Podcast #19: Naturopathic Medicine, Nutrition & Performance

Podcast episode number 19 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. This is your weekly free audio exposure to cutting edge fitness, diet and wellness news. Hey. Whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, this podcast is going to present you with the latest exercise and nutrition content from the nation's top experts. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, certified nutritionist and exercise, diet and wellness guru. Each week I'm going to be bringing you cutting edge fitness, nutrition and wellness advice. Stay tuned for this Week's podcast from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield coming to you on October 28, 2008 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com I have a packed episode today with a listener Q and A on aerobic fitness and strength and whether you can achieve the two simultaneously. We have a fantastic interview with Dr. Todd Schlapfer who talks quite a bit about not only what naturopathic medicine is all about, but how you can apply some of the nutritional philosophies of naturopathic medicine to achieve better recovery and enhanced performance. And finally, I have a special announcement about a brand new newsletter at a website where I've created a new meal plan, a new exercise or workout for you, and every week for free delivered right to your email inbox. So without any further ado, let's delve right into this Week's content@BenGreenfieldFitness.com listener Q& A Before I get into this week's Listener Q and A, be sure to go to the blog and post a comment if you have a question or email me. Ben greenfieldfitness.com we love to get feedback from our listeners. In addition to posting a comment on the blog, I would also really encourage you to go to our page on itunes and leave us feedback. You can actually give a podcast that you like a star rating. If you don't like our podcast, don't give us feedback. No, I'm just kidding. You can rate anything from one up to five stars and basically give people an idea of what you get out of the podcast podcast so that they might know a little bit more before they subscribe to this podcast. Now let's go ahead and move on to the question and listener Steve asks, is it possible to become stronger and more aerobically fit at the same time? Well, basically the idea behind Steve's question is that some strength and conditioning professionals are of the mind that if you are trying to build power strength, that because that's primarily an energy system that uses fast twitch muscle or what we would call anaerobic energy, that it would not be something that we could concurrently train with aerobic slow twitch energy systems. Now, what I'd like to reference to answer Steve's question, is a study that appeared fairly recently in the Journal of Strength and conditioning research for September 2008. And in this journal, the researchers evaluated the effects of doing your strength training at the same time as your aerobic training. So essentially trying to pursue two different results, both strength and aerobic fitness via the same workout program. Now, what the researchers found was very interesting, and I'm going to give you some of the practical applications from the study. But first I'd like to present to you the type of exercise and the type of the workout routines that were compared during this study. So in the first study or in the first group, strength or resistance training exercises were performed all by themselves. So group A did an aerobic warm up for about five minutes. They did traditional strength training, which involves doing sets of resistance exercises with brief rest periods. And then after their strength training, they performed aerobic exercise for about 30 minutes and then they cooled down. In group B, there was an aerobic warm up of about 20 minutes. But instead of doing strength followed by aerobics, group B alternated sets of resistance exercise with brief periods of what they called aerobic cardio acceleration, which means that the individuals exercised vigorously between each strength protocol rather than simply resting. And so this would be considered a little bit closer to circuit style training and more specifically, circuit style training that includes an aerobic component between each resistance training exercise. Specifically, in this study, the same eight to nine basic strength training exercises were used. It was just that one group did about a minute of hard cardio efforts after each strength effort, whereas another group did all their strength and then they finished with their resistance training. Now, what was found by the researchers was that first of all, both groups became fitter, but the group who engaged in the circuit style training with aerobic and resistance training exercise combined actually had greater adaptations than the group that was engaging in just the strength training. And when I say adaptations, essentially what they were measuring for cardiovascular adaptations was the effect on maximal aerobic capacity, resting heart rate, and blood pressure. The researchers also found that exercise timing and sequence was important and that aerobic endurance adaptations were maximized by training when the aerobic endurance exercise was taking place prior to strength training rather than after strength training. And so what this means is that if you're still going to engage in strength training alone, you would get better benefits out of doing your aerobic exercise prior to that strength training. The final observation was that if you're going to increase your heart rate and you're going to do these brief bursts of cardiovascular intensity during a circuit, that it helps to do your burst of cardiovascular intensity, do your strength set, and then take a breather if you need to take a breather rather than doing your strength and then doing your cardio. And so the takeaway message from this is that A, you can train for strength and cardio simultaneously and still see great adaptations in your aerobic fitness and your strength, and that B, no matter what you do during a circuit, you should always proceed the strength component with the aerobic component, whether you're doing all your aerobic first and then your strength after, or whether you're combining the two and doing brief aerobic efforts followed by strength efforts. And if you would like to go find that article for yourself, the title of this article was Concurrent Training Enhances Athletes Cardiovascular and Cardiorespiratory Measures. And then there is a companion article that was done during the same study entitled Concurrent Training Enhances Athletes Strength, Muscle Endurance and Other Measurements. And so both studies were looking at group A and group B. It was a fantastic series of articles that I highly recommend you delve into further if you want to read a little bit more. But the takeaway message is that you can do strength and aerobic at the same time and you can get pretty good results doing so. So fantastic question, Steve. And let's go ahead and move on to this week's interview. Hey, podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield, and I'm here today with an exciting interview on naturopathic medicine. I have with me on the other line, the 2005 Naturopathic Physician of the Year for the Entire Nation. He is a naturopathic physician out of Coeur d', Alene, Idaho. He's the physician for Coeur d' Alene Healing Arts in Coeur d' Alene, and His name is Dr. Todd Schlapfer. It goes by Dr. Todd to his patients and his friends. And he's been practicing in Coeur d' alene for about 25 years in naturopathic medicine. He has a lot of experience, so he's going to be able to provide us with quite a bit of insight on this form of medicine. Dr. Todd studied over in Portland at one of the most established naturopathic educational institutions in the country. And he studied down at the National College of natural medicine. And Dr. Todd, I want to welcome you to the show and thank you for coming with us today.

Thank you, Ben. Thanks for joining you too.

I want to hear a little bit, and I think this would be interesting for the audience to hear about how you became involved in naturopathic medicine. What road did you take?

I took a lot of different roads. I suppose it wasn't a straight line at all, but I guess to try and keep it into a sort of a summarized response, I would say I was a real curious kid and wanted to understand the mystery of life and ended up studying a lot of science and then specifically moved towards biology and.

Learned.

I was first a biologist and learned about how living organisms have an intrinsic capacity to self correct and or adapt to conditions. And what I learned in dealing with plants and animals became so intriguing to me that I began to develop what I would call a passion for trying to understand how that's true for human beings. One of the most prevailing lessons I learned in studying and practicing as a biologist was how critical the interconnections are between conditions and our biology, our physiological biology. And it was almost, I could say, a startling experience for me to really appreciate how interconnected everything is. And I simultaneously learned that there was a body of healthcare or medicine dedicated to the principle of how interconnected things are. I had done pre med as a biologist, but became discouraged in terms of going into a traditional study of medicine because it was so narrowed to a particular therapy, either surgery or medications. And it was pretty much a, a discouraging experience for me to continue there. And that's why I went off and finished in biology. So that's where I think I stood at the root of how I became interested in naturopathic medicine was to try and find a way to enter, integrate my interest in natural life forms and forces with life as a human being. And it was exciting for me to find out about naturopathic medicine. And so I started off by attending the Nahua College of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon in 1979. And I never, never regretted it. It's been such a blessing for me to find that and then to find the opportunity to actually practice this. So there you have it.

Yeah. Now, when we throw around a term like naturopathic medicine, I know that some people are aware that there are MDs and NDs, but I would like to hear from you what you would say that the primary differences are between those two types of physicians.

Well, the precept or the principle behind naturopathic medicine is what we refer to as the vis medicatrix naturae.

The Latin for, I was gonna guess Latin or Spanish.

Yeah, Latin for means the healing power of nature. It goes back to what I just said about how as a biologist I became, via curiosity, interested in how everything was connected and how it has this self correcting capacity. The healing power of nature is a way to summarize that. And allopathic medicine is based upon the precept of the law of opposites. In other words, it practices how to suppress a symptom. In other words, that the principal focus of care is the symptom itself rather than the cause. And what can happen, albeit a very beneficial practice because it's very, very appropriate when it comes to life saving procedures and emergencies. But it is very poor at being able to resurrect, rehabilitate or reverse disease simply because it's based upon a principle of suppression. When in actuality what the body is doing, the human body is doing, is trying to self correct. So what needs to happen is to provide something that's complementary to that intrinsic force in our human nature that helps rehabilitate that capacity to adapt or to heal and re establish balance. That's the principal difference. It's not to say that one is bad and one is good, it's just simply to say there's a difference and they need to be, wherever possible, married. In other words, integrated perhaps.

Well, I think a perfect example of how you might find yourself integrating the philosophies of allowing a disease to play its course or even allowing your body to operate as naturally as possible, while at the same time perhaps using allopathic medicine to correct certain problems would be. I had a recent post on BenGreenfieldFitness.com or on the podcast where I've been struggling quite a bit with an IT band injury. And I would say that as a triathlete and the reason I'm I'm using this example is because a lot of the people that listen to this show are involved in endurance athletics. I use more of an allopathic suppress the disease corticosteroid injection at one point so that I was able to complete the race. But at the same time I've been doing a lot of different modalities, such as increased vitamin C intake, flower pollen extract, anti inflammatories and things of that nature to help play a little bit more of a preventive role in the problem. And so I think that in a healthy lifestyle, I don't know if this is what you're trying to say. But the two can coincide, right? Naturopathic and allopathic medicine.

They can cooperate and collaborate, and they can very often bring best of both to an individual's health care. But they can also clash. And that is why in the study, in the matriculation process of becoming a naturopathic physician, the first two years are dedicated to learning allopathic medicine in the sense that study the same anatomy, same physiology, same disease processes, same dissections.