Podcast Episode #8: Yoga, Massage, Cherries & Watermelon

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 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com and on this week's episode number eight, we have a ton of awesome content to bring to you. Johnny Gillespie of Balanced Athlete Yoga is going to be with us, as well as Tim Gilreith of Therapeutic Approach Massage. I've also got a Q and A section for some of the questions asked in this week's podcast episode as well as a review of the newest content@bengreenfieldfitness.com so let's go ahead and dive right in with our Question of the Week from a podcast listener. Remember, if you have questions, you can email them to me@Ben greenfieldfitness.com, or feel free to add comments to any of the Posted content@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I love to see it when people actually read a post and leave a comment. Get it out there, get it in public and we can generate some discussion because that's what this blog is all about. So question from listener Al he says in a recent podcast you answered a question concerning eating as many vegetables as one wants because you feel it would be difficult to overeat that type of food. I wonder if you feel the same way about fruits. I eat bowls of fruits every day. We take advantage of whichever fruit is in season and on sale and buy as much as possible. For example, we are now in watermelon season and I can eat a large watermelon in one day and not those wimpy single serving sized melons. Then when grapes are on sale I overdose on those and move on to oranges, etc. Can I eat too much of a good thing? And the listener continues. I am also fanatically in love with concentration orange juice and have been drinking several glasses a day for years, primarily at breakfast with about 1620 ounces and 18 to 12 ounce glass at night before I go to bed. I believe that it is the elixir of the gods. What are your feelings on this? Well, if you remember, in last week's podcast, we talked a little bit about vegetables and caloric consumption of vegetables not adding up to be anything significant at all. For instance, I think we said that 10 cups of broccoli was something like 200 calories. So can we say the same thing about fruits? Well, if we go to that same website where we looked at the amount of calories in broccoli and that was nutritiondata.com let's pull up a watermelon and let's look at one melon that's 15 inches long with a diameter about 7 and a half inches. And that's about a medium sized melon. We're looking at 1,355 calories, 341 grams of that from sugar, incidentally. That's about 114% of the daily recommended load of sugar in a 2,000 calorie diet with an estimated glycemic load of 93. We'll talk about the glycemic index in a second. But first of all, it is highly obvious that fruit has flat, far, far more calories and far more calories from high glycemic index sugars than vegetables do. So the answer to that question is yes, you can eat too much of a good thing. Most of my clients who are trying to control their weight or trying to control their blood sugar levels follow my recommendation of two to three pieces of fruit per day. That would be, for example, one apple, one banana, and a small handful of berries. Now, difference between fruit and vegetables in terms of its effect on your hormonal levels is the glycemic index. And basically the glycemic index measures how quickly a sugar ends up in the bloodstream after you eat a food. Some fruits are low on the glycemic index. Now, all vegetables are low on the glycemic index. But if we look at fruits, some of the fruits that are lower on the glycemic index and have less of an effect on your blood sugar level and therefore less of an effect on the conversion of sugar into fat, would include cherries, which are low, grapefruits, apricots, apples, pears, plums, peaches, oranges, grapes. And then we start to get a little bit higher with kiwi fruit, bananas, fruit cocktail, mangoes and papayas, apricots, raisins, all those are a little bit higher on the glycemic index. And then when you get up to those real Citrusy fruits and especially melons, very, very high on the glycemic index. Much, much more likely to wreak havoc on your blood sugar levels. So not only can you eat too much fruit, but there are also some types of fruits that are more damaging than others. Now, in response to the question about orange juice, concentrated orange juice, well, concentrated orange juice would be off the charts in terms of its level of glycemic index. It would probably be close to white bread, which is ranked 100. Watermelon, incidentally, is in the high 70s. Basically, if you're consuming a concentrated fruit juice, what you're getting is a ton of sugar in your system with very, very little of the fiber, the vitamins, the minerals and the nutrients that you're going to get when you eat a fresh, whole, raw piece of fruit. So my first suggestion is to consume fruits from low glycemic index sources such as cherries, grapefruits, apples and pears. Number two, limit your consumption of fruit to no more than two to three servings per day. And number three, consume fruit in its whole, fresh, raw source, not in a concentrated juice source. That's today's question and answer section on podcast episode eight. Remember, feel free to comment on the blog. I'll answer to your questions on that or you can email me@BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Yes, we do have some very cool interviews this week on BenGreenfieldFitness.com but before I go on to those, just a couple of things. We have added some new content this week to the blog and one of the things that I did in July was I taught a nutrition clinic, specifically a race day nutrition clinic for endurance athletes where I talked about the five different ways that we fuel our body, carbohydrates, protein, fat, water and electrolytes, and the specific recommendations for each based off of the logistics of race day fueling and the science behind what our bodies can actually absorb and oxidize during the race. You can check that out@bengreeptelfitness.com and I put a special code on there, BGF08 to actually get a 10% discount on the one hour lecture video and the PowerPoint presentation. And speaking of discount codes, I also received a packet from a company called Cherry Pharma yesterday and they basically sent me a few bottles of this product that is simply concentrated cherry juice with 50 cherries in each bottle. And the idea is that cherries, not only are they very low on the glycemic index, one of the lowest fruits on the glycemic index. So they have a very, very small effect on your sugar level. But cherries are also full of antioxidants. They're full of vitamins and minerals. They have what are called terpenes in them, which are essential oils from plants that our bodies use to actually produce the membranes around our cells. They have flavanols and flavanols in them. And those are the two things that you hear about in wine that actually improve your cardiovascular health, lower your blood pressure, reduce your cancer risk. Well, it turns out that cherry juice has the same type of effect on your body as the good compounds in wine do. And the actual antioxidant compounds that reduce inflammation in this cherry juice, they're called anthocyanins. And in one 8 ounce bottle of this stuff, you actually get all of those positive benefits. I was a little bit nervous, to tell you the truth, about drinking a full bottle, because I could just imagine what would happen to my gastric system if I consumed 50 cherries. However, I've had two bottles in the past 24 hours with no dire effects. It tastes fantastic. I feel great. I'm drinking it to enhance my recovery and give me a good low glycemic index snack. And this stuff calls cherry. It's called Cherry Pharma. Their website is Cherry Farm. I'm sorry, Cherry Farm, not Cherry Pharma, but it's cherrypharm.com and if you follow the link@bengreenfieldfitness.com they're offering a 5% discount if you use the discount code BGCherry. So it's pretty cool stuff. I'm going to start using it for my own training, for my racing, for my recovery. So cherryfarm.com discount code bgcherry. The other thing that is new@benrewfulfitness.com this week is a recipe that I put on there for broiled bananas, which has become a little dessert that I've been utilizing since walking into the house one night and smelling this wonderful sugary banana smell wafting from the kitchen. And it was a recipe that my wife had actually been using for some time and I discovered just recently. And it's very, very tasty. Way a great snack on a summer evening to enjoy bananas. If you, if you like the flavor of bananas and pretty low in calories, it's even better with a dollop of yogurt and a little bit of pineapple. So try it out. Borrow banana recipes, check out cherryfarm.com with the discount code bgcherry and if you're a triathlete, check out the race day nutrition clinic on the website and you can use discount code BGF08 to save 10% on that clinic. Let's move on to our interviews. Interview number one today is with Johnny Gillespie about a 15 minute interview with a yoga master. Hey, BenGreenfieldFitness.com fans, this is Ben Greenfield and I am here with yoga master Johnny Gillespie. And I first came into contact with Johnny Gillespie and his theories of yoga just a few weeks ago down at the National Strength Conditioning association conference where Johnny and some of his associates put on a morning yoga class for everyone who is crazy enough in Las Vegas on the Strip to get up at 7am in the morning. Basically, the type of yoga that Johnny put us through was, I would say, just a little bit unique and maybe slightly different than the type of yoga that you might do at your average club. And so today what I want to do is have Johnny give us a little bit of a feel for what that was all about and also just kind of tell us a little bit about what he's doing. If I'm correct, the type of yoga that we did was called the balanced athlete. But as you listen to this interview, don't think that you just have to be involved with this type of yoga if you're an athlete. But Johnny's right here with me. Well, he's not right here with me. He's actually probably just about as far as he could get from me. Which state are you in, Johnny?

Wilmington, Delaware.

Okay, Wilmington, Delaware. And I'm in Washington state. So we're pretty far away in the two corners of the states. But tell us a little bit about yourself, Johnny.

Well, thanks, Ben. I appreciate you having me on your cast. Yeah, I'm originally just from the Philadelphia area and grew up playing different sports, Was always getting after it, whether I was playing ice hockey or running basketball, and went to college, studied sports management, was always in the gym, always working out. In my early 20s, I had my first injury. Then over the next three to four years, my injuries seemed to mount as I was getting older and I was using my body more and more. One morning I Woke up about 10 years ago and I kind of was sat on the side of my bed and I looked over at my running shoes. I just said, I can't do this anymore. That was the morning that my life definitely took a turn. I went and I took a yoga class, a heated yoga class down in Philadelphia. I didn't know what to expect. I went in it was intense. I felt like I was back in high school in the locker room, the ice hockey locker room. The room stunk and people were warming up, and there was this intensity. In about 10 minutes in the class, I was sweating profusely and being put into positions that were not so easy, and my muscles were firing in all different kinds of ways. And by the end of class, I was lying on my back, just exhausted, and I just had a work ethic that completely challenged me in more ways than I could have ever imagined. When I left, I didn't feel good. And I woke up the next morning and had no plans to necessarily go back to that class. And I felt better, and my back felt better, and I knew that this is probably something that I should do. And that's kind of where it all got started for me.

Right, right. And, you know, it's something like a heated yoga class. You know, I know that something like that might scare some people away. You know, it sounds like, oh, no, that's like putting myself through hell so I can feel better the next day. But it's not really a it doesn't kill you, makes you stronger concept. It sounds like you may have had a lot of toxins in your body, a lot of muscular adhesions that were able to, over the course of. Of your first yoga experience, get worked out. And maybe you jumped right into the thick of things. But as far as people getting involved with yoga, before, you talk a little bit about the type of yoga that you do now, is that how everybody needs to start yoga?

No. You know what, though, Ben? It's great, though, because what happened, though, to me is that I had tried yoga in and out for, like, five years, but I never really tried it in heat, and it was never that intense of a workout when I had done it. The athlete in me was never really challenged. On that day that I went in there and I went through this, and my body was so challenged, and the heat made it really challenging. And you're right, I had lots of adhesions and lots of imbalances within my body. That was what really kind of got me. The next day I woke up, I felt better, and the workout was so challenging, and that is what kind of took me back again.

Right, Right. Tell me about the type of yoga that you do in the Balanced Athlete.

We'll continue the story. As I left, I continued going back to that yoga studio. And then as I started learning more, and first of all, I started realizing that there was a lot more going on than just stretching I was really looking at the yoga from the lenses of a strength and conditioning coach. As I started to study it more, I turned my gaze to New York City and I started driving up to New York City a couple times a month and going from yoga studio to yoga studio trying to figure out really what yoga was. What I found is that there was really no two styles that were necessarily alike. Some got really into the religious and Hindu side. Other styles were just laying on blankets and breathing. There was a lot of different styles. What I did over the next 10 years is started to really pull together what I thought would be the most beneficial approach to working with athletes. That's how the balanced athlete was created.

Okay, okay. So how does the balance athlete in some specific ways differ than say, some of the average yoga classes that you went to when you were trying out these different forms of yoga?

Well, first of all, what we do is we try to keep it as kind of non dogmatic as possible. We teach the mental aspects of it, which is just making sure that you're able to keep your mind in a present state, which is what athletes call the zone. We cue the movements from a very scientific perspective and mostly just dealing with the understanding of the kinetic chain and how the feet work with the shins and how the shins work with the thighs, and basically how force transfers through the feet, up through the body and through the spine, which is, as you know, one of the most important parts of developing and training the athlete is making sure that force transfers effectively and at the highest amount of output from the feet all the way to the head.

Right, right. And I thought that was really interesting because with a lot of the clients that I work with here in Spokane, sometimes we will warm up or we'll cool down with some simple yoga moves. And a lot of times we're wearing our shoes. But one of the things that you really harped on down there at the conference was we were paying attention to our feet, to our toes, to the flex in our toes, to the contact of our feet with the ground. And I thought that was a really interesting concept. How would that type of thinking help the non athlete?

Well, I mean, when we really look at the feet, I mean, they're the foundation for the body. So whether we're talking, I mean, you know, I like what Nike says, they say if you got a body, you're an athlete. So whether I'm dealing with a professional baseball player or whether I'm dealing with a 65 year old grandmother, no matter who it is, structure is structure. So the grandmother needs to have her feet strong so she's able to stand upright and not lose her balance. The athlete has to have their feet strong because it's where all their power and their force is being transferred into their body.

Right, right. So another question regarding athletes. Would yoga be just for the ability to, say, prevent injury, to warm up, to enhance performance, or are there also metabolic or health benefits to being involved with yoga?

Let's look. Let's take a step back and just look at really what yoga can do for the human body, regardless of the athletic nature. What yoga does is it works on creating connection throughout the kinetic chain of the human body. It creates connection through the feet, into the shins, into the thighs, into the pelvis, through the spinal column, and then through the arms. So as you learn to move yourself through the postures effectively with safe biomechanics, you're working on creating muscular strength throughout the body and connection. So you're absolutely going to be burning calories, particularly if you wind up being in a warmer room or you move through the practice with a lot of awareness and strength within the alignment.

Well, you know what? One of the things that I notice with the people who I work with is that they have poor posture. The average person has kind of a hunch in their low back. They. Or hunch in their upper back. They arch their low back, they kind of display that I've been sitting in an office chair all day syndrome. And I've really noticed that those people especially respond to yoga favorably. Their back pain disappears, their posture improves. Is that something that you've observed in your practice?

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Because what happened a lot, and it was one of the major things that I was kind of suffering from, is that most of the traditional forms of exercise and sports that I was doing up until the point when I got into practicing yoga, was not necessarily working my spinal column in a way that was going to create strength and balance. What the yoga postures do is they help you create stability and mobility within your spine, which for many people, they're just not really moving their spine very much. So if it's imbalanced as you continue to live, or if you're an athlete, you continue to move your body, eventually the back starts to hurt. And then there needs to be some type of a modality that's put in place that helps realign the spinal column. And that's specifically what yoga does, is it works on realigning the muscular skeletal structure of the human body, which is of utmost importance, particularly if you're an athlete because you're moving your body and you're challenging your body so much. It's very similar to a car. If you don't get your tires realigned, your tires are going to wear really fast in certain areas. So what's lacking in the athletes field, as well as just the general human field, is a system of exercise that helps realign and continually balances out the musculoskeletal structure of the human body. Now, it doesn't not only affect the musculoskeletal structure, but it affects the neurological system. It's going to affect the endocrine system, the circulatory system, lymphatic system, and so forth and so on. And this really starts getting into the science of yoga and how the asana practice really works much, much deeper levels than just muscles and bones.

Right. Right. Now, I had one final thought, and I'd like to hear your feedback on this regarding yoga. I'm a triathlete. I'm an ironman triathlete, actually. And one of the things that you see a lot in strength conditioning research is that static stretching, meaning holding a muscle in a stretch for an extended period of time, can actually reduce the amount of force that a muscle is able to produce. And one of my pet peeves is when one of my athletes approaches me and says, well, I don't want to stretch because I'm not going to be able to produce power on the bike. I'm not going to be able to extend my hip on the run. And my take on that is that, you know what, it doesn't matter if the muscle can produce a large force, if you can't stay in your aero position on the bike for three or four or five hours, or if you can't rotate your hips through a range of motion when you run, that allows you to run two or three hours without your back locking up. And I don't know, do you have athletes approach you with those concerns? Like, I don't want to get too flexible.

Yeah. I mean, you know, every once in a while you do. You do get people like that. But pretty much the response that you just gave would be one that I would give is that, you know, it's like, I would use the slingshot analogy, that if you can't pull the slingshot back very far, you don't expect to get any power out of it. And I think one of the biggest misinterpretations of yoga, and because there's so many different styles, I'm sure there are plenty of styles out there that will just statically stretch. But with the Balanced Athlete program, we're not really focusing on statically stretching. What we're working on is engaging muscles throughout a chain. So we don't just work on stretching a muscle versus we're working on engaging the foot. And as you engage the muscles of the foot, pulling those isometric contractions that force into the shins and into the thighs. So what you're doing is you're starting to create a connection, a neurological connection between the foot, the shin and the thigh. And that's what makes the Balanced Athlete program so different. But now if you're dealing with somebody who has some injuries or they have range of motion limitations, it really falls back into what you just said. You're not really going to get very much power. You can't get into the right position on the bike. You can't get your arm straight up over your head to catch a football when you're a wide receiver. It doesn't really make any sense. And I think there needs to be a lot more research that goes on that can kind of debunk some of these myths. But my final comment would be it's very, very inaccurate to put yoga and stretching in the same category because they're very, very different.

Right. There's. I would say. And my final comment is that there is a huge amount of personal physical awareness when you finish a yoga class that you simply do not get with almost any other activity in life. So all you listeners out there, if you haven't tried yoga, I highly recommend that you give yourself at least one go of a yoga class or a yoga video or some sort of yoga resource that allows you to introduce yourself to the practice. And I know that Johnny has a website. What's the name of your website, Johnny? It's balancedathlete.com balanced athlete.com it's not the balanced athlete. It's just balanced athlete.com.

Yes.

Okay, so check out balancedathlete.com for more information on Johnny and his program. And Johnny, I want to thank you for joining us today@BenGreenvilleFitness.com and we look forward to maybe down the road hearing from Johnny again at the Balanced Athlete. Thanks, Johnny.

Thanks, Ben.

Interview number two this week is with Tim Yuri, licensed massage therapist extraordinaire. And I wanted to have a little conversation with Tim because he's literally saved my butt this season in terms of keeping me injury free for the Ironman triathlons. And really all the triathlons that I've been Involved with. I've seen a huge difference in the responsiveness of my muscles, the frequency of my injuries in terms of their decreased frequency, and the enhancement of my performance when I've been working with Tim. And the question is, how the heck does this happen? Why does it work? And I've actually got Tim sitting right here beside me in my office. Frankly, I'd rather be downstairs on his massage table. But I wanted Tim to kind of give our listeners an idea of why massage therapy can actually make you perform better or reduce your risk of injury. So what would you have to say to that, Tim?

Well, I would think that the first thing on that is that improving the flexibility in most of your athletes should be a primary goal. Especially with a beginning athlete that's maybe not competed or trained for a large period of time, the massage generally just lengthens the muscles, increases the circulation and makes you more flexible, thereby improving your performance and getting away from some of the injuries that you may be prone to.

So one of the things that I notice is when I come in and I get a massage with Tim, like, we work on things that are specific to the muscles that I've really torqued that week in my training. You know, say I've had a hard swim training week or I've really hit the hills hard on the bike and he's always got something different that he does based off of the state that I'm in. And I don't know, can you talk a little bit about what you would do with, say, okay, let's say, for example, a swimmer. What would you do with the swimmer who came in and swam really hard.

That week with a swimmer or any other biker or runner, if they're in like, call it like a tune up mode with their training and their massage therapy, where the massage therapy is worked right into their training, just like a run or a swim or a bike ride would be. They'll come in after, say, a really long or maybe really vigorous swim with some little tick, some little ache that's not common to them. So that way we can isolate it, work really specifically and return them back to their perfect function. Really, as long as they stay in that, they're usually pretty easy to work on and you're just making fine adjustments throughout the race season, not major repairs.

And like, you know, I know when I go in after, after a hard swim like that last time I had pain in my shoulder and it was just in my left shoulder, like, what.

Did you do that was. Yeah, that was just infraspinatus and Terry's major and minor. And that was just a little bit of cross fiber friction there at the, the musculotendinous joint where it seemed to be a little bit of a tear maybe really fine. A little bit of scar tissue starting to build up, a little bit of adhesion broke that up, restored the free movement to the shoulder and then off you went.

And okay, let's do another example. Like I came in another time and my IT bands were super tight, huge running volume week. And in that case, what's the strategy?

Yeah, that was right after iron, then Coeur d'. Alene, right? Yeah, well, the strategy after that was following a pretty big race. The IT bands were significantly inflamed. So we did work on fairly aggressively but at the same time worked more circulatory stretching myofascial release rather than working deep tissue into the muscles themselves which of course tie into the IT band.

So I've got this tip for you runners out there when you, when you talk to your massage therapy. I mean I'll have Tim tell you about this, but there's like one muscle group that we've been working that has left me with a ton of spring in my step. Well, there's a few muscle groups, I mean Tim usually hits like the calf and the soleus. And that's something that if you as a runner are getting a massage your therapist should be getting every time because the, what's called the gastrocnemius and the soleus, those things get, they get adhesed, they get stuck together and you got to work those out. But there's one other muscle group for runners that Tim's been working on this year that I've seen a huge improvement with. And you want to talk about that.

For a second, Tim? I'm thinking that's probably the adductors really started to notice it a lot in Ben. I think it was a little bit with speed increasing in his running. Like you said, the gastronemia soleus, always a big concern in the runners but then I think as their speed goes up, so does the, the stress place on those placed on the adductors. And I believe those should probably be thrown into every treatment too. Not a real enjoyable muscle to have worked on, especially if you're doing more of the myofascial release on it and actually freeing up the movement of it. But the long term benefit I think, well, should be pretty obvious probably to you, Ben.

Yeah, I mean I've, I'm, I've been getting a massage from Tim about An hour or so every week. And there's been some sometimes of the month or sometimes of the year where I can only make it in once a month. And even that I've noticed a huge difference. And one of the things that happens is that when you haven't gotten a massage in a long time, you feel really sleepy afterwards and you just, you gotta suck down water the rest of the day and usually you collapse in bed that night. What's happening? I mean, why does that happen?

A lot of what you get there is you get a lot of just chemical release from your body. Dopamine, serotonin, dopamine is huge, very similar to, or it's a pain fighting drug, basically that's released into your system. So I guess, you know, after you haven't had a massage for a while or if you've never had one, you're really sensitive to the big dumps of those.

It's like toxins almost.

Basically.

It seems like some of it is like hormones, dopamine. But yeah, I mean, with the muscular adhesions and the damage and the inflammation in those muscles, I'm convinced that there's quite a bit of immune system deficiency that can occur if you're never working those out of your muscle. And so, I mean, that's why I think people should be getting regular massages. But as a matter of fact, I know that Tim in about two minutes has to leave my office and head back out to go work on. I think it's what is a triathlete or runner? Another triathlete coming in. But he does have a website. It is therapproach.com like the word thera t h e r and then approach.com and Tim's contact information is on that website. So if you have more questions about massage or how you can work it in your program, whether you're an endurance athlete or whether you're just the average weekend warrior who needs to get rid of a nagging ache or pain. I look him up. He's a good resource on massage therapy. That's Tim Gilreith. Hey, thanks, Tim.

Hey, thanks a lot, Ben.

All right, folks, that is all the content today from BenGreenfieldFitness.com hey, go to the itunes podcast page. Leave us a rating. Leave us a comment. We love to hear your feedback on the podcast so that I can make it that much better. Also remember, at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, you can go comment on any of those blog postings. We can get some good discussions going until next time. This is Ben Greenfield signing out.