Nicotine Gum, Alactic Training, Binaural Beats, Small-Scale Farming & More With Robb Wolf.

You probably know who Rob Wolfe is. He's the de facto leader of the Paleo movement. I'm not Paleo, but he's still pretty cool. And in today's podcast, I interview him and we get into stuff that he hasn't talked about before on podcasts. So you really are going to want to listen into this one. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Show, I started finding all these studies of like the therapeutic benefits of nicotine, like it was beneficial for all these GI disorders and anti inflammat. And you know, there was always the caveat that the delivery mechanism, tobacco, was really problematic. But when they were using just kind of a pharmaceutical type agent, like a gum or a lozenge or something like that, then you didn't really have any issues. Getting 1200-2000 words a day was a real slog and I was super smoked from it. And I've been doing really consistently about 2,500 words a day.

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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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And actually just yesterday, if you were on Snapchat, you may have noticed me chomping down on some nicotine gum at the gym. And that was the latest tip that I picked up recently from today's guest, who actually has passions and interests and accomplishments that go above and beyond a cigarette in chewable form. His name is Rob, Rob Wolf. And if you don't know who Rob is, you have probably been living either in a cave or possibly at McDonald's. Rob is a former biochemist. He wrote this New York Times best selling book called the Paleo Solution. And he's got one of the top ranked itunes podcasts as well as one of the top ranked books out there. He has written for Men's Health and his gym has been named one of the top 30 gyms in America, Norcal Strength Conditioning. He consults for folks like the Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Program, Paleo fx, Paleo Magazine, and he also spends a and has spent a little bit of time in the trenches. He was the California State Powerlifting champion. He had a 565 squat, 345 bend bench, 565 dead. And was also a 6, 0amateur kickboxer, which I actually find quite impressive, having recently gotten my eye broken. Kickboxing, I know that's a tough sport, but. Rob, coaches.

Oh, go ahead. I got out early.

Yeah, unfortunately I didn't. And I'm still signed up to step into the cage in July. And yeah, still still trying to determine the, the pros and cons of headgear. Anyways, though Rob works with mma, motocross, rowing, triathlon, Olympians, naval special warfare, like I mentioned, NASA, the United States Marine Corps, the Canadian Light Infantry. But today we're just gonna delve straight into Rob and Rob's life and some of the cool training and nutrition biohacking tools he's been messing around with of late.

So Rob, man, if nothing else, it'll be a perfect cure for insomnia. Like if it's exactly boring, people will pass out and fall asleep.

So we'll put that, that bonus one in the sleep phone, substitute this for the binaural beats.

Right, Exactly.

Which actually we'll talk about because I know you're messing around with those.

Yeah, yeah.

So you're living, you're living on a ranch. Word is, and apparently it's called Lazy Lobo. I'm curious, can you describe to folks what this ranch is? I mean, are you like hundreds of horses, cowboy hat, out, wearing the spurs and the leather chaps all day, or is this like a small farm operation? Or what exactly are you up to from a living situation?

Small farm operations. So we, we kind of made the switch from the suburban kind of track home gig and really wanted some more acreage. I've really been interested in this sustainability story. Grass fed meat, sequestering carbon, you know, all this type of stuff. And so we picked up a place just about a year ago and have been installing these things called hugel mounds and getting ready to bring in goats and sheep. The area has been massively overgrazed for about 50 years. 40 to 50 years. So the soil is really compacted. It's interesting. I'm just starting to learn a bunch of stuff about like permaculture and sustainable farming and all that. And so as you learn like the, the types of weeds and plants that are growing there currently are actually these taproot plants and they're trying to break up the soil and they're part of the secession process. Like they would break the soil back up and then if that Area got grazed, perennial grasses would move in and then if, you know, people weren't messing with it, then you would get some like hardwoods that would move in and stuff like that. So we're just trying to get in and you know, have a great place for our girls to grow up and play with chickens and goats and sheep and you know, learn some, some good responsibility, taking care of the animals and also just have a hopefully better quality of life, spend a lot of time outside. And the goal is to try to raise as much of our food as possible. And so that's where some greenhouses, Hugelmans, Reno's High desert. So it's kind of a, it's a rough go here. Like today is 80 degrees. 16 days ago we had a foot of snow. So it's a, it's a super helter skelter environment. You have to really watch your ass with, you know, when you bring plants out and you know, make sure to protect them from the cold and the extremes and all that. But yeah, that's the basic deal with the Lazy Lobo Ranch. It's our little, you know, opportunity to experiment in this sustainability story and hopefully have a better quality of life with that.

Yeah, yeah, we've had to deal with, with a lot of the, the weather changes up here in Spokane, so we, we try and grow most of our food, but we've had to build, you know, I don't know if you've experimented much with like, like hoop housing for some winter growth. And then we've got a lot of, as a matter of fact, our laundry room looks like a marijuana growing facility right now. We've just got a bunch of lights in there and we'll bring the plants in, the herbs and the patio plants in when the weather kind of shifts real quickly like it does in the spring, and then set them back out when the sun is shining. But that's interesting about the fact that you've got like. Would you say it's like dead soil, more or less?

It's not quite dead because it does have growth in it. So a few of our neighbors that have been even more negligent in maintaining the soil by overgrazing their soil is close to dead. And what happens when you remove all that ground cover instead of there being organic matter getting produced by the plants? I think it's interesting. Again, this may end up being the biggest snoozer podcast that you've ever done, but, well, we've at least got all the farmers ears. When the plants are growing, they actually release Glucose and other carbon compounds into the soil and that starts growing bacteria and fungus and all this stuff. And you get this really rich kind of ecological environment that goes on below the soil. If that, if the plants are gone, even if it's just what we would typically call weeds, then the soil starts oxidizing and that's when it literally starts dying. And if you have any type of wind, any type of water on it, that topsoil is just gone. And it takes a long time to build that stuff up. So we're, you know, our area was pretty negatively impacted, but it's even just the way that we handled it last year. We have photos from last year to this year. It's dramatically better. Like it's incredible if you start giving it the things that it needs. And in a lot of ways it's just kind of getting out of the way and just not abusing it, then it really starts bouncing back quickly. But my wife and her dad have been giving me hell because we did plant a small orchard and we had some weeds that were growing around the orchard, some actually perennial grasses, but they do compete with the trees initially. And so I dug those guys up and actually took these, these things that anybody would call a weed. Like 99% of people would spray them with Roundup and you know, like, try to, try to kill them with fire kind of deal. And actually like transplanted these weeds out into our, our pasture, which my father in law was just like, I can't even believe that I'm looking at this because he has like the beautifully manicured back backyard flowers and grass and everything, and he's out there weeding and Rounduping and everything. And we've, we've had a little influence on him, but not a ton yet. So. Yeah.

Yeah. Are you gonna look much into the use of some of those, those wild plants as potential edible sources? Like you talked about taproots, for example. You know, I know that includes like, you know, dandelions and, and beetroot and some of these things that, that are technically good for eating. Are you, are you studying much up on that?

We have gone wild on that. And what we, what we did with that is. So we have some areas that are kind of fenced off to keep the rabbits and marmots and all that stuff out of them. But out in the pasture where and have goats and sheep and stuff like that, we've actually just been spreading seed for these taproot plants and we're just going to kind of get what we get. But the, the Main idea is to increase the biological diversity and then also start again, like, breaking up that ground and not having it be so impacted and clay, like, so that other plants can grow in there. But ideally, we kind of turn this. I think they call them, like, a food forest or whatever. Like, purslane grows around here really, really well. And so we're helping to encourage the growth of the local edibles. And funny enough, like, I ordered a huge bag of dandelion seeds, and, like, we have dandelions everywhere. And this is, again, something that people usually, you know, spray those things to kill them. But our girls love collecting them. You can eat the leaves, the flowers, you can dig up the roots and eat those. So, yeah, we. We.

We use. What I do with the boys is we have this app called the Flower Checker app.

It's kind of cool.

It's a team of live botanists that within 24 hours, when you photograph a plant, they will identify it and send you the Wikipedia page for the plant, along with any other interesting resources specifically on the edible or medicinal uses of that plant. So my project for the boys every spring and summer is once a week, I'll send them out to find one new plant. And then what we do on Fridays is they have to cook a meal, either lunch or dinner, comprised of the specific plants that they've discovered over the past few weeks. So, and. And we've got, you know, purslane is a great one. We've got a lot of dandelion up here. We found. There's actually a batch of elderberry wine out fermenting in the garage right now, because we found a big old elderberry tree at the corner of the property. And I mean, that's. That's one of the coolest things. And I know not everybody necessarily owns acreage, but, I mean, you can. You can find a wilderness in the blade of grass growing up from a sidewalk. And it's kind of cool to walk around this app, take photos, figure out what you can eat, what will give you explosive diarrhea, and it's a lot of fun. Now, what about hunting? Do you have much food on your land in terms of things that you can hunt and eat?

We're only on five acres, and so it's not huge. But I have actually, interestingly enough, during waterfowl season, I can do archery hunting on my property, which I have not gotten around to yet. You just told me about the turkey guillotine setup and everything, which I'll have to explore that. But just maybe a quarter mile away. From us, we actually have a put in for BLM land where you basically punch up into the Sierra Nevada mountains and you hunt everything from rabbit to coyote to deer and bear and just kind of sky's the limit from there.

Yeah, yeah. No, the bow hunting for birds is really interesting. A very humane way to kill a bird and a good way not get a lot of lead in the meat, which you actually don't want, is to use these guillotine broadheads. So you get a bow, like a compound bow and you can purchase this special type of broadhead called a guillotine broadhead. And this is actually what I'm headed out to do after this podcast is I've got some wild turkey I'm going after. But you've got plenty of room for error because these broadheads just. My apologies to all the vegans listening in. They just cleanly slice off the head of the bird in a very humane way and also a very clean way. And then you can, you can go about defeathering and cleaning accordingly. But bird hunting with a bow is actually a ton of fun.

Yeah.

Whether it's, whether it's grouse or turkey or whatever. So that's pretty cool that you're up to this, this whole ranching thing. I'm glad that you've tapped into that. And I think at least what I've witnessed with my, my own kids is for the kids, it's a hoot. I mean it's a. They learn everything from edible plants to. One other question I wanted to ask you before we talk a little bit more about biohacking your body animals. Are you looking at a specific type of goat or chicken or what kind of animals are you actually going to grow there and for what purpose?

Oh man. So there was a little battle between my wife and I. Like she wants to turn the thing into a super expensive petting zoo. And I'm like, dude, we're gonna, we're gonna eat some of this stuff. And so the, the, the middle ground that we have, we're gonna have a few goats which are going to be long term and then we're going to do dorper sheep which are a short haired, you don't collect the wool, they're not bred for wool, but they're from South Africa, so they're very heat and desert hardy. But that's going to be one of our primary meat sources. We have chickens, we have chickens for eggs. Currently we're going to do the chicken tractor deal where we'll move the sheep. Like we're Basically going to do the mob grazing using electrical fencing. So you take a group of animals, move them into a fresh paddock. And the problem, the way that these areas get overgrazed is that the animals just kind of cruise around and eat whatever the tastiest item is. And so the grass will grow up a little bit. They eat it. The grass tries to grow back again, they eat it again and then it basically kills the grass. And then you end up with these kind of non beneficial things like sagebrush and stuff like that. It kind of varies on the location, but when you move these animals through an area in mass, it's the way that they used to move in a large herd under predator kind of pressure. So it's really pulling a page out of the evolutionary biology the way these animals are wired up and what they do then is they basically eat everything in an area and then you move them to another area. And it goes beyond just simply rotational grazing. Although rotational grazing has an element to that. The mob grazing, they eat pretty much everything. And what you end up really encouraging is this kind of climax plant species which are these perennial grasses which really hold a ton of nutrients in the soil. They tend to sequester more carbon and everything. But we're going to sheep and goats. The goats aren't going to be edible. Those are going to be pets. The sheep are definitely going to be edible. And then next year we're looking at doing some pigs also and we're hoping to start getting some harvest off of some of our apples and making some cider, drying the apples and then any of the mash that's left over putting into the, the kind of pig feed. So we're trying to figure out how to make this thing reasonably closed loop. Like it's a lot of moving parts, but that's the goal. I've been kicking around the idea of almost like a chicken tractor for rabbits. So we would have some smaller scale grazers out there. But that's going to be, it's going to be pretty interesting when we go to harvest the rabbits and the girls are kind of like. So we're going to eat those, right? Yes. Yeah, we'll see how that goes out.

Ro grazing thing with, with the electric netting looks good on paper, but I've, I've found it to be quite messy because, because I've got a lot of the electrical nets that you use to, to put up small fenced areas. Because we have, we have goats that we move around and chickens that we move around. And I'm actually getting rid of all that electric fencing this year because, you know, I don't know, for those of you listening in, if you've ever tried to move around electric fence netting in, and we have a lot of dense shrubbery up here. And not only does the netting kind of get grounded and so you got to constantly mow everywhere you put up a new set of electric fencing. But the goats tend to pretty easily figure out ways to escape. We have Nigerian dwarf goats, which are great because they'll give you about 6 to 8 cups of milk a day. And they're, they're, they're really small goats. They're not like meat goats or pat goat or pack goats, but they're, they're good for milk. And what I'm gonna do is just build three or four permanent fenced areas. This, because that electric netting is just such a, it's a pain in the ass to move around, to take up, to unbundle it. It gets all coiled up and, you know, I got to have a separate solar charger for each, each different piece of netting. And so we have the whole mobile chicken coop thing that we move around and then kind of a permanent chicken barn. But the, the electric netting is that, that hasn't worked out so well for me. I'm curious how it, how it turns out for you. And yeah, it can be a mess. Right, right.

That, that's what I've heard. So we'll, we'll see how it goes. I've spent a decent amount of time with Joel Salatin and they really get some mileage out of it. But I mean, they really have gotten their operation into a, a legit, like, perennial grass scene.

So they're not dealing with like, that's our problem. Slopes, slopes and dense dench. We were in the middle of the forest basically.

Right. So.

Now kind of for the folks who are not farmers and aren't growing their own food, if they're still even hanging around, there are some other things you've been doing. For example, I understand from a recent blog post that you wrote, which I'll link to in the show notes. Great blog post about some new things you've been experimenting with. At 44 years old, you're doing some post meal blood glucose monitoring. Tell me about what you're using for that and why you're experimenting with glucose monitoring.

You know, so there was a great study that came out, gosh, back in November of just the last year, and it was a fantastic study done in Israel where they inserted a subcutaneous blood glucose monitor into 800 people. They checked these folks, their gut microbiome, their genetics, basic blood work, and they were able to create an algorithm that based off of the response that these people had to various meals, they'd look how their blood glucose responded to things like bread, bread plus butter, rice, just a whole variety of things. And they were able to create a predictive algorithm where then if they just looked at another person or a group of people, their gut biome, their genetics, they could predict what these people would respond favorably and unfavorably to. And I have done some gut testing, I've got some decent genetic testing. I haven't been able to crunch all this stuff the way that they did. But what they really pulled out of this was that when people figured out whatever the carbohydrate types and amounts that were good for them individually, if they stuck with that, over the course of time, their gut health, their metabolic health tended to improve. And it just kind of kept incrementally improving. And so I started tracking my post meal blood glucose levels because I've always had a reasonably difficult time getting the right air fuel mixture for what makes me feel good. I cognitively feel really good. Ketotic, I haven't really quite been able to make that work for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I've fiddled with it, but I've kind of settled in this area of maybe around 20 to 30% of my calories from carbs, which really only amounts to 100 to 200 grams of carbs a day, depending on the activity level that day. But I just to get a little more granular, I started doing it 30 minutes, one hour and then two hours to try to get a little bit of an emulation of a total area under the curve type of continuous blood glucose monitoring to see how I was actually responding to things. And some stuff that I'd always suspected that I had some problems with, like white rice, I can eat it. I don't really think I get an immunogenic response from it. But you know, if I go more than about a half a cup, quarter to a half a cup of rice, like my blood glucose just goes to the moon and stays there for a long time. And then I get a really pretty gnarly trough at the end of that.

And are you, are you doing, are you just using like an accu check, like blood glucose? Are you doing the full on? I was talking with Dr. Mercola recently, who's been doing a lot of 24 hour blood glucose monitoring. He mentioned this thing called a Dexcom G5.

Yes, I was just checking those out.

Yeah, you have to get a script for it and if you want, I can probably connect you with somebody who can, who can write a script, although you probably know someone. But apparently the G5, for people who are worried about electrical pollution, right? Like from constantly having something, tracking data and producing Bluetooth and EMF on your device. Apparently the G4 is like a radio frequency device, but if you use this Dexcom G5 for blood glucose monitoring, like it'll wake you up if your glucose drops below a certain level at night. If you, if you want to be tracking your data or you can, you can turn that sensor off if, if you don't want to be annoyed. Low blood glucose at night, but apparently like pretty much every hour of the day with this Dexcom, you can pretty much get, get a value for, for anything. So I've, that's, that's one I've been thinking about looking at for, for similar reasons to you. You know, I noticed that. Were you referring to the study that they did in Israel where they looked at different people and their glycemic response to foods?

Yeah, it was a personalized glycemic response study and some fascinating things. You know, like they had one person who ate a banana and they had beautiful blood glucose response and then another person ate the same amount of banana and their blood glucose went to the moon and then they had a hypoglycemic drop and then another person ate a cookie and they had good blood glucose and then a different person ate the same type of cookie and they had a horrible blood glucose. And then so there was huge interpersonal variations on this stuff. And then there was kind of a wacky assortment of foods that were good for some people and not good for other folks, like hummus, which, even though I'm like the Paleo guy, you know, I'm like, dude, hummus is protein and fat. Like you would need a private detective to find a glycemic response from that. But some people, they're not totally sure what was going on. They don't know if maybe these people had small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and they had kind of a inflammatory response. But hummus in about 50% of the people ended up being kind of a negative food for people. And what it really opened my eyes to is, is that, you know, we have some general guidelines, you know, like, sleep better, move, eat whole unprocessed foods. But even on that whole unprocessed food story, there's a massive amount of variation within that. And that can, you know, it's very different, you know, you versus me versus my wife. But then there's also variation baked into that cake depending on how well you're sleeping. Like if you're a cop who does shift work, like when you're off shift and you have a couple of days of, of good sleep, your metabolism is quite different and the way that you're going to respond to food is going to be quite different than when you're, you know, you're doing your graveyard shifts and stuff like that. So that was definitely the impetus for me to get in and start fiddling with this blood glucose monitoring.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Now if you looked into, you know, from a genetic standpoint, you know, when we look at the nature, obviously things like night shift work and the, you know, gut permeability and the potential inflammatory response to foods would affect blood glucose. But if you look, looked much into like some of the genetic SNPs responsible for whether people will, for example, lose weight or have a pronounced glycemic response to like low carb, high fat versus high carb low fat, like any of these SNPs that you can feed out from your 23andMe data or your DNA ancestry data, I haven't looked at that.

For other folks at all. Like, I've been fiddling with that for myself and what came back on that? So both my parents ended up dying from type 2 diabetes. These complications, if I eat a lot of carbs, I'm like the doughy northern European guy. And when my data was analyzed and I actually put this through Promethease to.

Get the Prometheus is the perfect one to do it.

Yeah. And it indicated that I was 300% more likely than the average person to develop type 2 diabetes. Based off my genetics, I thought I.

Was high and I'm like 30% higher than normal. So you're off the charts in terms of your, the, the, the motivation there to control your blood glucose.

Yeah. And that's where the, the testing, you know, I, I still oftentimes kind of default to just get in and experiment, do high carb for a while, do low carb for a while, see how you look, feel and perform and all that stuff. And I think you really end up getting a long ways down the road with that. But some of this deeper testing, it really provide, you know, because you always wonder, you're like, am I really carbon tolerant or am I just screwing something up here? And then it was like, no, man, genetically, you're in the shallow end of the gene pool.

So yeah, yeah, it's interesting with that Prometheus, I'll link to a pretty cool article. It appeared on a website called Rockstar Research. It's just a very simple algorithm where if you've ever done salivary genetic testing, which I think is well worth it for just about everybody to shove over 100 to 200 bucks to do, you can export the data for 5 bucks to Prometheus, which Rob mentioned. And then there's an algorithm where you check for specific SNPs, like you check for Rs4994 and if you have the AA or double T version of that, then you would check for Rs104 2713. And you continue to feed down through this algorithm and it spits out basically two things. Things whether you respond best to high intensity versus low intensity exercise and whether you respond best to a high fat versus a low fat diet for weight loss. And it's incredibly simple to just plug your values in. And it's really interesting. For example, I found by using that, that high intensity exercise, I'm an extreme responder to it, but don't do well at all with chronic endurance exercise, which is very, very interesting because I've always had my best, you know, endurance races when training with high intensity exercise and weightlifting. And then interestingly, it also shows that I would respond better to a slightly higher carbohydrate intake, which I actually haven't experimented too much with. At least not a healthy higher carbohydrate intake. But for anybody listening in, by the way, I'll keep some furious notes here. You can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Rob that's two Bs. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Robb because I know we're covering a lot of stuff and I'll link to that particular article if you tend to go through your results and export those. But that info on high intensity exercise, that leads me into another question I wanted to ask you, Rob, and that is this concept of these alactic sets. I came across this idea from you that you're now performing kind of like to get the most bang for your buck out of your training time. Have these a lactic sets. Can you explain what those are, how they work and how you do them?

Yeah, so you know, the first time that this concept got on my radar was from Art Devaney and this was back in like 98, 97, somewhere around there, his old university kind of website for his evolutionary fitness site. And he described these two things. One was a hierarchical set where you took a, say, like you're doing back squats and you would do 20 reps with an empty bar and then you'd put a 45 pound plate on each side and do 15 reps and like you just go from one to the next to the next. So you do 15 reps with 45 pounds and then 8 reps with 225, then put 315 on and get like 3 or 4 reps. And that's about as heavy as you're going to go that day. And you're, you know, you've generated a lot of lactate, you've theoretically fatigued all of the different muscle fibers from the slow to the, the fast twitch. And then you finish this thing with some jumps, like some jump squats to really hit those high end motor units. And so that was one technique that he used. And then another technique was what he called a lactic sets, where you kind of warmed up, got mobile and everything. And then you put a weight on a bar that was maybe about 80 to 85% of your one rep max and you do one to three reps and then you just kind of walk around, wait a couple of seconds till you felt recovered, do another couple of sets or a couple of reps and you would accumulate, you know, basically enough volume so that you just started to get a little bit of movement degradation and then you were done. But like your deadlift session, you know, aside from warm up and mobility and everything, literally might be less than five minutes because you, you just kind of stack this stuff. And I had fiddled with that both of these, both the hierarchical sets and the a lactic sets before I got into the CrossFit gig. And I really liked it. Like it was super time efficient. You know, you weren't going to set any powerlifting records with it or anything like that, but it was just kind of shocking. It's funny. Art's a, Art's an economist. He's a brilliant guy. And so it was like the most time efficient thing that I'd ever done in my life as far as training. Like, it was pretty shocking in that regard. And so then Mark Sisson's recent book, Primal Endurance, he had kind of a takedown of this stuff and he called it something different. I'm forgetting what the.

Yeah, like sustained power training or something like that.

Yeah, sustained power training. They actually, the way that Mark described it in the book, it was carrying this stuff out for longer, maybe even like five to ten minutes throughout the whole set, which makes sense for what he was trying to accomplish. So I'm super busy. I'm in the middle of writing a second book. We're running the farm, but we're also doing a house remodel, which means we're living about a mile, mile and a half away in an apartment. We've got two kids. My wife's busy, so I try to get in as much Brazilian jiu jitsu as I can. But I still wanted to lift some weights. And so I started doing these a lactic sets. And I'll basically do some sort of lower body movement, a squat or a deadlift or some variation off that, plow through it, and then do some sort of vertical or horizontal press and pull. And I hit those on separate days. So it might be like deadlifts, standing press and chins one day and then front squats, bent rows and incline, dumbbell press on the other day or like dips or something like that.

So the rest periods are pretty small. Between these sets you'll do like five reps, walk away, rest a few seconds, come back, do reps, do reps, do reps over and over again, walking away and coming back until you get to the point where you can only do one rep.

Exactly, yeah. And so that's the way that Mark recommends it. Something that I did which is even a little more conservative is I just accumulate about 20 to 25 total rep reps. And then when I start getting to where I consistently get like five sets of five with it, then I just up the weight. The way that Mark was doing it is a little more specific for power, endurance. And they carried the sets out a little bit longer, but it seems like either way would work. It just kind of depends on which direction you want to steer it. But I mean, my whole workout, aside from some mobility and warm up, is literally like 15 minutes. And I'm kind of knackered from it. But it's not like doing Fran or some sort of a CrossFit deal. Like it doesn't negatively impact my rolling, doesn't impact my sleep or anything. So it's just been this really time efficient way of getting some training in. Prior to that, I had been following the gymnastics bodies foundations program and really, really enjoying that. But I have none of my gear. I can only work out in a big box gym right now. So I didn't have any rings, I didn't have stall bars, so. So I had to figure out something else to do to just kind of get me through this three to four month period. And so I gave that a shot and I've really been enjoying it. Yeah.

It's especially interesting in light of the fact that there was a recent. I think it was a journal of strength conditioning. Research showed that diminished rest periods between sets, like full body heavy sets like that, actually induce, probably due to the lactate buildup, a higher growth hormone response than. Than resting. Obviously, if you're trying to get as freaking strong as possible, you'd rest for three to five minutes between the sets and really load up the bar. But for time efficiency and the hormonal response. I love this idea. I've been taking some notes here because occasionally I do find myself in a situation where I just have a barbell or a kettlebell and I want to squeeze as much strength and work in as possible in the shortest period of time.

So.

So it's called a lactic training.

That's what Art Devaney calls it. And then in Mark's book it was, I think you're correct, like continuous power sets or something like that.

Yeah. Mark's book is Primal Endurance. For those of you who want. I'll link to that one in the show notes. Now, speaking of Mark and training, I think it is Mark who I've heard wax pretty positively about this bursa climber piece of cardio equipment. And I've heard you talk about it too. What is it about the Versaclimber that makes it so interesting for you guys?

Well, you know, one thing for me is that it's one of the only pieces of equipment where you're upright. I mean, clearly a treadmill you are also. But I'm at a point in my life now where I'm like, okay, I need to be outside, even if it's like 20 below zero. If I'm going to be on a treadmill like I. But you're upright, so you're not sitting down. It's one of the rare things where you get some contralateral movement, kind of like crawling. And you do this a ton and in combatives and everything. And man, the thing just crushes you. If you really tighten up the resistance on it and do short bursts, it smokes you in ways that are even worse than an Airdyne or an assault bike. I think the fact that you're fully upright and standing up, that fluid column that your heart and circulation needs to deal with is higher. So it's just a really potent dose. And I use it everywhere from just my low level basic aerobic training to help with jujitsu. And recovery. And then there was a great article and man, I'm completely blanking on it. But this guy got in and really geeked out on how should you strengthen condition training. Trained for Brazilian Jiu jitsu and they analyzed just hours and hours of competitions at the world level. And they had broke this thing down that you tended to see about every minute, about a 10 to 15 second scramble, and then you had a minute of continuous activity and then a 10 to 15 minute scramble. And so I started doing a lot of my training kind of based around that. So I'll actually start on the air diner or the rower and go for about a minute, hop off that jump on the Versaclimber where the resistance is set up. Just like I've got a. It's literally almost like doing a max effort to get the stuff to move. Like it's super high resistance. And I'll go as hard as I can on that for about 10 seconds and then I'll shift back to the rower and essentially it's, you know, it's, it's, you know, work recovery type stuff. But I'm trying to emulate those, those really hard scrambles. And I kind of randomize it a little bit. Like I'll do a minute and then the 10 second burst, and then I'll do two minutes of recovery and then a 15 second burst. You know, I'll kind of vary it based off of how, you know, if the white buffalo in the sky is coming to visit me or whatever's going on. So I've just really liked it for that, you know, those reasons. It's pretty big. It takes up a decent amount of acreage in my.

But it's vertical, right?

But it's vertical, so it's good in that regard. I had actually cut a hole in my garage to fit this thing in there. And the Versaclimber guys always want me to ship them a photo of me using it. I'm like, my garage is a dump. And I have to do this crazy maneuvering to get the thing in and out of this hole in the ceiling. So they don't get much in the way of photos or video of me using the thing.

Yeah, it's really interesting, that whole idea of loading up the muscles, producing a bunch of lactic acid. And it's kind of like that philosophy behind that as seen on TV or the one you see in the airplane magazines, the four minute exercise machine where you're just moving exactly at maximum pace. And there's actually. I've experimented with this A little bit. There's this machine out there called the Vasper that's popular among folks. Yeah, it's where they actually attach these tourniquets that are ice based tourniquets so you're cooling and causing vasoconstriction in a muscle along with compression. Almost like that Japanese style Katsu training where they're or what's called blood flow restricted training. So they're basically combining blood flow restriction, cold thermogenesis and exercise all simultaneously. And you just work out for I don't know how long the protocol is. I think it's 10 to 15 minutes on this Vasper. But it's extremely, just like that four minute machine. It's extremely expensive. So I've been messing around with just wearing compression gear and then shoving some ice packs into compression gear like they make compression gear now that you can put ice packs into and then just doing like a high intensity set on the bike with the legs compressed and with ice on them. And it actually is pretty interesting. You can get this huge, huge pump in the legs and I have no clue, I haven't measured lactate buffering capacity or anything like that. But some of these new pieces of cardio equipment are ways that you can use them. They're fun to experiment with and I agree the full body ones to produce what you call the white buffalo in the sky effect give you a lot of bang for your buck.

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool and it's super time efficient. And again like you made the point like if you want to become a champion powerlifter or something like that, like it's going to be two hours in the gym each session. You need three to five minutes. I think even, you know, closer to the five minute mark more consistently between sets because you're really training that neural element of strength. But for just general health and fitness, it's these really short time efficient sessions that challenge you but don't leave you completely knackered. It's pretty legit.

Yeah, yeah. Now I wanted to ask you a couple other things about items I know you've been experimenting with a little bit. For example, in the, in this post about your life at 44, you mentioned something we already talked about a little bit, Binaural beats. Tell me about how you've been using binaural beats.

So I had read a little bit about these. The idea being that you would listen to a program where it would send a signal to one ear that was say going at 12 cycles a second and to the other ear at, at eight cycles a second. And then theoretically these two would meet in the brain and it would produce a 10 cycle per second, like brainwave state. And I really haven't gone deep down the rabbit hole of how credible the science is, but I started using it initially just kind of as a relaxation, like kind of active meditation deal. Like I'm too squirrely and fidgety to actually sit down and meditate. And even yoga is a little bit of a challenge for me. So, so I started fiddling with that and I was like, wow, I really like this stuff. And then as part of my ramp up for the book, there were different settings and so there was a relaxation setting, then there was like a creativity setting. So I put this creativity setting on there and started using that. And then I guess we'll talk about nicotine gum in just a little bit. But I just found a couple of different things that if I kind of daisy chained them together, my productivity was pretty, pretty damn impressive. Like I had some metrics on when I was writing my first book and you know, like getting 1200 to 2000 words a day was a real slog and I was super smoked from it. And I've been doing really consistently about 2,500 words a day on this book. And I really like, I've tried doing little blocks of writing without the binaural beats and I notice a huge difference in my concentration and almost seems like it helps my, my working memory. It's almost like my RAM is better so I can keep more kind of disparate ideas in that working memory so that I can pull ideas together and kind of make these kind of wacky connections with the stuff that I'm trying to write. So it's been incredibly helpful in that regard. And it's almost become this thing where if somebody, some football team, they're winning all their games and they haven't washed their uniform and so they get almost religious about it and they don't wash the uniform. Like now I don't change anything. I just keep all the exact same stuff I did just put in an arazepam in that whole mix. And my best writing day on just the binaural beats and nicotine gum was pretty consistently around 2,500 words. And the past couple of days of doing this other stuff, I've had some 34 and 3500 word days after dropping in the anirazepam also.

I'll ask you about that anirazepam here in just a second. Because I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. So for the Binaural beats, you're using them more for focus and alertness and I guess what would be called alpha brainwave production more than you are for, say, sleep.

Yes. Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. See, I've done a little bit with Brain FM when I'm writing primarily, I've found especially for fiction, it helps me to block out a lot of. Well, I'm writing a medieval kind of like fantasy fiction book and it's very difficult for me to get into medieval fantasy fiction mode if there are phones going off in the background and my kids are playing piano and there are all these modern settings. So I go into Brain FM mode. But I've primarily used Binaural Beats kind of religiously almost to the point where when I'm out camping in the woods and stuff and I don't have my phone, I miss them. I've been using an app called the Sleep Stream app and it has the ability to choose a focus function or a meditation function, but then it also has a. It's got a deep sleep function and it has what I think is really cool. It's one of those apps that has the ability to purchase things in device and one of the things that you can purchase is an eight hour sleep cycle where it'll walk you through eight hours of sleep, cycling you through five different sleep cycles during those eight hours of sleep. And you just put it in when your head hits the pillow. I use these soft headphones called sleep phones so they don't really dig into your ears and you listen to this app as you sleep. So it blocks out ambient noise. But it also, it's binaural beat based and this one, it takes you from beta to alpha down to your delta and your theta waves. And, and it's really interesting. I suppose you could probably just be wearing headphones all day long and all night long if you really wanted to.

And just be mega.

Now is the morning beat and now's the afternoon beat. And I've always wondered sometimes if it does kind of eventually mess with, I don't know, the little hairs in your ear and all that jazz. But I'm constantly vibrating them during every night of sleep. But I swear by them right now. That's kind of cool that you're using them so much for writing. So you combine them. Let's talk about this. Did you say Anirazepam?

Yeah, it's a Pirazetam derivative and I had tried Pirazetam a number of Years ago and was completely nonplussed with the stuff. Like, I'm pretty unimpressed. Although now with the results I've had with the anirazepam, I want to circle back around and try some of these other drips derivatives that I tried previously. And it kind of disregarded them, the pharmacology on them. They're modifying dopamine elements. I have not gone deep on exactly what they're doing, but, you know, they're definitely in that.

Aniracetam. You said aniracetam.

No, it is aniracetam.

Okay, I got you. Yeah, I'm somewhat familiar with that one. Yeah, you get a, you get a little bit of a dopamine dump. I talked to a guy who works with video gamers recently and he uses that one quite a bit combined with. I'll have to link to the episode. I forget what he combines it with, but he sent me some. It's like a bitter tasting powder and you put like an eighth of a teaspoon into your mouth if you're not taking it in capsular form. And his only warning to me, and I don't know what you think about this, is he said that a lot of it was metabolized by the liver. And so it was something that he, that he didn't recommend using on a daily basis. Have you looked into this much?

I have not. I have not.

That was my only, My only drawback to it was apparently it has a pretty expensive or extensive first pass metabolism, by the way.

Gotcha, gotcha.

But it does certainly pack a punch and I'll link to that particular episode. But it was aniracetam combined with, with. And I don't. You know, there's all these different stacks nowadays.

Right.

It's a, it's hard to keep up. You know, for me, I, I typically go with mushrooms or adaptogenic herbs. That's typically my.

You know, the funny thing is that this product actually has like five different mushrooms and a bunch of other adaptogens in it. So it, it's more than just that. And I, I just have no idea if it's the, the singular action or the, the whole, whole, the whole product doing the, the magic. But it's product is it. You know, let me, give me, give me two seconds. Let me grab it out of my backpack. One minute.

This is good podcasting, folks. Rob digging in his backpack. We can do the Jeopardy Music as he digs.

Okay, one second. Here it is. Mixle boost.

Mixel boost. Yeah, sounds like something for kids.

Yeah. Yeah, it does. It does. Like, yeah, yeah. Oh, Mixel Shield. Mixel Boost. I think it's out of the brain. What is the name of the company?

Mixle Boost. I can hunt it down and link to it for folks. How do you spell Mixel?

M I, X, E, L. Mixel Boost.

Interesting. I've never heard of it. I try and stay on the bleeding edge of smart drugs, so that's interesting. Mixtall.

One bottle is lion's mane mushroom, rhodiola, ashwagandha, cumin, and then the other one goes a little bit more. The anirazepam, Alpha gpc, Bacopa. But I just did like a really low dose.

You said M I, X, E, L. Yeah, yeah. Huh. Interesting. I may have to dig around for this one, but I'll find a link to it for everybody listening in if I can hunt it down. Now the other thing that fascinates me and that I just started doing after actually reading this article that you wrote. I. I've been chopping it down in the gym is nicotine gum. I'm actually, I'm holding this stuff that I. The stuff that I found to be the lowest in colors and artificial sweeteners. It still has a little bit of acesulfamy potassium in it. Is this stuff made by the company good sense. It's just 2 milligrams per, but it still doesn't taste that great. But nicotine gum, Tell me about the safety of using nicotine gum and why you use it and what you found with. With the use and the dosage of nicotine.

Well, you know, gosh, it was seven years ago, I started doing work for the Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Committee. Basically going in and talking to the SEAL teams, the boat teams, and also the family members of the teams in their pre and post deployment kind of get togethers that they would have. And they wanted me to talk about sleep and food, exercise, which the exercise was kind of goofy because these guys, I have that pretty wired up. But it was part of what they wanted me to cover. And then they wanted me to cover some lifestyle stuff like booze, nicotine, caffeine and all that. Because hyper vigilant environment. These guys get on flip circadian rhythms where they're awake all night, then they go to sleep during the day. They use sleep aids to go down. They'll use monsters and all kinds of stuff to get back up and going. And so, so in my trying to do some due diligence, when I was getting ready to talk about nicotine, I was like okay, let's just do some basic pharmacology and toxicology on this so that I'm brushed up on this stuff. And as I started digging around on was interesting because I started finding all these studies of the therapeutic benefits of nicotine, like it was beneficial for all these GI disorders and anti inflammatory. And there was always the caveat that the delivery mechanism, tobacco was really problematic. But when they were using just kind of a pharmaceutical type agent like a gum or a lozenge or something like that, then you didn't really have any issues. When you looked at the toxicology specifically of nicotine looked a lot like caffeine. Like you certainly could kill yourself with it. But every once in a while some knuckleheaded kid will order pure caffeine off the Internet it and like get a lethal dose of it. But you know, it's easier to kill yourself with Tylenol than it is stuff. And it, it's another dopamine modulator. And I definitely, you know, I have all these symptoms of kind of low dopamine, just kind of fidgety add like always need a project going on and stuff like that. I'm, I'm kind of happiest when I'm just you know, barely on the edge of death by, by doing something knuckleheaded. And so as I started really reading through this stuff I was like, wow, this is really interesting. And then I thought back about my family and thinking a little bit about my genetics. So I'm like every one of my family members smoked and so I just started noodling on this and cigarette smoking it always just completely repulsed me. But I was kind of like well shoot, I'll give this stuff a shot. And so my first try with it was a 4 milligram piece which was way too much much. And I got horrifically nauseous, almost threw up room spins for about an hour. It was terrible. So if people play with this, I strongly, strongly encourage you start off with a milligram or less.

Your first time I did two. Well what I've been doing is two. And that's typically because I do a hard workout typically sometime between 4 and 7pm you know, I'll and I take a nap after lunch, right? So I've woken up from my nap the past couple of days and grabbed a piece of 2 milligram and started chomping on it. And I've found I go pretty hard until about 9pm When I'm chewing on the stuff and I haven't even gone above 2 milligrams yet.

And, you know, I pretty much stay at the 2 milligram level. I'll do a couple of pieces throughout the day. And what's interesting is nicotine is a stimulant, but, but it works differently than the way that caffeine does. It's not just specifically dinging the adrenals and kind of getting that epinephrine kind of release. It's working through a little bit more of a dopaminergic activity. And what was really interesting within the military context was that it would keep guys alert. But if they say like they were out on a patrol, but they were going to get home or get back to base and then go to bed, it seemed like a better option if they needed to stay awake. But then they could sleep in pretty close proximity to their workday wrapping up because it wasn't going to disorder sleep the way that caffeine does. It wasn't going to antagonize melatonin release. And what was also interesting is that it didn't tend to interrupt fine motor skill. So if the guys knew that they were going to cover a lot of ground and they were going to have a heavy pack and stuff like that, then I was recommending something like 50 milligrams of caffeine every four to six hours to keep physical activity. But then if they were dug into a hillside and they were waiting to take a long distance shot or something like that, or even if it was as mundane as needing to stay awake to finish a report and then go to bed, I was recommending the caffeine or the nicotine for some of these other options. So they kind of had different stimulants that they could use based off of what type of needs that they had going on. And it's just been phenomenal for me. And I used to have ulcerative colitis a long, long time ago. The basic paleo eating really helped that enormously. But I've always had still a little bit of a touchy gut and the nicotine seems to have helped that quite a bit too.

Interesting. Very interesting. Returning back to the the discussion on genetics, I did notice when I went through my Prometheus gene printout, I have a four times higher than normal risk of being addicted to nicotine. So I suppose for me this could turn into a concern or just very, very good business for whichever nicotine gum business that I choose. But I'm curious if people are metabolizing it or addicted to it in different ways. But regardless, just in my own personal experimentation with it and the research that I've done based off some of the resources that you provide in the article that I'll link to in the show notes, it does appear to be safer than I would have thought based off of the negative perception we all associate with it. Probably because of cigarettes.

Yeah, There's a fascinating WebMD piece, like if you Google WebMD nicotine gum. There's this piece basically talking about all these former smokers are now addicted to nicotine gum. And it's probably a three page deal and there's all this hand wringing and all this concern. And then at the very end, the guy, almost as if he kind of, I don't know where he did research in this whole cycle or who got saddled with writing this thing, but literally the last paragraph, guy basically wraps up and he said it's actually hard to vilify. Like I'm left wondering if this is even an issue given the fact that the nicotine itself, pharmacologically and toxicologically really is pretty damn benign in that all of the negative effects that we usually ascribe to nicotine is a byproduct of the delivery system, the tobacco, whether it's smoked or chewed. So that's just an interesting read because these guys are really, they're talking about, well, how do we get folks, folks off of this nicotine gum? You know, it's a real concern. And then the guy actually wraps it up by saying, I medically, I don't know that there's anything wrong with this. And are we just wasting our time doing this? So that, that was a really fascinating piece because WebMD is about as like orthodox missionary style mainstream medicine.

Oh yeah.

So. And even that guy was kind of like, I don't know that I could really say that there's anything wrong with this stuff.

Yeah, I see that article here about, it's called Addicted to Nicorette. I'll link to it, I'll link to it in the show Notes for folks. And of course the only thing I've run into in addition to my concern over potential for addiction based on genes is the fact that I have this healthy, xylitol flavored, vitamin B enriched, gluten free, everything free, vegan, sustainable gum that I chew. And whenever I grab a piece, my kids ask for a piece and I'm relatively guilt free about handing a to and so I've been grabbing the Nicorette and my kid's like, hey dad, can I have a piece? And so I run into the same situation I run into when either vaping or drinking a cup of coffee, trying to explain to them that they need to wait a little while until they're of appropriate age and their organ slash gray matter can handle handle that load.

That's a concern because you definitely don't want a kid digging into your nicotine gum like that. That would be a disaster.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Well, Rob, this has been fascinating. I have so many notes that I've taken as we've been talking about this stuff. Everything from your brainwave app that you talked about to this blood glucose monitoring to everything else. I know that you're going to be at Paleo FX 2016 coming up here very soon. I'll be there as well, along with my family. And so if you're listening in and you want to go hang out with Rob and I and potentially catch us drinking a few margaritas, you can head over to Paleo fx. We happen to be down in Austin. And then one final question for you, Rob. I know that you're working on a new book fueled by nicotine and aniracetam and headphones and God knows what else. This could be an interesting book. Can you, for all of the Ben Greenville Fitness listeners, perhaps share something that you that you have not yet revealed about this book or something that you feel would be groundbreaking or quite interesting for folks about this new book you're working on?

Oh sure. Well, you know that personalized glycemic response paper I'm actually that's going to be.

A piece of the book.

Like I'm going to really try to help people figure out how to crack their individual code on can they deal with high carbs or low carbs or what type of carbs to as it need to be. So that's going to be an important feature. And unlike the first book, I talked a bit about the neuroregulation of appetite. But I really, really go deep on the neuroregulation of appetite in this book and do a little bit of geekery related to optimum foraging strategy and how that's forged our genetics to try to eat more and move less and all that type of stuff and how that's set us up for some some problems. But those are maybe the big potentially interesting points in the book and shooting for March or April release of 2017 on that.

Very cool. I can't wait to check it out. No regulation of appetite sounds like a pretty cool topic I'm personally quite interested in because I'm always hungry. Speaking of which I need to go find a turkey. So anyways, Rob, thanks so much for giving all your time and sharing your knowledge and for coming on the show. And again, for those of you listening in, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Rob that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Robb if you want to dig into everything that we talked about or learn more about Rob. And Rob, thanks for coming on.

Awesome time. Thanks for having me back on, man. Always a pleasure chatting with you. You all right, folks?

Well, this is Ben Greenfield and Rob Wolf signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

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

Sa. Sam.