The 33 Question Extravaganza on Training, Nutrition, Supplements & More!

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast, 33 Big Fitness Questions answered by Ben. A special post Ironman Hawaii recording with Tony Prasak and me, Brock Armstrong. Top tips recorded live with other listeners of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast and special guest appearances by Vinny Tortorich and Jessa Greenfield. Welcome to the Ben greenfieldfitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness adv 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.

Who starts?

Yeah, who does start? In this case, I think. Let's go. Ladies first.

Hi, guys. Connie Prasak here. It's your host of Endurance Planet and.

Brock Armstrong here from Ben Greenfield Fitness. And I am Ben Greenfield. I am well on my way into a celebratory mode. Cheers. Post Ironman Hawaii. Cheers. If you are lucky enough to be watching the video of this podcast, then you see Tawny, Brock and me on camera stuffing our faces with healthy beverages. Mm. Smoothies all around.

Being a spectator is tough, especially when I'm trying to cover the race to some.

So tough. So tough. So today we're all on our way to the. To the post Hawaii Ironman parties. I believe it's called the plural. The big year. No, the big chain ring. The big chain ring party with Macca.

So who ended up not racing this year due to an illness decided.

Can anyone name these illness? Epstein Bar. Don't kiss him. You guys must know it's like mana. No kissing. Yes, it's kissing disease. Yeah, nobody's gotten that since they were in grade. Farmer dude.

But he still comes out here to do business and party because Maca Mac is one of those guys who knows how to hang.

He knows how to do business and partake. That's right. So. So yeah, we're gonna spend about the next 25 minutes or so for you guys kind of laying out the ins and outs of kind of how my race day went with the goal of hopefully teaching you some lessons and letting you know a little bit about Ironman Hawaii and how the day goes. Brock and Tawny are kind of in charge here. We're going to do a little bit of Q and A style format. We honestly, aside from a very brief discussion at breakfast this morning, I haven't really told them about my race much at all.

And that's why originally we were Going to answer the questions that you guys have submitted on our Facebook page. But I decided I really need to hear this story. Like I've been waiting, waiting, waiting. So I gotta hear it.

So if you're listening to this on Endurance Planet, just tune into the Ben Greenfield fitness episode this week. And we also cover, I think what, like 30 questions from you guys too. Yeah, maybe 40. It's ridiculous. So let's jump in. What questions you guys have about race day yesterday?

Well, you did your bulletproof coffee, so my question is, were you able to find grass fed butter here? Because I wasn't.

Alright, so great question. Bulletproof coffee, it's a mix of coffee. Technically, if we want to be all legal and not get sued by Dave Asprey's lawyers, it is branded by the company upgraded cell.

Did you bring that coffee with you?

Yes, it's from altitude high in Costa Rica. Full disclosure, they actually sponsor me as an athlete and Otherwise it's about $100.

Justify it on his podcast and I.

Understand it, but it is, it is. Why if you're watching the video right now, my nipples are the size of dinner plates. But it's grown high up in the altitudes of Costa Rica and it's low in mycotoxins and mold and fungus and so you don't get a lot of that crossing your blood brain barrier. You blend that with about half a stick of butter and a few tablespoons of what's called medium chain triglyceride oil, which is coconut oil that's been centrifuged and concentrated so that the actual fats in the coconut oil that are easily utilized as energy are able to be taken up more quickly. For those of you who don't know what centrifuge is, it's spun around like crazy. Giant spinner, fast and whatnot. Giant ass spinning machine. Sort of just like Ironman Canada. That is what I consumed prior to the race. And just like Ironman Canada, just a great feeling during the swim, you know, zero blood sugar, surges up and down. Great focus, really nice settled stomach. If this is a bonus for any of you who have trouble with your morning movement, shall we say on race morning, same as Ironman Canada. Ben spent a good half hour. Yeah. So alone time. So I sipped my coffee while I sit there. I mean, full disclosure, this is the way things roll. I sit there drinking my coffee, taking a crap for a good 20 minutes because I honestly don't want anything in my system because I don't want to have to stop during the bike or the run to go to the bathroom.

What time do you start drinking the coffee?

So for a race start, I will try and start the coffee about two to two and a half hours prior to race start. So this race starts at 2am I was gonna be like, I set my alarm for 4:45, had the coffee ready to rumble, made the coffee, Brock walked out just as it was finishing. I dumped the coffee and went in to take a dump. So that was breakfast and I do highly recommend it. Huge change from the sweet potatoes. I used to recommend the oatmeal. I used to recommend everything. Not that that stuff doesn't work, but if you haven't tried this yet, what happens is the fats in the butter and the MCT oil carry what are called the terpenes in the coffee across your blood brain barrier. And this gives you a more intense feeling of focus.

This is my answer, my question.

I asked you, what was your question.

Did you find grass fed butter?

Oh yeah. Oh, that was like an hour ago.

I know. Yes, we all know what bulletproof coffee.

Is at this point when you're travel. When I race in triathlons, I ship my bike. And so anything that is large, like magnesium oil, sunscreen, stuff like that, that's bigger than the 4 ounces or that might be considered food, I put in my bike case. I've never had a problem. And I had a big stick of grass fed organic butter that was in my bike case.

There's one, there's one place out here, Island Naturals or something like that where I've been doing some of my grocery shopping since we've been here. And they have organic butter but they did not have grass fed butter. And I think that would be the only place. Yeah. Okay, so you're smuggling butter across international.

I'm smuggling actually. Hawaii is in the United States of America, Tony. We don't know why. How did America get Hawaii? That's not fair. All right, next, this is gonna be a two hour podcast at this point.

I know, right?

I was gonna add something into the butter thing or the coffee thing. Well, the swim. Let's move on to the swim. Lined up where I usually lined up, far left for Ironman Hawaii, hopped on some feet and stayed on the same set of feet the entire. By that he means he was swimming just back from the feet up to the in front of him, which is a drafting technique. My rule is if I'm drafting and I try to pass someone and I have to work very hard to pass them, I simply fall back and stay on those feet, I ended up swimming A102, which is my slowest swim at Hawaii. I'm not sure if it's because the person I was drafting off swam crooked or I'm just going to blame the whole thing on them.

The water was very calm. I was out on the pier, and it did.

I felt like it should have been a faster swim, but either way, I felt like I didn't work at all on the swim. And I kind of sort of wanted to feel really fresh getting onto the bike. So I literally was not by myself the entire swim and was about 2 inches from a set of feet the entire swim and drafted the whole time.

Okay, so you got out of the.

Water and I sighted once during the swim. That's it. So you were really trusting. When we got well, they slept. Felt like they were swimming pretty fast. So I trusted they're swimming straight.

And did you have people on either side of you or were you pretty much just like.

We were kind of working through crowds and stuff. And so I trusted this guy. And I mean, granted, yeah, I was a few minutes slower than I would have been, but I was so fresh coming out of the water.

Yeah.

So maybe I did cop out by not trying to leapfrog and move up through the crowd a little bit, but.

Sounds like it was good vibes, though.

Yeah, I felt great coming out of the water.

Okay, so as soon as you get on the bike, you're feeling good. How does nutrition start in that sense?

Got my. We've talked about this on previous podcasts. My youcan superstarch mixed up with MCT oil, some amino acids, and what else is in there? A little bit of x2 performance.

They were handing that out in the media room.

They were. X2 performance is kind of like a sponsor for Iron man now. I didn't take any anyways, though. But you added extra stuff. This, by the way, for those of you watching my video, I hope you like my barely washed off tattoos. Those are actually not. He hasn't showered since the rice. I haven't showered since the rice. Ye. Anyways, though, I used that fueling mixture, had it in my bike bottle and used that all the way out to Hawi and felt extremely kind of sluggish while I was riding out to Havi. Excuse me while I pour another bottle of wine. Glass of wine. You might be able to hear that.

There'S some good sounds right now.

That's right.

So is this streaming live or are we.

No, this is. Don't worry, we can. We can edit out all of your cursing Anyways though I felt very sluggish going into Javi. And by the way, Block Brock, Block, Block Brock has disappeared from the video because he's trying to figure out how to plug in his computer. We've got 32%. We'll be good. Well, either way, well, Brock, well, Brock's out gallivanting so you feel really good on the swim.

You get on the bike, you feel sluggish.

I felt what were you.

What was your mind thinking?

So usually during the bike I have this like feeling of kind of like superiority. Like I can just kind of go when I want to go and I can hammer when I want to hammer and pass when I want to pass. And I kind of felt single speed which was really, really weird. And I can only think of three reasons why that would be number one. And this is something that apparently Tanya didn't know until this morning. I thought I told her this before because I knew, I told Brock. But this is my last Ironman triathlon that I'm going to do. There are other things I want to check off in. I'm spending more and more time now homeschooling my kids, less time training. And I just, you know, all respect to the people who have done 30, 40, 50 Ironmans, whatever. If you want to grab my power strip rock, you can try that one too. All respect to those folks but I just, I don't really want to be that 50 year old person. Just keeps coming back to Ironman year after year and beating up my body with that sport. I want to go back after national ranking in tennis. I want to focus a little bit more on some of the music that I've neglected the past few years. I used to be big into music and for the past four years haven't been in a band. After being in a band for most of my life, there's just lots of things that I want to, I want to check off in life. And so. So this was my last Ironman. So that, that's reason number one is I had a real goal going in of enjoying the day and I think maybe part of enjoying the day meant that I wasn't as mot to suffer hard. So that's number one.

I think that's fair.

What was your question?

So do you think part of your reason to step out away from Ironman is the more you're learning about the negative effects of endurance exercise on one's body and the negative health effects, Are you starting to become more of a believer in that and just want to be like, obviously still be healthy and I'm sure you'll still swim by then.

But I'm very, very interested to see after about a year of not training for Ironman, what happens to my blood biomass. Right.

Because earlier this year you were shocked by seeing results.

Because despite my real focus on real food, nutrition supplements, taking care of my body, de stressing everything, I have been concerned by some of the biomarkers, some of the lab values, and I don't necessarily see benefit. I've been doing ironman now since 2007, which isn't a ton of time, but what is that, six years? So after 10 Ironman triathlons, I. That's enough for me.

I've been doing triathlons since 2007. I can't imagine having done 10 Ironmans already.

Yeah. And lots and lots of other races. And so this was my last Ironman.

What a way to go out, though.

Yeah, yeah, kind of. We'll get to that. Okay. So I felt sluggish on the bike, wasn't able to kind of go with the packs of guys I would usually go with. So a few big packs rode past me and I was just like, you know what? I know don't. I don't have it in my legs today. And part of me just didn't really want to suffer. So that was reason number one. Reason number two, that I think I may have been a little bit sluggish on the day was because if any of you follow my personal training protocol that I post to my website, ever since Ironman Canada, all I've been doing is traveling, sitting in airplanes, and training in hotel rooms. And I think that that kind of wears new a little bit too. And my training, I always view Hawaii as more of a fun race because frankly, I don't stand a huge chance of beating all the fast Austrian and German kids.

I listened to a podcast with Vinny and Rich Roll earlier this year and they were both talking about when they released their books, the toll that took on their lives and what you have to do. And you're right there in the book of the book.

Publishing a book on health, like they say is the least healthiest thing you can do is publish a book on health. My book released this week. So BeyondTrainingBook.com released this week in Kona. Huge thanks to guys like Brock who played a huge role in like, you know, Brock was like handing out flyers, doing guerilla marketing.

I saw them everywhere in Kona this week.

But a lot of work on my part in terms of getting final manuscript to the publisher and all that stuff. And I don't want to be that guy that sits around making excuses, but I think that affected my training a little bit. There's a difference between making excuses and having excuses and I think these are legitimate excuses. Yeah, maybe.

So here's the third one. Is that so what I really want to hear the story and that's the nutrition side of things. Like your special needs bag and what happened.

So the last thing that happened. Alright, so lesson learned. Yeah. I make big mistakes sometimes, so I usually try and keep my fuel cold. I actually usually travel to Hawaii with a mini cooler and have it like on ice out in special needs when you turn around on the bike. And special needs in my run bag is on ice. And in my T2 bag, my bike to run bag is on ice. I didn't do that this year. I think maybe it was because I was being cavalier, casual, whatever, but either way, when I got out to the special needs station at Hawi to get my second bottle of quote unquote ketogenic endurance pack fuel, the stuff was warm and it tasted like warm gasoline. That mix of MCT oil and Superstarch fermenting in the hot Hawaii sun for five hours. Big mistake. And I was like, there is no way in hell that I am going to.

If you were to say it tastes like anything, what did it taste like?

It tasted like drinking hot oil. I took one huge swig and almost immediately got heartburn. And I like never get heartburn. And so it was, it was not good. So I pretty much was not doing the whole ketogenic thing from Havi all the way back into town. And so your entire nutrition plan and through the run. So my entire nutrition plan was out the window starting at mile 60 or whatever. So what did you switch to? I switched to bonk breakers on the bike. I switched to coke on the run.

Did you feel sick because of that? Because of what you've been doing otherwise.

All the way down from Javier was like burping up and it was so. It was a little different. It threw me off a little bit. But when I split myself at Javi, I already knew that I was a little slower than I would normally have been. So at that point I thought, you know what? Last Ironman, if I can beat 10 hours, I'll be happy. And so that kind of became the thought at the back of my head was, have a good time, beat 10 hours and that's it. Don't drink warm oil gasoline.

So what do you have on the run.

So on the run, pretty much coke from the get go. Every aid station, really simple scenario. Get to the aid station, every other aid station. So get to every other aid station, about 8 ounces of coke, dump over ice, chew it like an ice slushy during a very, very brisk 30 second walk and then break back into a run. And that was my protocol. Zero electrolytes. I would have actually had electrolytes but my electrolytes were mixed into my water bottle that I decided not to drink. So there's good proof though because I didn't cramp at all. So good proof that you don't need electrolytes even on a long day like Kona. We'll get to it. But there was some serious cramping eventually. But we'll talk about that later. We'll talk about that. That may have been affected by lack of elective. This is really weird. Tawny didn't hear about this. It's kind of funny. I'll put a little picture in there. I had an alien pop out my stomach. It was creepy. So anyways though, so rode all the way back in from Hawi. Felt good, but again just not the same pop in the legs as I usually have. I think I bike like a five. Was I 5 11, something like that? Yeah. So normally being where I'm at right now, I would have biked at 450, 455ish. But it kind of was what it was and rode into transition and felt good going into the run and knew that even though I wasn't the best day of my life, all I would need to do is run a 3:33:40 marathon, kind of suffer through the Hawaii heat and I'd be able to enjoy my last Ironman, be able to smile at folks, love life and still kind of have a decent race. So the run, what'd you think of the conditions?

Because they were, I mean I was there. I've been here four times now. So I'm getting kind of idea of what's bad day, hard day and what's a. Like a mild day. And it was a pretty mild day and everyone seemed to reflect that.

Not a lot of winds. Yeah, the cloud coverage. It actually honestly, it would have been a Good day to P.R. like. Yeah, yeah. Women's record and a lot of people PR'd. So you know, as it was I, I was, I was pretty fortunate to even go under under 10 hours. So. Yeah, it's not, you know, just a little bit sluggish. Not the, not the fastest day in my life, the run pretty much like that every two miles run walk protocol. You know, run through one aid station, get to the next one, do a little bit of ice, a little bit of coke, a little bit of water, and then keep on going and rinse, wash, and repeat. I usually pull the trigger as I'm coming out of the energy lab. I did do one thing that I really recommend to folks. We haven't talked a lot about it on podcast, but I decided to put Peppermint Tums in all my special needs bags and in my T1 bag and my T2 bag. Brock and I, for the YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness video channel, shot a what to put in your transition bags 10 minute long video that would be really helpful for any of you who want to do Ironman. But what we didn't talk about in the video was the fact that I did Indeed put about 10 peppermint tums in each of my bags. And those things really feel really, really nice. It's like a breath of fresh air. Yeah, they do just. They help your stomach feel really nice and they're just like refreshing.

Refreshing.

Yeah. It's like popping a mint. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and search for Stacy Sims. Yeah, she actually talked about in the. Yeah. From osmo. She talked about that on the podcast. Like, that's probably close to a year ago. Yeah. And yeah, it's interesting that you finally got around to trying it.

And I have to ask because it's, you know, the question that everyone wants to know with that sort of stuff is like, did you wait till race day to try that for the first.

Time or did you. I tried it in a couple of the training sessions and in. Did feel really nice. I've never. I probably ate about 10 of them during the whole race and it. And I highly recommend carry me a little noon bottle. Here's the catch 22. Everything I had was blended in those water bottles and run flasks. So from mile 60 on the bike, the only things that I consumed the entire race was Bonk breakers, coke and Peppermint Tums. So that was my nutrition protocol.

Wow.

It was a little diversion of this stuff, but I tasted the version that you did in Iron Man Canada and it was gross already.

Yeah.

And then this one was grosser and warm. You thought this. This one was grosser? Yeah. Oh, did you taste it fresh? No, it was good fresh. The reason why was because I did an hour long. I did an hour long consult with Dr. Peter Attia after Ironman Canada. And we talked about why it was that I kind of sort of bonked a little bit about 13 miles into the run. And we decided that I not only took in about half as many amino acids as I should have taken in, so we added in a bunch of amino acids specifically from a company with which I have no financial affiliation or anything like that. It's called BioSteel. So I did about an extra 5 to 10 grams of amino acids or this was the plan per hour of that. And then also we added in for the nutrition plan. The plan was for the last hour of the bike to top off my glycogen stores with about 600 calories worth of bonk breakers, basically, which is good that you had those because otherwise you would so at least had those. And I don't want to look at a peanut butter and jelly bonk breaker.

Is that what they have in the course? No way. I should know this because I was.

Working at peanut butter and jelly and I did at one point get a coconut cashew. And it was.

They didn't say they were gonna have that on the course.

Well, it was heavenly because after peanut butter and jelly all day, coconut cashew tastes really good to me.

It tastes like poke dough. And honestly, that's like what I ate all day yesterday. And I had poke bowls. No.

And bonk breakers, by the way, folks, they're lactose free, gluten free, soy free. They are a Ben Greenfield Fitness Endurance Planet approved nutrition bar. They're good stuff. So anyways, the run pretty much stuck to my run as planned. So my pace for some race like Hawaii Ironman, where the elements and heat are at play, is I run at a pace that would be slightly embarrassing if you're running with your friends. That's kind of like my. My rule. It's like a pace that you feel like is a little bit slower than what you would like to be running until you get to the point where you're really ready to pull that rip cord and go hard. And for me, that's. That's at about when I have about 10k left coming out of the Energy Lab. And that's. I followed that plan to the T and ran at a pace that was manageable. When I look at your run splits, that's not.

I think the timing map messed up.

Yeah. First of all, Ironman Live messes up run splits. The second thing is that I stopped at the special needs bag for the run for about like two minutes to get all my stuff out.

Everyone's last run split looked like ridiculously fast, like four minute mile.

Oh, I'll get to that. Mine was fast. Oh yeah, mine was fast. So I quit looking at my watch at mile 13 of the run.

Did you have heart rate on or anything?

No heart rate, no. I race Ironman by feel.

Yeah.

So no heart rate. Wasn't even looking at time and I was just like, you know what, at this point I'm just gonna enjoy the day. If I'm running down a lead drive and I'm under 10. Great. So I get to the top of Palani Road which for those you haven't been to Ironman is where there's like it's a little under a mile to go. Basically it's about 0.9 miles or so and somebody shouts out, wish I could hunt them down and, and choke them. Thank you so much. They're like you've got five minutes to go under 10. And I'm like, like this is almost a mile.

I'm like, and the best part of the race too, I'm sure. Like, I mean well, it's the part.

That you want to like.

It's an amazing.

Join yourself. Looking good, maybe running your hands through your hair, making sure your hair looks good, zipping up your jersey. And I just took off like a shot and it was the most. There's a video on facebook.com BG Fitness of me crossing the finish line. Brock does like a quick like 10 second interview with me and I'm like that was the toughest quarter mile of my life because when I turned on to a lead drive I looked at my watch and it said like 9:50 8:30 or something like that. Ran past my family, barely even acknowledged them like ran to the finish line and finished in 9:59, 17. And I've never been that wrecked because I've never really had to like sprint out.

That's where that minimalist high intensity interval training really pays out.

There you go. Yeah, maybe. And by the way, we're going to expound on my, on my whole minimalist training protocol. If you listen into the Ben Greenfield fitness version of this show that'll be coming out over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 260 on the five hour plane flight back from Hawaii, I'll be answering about the 30 or so questions that you guys have asked about minimalist training supplements. I use all that kind of stuff. But we wanted to give you guys kind of like the, the, the, the 40, 000 foot overview today. So. Yeah. And then you're right, Brock. I. I did cramp. First thing I did was I went. I went to the medical tent and I flopped. I pretended I was. I was really hurting, and I was surprised they wouldn't let me into the medical tent.

You look too good.

No, I went to the medical tent, and they're like, you're walking. You're able to talk, so why don't you just go walk around? I'm like, seriously, I'm like, if I had a heart condition or something was really wrong with me, you'd probably. You'd think that they'd let people into the medical tent. They'd probably listen to the podcast because. And I'm serious, like, I really did. I really was having to be carried at that point. I just wanted to be cradled. So anyways, they gave me some ice, at least at the medical tent, and then I went and I sat down in the grass and my body went into like. Like full body cramp. Yeah. I didn't know what was going on. He stopped talking, looked panicked, and just was laying there with his eyes bugging out. And I'm like, what? What's hurting? What? What's going on? Brock looks at my stomach and like, right. For those of you watching the video, like, right there, it looks like right under the. We'll move the microphone a little bit here. Okay. So right there, I'll post a photo. Because I did take. I did take a picture. Picture. It was like an alien head popping.

That happened to me once. That happened to me once at a Sprint Triathlon in T2 when I bent over to put on shoes.

I thought I was having a hernia. Yeah, it looked like a hernia. If it was lower, I would have been like, okay, hernia. And so I had all my, like, my post race swim bag stuff just like yard saled right there. I had, like, pheno cane and topical magnesium and like, all the stuff that I.

Meanwhile, everyone else is eating. Eating pizza.

Yeah. And I'm like, Brock, put magnesium on their right. So Brock just like hosing me down with magnesium.

And it was.

It was weird. Like, there was some. There was like a. What was she like a nurse or like. No, she was just a volunteer. One of the volunteers was standing there and she was watching the whole thing, and you could watch it. It, like, went from being that big. As soon as the magnesium hit it, it started automatically. It, like, fluttered really quick, and then it went and just, like, went straight down.

Was it your, like.

It was. It was my actual rectus abdominis was like it exploded. It was crazy though. Like really weird. Literally, like you could see it start to quiver and then just went, okay, I'm okay now. I got some magnesium. So I guess, I guess the lesson learned is maybe you don't need electrolytes during the race, but once you stop moving afterwards, you might go into a full body cramp.

Like something similar like that happened to me during T2. It was at the Palm Springs or at the Desert International Triathlon a couple years ago. And I bent over to put on shoes and it was my first race of the season. So my body was kind of in that shock and all of a sudden that like bending over motion and like flexing of my abs caused that. Like.

And that's what happened, right, Brock? Like I tried to sit up and.

Then I was like going like this and I had to stretch out like this. And I felt like I had alien coming out of me.

So lesson to all the listeners out there, don't try to sit up. Unless you want to give birth to aliens. Don't sit up or bend over.

So the other interesting thing that you mentioned this morning when we were at breakfast was that that was actually breakfast this morning was the first full meal you'd even eaten since the race.

Yeah, I don't get so. Well, you had quite a huge bowl. Oh, no. What happened was I had a bowl of random. I had a bowl of rice. What did I put on there? Sardines? Yeah, some sardines. I got rice with some sardines and some nori last night because I knew I would need each something. And then also when we get went to pick up my bike, I had ice cream cone.

Oh, I saw a picture of that.

His ice cream cone was as big as Ben's head. It was not that big. It was a double scooper from Baskin Robbins. It wasn't huge.

Did the sugar rush from that? Was that like a sensation you haven't felt in a very long time?

Probably a total about a thousand calories after Iron man, which is not that much. I personally go ape nuts like about 24 hours after iron man about now. Yeah. You really haven't stopped eating today? Today I've been eating. We went to the power bar breakfast and I ate. And then I'm how far into this bottle of wine? Wow. Well, this could be a bad night. I'm only a quarter inch.

Pace yourself, homie. We got things to do.

We've got a long night tonight.

Meanwhile, Brock's finishing. So I've since we've started this Podcast. I've had this.

No, I'm a total, I'm a total lightweight.

I don't want to embarrass you.

Okay, Let me show those of you watching the video. If you, if you have. Beer ain't drinking.

I know.

If you have.

I know how this works.

BenGreenfieldFitness.com Premium is where you can get the video. You can see here I've consumed about a quarter bottle of wine, maybe. Quarter bottle? Yeah, and I'm already light headed, so that's how much of a lightweight I am after I'm.

How many listeners are we losing right now because of this?

No, we're gaining because we're getting more charming. What we're doing is diluting the quality of our listener base. We're stealing all. Yeah, we're stealing all of somebody else's listener listeners. I don't know someone who has it. I'm sure we're getting better looking and more charming as well. So I guess probably we're saying all of Joe Rogan podcast Highway podcast drunk.

If you're not going to be doing Iron man and endurance stuff anymore, are you still going to stick to the ketogenic low carb?

I didn't say I wasn't going to be doing endurance stuff. Okay, well, like, I'm doing, I'm doing like Israel man. I'm doing Thailand. Like, I'm just not racing Iron Man.

Israelman is like longer than Ironman, isn't it?

No, it's like a half.

Oh, I thought it was longer.

I hope not. So not full Ironman distance?

You should call Dr. Minkoff about that. He wrote the course this summer. You went on vacation?

Yeah, I think I'm going out there to cover the race for every man try, actually.

So are you still gonna stick to the ketogenic low carb high fat protocol? Are you gonna be a little more relaxed with it and maybe still do the workout?

I was telling Brock about this. So I'm starting into mass made simple as soon as we get back. What's that meaning? My goal over the next three months is to put on 25 pounds of muscle. So what that means is we won't be able to see. Like, I used to weigh 210 before I started doing triathlon. I weigh 175 right now.

Now my shoulders compared to yours are skinny.

Over the next three months goal is 25 pounds of muscle. And I was telling Brock this earlier that the amazing thing about being on a mass gain protocol is you can eat pretty much whatever you want. And it turns into muscle. So I will watch my carbohydrate intake just because it's healthy to do so anyways. But I'm not gonna be going out of my way to be ketogenic because I don't need that level of fat burning efficiency because I'm not gonna be doing Ironman.

What about those who don't even do Ironman and just think it's a healthier way to be, like plenty of people are starting to do.

It's not. It's. It's. It's a cool. It's a cool trick to have in your back pocket if you have a long day of exercise to do. It's not necessarily. I mean, from a health standpoint point, like limiting your carbohydrate consumption, avoiding lots of sugars and avoiding lots of starches doesn't necessarily get beat out by some kind of a strict ketogenic diet, at least as far as any research studies have shown. So you're talking about more like a Jimmy Moore sort of approach.

What does Jimmy Moore do?

I'm sorry? He wrote the Jimmy Moore does a ketogenic diet. No, what I'm saying is that I am more of a fan and there'll be more. If you're listening to the Ben Greenfield fitness version of this episode, there's going to be more on just eating real food at the end of this episode. Or if you want to hint now, you can go to tinyurl.com justeateralfood but I am gonna be taking more of an approach of just eating real food and limiting starches and sugars. And if I were to ever advise someone to do Iron man or ride out an Ironman training protocol and nutrition protocol, which I will continue to do, I'll still be coaching. I'll still be going to Ironmans. All that jazz, ketogenic, fat burning, metabolically efficient diet, whatever you want to call it, still an extremely handy and healthy diet to have for Ironman. But I'm not gonna lie to you, it takes a ton of self discipline and you need to be in it for the long haul. Meaning like a good one to two years to really make it work. Well, Jack Cruz says more like three. Well, it depends on where you're coming from. You know, it is. So for me personally, I'll limit carbohydrates and be careful with starches and sugars and continue a high amount of fats, moderate amount of proteins, low amount of carbs. But how about gluten? I ain't gonna be pulling out the ketone. Blood strips or breath tests time.

I think that's fair. And probably a more relaxed, stress free way for you to be right now.

It's a good way for me to get 70s big. I'm gonna know what that means.

I'm gonna get muscle.

I'm gonna get swole batches. So anyways, we are. We are getting close to the time where we have some serious parting to do. Brock is going to the Ikomo Kai. Is it the. Is Ikomo Kai the welcome back banquet or the awards banquet? Brock is gonna go to the Iron Man Awards banquet. Give it a try. I've given him my, my vi. My VIP ticket to see if he can sneak into that. Well, the VIP section has better.

Oh, does it? Yeah, Every time I've gone there, it's.

An alky hall sketchy.

Well, the alcohol, yeah, that's. It's complimentary with tickets.

And then Tawny and Tawny's boyfriend who's been sitting silently across from here. Everybody who has not yet met Tawny's boyfriend. Yes. Here's John. He's double fisting right now. They're empty. Empty beer bottles. And then my beautiful wife Jessie, who's inside.

Actually, if you see me smiling, waving in this direction, it's because Ben's kids have been playing right there and building forts and it's actually extremely adorable. So I can't help but gravitate towards.

So anyways, Jessa and John, Tawny and Brock and I are gonna go out and paint Kailua Kona red tonight. So we're gonna get going. But for those of you listening in, thank you for listening in. I promise again that if you're listening to this and you feel like many of your questions have not been answered, if you're listening to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 260 we are going to be answering them in this episode. If you're listening to this as part of this week's special episode of the Endurance Planet Sports Nutrition release, just surf over to episode 260@bengaroopfitness.com and you'll get more of that stuff. Hopefully. You've been enjoying all the coverage from Kona Week. It's finally coming to an end. We cannot guarantee there won't be any crazy Instagram and Facebook photos posted tonight.

Do you see how many followers we've gotten on Instagram this week?

We just launched Instagram like five days ago.

It's blowing up, baby. I've been having a good time with that and I thank you. For all your comments and follows. And it's been real fun.

Thank you guys for all of your support. We would never be able to come to Cool Sit on a porch, get drunk, and podcast without you.

So you can't say that everyone is, like, now officially not.

We're never giving money again. Seriously. We've been working our asses off all.

Week, like I said to you guys.

On Friday, trying to deliver mad value to you. And this, now is our chance for.

R R. I haven't been resting whatsoever. Yeah, and I'm not complaining, but, yeah, you definitely don't get to rest a lot here. It's been. It's been a grandma.

It actually is kind of hard. My first good night's sleep last night.

Since we got here. I was out there, finished until almost midnight.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Nice. I slept with my kids the night before Ironman because my wife was at the. Thank God. With me.

With us.

I got her loaded. Yes.

Anyways, I think we should turn this off.

This is. This is degrading. Let's go ahead and press the stop button. Thanks for listening, you guys. Let's get a little clink. Cheers to Kona.

Cheers to Kona.

Beer.

Cheers.

Hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield, and I am here with Vinny Tortorich, and we've got reason number 178 that you need to listen to Vinnie's brand new book, Fitness Confidential. Vinny, what's up? How's it going? Ben, thanks for having me on again. You know, right before we recorded this, you told me something I didn't know, and that was that you cut a bunch of useless, boring content out of the book that you actually include in the audiobook. Yeah, as a matter of fact, it wasn't useless and. Or boring. We cut it out. It was one of my. And Dean Lowry, my co writer. It was one of our favorite pieces of material, but we felt like anything in a book that we didn't feel made the book flow exactly like it should flow. We cut out. As you know, the book reads very, very fast. Oh, yeah. And we both, at the very last minute, as much as we love this story, we cut it out of the book. Okay, so give me a hint. What's the basics of the story that you cut out? We're basically talking about the Beverly Hills types. Actually, the Hidden Hills types. And if everyone knows it's where the Kardashians and all those people live. You know, I work up in that neighborhood every day, all day. And I was talking about the different parties they go to and how they throw their own parties and have their own red carpets up there as if they're, you know, they're bigger than they want. We cut that whole little section out. I could have written a whole book on that. It just didn't flow with the rest of the book that was taken out. Either way, though, there you have it, folks. Insider sneak peek into Hollywood Hills. Another reason, go get Fitness Confidential. Hey, we're gonna put links in the show notes, but you can get it on audible, you can get it on Amazon, you can find it in itunes. And this is one of the best books I've read all year by Hollywood celebrity trainer Vinny Tortorich. Vinny, thanks for tip. Thank you, Ben. Listener Q and A. Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And if you're a regular podcast listener, you know that the past couple weeks of podcasting of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show have been a little irregular, shall we say? We've been doing lots of travel. I just raced Ironman Hawaii. My podcast sidekick Brock was down here in Hawaii with me. And as a matter of fact, this. This particular recording that you're listening to is the Q and A section of basically a podcast that we. We strung together from a lot of content that we gathered while we were down here in Hawaii. So I gotta be straightforward with you. I raced ironman less than 48 hours ago. I'm a little bit knackered, shall we say? I'm sitting out here literally on the porch, the patio, back in our condo here in Kailua Kona, the same condo that you may be well familiar with. If you're watching the video version of this episode or you watch the video version of the last episode, which you can get over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com premium. If you hear golf carts, cars, lawnmowers, kids, stuff like that, that's probably why. But hopefully it's a nice, quiet evening for us here for me to answer your questions on all things fitness, nutrition, and training related. And today we are going to have a little bit of a bent towards Ironman, of course, just because that was. That was kind of the big thing on the radar this week. So I want to get a couple of quick announcements for you, actually. Really, I just want to give you one big announcement, and that is that I had the great privilege of being able to present at something called the Real Food Summit. And my presentation was entitled the Real Truth About Workout. How to say Goodbye to Engineered Frankenfoods and Eat for Exercise with Real Nutrition. That's a mouthful, pun intended. And I was part of an online summit that's free that has 29 other nutrition experts from around the globe teaching you a ton of cutting edge things about real food, basically real food solutions for fat loss and anti aging, living disease free, and essentially kind of getting past all the stuff that big food companies and the FDA and mainstream medicine kind of don't want you to know. So I'm going to put a link to that particular summit in the show notes. It's called the Real Food Summit and I will put a link to that in the show notes. Or if you want, you can go to tinyurl.com justeateralfood how do you like that? Tinyurl.com justeatrealfood okay, announcements out of the way. This is going to be a very jam packed Q and A because I'm going to respond to all of the questions that you all Left over on facebook.com bgfitness and also on the Facebook Endurance Planet page. I'm not exactly sure how many questions there are, but it looks like right around 30 or so. So this is going to be a little bit more of kind of like a replacement rapid fire style podcast. So if you're ready, let's go ahead and jump right in. So we're gonna start off with Kelsey's question. Kelsey says, what specifically do you do or not do as far as active recovery? Well, Kelsey, I'm a big fan of doing as many things as possible to beat what's called delayed onset muscle soreness or doms. And some of the things that have been shown to be most effective, effective in helping you to recover as quickly as possible in terms of actual research studies that are out there. One is warm water immersion. Okay, so I will go and hunt down like a hot tub or some kind of like a sauna spa type of environment. And even more effective than that is cryotherapy or cold water immersion. And even more effective than that is going back and forth between warm water and cold water water. And you can do that in a shower. You can do it by alternating between like a cold pool, hot pool, that type of thing. That's number one. Number two would be massage, massage therapy with a foam roller, lacrosse ball or a massage therapist. And for me, usually post Ironman triathlon, it's a massage therapist because frankly, I just don't feel like rolling around and fighting a foam roller, so to speak, on the living room floor after I've done Iron Man. Iron Man. And then finally one thing that I found to really, really help out quite a bit is high dose curcumin. And there is specifically a supplement that I double up on for my few days after Ironman called phenocaine and it's kind of like a natural alternative to ibuprofen. So that one's called phenocaine. You can get that at Pacific Elite Fitness. You can do cold hot contrast therapy just in your shower and then soft tissue work or massage works really well. Well so those are my active recovery techniques. Dan says. I'm interested in what eight to nine hours of training consisted of, especially with your twins. What exercises did you focus in the gym or at home? How much swimming? Swimming is a time killer for me. By the time I travel to the gym, change, get in the pool, swim, get out, et cetera. Great question Dan. So I those some of you may know I did minimalist training for Ironman Hawaii. I trained about eight to nine hours a week and most of that was out of hotel rooms, hotel gyms and kind of on the go. I was traveling, launching a book and kind of doing quite a few things in the month leading up to Ironman Hawaii. Typical week for me just to walk you guys through this super quick about three 30 minute swims all consisting of very fast 25, 50 and 100 meter repeats. And I never go to the gym or take time to go to the gym unless I'm doubling up workouts. So a swim was always followed or preceded by a weight session or I would bike to the pool or I would in some cases run to the pool, swim, run back. But ultimately swimming especially for triathletes, can be a big time suck. So when you're going with minimalist training because you are having to typically go to a gym to swim unless you've got access to an open body of water nearby, it's always combined with something else else. So typical week for me was Mondays I would bike to the pool and swim. Tuesdays I would do about a 20 to 30 minute high intensity interval run on the treadmill and then lift some weights. Wednesday I would do something similar, bike to the pool and swim. Thursday again I'd run or play some sports like tennis or basketball and do weights again. Friday was usually kind of an easy day, typically yoga, foam roller things along those lines. Saturday about a 60 to 90 minute run and then Sunday about a 1 1/2 to 2 hour hard bike ride indoors, typically using something called Sufferfest videos. And then on either Saturday or Sunday I'd usually try and throw in Another hard swim if time permitted. And I was able to swing by the gate gym sometimes just bringing my kids to the gym, letting them play in the kiddie pool next to the gym while I threw in my quick 20, 30 minute swim. So that's what minimalist training kind of looks like. And you certainly have to go to the pain cave, but that's kind of a glimpse into what my week of training looked like for something like an Ironman. So you know, just super, super duper consistent. That's key. Sam says, how did you mentally feel before, during and after the race? Mental fog. Strength enough to push it, strong enough to keep run technique, good zoning, all that jazz. Sam My number one thing that I do to distract my brain when the going gets tough, which is typically for the last couple hours of that race, as boring as this sounds is I will count to 100 over and over and over again and I'll even play games. I'll say, okay, I'm going to make it to the next aid station, then I'm going to count to 100 and then I'm going to make it to the next aid station and I'm going to count to 90 and then the next aid station I'm going to count to 60, 70. And I just do as a, as a car alarm goes off, I just do very, very kind of boring, repetitive type of things like that to distract my brain when I start to go hard. But that's really the key, is that I pass a ton of people in about the last hour of Ironman because up until that point, for me it's just a matter of, you know, being managed, managing the race and being kind of present mentally and not pushing so hard that I'm not present mentally. So you know, during a race there's just so many things going on. Other competitors, you know, volunteers, spectators, your family, stuff like that. Zoning out has never really been an issue for me. Pardon me for, for being blunt here. But if you're zoning out during Ironman, I think that if that's happening to you, you're either hypoglycemic, your blood sugar is dropping and you need to eat more, or else you're mentally weak and you need to do more meditation, more yoga, more doing things like heart rate variability, training, biofeedback, using something like the HeartMath Institute. You can go to heartmath.org to see what I'm talking about. But we live in an age where we're used to being constantly distracted, multitasking, shifting focus, and, and it does make you mentally weak when it comes to, say, buckling down and focusing for 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 hours during something like an Ironman triathlon. And occasionally that mental fog sometimes is hypoglycemia, but sometimes it just is. You need to do mental training and not just physical training. There's a really good sports psychologist who actually works with our team at Pacific Elite Fitness. His name is Chris Janzen. He has an entire program called Inner Game Training Training. It's the best I've ever seen when it comes to really helping you dial in that mental component. So if you go to pacificfit.net you can check out Chris's program. It's called Inner Game Training. And he works with you to some consults with you. He's got some preset programs that he runs you through. There's kind of some flexibility in terms of what you can do. So check that out. Brian says, I'm guessing you don't count calories. Does this translate to race day? Was your fuel all carb? Was there any fat in your fuel? You probably at this point in the podcast already know. If you've listened in to some of the stuff that we went over leading up to this point that I, that I fuel with primarily medium chain triglyceride oil, which is fat, plus a little bit of amino acids and a little bit of superstarch. On race day, it comes out to about 200 to 300 calories total, total per hour for an Ironman triathlon. And that is because I'm fat adapted and I'm using fuels that allow me to tap into my own fat stores. Normally if I were relying upon carbohydrates, I would eat about twice as many calories as that. But that is the nice thing about metabolic efficiency and using fuels that allow you to tap into your own body fat is that you, you only have to consume about half as much fuel as you normally would. So Peter says, did you hit a wall at any point? I noticed you slowed to a nine minute pace at about the 17 mile mark, Peter. The reason that that shows up on the race split is that is the point where you get your special needs bag. And I took about a good two to three minutes to kind of go through my special needs bag. Grab some peppermint Tums. Grab some. What else did I have there? Some X2 performance. I had to adjust my shoelaces right there. So usually in an Ironman, there's a certain point in the race where you get to that special needs bag and that's where you slow down, down. But no, other than that I didn't bonk or hit a wall or anything like that during the race. It was just kind of a steady pace during the full Ironman. So Mike says, what under the radar supplements did you take and what changes to that protocol would you adjust? So Mike, the things that I took that I think probably Ironman triathletes may not know about. One is marketed as an anti aging supplement. It's called Oxaloacetam. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you do a search for oxaloacetate or a search for anti aging, you're going to find this stuff. And what it does is it allows you to convert lactic acid that you produce during exercise into usable glucose. And so if you are eating like a high fat diet, it actually allows you to generate your own carbs essentially. So that's one kind of under the radar supplement that I use. Used another under the radar supplement. And I don't know if you classify this as a supplement or not, but peppermint tums to coat the stomach and give you a really, really nice feeling in your tummy during the race. That's another one that I've been using a little bit more recently and it works quite well. What else under the radar? I take Chinese adaptogenic herbs about an hour before the race in the form of something called Tianchi. I also do a shot of this stuff called. It's basically hornet extract. It's an amino acid that allows you to tap into your body's own fat as a fuel. It's made by a company called Vespa. And so those would be some of the big ones. Oxaloacetate from an anti aging supplement. I use the upgraded anti aging supplement, Chinese adaptogenic herbs. Peppermint tums and hornet extract. Those would be some of the more kind of under the radar type of supplements that I use. And they all worked great. I wouldn't really adjust that protocol other than make sure that you don't just stuff peppermint Tums into your jersey. I did that and they dissolved as soon as water hit them. Make sure they're actually in like a film canister or a noon container or something like that. So JT says, do you cycle carbs? Was it a window of time or just one meal week? JT for the 12 weeks leading into Ironman Canada, I ate a high fat diet with pretty much only one. There may have been two days where I actually ate carbs liberally for the entire 12 weeks I was a little bit more slack. Leading into Hawaii, I had what you'd probably term a cyclic ketogenic diet where about five days a week I ate a higher fat fat intake and only ate maybe 75 to 100 grams of carbohydrates a day. But then on those bigger days like that Saturday where I did a 60 to 90 minute hard run, or the Sunday where I did a 1 1/2 to 2 hour hard bike, little bit of extra rice or sweet potato with dinner, a little bit of extra red wine, some dark chocolate, stuff like that. So that was a little bit of a change that I did. And it just, you know, for me it was just having a few more varieties when it comes to nutrition and being able to add in those carbs. And I also wanted to experiment and see if it had an effect on body temperature and thyroid. And I did indeed see a surge in my body temperature suggesting that there probably wasn't enough carbs present in my, in my strict ketogenic diet to allow for the adequate conversion of T4 to T3. And so that that affected my thyroid a little bit. And so that was another reason I added in the car carbs, did a, did about a 14 day morning, what's called an axillary and an oral body temperature test and noted a pretty significant effect on my temperature. So Amy says, was there any part of your nutrition or training that you feel better served you in Whistler vs. Kona and Vice versa? Amy, in the, in the video and the podcast that I did with Tawny and Brock that is either coming directly after you hear this Q and A or you've already heard it before this Q and A, not quite sure yet. Because they're stringing this one together, that question is kind of answered. I had some issues during the race in Kona, just some tactical errors on my part where I wasn't able to use some of my fuel. And so I ended up using Bonk Breaker bars and Coca Cola for much of the race during Kona. I felt much better doing kind of more of the ketogenic you can superstarch thing and whiskey than I did using that Bonk breaker Coke approach in Kona. I also did not have a very happy tummy for a couple of days after Hawaii, whereas after Ironman Canada I was fine. So, and that's just because of all the fermentation that happens from all that carbohydrate that you have to eat. So Mike says, at what level of base fitness can you begin minimal training? Mike, this is A question a lot of people wonder. They're like, do you have to have some kind of a big aerobic base to go into minimal training? Training? The answer is no, you actually don't. You can start into minimal training right away. The human body is extremely good at endurance. Read the book Waterlogged by Tim Noakes. To wrap your head around how naturally talented the human body is at endurance, all you need to do is make sure that you're physically active throughout the day. Standing workstations, not sitting for long periods of time, kind of trying to simulate this whole hunter gatherer type of approach. Approach. You know, I talk about a lot of this in my new book over@BeyondTrainingBook.com but if you do all that and just kind of put, put some, some icing on the cake, so to speak, with some high intensity intervals combined with that, it works, works really well. So you can actually, you can jump straight into minimalist training, assuming that you don't have like a sedentary desk job. If you have a sedentary desk job, you need, you either need to hack your life so that you're using things like standing workstations, etcetera, etcetera. Treadmill workstations, commuting to work on a bicycle, staying active throughout the day, or you need to do extra aerobic based training on top of high intensity interval training. If you are kind of painted into a corner where you have a sedentary job. In my opinion, if you have a sedentary job, you should start looking for another job in terms of what it does to your quality of life and your potential for longevity. All right, question from Andrew. Some more information about extreme isometrics, please, Andrew. Extreme isometrics are a form of training in which you, you hold positions like a squat position or a lunge position or a push up position for 60 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes. What happens is when you hold that position, you build up a ton of lactic acid in the tissue and it teaches your body how to buffer that lactic acid more efficiently. Now what I do is I will throw in a bout of extreme isometric, say, extreme isometric squats or extreme isometric lunges after a bike ride or after a run or an extreme isometric push hold after a squat for Kona. I did some of that stuff in the sauna too, and that's pretty much it. I mean, it doesn't get much more complex than that. But I just basically use them almost as finishers to main sets that I was doing or main workouts that I was doing. So just like finishing a workout like a run and doing a two minute isometric lunge hold per leg and it really helps your body to be able to buffer lactic acid more efficiently. And it is pretty tough. Your muscles shake quite a bit when you're doing that. Kurt wants to know how much brick training did you do? Now for those of you who don't know what brick training is, brick is when you're doing bike to a run. Kurt I don't enjoy bricks that much. I think I've done maybe three brick workouts the entire year and for me that means I'll do like that hard suffer fest video bike ride for like one and a half to two hours and then I'll run for 10, 15, 20 minutes off of the bike. And I never really endorse running any longer than 60 minutes after a hard bike ride ride. For me, I'd rather do my brick training by racing. And that's just me. When I finish a hard bike ride, I like to be done rather than throwing on the shoes and going for a run during my training. And if I'm going to do a brick workout, I usually just hop into a sprint triathlon or an Olympic triathlon or something like that. Kevin says, what changes did you make to pre race and in race nutrition from Ironman Canada to Ironman Kona? Kevin Hopefully I kinda addressed most of those questions at this point between this podcast and the video that I did with Tawny and Brock that comes either before or after this Q and A. But I really did not change up much at all. You know, bulletproof coffee for breakfast. You can superstarch MCT oil added in a lot of extra amino acids, about twice as many amino acids as I normally use, and also really topped off the gas tank a lot more in the last hour of the bike to make sure that I didn't experience any kind of bonking issues during the run. Excuse me. And that's about it. So really only a few slight changes. I was under pressure, shall we say, from some biohackers to go as far as to order what's called beta hydroxybuty salts, which are a concentrated form of ketones to elevate my blood ketones really high during the race. Honestly, with all the travel and everything I was doing leading into this race, never had a chance to give any of that stuff a try. So I had thought about kind of throwing those in too. But ultimately the biggest change was more amino acids, like 20 grams of amino acids per hour mixed with About a serving of you can superstar tablespoon of MCT oil per hour, tossed in a little bit of that wasp juice, tossed in some of the X2 performance, about one X2 performance every three hours or so. And that was it. Jim says, do you think that old school long training such as the hours put in by Dave Scott and Mark Allen would have put you at the top of your age group or even above given your obvious physical abilities? Jim, that's called polarized training. Maffetone style training. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you do a search for polarized training, you will see that I have indeed written articles about how effective that form of training is. If you have the time to do 25, 30, 35 hours a week, to do most of it like 80% of it aerobically, to throw in about 20% or so high intensity intervals, yes, that's like a gold standard professional triathlete training program. But I personally have no desire at this point in my life to really pursue career as a professional triathlete. I have a lot of other things going on in my life from homeschooling my kids to writing books and articles to running my businesses and I absolutely could have gone faster if I would have put in hours and hours and hours of training. But that's just not my gig. That's not my wheelhouse. I coach some people with that approach and they do really well. Well, but ultimately for me it's really not, not my cup of tea because it's not really, not really on the radar so to speak for me to try and like go be, be in the top of my age group in something like like Ironman Hawaii, I just don't really have the, the time to do that at this point in my life. So Joel says, what was the extent of your running and biking lengths, Joel? For Ironman Hawaii, my long run was about nine miles. My long bike was one and a half. Actually there was a two hour ride in there. Two hour ride on the indoor trainer with a Sufferfest video. I use Sufferfest. They've got a workout called Blender. They have another one called oh gosh, what's the. If you go to, if you go to Sufferfest or actually if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for Suffer Fest. I've written like a review of all their videos and there's two in there that are two hours long. So for Hawaii, nine mile long run and a two hour hard indoor bike. Kate says you recently mentioned on Endurance Planet episode A new amino acid supplement you were going to use Kate Yes, I used about one packet of it per hour to top off the master amino pattern. Amino acids out of use. And the name of that amino acid supplement was BioSteel. It was recommended to me by Dr. Peter Attia. And it's just a bunch of branched chain amino acids mixed in a kind of a precise ratio for Endurance specifically. So it's called Biosteel was the name of that stuff. And so I did about 10 master amino patterns per hour, plus one of those biosteel packets per hour. So Heidi says, what are the top beginner mistakes made during a triathlon? For example, when the man who was in the lead coming out of the water couldn't find his bicycle, the commentator said beginner's mistake. What are some others biggest beginner mistakes? Number one would be using new protocols or new food during race week because you get under pressure, see other people using something, want to try something new, etc. And so you do it and it messes up you up so you don't stick to your plan. Number two is not knowing the course, getting lost, having a volunteer point you the wrong way. And you have to know the course. It's your responsibility. And I've had a lot of people who kind of don't know where they're at during the race or get lost or, you know, get dinged with losses in time because they just don't know the course. It's your responsibility to know the course. So number one is trying new things during race week. Number two is not knowing the course. And I would say that if I had to name a third, it would probably be going out too hard, too early and fading too fast. It's a really cool feeling to be able to pass lots of people at the end of a triathlon rather than to go out in the lead and then feel like kind of a loser for the last hour because you're walking. So Darren said, how did your weekly average hours break down in terms of weight room, swim, bike and run? Kind of similar to the other question I got David. My weight training workouts are about 30 to 40 minutes long. My swims are 20 to 30 minutes long. My bikes are mostly commuting with one one and a half to two hour ride on the weekends and then my runs were two 20 to 30 minute runs on the weekdays with one of those sometimes being tennis or basketball and then the other run, a 60 to 90 minute run on the weekends. So Matthew says, what kind of strength training sessions did you do? Matthew I did one heavy strength training session on a Monday, which was a actually no, it was on a Tuesday. Five by five, which means like five sets, five reps of squats, overhead press, super slow push ups lat pull downs or pull ups lunges and then some type of a core exercise. So one day was heavy and then the other day I would do bodyweight stuff like suspension trainer, gym stick, trx, that kind of stuff. So that was pretty much how I split it up for the weeks leading into Kona. That worked pretty well for me. It was just easy for me to wrap my head around. So one heavy strength day, one kind of more body weight type of day Scott says Suggestions on the best way to heal a strained calf Two weeks out from my rock race Scott Best thing you can do with the strained calf is a combination of topical ice plus electrostimulation. If you don't have an electrostim unit and you plan on being in this sport long term, just go buy one. Compex makes really good electrostim units. You're going to fork over 500 to $1,000, but you're going to save yourself lots of trips to the physical therapist and you're going to speed up your healing time dramatically, especially when you combine electrostim with ice. That's the number one protocol I could give to you if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you do a search for recovery. I've got a ton of other things. I've got like an entire section of the book Beyond Training devoted to this, but those are the main things Shelly says. What did your weight training program consist of? Kind of already answered that question Shelly, so we'll skip over that one. Hopefully you already got that one. Jared says I'm interested in someday doing a full Ironman, but so far I've only done a sprint triathlon. Do you think there's any advantage to training for and racing the individual events like a marathon, 112 mile bike, 2.4 mile swim before going all out for an ironman? Yeah, I think you definitely have a mental advantage if you have maybe run a freestanding marathon, if you've gone out and done like a longer open water swim race and if you've done a few bicycle centuries before you do ironman. Like if you've actually gone out and competed in those events individually, it gives you a really good training day and it also really helps you out mentally. So absolutely, I do recommend that for sure and it's easy to do. If you go find the local outdoor calendar for your area, you can usually find open water swimming, swims, century bike rides, you know, 25Ks, 30Ks marathons, something that allows you to, you know, at some point, you know, one, two years leading into an ironman that you've targeted to actually go out and get a flavor of what each of those distances actually feel like on their own. So Brandon says on thermogenesis, since you went from a sauna to a cooler area, I would assume that a bigger temp difference had better affect effects. Say hot cold shower versus a warm cold shower. I'm not quite. Oh. And then he says, what is your reason for using cold adaptation? As you don't seem to have much fat to lose. Okay, so if I understand Brandon's question correctly, first of all, when you're doing something like cold thermogenesis, cold baths, cold showers, stuff like that, it's not just for fat loss. You actually get better cardiovascular capacity and a better ability to move blood flow around your body body when you do stuff like that. So ironically, cold thermogenesis actually helps you to be able to handle the heat better because you can shuttle blood around your body better. Now, Brandon also says since you went from a sauna to a cooler area, I would assume that a bigger temp difference had better effects. I have, I have no freaking clue what brand. Oh, I see what he's saying. Okay, so when you're doing, when you're, when you're doing like the hot cold shower treatment, treatments I'm a big fan of for hot, going as hot as you can handle and for cold, going as cold as you can handle. Now, Ray Kronice, who is the NASA materials engineer who recommends contrast showers for doing things like fat loss, says you only need lukewarm water and luke cold, if that's a word, water. But I like to do as hot as I can go to as cold as I can can go. Maybe because I'm just a more is better kind of guy. I just feel it more when I do that. So Eduardo says congratulations on Kona. Ben, will you be putting out a soup to nuts outline of your plan week by week, nutrition exercises, etc. Eduardo, we will be doing, in addition to what you're listening to right now, a premium podcast over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com premium where I actually lay out kind of like exactly what to do if you want to kind of biohack Ironman for four weeks, three weeks, two weeks, one week, and the last few days. Leading up to the event as well as the event day itself. And that's also going to be available as a hidden chapter for anybody who orders my new book@BeyondTrainingBook.com so kind of like the best one, two combo you could have right now. If you want to get your head full of all the knowledge that's necessary for you to really do well at Ironman, but have a lot of time left over in your life for lots of other stuff and also stay as healthy as possible would be to sign up for the $10 a year program at BenGreenfieldFitness.com premium and then grab the new book at BeyondTrainingBook.com all right, Christopher says with a change to a high fat diet, did you have before and after blood work completed to see if there were possible or negative effects? I ask because I was on statins before and I am afraid to go high fat and have my cholesterol and triglyceride numbers go up. Christopher, first of all, read the brand new book by a guy named Jimmy Moore called Cholesterol Clarity because ultimately if your cholesterol levels go up, that in most cases is a good thing as long as your triglyceride levels aren't going to up too. Okay? So first of all, go read that book Cholesterol Clarity or go listen to the interview that I did with Jimmy Moore on cholesterol and it'll be really eye opening for you and you'll also learn a lot of things that are that are interesting when it comes to kind of like helping your body to bounce back from having been on statins. Now as far as blood work, I am going back in for blood work work in about two weeks to see what effect kind of like stopping training for Ironman has done to my testosterone, cholesterol, inflammation, thyroid, things of that nature. But as far as before I even ever switched to a high fat diet, the only blood work that I ever had did show that my cholesterol levels were under 200, which I wasn't happy with because cholesterol levels under 200 are associated with lower IQ, lower testosterone levels, lower vitamin D levels, et cetera. So I'm actually quite happy that in my recent blood work since switching to a high fat diet, I have extremely low triglycerides, very high hdl, high total cholesterol count and low inflammation. And that's kind of a really, really good scenario for good brain function and good nerve function function. So kind of flies in the face of a lot of the stuff that we hear about cholesterol, but that's the way it is. All right. Kyle says, do you think you could have seen a noticeable improvement by adding just one to two extra long sessions a week on top of the minimalist training that you did? Kyle Short answer is, yeah, absolutely. If I would have gone out and hammered a five hour bike every weekend and a, you know, whatever, you know, gone two, three hours on the road run, would I have possibly been able to race closer to say, like nine hours than 10 hours? Absolutely. Would I have missed a lot of time with my kids? Would I have missed a lot of opportunities to learn new songs on my guitar? Would I not have learned all the new recipes to cook? Would I not have been able to spend as much time homeschooling? Would I have neglected my business and my clients? Yes. So, you know, there's always trade offs for me. You know, it's just not worth it to me to go out and be riding my bike five hours doing these super long runs. And you also just, it wears you down. You get injured more easily. And frankly, for me, I feel like I've been able to live life to the fullest while still racing a decently fast ironman. And I'm happy with that. Like, that's great for me. So, yeah, I could absolutely go faster If I train 25, 30, 35 hours a week, but not as significantly faster as would be. Let's put it this way, unless you're going pro, the payoff really, in my opinion, isn't worth it. So, you know, unless you're getting a paycheck when you cross the finish line. All right, Damien says, among all of the unconventional training techniques you used, which one do you think had the most positive impact on your performance? Performance? Gosh, I would, I would have to say the biggest one would be staying on my feet all day and using this greasing the groove protocol of like, you know, five pull ups every time I walk under the pull up bar in my office, 20 body weight squats every time I go in and use the restroom, you know, hanging from an inversion table after I've spent all day long on my, my feet, saving my workouts for the end of the day after I've spent all day long on my feet, basically biohacking your life so you're staying as active as possible so that your trainings, your actual training that you do can be short and sweet. That's the biggest unconventional training technique that I use. I just, I like, don't sit, you know, I try and simulate that kind of whole hunter gatherer moving approach all day long. And that hones in my primal endurance, you know, my natural endurance capability. And then like I mentioned earlier, you just throw a little speed, power and strength as the icing on the cake on top of that. And it works out really well. Just take some lifestyle changes. So you know, when it, when it comes to like you know, standing workstations or treadmill workstations or pull up bars in the door of your office, you know, stuff like that, there are some folks who you know will even like keep like some heavy stuff around to lift and swing, like you know, a few kettlebell swings here and there or a barbell in your garage that you can go out and deadlift a few times a day. So you're just trying to hack your life and fool it into thinking that it's still living in a little bit more active format than say post industrial sitting at a computer might be considered. Kevin says any ideas or resources for maximizing swim training in an endless pool? Kevin about a year and a half from now I'm going to have an endless pool. I'm working on kind of putting one as an addition to the house that we're going to be moving into to having swam in an endless pool before. The fact is you can set it to push a current against you that puts you at a certain 100 meter pace, like whatever, one 3000 or 140, 100 or whatever. Best way to train in an endless pool, because it can be incredibly boring too, is to just get in and set it at the 100 meter pace that you want to swim at for your race and do like half of the race race distance or a third of the race distance at that pace. And so it's like steady state training at race pace. And honestly like that's the way that I plan on training when I get an endless pool is just putting on the underwater MP3 player, setting it up as like, you know, whatever, 120, 100 meter pace and seeing if I can hold that for 20 minutes and then just like calling it good. So I don't, I don't really feel that interval training is necessarily as, as easy to do in an endless pool as much as just, just like steady state training at a pretty tough pace. And you could even use like a, like a wetronome, which is a special kind of metronome that you could put inside your swim cap to keep your stroke rate up when you do that. So Paul says, I take it your eight to nine hours of training a Week didn't include weight training. Paul actually it did include weight training. So Kevin says how far out from Ironman do you start? Sauna cold thermogenic genesis. Kevin what I do is four weeks out, I will start into my heat acclimation, sitting in a sauna about three times a week, reading magazines for 30, 40 minutes, listening to my MP3 player, just kind of sitting there. Now that I don't count in that eight to nine hours of training a week. So that is just, you know, I subscribe to some magazines and I, you know, once I get all my magazines I take them into the sauna, sit in there for 30 minutes until my feel like my heart rate's popping out my chest. And that's my heat acclimation protocol. And I start that four weeks out from a hot race. So Dan says I'm interested in. Oh wait, I already answered that question. Dan he says I'm interested in what the eight to nine hours consisted of, especially with the twins. I think that was the first question I answered. Darcy says, what did you eat, drink the day of the the race? Darcy we already pretty much laid that out, you know, bulletproof coffee, MCT oil, superstarch, all that jazz. When I crossed the finish line later on in the day, I had a bowl of white rice with some sardines and an ice cream cone. So there you go. Thomas says your minimalist training methods and hack combos helped you with your under 10 hour finish at Ironman Hawaii. What do you think you could have changed as far as training and recovery supplementation to place higher? Thomas I could have not raced the other Ironman Ironman Canada so close to this race. I could have not packed a book launch and a ton of travel in between the two races and that's about it, you know. But again, I'm not getting a paycheck when I cross the finish line. I'm not a pro. I have business, I have family. So for me it was, it would have just taken more focus in terms of just like staying on the home front and focusing more on training, less on planes, trains and automobiles. So you know, it is tough to hack together Ironman training and high amounts of travel, but you can definitely do it using a lot of these protocols, you know, and this is the stuff I talk about in the podcast teach in the beyond training book. It's all there, you know, and so if you're busy you can, you can definitely still do an Ironman in a respectable time. You might not be able to go pro, but you can definitely do Well, a question from Ahmad. Ahmad says, what are some of the negatives of a ketogenic diet? Ahmad? Besides missing out on pizza and pasta and you can get pretty good rice pasta and quinoa pasta and gluten free pizza. By the way. Negatives would be that, that hit on the thyroid that I mentioned. And then it takes a while to adapt to a ketogenic diet. So for the first four weeks, sometimes six weeks, sometimes eight weeks, you're a little bit blah. And in some cases it can take you nearly a year of eating a high fat, low carb diet before your body really builds up enough density of mitochondria for you to be able to thrive on that diet. So the negative would be you got to pay attention to your thyroid to make sure that's not taking a hit. You know, eat lots of liver and organ meats, sweet bread, stuff like that. After Ironman Canada, this is something I haven't talked about before. After Ironman Canada, just to cover my bases, I actually started taking a supplement called Thyro Gold, which is a, which is a desiccated thyroid gland extract. Just because I was traveling so much, I wasn't able to eat organ meats. And so I was literally using a desiccated thyroid cap capsule called Thyro Gold. And it's not cheap, it's like 60 bucks a bottle. But that's what I was using to support my thyroid leading into Ironman Canada because of my lower carbohydrate intake and inability to eat like some of these primal ancestral foods. So those are some negatives. And then the last thing would just be the amount of time that you got to put in before a ketogenic diet starts to pay off. Last question here from Eric. Eric says, what's the long term effects of such an approach? Approach? I noticed from your results after Canada that your hormones were a little off, Eric. Long term effect of Ironman training period. And I remember I work as a practitioner for Wellness fx. So I look at the biomarkers, the blood biomarkers of Crossfitters, triathletes, you know, all the active individuals that they send my way across the board. When you're depleting your body day after day with hard workouts, it's usually usually lower testosterone, lower growth hormone, lower insulin like growth factor, lower thyroid levels, higher tsh, which is the inverse to thyroid. So high TSH usually means low thyroid and vice versa, kind of high levels of inflammation, a lot of times elevated liver enzymes because of a lot of the, the processing of the high calorie intake that you're putting the liver through and then what else? Sometimes a little bit of acidity, low CO2 because of the amount of acidity that builds up in the body due to exercise. Those are some of the biggies. I can tell you right now. Now that I'm done with Ironman and done with Ironman training, like I mentioned earlier, I'm going to go back in and do a lab test after my body has a few weeks here to recover and rebuild, build and I'll publish those lab results out to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you're going to see everything from a jump in testosterone to a renormalization of thyroid to a drop in inflammation to an increase in alkalinity to a drop in some of those liver enzymes. It's going to be really interesting and I guarantee that you'll see that stuff. It's just that I've seen the numbers of the people who do the Ironman training and the CrossFit training, etc. And the numbers of the people who don't and some of this stuff isn't necessarily healthy. It's about mitigating the damage. Again, I don't want to kick the horse to death, but that's the entire reason that I wrote this Beyond Training book is to show you how you can do these kind of things that may not technically be all that healthy for you, but if you're going to do it them, I show you how to do them the right way and minimize the damage and still achieve amazing feats of physical performance without destroying your body and your mind and neglecting your family, your job, your friends, social events, stuff like that. And again, not to harp on the URL, but it's@BeyondTrainingBook.com can you tell I'm excited that my book is out, by the way. You can check that out. That is about all the questions. I didn't even count how many we did just now. It sounded like 30 or something. Something. I think I'll double check. So be sure to check out that Real Food Summit that I mentioned over@tinyurl.com justeatrealfood be sure to check out audiblepodcast.com Ben and@AudiblePodcast.com Ben you can grab Vinnie Tortorich's new book, Fitness Confidential. You can grab what's another one? Dr. Kalish's new book why Isn't My Brain Working? There's a lot of good books out there right now, so check those out. And I hope that this was informative for you guys. Remember to leave the podcast, a ranking in itunes and finally grab your free gift over@giftfromben.com. there's a special video from Brock and I over there that I think you'll enjoy quite a bit. A quick little 30 minute video we shot for you. So this is Ben Green Field over and out from Iron Man Hawaii. Time for me to hit the sack and get some some much deserved post Iron man sleep. Thanks for listening.

We're on.

We're live. Hey, we're on. We're live. Hey, hey, hey, what's up? This is the voice of Ben Greenfield, and I'm sitting here in the King K lobby with a bunch of podcast listeners and also a few special guests, namely a female voice you might be familiar with.

Hey, folks, Tawny Prasak here, host of.

Endurance Planet, and a complete clown nerd who you also might be familiar with. Hi, everybody. Brock here. What we want to do for you guys as part of this special episode is we're going to go around the room with a few of the people who are here with us today down in Hawaii at Ironman. Volunteers, spectators, racers, and they're going to share each of them their top health, fitness, or nutrition tip with you so that you can kind of. Kind of learn from some people. Because I know you get super sick of Brock and Tawny and I and our voices inside your head all the time. So we're going to give you some fresh voices today. So let's start. Maybe we'll. We should start with. With Mrs. Jessica Dawn Greenfield sitting right here.

Lovely.

All right, Jessa, my big tip would be food prep. Always having good food prepped around you, easy and accessible. What did you prep for us at the condo, Jessa? Well, I didn't really prep a lot.

For you at the condo because I'm.

In a different place. Fail. Actually, we have, like, sardines, nori, white rice. Wow. So actually, we've got a refrigerator stock full of real food back at the condo.

Yeah.

But we've got.

We've hit a couple of good restaurants.

All right, sweet. So Jess's tip is to prepare real food. Unless you're traveling, in which case she failed. No, she actually did. We had flax crackers that we brought from the house and homemade yogurt cheese that we saved Brock's ass when he got off the plane. Whatever. All right, let's go to Jamie. Right. Okay, so, Jamie, introduce yourself where you're from. This is Jamie Tranthem from Michigan. Come down here to see these guys. In Kona and they hand me a microphone. So I'm pretty much a newbie. I've been doing this maybe two years and my biggest thing working on is consistency, keeping the training consistent and just keep going. And every day and just trying to build upon. Biggest thing you found that helps you to be consistent with your workouts every day. My planning, writing it all down on a calendar at the beginning of the week. Do you write it all down? I write it down like months in advance. Months in advance? Yeah. I have it laid out what I want to do. Do you use like Evernote or Training Peaks or something like that? Excel. Excel, yeah. Yeah. I pretty much just have a little calendar and I just jot down what I want to do and then that's my writing outline and lay it out as I come to it, how I'm feeling that day. Awesome. And. And you've had a pretty good success journey the past year or so, you're telling me. Yeah, pretty good. I used the tri rip program and that was just huge help. It showed me how to lay things out, you know, I mean, how to add some more muscle and get a lot stronger. Yeah. Just gotta work on the speed now. Yeah, yeah. Getta get fast. Well, cool. And you're volunteering here at the race? I am volunteering. I'll be at Waikoloa rooting you guys on the bike. Oh yeah. Sweet. Killer. Thanks, Jamie. All right, let's go over to Ferdinand. You want to. You want to give a little tip? So I know Ferdinand because I came down here two years ago to Kona and gave a talk about health to your guys' energy. What was the Energy Lab? It was our telescope. So Canada France Hawaii Telescope. Yeah, the Canada France Hawaii Telescope. And I remember I was super nervous. There were people watching like via satellite or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Which was. Which was interesting. It was fun. So that's why I met Ferdinand. And here's Ferdinand actually for me, coming from Endurance Planet's point of view and Lucho, the math atone. Yeah, math training. Math training is one thing, definitely. And from you guys, I know it's just anything dealing with healthy fitness and I'm taking on the, you know, like the high fat, low carb. So that's one thing that I'm taking from you guys. So. But there's so much information. Yeah. I don't know where to begin. So can you give an example of like a, like a mapetone style workout that you do? That's like one of your key workouts? The long run. I Know, every weekend I, I try to get out and do a long run, just keeping that math heart rate going. And for people who aren't familiar with the math heart rate, do you just take 180 and subtract your age or do you go out and do a test to find out? I do more than 180 minus my age, but I've done some, some testing to see if I can kind of get that. But it, for me, it's pretty close. Yep, it's pretty close. That's really helped you with like long runs and stuff like that, huh? Yeah. Cool. Nice. Nice. Thank you. All right, so there's your tip from, from Ferdinand. Use use the math method to find out what your heart rate is for for long run. All right, here we go. Next up. Yeah, it's Reed from Calgary. Yeah, I've been, been a listener for a while here, down here supporting my younger brother who's 22, Keaton, and hopefully he has a great race. I guess from you guys. One of the things I picked up being a, a newbie to the sport is not to let strength training go. It's amazing what keeping 20 or 50 push ups a day and getting some body squats in can do for a guy. I definitely noticed when that's out of a program, what will happen and how injuries will flare up. I guess my little thing is I just try to take everything that I hear from Endurance Planet or BG Fitness podcast and try and take out things that I can fit into my life and apply them on a, on a daily level and not try to over complicate it. So far it's looking like it's going in the right direction and hopefully there's plenty more groundbreaking theories and experiments to come. So you heard it from reed. Jack out 50 push ups a day. Yeah, that's the trick. And this guy's got guns, so he knows what he's talking about. Our 50 push ups. And you're Reed's little brother, right? Or big brother? Keaton. Here's Keaton and he's racing. Yeah, I, I guess how I got here would be following Ben's minimalist training. I like to do short fast swims, super hard short bikes like the Sufferfest videos, and short, high intensity runs with a long run every week or two. And yeah, high fat, low carb diet, that's pretty much it. Just listen to you guys, endurance plan and BG fitness and try and be like you guys. So everyone except Brock. Just kidding. And by the way, I should mention a good visual Maybe we'll toss a picture up on the show notes for this podcast, but I think half of us are wearing nerdy compression socks. This is about the most geeked out triathlon crowd you've ever seen. But that's alright. Everybody looks fit, which is good. So here we go. That's a great segue. My name is Brendan o'. Melveny. I work for Imagine Swimming, a children's swim school in New York City. And I try not to geek out too much. I like to listen to your gut Endurance Planet podcasts, other podcasts, so that I know it's out there. I try things out. When I learned about Rich Roll, I went vegan for three months and my grocery bill shot up to comparable to my rent, which is impressive when you live in New York. So then I figured out what's really essential from that approach, a vegan approach. I took mostly the whole food thing from it, real food, and applied that to my life and my training plan and everything going forward. So when I'm traveling, I won't stress too much out about getting the finest fresh organic whatever. But this time I went to Costco, got a bunch of frozen spinach, frozen berries, that kind of thing that I know will last me for the entire 12 days I'm here. And yeah, that's basically it. Sustainability. Same thing with training. Make sure I'm not doing too much so that I can have consistent training across the board. Nice. Nice. Fantastic. Anybody else here want to give a health, fitness or nutrition tip? I saw somebody sitting on the couch, but he looks like he ran away as soon as we started recording. So let me surf over to Tawny Przak here so that you don't think that this is one big sausage fest after Jessica Greenfield, although it kind of is. Let's hear Tawny's top tip.

Ok, so mine is pretty easy right now. It's get good rest and quality sleep. And I say that because I'm on my sixth day in Kona and I'm starting to burn the candle handle at both ends and I'm starting to feel the effects of not getting good rest and realizing how much I appreciate getting that eight hours a night or whatever it is for you, whatever your formula is. But when you start to not get that, how much you start to suffer. And I'm ready for a nap already. And it's only 9am.

Nice. Nice. And that is one thing that's so hard for those of you who maybe have not. You know, I know some of you, you listening in might not be interested in triathlon at all. And some of you really are. But when you come down to Hawaii, it's really weird. This is a, it's kind of a difficult place to sleep and to rest because there's that combination of so much going on, you being way out of your time zone and also sometimes the weather, the heat, if you don't have air conditioning, there's all these little variables that really keep you from sleeping. So I mean, go listen to last week's podcast. At the time you're listening to this, Brock and I did podcast number 259. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 259 on travel, jet lag, sleep, stuff like that. And yeah, super important when you're out doing stuff. So how about Tani's boyfriend John? You want to contribute a tip, man? You in? He's a triathlete, he's a kick ass race car driver. He just did his first Ironman. So let's hear what John's tip is. Well, well, listen to Tony Prasak. I think that's.

Living with me has definitely kind of improved your health and fitness.

I seem to do pretty well. I don't know, I mean, you know the, all the old adage is, you know, you don't do anything different on race day that you wouldn't do, you know, that you haven't trained with, you know, a lot of people training, changing it up a lot, probably not a good idea. The other one is, I don't know, we're seeing a lot of people train in last minute. That always kind of worries me, especially down Ali' I drive when it gets really, gets really crowded and, and wear your helmet.

I know the simple things. So many people I'm seeing not wearing helmets, people.

Guilty as charged, Ben. Gosh, yeah, other than that, like I said, it's, it's, you know, make sure you're getting your calories in. I know my big issue racing is just having so much, much fun. Forgetting to eat, forgetting to drink, whatever I'm gonna do. So get a plan, stick to it and hopefully you have a good day.

Beautiful.

Sweet. All right, we've got another listener here. Slash racer guy in compression socks. What's your name, where you from and what's your biggest tip? My name is Ryan Fulmer. I'm from the Philadelphia area in Pennsylvania. Biggest tip I think that I've really gained from listening to your been for the last few years is just really staying consistent. I loved when we had, when he had Sammy Inconen on that really, really kind of hit me. Just staying consistent, doing not an insane amount of volume but just being super targeted and day in and day out. So really my lead up for this, I've just been doing 10, 12 hours a week every week for the last 40, 40 weeks or so. Right. So so much easier to get in like an hour a day than it is to get in three or four hours every two or three days. Exactly. That's my big thing is, is I hit it consistently day in, day out. Yep. Yeah. And for those of you who don't know the Sammy Incinen podcast, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for S A M I Inkinen I N K I N E N I think he's racing this weekend much. Is he? I'm pretty sure he's down here. A guy who does really, really well like wins. Ironman's full on like overall as the age grouper on like 8 to 10 hours a week of training and he talks some cool strategies on there. So sweet. Thanks Ryan. Sure. So we've got two other two other probably the coolest guys here at the at the Ben Greenfield Fitness Endurance Planet Me meetup. Their names are river and Taryn Greenfield and they're going to tell you what their favorite workout is. What do you guys think? Favorite workout? You want to do that? Why don't you tell the microphone what your favorite workout is? This is Taren Greenfield. Taren, say hi. Hi. What's your favorite workout or your favorite healthy food to eat? My favorite workout is push ups. Push ups. Nice. He likes to crank up. And what's your favorite healthy food? Carrots. Carrots. Alright river, how about you river, what's your favorite workout? Push ups. Push ups too of course. And what's your favorite healthy food? Salad. Salad. Wow. My kids are really creative. Push ups and vegetables. Vegetables people. Push ups and vegetables. So there you have it. Five year old wisdom. Did we get Brock's biggest tip yet? And my kids do kettlebell swings and medicine ball slams but apparently it's push ups. Alright, let's hear from Brock. Okay. Being a guy who was born in northern Alberta and lives in Canada, my biggest tip is get ready for the weather. I'm not even racing this weekend but I just, all I do is walk down to get a coffee and, and I'm covered in sweat and exhausted because it's just when you come from a completely different climate here and Ben talks about this a lot doing the workouts in the SAUNA doing the workouts with, with the humidifier going, you have worked out in the, in the sauna in the past, but really like getting ready for the climate is huge because it can, it can just take it out of you. Especially for nutrition wise. Your body's spending so much time trying to of cool itself down that you're not able to absorb the nutrition and that just leads to no good. So get ready for the, for the weather. That's my tip. Well, cool. Oh crap. We weren't recording. All right, you guys, we got to do this. No, I'm just kidding. Well, folks, if you're listening to this and you know, obviously we at Ben Greenfield Fitness, we're putting out content for you whether you want to do in triathlon or an ironman or just like shed a pounds few and get healthy. If you weren't familiar with Endurance Planet and you heard tawny over@EndurancePlanet.com that's really a lot of good interviews and news and advice for marathoners, cyclists, swimmers, runners, triathletes, everybody like that. Either way, head over to EndurancePlanet.com to check out that podcast and you may even be hearing these interviews there as well if we decide to publish them over there too. Head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com remember to leave an itunes review if you like these podcasts and stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook and we've got links for those on Both our websites, endoranceplanet.com and BenGreenfieldFitness.com if you want to kind of get in on the next meetup that we do in the next city that we happen to wind up at. Who knows where the heck that might be. But, but we're always doing something. So thanks for listening. And in the meantime, it's Ben, Tawny, and Brock and the entire crowd here say hey everybody. Aloha, aloha and mahalo from the big island. Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge.

Fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

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