Podcast Episode #87: Fitness & Nutrition Q&A and a VERY Cool Announcement for Anyone Who Has a Phone.

In this podcast episode combining something called the Beachbody Insanity Workout with endurance training. Should you wait until you're thirsty to drink? Something called Forskolin for fat loss, half Ironman nutrition, staying warm during cold water swims, energy bars for appetite control, and a very cool phone feature from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Hey podcast listeners, it's Ben Greenfield and today we are going to have a fitness and nutrition Q and A along with a very cool announcement about some features I'm offering you to your phone. But the reason that we actually won't have a featured topic today is because the feature topic was released earlier this week in a special midweek update with Chef Todd Moore, who I promised you I was going to get on a video podcast and I did. Chef Todd and I sat for about 45 minutes or so and chatted about cooking method and how it could really be used to enhance your nutrition, help you to make smarter, healthier meals, and really kind of wean you off of recipe books and teach you how to make inventive recipes out of healthy food, especially for people who are maybe afraid of being in the kitchen or just, you know, need to expand their nutritional horizons. So I did get a couple of comments on that post that some people had trouble with the audio on the video. If you subscribe to the itunes podcast, the video did come through on that just fine. So make sure that you're subscribed to the itunes podcast if you're not already. And then I also have updated that video and so if you download it now to your computer, you can watch it and it will work just fine if you want to download it to watch it later. For example, you're not connected to the Internet and then you also have access to the audio version on that same post. So check out this week's midweek special update because it really contains a lot of good information from Chef Todd. And also check out the cool new promo video that comes right before this podcast, podcast number 87, where chef Todd tells you even more about what his web cooking classes are all about. So we're going to have just a couple of special announcements and then move straight forward into this week's Listener Q and A. Special Announcements Special announcements for this week. The first big one. I know you've been on the edge of your seat since you heard the introduction to the podcast, but I'm offering now a way for you to get information from me via text to your phone. Here's exactly how this works. I know that some of you are out running or bicycling or working out or traveling and you don't have time to sit down in front of your computer when I tell you about stuff. But maybe you want to find out the information later on and you don't want to have to remind yourself to go do it. Well, here is what you can do if you text the word Fitness to 411247 as in information 24. 7. So if you text the word Fitness to 411247, what happens is you will get a text back that gives you a link where you can go sign up to receive special announcements from me, receive things like the links that go out in the podcast, show notes and just basically have a little help from me to stay on top of your game when it comes to fitness and nutrition. The other thing that will happen when you text the word Fitness to 411247 is that you will automatically be included in any of the special text messages that I send out in the future. I promise I'm not going to be sending out a lot of these. I know that it actually does on some plans that are that are paid plans. You know it costs for you to get inbound messages. I'm not going to be sending you five messages a day. But basically every once in a while I will shoot out a text to people who are opted into that text feature that will give you access to some stuff that nobody else gets. And so you know it doesn't doesn't cost you at all to have access to that stuff. All you gotta do is just text Fitness to 411247 and I will make you part of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Text vip and you'll also be given a link where you can join the email VIP list as well. So you get quite a few benefits when you text the word Fitness to 41124 7. So definitely check that out. Along those same lines, My body transformation club is rocking and rolling. People are doing awesome. You're getting fitness and nutrition mailings every single week to your mailbox, access to a secret video page. All that is $7 a month. If you're not a part of the Body Transformation Club. You really can't go wrong with this. I mean, we're talking about a few cents a day to be a part of an awesome amount of accountability and instruction when it comes to transforming your body. So check that out. And then just a couple other things. Remember that if you're a triathlete, you can get your video recorded swim, bike or run workouts analyzed by me and I will essentially take your videos. I put a link in the show notes, you can read all about this. I'll take your videos, I'll analyze them, do voiceover, tell you everything that you could change. But it's basically like getting a biomechanical analysis, except it's online. And also for you triathletes out there, not only am I teaching that Coeur d' Alene Ironman Triathlon camp from Sunday, May 16 through Wednesday, May 19, but I'm also teaching a clinic very soon. On Thursday, April 8, a free Ironman clinic to anybody who's kind of in the Northwest in the Coeur d' Alene Spokane area. You can take advantage of that. And it's going to be at Pilgrim's market on Thursday, April 8th at 6pm so just show up Thursday, April 8th at 6pm Bunch of cool Ironman info, basically. Nutrition tactics, pacing tactics, all that good stuff. So finally, to wrap it up, if you heard about the cell phone announcement and being able to text the word Fitness to 411247, you don't have a cell phone, but you plan to get them in the future. If you want to take advantage of this now, I'll also put a special four form in the show notes to this podcast where you can just enter your phone number there and you'll be a part of that. If and when you do decide you want to do some texting, it's going to be available there for you. So those are all the special announcements for this week and let's go ahead and move on to this week's Listener Q and A. Listener Q and A. Remember, if you have a question for the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast, you can just email BenGreenfieldFitness.com you can call to 877-209-9439 or you can Skype to Pacific Fit. So the first question here is from listener Kelly and Kelly says, I know you appreciate my question, so here goes. I have a couple of girlfriends doing the Beach Body Insanity workout and they are trying to get me on board. I was thinking, no way, since I'm training for a marathon. But as I started thinking more, perhaps it's fine to supplement with my running program. What do you think or what do you know about this program? Alright, so Beachbody Insanity workout. If you've heard of P90X, if you've heard about any of these kind of metabolic resistance training workouts, CD sets, high calorie burning type of interval routines, this falls into that category. You know, they claim you can burn up to a thousand calories in an hour. Most people I know, including myself, need to be working at about a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 in order to do that. But it's a lot of maximum heart rate, total body type of interval workouts. And don't get me wrong, all that is great for getting into shape. However, if you're trying to combine that with a endurance training workout, you're going to be looking at over training and you're going to be looking at reduced quality of your endurance based workouts unless you really moderate the extent to which you're doing these other workouts that are designed to completely destroy you. So my recommendation is that if you're going to incorporate something like beach body insanity workouts into your training, that you not overdo it, that you not be doing them every day. I would recommend no more than three times a week that you do these workouts, that you not do them seven days a week, and that you make sure that you properly recover after each one and preferably prioritize any type of marathon style training that you're doing to get you ready for a race before you hop into these high intensity intervals that will get you into shape, but may also detract from the quality of your other workouts. Especially if your marathon based workouts are also including intervals and speed work and all the things that they should to make you a better marathoner. So yeah, you can combine the beach body and sanity workout with the endurance training. You'd probably get some benefit from doing so, but you would just not want to go six days a week or seven days a week on something like this. I would moderate it at least 48 hours between these workouts and you should be good to go with that. So great question. Now the next question is from listener David who says my wife does not drink enough water. She admits to this as well and fails to drink water from a lack of thirst. She has a history of kidney stones and so her need to drink more water is evident. Her dad, who I bike with regularly, also does not drink much water. He hardly ever brings two bottles on a ride, even when the ride exceeds 50 miles. Does some people just not get thirsty? Can this be healthy? And can there possibly be an underlying reason for their lack of thirst? If so, do you have any methods to re thirst and rehydrate? Perhaps? It's a great question. There are some people that do not tend to get thirsty quite as easily. But there has been some research done on the link between thirst and dehydration. And what happens is that in most cases, once you've lost about 2% body weight, that's when you start to get thirsty. Because at that point, what happens is the actual water content of your blood has dropped down to a low enough point to where the salt concentration of your blood is high. And that sends a message to the thirst center in your brain that tells you to drink. Now, I suppose, even though I haven't seen any research to back this up, that it's possible that maybe some people's thirst centers in their brain aren't quite as responsive as others. But what it ultimately comes down to is that you shouldn't wait until you're thirsty to drink. Ideally, during most forms of exercise, you should be taking in the equivalent of about one bottle of water per hour. Now, in the case of your dad and your wife, I suppose it's possible that they are perspiring a little less heavily. It is possible that they are perhaps very thin and are not actually working quite as hard. Or it's possible that they're maintaining their body temperature a little bit better because they have more body fat and more water storage in that body fat. I mean, there's, there's a host of issues here that could be at play if they're not getting thirsty. But ultimately what it comes down to is they shouldn't be waiting until they're thirsty anyways to drink, and they should be consuming close to that bottle of water while they're exercising every hour. So if they're looking for enhancing anything from speed, which relies on proper hydration because your speed is going to drop by a certain percentage for every percentage of body weight loss, or if they are focusing on fat burning, which requires a water molecule for the beta oxidation process of fat burning to occur, either of those benefits are going to be diminished if they're not drinking water. So you can come at it from that standpoint that, you know, say, hey, if you're not thirsty, you should at least know you're not going to burn as much fat and you're not going to be able to go as fast. And so you're not going to get as much benefit out of this ride. So, you know, a good comparison to draw would be you get a ton of benefit out of consuming branched chain amino acids while you're out there, but your muscles aren't getting sore necessarily, and telling you that you need them, you just take them because you know it's good for you. Coenzyme Q10, same thing. It's great for the mitochondria. You're not going to actually have some mechanism necessarily that kicks in and tells you to eat them because you're getting slower, but you just consume that supplement because you know that it's good for you. So take that approach with the water, and that's my recommendation. So. Great question. And the next question here is from listener Chuck. And Chuck says, can you help me figure my race day nutrition for the Half Ironman when the race gets closer? I can help you figure that out right now, Chuck. Half ironman nutrition is a little bit tricky because you're going faster than you're going in an Ironman, and so you do want to eat a little bit less, especially during the run. And there are some pro triathletes that don't eat anything at all during the run on a Half Ironman just because they're running that half marathon so fast that all they have time to do is grab a little bit of water and they don't want to actually slow themselves down by fueling. Now, granted, they're, you know, running anywhere from 110s up to, you know, 118s and a lot of us are out there an hour and a half, two hours, over two hours. And so we definitely do need to consume some food. My rule of thumb for the Half Ironman is that you really take care of yourself nutritionally on the bike so you can get away with eating a little less on, on the run. So in most guys, Chuck, that means that you're taking in anywhere from 300 to 400 calories an hour during the Half Ironman bike, and you're starting to taper off that caloric consumption when you get about 20 minutes away from getting off the bike and getting ready to run. What I do during the run is I fuel pretty minimally. I get down about 50 calories every half hour, just barely enough to keep myself going so that I can maintain as much speed during that Half Ironman as possible without actually bonking from completely depleting my glycogen levels. So the idea is you feel very well on the bike and you don't feel quite as much on the run. So 340 calories an hour on the bike, right around 100 calories an hour on the run. If your hands start to get tingly and you're getting dizzy and you're feeling yourself start to bonk, then you definitely want to take in more than that on the run. But practice a few of the half marathons off the bike or half marathon pacing off the bike and see how much you can actually eat and get away with keeping the speed up. In most cases. If you're getting over about 150 calories an hour, it starts to get tough to really maintain speed because you're shunting so much blood into the gut to help digest that food for the swim. When you're coming out of the swim, yeah, you can take a gel and a couple electrolyte pills and transition. You do lose a little bit of calories and salt while you're out there, but it's not completely necessary. It really depends on how fast you are. You know, if you're planning on doing anywhere from five and a half hours to under, you can get most of your fueling done on the bike. So I hope that that broadly answers your question. And you know, of course I do a lot more specific nutrition consulting. If you want to like a full on half Ironman plan, we can do something like that. But that's, that's kind of the basic overview of what you'd be looking at. And then a follow up question from Chuck. He's doing the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon in May. He says the water temperature is going to be about 54 degrees for the 1 1/2 mile swim. Besides my wetsuit, are there any other things I can do to not freeze to death in the water? I've heard wearing a second swim cap might help. Yeah, you could wear one of the neoprene swim caps. Technically if you are One of those, for example, Blue 70 makes one, you don't need two. One of those is enough to keep your head warm. You definitely want to wear the full length wetsuit. You want to wear the gloves and the booties. They make the neoprene gloves and the booties that can go along with your wetsuit. But then the other thing that you can do, and this is something I've talked about before, is you can use a muscle warming cream or muscle warming rub to actually bring a little bit of blood flow to the extremities to keep you warm. This is a strategy that I've used before. There's one made by a company called Greyhound and I've reviewed it before@BenGreenfieldFitness.com if you go there and you do a search for Greyhound Muscle worm, they actually make this rub on. It's like a deodorant stick and you put it in the places that you want to keep warm during the swim, particularly the shoulders, the arms and the extremities or the legs and it helps out quite a bit. It has things like cayenne pepper in it, some essential oils that bring blood flow to the surface of the body. Definitely make sure that you do not touch any sensitive areas of your body such as your eyes or your lips or your crotch after you put this stuff on because it does burn. Also make sure you don't touch your goggles after you put it on because it's fat and oil based and it'll smear your goggles. But that stuff helps out quite a bit. It's a great question. Okay, we have a special announcement because listener Rick asked a question. I thought it was a great question because we haven't talked about it much before, but Rick has actually won a free month of membership to my Body Transformation Club for answering or for asking this question. So every week I am going to be giving away a free membership to the Body Transformation Club to the best question. And if you want to claim that free membership that you won, just shoot me an email and I'll actually give you the code that's going to allow you to to sign up for the Body Transformation Club and get that first month 100% free. So email me Rick if you want that. And that's open to US Customers only. I will still answer questions from international people, but the Body Transformation Club because it's mailed in the US And I'm paying postage for all that. We can't actually do it international, not for $7 a month, because it's just, it's too good of a deal and I really can't. You can't jack up the price just to justify postage to international customers. So let's get on to Rick's question. Rick says I have gained valued information from your podcast. Thanks. I've heard many good things about Forskolin. What do you know about it? Do you recommend supplementing a training regimen with this herb? Any information would be greatly appreciated. Okay, so here's the deal, Rick. Forskolin is actually a plant extract and the way that it works is when your muscles contract one of the elements that's necessary in the cascade of chemical signals to actually help your muscle contract and help your muscle cells signal to one another is something called camp or camp. And there's an enzyme called adenylyl cyclase that actually acts, activates the C amp. And the idea behind taking the Forskolin is that it actually enhances or speeds up the activity of that enzyme. That's the way that a lot of sports performance aids and fat burners and things like that work is they speed up the activity of enzymes that are responsible for activating certain reactions. It's the way a lot of drugs work, too. You either turn off the activity of an enzyme by decreasing its prevalence or its speed, or else you speed up the activity of an enzyme by stimulating it. So the idea behind Forskolin is that it would actually assist you with intramuscular cellular signaling. And so it would be beneficial if you are, for example, combining your healthy nutrition and a fat loss protocol for with something like resistance training or weightlifting. Okay. That's where you would use something like that. I would encourage you to take something like it if you're not exercising at all, just because you're probably not going to be using it to its greatest benefit. But it has been used, you know, in muscle building and bodybuilding for a long time. It's not a bulk you up type of supplement. It just helps you build a little bit more lean muscle and keeps your lean muscle a little bit more responsive during exercise. One of the one, two combos that I recommend to my clients for fat loss actually has the Forskolin in it. It's called Lean Factor. And the Lean Factor, actually one of its primary compounds is that Forskolin. So if you're doing weightlifting and resistance training, yeah, I would definitely check it out. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes to this podcast. And then we have a question from listener Patrick. He says, hey, Ben, I wanted to ask you about a very popular brand of nutritional product that I see being sold at many stores and greatly displayed at a triathlon last weekend. The company is called Pacific Health Labs and they have a popular product that has been around for years, Endurox, R4 and Accelerade. They also have a gel called Excelgel and an energy bar that promotes appetite control. What are your thoughts on these products and how come you don't suggest using these products in training? Okay, well, let's tackle the. Well, basically the whole idea behind the Pacific Health Labs is they were one of the first labs to put protein into their gels. So the idea is that in studies, a 4 to 1 ratio of carbohydrate to protein has been shown to help out with recovery and performance a little bit. So the Excel gel has actually put this formula into their gels and we'll talk about this energy bar in a second. But when you look at the label for the Excel gel gels, what you're getting is water maltodextrin. Okay. That's the dextrin blend. High fructose corn syrup, whey protein concentrate, salt, mono potassium phosphate, citric acid, malic acid, artificial flavor, ascorbic acid, vitamin E acetate, potassium sorbate, sodium benzoate as a preservative and then FD and C red number 40. Now I don't have any issue at all with the whole idea of consuming proteins along with carbohydrates in a gel. For most people, a branch chain amino acid source of protein is actually going to be a little bit better than the whole whey protein that they're using in the Excel gel product. So I'm not a fan of the type of protein that they've chosen. And the other issue is, yeah, they're using high fructose corn syrup. I'm sure you picked that up. Not a huge fan of that. And how the liver actually treats that in terms of propensity to actually store it as fat. And then they've got the sodium benzoate in there and the FDC Red 40 again potential. They're chemicals, they're preservatives and chemicals. And I try and stay away from those as much as possible. You know, the protein carb blend that I roll with, just because it doesn't have some of these issues is is the Roctane made by a company called Goo. And the science behind the Excel gel is good, don't get me wrong. But I'm not a huge fan of some of their ingredients. So I'd recommend you go after the Goo Roctane. Another good brand. Hammergel has a good brand out there. I think they've got proteins in their gel now as well. So I would recommend those over this product. And then if you go to the, the energy bar that you're talking about is called a Forza GPS bar. And it's kind of a, kind of a new bar that they've come out with. And the claim by Pacific Health Laboratories is that they use a patented blend of fats, proteins and calcium plus fiber to activate the body's natural appetite control signal. So they've got four flavors, chocolate, peanut butter, cranberry nut Chocolate decadence and, and caramel chocolate. So let's go ahead and check out the ingredients on these bars. The first ingredient is granola, which is made out of rolled oats, sucrose, canola oil, honey and molasses. And then soy nuggets made out of soy protein isolate, tapioca starch and salt, dried cranberries with added sucrose and sunflower oil inulin. And that's where they're getting their fiber, nutrient, Completely nutrient empty fiber, but it's fiber. Rice syrup, glycerin, sunflower oil, agave syrup, which we have talked about before on this podcast. Very high in fructose, almost 90% fructose. Agave syrup is almost equivalent to like a high fructose corn syrup milk protein isolate, sunflower seeds, rolled oats, pumpkin seeds, fructose, dicalcium phosphates. Threw a vitamin profile in there. Looks like vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin E, folic acid. So they've got some vitamins as well. Then that's the cranberry nut flavor. Pretty mixed feelings on this. You're getting a lot of wheat products or oat products, I don't know whether those are non GMO or gmo. Getting a lot of sugar, a lot of the high omega 6 content, free radical content, vegetable oils. You got the soy in there. There's quite a few red flags on this bar. Yeah, they threw fiber in there so they could, they could claim that it's going to control your appetite. But I mean, man, there's so many other things in there that are going to stimulate your appetite and do some metabolic damage. Let me throw this out in comparison to you because here's one that I use. It's called the Cocchia bar and its ingredients are organic coconut, whole chia seeds, organic almond butter, xylitol probiotics, organic agave syrup. Again, you get that fructose in there, non GMO brown rice syrup or brown rice protein, sorry, Acacia gum, organic chocolate liqueur, organic cocoa and a grapefruit seed extract. So again, still getting some of the sweetness and still getting some of that sugar that you're pretty much going to get in just about any bar. But a lot more of the either medium chain triglycerides based fats or the plant based fats that are a little bit lower in the Omega 6 content. Plus a lot less of the preservatives and a lot less of the sugar sources in something like this. And I've actually had the GPS bars, I've had these before and I can guarantee that The Coco Chia bars satisfy my appetite a lot better. I mean, a lot of times when I'm trying out all these products, it's kind of a fun job I have, huh? Eating energy bars and figuring out which ones work. When I find the one that works for me, I mean, I put it up on the website and make it available to you guys. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Patrick, it's a great question. And again, remember, if you have a question, email Ben greenfieldfitness.com you can call leave an audio to 877-2099-4391 or you can Skype Pacific Fit. And remember, brand new feature, you can text the word Fitness to 411247. That's 411247. And you'll automatically get onto the VIP text list and you'll get a response back onto your phone that lets you click through at your own convenience on your own time. And sign up for the VIP email newsletter if you're not a part of of the newsletter yet from BenGreenfieldFitness.com so that's going to be our show for today. Make sure that you leave us a ranking in itunes that helps out the show quite a bit. And also check out the videos from Chef Todd. We didn't get a chance to watch all those last week. Of course, I saw them all. And I've actually started to incorporate a lot of his little tips that I picked up in my cooking. And it's been a lot more fun, a lot more more practical, a lot more tasty, too. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.