The Hunter McIntyre Podcast: Crossfit vs. Spartan, Top Recovery & Sleep Tips, Crazy Bobby & Much More!

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, my dream job is to be the Crocodile Hunter. And I told the academic advisor and they're like, we don't have a degree for that. And I was like, well, I'm out of here. Can I run 400 meters while doing high rep benches into ring muscle ups, into walking on my hands?

So you're saying the missing component of CrossFit, in terms of it claiming to be producing the fittest man or woman on earth, would be like the stamina or the endurance component?

I feel like you'd know about that. If anybody was gonna know about some kind of crazy surgery, it'd 100% be.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Oh, hello. Yo, this is Ben Greenfield. Of course it is. You listen to my podcast. I had a chance to sit down with my buddy and crazy athlete Hunter McIntyre recently at Spartan World Championships. This guy has a ton of history in obstacle course racing. Before that, I believe, underwear modeling, and before that, swinging chainsaws in the forested wilderness of Montana somewhere. Anyways, though, he has a super interesting story. He's been on the podcast before. If you go to my website@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search, Hunter McIntyre, you'll find it. And everything that we talk about on today's show, you can find over at BenGreenfield Fitness.com HunterPod H U N T E R pod BenGreenfieldFitness.com HunterPod all right, I'm sitting here with my buddy, Hunter McIntyre. Men's journal called you the man behind the Spartan Race Empire. Competitor magazine called you the rising star of obstacle course racing. Men's Fitness, which I think did a cover story on you that was good to hear, listed you as the future of the sport. And your list of accolades go on and on. I believe that yesterday you added another crown to your list of achievements as the top. The top something in a sport that doesn't quite exist yet, but that we made up.

Well, you know, I mean, all sports don't really exist when they first start out. And then all of a sudden, with a couple years and some good athletes and some good names behind it, you get some energy and it becomes something awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah. Dude, I was just looking at your hands. I had no clue your hands were so big.

They're big and they're also a little bit swollen from that. From all the.

I was about to say, I was like, why are your fingers so gigantic?

Your Fingers are swollen after all the cold at the top of the mountain?

I don't really think so. You know, honestly, we kind of. I really managed it super well with gloves and I took care of myself. And I realized that we were going to do so much crossfit in the afternoon that if I didn't have good management, I would have lost it. Yeah, Like, Chandler had to drop out of the competition. He's a military guy. He got really bad cold exposure on a mission and a training mission. And he has such bad frostbite. Like as soon as he gets exposed to cold, he completely loses control.

The human body is weird like that. The same thing happens with hyperthermia. People have had hyperthermic shock. Like, whatever. The military in the desert or whatever, they're way more heat sensitive.

Heat sensitive or cold?

More heat sensitive. And then people who have had the cold stuff, like, like this guy Chandler you're talking about, had. They're more cold sensitive.

Okay.

So probably the worst thing you'd want to do in life is get frostbitten and get hyperthermic because you wouldn't be able to handle shit.

You just have to stay like, you know, in like Arizona the whole time. What's actually. What's the most moderate temperature you could probably find?

California.

Yeah. Southern California.

Yeah. Yeah. Southern Cal. So anyways, though, so you put together like this whole CrossFit versus the Spartan athletes.

Yeah, it was interesting. So, you know, I've always loved CrossFit and I've always loved Spartan racing. I was a Spartan race athlete. I did CrossFit games this year and I went into their, their grounds and I challenged them and I did my thing. I didn't, like, I wasn't a champion the way I wanted to be, but in reality, it took, you know, a whole year off to go expose myself to that. And I contacted my buddies. I was like, listen, guys, I did your thing.

Buddies in CrossFit. Yeah.

I contacted Chandler Smith, Jacob Hepner and Sean Sweeney, all multiple time CrossFit Games athletes. And I told the guys, I was like, listen, I have an awesome opportunity. I want to get you guys to fly out to Spartan Race and I want you guys to do this thing in the morning, we're going to run the race. In the evening, we are going to do four CrossFit wads. And everybody was like, super into it. And I'm pretty amazed that it went so smoothly. Because honestly, when you're a professional athlete and then someone asks you, like, if someone invited me to the CrossFit games, just like on a whim a month later, I don't think I would have shown up, but these guys showed up and they threw down and it was pretty spectacular. Like, big results.

Okay, so the crossfitter athletes, and I think most of my audience knows what CrossFit is, they had to go do a full endurance, stamina based spartan race. Yeah.

Probably the hardest kind you can imagine because mountain running is spectacularly challenging on a.

Much harder than just like a trail run. And they got a half hour head start on you guys. Yep.

And we had to chase them down and the whole goal is to catch you.

Did you chase them down?

Yeah, we all got them. They're actually very impressive. Like top guy only finished I think 30, 45 minutes behind me.

And that's a lot of muscle to carry up a hill.

Totally. I mean, These guys are 5 foot 7 to 5 foot 9 and they're holding 195 pounds. They're like 10, 15 pounds lighter than I am.

I mean, I'm not just saying this to give you shit, but like you are like at least in the realm that I play in in endurance sports. Like, you're one of the bigger dudes.

Yeah, totally.

And I saw you on the CrossFit games and you looked small compared to these guys. Yeah. And you're not a small dude. No.

I mean, they're just so densely designed.

Yeah.

I mean CrossFit's completely, almost every sports done this. It's completely designed and it hones in on such a body type that's perfect for that sport and for that sport. Like, I was just talking to Kelly Surrette's wife and she was like, a study came out from UCLA I think, or someone, one of the UCLA things, and they said it's a 0% chance if you're 6ft tall that you can win the CrossFit Games based on all of the metrics.

That's just based on like the lever arms, like the muscle length, basically. I mean like the, the bone length, 6 foot 2.

And when I reach my arms up overhead, like I'm well over nine feet over here. And if you can imagine, these guys were 5 foot 7 who have even like shorter little stubby arms. Dude, there's probably about a quarter second every single rep that they're, they're missing out on that I have to travel.

They're like Vikings, basically.

Yeah, yeah, it kind of sucks. I mean, like, listen, I've never wanted to be short, but if I was going to become a professional CrossFit athlete, I think I'd probably like have some kind of surgery to remove some femur bones.

I think it'd be good. I think the Chinese know how to do that.

Yeah, I've heard about that.

Go to Hong Kong, come back a year later with your bones.

I feel like you'd know about that. If anybody was going to know about some kind of crazy surgery. 100% be, you know, so I'll definitely hit you up.

Yeah, I'm going to find affiliate link for some Hong Kong bone breaking. Okay, so, so then you guys came back and on the same day you turn around and, and then you go head to head on all these wads.

Yeah, so the first one was very, I mean when I say these are CrossFit workouts, it's, it's by their definition constantly varied high intensity functional movements. So they weren't with barbells, they weren't on pull up bars, they weren't on box jumps and stuff. Everything was done in a parking lot to the side of the venue where we had huge 150 pound slam balls, the ram rollers. We had a four foot wall, a six foot wall. We had 400 pound logs that we were doing.

I think people know what everything is that you just said except a ram roller.

Ram roller is a piece of equipment that Spartan Race started to employ, which is pretty cool. I mean it's super well designed for functional fitness just to have in the gym. It has multiple designs in the way it's, it looks just like a foam roller, but it's 55 pounds, super dense material, really high, like composite rubber. So you could chuck it against the wall, you could slam it against a rock, you could do whatever.

It's like it looks like a foam roller.

Yeah.

But it's a piece of exercise.

So you could, you know, if you really want to foam roll, you have a foam roller. But if you want to do some like, you know, all those kind of cross chop, core burpee type things, you use that.

So you guys are on the hail, in the snow doing this.

Well, you know, it was actually kind of like perfect, like beautiful sunshine, perfect weather, a little bit of a gust of wind, but it kept you cool.

When you're God's country, baby.

Yeah, it was so, it was like, I was like, wow, this is like serene. Like this is like, I cannot believe that this is like. Because we were supposed to get snowed out, we were supposed to get slammed by bad weather. And of course the fourth workout's about to start and lightning hail rain came and we had to cancel the fourth workout, which I'm super glad we did, because it was the suckiest one. You had to, like, crawl under barbed wire carrying the ram roller. I really would just. That would have rocked my day.

All right, so smoke clears. What happens?

Smoke clears. I had a pretty clear, big lead. I was like, three workouts, and I was already leaving by five points. So it was not to toot my own horn, but I was just telling you guys how it goes. But we had actually. Team CrossFit was just a few points behind us in overall points. They actually kicked some serious ass. Isaiah took second. Sean Sweeney, the CrossFit guy, took third. Kempton took third, fifth, and Hepner took fourth.

All right, so if people want to see a video of this, is there a video anywhere? Like, in the show notes?

So they're trying to produce it a lot at this point. Like, I don't have the content, but supposedly this is produced through Spartan Race, sponsored by Fit Aid. Going to be in your inbox hopefully in the next month.

Okay, I'm gonna write note to myself. You guys go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com HunterPod that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com like Hunter podcast BenGreenFitness.com HunterPod and I'll put the video in there. You can go check it out. You'll probably have it on your Instagram, too.

Totally do. I'll share it as soon as I get it.

I'll link to Hunter's Hunt the Sheriff Instagram page on there, too. Okay. So you. Before you got into the world of Spartan, and even when I was looking into Spartan, I think I caught a glimpse of you at one point. I saw you, like, training in the backwoods of Vermont at Joe's Farm on some documentary. And so I had seen you at some point on tv. And really, my own interest in Spartan was just seeing an interesting sport that looked like it was something totally different than triathlon. At the time. I was bored with triathlon, so I started getting to Spartan, and. And I ran into you, and you had a whole different kind of entry into that whole world for you. It was almost like a savior, to an extent, from what I understand.

I mean, certainly Interesting was a successful athlete in high school, but, like, you know, I'm not going to say troubled in the wrong way, but I certainly got in a lot of trouble doing a lot of drugs, partying a lot, getting arrested a lot. Like, for harmless things like throwing a rock.

Are you talking about like, weed and beer?

Yeah. I mean, I would do cocaine and anything else. I dabbled with heroin all. Every kind of drug you can imagine.

More than weed and beer, then.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But those were my go tos. Like, I'm not going to say that I was one of these kids who had, like, a needle in his arm walking around town. Like, I was just more like, if you hit me up, be like, dude, I got this bag of something.

And you're like a jock who partied.

Certainly. I mean, I think there's a lot of jocks who party. I mean, it's just. It's. I'm a person of high intensity. I love the intensity of competition. I didn't even train at all. Like, at that point in my life, I never worked out. I didn't do any of the training practices, nothing. I would just.

Your sports?

Wrestling and running.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, like, I had to go to wrestling practice, but I would just fuck around. I wouldn't do any. Learn any of the moves. And then I just came, they blew the whistle, and I just focus on pinning the person or taking them down. Like, that's all I cared about, like, manhandling people. And then, like, when we go to cross country practice, I would just go in the woods and smoke a joint, and we were supposed to be back in 45 minutes, and we were supposed to do our, like, you know, mediocre run every single day. And I'd only gone, like, a mile into the woods, a mile back out with, like, you know, washing my hands after I'd smoked the joint.

They say CBD is good for endurance athletes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so crazy. That's one of the weird things. I could smoke so much weed when I was a kid. Now I can't. I mean, CBD has become, like, a total lifesaver for me because I. I can't smoke weed now.

You sound like mom. Weed has changed since the 60s.

Oh, yeah, dude. It's crazy, dude. If I take a puff of weed nowadays, I honestly feel like I'm on another planet. Yeah. Yeah. So to go back to where I was at, like, went through that whole experience, had to go to rehab for a year because I basically, they were gonna send me to jail, but there was kind of like they were gonna give me one last chance. They're like, we'll send you to rehab for a year and put you on two years of probation, but if you don't come back completely, you know, buy the book and all your community service hours, everything done perfectly and not one scratch on Your record for the next two years, you're gonna go to jail.

Who said that, your parents?

No, it was the court system.

Okay.

Yeah, I wish my parents had that kind of power. Yeah, yeah, that'd be crazy.

So that would be a bad thing if parents had the power to put their own children in jail.

You go to jail. So basically I get out of rehab. And during rehab I was like, I only got more into drugs, to be honest. Like, I just met up with more people who were better at doing drugs than I was. Because.

Was this the rehab where you were like in the backwoods in Montana or this different rehab?

No, that was where I started out in Montana. Went to rehab, went to my first year of college. They were giving me like a couple classes and I was gonna. I was doing like all outpatient programs. So it was like the loosest version of rehab. I had my own apartment. I had to do like four AA meetings a week, two therapist meetings a week. Had to meet my PO twice a week. Peanut cup twice a week. Like, but I also, I didn't have a leash on me. So basically did the rehab thing. And then I got booted out of that rehab because I was partying too hard. Went to another rehab, and then I went to another rehab and went to another rehab. And I think the first time that I ever really appreciated hard work was I finally got back from one rehab to the one I originally started in. And I told my probation officer, I was like, if I don't do something that's going to exhaust my energy so much, I'm going to end up going to jail. Like, you got to help me out here. It's not the fact that I don't want to be a better person just because I don't have any reason to be. You guys are just telling me to stop doing drugs. I'm like, what's your reason behind stop doing drugs? And no one could give me a real answer because here's the reality. Like, when you're that age, there's no reason to not explore life, to, like, its absolute depths in every length, in every direction. Like, you know, are you gay or you are drug doer? Do you like to read the Bible? Do you like to climb up to the top of mountains? Are you a person who stays at home, read books? Like, you're just kind of developing as a person and it doesn't matter, like, which direction you go in, there's no right or wrong answer. And when you have people who are older than you telling you, like, no, this is the way to do it. And this is the way to do it. And it just creates this calloused emotion of, like, I don't want to hear the shit you have to say.

Right.

Like, I'm trying to figure it out on my own.

Were you also on. On Ritalin or Adderall or ADD adhd?

I was on every kind of medication you could imagine from the age of seven and until I was 21.

So you were the classic boy, wired to move, wired to explore, who was basically kind of getting held back, which is crazy.

I mean, the way I look at it now, like, the amount of drugs that they were giving me on a daily basis, I could sell those pills for probably like a hundred dollars plus a day to people who want to take Adderall to get high. Like, I have people, I'll see them at parties and they'll like, crush up 20 milligram adderalls and snort them. I was like, dude, I used to have to take four of those just to wake up in the morning. Because they told me, as a freaking.

Adolescent, as a developing adolescent, I mean, well, river and Taran get hyper. Yeah. Like, they are going out in the cold pool, they're getting in the sauna, they're building Fort Chipmunk. They're running around in the bat. Like, I just basically exhaust them. Yeah.

And that's the thing that should have been done.

Yeah.

Yeah. And schools don't really have that kind of infrastructure to handle somebody of my caliber.

Yeah.

And there's not. It's like, I don't necessarily blame the school system because it's, you know, it's developed to have a one size fits all because the funding around it.

They should have at least given you a treadmill desk, though.

Yeah, that would be nice. Those standing desks that. That they have now would have probably been helpful. So went through that whole pattern. And when I was in the rehab, I just said, you have to give me something that gives me purpose. So he got me a job as a logger. And I had to be a logger for like eight months in the woods, like, punching holes through snow to wrap up big logs with chains. And I went from £160 to £215 like that. I had, like, a second puberty stint.

And was this logging food, like, fat, or were you just, like, putting on muscle?

Oh, no, that was fucking Jack, dude. I was humongous. I'm stronger than. Than I am now.

Pretty much.

Like, it's. It's interesting. Like, I've actually wrote a lot about it. I just picking up raw objects rather than being that linear pattern of doing five by fives and stuff and squatting and benching. Like, my hands became thick. My hands have changed back to being a little bit more slender. But, like, the meat of my hands and my fingers, like, everything transformed. Because you're. It's a different kind of strength training. Like, you know, you're getting it.

My brother is a farmer. Yeah. And, you know, you were commenting about my hands earlier. Like, he shakes my hand and his hands just, like, envelop mine.

Just, like, eat them up.

They're huge. Yeah.

Yeah. So everything changed. And I think that's when I started to gain our appreciation for, like, working hard. And I watched my body transform. Like, I was never. I never had a bad body. Like, I was always a lean kid and, like, had like a. Under those kind of, like, boy, six packs. Always.

Yeah.

But now all of a sudden, I was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like, ass, thighs, chest, triceps, biceps. And I was like, okay. And then, you know, I went to college for a year, and I was on academic probation, and I didn't really kind of get the experience I wanted to be as an athlete. They wouldn't let me compete. And I basically just like, started training really hard in the gym. It was the first time I'd ever picked up weights. And I was like, I don't understand, like, why I want to go to school to study something that I don't want to do when I just want to compete. Because my dream job is to be the Crocodile Hunter. And I told the academic advisor in there, they're like, we don't have a degree for that. And I was like, well, I'm out of here.

Yeah.

So then I kind of get out, and I didn't really have any direction. And I was. I was a good looking, lean kid. And someone, you know, told me is like, you should be a model. Because he was already a model, and he told me I should do it. I was partying and I jumped out of.

Especially if you get to model crocodile hunter outfits.

Exactly. So I popped out of a door in my underwear at this house party, and this kid was like, you should be a model. And I was like, hell, yeah, I should be a model, bro. And next thing you know, I had a contract down in Miami and I started modeling. And then I'm traveling overseas. Modeling. I'm in New York City modeling. And I did that for a while. And it was the kind of thing where it's like, almost like when you experience bodybuilding like you want to see the way you could just develop your body. You want to see what length. And like, modeling for me wasn't really. I didn't care about the fashion, I didn't care what clothes I wear.

It's fun to a certain extent. For me it was like art. Right. With my body as the canvas. Totally. You just are basically molding it and seeing what you could change, which I think is the draw for a lot of people for bodybuilding or figure.

So that's what I had to do. I had to transform from this now 215 pound body and I brought myself back down to like 169 at my skinniest and found a way to take my shoulders out here, my waist down to here, my thighs trimming down to like, you know, this lean kind of like slender body down here. And I was obsessed with that for a while. And then I was like, honestly, like, all I'm doing is working out really hard to take pictures. There's like no real depth to this. So that's when I moved out to California with a couple friends and just, I kind of lucked out. One of my buddies in college made a lot of money and he wanted to house all of us and to party for a year in California. And I didn't have a car because I just moved from New York City and living up in the hills of Malibu, which you've seen before.

Like, is it that same place out of Malibu?

Similar. Similar spot, just down. Down the range.

Yeah.

So basically I was like, I don't have a car, I just have a bicycle. And I started working as a spin instructor. So I used to have to ride my bike down the mountain, get on a, get in a bus, ride the bus into town, teach a couple spin classes, come back and then do a workout. So like, without even trying, I was already getting like four to five hours of workouts a day.

Yeah.

And that's when I discovered my first. I did a half marathon. I was like, I should get back into running because I was a good runner when I was younger, did well there. And then I did a turkey trot. And then I did Gladiator rock and run. And then I did my first spartan race and I was like, holy crap. And then like from that point on, it was like a tidal wave.

So your base in terms of endurance and strength was actually pretty massive going into your first spartan race.

Totally.

Just through life.

Yeah. I mean, I had probably spent every single week logging like, you know, 40 hour weeks doing on Lines just like here at Tahoe.

Yeah.

You know, logging humongous stumps that were so heavy and carrying, you know, basically like a 30 pound chainsaw where me, everyone went.

So your career in Spartan. I think that I do have a lot of people who listen, who are in the world of endurance, who watch Spartan races or know about Spartan. And I think it's obvious. Like, you had a really successful career at Spartan. Like you, you won multiple championships, you're a podium athlete. You're one of the top ranked Spartan athletes, you know, for all the years you competed. How many years was that?

2012 until 2017 was the last one I did.

Yeah. So like a five year stint and then CrossFit happened. Yeah. How did that go?

I mean, it was interesting. So I can imagine anybody who's listening to this podcast, you eventually find that the stimulus that you're putting yourself through in fitness, unless you decide to reach out into another endeavor, like your body will reach its kind of like maximal.

Capacity or you get bored.

Exactly. Boredom. But also it's just like your body grows stagnant. And I'm always a person who's like, you know, I've already told you, I'm kind of an ADD type of person. I need to have something that's very energizing, distracting and like, I need to have tons of passion for it or I can't do it. I'm the kind of person who will not do anything unless it's 100%. And I just said to myself, I was like, you know, I had these two years of doing tough mudder. I kind of started to pull away from Spartan and do the things TMX was like, almost like CrossFit on wheels. Like, it was CrossFit while running. And it was an easy transition because I didn't have to get into heavy weightlifting. I just had to kind of do the circuit stuff.

That's right. I forgot about TMX. That was kind of like in between Spartan and CrossFit for you.

And that was a lot of fun.

And describe that briefly to folks what TMX was.

So they, they mark it as the world's hardest mile and it's 10 functional fitness movements. Like, they couldn't use the word CrossFit because of, you know, whatever branding and trademark or whatever the heck it's called, I guess. But while traveling through a mile with 10 obstacles so you could start out and do first year, we did it like this. You run, you do one obstacle, you do one functional fitness movement, then you do an obstacle, Functional fitness movement, obstacle 10 times in a row covering a mile. That was a really brutal style. Then they were like, we want to kind of appeal this more to somebody who's into CrossFit. So then they started it out with run. Hit a circuit of like 4 to 5 movements, then 4 to 5 obstacles, then 4 to 5 movements, then 4to 5 obstacles. And that one was like a totally different sport now because now it allowed these CrossFit Games athletes to come in who did very well that year and be able to take this, like, you know, wad mentality and structure of their fitness and basically just hammer through those and then kind of buzz through the rest of the section. So I had to completely transform my training from this guy who could swing kettlebells and carry sandbags really hard to somebody who can now take like a 95 pound barbell, which is not massive for any of you guys to hear, but anything like, you know, if I told you to run 100ft, if you ran it hard enough, it's hard.

Yeah.

So you take a 95 pound barbell, and I need to be able to rep out like 20 thrusters, 20 lunges, 20 power cleans, 20 shoulder to overhead, straight through, and like, do not break. Like you can put the barbell down for a second, shake your hands out, and then go right back into it.

Yeah.

And so then I got exposed to competing against all these CrossFit Games athletes. And, you know, admittedly, they're all very talented athletes, but I gave them a good ass whooping, like I crushed them.

Because there was a lot of stamina and endurance still involved.

You still had to have like a crazy good engine.

Yeah. And by the way, do they still do those TMXs?

No. Toughmunner. You know, this is a whole nother tangent we could go off on, but Tough Munner kind of had to really rebrand themselves. They shut down. Will Dean, the CEO of the company, left and all this money kind of fell apart. So now they're starting from scratch again. So hopefully they said it will develop for 2020.

Okay.

Yeah. So they took a year off.

But that's what kind of got you into doing CrossFit workouts. And before TMX, you hadn't really been doing much CrossFit.

Well, I mean, I always did CrossFit style training, but there's a difference between training CrossFit and then training. Like, it's like me saying I bodybuild, but I don't compete in bodybuilding. It's like totally different. One of those people doing steroids, counting Their macros, doing everything, working on their tanning, their posing. Another person is just broing out in the gym, trying to get some pecs and biceps right. So I was doing CrossFit at a very mild level.

Just. But both fart on elevators, dude.

I fitness experts, my gas is exponentially worse as a crossfitter than it is. I don't know why. I think it's because of the level of stress that my body's under at all times.

I can tell you exactly what it is because it's, it happens to me on certain days and it's sympathetic nervous system overdrive, drawing a ton of blood away from your gut. So everything just sits in there and ferments because it can't digest.

Okay, So I needed that explanation because I couldn't tell. Like I would just like literally be sitting next to my girlfriend. I'd be like, dude, like I just finished this hard ass workout and I cannot stop farting.

Yes. And a lot of athletes are like, well, I need to, I need a chance. I need to go low fodmap. I need to do high carb, low fat, high fat, low carb. But all it is is like you just donate blood to your gut. Like it can't digest stuff.

Yeah. And that's probably gonna be a problem for me for many years.

Yeah.

Sucks. So what I was saying though is I basically competed against these guys and, you know, I beat them. And I feel like I still didn't get the street cred for being like a fit athlete. Like, they were like, you beat us in your little mud run thing. And I'm like, God damn it, I'm sick and tired. Like, these guys get pegged as the fittest on earth. And I'm like, honestly, I think that's a crock of bullshit because I know so many people who blow your minds. I'm like, I got friends who can run sub 15 minute 5ks and bench like 400 pounds. Like there's just freaks out there and they do different things.

Who can do that, by the way?

Just there's some guys in, you know, Hollywood are pretty nasty. Yeah. But I mean, the reality is, is like, I'm almost there though. I can run. I used to be able to run a sub 15 minute 5k and I can bench over 300 pounds.

Right.

But can I run 400 meters while doing high rep benches, into ring muscle ups, into walking on my hands?

So you're saying the missing component of CrossFit in terms of it claiming to be producing the fittest man or Woman on Earth would be like the stamina or the endurance component.

I would say that it's just. It doesn't. Like today is a better example for me, it's such an incredible test of stamina, but then it's like also incredible test of strength, but it's not extremely technical.

Strength. Yeah.

There's a barrier to entry there. If you don't have technique, then you can't play the game. Doesn't matter how strong you are.

Because I know a little bit of resilience, too. I mean, like, there's the elements, right. Like cold and heat and the attrition component of having to fuel not just pre and post, but during. There's a lot of little things that happen in these longer events.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So I came to that crossroad where I was like, I need to prove to myself that I could at least do what these guys do, because I'm never gonna. I have this, like, tearing feeling at me every single morning when I woke up and started training again, that I was like, if I don't beat the them, or at least get the satisfaction of being toe to toe with them again in their own world, I'm never going to feel satisfied as an athlete because I've won tons of titles in obstacle course racing. I've been undefeated on Broken Skull Ranch. I've been undefeated in this. I've been undefeated in that. And it's like, yeah, those are things I'm just good at. It was easy for me. Not necessarily easy, but it was just something that I had trained really hard and I was very, you know, well versed in.

Right.

I needed to get out of my comfort zone and, like, jump in the water with a bunch of great white sharks and just feel that fear and feel that intensity around me. So within that, like, it was kind of crazy. As I started to formulate this idea in my head, all of a sudden the wild card came up. And that's. Anybody who doesn't know what that is. CrossFit decided for the first time ever to invite athletes outside of their sport, based on merit in other sports to come compete at the CrossFit Games.

Kind of smart from, like a promotional or media standpoint.

Totally. I think it's super badass. And I thought it was something they should have started earlier, but I'm lucky I was the first person they ever invited to do it. So I get the bid, I go in, I competed. And they had a cut structure, which basically, if you didn't come top 50% in each workout that you did, you got cut. So.

So they like cut multiple times per day.

Oh, yeah, it sucked. I mean, start from like 150 and then went all the way down to 10 athletes the last day. And it took out a lot of really, really talented athletes because originally the way it was structured, it was like you could be a specialist and do really well in like three to four workouts and have really high points and then kind of like be decently good at the rest. And now like, if you screw up on anything and you're not like, you know, pretty much iron tight with like, you know, with this stuff, like you, you're out.

Or if those first few workouts in which they're cutting a lot of people don't happen to be something that you're particularly good at, it's just, it's just bad luck at the draw.

Yeah, that's what happened to me. So I did well in the first one, which was like a run 400 meters climb, a legless rope climb 20ft three times, which was insanely hard, and then snatch 185 pounds seven times, four rounds. All things that I'm decently good at. I'm good at the running, but trust me, like, running is not easy after you do those other things. And then the next piece was a row into shoulder to overhead, into walking on your hands. Super good at rowing, super good at shoulder to overhead. I'd never tried walking on my hands on AstroTurf. And this wasn't just after a turf. This is brand new AstroTurf. So if I told you to do like push ups or like even hold a handstand on this in this floor right here, it's very stable. But if I told you to go do like a similar movement like a pistol squat on that rug right there. Even.

Yeah, that.

Even those little micro imbalances right there, it fatigues the muscle differently. And I was not ready for that. And I blew up and I, I went 100ft, I think so. And then I only had to go like one or two more lengths and I couldn't get it done.

Wow.

And I had so much time left. I had six.

That's like sports specificity on the micro level.

I know, dude. It drove me nuts. I had six minutes to cover basically like 80ft on my hands. And I can cover 100ft in less than a minute.

Yeah.

And I can repeat it over and over again. So like it's something that was emotionally burning me for a little while.

It's also where Being a seasoned athlete comes in handy. You know, people who have competed at the CrossFit Games before probably knew they were going to be hand walking on astroturf.

I didn't even think about it. And it's kind of embarrassing. Like, it's just one of those rookie things. Like, you know, now when I run Spartan races, Joe to Senna taught me this. If you tie your shoelaces regularly and then you knot it backwards the other direction. So like, let's say you do right over left the first time, do left over right the next time, when you knot it, it never comes undone. And I didn't know that because he had done so many ultra marathons and things like that. He taught me how to tie my shoe really quickly. And I never had my shoes come apart in a Spartan race ever again. But so many times before that, I'd be running races and my shoes would come apart and I'd be like, I tied that thing so tight. What the heck is happening? So, like, even something as small as that changed my life afterwards.

Were you working with a coach at the time?

No, I kind of did my own thing. I just wanted to know. I mean, I had worked a lot with coaches and I had somebody kind of be advisor for me, a couple people. But here's the one thing that I'm even realizing now. Here's what a high level crossfitter does, and here's what like a moderate level crossfitter does. And I basically tried to close that gap so fast that it was just like prone to injury and just bad habits.

Yeah.

And coming from this world where I was the best at one thing and this super high amount of volume of endurance and everything, like, I was like, I trained 25 to 30 hours a week. I'm gonna go try to train 25 to 30 hours a week doing CrossFit. You can't do it. One task taxes the cardiovascular system and in some ways can tax the nervous system mildly. But this is completely on your skeletal structure, your nervous systems, your tendons. Everything is getting fried on a daily basis with CrossFit.

Yeah. If you measure and they've done this real time heart rate variability, which is insight into sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system activity while you're doing any type of movement. It is powerlifting, it is heavy barbell loading that decreases HRV during the exercise the most, meaning that of anything that trains your sympathetic nervous system and also stresses your sympathetic nervous system, it is heavy loading under a barbell. There's nothing like it to stress the body, which is great. If you want to get fit fast, that's the way to do that. But it also means that your neuromuscular system is more beat up by that than anything else. Which means that, like, if your cardiovascular system is good, right, Your blood has replenished and your ATP pool and your creatine and everything, and your musculoskeletal system has recovered, like, the. Like the fibers have repaired and regenerated. That means your neuromuscular system could still be, like, two or three days behind still. Yeah.

And so that's the interesting thing that I'm at right now. Like, so I just did CrossFit really hard for the last year. And, you know, I'm a person who reads books like crazy. I mean, that's how I discovered you and started to kind of, like, get into podcasts, like, constantly want to just eat up information and break it down and try to find out ways to cut corners and develop myself faster and make myself fitter in any way possible. So, you know, this whole year of doing CrossFit, like, I just keep on pulling in more and more information. And the way that I'm starting to train, like, it's just. I know that it's not good for me what these guys are doing, to be honest. Maybe because they. They've been doing it for so many years, they might be able to handle it, but to train at their level and try to speed things up or accelerate to that point, the way that I'm at, it's just not possible.

Hasn't the guy who won the CrossFit Games, Matt Fraser, been involved in powerlifting or Olympic for a very long time.

From, like, the young teens, and he was training at the Olympic Training center and everything. So if you imagine the guy's almost 30 now, and he has probably, like, 13 years of barbell lifting on his, like, on his shoulders and legs, like, he has probably done thousands of reps every single year. So he's reaching up over, you know, towards like, that 20 to 30,000 rep mark.

Yeah. So. So with. With that being analogous to, like, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's book about the 10,000 hour rule, which applied to chess, it would be the equivalent largely of you attempting to be a chess grandmaster on 2,000 hours this year instead of 10,000.

Yeah.

So you still would have, like, 8,000 hours still left to go to really, truly feel as if everything was smooth.

Yeah. But the one issue is I'd much rather try to be a chess master than end up having, like, you know, disc and knee surgery, because I've tried to match those guys levels. So, you know, it was this kind of, it was this terror. Is a man, an ego, like this ego inside of myself where I'm just fighting like, I'm like, am I just not good enough and I want to walk away because I'm not good enough or am I just the person who do I just need to swallow the pill? That I do not think that taking this challenge of CrossFit further than I'm going right now, like, and pushing deeper into the training hole is healthy for me because I keep on reading up and trying to find out more information about these guys. Like, I know over a half dozen guys who have been on the podium since the beginning of CrossFit who've had knee surgery. Surgery. You can't say that about Spartan race. I don't know anybody who's had surgery for the. Yeah, you know, eight years that I've involved in the sport.

So what are you going to do? I mean, do you want to go back and compete at CrossFit and, and try to see if your body can soak that up after going through it one time? Just coming back is a little bit more of. Not a veteran, but obviously more experienced. More experienced on AstroTurf.

Here's the thing that I'm thinking about right now and like this weekend kind of really shifted my brain a lot. Just coming back into this space. Space because I've been away from it for almost two years. I'm a person of passion and as I said, like, I need to be 100% in. And I'm starting to kind of fall out of that place where I was 100% into CrossFit because I'm starting to realize the lifestyle behind it of training, you know, four to five hours in a gym, like just never leaving this space that we're in right now when if you could just go out your door and look outside, like, look what we're surrounded by. Right. I mean, I live in Malibu, California. It's equally as beautiful as this. Yet I stay, I stay inside all day long and my body's destroyed because of it. And I'm not saying the sport of CrossFit's bad by any means. I'm just trying to say that if anybody's like in my shoes right now and they're like, what do I do? Like, I want to get better at CrossFit and stuff, you can't, you can't speed up and try to match these people. Like, it is A gain, like an incremental gain of just slowly putting on like a pound to every single movement, every single month rather than trying to. If the best guy in the world snatching £300, I cannot try to train at his numbers, his volume. Like some days I'm putting out £30,000 of volume and that's crazy.

It's a long row to hoe. And it sounds to me like part of you knows that it's going to be a lot of time in the gym away from nature, which I can tell you love, I love. And I run into that sometimes too at a much smaller level because I'm no longer really competing for the type of titles and at the level that you're competing in. But when I look at, you know, the Japanese centenarians and you know that the Sardinian Italians, you know, living off the, off the coast of Italy and you know, drinking rosemary tea and walking in the mountains, swimming in cold rivers, getting lots of sunshine and you know, when I hear that if I'm in a hotel gym with moldy carpet and a bunch of treadmills and WI fi and fluorescent light, part of me inside knows that I'm really not making myself healthier. I'm getting fit, healthier, happier. Yeah. Yeah. And for me it's hard because the gym is a happy place for me. Like, I love to go and work out. I'll go work out even if I'm not signed up for a race or competing for anything. I like to work out. It feels good. It's happy movement. For me, it's almost like moving meditation. But increasingly I find myself thinking, you know what? This is not what anybody who's living a long time is actually doing. And you know, it's getting, and maybe it's just getting old, but it's more and more appealing to me to like go for a walk and go out and do some push ups under a waterfall with some rocks. Yeah.

I mean, it was interesting. Like I just competed in a parking lot where a month earlier, two months earlier, I was competing in a stadium with tens of thousands of people and competing in that parking lot, just being surrounded by the outside. I was like, wow, this is just incredible. Like we were taking sandbags and just running up a fire road.

Yeah.

And it wasn't even that crazy of a workout. It's just like this just feels like me.

Yeah.

So I'm an interesting place. I mean, like, I'm just such a competitive person. I can never be, as I said, anything less than 100%. So I have to kind of go back from this weekend and kind of really talk to my coach and like, kind of try to find like a happy medium. Because I do really. I'm very passionate about competing in CrossFit. I think it's super cool, but I understand it will come at a cost. So I still have to find that.

Take up chess. Like I said, the pieces are somewhat heavy. Carpal tunnel is a. It is a risk.

I play a lot of Magic the Gathering, to be honest.

Yeah.

Or Dungeons and Dragons.

Mm. Yeah.

Listen, are you a dungeon master?

I'm not.

I feel like you would be a dungeon master.

I never found a handy for picking up girls. The dungeon master.

You know, all the things that I did when I was younger that I knew was gonna kind of get deter the kind of babage that I wanted to get, I now have started to bring back in my life because I realized that, you know, I hit this point in my life where I was like, man, all I want to do is get girls. I just want to pull girls all day long. And it's kind of like this man feeling gotta, like, lift weights and pick up girls and get in bar fights. And now, like, I realized that picking up girls does not really make me that happy. It was like, you know, a moment in time. And now I'm going back to all the things like playing instruments. Like, I played trombone for nine years. As soon as I found out the girls did not like trombone, I left trombone.

You're gonna find that they probably do like it. I think that's. I know. The babe parabola.

Dude, I should have.

We're gonna make that up.

Yeah, dude, I should have been like John Mayer. Everyone made fun of John Mayer and gave him shit. And then he got really good at guitar and singing, and now he literally could have any girl in the entire world.

I think that happened with folks like Buddha too, but they had to die first before people liked them.

I don't think that works. I mean, if you and I die before people like me, I don't think I really get any of the benefit of that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, dude, my audience likes. They like little practical hacks and tips and tricks. What do you guys putting your freaking body through CrossFit like you did? Having. Having to like, take the accelerated route recovery. What kind of things were you doing to help you recover as fast as you needed to?

I'll tell you one thing. Hanging boots. If you're very, very into lifting weights, you should get into hanging boots.

Gravity boots.

Yeah. Basically, like, I. I'm over 6 foot 2. When I'm healthy and with tons and tons of weightlifting, I can go down to six foot three quarter. Like, it's. It's like over an inch lost.

Really?

Yeah, it's bad.

Wow.

It's just like it compresses the discs and your joints and your hips and everything. You're kind of like this. You're just completely displaced. So I started to do that and it kind of would alleviate the stress on my ankles, my knees, and my hips and kind of like that separation of the joint capsule. And I think maybe that would just allow fluid to get in there and kind of bust out inflammation.

Now I have gravity boots. I use a yoga trapeze more because it's easier to hang inside. And I put the boots on and off. I find that when I hang from the gravity boots, I can almost like swing my hips side to side. Yeah, Almost as like you're trying to get out of the boots and you can feel it kind of traction your hip.

This one pops out.

Yeah. Yeah. You can literally feel the popping. Do you have any other, like, little moves that you do when you're hanging gravity boots?

Typically what I do is I'll hit like five sit ups, five hamstring curls, and then I allow myself to like, really relax. So I hit tension and then I do extreme relaxing. It's almost like. Is it. Was it called pnf, where you basically.

Contract for like that body scan thing you can do before you go to bed at night where you tighten your toes, then relax, but they get more relaxed than they would normally?

Yeah, exactly. So I started to do stuff like that where I would, like, allow myself to really kind of activate and get into it. I allow myself to pull, like, try to really open up through my lats because it's really hard to get upper body stretches. Like, I do yoga a lot and apps like Romwad and I'll talk more about that. But like this thing right here, I'll pull against it and I'll push against it, and that's really open up, like all the intercostals in here and get my lats going. Open up the shoulder girdle.

It's hard to traction the upper body with that. Well, Kelly Starrett has a fit and I'll ask you about Romwa in a second. But Kelly Starrett used to be a mobility wad and I think he's something else now. I forget. Sorry, Kelly. But he has the idea that you.

Is it game ready or ready state?

Yeah, ready state. That's what it is. You basically attach elastic bands to for example, your wrist and then you're like pulling away with one end of the elastic band attached to like a pole or an immovable object.

Yeah.

And so you can basically use an elastic band attraction, the upper body. But it is more difficult than like hanging from gravity boots. Someone needs to make gravity wristbands. That's it.

You mean like hang like this?

Yeah, gravity wristbands.

That would hurt so much, dude. You have to really build up to be able to hang upside down. Like it hurts.

I don't know, like, like clamps with a hook on the other end. Like a gravity boot, except made for the wrist.

Listen, I'm. I'm willing to try like another thing. Like as I mentioned, that Romwood thing. Like, I have no financial interest in them. I just, I like the apple speak on their behalf. They're awesome people.

And what is it?

It's basically just like a, it's a app designed for more CrossFit and like functional strength style people. Because like one thing I realize is as a runner, you have a very similar movement pattern. Like it's. It's a simple movement pattern. It is nice to have some range of motion in there, but it's not super, super key to success. But.

And how long would a RomWad last?

You can do a short one and that's like 11 minutes. You could do all the way to 45 minute long one.

And what type of movements are you doing?

It's basically a ground based program. Like, you know, it just kind of. It just coaches you through and discusses through every single one. And there's a video and everything. But it's just like I'm the kind of person who almost like I don't like going to yoga classes for some reason. It just doesn't fit with me every once in a while.

Just like grinds are uncomfortable.

Yeah. It's kind of creepy. And I sweat so much and I look like a total goofball.

Yeah.

Yeah. Like, I remember one of my first yoga classes. I wore tights that were like almost see through and I didn't know it. And then a girl came up to me after class. She's like, I could see everything going on in your pants.

Yeah.

It wasn't sexy.

Yeah. As a former underwear model, I don't think you could really make it in a yoga studio.

Yeah. I mean, listen, I, I certainly made people want to do more yoga. But so like the Romwa thing, like I, I only mention it because like I realized also humongous part of being fit is also being able to get into the positions like it is. It is more stressful on your heart rate and your entire system trying to get into a position that your body can't mobile even reach.

Yeah.

So you have to grease those grooves to actually have power and strength and mobility and and speed and endurance in those grooves as well.

Would you define romwad as more like dynamic stretching or are you doing like static stretch and hold?

All static stretch and hold.

Okay. Yeah.

The basics.

Look it up.

Yeah, it's easy. It's easy. Like I mean I'm the kind of person where it's like if I'm just cruising on my phone, I'd rather do romwad. And the app allows you to kind of like come out of it and it will dictate like it keeps on telling you what to do and you don't have to watch the video and you can just screw around, write emails, whatever the heck you want to do while it's going on.

I'll link to in the show notes for you guys. BenGreenfieldFitness.com HunterPod I want to ask you about sleep, but give me one more recovery tip.

Dude. Biggest thing is probably like calories. I think everybody's super under eating and super dehydrated. Like I started tracking my water. I have like a 64 ounce water jug that I carry around with me everywhere and I have to take down about two at least a day. And also like doing like a my fitness pal and making sure that I'm hitting bare minimum of 4500 and then all the way up to like 6500 a day.

Yeah. And there was actually a research study that showed that that was. This was recent amongst female endurance athletes. The biggest problem was it was just lack of calorie intake overall. And for me, because I have some female athletes will come and hire me to go through their nutrition and I'll look through what they're eating. They're like just shoving food down the hatch. I can't eat anymore. One egg white pumpkin spice bar for breakfast, egg white with spinach for lunch. And then they'll carl bow load at night with half their sweet potato.

Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I mean it's kind of sad. Sensitive subject. But I just bumped into another girl who's an incredible endurance athlete here and she has fractured sacrum and that's. I think it's a very hard bone to break.

It's a very hard bone.

Broke it running and like, you know, that's something that's different for that population. But for, you know, at least for me, I realized how much I was under eating and like I should basically be eating like 10 Big Macs a day just to even hit like you know, base level of calories.

It's crazy. Were you using any like quantification device that you could wear to tell you about how many calories you're burning?

I mean I have the. I did work with. What the hell is it called? I tried whoop for a while and I'm not trying to make fun of their company, but I broke it all the time. Yeah, that's a cool piece of equipment. If you're kind of more of a not so like a wild person like myself. I do my suunto and that would track everything. And you know those are two. It's my go tos.

And then with the water. I don't know if you've discovered this tip, but have you tried adding like a bunch of minerals, like salt, liquid minerals that helps with hydration so much? Because what I do now is 32 ounce glass mason jar in the morning and in the evening. And the one I'm using right now is called Quinton Q U I N T O N And it's like this super salty seawater. They actually get it from the sea. They isolate it from the sea you put it in.

Is it like liquid already?

Yeah, it's liquid. And you could pour it straight into your mouth. Yeah, it just tastes like horribly salty salt water. But then you dump it into like 32 ounces and it's like you're drinking like mildly salty salt water.

I use this company called the Right stuff.

I've heard of them before too.

That's incredible, dude. Like, I mean it's got like 70% of the electrolytes you need to have for the day. And I put that in the jug in the morning and I shake it up and I chug through that thing. For some reason my body actually really has a hard time drinking just regular water in the morning. So I almost need to add either beet elite or something else. Like just like something just to kind of change my like get palate exhaustion from drinking too much water.

I found another thing I like and I put this in there with the minerals is. You know how there's all this research now on hydrogen water. Like it's really good for anti inflammatory and antioxidant and it, it reduces lactic acidosis if you do it before a workout. But there's this company, it's. It's the guy I interviewed on my show. I'll link to it in the show notes. It's Robert Slovak and he had this one, he has this website where he sells hydrogen water tablets. But they're like raspberry lemon flavored. So you put a few drops of those in the water and they're non calorie and they just give this amazing flavor to the water. But. So you get hydrogen and minerals.

Dude, pass it on to your boy. I need some of that stuff.

I'll send you a link later on. Okay. So sleep. Sleep is obviously it goes hand in hand with recovery. What were some of the biggest things you did for sleep?

I did. This is gonna sound crappy because I know that this. You're a very intelligent person, but I've never been a person who slept very much. Like last night I went to bed at 2:30 and I was up by 6:30. And I've been going all day and I won't. Yeah, I will just. I can just be that kind of person. I am a person.

Who's your Modafinil sponsorship?

What's that?

Your Modafinil sponsorship. That's like the anti narcoleptic drug that all the CEOs in Silicon Valley use to like go for like 18 hours a day. It's this little pill called Modafinil.

Really?

Yeah.

They can just hang out with me and I'll teach them my tricks.

But there's some people with a genetic variant that allows them to go through a sleep cycle, like a 90 minute sleep cycle in like 45 to 60 minutes and then get by them way less sleep because you can hit four or five sleep cycles in like six hours.

Yeah, I remember reading about that one. Yeah. So basically I don't sleep that much. I mean I do sleep about seven to eight hours a night since I started doing CrossFit. I go to bed around 10 and I can stay in bed until like eight or nine. It's crazy, the impact on my body. And like my. My roommate Kempson, he was like talking to me yesterday about it. He was like, dude, he and I have been living on to get on and off together since 2016. And he's been with me through every form of training, what I've been training for. And he was like, dude, when I first met you and you were just training like 100 mile weeks and over 100 mile weeks on, on the bike and over 100 mile weeks on the foot and hitting the gym, you'd go to bed at any time and you were up by 4am like exploding. And now with CrossFit, like just because I said the different kind of load on your body, I would just. I need to stay in bed longer. I didn't necessarily sleep longer, but I just needed to like be in that laying position because I was so trashed.

Yeah, but again, that neuromuscular thing, a.

Big thing with sleep, just those super shakes I like at nighttime. I think when you just get over into that overreaching state as an athlete, usually a lot of it has to do with the fact that your heart rate's still elevated. Like I would put a pulse oximeter on myself and try to make sure like I will not work out too late in the evening. Especially high intensity because your heart rate will never come down. I'm like a 33 to 29 guy is my resting heart rate when I'm sleeping. I found that if I could not go to bed without a certain amount of food in my body, if I was still in the 40s.

Yeah, that's the tricky part because there's all the research on disruption of circadian rhythmicity when you, you eat too close to bedtime. But all those studies are not done in athletes who are completely like emptying their glycogen tanks three hours prior to bed. Do you ever try like a cold shower to get the core temperature down before you go to bed?

Dude, this is crazy. So this summer we didn't have. I just called it the hot house. It was like we had this crappy apartment or house in Boulder, still cost $600,000 and it was a piece of crap house. That's what boulders become. So we didn't have any air conditioning. And I would be so hot at nighttime and just like being like sitting on the couch naked like basically. And I would take a freezing cold shower and then I would take my towel and I would get it wet and I would literally put it on my body and lay under a wet towel. And we'd even take empty out protein jugs and we call swamp make swamp coolers. We put it inside of a bucket of water and put a fan over it. And I would sleep with a freezing cold. I'd wrap it up like a baby and I'd sleep with like. You ever heard of like a hot toddy? Like where you put it and you put it between your legs and you heat it up so you stay warm at night when you're camping. We did a reverse version of that with like freezing cold bottles.

So it's like I was in Switzerland, teaching at that, that Swiss health clinic in the. For a couple weeks. It was really cool. But it was during the. The heat wave wave in Europe. And so it was like 104 to 106 degrees. And I had to do a five minute cold shower. And then I went into the little town. Took like 40 minutes out of the Alps. Going to town. I found a fan. So just got myself as cold as possible, put the fan on, then you just lay there naked. And that's how you fall asleep. Yeah, dude.

Every single night. It's crazy. I actually did a bike race across those same exact Alps during a heat wave back in 2015. Picturesque, beautiful, but one of the worst feelings I've ever had. Worst dropout I've ever had.

I don't know why Europe doesn't believe in air conditioning yet. Okay, so, so sleep for you. It is having enough calories and your body when you go to sleep, totally making sure the body temperature is cool. And then are you using any kind of devices? Like special noises when you sleep?

Just that fan, kind of like having that white noise?

Yeah.

As I said, dude, like, I try to keep things as simple as possible. Like, I almost use like, only like a training Timex watch like that nowadays, because I just wanted to get all the technology off me. But the one thing is, like, using a pulse oximeter can be like a very basic oximeter.

Really?

Yeah. As I said, like, I would just put that thing on there. I would see where my oxygen saturation was, read my heart rate, track that very easily.

The one that stays on the whole night.

You don't do it all night. I would just do it for, like, I would lay down on the couch and just, like, breathe. And I would just like, sit there for a second. I'd be like, okay, this is where my heart rate's at and this is where my oxygen saturation is at. Like, I can tell that I'm, like, pretty fried right now. I couldn't really change the oxygen saturation, but I could, I could track where I was at, but my heart rate, as I said, was high. I would have to do, like, a couple things before I would allow myself to go to bed.

Like, the cold or, like, enough food.

The cold enough food. Like, I would make these super shakes where I do about six to eight tablespoons of honey, up to six bananas if I was really up there, and about four scoops of. Four scoops of protein, a little bit of heavy cream, a little bit of coconut milk, and a lot of creatine.

Wow.

Yeah. And lots of. I just put a lot of, like, you know, Himalayan sea salt in there, too.

Yeah, it was gross. Everyone who's listening in, who's trying to lose weight, don't do 100. Just said, would you remember everybody who's an athlete who can't sleep, try 100? Just said, yeah.

Everyone's like, yeah, I'm going to try it. And they get, like, 50 pounds of fat in, like, a month.

Yeah.

This is market.

One other question regarding sleep. You ever mess around with CBD or any of that stuff?

I just. I'm here with a company called Pure Spectrum. They're my sponsor. And I've been using CBD for, like, two years constantly.

As I said.

Like, I used to love smoking weed, and I kind of got really bummed out as I got older. I just kept on making more. More anxious and having that spot where I could, like, you know me, dude, I'm a freaking energized person. One, if I work out too much, I'm super energized. And two, like. Like, I had to drink two glasses of wine before I competed the other day at nighttime to go to bed because I saw people like you. And I'm like, oh, Ben's here. And then I'm like, yeah. And, oh, Ryan's here. And then this is it. So the only thing, like, I'll take almost 200 milligrams a night.

Yeah, like, CBD helps. I'm surprised at the number of people who drink wine to sleep who don't realize all wine is. Is gaba. Like, is that inhibitory neurotransmitter gaba.

Really?

You can buy GABA at Walgreens, right? So people who don't want the alcohol or the calories or whatever from wine, you can literally just, like, go buy GABA from CVS or wherever. And it does the exact same thing as wine does.

Yeah, I'm sure it's kind of like that. Just like that casual sipping feeling, too. Almost like some people just, like, smoke cigarettes.

Like, it's just like, it's always association of it.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. But what that guru was talking about.

Cbd.

Cbd. Yeah. That's one thing I was just. I was having conversation with, like. So Atkins came and stayed at my house for a couple days. He had just finished. I'm sure this information's out there. But he went and competed in the. In the. What is it called? The new ultimate. What is that called? Survivor Challenge or something? Quest.

Eco challenge.

Yeah, Eco challenge. Yeah. Yeah. Which is like, A crazy ultra endurance race.

Yeah.

And he's beat up from it. He comes to my house. He flew from Fiji, comes to my house. He's like, I'm here for the week until we go to Tahoe. And I was like, dude, you want some cbd? Like, you must be so messed up. And he's like, ah, dude, I don't believe in that stuff. He's like, I'm like, how much are you using? He goes, I just put three or four drops under my tongue. And I was like, dude, I'm taking three or four droppers.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's one thing that really changed up my game is like, I take massive doses of that.

Yeah. Because of course it depends on, on the source. You know, they, they now have like, what's called phytocannabinoid. Rich hemp, I think it's called. With denser sources of cbd. It depends if it's got the terpenes in it.

Like this company has a really high level.

Yeah. I found some companies. Either way I have to take at least like 100 milligrams, but I found some companies you need like 200, 300. Yeah.

But also like, I remember, so remember when we met with Mark from Primera?

Yeah.

Like he and I originally started to build, build our friendship because the secret.

Behind the scenes sleep supplement that doesn't exist yet.

Yeah, dude, trust me, I've been on that, on that phone call multiple times. We can have a great conversation about that. But basically I would call him and I'm like, there's no way that creatine, like someone my size who works out as much as I do, needs to take out the same amount of creatine as somebody who's like 150 pounds in the gym and they work out four days a week. And typically they give out such bad information on creatine these days it's just like 5 grams of creatine and that's all you need. And I, I come from like the school, like where I was reading all these bodybuilding books where these guys are, are like super dosing 20 grams a day in gallon jugs for a week just to kind of saturate the muscle with it and then would get on to like, you know, 7 to 10 grams minimum of creatine. Then these are like, you know, strength training athletes. And the same exact thing as I said with C, like I'm, as I'm reaching with cbd, it's like depending on, I think there's not enough information out there for People who are really high training, high performing people where we really need to not only have more calories, we need to have everything on such a higher level.

Yeah.

And it took me years as an athlete to find that out. Because I'll admit, like, I hate to put down the card that I'm getting older because I'm still young, like I'm in my prime, but I can't drink a six pack of beer and have like a couple drumsticks of chicken and like a coconut water. And like, that's my. That's my food for the day. And then I just train all day long. Like, if I want to get better, I need to eat the right things, I need to do the right things, because everything now is like milliseconds, practically getting better. Atkins has come second place at the Tahoe World Champ Spartan Race World Championships four times now in all than less than a minute margin, like on the same freaking obstacle. And not to say that he's not training the right way, but, you know, if you just change a couple things, if you took almost a second off of every single obstacle, he would have won the race.

So in other words, he's using 70 milligrams of CBD. He needs to be using 80.

Total amateur.

Change the whole game.

Total amateur.

Only these people knew.

Yeah.

All right, so you're a well read guy. You mentioned, you mentioned that you like books. I know some people give you a hard time. You know, like you're a meathead or something like that. But I talk to you. And you read a lot of books.

Yeah, I try to play dumb. It makes things a lot easier in life.

Top books lately. I won't give you a number. It could be one, it could be a few. But anything you've read lately, that or in the past that's just mind blowingly good that you think more people should have read.

I'm gonna actually go into my phone so I can get the exact titles because I just don't want to screw this up.

Sure.

Give me 30 seconds.

And while you're doing that, may I? I'm gonna throw one in there just because it's fresh on my mind right now and it's. It's Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday. Amazing book.

So I just finished reading Hitler's Last. Hitler's Last days by Bill O'Reilly. I like reading when I'm like, heavily heavy in training competition about history books, about like, some of the greatest people in history and not saying, like, I'm applauding Hitler for what he did.

Because you find them inspiring or because they put you to sleep?

No, I find them inspiring.

Okay.

I mean, to imagine like, you know, I am, I'm reading actually another book on Hitler, getting deeper into it because like, you know, the transformation of who he was and who he became is insane. And what he did is not what I'm trying to applaud, but I'm saying, like, it's a. It's the mentality and it's the daily practice and it's the things that he did that blow my mind. And you know, reading about all the generals and the people surrounding him and his thought process of attacking things like reading about Napoleon, whatever is going on. Like, I love to read about history because, you know, history is basically a great indicator of what's going to happen in the future. And being one of being able to read what the greats did back in the day is a very easy way to like, you know, direct yourself into those, becoming one of those same people. And, you know, I do read a ton about exercise science, but I think I'm at the point now where, you know, I do read scientific studies and journals every once in a while just to kind of stay up to date.

But should we read that book? I interviewed this guy, Guy Peak by Mark Bubs. Dr. Mark Bubs. It was a really good book, you know, and I'm not just saying this to toot my own horn, but beyond training, like, I spent a lot of time like physiology.

I do that all the time.

His book was almost like kind of like a fresh, well resourced version of that sort of reminded me of while I was reading it. Yeah, it's really good. It's called Peak, the New Performance. There's one other history, one I was going to bring up, but I'm forgetting what it was like, the history of the world, like in a very small manual.

I like that.

A ton of takeaways. Yeah, like every single sentence in that book is impactful and I don't remember what it is, but I will find it for you guys who are listening in and put a link in the show Notes. In addition to books, any audios, podcasts, documentaries, any other forms of media that you found to be really meaningful.

I'm kind of burnt out on podcasts, to be honest. I think there's like an over saturation of discussions of the same exact thing.

Or podcasts is the new blogging and.

There'S so many brilliant people in the world. Like, you're an incredible resource and I honestly feel like people listen to your podcast. And then all of a sudden, they try to kind of do the same exact thing and open up the same kind of conversations, and you're only a few degrees away from everybody else, and, like, you're one of the people who's at the top, and then there's just a couple people below you who try to do what you do.

The only reason I'm at the top is because I'm the oldest. Yeah. Doing it the longest time.

Yeah, you've been biohacking the longest.

So I've been podcasting for. For long enough to where the itunes algorithm, I think, favors me just because I started so long ago that they. I'm just considered an OG now, I guess, in Apple. That's my logic.

That's pretty incredible.

That's the only reason I could figure out that I'm still. Still up there.

But the thing that I try to do the most is I make a lot of phone calls every single day. And with mentors, I try to reach out to them, like, every single week. And I try to speak very deeply on anything. Like, as I've grown older, I communicate everything that I can. Any emotion, any question, any leave, like, no stone unturned. Like, I'm in a relationship with a girl right now, and usually, like, when I was dating people, like, if they bothered me at all, like, I just kind of let that stuff build up and I would just be like, it's not even worth having the conversation because it's probably going to annoy me even more. And then I'm just going to, I guess, gonna. But now, like, even though I know that I'm going into, like, the heart of a storm, I just dig right in and, like, it's kind of changed my life. That's probably the biggest sources of information for myself nowadays is you'll just, like.

Pick up the phone and call someone. Oh, yeah, shit goes south. Or if you just need to know, a conversation needs to be had. Yeah, you don't text, you don't ig message.

Dude, you want to see something crazy?

Actually, I know this because you've called me out of the blue a couple of times.

964 unread text messages.

Oh, my gosh. He's not lying, folks.

I don't. I don't read. Yeah, I don't read anything. Like, people send me. I'm just a conversation kind of person.

Wow.

Yeah. Interesting. That's where I'm kind of getting my sources of motivation nowadays. I think, honestly, if you can one find great sources of light, meaning whether it be a book or people, and then to constantly verse that to yourself and other people and, like, you know, like, that's what I'm talking about. Talk so deeply with you about. I talked to everybody this weekend of, like, kind of what I'm going through. The idea of whether I go back to CrossFit or come back into Spartan racing, just. Because if I just sit there and do all it on myself, I think I don't really get to really live out the ideas.

Yeah. You know, one last question I wanted to ask you was about mentorship. You know, we talked a little bit about coaching, but I think a mentor is something different. I went for the longest time, years and years, as a lone wolf without a mentor. I read a lot. Like, books were my mentor.

Right.

Books and occasional conversations with people in their little unique sectors of whether it's nutrition or fitness or whatever. But I never found somebody who I felt like, oh, this person finds family important, understands health and fitness, is inspirational, is massively successful, like, somebody who could go forth and do things before for me and then turn around and teach me the lessons. Very hard for me to find. And it's only been literally in the past two months that I have finally found the guy, like, the person who I can actually listen to and respect as my mentor. That's actually why I had to reschedule our show today to be later, because he wanted to get on a call with me and I had to take it, and I stepped out and took the call with him. But it's life changing. I actually have this person now who it's kind of like, you know, that person I wish I'd always had just to be able to ask any questions and talk to. And I'm sure someday, for those of you listening in, I'll. I'll have him on the podcast and tell people who he is. But in the meantime, keep it secret.

Keep it safe.

Keep it secret. Keep it safe.

Yeah.

How about you?

I got this guy. I mean, I have a few. Everybody kind of provides a different kind of thing. Like, Crazy Bobby is an easy one to talk about. I think I've mentioned Crazy Bobby to you.

Crazy Bobby?

Yeah, he's this guy in Malibu. The first time I ever met him, I go over to his house, and he's just like. My friend told me, he's like, you got to meet Crazy Bobby. He's like, you know, the older, fitter version of you. And I was like, no one's fucking fitter than me.

God dang.

So Next thing you know, I come over this guy's house and he's got a wrestling mat in his backyard. He's like, yeah, he used to be on Olympic trials, wrestler. And I'm like, I wrestle for 10 years. Let's go. And he's 55 years old, maybe 54 years old. When I meet him, we wrestle for like an hour straight. Eventually, he breaks my nose while we're wrestling. And I was like, you son of a. But from there, like, immediately respected him because he was just like, one. Not only like, could he physically handle, like, you know, back up everything he was saying with physicality, but he is, like, so deeply read like you and those. Every piece of the body, like mind, body and spirit. And he changed my life. I mean, I'll admit went through this, like, crazy breakup back in 2015. And I came here and I just was, like, on this rampage of all I wanted. Like, I kind of hated girls. All I wanted to do was just go out and, like, casually date and, like, drink a ton. I started getting back into drugs a little bit, and I was like. I was like, fuck this. I was like. And I was working out really hard. I was really pissed off. And he. And I met him in that period of time because I had to rebuild, like, a friend group. And so I started reaching out in different directions around la. And, you know, he's like, dude, he's like, I kind of watch you and. Tell me if I'm being too crude for your podcast. I don't intend to be. But he's like, you basically just like, jacking off into the world. Like, I just watch you go on dates. I watched.

I'm gonna edit that out. All the minivans just stopped as the monster.

I don't know. I don't know who listens to your podcast. So I tried to keep it PG this time, but, you know, he's like, I'm watching you go out on these dates and you just messing around with these girls. You don't get anything out of it. You're kind of just charging the world in your workouts, you're charting the world at nighttime drinking, you're charging the world this direction. It's like, none of it's re energizing you. All you're doing is just giving away your energy. And she kind of started to bring me into the whole mindset of, like, the Taoist approach to sex life and longevity and just, like, started teaching me these little things about actually really kind of being intentional with your time with a person in A relationship being intentional with your time in the way that you train. Being intentional. The time with the substance that you put in your body. Because I wasn't in that mindset at all. And you know, honestly, like, the Guy is now 57 years old and he lives in Malibu. Yeah. There's a Malibu Park City.

This isn't like a well known guy like people wouldn't like.

Yeah, I mean, he's. I mean he's like, he is really well known in that area. Like, everybody knows about Crazy Bobby, but Bobby's not like, you know, this celebrity or anything like that. He. He used to be a really successful stuntman model, everything like that. And he just kind of always stayed away from the scene because I don't think he ever really wanted to be one of those people.

And I see that guy who you mentioned to me, he was like inventing some top secret. Yes. Recovery space thing.

Yeah. So like a super brilliant guy.

Maybe I'll have to have him on the show once he kind of invents that. We maybe can keep that under wraps for now.

It's there now, dude. I mean, right now they're like doing testing with the air Force and NASA.

Give people the 32nd overview of what it is.

It's a product called Stratosphere, which basically is an extreme chamber chamber that you can do exercise in and you can do almost anything. And it's big enough. Like it's, you know, probably about a fifth of the size of this room. And it can change pressure and altitude extremely rapid rates.

I forget what that's called. Like a cvac.

Yeah.

Machines. Yeah. So it'll take you like from the bottom of a mountain to the top of a mountain, over and over again.

Exactly.

They have one. I've seen the one at the upgraded labs in Santa Monica. They have one. But it's not like a giant room. Like you couldn't work out in it.

Yeah, it's like a pod. Yeah. So his is uniquely designed for one. It's going to. I don't want to bastardize his information here, but I'm going to try to give like the rough understanding of what I have. Basically it can help like, you know, through revolumizing your red blood cells, things like that, helping out with athletic endeavors, health endeavors. Like there's tons of research going into it now. But, you know, the guy is just a genius. And as I said, like, he continues to impress me. He came with me to the CrossFit Games this year and like he could have competed in the CrossFit games without even really knowing how to do CrossFit. He's just intensely physical Beast. And also an extremely smart person. And, you know, as a man growing up in the world, you almost don't want to allow other males to kind of make you feel insignificant with their. Their intelligence or their physical dominance because you want to be like, I'm the man in the room. You know what I mean? And being an athlete, that's very challenging for me because I always need to test myself against other males, you know? So as I started to kind of put away that ego and allow other people to come to my life and show me flaws and now all of a sudden make them strengths, it kind of changed me as a person.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wow. So Crazy Bobby's the man.

Crazy Bobby is the man. He's the guy who I raw Elkhart with during a podcast.

I Elkhart for dinner last night. Wind up at a party. Yeah. Well, no. This dude rolled in. He just shot in Elkham, Montana, then came here, and he showed up at the party with a Ziploc bag. Elkhart. And a Ziploc bag with the elk liver. And we had somebody went to 711 to try to find olive oil and butter. Couldn't find it. So he just slapped those things on the grill. I had some sea salt with me, and it was like salt, pepper, liver, and heart. It was actually pretty good, but I was also really hungry, so. And it was cold.

Grossed me out.

Well, Hunter, maybe like three years from now, I'll have to have you on the show again as a three peat. Maybe sooner. I'm excited to see where your life goes in the next few months as you explore the maybe CrossFit thing or wherever else things go.

Whatever I end up doing, I'm gonna crush something. I'm feeling pretty physically strong these days.

I believe it. I believe it. And, folks, if you're listening in and you want to listen to my other episode with Hunter or just delve into anything that we talked about today, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com HunterPod I will link to everything. And Hunter, dude, thanks for inspiring people. Thanks for watching being who you are. Thanks for being a curious seeker and lover of life.

It was a pleasure, man. Thanks again for having me.

Over and out, folks. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.