The Potent Ergogenic Effect of Something Called "Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy" (And Exactly How To Use It).

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, while it's helping you sleep, it's stimulating the mitochondria so that the mitochondria utilize oxygen more efficiently to produce less oxidative waste. So your oxidative stress goes down and the ATP levels just go through the roof. Delta sleep has been associated with all of those things. You don't have delta sleep, your immune system goes to heck, your memory is shot, you're not producing as much hormones as you should. Basically, you're going to break down if you don't have enough delta sleep.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy, all the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And it was about three years ago that I had the inventor of this device called a pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, or PEMF device on the show to talk about how PEMF can actually change your brain waves while you are sleeping. How you can place these devices near your body while you're sleeping to actually do things like activate delta brainwaves or theta brainwaves. Really cool stuff. I've talked about it like in the sleep hacking chapter of my book Beyond Training, in multiple articles that I've written at Ben Greenfield Fitness. And also by the way, if you want to go back and listen to the podcast that I did on how PEMF can help you sleep, you can just go hit the show notes for the podcast you're listening to right now and you can grab the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com EarthPulsepodcast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com EarthPulse podcast. Well, the inventor of that handy dandy little donut shaped magnetic device is who joined me for that original PEMF and sleep episode and I've brought him back today. His name is Paul Becker and Paul has been researching quite a bit into the use of pemf not for sleep, but for but for performance. He's been looking into how you can actually use PEMF as an ergogenic aid. And being somebody who is always wanting to keep you on the Cutting edge of the latest greatest biohacking gear and tools. This one definitely is something that we gotta talk about. So Paul, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me back.

Yeah, my pleasure.

Now, looking forward to it.

Before we delve into kind of a review of what PEMF is, I'm curious if you can go over your story. You have kind of an interesting story of how you began to delve into this stuff because you're not like a doctor or a traditional dye in the wool university researcher or something like that. Can you kind of tell your background of how you discovered pemface?

Yeah, well, I had graduated law school and I went to Pepperdine Law School and had a somewhat of a major in entertainment law, specialization in entertainment law. So I was living in Las Vegas with my band and I was trying to study for the bar exam and run this band and bartend graveyard shift at like two or three different bars in town. And I stumbled into this whole life expo in Las Vegas in 1996. Yeah, I went there for the UFOs and the alternative energy and I was reading the program and there's this guy that claims he's got the cure for AIDS. And this is 96. Right. So HIV is like huge.

And I gotta interrupt you, but I don't like, when I go to a lot of these health exposure, I always walk in with one eyebrow raised really high because there really is a lot of kind of like pseudoscience and woo woo stuff that goes on at a lot of these. I mean, was it kind of that way at this Las Vegas conference?

Yeah, I mean there was some really interesting stuff, you know, an alternative energy field and guy, you know, some guy from. Retired Air Force colonel. You see him on all the YouTube UFO stuff and I forget his name, but it might come to me and you know, amazing slides and presentations and stuff. So anyway, so this guy is Bob Beck and you can look him up on YouTube. He's dead now. I think he OD'd on colloidal silver. Literally.

Holy cow.

Because I had a friend who actually knew him, used to have coffee with him and he said, and toward the end I just kept telling him, bob, stop, lay off the colloidal silver.

Seriously, that's like, that's like a perfect story for, for some, I mean it's sad that he died, but at the same time it's, it's kind of an ironic way to go being in the alternative medical field.

Yeah, you know, he was, he was in such bad shape when he stumbled into the stuff himself. That, you know, he got. He probably wouldn't have lived too long if he hadn't started using the blood electrification and all of this stuff. So anyway, so I go into this thing, you know, and this guy claimed he's got the cure for hiv. And basically it was this story about these guys from Albert Einstein Medical College in New York and they invented this and patented this thing and proved that it worked. But it stick needles into the artery in the vein and then run current, use the needles as electrodes and stimulate the blood. And this would inactivate the virus. So long story short, the guy's like, you know, this is the, the holy grail. You blood electrify yourself, you kill all the virus and bacteria. And I bought it and I was just like, holy shit. This is like, this makes a lot of sense to me. Just electrocute these very, very small foreign bodies in your body and it's not harmful to you, but it just destroys them. So anyway, so I bought his little system in 1996 and I've not had the cold or flu since. Now it's 20 years later, 2016. So I haven't had a cold or flu in 20 because I carry.

This was, this was a PEMF device?

No, this was an electric stem device.

Okay.

And this is how I started to get into this. It was 96, I'm studying for the bar exam, which I passed that year, finally on my third try. But most of my time I was investigating the history on where this stuff came from. I mean they were using electric stem back and electromagnetics back in the 1920s, in the 1800s when electricity was new, they were stimulating the body with these machines.

And is this like a different type of electrostim? For example, there's a device out there called the Compex and there's another one called the Mark Pro and those are popular among athletes these days for attaching the electrodes to specific muscle areas and causing them to contract. Is this like a different frequency that you'd use on viruses and bacteria and stuff?

This is completely different. You know, that stuff has, you know, the science behind them. Because I read a lot of the abstracts and some of the full papers. You know, body, full body vibration. I think that's Russian, Eastern European technology that makes you stronger. The muscle contraction, the electronic muscle contraction which you're talking about, that makes you stronger. But it's very one dimensional stuff where the PEMF system, at least mine, it's a multidimensional thing. You sleep on it every night. It helps you Sleep. While it's helping you sleep, it's stimulating the mitochondria so that the mitochondria utilize oxygen more efficiently, produce less oxidative waste. So your oxidative stress goes down and the ATP levels just go through the roof. At least based on this tong study that shows under 10 Hz stimulation, it triples nerve synapse energy like in a matter of five, 10 minutes.

Now, now, before we, we delve too deeply into what pulse electromagnetic field therapy does, I just wanted to mention real quick like about this E stim because I know a lot of people will like scoff at whether or not viruses and bacteria and stuff like that can be sensitive to E stim but there's some really interesting research on PubMed that goes into, you know, even like novel treatments for HIV and how for example, cancer, cancer and those cells seem to be very responsive to low electric potential stimulation. So. So this stuff folks listening in like is. Is not woo. There's some really interesting studies on electrical stimulation not just for muscle recovery, but also for viruses and bacteria. But still, that's not pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. When did, when did this pemf, which I'm going to start saying just so this podcast isn't like super duper long for me using multisyllabalic words. When did you discover pemf?

I was, had just come back from India. I was there doing, I done this micro current still electric stimulation device. And while I was in India and with a lot of time on my hands waiting for the, for the prototype, I was, I was doing research. My dad had died of like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's syndrome. You know, he was perfectly healthy. They put him on statin drugs and in four years he was dead. But that's another story. But I was trying to figure out why the electric stim that I was using on my dad had had no effect. So I was doing research and I stumbled into this line of research using pulsed electromagnetic fields for Parkinson's disease. So I'm just like, holy crap, you know, I missed the boat. I was really close, but I, but I wasn't where I needed to be. And I'm reading these studies and there's a whole chain of them. Like a guy named Sandike Reuben, Sandy out of, he's in Long Island. He did, I don't know, 20 or 30 studies using his little pico Tesla, which is like a thousand times less strong than the earth pulse. It sounds ridiculous, but I think that like mathematically they're figuring how, what the magnetic field Was in the center of the head or something. Pico Tesla. It's so small. It's like you need, like a jet laboratory, you know, the jet propulsion laboratory equipment to measure it. You know, it's like. I think they came up with Pico Tesla mathematically or something. Anyway, amazing studies. I ordered the whole full text studies. I got back to Florida, still didn't have the prototype of the E stem machine. And I'm looking at these full text studies and these people's faces, and I'm going, that was my. That's my dad right there. And then literally one day later or six hours later, the person's face is completely changed. Like, the smile, the side of their face goes up. You know, this technology, if there was a level playing field and it. And it wasn't slanted heavily against alternative stuff, this stuff would win out every time. I mean, it's so much better than chemicals and pharmaceuticals. It's just. It's mind blowing. You know, you catch a cold, you stim yourself, the cold goes away. You know, you start catching the flu. You feel like you're getting sick, you're starting to cough up loogies. You hook yourself up to an E stim machine, and the next day it's gone away. You know, it's crazy stuff. People just need to learn about it now.

You just. You just said, like, when you're sick, you hook yourself up to an E stim machine. Machine.

Like, yeah, you're talking about, like, the Beck device. You know, the original thing, the guy that said this is the cure for hiv. You know, that thing, it kills. It kills whatever's trying to take your body over that's in your blood, that's floating past those electrodes. You hook them on your wrist. I just wear it to sleep at night.

But that's different than an earth pulse, right? The back device.

Yeah, totally. But I'm just like, where could people find.

Find more information on. On a Beck device?

The Internet's loaded with it. You know, there's. There's just tons of videos of him that goes back to, like, the 1970s, like the early VCR days.

Okay, gotcha.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. People should check it out. I mean, though, you'll never get sick again.

Okay, cool. Well, I'll hunt down some resources for folks on this Beck device. But in the meantime, once we get past, like, E stem for bacteria and viruses and sickness and past, like, a Pico Tesla form of pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, what next? Because I know that you've basically. And I have one of These Earth pulse machines and I sleep with it. But you keep talking to me and you've sent me a few emails about how I could use it to enhance things like mitochondrial density or reduce oxidation and produce like an ergogenic effect. So can you first go into what exactly is the difference between this PEMF that is put out by, by this Earth pulse device and like this Pico Tesla, like tiny little PEMF that you're talking about?

And, and let's say the maths as well. Okay. You take a 20 minute session on a mat or is that like one.

Of the Beamer mats?

Yeah, or any of the mats. There's you know, 50 of them. And you know, your body gets, you know, a little bump. Okay, but we're talking about with the Earth pulses, this thing is in your bed all night. And while this thing is entraining your brain into a more deeper state of sleep, the same frequencies, and this is like some law, you know, natural law. Those same frequencies and these are the frequencies that the earth puts out itself. If we had a clean environment and we had Schumann waves. Schumann waves are in the. Most of the Schumann spectrum is in, in the, you know, delta, theta and alpha range, right?

Yeah. The Schumann range being like what you'd get exposed to if you're walking around barefoot on dirt, like outside or.

Right, exactly.

Camping. Camping and sleeping on the ground.

If we, if we had no radio frequency pollution and stuff. Because now the magnitude of that stuff is, it's like, you know, the analogy is trying to listen to a flute, you know, in a, a platoon of bassoons or something. You know, it's, it's like it's behind it's now background noise to the rf. So we're not, we're deep. We're being tuned up during the daytime. And so when we go to sleep at night, and plus all the electronics and everything that we're exposed to all day and the blue light from the screens and everything else, you know, we're a wreck. So we can't sleep well. But the ergogenics comes from the. While you're sleeping, conserving energy, your cells are producing more and more ATP from the oxygen that you consume. So instead of wasting the oxygen and creating a bunch of oxidative waste that turns into oxidative stress and potentially disease, inflammation and then potentially disease, the oxygen that reaches the cells in the dilated blood vessels. Because PEMF dilates your blood vessels, so you got much better blood flow. That oxygen that gets to the cells gets burned completely or nearly as completely as possible. The studies that we hang our hat on, so to speak, is a guy named David Hood that showed that 10 Hz tripled the two key enzymes responsible for oxygen metabolism and oxidative phosphorylation process. One is the pacer of the Krebs cycle, and the other is responsible for dragging the oxygen molecule through the mitochondrial membrane. And if oxygen gets there and doesn't get burned, then you have. Oxygen leakage is what they call. Because the oxygen molecule didn't go through the burning process. Now that is a free radical that needs an antioxidant to quench or, you know, you start creating inflammation.

So basically, I mean, like, a big part of this comes down to understanding this, this whole concept of, like, Physiology 101 and the. What's called the electron transport chain, right? Because, you know, when, when you're creating ATP, electrons are basically passing along this chain and oxygen is getting consumed, converted into water and hydrogen ions. Then, like, ATP is a byproduct of that. And what you were saying is when you expose the body to specific hertz frequencies, for example, while you're sleeping, and let's say you can't go outside and sleep on the ground, or it sounds like from what you're saying, even if you go outside and sleep on the ground, you're still getting exposed to all the power traveling back to substations and radio frequencies and all the annoying side effects of living in an industrialized society. Unless, I guess, you're deep out in the wilderness. What you're saying is that you can experience, expose your body to these frequencies while you're asleep, when you're like putting one of these magnets underneath your mattress, and that is essentially enhancing your mitochondrialsyour mitochondria's ability to convert oxygen into ATP as you are asleep.

Exactly right.

Okay, now, I know that folks are probably wondering this right now, so I'm just gonna ask it. Why the heck would you want to produce ATP while you're asleep?

Because when you're sleeping, just when you're synthesizing hormones, your body's repairing itself from daily wear and tear, and also from injuries and injuries you don't even know you've got. You've got memory consolidation and your immune function. So delta sleep has been associated with all of those things. We don't have delta sleep, your immune system goes to heck, your memory shot. You're, you know, you're not producing as much hormones as you should probably, you know, basically you're going to break down if you don't have enough delta sleep. In fact, this one woman, Eve Cotter, C O U T E R I believe she did a study with healthy college kids. And they rigged them up so that as soon as they started to go into delta sleep, they would be awoken slightly, not totally, but they would be jarred a little bit with a little vibration or something that caused them to go back into theta mode. Within, I think it was seven to 10 days. 60% of those kids had elevated blood sugar. So they showed that lack of delta sleep in as little as seven to 10 days could cause you to go pre diabetic. That's how important delta sleep is to body repair and function. Okay, so during sleep, you've got all this ATP going on, so you're just. Your body's repairing itself like mad. I mean, you asked, like, how I stumbled, you know, I mean, I stumbled into this stuff. I didn't research it. It wasn't my goal to, like, create this device that fixed to my shoulder after 22 dislocations and my right knee, that clicked for, like 15 years. You know, I wasn't aiming for that. I was shooting for a Parkinson's thing. I saw my dad go down the tubes, and this could have helped him, and I didn't know about it. So, you know, I brought somebody by hand, physically delivered them to the doctor in New York. I saw them get better, you know, the Parkinson's. He had to go back to Florida, couldn't have a device. And because the doctor wouldn't sell him one, he said, no, you got to come back every few months and get your treatments. So he asked me if I could build something. So I said, yeah, I think I know enough about this stuff that, you know, I know what. What to do, and it might work even better. And it did. And that was because I honed in on this earth pulse, this nine. We didn't talk about this 9.6 hertz, which. This character, Bob Beck, the guy that did the blood stimulation that I stumbled into in 1996 at that whole Life Expo, I heard him on a. On a podcast, say that he drove stakes, a metal rod 20ft in the ground, hooked it up to an amplifier, and then ran it through a frequency counter and found that the Earth itself, the terrestrial planet, had a resonation at 9.6 Hz. So I had already known that there was a pattern around 10 hertz. 10 hertz always seemed to work best, whether it was optic nerves generation, arthritis, tendon problems, broken bones. The Russians picked out 10 hertz long before anybody else had. They were doing studies at 10 hertz in the 1960s, I think.

So when you're, when you're saying 10 hertz, like, one thing that comes to mind for me is a lot of times you'll hear like about 8-12 Hz is what would stimulate your alpha brain waves, right? Like focus and being in the zone. But wouldn't you, wouldn't you not want to stimulate those while you're asleep when you want, like more delta waves when you're asleep?

It's a phenomena. I have to say, it's very surprising even to me after since 2002. I'm into my 14th year now, you know, sleeping predominantly at 9.6 hertz every night. Andrew Marino, that did a lot of research with Robert O. Becker of the Body Electric. Robert Marino once said that 10 hertz was like a crossover frequency where people, Once they reach 10 hertz they would slide through theta. And it was like a gateway frequency or something he called it. It's very odd. You know, you would think after 14 years, if I was suffering from no delta sleep, I would have symptoms, but I don't seem to, you know, I mean, you know, I just turned 58. You know, most people are surprised when they hear that I don't feel I've aged much at all. You know, the last two years were pretty rough. I got poisoned. I had staph infection in my eye. I almost went blind. So it's been a two rough two years. You know, I just got almost perfect comeback. You know, my abs aren't quite as, you know, I'm not as proud of them as I'd like to be. You know, that was my goal. By Christmas, by New Year's, I was gonna have, you know, an eight pack again.

But yeah, we can talk about that. We can talk about that off air, man. I can help you out with the ab component for sure. Yeah, but I have questions, though. I have more questions about pemf, but.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry to ramble. I'm sorry, I know I'm rambling. I apologize to the, to the.

That's okay, audience, I'll loop you back in. I'll reel you in, dude. So. So we've got this repair of mitochondria while we're asleep. Obviously, mitochondria is pretty important for athletic performance and you've got some really interesting research. I'll link to it in the show notes for people who want to listen in. But yeah, there's, for example, there's there's one by James Tong who, who saw a, a tripling of nerve synapse energy and a doubling of mitochondrial density with exposure to 10Hz frequency. There's another one that shows a fourfold, this was a study by NASA, four fold increase in rate of tissue regeneration and repair again with exposure to this 10Hz frequency. And there's a bunch of other studies and I'll link to them for those of you who are all engineer and technically minded and want to look at some of these studies. But a question that I have for you.

The interesting thing is you don't have to sleep at 10 hertz to get these effects. I had one 65 year old guy who's like a, you know, still like 275, trained in his gym, he was an ex football coach, slept at 1 Hz. It was the only thing that would make him sleep. He went from a bad shoulder and a bad back, could barely do. I think it was eight push ups. And then within like three weeks he was doing 21 push ups. You know, sleeping at 1 hertz. So you know, 1 hertz is not optimal, but it will make you sleep.

So what it comes down to is, is there's like an optimal hertz and then this 10 hertz is, is kind of the optimal. But any exposure to a form of pulse electromagnetic field therapy can at least assist you with mitochondrial repair and, and mitochondrial density in this range.

It seems like when you get to 20Hz the mitochondria start to drop off. 15Hz. Actually it seems to be the cutoff, you know, the bell, there's a bell shaped curve at 10 hertz. At 5 and 15 hertz you've still got double the tissue regeneration at 10 hertz. According to NASA, it was four times the tissue regeneration. So based on that bell shaped curve, I would say about 20 hertz. You wouldn't want to go over that because then you're causing stress on the cell.

Right?

And there are studies that prove that.

Actually, that's actually what I wanted to ask you Paul was because cell phones produce pemf, right?

It produces emf.

How is the frequency from a cell phone different from like a PEMF device?

Okay, well most of these devices, you know, my device specifically is very, very, very, very. You know, it's called ultrasound infrasonic. Infrasonic because you can't hear it. It's below 20 hertz. Cell phones and microwave ovens and Wi Fi, it's RF radio frequency. Okay. And, and that's, that's worse for you than emf, which, you know, straight EMF is like what comes out of your wall current, you know, get through your, through your wiring in your house. That's fifth. That's 60 hertz in the United States. 60 hertz. But RF is gigahertz, you know, and, and higher. I'm not even sure because I, you know, I'm not that knowledgeable about the stuff, only that it's not good for you.

Okay, gotcha. So we've got basically this donut shape. It's like a donut shaped magnet. And I actually have two of them. And there's this little handheld device that controls it. And that's basically what the earth pulse is. You set it on a specific frequency, you put it on your mattress while you're asleep, and you get exposed to this PMF while you're asleep, same as you would get exposed to if you were just laying on the ground outside. But they also sell like, these earthing mats and grounding mats. Now, you had brought up mats earlier, but I didn't quite get my head wrapped around how this is much different than then, you know, like buying one of these earthing mats off of Amazon, for example.

Well, you know, it's like I walk barefoot everywhere. You know, I was a surfer, always in the ocean, very well grounded, you know, my shoulder was destroyed. 22 dislocations over 16 years. Grounding didn't fix my shoulder. You know, this device. When I realized that it made me sleep and I was testing, you know, first time I tested, I fell asleep on a pot of coffee, you know, only an hour and a half before I got home. So I laid down, woke up three and a half late hours later and felt like a new man. Like, my head was all like, I can't really put my finger on, except to say that I was well grounded. You know, not from the grounding sense, but just I felt grounded, like, like martial arts grounded. You know, like I went out, walked around the pool like a, like a tightrope and, and talked on the phone and called the Parkinson's guy and said, yeah, I think I hit the nail on the head with this thing. So I started sleeping on the machine to see what would happen. Like, because I couldn't. I was amazed at how, like, I would lay down, I would wake up six hours later and I'd be, you know, on the run and feeling amazing. And after three days, like, the ache from the shoulder started to go away. At three months, my shoulder was healed, you know, I mean, yeah, I Was taking joint formula, but I've been taking joint formula for 10 years before that.

Is it because it's, is it because it's pulsed? Like, is it because of the way that the electromagnetic frequency is released that it's different than grounding or earthing?

Yeah, it's an active thing. No, grounding is more of a discharge of static electricity. You know, they've, they've done some stuff, you know, I've read some things that, that insinuate that really what's going on is you're discharging static electricity. Yeah, you're picking up some electrons from, from the earth, but there's not a whole lot of stuff going on. This is very active. You know, this is, this is a, you know, a rhythm that's going, you know, through the mattress, through your body and out the other side at a specific frequency. That, that is just, you know, we're biologically tuned to, you know. That's why when they do these 10 Hz studies, they all, you know, almost, they almost always work, you know, very few failures at 10 hertz. And if it is, it's because it was too short of an application time or something. And that's why these, the MAT systems, they're not designed for long period use. And the waveforms of those systems are not optimized really either. You know, some of them are alternating currents, so they're going north, south, north, south. Others have a very sharp sawtooth wave, or sawtooth's not so bad, but a triangulated wave, and these are expanding and contracting fields. So when you really get into pulsed electromagnetics, there's only a couple of the manufacturers that actually pulse it. When you discharge into a coil, a steep pulse, a strong pulse, it creates a magnetic field that expands to infinity. It goes like a radio wave, you know, it goes forever. And so that's why when you, when you, when you actually have a true pulsed system, it's so much more powerful than ones that have sine waves and, you know, funky saw tooth and whatever. Because they're not popping. They don't, they don't, you know, they only expand and contract as far as the magnetic field expands, and then they go back to zero and expand again.

That makes sense. I've got some other questions for you about this thing. First of all, you've told me, and I've tried this out a few times, but I want to clarify. You can take these magnets, whether you're using two magnets with the device or one magnet, and you can hold them up to different body parts that are injured. Is that correct?

Yeah, I mean, when I healed my shoulder, I did no local application because I was kind of in disbelief that my shoulder was getting any better, you know, So I just kept it under the mattress. I played around with putting it further away from my body, but I never did direct application on the shoulder until, you know, sometime later when I re injured it, you know, and then I'd realized, you know, hey, this is a lot better when you put it directly on an injury than if you wait, you know, several days or whatever to get the effect, you know, do you.

Just like hold it up against the injury for a certain period of time?

Bandage is the best because I've design. I could have had an ice cold coil. I didn't want an ice cold coil. So it's designed to generate a certain amount of heat and hopefully this year I'll release the far infrared cover for it so that that heat generates far infrared working with some far infrared ceramic material to see if we can get, actually get any far infrared from that heat.

So anyway, that would be actually pretty cool. But if I have an infrared sauna, for example, I could bring my PEMF device in that and I could ace bandage it to say like an injured shoulder or an Achilles or something like that and actually increase the rate of tissue repair by using it that way.

Sure you could, but the more efficient way is you go in there and then after you shower and you're getting ready to go to bed, you ace bandage it to the shoulder and you put the controller on the floor next to the bed, run the cable out, and you sleep with it all night.

Like that the whole time you sleep, doctor?

Yeah, man. I mean, I've got guys that.

So it's not like ultrasound where it's gonna cause tissue burns if you leave it on?

No, not at all. I've got some Mirac, like guys that, you know, were like crippled and, and healed themselves in no time at all. You know, one guy ripped his bicep out of his. You know, I'm, I'm not a, I'm not a doctor. So where the, where the bicep ties into the elbow. Okay, that, that pot, right. He ripped that out in an industrial accident. And he was back to work in five weeks instead of physical therapy at three months. He was back to work in five weeks post. Five weeks post surgery.

Okay, what about the nervous system? Because I measure my heart rate variability every morning and I've measured it with and without the earth pulse on, and I'm Curious how it actually interacts with the nervous system and how it might affect something like heart rate variability.

Well, I've got a guy. You familiar with the Sweetwater system?

Oh, yeah, very much. We've had him on the podcast a few times.

Okay. So a fella, one of my biggest fans in Sweden. He's like 38 or 39 or 40 or something. He's. He's a Muay Thai kickboxer. So he's a. An instructor. And, and he told me that even the difference from the V4, that he had the single magnet system and, and the two magnet system, like he saw a huge gap up in his. In his hrv like that. Sweetwater tells you whether you can work out or not. You know, he says that he hadn't had a day that the thing told him he shouldn't work out since he'd gotten the Pro system. So, I mean, you know, I don't have a lot of research to go on. All I can say is it looks like it beneficially affects it. I know it increases VO2 max.

You know, you've got to. I'll link to it in the, in the show notes for this episode, but you've got. You've got a few good stuff. Screenshots on your website of somebody it looks like sent you in some hrv.

That's him. Yeah, that's the guy. That's it. Yeah.

I'm looking at it right now. It's actually a pretty decent spike when he puts this thing on, which is actually pretty impressive really, that it seems to be affecting the central nervous system positively in terms of an increase in his frequency strength.

He's not wearing it while he's doing the measurement. That's just him using it at night when he sleeps.

Yeah. Now, there's different settings. There's different settings on the actual device. Right. Like you've got like sleep one, sleep two, and sleep three, and sleep four. Can you kind of. Kind of clear up exactly which one you recommend? Or are they all 10 hertz?

Okay, well, they. They scan back and forth, the sleep modes, you know, and what we did, we just came out with a basic model a few months ago that I got rid of all the modes because I only use the manual mode now because I sleep at 9.6 hertz exactly.

Yeah. That's. That's all I used to do for a long time. When he sent to me, like, you had all these different modes. I just put it in recovery mode and left it there all night.

Right. But manual Mode boots to 9.6Hz exactly. You know, it stays 96 parked on it until the timer runs out. And so recover mode scans down half a hertz and. And it goes. It goes from 10.1 Hz down to 9.1 Hz, but it stays in the center at 96 half of the time. So half the time you're on 96 and the other time you're floating back and forth. So when I started, when I came up with the manual mode, because I wanted to go back to like, you know, the days when I had a system that was exactly 96 because I wanted to play around with it and see what would happen. So I start sleeping on 9.6Hz and I find myself waking up on my own six hours in. And I hadn't been doing that since I had the analog system, which I could Keep parked at 9.6. Recover mode. I could sleep eight hours like a hibernating bear. Yeah, I could sleep 10 hours if I set the timer long enough because, you know, it gets to the end and it wakes you up because it goes to alert mode. So then.

Do you use it every night?

Every night, man. Unless I. Unless I get stranded away from home. If I'm overnighting somewhere, I take it with me, you know?

Okay, got it.

Now I've got it hooked up to that. That voltaic battery system, so it's always plugged in. We have a power failure, it still runs all night. So I just pick that thing up, wrap the coils around it and throw it my bag and I'm out the door. But yeah, I mean, listen, you know, when we get back to just real quick on the ergogenic stuff, you know, people should go to the ergogenic page and just read those emails. Like, I don't even know. Have you ever been over there and read those emails? Like, you know, they're mostly Tom, Dick and Harry's. And then there's some people that are some. Some, you know, professionals. You know, call them professionals.

Yeah, I checked them out. I mean, you did a good job. You did a good job pasting them in to show that they're actually from.

From people, right?

Actual people. Because a lot of these websites you go to and they're like testimonials written by. Let's just say it's questionable copywriting that looks like somebody actually got hired to write a testimonial. But all. All you. It appears all you've done is just like copied and pasted.

That's it.

It's a little bit hard to Read and scroll through, but it's literally just a crapload of copied and pasted emails from folks who are using this for their CrossFit wads, their triathlons. Powerlifting, and it is pretty impressive. And what I wanted to ask you next, Paul, was there's a way that you can actually. You can double up the effects, right? Because you went the way that I have is I have two magnets and then like a headphone splitter. And so I'm using one magnet kind of like under my neck and upper torso area while I sleep.

Oh. So we never got you the full pro system that's got two full power magnets.

So tell me about that.

Yeah. Okay, well, what you've got is the V4. And then as soon as you put two magnets into one jack, you end up dropping the power on, you get more power from the two magnets. In total, one is less powerful. Okay. So the V5, if you get a splitter, an upgrade. A splitter and a magnet upgrade, you now have two magnets that are as strong as your system is with one magnet. Okay. But if you have the system with the two jacks and you have two magnets, you've got two magnets that are 30% stronger than your machine. If you just got one magnet in it, you got two magnets 30% stronger than that. And, man, it's like a cocoon that you crawl into at night. And. And from head to toe, you're just. I don't know, even after 14 years, you know, I can feel it. You know, the Earth EP is Earth pulse is something you really can feel.

Yeah. I'm looking on your website right now, and you've got, like, you've got five different versions, but it looks like. So you said you use yours in manual mode most of the time, and it looks like you've got one version here. It's got two magnets and then it just comes. It doesn't come with the 10 programmable modes, but it has just that manual frequency mode. That one's called the Pro Basic. Is that the one you're talking about?

That's the one.

That's the one I need to use.

That's all you need?

Okay.

That's all you need. That'll get you out of it, you know, I mean, you could have a critical accident and they'll tell you you'll never play ball again and you'll come back from it. As long as your nutrition is good and the surgeon was good. That put you back together again. You'll bounce back from it. It's absolutely amazing what the body will do if it's got the tools to do it. And you can take all the nutritional products that exist on the planet to heal yourself after a traumatic injury, and you just will never heal as good as new. But with pemf, you throw that into the equation and you'll be absolutely astounded what can happen.

You're not supposed to. And I don't want to scare people away, but I think you told me this when I first got the device. You're not supposed to hold it up to your head, right? Put it up against your skull.

No, it's the south pole, the south polarity. If you have the ring on the dual polarity ring, which is really for local application. So you have a north pole in the center and it's surrounded by south pole, and it creates a very strong field gradient right there where the injury is. So. And it helps exchange ions, push, you know, like a magnetic pump, so to speak. The opposites are attracting north's pulling in south polarity and the south that's surrounding it is pulling out the inflammation and the waste product and such. So that dual polarity ring, I don't like near the head because it gives. I find south pole gives me a headache. If the magnet, if I'm sleeping with it under my pillow, you know, after I got poisoned, you know, I had really bad tinnitus. I had headaches for like months. So I slept with it under my pillow for months, probably 18 months. I mean, because it's. I'm at 20, 21 months now since the poisoning and the tinnitus is almost gone. I'm back to sleeping with my magnets under the mattress full time now. But I slept with one or two magnets under my pillow every night to try and get rid of the tinnitus and try and get rid of the headaches and try and detox my brain because I feel like I couldn't walk down the hallway in my house without bouncing off each wall once.

Got it. So. So if you're going to use it under your head like that, just take the little, the little ring that goes under the ring. Okay.

I got guys that play, that play ping pong, like professional ping pong. They'll do a session direct to the head, like, you know, 20 minutes before their game and go out there, you know, ping pong, man, those guys are blazing fat.

So for those guys, where are they putting it? Like, how are they using it prior to just like going out and competing.

They'Re laying down on, you know, wherever they find a spot to lay down and a power outlet, and they just put it under the small or the. Under the aquarium occipital at the base of the neck.

Okay, got it. Cool. Well, I've been taking notes as you've been talking, Paul, and for those of you listening in, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com EarthPulsePodcast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com earthpulsepodcast to read some of the research and the previous episode where Paul and I really delved really, really deeply into sleep. I know we talked a little bit more about mitochondrial density and the ergogenic effect, but if you want to look at how it affects your sleep cycles, too, you can go back and listen to that podcast. I'll link to that along with some of this research that NASA has done. Some of the research on mitochondrial density, and then also some of the research on electrical stim for virus and bacteria. And just to clear things up, it sounds like if you're listening in and you want to get an earth pulse, probably the V Basic Pro is going to be a good combination of. And correct me if I'm wrong, Paul, kind of like simplicity, because it's just manual mode, but also power, because you've got double magnets. Right?

Yeah. Without the, you know, I mean, if you want to sleep in delta, you set it at 3 hertz or, you know, I wrote a paper, a couple of papers on, you know, this new one's going to be called Pythagorean PF pmf because I've been doing a lot of numerology, which sounds crazy because I never believed in that kind of stuff, but based around tuning and, like, Himalayan bowls and chanting and these healing tones and things. Okay. And it seems like, it seems like 9.6 Hz fits into the sacred geometry of all of these things very nicely. So if you're going to sleep and not at 9.6, use a harmonic of 9. 6. Like use 4.8, which 2.2 times 4.8 is 9.6. Right. Or use 2.4, which is in delta mode. Or you can even go to 1.2. And. And because we use a square wave, we're creating harmonics, and these harmonics fit into the sacred geometry of things. If you're, you know, willing to look at esoteric stuff and, you know, Pythagorean math and geometry.

Yeah, dude, I've. I've delved into that stuff. I went to a crystal bowl healing session back in Vermont. Super duper interesting stuff. You can literally kind of like holotropic breath work. You can go to a whole different place mentally just going through one of those crystal bowl sessions. I've also done one of those deals where they do. It's not a didgeridoo or whatever. Maybe it is a didgeridoo, but where they just blow this thing all around you and just get infinite immersed and blasted with sound waves. It's pretty crazy what some of these waves can do. And I've experimented. I actually haven't talked about this on a podcast before, but I've even experimented with that sacred geometry stuff you're talking about. And I have to admit, I did not like that. I had you familiar with a DHT dump where your body just releases a bunch of the same stuff you'd release if you were on an ayahuasca trip. I was not ready for that. I put these sacred geometry, you know, they're like basically for people listening in. And I know that this is kind of a complete segue or a complete rabbit hole, but I put these posters under the bed and on the wall and I really did not know what I was doing. And it's kind of like doing ayahuasca if you don't know what you're doing. And I just had horrible, like lucid dreams. Really, really bad lucid dreams. And I. Eventually I got rid of them. And then I did research later on and found out that what typically happens is you go through like this period of time where you have this DHT dump and then eventually the nightmares and stuff go away as you almost like detox your brain. But that stuff is super intriguing. I've had to be kind of careful talking about it too much on the podcast because I get called out all the time whenever I start to bring up this stuff that doesn't have a lot of peer reviewed research behind it. But man, it's really interesting. Like healing bowls, healing sound, sacred geometry, obviously. Obviously we could do a whole different podcast on that and maybe we will. But in the meantime, Paul, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Hey, do you want to do a coupon?

Like a coupon for folks to get the earth poles?

Yeah.

Yeah, man. What can you do for us?

You know, the basics. They'll lean toward the basics. Consider that sort of on discount already. So 15% for the month?

Yeah, dude, let's do it. 15% until the end of. Well, this. This podcast for. For people listening in. This podcast is released on February 27. How long do you want to make a coupon available for?

So February till March 31st.

Okay, what's the code? You tell me and I'll put it in the show notes for folks and announce it right here.

G Fitness.

G BG Fitness.

BG Fitness.

BG Fitness. This is good podcasting right here, folks. We're actually making up discount codes for you as you listen. So BG Fitness gets 15% off an earth pulse if you get it between February 27 and March 31, 2016. Is that correct?

Yeah, lowercase, lowercase. Because I think it's lowercase.

BG Fitness. That's actually a really good deal. Sweet, dude. Thank you. That's awesome. And I'll put all this in the show notes too, but in the link. But BG Fitness, folks, 15% off. That's actually a really good deal.

Cool.

The shownotes are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com EarthPulsePodcast if you want to check this thing out or get 15% off of it or just delve into the research or go leave me a nasty message about my woo woo. Talk of sacred geometry.

Or mine.

Either way though, if you do leave a comment, either Paul or I will jump in and reply. And Paul, thanks for your time today and for coming on the show, man.

Hey, thanks for having me again. It was fun.

All right, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Paul Becker signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week. You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.