so I'm gonna start this off by saying, even though I just mentioned it, if you're not following me on Snapchat, I am constantly reading books. I have a giant stack. It annoys the heck out of my wife because there are are seven books stacked high next to my bed stand that I read each night. There's another four here in my office.

Seven books, different books that you read at the same time.

But I try to take photos of the most notable sections as I go through them and I've been posting those to Snapchat. So, for example, this morning I posted a comparison of what they call a lion versus a dolphin versus a bear versus a wolf, and how these different personality types respond to circadian timing differently, like sleep timing, sex timing, meal timing, etc. Fascinating book. I actually was sitting having dinner with my family when I got back from Park City last night and we were all taking the survey in the book to figure out which animal we are. Like, my wife is a bear.

I'm definitely a lion.

Or a wolf. I'm a lion. Have you read this book? Book?

No, I just know it.

It's called the Power of When. Okay, you just know it.

I just know it. Women's intuition.

All right, so in response to Jason's question, the best books for power and strength. Let me give you five. I'll give you five. How's that sound?

Five is good. It's a good number. The whole number.

So, okay, so first of all, Starting Strength by Mark Ripo. I think that everyone who's trying to build strength should know how to move a barbell with proper biomechanics. And Starting Strength by Mark Rippeto is a perfect way to learn how to do things like a barbell deadlift or a barbell squat with very good form. And it's simply one of the best tools, the barbell for building mass very efficiently. But you can hurt yourself if you don't do it right, kids. So Starting Strength by Mark Rippeto. That would be number one, number one fantastic book. The next one would be Mass Made simple by Dan John, who has been a guest on this podcast, who is quite the ninja when it comes to getting swole and who has an excellent program in that book for developing mass that I've done typically in what I Would call the off season the period of time. Kind of like the winter when you're eating more food, when you're. And it's kind of fun to put on mass anyways. Turning all the Thanksgiving turkey and the holiday cookies into muskle. This Mass Made simple book is really good. It's the same workout over and over and over again, but it works like gangbusters for putting on muscle. Ignore all the nutritional advice in that book because it's basically based on eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and whey protein chips. But for the actual exercises, that book is really good. Mass Made simple by Dan John. So that would be number two. The next book would be one that I've talked about recently on the show before that. I really like that. All you need to do it. The only equipment you need for the book would be a kettlebell. Two kettlebells actually, and your body weight. And that one's called Neuromass by John Bruni. And Neuromass is a program in which you do a super slow, what they call a grinding exercise followed by a very quick and explosive power exercise followed by an isometric exercise for one specific body part like your quads or your hamstrings or your shoulders. Then you move on to the next body part. That is a good program if you want to build both neuromuscular strength and musculoskeletal strength and mass simultaneously. So that one's called Neuromass. That would be number three. Number four would be a book by Pawel Zatzelin. And Pawel Zatzelin is a guy I followed for quite some time. This is one of the first exercise books I ever purchased, actually. It's called the Naked Master, the Secrets of the Super Strong Using Body Weight Exercises Only.

That one sounds fun.

Yeah. And this book is basically everything from, from the philosophies of Greek wrestling to Chinese Kung fu to modern special ops, basically all these different strategies that are used by people to put on muscle and to gain strength, but just using body weight. So lots of, you know, you learn how to do things like pistols and single arm push ups. And Pavel has a lot of other books, but this one in particular is a great one to start with, I would say. It's called the Naked Warrior. The Naked Warrior. So and the final one, that'd be number four. And then the final one isn't a book, it's a magazine. And I subscribe to it. I actually have right here on my desk the latest summer 2016 edition of this magazine and the Magazine is called Milo M I L O. It's put out by Dragon Door Publications and Dragon Door has a lot of really good books for building mass and strength. But for example, some of the features in this particular book are how to build grip strength, right? Like, like wrist and grip strength. An interview with the German superpower Josef Menger, review of the Los Angeles Fit Expo and the something called Grip Strength Excellence. An episode called the Sum or an article called the Sum of All Strength. Tendons and ligaments Drills for strength training Technique. Technique. All sorts of really, really good reviews of gear that can be used for training. Like, you know, hip belt squats that you like, like weight training belts that you can attach plates to to do squats with to, you know, captains of crush grip strength training devices to, you know, the book is just full of giant men from Finland and women with, with thighs that are larger than my torso lifting. And if thumbing through this magazine doesn't make you want to go lift something heavy or flip a tire, then something's wrong with you. So it's called Milo M I L O Strength and both this the Naked Warrior Neuromass Mass Made simple in starting strength. That's what I would go with. I mean, my library is huge. I have literally thousands of books down here in my. Have you been in my basement, Rachel.

I've seen your library and it is humongous.

Yeah, so I'm just surrounded by books. My wife is always on me to throw out my T shirts and throw out my books, but I just won't.

Oh, we shouldn't throw out books.

No, never. So anyways, Jason, that is where I would start. And if you are listening in, anybody out there and you have something you would add, go over to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 358 and let us know what your favorite strength training books are. But those are mine. And we'll link to those along with everything else that I discuss in this podcast from the altitude training supplements that I recommend to some of those cool studies on gene splicing and why we race faster than we train to herbs for lucid dreaming and oh, so much more over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 358 and this is, I suppose, a perfect time to give away some swag. What do you think?

It's always a good time to give away some swag.

All right, so here's the deal. First of all, I noticed we haven't had many iTunes reviews lately, and it's probably because I'VE done a very poor job reminding you. So if you haven't yet left an iTunes review and you're out there listening, then you are using us. You're using us. You're not creating good karma. You gotta go leave.

Us a good review. And we're shamelessly doing it. We're quite happy about it.

Yeah. If you leave a five star review and we read your review on the show and you hear your review read on the show and not done yet, you email gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's G E A R at greenfieldfitnesssystems.com we'll send you some gear, include your T shirt size, but we'll send you a cool tech T shirt, water bottle, beanie, everything. So it looks like we actually have a fantastic review left by Alev called My Workout Companion. She left five stars or he yeah, I don't know why I assumed Alev was a girl, but you want to take this one away, Rachel?

Yes. All right. Thank you Ben. I've been listening to you since January. You've been my workout companion. I've lost 55 pounds since January 1st. I'm also stronger than I was last year, even though I'm smaller. I have to give you credit for the inspiration and motivation. Many times I've wanted to stop my workout early, but you've kept me going. I've learned so much from you and look forward to your podcast every day week. I've changed my life for the better listening to you and I know I'm not the only one. You're the best.

Smaller but stronger. Lost £55. That's pretty good.

Incredible. Good job.

Incredible. Nice work. Nice work. Awesome review. And we're all about helping people get stronger and smaller. So you too want to get stronger and smaller. Listen to the show. Leave us a review. So we also Last thing I want to mention, if you're listening in, you may have heard that we are going to start transitioning to once per week podcasts that are going to be long form podcasts. And as we approach September and October of 2016, you're going to start to notice the frequency of the podcast decreases, but the quality just goes through the friggin roll. So this weekend we will have a Saturday podcast for you. Next week Rachel and I will not be back, but you will get to hear me interview the great Dan Pompa whose house I just left yesterday. And we're going to be talking about some pretty mind blowing detoxification strategies that I had personally never heard of before. So Stay tuned. For that, visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com 358Follow my my little book underlinings over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Snapchat and have yourself a healthy week. What do you think, Rachel?

See you later.

All right, later.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more comfortable, cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.