The South African Performance Expert Who Blends Biohacking, Biomechanics, Body, Mind, Relationships, Environment & Beyond To Optimize Human Performance.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, I realized that if I stood any chance in this apartheid system, I needed to be academically very, very sound.

I'm still shocked. More personal trainers, more performance coaches aren't finding out what's going on on the.

Home front, what we can do right now. It's really changed the face of professional sport and how we analyze. And not just professional sport, but actually professional training.

Yeah, but that's not fun. Most people want to find out what kind of superfood smoothie they're supposed to drink, all the different magical supplements they can.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more.

My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, many of you who may have been following me for the past couple of years may know that I went on a media tour of India last year and while there met a super smart guy who I finally finagled into recording a podcast with me. And he is just a wealth of knowledge on like sports performance and biohacking and really just like peak optimization of body and brain. Hey, everybody. You may recall if you've been listening to the podcast for any longer than a year, that last year I did a kind of a tour of India, went to all these amazing places and met a lot of really, really cool folks. But when I was having a dinner there, I wound up sitting across from a guy who really, really intrigued me. He delved into what he does, which is essentially working with extremely high performers, with athletes, with teams, and with a host of people who are not only like extreme exercise enthusiasts, but also professional athletes, executives, etc. And he specializes in kind of using a unique flavor of biohacking and biomechanics and physiology and breath work and alteration to one's personal and professional environment to enhance performance in some really cool ways that I hadn't heard of before. Anyways, after I wound up having dinner with him, we actually, we hung out a little bit. We went to lunch, I think, a couple days later, and I found out that he was in the process of releasing a book which he just sent to me a few weeks ago. And I read it's called Breathe, Believe Balance. It's actually available on Amazon and the book is wonderful. The stuff we talked about was so cool and I just think he's a diamond in the rough and I had to get him on the show. He has served as a consultant to a ton, like too many to name in terms of the athletic teams and Olympic associations and Davis cup teams and Asian Games participants and Olympic participants. He's worked on the ATP Tennis Tour for six years with Grand Slam champions and just a ton of professional tennis players. And he also runs an institute in Mumbai called the Heel Institute, or ran that institute, which was a sports science and rehab practice. And now he works in digital content and then as a private consultant for a lot of these different companies. So he is just. He's a wealth of knowledge and we're super lucky to be able to listen to him today. Calling in from Shamal. You're over in Mumbai right now.

Hi, Ben. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I am in Mumbai at the moment. Yes.

All right, cool. So, Shamal, we've talked before, but you have to pronounce your entire name for me just so people can get it straight because I don't want to butcher it.

No worries. It's Shamal Valabji.

Shamal Velabji. So I'm not getting to spell your last name, but Shaml, for those of you listening in, because this is where you're going to find the show notes for everything we talked about. Shamal is s H a y a like Shia and then Mal M A l Shaml. It sounds like it should be Shyam All. Does anybody ever call you that, man?

A lot of people do, yeah.

Because when I saw your name, I was like, ah. He said Shaml, but I sham all. So BenGreen Fitness.com S H A Y A M A L Shaml is where you can access the show notes for everything that we talk about. Shaml. Remember when, when we met at that dinner. I forget. We were. We were with Jag and that was it. That was in Mumbai, wasn't it, where we met?

We were. We were in Mumbai in bkc. Yeah, Complex. We walked around to. We actually had lunch at a place called O Pedro.

Yeah, you showed me that mall. Apparently they're building like the biggest mall in the. In the world. Like puts the. The Mall of America and the malls in Dubai to shame. That was. That was quite impressive when we walked by that place on the way to lunch. You remember that?

I absolutely do. It's massive. I think it should be close to completion and opening now. It would have opened actually if we weren't in lockdown. It was scheduled for October this year, but it's going to be. Yeah, it's called the Reliance Mall. It's probably going to be one of the biggest in the world.

Massive. I'd be. I'd be probably more excited if I was a mall guy, but I'm sure I'm sure, somebody will, will be salivating over the idea of yet another giant mall. And then that, that place that we went to lunch and I realized I might be boring all of our listeners, but it was actually really amazing style of cuisine. What was that, what was that style of cuisine? Do you recall? So.

Yeah, I do. It's a, it's a famous restaurant in Bombay called Old Pedro and it specializes in Goan food. So Goa is a little beach town which is in the, in, it's got, it's in its own state. It's about a 40 minute flight from Maharashtra, from Bombay and it specializes in a lot of this seafood and sea cuisine. So go in for G O A.

N. G O A N. Cool. I'll link to that in the show. It was actually really good food. It was like just fresh. Amazing. I'd never eaten that cuisine before. It was fantastic. So thank you for jogging my memory because I may have to get a guan food cookbook at some point. Anyways, let's talk about you because I talk to a lot of people who specialize in things like performance enhancing, biohacking, applying things that have the flavor of functional medicine, for example, to sports or to exercise or to high performing executives. But you kind of have your own unique flavor that I know we're going to get a chance to delve into on today's show. But I'd love to hear a little bit of your background, like how you actually came to do what it is that you do now. And we have time, so feel free to take your time. But walk us through how you actually came to be kind of the sports scientist, psychologist, high performance coach that you are now.

Ben, it's an interesting question. It started off I grew up in South Africa and I grew up during what was the apartheid era. So the apartheid for our listeners is an institutionalized segregation of people of color. And in South Africa, people of color was generally those of African descent, colored and Indians. So everyone of that descendancy was classified as a person of color. And in the apartheid era there was restricted opportunity. So you couldn't play sport for the country, you couldn't go to certain universities, you had no access to certain beaches and parks, you could only study in certain careers, you could only live in certain areas and a whole host of things that went on there. And I started wanting to play cricket for the country and I was very keen as a young boy pursuing it. I played at lot of state levels, at national levels when I was way under 15, under 14. And what happened was, you know, when I turned 18, I realized that I now fall in what's called the open category. And the open category meant that I now was competing with everyone else and I was competing in the ecosystem where people of color were not given opportunities to represent their country. And that was really, it was quite disheartening at the time because everything that I'd known, everything that I worked and sacrificed for was there. And when I was as young as 17 years old, I had to really make a hard decision. And that decision was, do I stay as an athlete trying to pursue a career in the sport or do I try to deviate? And, you know, I was so passionate about sport that I really didn't want to leave it completely. So I went and studied sports science because I was a pretty decent cricketer. So the cricket union gave me a scholarship where they paid for all my studies. I went to The University of KwaZulu Natal, which was one of those universities where it was really the bedrock of all movements that started in that apartheid time. Our lecturers were really activists of some sort. So, you know, anything that was bubbling under the political radar started there. So it was also quite a life at that university. So I studied sports science. I was quite fortunate then that from the day I started studying, I was given the opportunity to work as a coach in a high performance system with athletes. So I literally went from one day being a pure athlete or a pure team member from the cricket team to the next day being on that coaching staff. And that was a mind blowing transition because one day everyone's your friends and the next day you have to give them direction on what to do. And I had to learn.

That's gotta be a little awkward.

It was extremely difficult because a lot of them were my heroes. A lot of people I aspire to are now looking to me for guidance and they're judging me in a completely different lens. So I had to fast track my learning, fast track my growth. And I did that. And, you know, I realized very early on that if I stood any chance in this apartheid system to rise up in the coaching ranks, I needed to be academically very, very sound. So I put my mind into really studying. I got into postgraduates, I studied multiple areas of expertise. I tried to really peel away and understand human physiology because I realized that that was what was going to give me an advantage. And I stayed with the team. The teams that I worked with did pretty well. I kept giving the same excuse, saying that, you know what? You're not good enough, you don't have enough experience. To work right at the highest level, which was the national level. So I was currently working probably one level below that. So I was with the South African High Performance Squad, the South African National Academy, just one rung away from being with that national team. But I kept hitting a stonewall every time it came to that. In 2003, when I got called up to be the technical analyst of the Indian cricket team going to the 2003.

Cricket World Cup, I'm not quite sure what a technical analyst means. Does that mean that you're analyzing biomechanics or something different?

Exactly. That's exactly what I was doing. I was analyzing biomechanics of our current players. I was analyzing biomechanics off the opposition, and based on biomechanics, I was trying to understand who should be the best team that we should play and how could we counteract those weaknesses. Like, for example, if you have a fast bowler who's coming in, if he has a biomechanical flaw based on his biomechanics, he could only do certain things with the ball. The ball could only swing in certain areas.

That's pretty high end. One quick question for you. Sorry to interrupt. When I was an intern at Duke University, I did a lot of digital and biomechanical analysis as part of my practicum there with a mentor of mine, Dr. Rafael Escamilla, and he invited me to the Olympics. I wasn't able to go for that year, frankly, because I was getting married to my lover Jessa, who I'm still married to, and that would have kind of disrupted quite a bit of that. But one of the things that he did at the Olympics was he put patches on each joint of the player and then used high speed video cameras to do basically digital biomechanics and see exactly how joints were moving in space. Is that kind of similar to something you were doing, like using high speed digital cameras and patches placed on joints?

Absolutely. We don't have the luxury of doing that for our opposition, but with our players in research, we're definitely doing that. And what we do with using those patches on joints is when we're really looking for something with respect to changing a player's technique or with respect to managing injury. So if an athlete has come out from a severe injury, perhaps he's got a stress fracture in the lumber back, you know. Now a stress fracture is a chronic injury, which means that there's a certain load in a certain movement pattern. That's where that digitized version of his movement pattern would give us an Idea to quantify exactly where that load is and we'd work on that. When I was working with the cricket team, I had to. It was quite complex because we had to take video footage off TV from the cameras that were filming it and we had to digitize that footage ourselves.

Yeah, yeah. Like by hand. I remember doing this. And for those of you listening in, like picture that, someone puts like a little dot that the camera is picking up on each of your joints and then whoever's the biomechanist actually has to go in and frame by frame, like click on each of those and create almost like a stick figure of each, each frame of the movement that you're going through. I would imagine, Shamal, that that technology has come quite a ways. I'm a little bit disconnected from biomechanics laboratories these days, but I would imagine that there's a little bit more efficient way to do things now.

Oh yeah, Ben, we've moved. I mean, this is 2003. What we can do right now, it's really changed the face of professional sport and how we analyze. And not just professional sport, but actually professional training. Because it's the data that comes out of these movement patterns that allows us to really quantify and design programs and understand even the fueling because based on how much of distance and speeds and turns that they're covering. So everything's coming, it's been extrapolated out of this data here. And we use companies now like they're different companies. We have a company like Silicon Coach which still does these digitized versions of it, but we have a company like Prozone which would set up 13 to 15 cameras that's catching every single movement of an athlete. So you're getting 13 views of an athlete moving and you then digitizing that, you're looking at speeds. Then you have a company like Catapult which is tracking GPS movement, accelerations, decelerations, turns. And as a sports scientist, I'm taking all of this data, putting it together and then breaking it down to see how I could use this in training methodology.

Right, okay. So that's what you were doing back in 2003 and what happened from there?

Yeah, so this, what happened in 2003? I went to the World Cup, India lost in the final to Australia. It was an absolute cracker of a game. I come back to South Africa and I get interviewed for the job at the highest national level and I get shortlisted to the last two people and Ben, I go in for an interview and that interview lasted an hour and a half. They asked me every single thing that was possible, from biomechanics to physiology to injury to management, everything. And then the next candidate goes in and five minutes later he comes out, you know, my coffee was still hot in my hand and he says, they've offered me the job. And I realized right there and then that, you know, I was really the person of color candidate. I was a quota system in that apartheid era so that they could say that, you know what, we interviewed someone of color. And that's what I was. And I was so disappointed. I came back, I worked for a couple of months, but I realized that, you know, I was getting very. This toxicity was building up in me. I was not happy and I didn't want to. I was becoming a person I was really not happy with. So I moved into a temple. I moved into a Hare Krishna temple for a while. I didn't plan to stay there for as long as I did. I eventually ended up staying there for about three and a half years. It was just supposed to be a weekend or a week. But I realized when I went in there that I needed to spend some time to really calm down, calm my nervous system down, understand myself, understand the source of this anger. I went there to really understand how to love someone who's treating you badly. You know, that was the aim of being there. But throughout that entire process then it was a mind blowing experience because, you know, I learned some of my greatest learnings in there, which I use with every single athlete up to today. And you know, I'll give you one such lesson was that when you live in the temple, you've got to wake up at 3am every single day. And to wake up at 3am you got to be in bed by 8:39 latest. Otherwise you're not going to get enough rest. And you know, you don't have the luxury of missing that 3am because you are sleeping in a dormitory style room with all the other monks and they wake you up to take you to the temple. So for the first three or four months I was in the ashram and I was practically falling asleep because I wasn't sleeping early enough. I was sleeping close to midnight, if not after that. So I was getting barely an hour or two sleep. I was dozing off in there. And that process went on for about four or five months. And then one day a penny just dropped and a realization hit me that, you know what if I'm going to be here and I have to be here, and as long as I want to stay in this Temple I have to wake up, which means I should get to bed early. And you know, that realization shifted everything for me because the next day I started getting to bed early. I started being a lot more disciplined in the meditation. And the lesson there is that discipline is sticking to something long enough for it to break you before it actually makes you.

One question that I have about that, you know, that waking at 3am and establishing that habit and that kind of sticking with you, did you find. Because I found that when I, when I go on a hunting trip or when I'm in some situation where I'm sleeping far less and kind of get on this schedule where I'm waking up far earlier than what I'm accustomed to, the body becomes so accustomed to it that, that you almost reset what you're able to tolerate when it comes to, for example, the amount of sleep that you can get. So I'm curious for you, like, like these days or do you still get up at 3am or do you, do you find you can get by on less sleep than you were able to prior to that, that experience?

Well, I definitely get by on less sleep. I'm not waking up at three. I'm up by about six every day now. But you know, I work generally quite late at night because I'm doing a lot of writing and you know, as a writer there's so much of. I needed to be pin drop silent. So all my writing happens late at night, early hours of the morning. So that's the only reason that it happens. But generally now I'm up by six and my routine goes on from there. But I find that I can operate on a little bit less sleep. Even though we know that there's really only one gene type of modification on one gene. The DEC2 gene is a person who can operate on two hours less sleep than everyone else for a prolonged period of time. I don't even have that gene. But somehow we seem to adapt and I guess that's the resilience of the body. What's the long term ramifications of that? I guess we'll see over time.

Yeah, well, we'll get back into your personal routines because I know you have some pretty cool habits and pretty cool hacks that you work into your own life. But back to your monastic life, how long were you at the temple doing that with the monks?

So I was there for about three and a half years. And at the end of three and a half years I got a call. Someone just dropped me an email from India saying would you like to come over to India, work with the Indian Davis cup team and prepare some of the athletes for the Beijing Olympics. So I thought it was very cool opportunity. I was very fascinated with India because I worked with them during the 2003 World Cup. And so I jumped up. I mean, I didn't really have much possessions or wasn't doing anything. So it was an easy decision to make. And yeah, I jumped on a plane, came to India. I worked with the Indian Davis cup team for about six months, helped prepare them. We went to the Beijing Olympics. I went as one of the head sports scientists working with quite a few athletes. And that was quite a, you know, quite a journey because, you know, we went to India, had 89 athletes in 2008. We had probably about 39 accreditations for support staff, of which about 25 went to administrators from the Olympic Association. So we had like three physiotherapists, you know, to look after 89 athletes. So everyone was running helter skelter, treating athletes. Boxers were going into fights without physios, there was no nutrition, there was no dietitian, the doctor was not qualified. It was a whole host of problems. And you know, having come out of an apartheid system, the reason I studied sports science was I felt that I had to stay in the system to change the system. And I came to India and I thought that this is a completely different level of discrimination. But it is discrimination when you're taking an athlete and giving him absolutely no resources and you're putting him on the same platform where another country is spending a million pounds on an athlete. It's discrimination on some level. So I stayed and I worked in India for another five or six years, traveled on the ATP tour with these athletes, consulted, worked with them, went to the London Olympics hoping that something would have changed. And honestly, nothing changed. India performed worse in the London Olympics than it did in actual Beijing. And the exact same story repeated, I mean, 24 hours before we left India for the Olympics. Certain athletes were appointed new coaches by the federations, people who they've never seen, who they've never worked with, they were just sent, you know, and that was what gave birth to me becoming an entrepreneur in India. That's what I set up, the Heal Institute, which was really a sports science institute that was dedicated to training physiotherapists, physical trainers and doctors on the understanding of how to work with an athlete, with a professional athlete. And in between, this entire journey here, the time in the temple to India, really highlighted to me the importance of the mind in everything. And that's where I really deviated a little bit from sports science to psychology, understanding that, you know, the mind can control the body. And later on we learned that if you, if you're familiar with the work of Professor Tim Noakes from the University of Cape Town.

Oh yeah, yeah, he's. Well, he's been on the podcast a few times, particularly related to some of his controversial thoughts regarding electrolyte intake, Gatorade. And then also way back before kind of ketosis and low carbohydrate intake was popular amongst exercise enthusiasts and athletes. I had him on and he was one of the first voices in that sector. So yeah, he's an old friend and he's been on the podcast a few times.

He is an absolutely amazing person, really. Path breaking research and his book Law of Running, the amount of research that's in the running ecosystem and the running world that was there was phenomenal. So Professor Tim Noakes and I did some work together. He was my Prof. When I was at the, with the High Performance Cricket Academy in Cape Town for two years. And he came up with what's called the Central Governor theory where he shows that, you know, it's the brain that really tells the body to slow down. You know, so when you're pushing yourself and you're unable to push yourself beyond a certain limit, right. It's not that you're physiologically tapped out, it's that your muscles have felt something uncomfortable, they've sent a sign to your brain, a signal to your brain, and it's your brain that's told you slow down.

That's right.

And that's his central Governor theory. And that central Governor theory really grounded for me the importance of actually understanding that if the mind is controlling a lot more, we need to spend a lot more time understanding the mind. And back in 2000, psychology, or sports psychology was really not spoken of too much. And when you did talk of sports psychology, everyone was only talking about visualization and imagery. So being able to clearly visualize this. And I thought to myself, you know, that is what mindfulness is. That's what meditation is. That's what they're teaching you in the temple. They're teaching you to still the mind so that you can have clarity of thought and perspective and you can look at things from multiple perspectives. So I thought, instead of throwing a lot of jargon in here, why don't I start blending mindfulness and meditation as a training technique to help athletes come to grips with the situation, understand anxiety, perceive things through multiple situations. And then hopefully in a high pressure situation that would give them better clarity about the options available to them. And that's where I came. So that's what I currently do. And that brought me to India. I set up Heal. I exited HEAL in 2018. We opened 10 centers. We used to treat about 100,000 patients a year out of those 10 centers. And yeah, that's my journey.

Okay, so I know that there's some pretty cool things that you do with the athletes and the high performers that you work with, but even before we delve into that, I'm just curious, you know, with, with your own journey and as much of you as you've learned, being immersed in kind of this unique flavor of both psychology, you know, meditation, living in a monastery, et cetera. But then you're also very kind of steeped in the whole technology and biohacking side of things. Can you walk the audience and me through what, what a typical day in your life looks like in terms of some, some outside the box or interesting or particularly meaningful things that you're doing to optimize your own body or brain or, or performance? What are, what are some must haves for you in your daily routine that you want to share with folks then?

There are a few things that are really non negotiable for me. One is the, you know, I take a lot of time for myself in a day. So for example, you know, the meditation and mindfulness practices, the mindfulness in the form of breath work every single morning for about an hour is a non negotiable intermittent fasting for me. I wouldn't eat anything before 1pm okay, these are non negotiables. My main training methodology is really running I average. Now during COVID I'm averaging about 50-60km a week. But if I'm training for a marathon, it will go up to about anywhere between 80 to 100k a week in training distance. I used to use a lot of supplements and over the last two years, because I've been delving a lot into various sciences, I've been trying to understand the body through the use of the five elements, which is water, air, space, fire and earth. And Ben, I know this is maybe, maybe a little controversial because I've used the word biohack myself quite a bit. I've called myself a biohacker. And I thought to myself one day this realization dawned on me. You know, hacking is finding an optimized way, finding a shortcut to do something. And I thought to myself, you know, how can my little Prefrontal cortex, even think that I can hack the intelligence of something that's existed for such a long period of time with reference to our cell biology, with reference to the functionality of this human body. It's so intricate, you know, how can I even hack it? So I now say that I'm not trying to hack anything. All I'm trying to do is understand the best way to work with it. I'm finding the best way to respect what wants. And how can I work in alignment with that as opposed to hack it?

Yeah, well, hacking. Hacking is an interesting word. I mean, you know, if you look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, it means to cut with heavy blows in an irregular or random fashion. And apparently that came from the word hackney, which was somebody who was like a person who does undistinguished work, like a horse for hire or a car for hire. But then in kind of more modern era, it kind of progressed from just being somebody who just fusses around with machines and takes stuff apart to somebody who will kind of explore the intricate details of a programmable or a complex system and figure out how to stretch the capabilities of that system using some kind of a novel method. And of course, with reference to biology, that would be biohacking. And so, yeah, if you look at the root word, it's a very rough and almost vulgar and calloused word, and sometimes inappropriate, in my opinion, for what we're actually doing, which is really much more refined with subtle nuances in a far more informed and educated manner when it comes to. To. To toying with our biology, so to speak. But one thing that. That you just said piqued my interest. You. You said you're using, you know, as you've kind of veered away from reliance upon supplementation, these Ayurvedic principles. You mentioned the use of the five elements, earth, fire, space, air, and water. I would love to hear a little bit more about that.

Yeah, Ben, I'll explain that. And I agree with you that, you know, what we do is far more nuanced than the term actually refers to by its definition. And I felt that was where actually the problem came. So that was actually why I started using the word respect the body. Because for people like us, we may understand the nuance of peeling away the layers of understanding it. But for the person who's listening to us, hack is still used as a shortcut. They're still thinking, oh, this is a shortcut to get to a place, you know? And so I thought, how can I teach them the first level is respect your body. When you respect your body, a lot of things will fall in line. But with respect to the five elements, like I told you, it's water, air, space, fire and earth. And Vedic sciences speaks of some interesting things. So they say water, the first one is the amount of water that you take into your body doesn't always have to be drunk. In fact, they recommend that 40 to 50% of the water is eaten. So they say eat your water through water rich foods. So foods that release water when they're cooked should be a part of your daily diet.

Great book about this and I interviewed the author, the book is called Quench. And it gets into the idea that when you look at even a lot of indigenous populations and hunter gatherer tribes, you're actually not seeing a large amount of the hydration being dependent on upon water. Instead it's hydrating and nutrient packed plants, it's electrolyte intake, it's even the inclusion of, you know, gel based plants like cactus and aloe vera. Yeah, it's very interesting, this idea that hydrating the body comes down to a lot more than just water.

Exactly. So that was the water. When it comes to air, air is really your breath work. It's the balance between how your inhalation and exhalation stimulates that parasympathetic sympathetic nervous system. So really bringing your balance in. In Vedic Sciences we also have that breathing technique where you're breathing in through a nose and exhaling through the other to counterbalance your energies. We call them your doshas. Okay, so we use air is your breath work space is fasting. And incidentally, fasting is probably one of the only principles that is completely uniform in every single religious or faith across the world, irrespective of what it is. You'll find that every single one of them promotes fasting. And really the reason why they promote fasting is because it's a principle of detoxification. And where Vedic Sciences differs from modern physiology is that modern physiology says that if you're sick, you need energy to heal the body. Right. So that's why we eat food. When you're eating food, it will metabolize, it will make energy available to heal the body. Vedic sciences says that when you're sick, all energy needs to be diverted to that. And any food that you put into the body is using energy to actually metabolize that food. So you're using energy to metabolize that food. So it says that the body in itself, if you redirect all its resources towards healing that it would recover itself. So it speaks of fasting as the primary form of cleansing and detoxification.

Yeah, but that's not fun. Most people want to find out what kind of superfood smoothie they're supposed to drink when they're sick and, you know, all the different magical supplements they can consume. And I believe it was a Hippocrates who first used fasting as a form of therapy. I believe he was the first to actually write pretty extensively about it. Of course, it's been a staple of religious cultures for a long time. But then Benjamin Franklin. Right, that's a. But he's well known for saying that the best of all medicines is rest and fasting. And I think my wife is the person who first kind of made me familiar with that idea, which she'd get sick and she just wouldn't eat for 48 hours. Clean up the body, detox, rest, lay in bed, read, and it works. But I think a lot of people in Western culture were just conditioned to want to run out to Walgreens and CVS and, and buy the five things that are supposed to fix us up fast, when in fact just not eating can have some pretty profound effects.

You're right. There's so much of data and there's so much of research, it's just unfortunately not mainstream. And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to just read about it, peel about it, peel away the layers and try to bring it a little bit more mainstream. When we come to the fire element, Ben, it says that you can draw energy from the sun. And it's interesting. Vedic sciences says that every, every single life form on Earth pretty much needs that energy from the sun to grow, you know, so what it's saying is that you also can draw energy from the sun. And the way to draw energy from the sun is there's certain yogis who practice what's called sun gazing. So early in the morning or before, when the sun's rising, when the sun's setting, you stare at the sun for about 15 to 20 minutes. Okay. And you got to be very careful with this to make sure you don't get any retinal damage and needs to be practiced, but that's a science. Sun gazing. Also eating a lot of sunripened food, okay. That's very, very important. So sun ripened food is you can take whatever you have, just leave it out in the sun. Your vegetables, your greens, they'll absorb energy. And if you don't overcook it that's how you can absorb that energy from the sun into your body. And the third is really cooking the food in an earthen pot. So using clay or mud based vessels as opposed to these Teflon things, you know, as opposed to using this cast iron and Teflon cooking earth, because that also helps retain a lot of that fire in the food and energy in the food. And then the fifth element is earth. And earth is with reference to really eating plant based foods, foods that are growing from the earth. And if you stick to these five elements, it's said that the body will really be in balance. But also in with this I also look at something very interesting. I look at the potential renal acid load of anything. So I'm constantly studying that. So the body needs to maintain what's called an acid base balance. And everything that you consume would either break down into an acid or it will break down into a base. Now if there's excessive acid in the body, the kidney has to really flush it out, but its capacity to, to flush out so much of acid in a day is quite limited. So it's really important to understand what you're taking in and how is it converting into your body and how much of that will put a stress on the kidneys, for example. So your plant based foods where you don't put too much of stress, for example, something like Parmesan cheese, releases a lot of acid in the body and makes the kidneys have to work exceptionally hard. In Vedic sciences they're saying the kidney's capacity to flush acid in the body is actually more in alignment with 0.5 to 0.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, as opposed to what most gym goes would say one gram, one and a half grams, which is really excessive.

Yeah, Part of that I should note that acid base homeostasis is also dependent upon mineral status because the body actually is pretty efficient at maintaining proper acid alkaline status, even if you're eating a highly acidic diet. But the problem is long term, the minerals that must be leached from, for example, bone in order to achieve that or the excess strain on the kidney long term, especially with excess protein intake in an environment of a largely acidic diet, you know, of high intake of alcohol, dairy, red meat, et cetera, dictates that long term it's stressful on the kidneys and even short term can be stressful on overall mineral balance. You know, a lot of people say, oh, there's nothing to the acid alkaline diet, but there actually is in terms of the long term stress on the body, especially when it comes to maintaining alkalinity in a relatively acidic state.

Absolutely. So this is what I'm really doing with diet. And then recently, when you want a cool hack that I figured out is when we've been talking about sleep so much of the time, we speak about blackout blinds and we speak about covering those LEDs and we talk so much about light. But I've been doing a lot of work and I've been trying to get my axes to understand the impact of sound on sleep, which is very, very interesting. So every single room would have a certain ambient sound. And generally if a room is silent, that ambient sound in there, if it's just an air conditioner on or device on, would be at about anywhere from about 35 to 45 decibels. And this is what sleep research is super interesting because it's saying that if some sound is consistent, your brain will eventually block it out. It's the fluctuations of sound that actually disturbs sleep. So what I've started doing is I started, there's a beautiful app called Noish N o I s h which is a free app. So I go into a room and I just check what the ambient sound is. And then I use a white noise machine. And actually they use it for babies a lot. So what I do is I put that white noise machine on at a few decibels above that noise that is ambient in there, so that becomes the consistent noise. And I've noticed that my sleep metrics have changed completely because of that. Because there's no more fluctuations. Every time your generators or anytime some sound goes off in those ACs or some disturbance, you're going to keep waking up.

Now, what was the name of that app that you said you're using to evaluate the ambient noise in a room?

It's called Noish. N o I s h. N o.

I s h. Yes.

Huh.

Never heard of it. Okay, cool. I'll link to that one in the show notes.

So that's really, really interesting. And I do this with all my athletes as well. So standard thing is I get them to have a white noise machine in their rooms whenever we're traveling. I get them, I show them how to use this app and we do this. So over and above blocking the LEDs with black tapes, over and above analyzing your pillows and your sleep and the room temperature, this has made a massive difference to the quality of sleep that they're having. So everyone's going in there really sound right now. So that's What I'm trying to do, Ben, and right now I'm trying to see. I've been looking at the body through these Vedic science methodology and seeing how it will stack up against my performance as a runner and have a look at what was the quantifiable difference between me going with all of these supplements and things. Even with supplements, I used to. I read an interesting piece of research that said that if you really want to understand the impact of a supplement on your body, you should take one at a time. And about seven to eight hours after you take that, you should check the PH of your urine to understand what it's actually doing to your body, as opposed to just looking at the benefit of it. How is it actually breaking and how is it actually shifting that ph, you know, which is very interesting.

Sounds like really what you're doing is taking a lot of what you're doing to optimize your own personal environment, sleep habits, et cetera, and then using those with some of the high performers that you're working with. And in your book, you really do focus on environment quite a bit. Not only optimizing environment when it comes to physical environment, but also relationships, spirituality, etc. But I'm curious if we could talk a little bit more about this whole piece of optimizing the environment. Let's say I were an Olympic competitor, and my performance is very important to me. My sleep is very important. My recovery is very important. How would you go about kind of detailing a little bit more what you were already starting to delve into, analyzing my environment and then optimizing my environment. And I realize it's a big question, but we have time, Ben.

For me, the environment is really broken up into two, which I actually describe in the book. I said the external environment is made up of everything that you can see, smell, touch, taste in here. And then it's your internal environment, which is your mind. And the reason why I classified in two environments is actually from a lens of spirituality because there's a beautiful book called Patanjali's Yoga Sutras where the saint Patanjali speaks about the relationship between your state of mind and your environment. And I'll take you through this and then I'll break it down for you and how I work with it. So what he says is that there are five states of mind. And in the first state, two states of mind, a person is a direct byproduct of the environment. If you change the environment, they will mimic that environment in whatever shape and form. Okay. The third environment is A person or the third state of mind is when a person is aware of the environment, but they have. They're also aware that they can transition above that environment. For example, someone is working in a highly toxic or a highly stressed environment. They're aware that, you know, what if I spend 20 minutes a day just meditating, then for those 20 minutes I am devoid of any stress. I can rise above that stress. I'm not impacted with it. The problem with the third environment is that a person cannot sustain that for a prolonged period of time. The fourth environment is where a person can sustain that new enlightened state for a prolonged period of time. It could be hours, it could be days, it could be weeks. And then the first state of mind is where a person is so enlightened that they change the environment around them. Now, the reason why this is so important and the reason why I'm talking about it, and I refer to two different environments is because you'll always see two environments at play. One environment is external with the sound, with the noise, with the food that you're eating, whatever you're doing, and that's providing a certain amount of stimulus. But there'd come a time when that environment stops providing any stimulus for you. And if you're relying only on the external environment, then what happens is it's pretty much the end of the road for you. But if you understand that your mental strength, your ability to still your mind, your ability to calm yourself down, your ability to rise above the trappings of that environment is a completely different option that's available to you. And it's an option that's in your control. And we've seen this in the book. I gave the beautiful example of Roger Federer playing Novak djokovic in the 2019 Wimbledon final. And that final, I said, was special for three reasons. It was the first final that was settled by a match tiebreaker. It was the longest final in the history of the Wimbledon competition. And it was the first time that a male competitor came back from two match points down to win the championship. And what was really remarkable was in Novak Djokovic's post match statement, he said, he made a comment, he said there was a moment in the game when the crowd were chanting Roger Federer's name. And if I had any chance of winning, I had to remove myself from that environment. And he there in that statement explained exactly what I'm saying. There will always be a time when the environment is supporting you, but there will come a time when the environment is not. And if you have not cultivated, the ability to pull yourself out of it. Then you're at the mercy of that environment. So when I talk about these two, I work on it like this. And when I'm talking about the external environment, I break it up into two. Especially with my athletes, there is a work environment, which is the playing field or the gym, and then there's the home environment. And at the home environment, I think probably one of the most important things or where they're resting, one of the most important things that I look at is I look at making sure that we standardizing the pillow that they're traveling with. Because that is one of the biggest disruptors, the pillow.

Really what kind of pillow are you having people travel with or how are you even analyzing that?

We get these analyzed. The beautiful companies out there, some they call. One is called Pillowology, there's another called Pluto Pillow where there's lots. There's been a few phenomenal amount of research done on different types of pillows and how it suits a person. And if you think about it, your clothes change at night, your bedding changes, your bed changes. But for eight hours or six hours, however long you sleep, your head is always on this one thing. And if that is changing, if the temperature of it is changing, if the density of it is changing, if the texture of it is changing, it's going to completely disrupt your sleep. So what we try to do is we try to keep that consistent. So we've noticed that things like the temperature of the pillow is exceptionally important. The thickness and the softness and the density of the pillow is exactly the same. So what we try to do is with our professional athletes is we get a pillow analysis done for them and then we order two or three pillows and it's mandatory for them to travel with the pillow.

Wow. You know, I, by the way, I'm a little bit of a pillow princess myself and I have all these fancy pillows I own that I sleep with. Like the necknest is one that I really like for back sleeping. I always like 650 down pillows on my bed that I can kind of cradle around my neck or between my legs during sleep. I have some other special pillow that's literally designed to go between your knees for side sleepers. I forget the brand on that one. But my problem is pillows are so bulky to travel with. That's the problem is they take up so much space.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the pillows, for example, if you have a look, the reason we travel with one, we travel with the main one that the head's resting on. Because the other ones, you can still hack it. You can still use what's available to get it between your knees, you can get it to support you on the side. All of those are still, you can hack them. But the one on the sleep, the one that your head's on, if it's too soft, you're going to be tossing, turning, you're going to be trying to punch it together to get some support the entire night. So we found that just getting this standardized is one of the best ways to start. If you're not going to get that standardized, you're going to be tossing around thinking it's everything else, but it's that. So, you know, I work on that. I get obviously, like I said, the noise shaping away. So a white noise machine in there. Every single athlete that we're working and traveling with, we get a portable game ready machine with them.

Oh, that's the one that. It's similar to the Normatec boots. Those are the ones that I own. They do gradated compression to kind of milk a lot of inflammatory byproducts out of the legs. But the game ready also has like ice water that circulates through it, right?

Yeah. So we're using icing and compression at the same time with the athletes. I think the one that you're talking about just does compression only, correct?

Yeah, yeah. It's like a gradated compression and I like it. But those game ready units, they kind of combine that with ice water, which is pretty impressive.

It's mind blowing. It's a lightweight machine. All of them have that in the room. And the reason why we get it into their space is that they can ice their joints in the comfort of their own home. Previously we used to have one or two of these units in a change room. So everyone was rushing for it and the last person was spending two hours longer in the change room than he needed to be. So it was a small investment. We make sure everyone gets it in there and then, you know, with respect to athletes, every single athlete, there's something really interesting you should know is that with most codes of sport, we have this little internal app which every athlete has, and on that app we can send footage to him of the games going back to every single game he's played or every opponent he's played against. So for example, if you're taking a football game, every time a guy touches a ball, we have a software that would record 10 seconds before that and 10 seconds after that touch. And all of that footage, footage is available to him on an app to study in his room whenever he wants to. And we encourage them to do this because this is where we flag things. We get them to look at their performances, all of that. So that's actually also a part of the environment. As much as we'd like to standardize air quality, getting air filters, all of those things, some things are beyond our control because we're moving literally from hotel room to hotel room every single night. But as. As a standard rule of thumb, in every single hotel, we try to take a single floor for all our team. We try to make sure that the players are nowhere close to any exits or any lifts. So we try to get them right at the ends of the room where it's a lot quieter. You know, these are simple things that we're doing with respect to just their home environments or where they're sleeping.

Right, right. So. So even selecting the hotel room that's not near the elevator, that's actually a big one, and that's something I'll actually ask now when I check into a hotel room is if I can get a room that's farther away from. From the lift, as you call it, or the elevator, as. As we normal people say. Shamal. Yeah, it's that. That's actually pretty significant too, because all those elevators, they're. They're noise generators.

It's crazy. And it's. Even if the lift, even if the elevator is not making noise, you know, the people. It's where people are congregating whilst they're waiting for it, if they chat. And when are you going to get the most noise? You're gonna get the Most noise at 2am, 3am, when people are coming back from a party, that's when the volume really goes up. That's when you're most likely to be disturbed. So as a standard rule of thumb, we try to look at what are the things within our control and really take care of that. And then when we're looking at the work environment, Ben, that's where it gets super exciting. So this is where we start tracking all sorts of data. So when an athlete will get into a field, we get a catapult, GPS trackers on him, for example. So we're looking at every single step he takes, every movement he's taking, we're getting that movement on there. We have a lot of hydration kits, so we testing pH. We're testing hydration pre practice and post practice. You'll find that the environments are always most new change rooms and locker rooms now have multiple ice baths. Every single environment would have timing gates set up where people can do the short 30, 50 meter sprints and we can get timings against them. When we're training an athlete, for example, and we're giving him 10 runs, sometimes we want him to do 10, but the idea is that we want them to not have more than a 5% discrepancy in timings between the first and last. That's why the timing gates are there, so that we're getting real time feedback on that. Obviously everyone has heart rate monitors where we monitoring that. It's very important the heart rate monitors that we're using for them. I use a company called Suunto and a company called First Beat. Firstbeat and Suunto create heart rate variability and heart rate monitors for team analysis. So they would give me a digital radar of at least 100 to 150 meters. If the player goes 150 meters away, I can still get his real time heart rate in there. And all of these devices are digitally coded through Bluetooth, which means that I can see exactly which athlete I'm looking at. And the reason we use digital Bluetooth coding is because when you use an analog coding, if two athletes are running close to each other, you're getting interference. So you actually don't know whose heart rate data you're looking at. So you know we're looking at digital heart rate data. So we use that we always in the environment, we have a video analysis team room set up where athletes can review practice footage, they can review match footage. This is all set up. Then obviously the nutrition is taken care of, the diet's taken care of. But that's where we start getting really excited. Most of these tools is to really give make sure the athletes don't have any excuses whatsoever.

Yeah, it's super fascinating. Now what about anything like blood or biomarker tests or things that you found to be quite helpful in terms of internal biology? Are you looking at any of those parameters?

Yes, we do look at it, but it's not done on a day to day basis for the simple reason that you can't keep poking professional athletes. In fact, you mentioned such an interesting thing. Up until a few years ago, a lot of the data that we got was not on elite athletes because you can't do muscle biopsies on elite athletes. So we're taking college students or we're taking amateur athletes that were really good and we're running tests on them. So we really always had a discrepancy in the data with respect to some of the data where I'm doing, I'm not poking them, but one thing that I am doing and it's not done very often, it's done probably once a month, is lactic acid testing. So I'm getting an athlete either on a treadmill, on a bicycle, I'm looking at his heart rate variability, I'm looking at his heart rate training zones, and then I'm testing lactic acid to look at where his turn point is. So I'm trying to quantify his intensity against his turn point.

You mean where the anaerobic threshold is? That's a test that I used to do quite a bit when I worked with a lot of triathletes and marathoners was. And actually Dr. Peter Attia is still very into this concept of lactic acid threshold testing. He's one guy who I know still does this quite a bit with his patients and his clients. And essentially it's a way of addressing or analyzing metabolic efficiency by looking at the point at which the body shifts into preferential carbohydrate utilization or begins to reach a state of lactic acid accumulation that's occurring more quickly. Then the lactic acid can actually be buffered or removed or converted back to glucose via something called the Cori cycle. And yeah, I used to do this test on myself all the time. You know, typically a four minute graded test and you measure lactate levels throughout and it can actually give you a really, really good insight into, for example, your training threshold for something like a time trial or hard effort. It can give you insight into how well you're doing and improving your metabolic efficiency. It's a test not a lot of people talk about, but pretty. I think those lactate analyzers are still like 300, 400 bucks. And it's like a blood glucose monitor, except it's tracking lactate instead of glucose or say ketones.

Absolutely, you're right. It's not spoken about enough, it's not done enough. But the secret, I mean the data it's going to give you is absolutely incredible. And that's what we try to do actually. We ultimately trying to quantify where the guy's physiological ceiling is, you know, and that's what is going to let us know how hard can we push this guy and beyond. The physiological ceiling is really where psychology kicks in. So we need to understand, you know, from that physiological upper threshold from when his body is kicking into that anaerobic zone. We know from there he's just going to be slowing down after that. So we look at that particular point of intensity and effort against the end result of what is needed. And we can then quantify how big that gap is. And that's where science comes in. What can we do now? Are we going to push this for training? Are we going to push this with equipment? Is it psychology that's going to get him to close that gap? What's going to get him to close that gap? So we need to understand where the ceiling is versus where the gold medal is. And what are we going to close the gap with?

Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. Now, I also know that in terms of circadian rhythmicity, that that tends to be whether a team is traveling east to west, which is less problematic, or west to east, which appears to be more of an issue. That's something that's always an uphill battle for not only executives, but also high performers, for athletes, for teams, et cetera. You mentioned things like the pillow and some of the things you're doing in the hotel room, but anything you're doing regarding playing with light or other strategies in terms of circadian rhythmicity.

So, yeah, you know, when it comes to really traveling, for the longest time our hands were tied. We couldn't really do anything. Isn't it, you know, because. And especially like if you take a tennis player, for example, we move in 40 weeks a year on the ATP tour, so every single week we are on a plane. And sometimes you don't have the luxury of when you're going to book it, but there's this beautiful piece of technology, technology which we're trying to explore right now, which is called Lumos, Lumos Tech, which is a sleeping mask that uses flashing light. And it's quite an interesting piece of research has come out from the University of Stanford where they've said that, you know, you can flash light at hundreds of a second whilst a person is sleeping and it'll send a neurological signal to the brain which really gets it to wake up at that time, even though the person sleeping. So the Lumos sleep mask is really flashing light and you set the time that it's flashlight based on where you want to wake up and the time zone that you want to wake up. So we are definitely trying things like that. We're using things like that. We use a lot of compression garments when we're traveling to try to make sure that the thing. But I think with respect to circadian rhythm, as a rule of thumb, I try to get my athletes to fast on planes because I found that and just our experience. It's actually your digestion that kind of knocks you out of sync more than anything else. And on a plane, what time zone are you eating in? They would serve your meal an hour after the plane takes off, irrespective of what time that plane takes off. And your entire big part of circadian rhythm is actually when your digestion starts and when it stops. So it's the meals on the plane that really knock you out of sync more than anything else. So I try to ask athletes to fast on planes. We do a lot of hydration, but we use, this is the tech that we really using to try to beat jet lag in some shape and form.

Yeah, yeah. I'm a huge fan of liquid ketone esters now for flying, just because sometimes you do get hungry when you're just sitting there on a plane, especially if you're not sleeping, you have nothing else to do. Sometimes the first thing that comes to mind is to either A, watch a movie or B, eat or both. And I've found a couple bottles of like the HVMN or the ketone Aid Keton. I mean, those keep me from eating on the flight, but then they also seem to shut down some of the NRF2 based inflammatory pathways that occur in response to airline radiation and things along those lines. So you kind of kill two birds with one stone. But I'm a huge fan of traveling now with ketones. Anytime I hop onto a plane, typically I'll slam a bottle. For a long haul flight, I'll slam a bottle every couple hours and then drink another bottle when I get in. And those things are a game changer for me when, when it comes to flights. We're getting a little long in the tooth here. But I do have some other questions I wanted to ask you. You have a big focus in the book. Kind of outside the realm of a lot of the physical and the biological things we've been talking about on relationships. Like you really delve into friends, families, relationships. I mean, in your book Breathe, Believe Balance, you kind of walk through some of these questions that you ask the people that you're working with. But why do you have such a focus on relationships when it comes to optimizing the environment of a high performer?

So the reason I focus on relationships is because experience has taught me that it's the relationship between the athlete and the coach or the athlete and the trainer that actually makes all the difference. Why is it? And I'll give you a few reasons. One is that I am the Person the athlete is seeing last before he goes into competition, I'm the person he sees first, irrespective of how that result has happened. So if he's won, all good. If he's lost, I'm the person seen first. So, you know, that relationship is super important. I also learned something really interesting. I've learned that the better an athlete is, the harder it is to push him out of his comfort zone, because he could be sitting in his comfort zone and still be performing so well that he would beat others. But the point is that that is not sustainable for a prolonged period of time. We need to get him out of that comfort zone. So more important than knowing who you are, it's important to know the type of person that can actually push you out of your comfort zone. So that is something that's very, very important. So I focus a lot on getting people to understand who they are, but I also get them to understand the type of person that's needed in their system to help them get the best of who they are. And, you know, Tim Noakes talks of the central government theory. He talks of the brain can actually slow the body down. Now, if your brain is telling your body to slow down, what is the external factor that's getting you to reset that entire wiring? That's that relationship with the coach. It's somebody who's there who's telling you, listen, you know what? That something is telling you to slow down, and you're very, very far from performing at your physiological limits. It's the coach's ability to really push you at that point. So I spend a lot of time really understanding the relationships, because for me, the relationships are the secret to everything. If you're looking at team sports, the dynamic in a change room is everything. It's the respect, the integrity, the dignity is all established in there. If you're looking at an Olympic sport, Ben, you're sitting across from your opponent 10 minutes before you can go and compete. Understanding the dynamic in there, understanding the psychology, having somebody sitting next to you who can help you carve away and cut away that tension makes all the difference. So understanding relationships is critical. And I spend a lot of time in peeling away these layers because. And you've seen it so many times when. When an athlete, when a professional athlete goes through something really disastrous or traumatic in their life, their performance drops quite drastically. Look at what happened to, you know, Roger Federer with not even traumatic, but the birth of his children shifts his psychology. Yep. You look at Tiger woods. What happens if you look at Pick any athlete if something big happens.

It's something that I never really appreciated. And for, I mean, gosh, over a decade, I coached and worked with clients, and I felt as though I was being intrusive by asking questions about, like, family life, relationship with spouse, relationship with children, even relationship with self, and, you know, spiritual habits. You know, it was a few years ago when actually for my intake questionnaires for a lot of the execs and the. And the clients that I work with, I actually began to ask those probing questions. And I would find that really, the people who did not have optimized relationships and personal environments when it came to their wife or their husband, their children, friendships in the local community, et cetera, these were often the people who seem to have the most struggles with things like gut issues, sleep issues, performance issues. And, you know, when I began asking those questions, not only did people not. Not push back, you know, but. But a lot of times it wound up opening up some interesting discussions when I began to work with clients in terms of just getting to know what's going on on the home front or with relationships or with coworkers. And it's something that, that, you know, I'm still shocked. More personal trainers, more physicians, more performance coaches aren't finding out what's going on kind of on the home front, so to speak. You know what I'm saying?

I absolutely agree with you, Ben. And, you know, I'll tell you two things. One is that, you know, when you work with a professional athlete, I keep explaining to this, I said an athlete works in two mental states. One mental state is he's got to be so confident. It's actually bordering on average, isn't it? Because if he has anything but that, the chances of him winning are slim to none. You can't expect him to walk onto a field thinking anything, but he's the best if he's got any chance of winning. But then the next mental state is a state of humility, because humility is the foundation of learning. He needs to realize that I'm only as good as my last performance. What can I learn from there? What can I learn from everyone in my ecosystem? Now, who is the person that's moving that athlete between that state of arrogance and that state of humility? That's the coach, and that's entirely dependent on that relationship. And, and what you said is so important. And that reminded me of something that comes out of Vedic science. Vedic literature talks of chronic diseases can enter the body through one of two ways, either through your mouth which is by the food you eat or what you drink, or the second is chronic disease can enter the body through the brain. And they refer to that by the quality of your thoughts, what are you thinking? And the brain and the quality of thought is stemming from unhealthy relationships. So exactly what you're saying, it's that you're ruminating on an unhealthy relationship. You're ruminating on a potential area of conflict with a certain relationship. And now that has entered the body through the brain and is going to manifest in a certain organ in your body. And that science is called German New Medicine, where they study the psychic route of diseases that enter the body through the brain.

Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating and something that I think more people should take into account. Now, with as much on the cutting edge as you are of a lot of these things, is there anything that you're excited about when it comes to the future of either technology or supplementation or diet or biology or biomechanics or any other development when it comes to particularly enhancing one's performance and one's recovery, whether in the realm of athletics or optimization for executive function, etc. You've talked about some things on the show before that I think a lot of people might not have been familiar with, like doing sound level meter apps and something like these smart sleep masks that emit certain amounts of light, et cetera. But is there anything else that you kind of have your eye on as far as exciting up and coming things?

Ben, I'm super excited about the next decade or the next two decades. The reason I'm excited about it is because we're going to see massive shifts in, in human physiology. And the reason I'm saying this is because if you look at sport over the last hundred years, most of the advancements we've really seen, obviously we've seen great athletes, but we've seen a lot of advancement in technology. You know, it's better apps, it's better training surfaces, it's deeper pools, it's better equipment. All of those things have moved sport forward quite considerably. And the reason that happened was because we didn't have the possibility of understanding human physiology in a non invasive way, we couldn't. But now we're moving into a realm, into an area where we can start understanding, for example, simple thing like muscle fiber type. You know, there's a technology which is called proton magnetic resonance spectrometer, which looks at muscle carcinoma and that will literally tell us what our muscle fiber type is like. This Was unavailable to us. So I'm super excited about how we can start testing human physiology and how we can start moving physiology forward.

By the way, is that muscle fiber typing? Is that muscle fiber typing a genetic test?

No, it's not a genetic test. Because you know, you can do a gene test and a gene test will tell you what you predispose to. So it will tell you your actin, your ace, whatever you predisposed to, there is some modulation between these two types. And remember, it's your training that create the ecosystem for this to be active. So even though you may be predisposed to have a certain type of fiber, it's going to be the certain type of training that's actually going to create the ecosystem to allow that gene to express. But whether that gene is expressed or not comes in through this non invasive testing that we now have. Because if you look at genes only, what you're looking at is innate potential. We have no idea whether that innate potential is tapped. This is why we need testing. And in the world of sport we try to take testing from what was predominantly in the lab to now being on the field. And that's why I'm super excited. You know, if you're having a look at the physiology of athletes, there's an interesting statistic. The difference between the first and fourth position in an Olympic event is about 0.5%. And if you look at the 100 meter final, that's two or three hundredths of a second, which is probably the blink of an eye. And we know that top athletes are really physiologically similar. And we always thought that the difference is going to be psychological. And we operated on that. So for the next two decades, I think we can challenge that. We can challenge whether that difference is only psychological in them. Whether it's just the ability to perceive pressure or absorb pressure in a high pressure situation, or is it actually physiologically different and how can we tap that? So I'm super excited about that. And with respect to certain technologies that we use, you know, I think we move forward quite quite nicely. What I encourage people to do is look at sweat analysis. I do a lot of things with sweat analysis. We move into an exciting era of customized personalized supplementation, personalized nutrition, personalized understanding of the body, whether it's through your gut microbiome, whether it's through your sweat analysis. I even use a beautiful test called a dermatoglyphics test, which incidentally maps your fingerprints to the cortexes of your brain. Because when a child is in the womb. The fingerprints and the brain develop at the same rate. And they found an interesting way in which they can do that. So when you do a dermatoglyphics test, you can understand which cortex of your brain has got the fastest processor. So you understand that information is traveling through there in the best possible, or you're going to process it through that. You know, once you have all of this information in place, it's really the canvas gets thrown out wide in terms of how you talk to athletes, how you understand them, how you push them psychologically, what they're able to interpret, all of these things. So I'm very excited about where physiology is going to move in the next decade or two.

Wow. That dermatoglyphics multiple intelligence test using the fingertip analysis that you just referred to is something I've thought about in the past just because. Because I've been exposed to iridology at a certain point in which I've had my irises analyzed with a very high resolution camera. And there's actually quite a bit of science behind the analysis of the iris and its correlation to different organ functions. And I've always thought I'm like, what is it that we can be told by our fingerprints and our fingertips, similar to our genetics, that we just haven't even been tapped into? So that's interesting. I've never actually taken a deep dive into that myself, but a, I'll hunt down some information on dramatoglyphics and put that into the show notes for those of you who are interested. And then also, you listed off a lot of stuff there, Shamal, and if you would like, I would invite you to, if you have a chance, at some point, maybe in the next week or so before this podcast is released, if you want to write me an email with links to anything that you have listed as things that you find exciting or different resources that you found to be helpful. I will definitely include those in the show notes because sometimes I can't write fast enough to keep up with what my guests are saying. But if you shoot me an email, I can certainly add all of this. And of course, for those of you listening in, I've been taking lots of notes and I'll add as many as I can. Those are going to all be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Shamal S H A Y A M A All what are the chances you might be able to email a few links for folks though?

Shamal I'll definitely send across. I'll send across. I have a lot of my notes here and I'll send you links and we'll definitely get across to all the listeners.

Oh amazing. Amazing. Well, we've only scratched the surface of what you talk about in your book, which I'm kind of glad for because obviously people can read your book, but then everything we've just talked about includes things not in the book. And so, so get the book if you enjoyed a little insight into the mind of Shamal and you may see more of Shamal and I together because we're talking about a few different projects and I'm going to eventually, once all these Covid restrictions are removed, get back over there to India because I met so many interesting people but when it comes to high end performance, gosh, you were just a wealth of knowledge and I really enjoyed meeting you and hanging out with you, Shamal. So thanks for doing what you you do and for being willing to come on the show and share all of this stuff with us.

Thank you so much for having me. It's always exciting. I remember we had some fascinating chats in Mumbai and we're looking forward to hosting you again.

So hopefully yes, yet another trip out to have some guan cuisine. I would totally be game to punish some more Indian west coast food. So anytime we're pulling up and bellying up to the bar to talk shop over seafood and coconuts and vegetables, I'm game. So yeah, we'll make it happen. And so anyways, for those of you listening in. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Shamal S H A Y A M A L is where you can access all the show notes. His book Breathe Believe Balance is available on Amazon or wherever fine books are found. And thank you for listening in. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield and Shamal signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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, 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.