The Truth About Vitamin D, How To Squat Better, Fast Muscle Gain Tips & Much More!

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast, Natural sunlight Replacements. How to fix heel whip in runners, how to squat better fast muscle gain tips. Do calf sleeves help? What is the best workout gear and why Africans win marathons?

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Iron man triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hello?

Hello? Hello?

Who is this? How did you get this number?

It does feel weird to be back at the, at the podcast.

And does this feel strange to be talking to you? I don't remember how to do this.

I am older, I'm wiser, I'm almost older. I am almost, I'm almost of Yoda like age now and sage. As a matter of fact. Yeah, Next week I'll do or do not. There is no try.

That's really good. It is remarkable.

I'm going to be 32.

You know what I say to that?

Yoda and Chewbacca. We should do the entire podcast as Yoda and Chewbacca. But no.

Anyway, yeah, it's your birthday.

Yeah, it's my birthday on Friday, so.

And what are you going to be? Did you say 32?

The ripe old age of. Yes, 32. Yeah. And as usual, I always send out a gift to our listeners on my birthday and I've got a special one lined up. So anybody who's listening in, if you haven't yet gone to giftfromben.com yet, if you go to giftfromben.com at this point, you not only get a free video, but I'm also going to be sending out a cool little surprise for my birthday. So sweet.

All kinds of birthday savings.

And we also, and I don't want to get wax too sentimental here, but we're also very lucky to have Brock with us and here as our podcast sidekick because you have kind of like, like an anniversary this week as well. Brock, right? Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I don't want to get too, too, yeah, like you said, not too nostalgic about it or anything, but 10 years ago on the 21st, on December 21st was when I was rushed into the hospital with pericarditis, myocarditis and had an angiogram and was in really kind of rough shape for a little while. And this is my 10 year anniversary. So I plan to. I'm going to do some sort of screw you death party, I think.

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't really know your your story, Brock, but it really is interesting how you had some really serious heart issues with that pericarditis and could have seriously died. And that was, that was almost 10 years ago to the day. Huh?

Yep.

Interesting.

I. I warn all of you, don't get it. It's not fun if you get an infection in your heart. It's. Yeah, it's not a good place to get an infection. So. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I think the screw you death party is a great idea and maybe we can just have a combined Ben Greenfield, 32nd and Brock screw you death party. And we'll be. We'll be at some bar between here and Toronto, Canada. Maybe we'll meet halfway and invite all the listeners.

So meet you Moustro.

It is.

News flashes. Head over to BenGreenfield Fitness.com 264 that's/264 and you will find links to some awesome news flashes. Actually a whole crapload of news flashes this week. You really. You got a little carried away.

That's right. Well, we haven't had the podcast in so long. I have a lot of the research and the articles that I tweet about constantly over@twitter.com BenGreenfeld I've got them kind of piling up. So I wanted to mention a few to folks. And because I've got a dark, dreary gray day here in Spokane, Washington, why not start with a recent article? That's fantastic. One of the better articles I've read on sun and the use of sun and kind of biological biohacking your way into the use of sun and the best way to do it. And this one was over.

I think we've got a question about this later too.

This is timely.

We're preempting and pay attention.

Yes. We're so smart. So how to Engineer a Successful Day of Sunbathing this was a really great article that appeared over at Mark's Daily Apple. Obviously, sunbathing, when we talk about getting vitamin D and aligning our natural circadian rhythms, is is really important. And the fact is that there are ways that you can kind of biohack your way into making your sun exposure even more effective. So for example, when you have breakfast, if you include a specific component called astaxanthin with breakfast, as well as EPA and dha, all of which are found in, interestingly, fish you can actually increase the amount of UVB that you're able to get while decreasing your exposure to uva. Now, remember that UVA is kind of the one that does a little bit more DNA damage when you get exposed to it versus uvb, which is a little bit healthier when it comes to upregulating your vitamin D. So you could include, you know, something like salmon or sardines with breakfast. If you're kind of like an eggs and bacon person, maybe you could try eggs and fish. Another really good salmon source.

SM salmon for breakfast. That is decadent deliciousness right there.

Slox. There we go. Happy Hanukkah. So, yeah, you could absolutely include something like fish. You know, maybe fish isn't your thing in the morning, but krill oil, fish oil, like a really good fish oil. And for those EPA, DHA omega 3 fatty acid compounds, even like eggs are another really good way to get those. And they talk in the article about how saturated fat protects you against sun damage more than like polyunsaturated. So saturated fat like you'd find in butter versus polyunsaturated fat like you'd say, find in margarines or vegetable oils. So I thought that was a cool tip. They talk a little bit in there about when you do get sun exposure again, that it's the UVB exposure which produces the vitamin D production. And UVB exposure peaks right around the time that the midday sun is overhead. And that's when you get kind of this unique balance of UVA and uvb. So if you're going to go and try and, and get sun exposure, if you can do it, you know, kind of between like that 11am to 2pm kind of time frame and you're wanting to get the most benefit out of sun exposure, that's the time to do it. So maybe you go out if it's a sunny day and you have lunch out in the sun, or you, I don't know, step outside and, and do your, your, your nude sunbathing. If you're one of our many housewives who listening to the podcast while nude sunbathing in the backyard of their giant mansion.

That's right, we don't encourage house husbands.

To do this in Hollywood Hills, but good time to get your vitamin D exposure. A few other interesting things. And again, there's a ton of really cool stuff in the article and we'll link to it in the show notes. But as far as photo protection, two of the things that offer some really good photo protection to help you with healthy skin when you are getting sun exposure, one is lycopene, which you're gonna get in fresh tomatoes. And another one is the anthocyanins and what are called the flavanols that you get in dark chocolate. So you can have some dark chocolate work in some fresh tomatoes. And those are just a few of the ways.

And that's along with your lox and your eggs cooked in butter. So we're making one hell of a breakfast here.

That's right. And interestingly, by the way, you know, this is something else that I, that I think is kind of interesting when it comes to this UVA and UVB exposure. I've always wondered if when I don't have a chance to go outside, if I'm just driving around in my truck, if, when the sun is going through the window, if I'm actually getting some of that good sun exposure. Well, it turns out when we're talking about this whole UVA versus UVB thing, that mostly what gets kind of through the window is UVA rays again, which are the skin damaging rays that have more potential to have kind of like high carcinogenicity. Big word for the day. So you should actually, if you're going to do that, like roll down your window or if you're going to like sit in an office that's close to the window so that you get more sun. Technically it'd be better for you if you like had the window open so you were getting both UVA and uvb. But it's kind of interesting the difference between those ray frequencies and kind of some considerations as far as those go. So good article. We'll link to it in the show notes. And speaking of sunshine, there was also another really good article that I'll link to about vitamin D and how there's new research that highlights that vitamin D and specifically high dose vitamin D supplementation, which I don't know about you, Brock, but I think a lot of people, especially in the wintertime when this podcast is being recorded, are doing.

Yeah, I just started taking some in the last three weeks because it's gotten so dark here.

Yeah, well, there's specific genes responsible for allowing your cells to regrow, specifically your skeletal muscle cells to regrow in response to damage. And it turns out that high dose vitamin D supplementation can actually inhibit the activity of those cells. And I'll link to the research in the show notes. It was indeed done, I believe, on a rodent model. But still it's really interesting the data that shows that vitamin D actually alters gene expression in the cells that are responsible for causing a muscle to grow. And I don't think that this means that we should avoid vitamin D or quit taking vitamin D supplements because there are a lot of benefits that come with vitamin D supplementation. But one of the things that you run into over and over again in the literature is how the intake of retinoic acid or getting beta carotene or vitamin A from food based sources, especially like our oranges and our yellows and even more so when we've actually cooked those oranges and yellows like squash and carrots and sweet potatoes and yams and things of that nature, what happens is it balances out the vitamin D and it actually takes up some of the receptors that like high dose vitamin D would actually take up. And so what I suspect is that it's not that vitamin D shuts down muscle growth or shuts down the ability of a muscle cell to repair and recover. What I think is dangerous, and this is something that I hit on a lot during the recent creative live that I did down in San Francisco, is that if you're going to take a fat soluble vitamin like vitamin D or like vitamin A or like vitamin K, it's very, very interesting that all of them have some weird toxicity issues unless you are taking them all at once. So that's why it's important, you know, if you're, if, if you're going to get fat soluble vitamins in to try as much as possible to get them from natural sources. And when I say natural sources, I'm talking about things like eggs with the yolk. Cod liver oil is another perfect example. Raw seeds and nuts are another example. But making sure that you're not just doing like high dose, unopposed vitamin D is really, really important. And you know you can get your vitamin D levels tested. I like for most people to kind of stay between about 40 and 70. Kind of below 40 is where you tend to see some of the effects of a loss of steroidal and hormonal precursors. And above 70 is where you start to see some potential for toxicity. But the more important thing is to make sure that you're also getting a lot of really rich sources of vitamin A and vitamin K. It's why I'm a fan of things like using organ meats like liver or using a cod liver oil supplement. It's why I'm a fan of eating eggs with the yolk. But it was a really interesting study and I think it just highlights, you know, any high intake of a Specific vitamin unopposed might be playing with fire.

And there was a. There's actually a study that people have been asking us about a lot in the last couple of days that's been. Or I guess it wasn't so much a study as it was an article in the New York Times, I think, that said that. That all these doctors have stepped forward and said, basically, supplements are a waste of time. You shouldn't be taking them.

Yeah. And I think multivitamins specifically. Yeah.

I think then that was sort of the main hole that I saw. And it was that they weren't talking about when anything was being combined with how it was being taken, what time of day it was being taken, what the diet was like to begin with, all that kind of stuff. So this really just sort of goes hand in hand with making sure you've got the right ratios.

Yep, exactly. That's why most multivitamin formulas out there are kind of just crap with a bunch of fillers and stuff. We probably don't have time to get into today. But, yeah, it's really interesting. And then since we're talking about sun and sleep, this was something that I tweeted out and something that we demonstrated again at the recent Creative Live that we did. And I should mention that Jess and I just got back from San Francisco. We spent three days there on stage for, like, eight hours a day, just teaching people all these healthy living and healthy exercise and healthy eating concepts. And if you go to creativelive.com and just do a search for my name, you should be able to. To find that. I think it costs, like, 100 bucks or something like that to download, but a lot of fun. And one of the things that Jessa demonstrated was that if you do need sun block, whether you're, you know, skiing in the wintertime, if you're one of our Northern Hemisphere listeners, or whether you're living in Florida or California, Jessa showed something really cool, which is that you can take zinc oxide, which you can get from, like, soapgoods.com you can get off Amazon. You want to be careful not to breathe it in, because it is like a. Like kind of a volatile powder that can do a little bit of damage if you breathe it in.

But no snorting it.

It's got a natural SPF. Yeah, don't snort it of about 30. And you can take any safe lotion out there. So let's say you're a fan of using, like, whatever, coconut oil, emu oil, any natural moisturizer. You know, maybe you've got something from, like, you know, a company that makes good oils that don't have a lot of fillers in them, like, you know, Badger Balm, for example. And you can add just a couple teaspoons of zinc oxide, and that gives you a natural 20 to 30 SPF sunscreen. Just by doing that, all you do is combine zinc oxide with lotion, and you don't have to go through all these steps of, like, making your own sunscreen. Sounds weird to be talking about it in the winter, but I can't talk about, you know, vitamin D and sun and circadian rhythms without mentioning that cool little trick that you can do.

I think that was. It was a good point to make right at the beginning when you're skiing. Like, that's often sometime you don't even think of putting on sunscreen on your nose or your cheeks or your forehead or something when you're out on the slopes for the day. And then all of a sudden you get back to the. Back to the chalet and you look like a raccoon or reverse raccoon.

Yep, exactly. So if you don't want to be that old wrinkly skier, there you go. Caffeine. So, speaking of sleep and circadian rhythms, this was another study that just ties.

So neatly together today.

My Sedgwies are just brilliant. Today, the Journal of Sleep Medicine did a study where they administered a caffeine dose at zero hours, three hours and six hours prior to bedtime. And even as far as six hours from bedtime. The equivalent of about a cup and a half to two of coffee taken six hours before bedtime. Yeah, about 400 milligrams or so of coffee. It kind of depends on the size of your cup, but that actually caused significant sleep disturbances even when taken as far as six hours prior to bedtime. And so this kind of highlights the importance of maybe doing a morning cup of coffee and then considering some other source of wakefulness if you need it in the afternoon. Like, one of my favorites for that is L. Theanine, which you get from green tea. And that doesn't cause those same sleep disturbances that caffeine can cause. But know that based on this recent research, if you're doing caffeine or you're having a big cup of coffee in the afternoon, that can stay with you for up to six hours. So really interesting. And I thought that was kind of a. Kind of a cool little test just to see how long it took for caffeine to stay in your system and actually still disrupt sleep. So who knows?

I need to. If I need to pick up in the afternoon, I just stand on my, on my head and put some ice in my shorts.

That's right. That's right. Well, I do a cold shower, but in Canada, you guys like to make everything hard.

Just grab some snow, shove them in your shorts and.

That's right.

No big deal.

That's right. Grab your local neighborhood snow, get into a handstand and shove it down your shorts. I like it. All right, cool. Speaking of shoving things down your shorts, a brand new toilet. We'll link to this article in the show notes. It appeared in the NBC Technology News. And there's this brand new toilet that they're making that can not only analyze your poo for things like bacteria or health defects or provide information about nutritional deficiencies, but we've talked about the squatty potty before. This is a brand new toilet that actually pushes you up into that 90 degree upright sitting position that allows that what's called the puborectalis angle to actually be unkinked. And unlike the squatty potty, which is like this thing that you purchase that you can place in the bathroom of your house, this is actually built into the toilet itself. And you can see a picture of the toilet if you go to the article. We'll link to it in the show notes over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/264. But as I tweeted, I consider this to potentially be the Cadillac of squatty potties. And I certainly think it'd be very cool to have a toilet that could actually analyze your poop.

I can't help but picture your. Did you ever see the Simpsons when they went to Japan and they checked into their hotel room and they had this little. The toilet actually did like this little water ballet show. And I am pleased to accept your waste.

Yeah, you know what's funny is the toilets in Japan have all these buttons on them that like, literally you have like a remote control with like 12 different buttons on it for everything from like the, the spray and the rinse to the hot versus the cold to the. You know, there's like seat warmers on there. It's, it's nice. But now we can add in actual poo analysis. So check out that article if you're interested in that. And then finally, since we've talked about sleeping, about nude sunbathing, about pooping, we might as well talk about the use of recreational drugs too, just to kind of come full circle and make sure that any children listening in are now scarred for life.

I'm pleased to accept your waste.

I love it. So this was a study on pot and the use of marijuana. If, and of course we know that marijuana has been used for thousands of years as a treatment for medical conditions and we in no way condone its use as a recreational drug. But what they looked into was the cognitive impairments and the potential damage to your brain when you use something like marijuana. Long term, there has been some research that has shown potential for an increase in what are called neurofibrillary tangles or the formation of what are called beta amyloid plaques and neurodegeneration in your brain in the presence of pot intake. And what this study showed was that if you can somehow inhibit Cox 2, which is an enzyme that converts arachidonic acid, which is kind of like it's associated with inflammation, but it converts arachidonic acid to prostanoids in the brain and so it potentially causes inflammation in the brain, so to speak. If we can Somehow shut down Cox 2 while we are taking in marijuana based substances, then we can shut down the potential neurodegenerative effect of marijuana. And so an example of a COX2 inhibitor would be like ibuprofen or a non steroidal anti inflammatory drug. The unfortunate thing about those though is they also shut down what's called COX one, which is really, really important for the lining of your stomach and your digestive tract and your blood vessels. And that's why something like ibuprofen can cause a lot of damage to your gut or damage to your liver or damage to your stomach. So there are COX2 inhibitors out there, like for example, curcumin is a perfect example. So the active component of the herb turmeric, which we find in things like curries, it's in that phenocaine anti inflammatory supplement that I personally use pretty regularly. If we can use something like that, like a high dose curcumin in the presence of marijuana exposure, so to speak, from all that secondhand marijuana smoke from your neighbors seeping in. As you're listening to the podcast, what we can do is glaucoma. All our pot smoking neighbors here in Washington, by the way, it's now legal. I think it's about an ounce and a half that you can get. So now we've got all these pot shops opening up, but basically I wouldn't really be going near pot unless you're also doing a little bit of COX2 inhibition and getting in your curry and your curcumin at the Same time next.

Time you've got some of the cancer munchies.

We just saved the brain of all of our high listeners. So there you go.

Special Announcements audiblepodcast.com Ben is the place to head over and sign up for your free trial of the the pretty sweet collection of what do they have, like 50,000? Maybe it's 150,000. I can't remember. It's like a ridiculous number of audiobooks.

That you can download for free. Billions. Just make up 150 billion billion and sharks with lasers. Audiblepodcast.com Ben and we're in a stressful time. The holidays and Speak for yourself.

I'm totally relaxed.

That's right, because Brock doesn't celebrate Christmas. He just sits up on his mountain top with his pants stuffed with snow.

And chills doing a headstand.

Anyways, though, anyway, it's stressful for some people. There's this book on Audible that I found called Mindfulness for Dummies. And mindfulness is something again, not to kick a horse to death, but this was something I demonstrated at the Creative Live presentation. We did about two minutes of mindfulness based breathing to kind of get ourselves back into a relaxed way of being. And mindfulness can help you clear your mind of negative and distracting thoughts and live a little bit more positively, make cool, habitual lifestyle changes. And this book teaches you if you're one of the dummies walking around out there, not that any of our podcast listeners are, but this, this is called Mindfulness for Dummies. It's only a two hour long audiobook, but over the course of the audiobook, which you get for free when you go to audiblepodcast.com Ben you can learn everything you need to know about how to be more mindful. So yeah, there you go.

You don't have to get that book though.

You don't have to get that book.

You could get the Hunger Games if you want.

You could get the Hunger Games. You could get 50 shades of gray Hunger or Hungry Hunger. The Hungry Games is probably.

That sounds way better.

Yeah, I like the Hungry Games actually. That sounds good. Let's write, let's write a book called the Hungry Games. Mindfulness for Dummies. Check it out. And then also while you're on the Internet, surf over to the brand new Ben Greenfield Fitness Gear page over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com gear. Now, as you may know, if you go and leave this podcast to review in itunes, then you've got a pretty good chance if we leave or if we read Your review on the show, which we'll be doing at the end of today's show. So listen in cause you may have won a pack. We've got the brand new PCB free, guilt free, healthy Ben Greenfield fitness water bottle.

Nice.

We've got the brand new BenGreenfieldFitness.com beanie.

Wait, did you say PCB or BCA?

Sorry, BPA. The other Alphabet soup.

Hopefully it's PCB free as well.

Probably PCB free. Let's keep our fingers crossed, but definitely BPA. The Ben Greenpool Fitness Tech shirt. We spared no expense on this shirt. It's actually a cool looking shirt that you can work out in versus being like one of those cheapo cotton tent shirts.

I actually wear it around not working out. It's that nice and that comfortable.

Yeah, it's actually a cool shirt. So check it all out. It's over at BenGreenfeldFitness.com gear but you get all that stuff, we'll ship it anywhere in the world. It's an awesome way to support the show. You get the beanie again, super duper, high quality head sweats beanie. And if anybody's worn head sweats gear, it's some pretty sweet stuff. So you could wear this. You could wear this during an entire day of skiing or if you're up in Canada, curling or anything else, the Ben Greenfield fitness tech T shirt. Perfect for the gym. And then of course, your BPA free water bottle so that you don't have children with birth defects. And you can get that all over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com gear. It's. It's 47 bucks for the shirt, the hat, the bottle. Check it out.

Steal of a deal.

Steal of a deal. And then of course, don't forget to get your free gift by going to giftfromben.com because I'm gonna be giving out some cool giftage in about two days on my birthday.

Do it soon.

So there you go. Did you know that Ben Greenfield personally mentors trainers, coaches, physicians and nutritionists from around the globe? From business building tips to advanced human performance and health concepts. It's all part of a private mastermind called the Superhuman Coach Network. When you join, you get instant access to monthly workshops with Ben, a Q and a forum, over 40 hours of cutting edge audio and video education, and much more. Check it out today and become one of the world's leading health and fitness experts@superhumancoach.com podcast. That's superhumancoach.com podcast.

Listener Q and A.

Hi, Ben. It's Anne from Boston. I was calling because I recently moved into a new office space that doesn't get any outside natural light during the day. I was wondering if you had any suggestions for a type of sun lamp I should get or any supplements I should take or anything else I should.

Be doing to minimize the negative impacts.

Of sitting in an office where I see very little sunshine during the day. Thank you.

Love the podcast.

Bye. Bye.

You know, you don't even have to move into a crappy dark office. You just have to live in the northern hemisphere and you're experiencing the same problem as Ann is having.

Yeah. And the issue, of course, is sad, not to be confused with the standard American diets, the seasonal affective disorder, and we also know this as the winter blues. But it's this problem where whether you're stuck in a dark office all day and it's summer or spring or fall or winter, or whether the sun's just not out where you're at, what happens is it lowers your serotonin levels, specifically, because when we get an upregulation of melatonin and kind of a natural circadian rhythm, we get really nice stabilized serotonin levels. And when that gets disrupted, we can get depression, fatigue, sleepiness, irritability, difficulties concentrating, a lot of different issues. So the trick is that you can biohack the sun and you can actually kind of introduce features into your office space or your home space that simulate sunlight or that help you get some of the chemicals into your body that sunlight would normally be producing. So one thing, probably the biggest thing on your radar should be one of these new fancy light boxes or lamps that produce typically blue light. So I'll put some links in the show notes under your question, Ann. And the show notes are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com264 but two brands that I really like that put out that 10,000 lux of light that you would just set on your desk or set on your table when you're eating breakfast. And they only take about 15 to 30 minutes of exposure or so. There's one called the Nature Bright Sun Touch. There's also another one called the Omega Light Therapy Device. Those would be a couple that you would just be able to pick up off Amazon usually. I mean, they're not super cheap. You're gonna spend 100 to 150 bucks on a good like 10,000 plus lux blue light box.

So that's the, that's the key right there, is to get the 10,000 or more luxury Lux being the measurement of light output.

Yep. And for it to really cause that bump up, that slight bump up in cortisol that you'd normally be getting and for it to stabilize your serotonin levels in the morning, it should include a little bit of the blue light wave spectrum. So most of them do, most of these, what are called phototherapy devices actually do. So they do have, have some risks. If you look at them for a long time, you can get eye strain, you can get headache. Some people who use them quite a bit have complaint of side effects like nausea and difficulty sleeping. So you don't want to overuse a phototherapy device. But literally just 15 to 30 minutes in the morning or at a, like a dark office could help out quite a bit. So that's one thing to look into. Is light therapy be another thing to look into?

I actually just, just googled what the difference is between lumens and lux because I was curious what 10,000 plus lux would be because I remember you got that, that killer light that you put on your bike that had like, I think was 6,000 lumens or something.

Yeah, yeah.

I guess lux is more the spread of the light and lumen is just the, the luminosity, like the actual brightness of it. So. So I guess they want to spread out the light for this particular usage.

Yeah. And you don't necessarily like stare directly into it. You can just set it one or two feet from you while you're working on your computer or while you're again like eating breakfast or whatever it is that you do in the morning. And yeah, just set it there and that can help out a little bit. Vitamin D supplementation which we already hit on, you can of course supplement with vitamin D. Again with vitamin D though. It's always one of those things where you need to be really careful. And the more and more research I see on just straight up supplementation of what's called vitamin D3, which is the popular form of vitamin D that you see a lot of people popping these days, there are some definite issues with high dose vitamin D and the absence of our other natural fat soluble vitamins. Now believe it or not, one of the best ways to increase blood levels of what's called 25 hydroxy vitamin D, which is the more natural type of vitamin D that you'd get circulating in your bloodstream if you had say good afternoon sun exposure, like that ultimate combination of UVA and UVB light that we talked about.

One of the stuff your body actually manufactures in response to sunlight to get.

Closer to the stuff, like the bioactive stuff that your body actually manufactures itself. One of the best combinations of the compounds responsible for allowing you to make that yourself is egg. Just like a whole natural, like not a farm raised egg preferably, or not a, you know, like a typical store bought egg, but like an egg that's omega 3 enriched or like a cage free hen, that type of thing. Not one of the chickens that's raised in a one foot by one foot space inside a, inside a barn, but literally like really good egg from like your local CSA agriculture where you can meet up with a farmer or take turns with other people meeting up with a farmer to get eggs or paying the extra one or two dollars at the grocery store to get the good Omega 3 enriched egg. That's a really, really good source of vitamin D as well. So that's something else that I do is focus on the vitamin D. Get the light therapy again like I mentioned, be careful just accepting that say like moving closer to, you know, an office space that has say a window in it that has exposure to the sun. Just be careful because you're getting mostly UVA rays when you do that. But those are two of the things that would do is good vitamin D supplementation, including eggs and fish in your diet as well. And then also consider the use of something like one of these blue light boxes.

Now I don't want to go too far from Anne's question, but you said something that I thought was kind of interesting when we were talking about eggs. You said the omega 3 enriched eggs. Now I've always heard that you shouldn't go for the Omega 3 ones because they're actually like feeding the chickens something that they naturally wouldn't necessarily eat in order to boost the Omega 3. So you're actually losing some of the other, some of the other good parts of the eggs. Do you not follow or subscribe to that idea?

I've never actually seen any evidence that omega 3 enriched eggs are getting omega 3 enriched by feeding them a bad diet. That's something that we should look into though. Maybe it's something we can research and one of our listeners can put up on the Facebook page maybe over.

Yeah, if anybody's actually interested in this.

BG fitness, I mean, I guess if you're supplementing chicken feed with something like flax seeds that have a good Omega 3 content, you know, I don't see a huge issue with doing something like that. I suppose if, you know, if a chicken is getting a lot of soy and you know other omega 6 fatty acids or something like that along with something like flax, it could be an issue, but I don't see an issue with feeding a chicken like extra flaxseed or some sort of other omega 3 fatty acid to increase the omega 3 content of the actual egg. Unless I'm missing something. And. And that certainly could be the case.

Yeah. I'll try and find the article that I'm thinking of. It's either Josh Axe or Dave Asprey, I think, that wrote about that. I'll see if I can find it.

Sweet. Hi, Ben. My name is Celia and I've been running for about a year and a half now.

I'm 53 years old.

I was wondering if you could describe what a medial heel whip is and what are some of the mechanics behind it and what can I do without spending so much money to go and get my gait analyzed?

What can I do to remedy it?

Thank you.

So, heel whip, that's. I know somebody who has quite a serious case of heel whip and I'm having trouble thinking of if it's you.

Guilty as charged. Guilty as charged. And it really annoys me, like when I see pictures of myself running triathlons and my right foot, foot is just enormously externally rotated, like whipping out to the side as I run. I have a pretty serious case of the heel whippage. And in my case, I went to like physical therapists, chiropractics, sports medicine docs, and you know, over and over again I was like, why is my leg turning out like this? You know, and. And for me, it took having kids and watching my kids and seeing my little boys, you know, as young as three years old, running up and down the driveway, and they both do the same thing, externally rotate their right foot. My son, who's left handed, externally rotates his left foot. And in the case of, you know, like a child doing it from the time that they're young all the way up until they're an adult, sometimes it simply is the angle of the femur. And you can have what's called femoral anteversion, where the way that your femur attaches to the hip socket simply causes your hip to be in a position that causes a little bit of external rotation of the foot as your foot leaves the ground when you push off during the run stride. But in many, many people that's not the case, especially if it's accompanied by things like it band friction syndrome, or a lot of injury of either the hip or the knee or the ankle or the foot. And the reason for that is because a heel whip initiates with an external rotation of your femur. So at some point between mid stance, when your foot kind of hits the ground and you're standing on your foot, and then the toe off, as you forcefully unload that foot and push forward into the next phase of your gait, what happens is there are excessive rotational forces that cause your femur to rotate in a position that throws that foot out or causes that foot to slightly rotate out. Now, the muscular imbalance that will cause the leg to want to rotate like that would be the gluteus medius and the gluteus minimus not actually firing properly, not actually doing what's called abducting the femur or moving the femur to the side. So kind of in more simplistic terms, this would mean that you have a weak butt and you would want to actually strengthen your hip abductors like the gluteus medius and the gluteus minimus. And you would actually also want to strengthen your femur's external rotators. These would be things like the piriformis, the quadratus femoris muscles that tend to get notoriously weak and deactivated by doing things like spending a long period of time sitting. So what you can do are a series of different exercises to fix something like this if it's not just due to, like a natural genetic femoral anteversion. So one example would be something like a hip hype. And this would be where you stand on an elevated platform and you simply kind of drop one hip to the side and then stand up again and drop one hip to the side and stand up again. And what you'll feel is that for the hip that's not dropping to the side, the other hip, you're actually working as you pull that hip up and you'll start to get tired in the side of your legs if you're doing this right. Fire hydrants, where you get onto the ground in a crawl position and you hike your leg like you're a dog peeing on a fire hydrant. That's another really exactly what it sounds like. Yep, exactly. Monster walks where you're using like one of these elastic mini bands to attach both legs together and kind of do like side shuffles from side to side while you're down in almost like a quarter squat position. That's a really good one. Pretty much anything that involves external rotation of the hips. I'm going to put a really good video link in the show notes. And the video link that I'll put in the show notes is basically chock full of really good exercises, about five exercises or so that you can go through to correct heel whip. And then the other thing that I should mention is that if you do want to kind of get your run gate analyzed, or you want to get your swim stroke analyzed, or you want to get your bike fit analyzed, anything like that, there are places online that you can actually send a video of yourself running into. For example, if you're running on a treadmill, you can get someone to video record you from the back, from the front and from the side, and you can send your video in. We actually do this over at Pacific Elite Fitness. Our coaches will do video analysis of your swimming, of your bike fit, of your run gait. And you can actually kind of get analyzed to see how much of something might be just natural anatomical gait versus how much of something might be due to muscle abnormalities. For example, if I'm looking at someone from the back and they're running, and I'm seeing that the hip is excessively tilting from side to side, meaning at mid stance, your hip just kind of collapses and drops towards one side when you're running. And that's accompanied by something like a heel whip, that's a pretty good sign that it's an external rotator or that it's an abductor weakness issue versus it being genetic because it actually shows that you have weak hips. Whereas if I see that foot kind of rotating out a little bit, but the hips are staying relatively level while you're running, then usually it's just a case where you have that genetic kind of femoral and aversion and it's not really an issue. So kind of depends. And if it's accompanied by pain and issues like I mentioned, like it band friction syndrome or pain deep within your hips or on the inside or the outside of your knee, that's where this is definitely something want to look at addressing through a really good strength type of program for the rotators and the abductors.

Hey, Ben, this is Eric. I wanted to ask your opinion about improving my squat. I recently had seen a YouTube video of you in some swimming goggles and some speedo trunks there doing some squats. I was very impressed on the level how.

How far you can go down.

I was wondering what tips you have to improve flexibility. Is it the goggles?

It's the goggles.

It is the. No, I thought it might have been the speedo.

Yeah. No, it's the Goggles. It's a little bit. The swim cap. The swim cap helps quite a bit as well. So.

There you go, Eric.

Yeah, that's it. Now, you know, it's just, it's. It's mobility. I mean, for example, I tackle the foam roller. I tackle, you know, my, my rumble roller, foam roller a couple of times a week. I just did it yesterday morning and literally make love to my foam roller for about 10 to 15 minutes to.

Make sure that I'm not literally.

Well, I'm down there on the floor. Usually when you're working your adductors and your abductors, if you have a house where neighbors can see in through the living room window, you're going to want to close the curtain because it does look like you're kind of doing something perverted to a foam roller. But. But that same company that makes the rumble roller, which is the foam roller that has the ridges on it, they also make one called a beastie ball, which is basically like this little. It's like a lacrosse ball that has ridges kind of sticking out of it. And that one's also really good. But I'll take like my beastie ball and my foam roller and go and do slightly illegal things with them on the living room floor. Literally, just like, you know, humping up all over my hips, my adductors, my abductors, all these areas that tend to get tightened up that keep you from doing everything from like a deep squat to being able to, you know, run for long periods of time without your hips collapsing. So that's, that's one way to do it, is you come at this from like a, like a fascial standpoint, and you make sure that you get some deep tissue work on a regular basis. That has a. Has a pretty profound effect on range of motion. Now, another thing that you can do is make sure that you're really taking care of your joints from like a nutrition standpoint. Like, this stuff kind of flies under the radar when it comes to mobility. But I think that lack of the proper nutrients in the diet can really lead to a lot of kind of cell elasticity issues that fly under the radar. So, for example, when we talk about cell elasticity, vitamin B, vitamin C, both of those increase cell wall elasticity, they increase joint mobility. They're found in pretty much any like dark colored fruit or dark vegetable. But working things like, you know, kale and purple cabbage and pomegranates and things like that into the diet, super important, like a really good full spectrum of antioxidants from food. There's been some really interesting studies on omega 3 fatty acids from fish and how specifically deficiencies of EPA and DHA, which are the active omega 3 fatty acids that we're going to find from some of these sources. When you have a deficiency, that can cause destruction or inflammation in a lot of your cartilage cells and that also can decrease mobility. So, you know, getting in a good fish oil, like doing about 4 to 6 grams of a fish oil, or working in omega 3s from things like cold water, fish eggs, things of that nature. Really important. We also do a ton of bone broth. Like we get a whole chicken and we make bone broth once a week. And I think that really making sure that you're getting in a lot of the collagen, the gelatin, the minerals, the amino acids, all the things that help with normal joint function by doing things like getting bone marrow and bone broth. And if you're too lazy to make it your, you could even go to a website like thebrothery.com and get it made and sent to your house. All that stuff is just as important as making sure that you go after fascial adhesions with a foam roller or some kind of a stick or a ball or something along those lines.

All those dietary things, really. It reminds me of an article I read about the ladies bakers, how they're actually working with Dr. Kate Shanahan right now, and she's introduced like bone broths and antioxidants and stuff into their diets and getting them away from the real inflammatory Gatorades and all that kind of stuff. And most of the people on the team, most of the guys on the team are talking about how they hardly ever get recovery pains anymore. Like, they just don't get doms. They don't. They feel like they're recovering faster. They don't get it sore. It's interesting.

Yeah, the LA Lakers are way at the cutting edge of this stuff. And that's some really cool stuff that Cate Shanahan is doing with them. And if you just go Google, like Lakers diet or Lakers Cate Shanahan, you'll see some of the things they're doing. I mean, like, you know, I was having this discussion with one of my buddies who's a scout for Major League Soccer. I told him that, you know, if he, if he ever had a team that actually wanted to kind of, kind of incorporate a lot of these ancestral living concepts and healthy eating concepts and kind of introduce this stuff into professional sports, that I would be more than happy to help just because this stuff flies under the radar so much. And when we're talking about everything from NFL athletes finishing up their career and having a ton of brain inflammation that can be controlled with stuff like curcumin and. And Huperzine, and a lot of these elements that can, for example, decrease hypoperfusion to the brain or increase your ability to repair your nervous system. Resveratrol, alpha lipoic acid. There's a bunch of compounds out there that can help with athletes who have suffered from concussions to a lot of these other nutrients that can help with joints and mobility. I mean, a lot of this stuff is as important as the massage work or the deep tissue work or the functional strength of work. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention is, you know, if you really want to work on your squat, one of the best exercises that you can do, in my opinion, to really help you with that mobility. And this is something that I do about every other morning. I'll do about 10 of these just to kind of wake up my glutes. And it's part of that whole series of core foundation exercises that I go through from the book foundation, written by Eric Goodman. We've mentioned this before on the show. So I'll just stand facing a wall with my toes up against the wall and try and drop into a deep squat facing the wall. And it's really, really hard to do without falling over backwards. But if you can train yourself to do that, you're going to learn how to activate a lot of the glute muscles and kind of tilt your hips back and get into that position that's necessary to achieve a deep squat, because if you're not able to turn on your gluten, glutes, you know, once again, kind of returns to what we were talking about with, like, the heel whip. You're really not going to be able to achieve that deep squat position without some things really kind of falling to pieces, you know, from like a. Like a hip or a knee standpoint. So. So, yeah, those are some of the things that I would think about.

Yeah, you know, I used to have a really terrible squat. And actually, those of you who've gone to giftfromben.com, you'll see me do a really terrible squat in that video. And it was pretty much right after that that I decided I had to get better at them. And, you know what the best thing was for me was just to do them more.

Yeah, I just.

I just so rarely did Squats, I just never really got good at them and I basically like, I started hanging out in a squat position just more often as well. Getting my body used to it, getting those muscles sort of just, that's more normal to them now. And that was, that made a huge difference for me.

Yep, squatty, potty baby. Hi Ben, this is Joe Cohen. I wanted to know if you can help me with my difficulty in gaining mass and size and weight. I'm a classic ectomorph, so I've been training since I'm 17 years old and I'm 25 right now. I've always been on the skinny side and I've been trying to really, really bulk up and just put on some good, good mass and I've seen some results to some degree. But I'm still only at 5 foot 10. I weigh 155 and I wanted to know if you can help me out with packing on some size and gaining weight. Thank you very much. Bye.

And this one.

Hello, Ben, this is Todd calling from San Diego. 46 years old, pretty active, work all day, do hot yoga about five days a week, and I want to put on about eight pounds of muscle. Problem is I rarely have time to eat enough to support any kind of workouts that I'm doing. So kind of a two part question, wanted to know if I've only got two days a week to hit the gym in addition to what I'm doing, yoga wise, what kind of exercises should I be doing to put on as much mass as possible. Don't want to spend more than 40 minutes in the gym. And also I'm having bulletproof coffee pretty much every morning. But at this point I'm kind of scared to eat lean because I'm trying to put on weight. So I need some advice here. Thanks.

Okay. I thought this would be a good opportunity to stick these two questions together because they're similar. No, not exactly the same.

We got a lot of listeners that want to get swole, get big.

I don't blame them.

Speaking of squatting, by the way, I don't know about you, but this whole mass gain program that you and I are doing from Dan John, I did my 50. A lot of the finishers for these workouts are squats because the growth and testosterone, the growth hormone and testosterone response you get from squats and kind of like the mass that you get from doing squats is enormous. It's this defensive position that puts your sympathetic nervous system into this whole fight and flight mode. But it's a great way in moderation to build muscle and get yourself bigger. And these workouts that Brock and I have been doing as part of this mass gain program, they end many of them with 50 squats. Like heavy squats, squats. It took me about 20 minutes to get through my 50 reps. And this was really three days ago. Well, with the weight.

I did mine the day before yesterday. The first time I actually made it to 50 without. Without having to take a real break. And I don't think it took me that long. I think it took me. You need more weight then 10 minutes? Well, I'm doing it with the prescribed weights. It was for a guy my size. Dan John says to do it with 135. Now in two days from now, I'm supposed to do it again with 185.

I was gonna say how that works because I'm at the point now where I'll do two reps, walk away, come back, do two to three reps, walk away, come back.

Wow, how much weight have you got?

That's literally, I'm at 225 right now. So yeah, it's just, it's destroying me. But really good way to gain weight. Gain size, size. The mass gain program that Brock and me and a lot of other endurance athletes who have kind of been wanting to put on muscle in the off season. We'll put a link to that one in the show notes. It's based off of the book Mass Made simple by Dan John. And it just involves a lot of multi joint moves and what are called barbell complexes where you'll do a complex where you'll do like a front row with the barbell, then go into a clean with the barbell and then a series of front squats, overhead presses, back squats, deadlifts. And you'll do all this without ever releasing the bar. And you feel like you're hit by a Mack truck by the time you actually put that bar down. Anyways, how out of breath I get.

By the end of the complex, I'm just like, just like I've sprinted for 500 meters or something.

Yeah. So check out that program because it works really well. And you know, the, the main thing is the, the biggest two mistakes that I see people make who come to me and they're skinny and they want to put on size. And I've worked with high school athletes, I've worked with, you know, 40 to 50 year olds who think they're too skinny. Two biggest mistakes that folks make is number one, they don't lift Heavy stuff. So they're, they're just trying to do all home workouts with elastic bands or they're, they're just using the, the machines at the gym or they're just using dumbbells, and they're just not using, you know, really the barbell is, is, in my opinion, a barbell loaded with weights is one of the best ways to put on mass, to get stronger, to put on muscle. And then they're also, you know, simultaneous to not lifting enough heavy stuff stuff, just doing lots of light stuff, lots of yoga and cycling and running and walking. And they're like a rat on a wheel when they're not doing any type of weight training. And it's just basically burning too many calories and putting the body in this constant state of catabolism. So like Dan John said in my interview with him, and you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for Dan John or Mask Made Simple. He's like, like, you lift heavy stuff and then you go like, sit around the couch and watch the, watch the college football game. And you know, like, that's how, that's how you put on muscle. So the other thing, the other mistake that folks make is they don't eat enough. And you, you really do need to be eating a lot of food to put on a significant amount of muscle. And in many cases, you got to be eating a thousand or more calories over and above what's called your basal metabolic rate. Now I'll put a link in the show notes to some specific free metabolic rate calculators. Like, I have calculators for everything from your ideal body weight and ideal body fat to how to calculate your basal metabolic rate. I have all that stuff over at a special page@getfitguy.com because a big part of the book that I wrote over there@getfitguy.com is based around kind of starting off by finding out your daily calorie burn. But I'll link to the page that has the metabolic rate calculators in the show notes for that, because that's another big thing is knowing, you know, like, for me, it's pretty shocking when a guy like me who's burning at rest without doing anything at all about 2,800 calories a day for me to need to put on muscle. You know, I got to be eating north sometimes of 4 and 5,000 calories a day. And a lot of people just don't eat enough food and they don't lift Enough heavy stuff. And those are, those are two of the big mistakes actually.

That's interesting because I've been like, I feel like I'm lifting heavy. I feel that I'm definitely lifting more than I've ever lifted in my life. And I've put on a lot of strength. Like I can't believe how much I'm bench pressing compared to five weeks ago when I started this program. But I haven't actually put on any. Well, I put on some muscle, not like a real noticeable amount and not really noticeable on the scale either. But I have put on some squishiness around my gut. So I guess it sounds like I'm not lifting heavy enough yet. But I have increased my caloric intake by 500 or 1,000 calories.

Yeah, I'm a bigger fan of not eating so much that you start to put on a gut. And this is kind of like finding that balance because if you eat a lot of food, you're going to put on muscle even more quickly. You're going to stay in that anabolic state state more readily, but you also risk some of it getting turned into fat. So I'm a, I'm a bigger fan of sacrificing your rate of muscle gain if you can stay lean while at the same time that you're putting on muscle. So for me it's typically about that 4,000 to 5,000 calorie a day window that allows me to, if I'm lifting heavy, still stay somewhat lean. And I actually periodize meaning that on the days where I'm not lifting and where I don't have a lot of activity, I'm going back down to like eating just as many calories as are in my metabolic rate. So I'm not eating a high number of calories on my non lifting days. And that really helps as well. The other thing you can consider, I.

Was just going to say Todd brought up in his question that he's been doing bulletproof coffee every morning. That's a good way to get some extra calories. But he's definitely not getting, getting protein. And that's something that, well, we've all heard we need a certain amount of when we're trying to put on muscle.

Yeah, you need about, to actually maintain muscle. You need about 0.5 to 0.6 grams of protein per pound of body weight to build muscle. You need closer to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight. That's still a lot less than many of these muscle magazines would have you to believe. But the other really, really important thing is that you should never, never step into a gym to say, lift weights. If your goal is strength and muscle size without having elevated levels of blood amino acids which ensure that you are staying in a very anabolic state and that you're not dipping into your own muscle for tissue. So you can do that by consuming like you can mix collagen or amino acids in with something like a bulletproof coffee. You can ensure that you're eating like a 20 to 25 gram portion of protein from, you know, like eggs or fish or something like that. About an hour to an hour and a half or so before you go to the gym or doing like a protein shake. But keeping blood amino acid levels high is really important. And along with that muscle gain program again that we'll link to in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 264, there are supplements that you can take that help with muscle gain. I mean, and like two that I highly recommend. That kind of fly under the radar. One is colostrum and colostrum, again, it's derived from mother's milk. It's what helps babies grow into big animals like goats and cows and stuff like that, or humans. And it can help you grow when you're in the weight room. So I do about four capsules of capricolosterone in the morning and, and four in the evening. And that's one thing that can help with recovery, with repair, with the lining of your stomach and with strength building. So that's one that I would consider. Another one that I've been using, quite a bit of that I just keep in my gym bag. And I ensure that I'm never ever going near a weight session or finishing a weight session without elevating my blood levels of amino acids. And that's that master amino pattern stuff that just, you know, it's just a capsule. I don't even use any water. I just pop them into my mouth and chew about 5 to 10 before workout or after workout to make sure that I'm never really in that catabolic state. So that's really important to make sure that you keep yourself in that kind of anabolic state as much as possible. So that allows you to do it without creating a lot of nitrogenous byproduct or ammonia byproduct, because those amino acids are, are literally converted extremely efficiency into the usable amino acids that you're gonna.

Use for like a protein that's been pre digested for you.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. So those are some things that I would consider as well. You know, I also have an article that I've written on strength training with kind of like every little thing that you'd want to consider when it comes to putting on strength and like how to periodize to how to time your workouts to all the different foods that help support testosterone and help to keep blood amino acid levels high. And I'll link to that in the show notes for this, for this show as well, so that you can go and read that if you want to geek out on this a little bit more.

Hi Ben and Broc.

I've seen a lot of people wearing calf sleeves lately for endurance running, and.

I was just wondering if you found.

Any research articles that have proven any benefits for them or if you personally know of any benefits of them.

Thanks for all your help and all your information.

I really enjoy your podcast and congrats on Kona.

Now, personally, I've started using, well, not necessarily calf sleeves, but I've started using compression socks.

Yeah.

And I've found that they've worked really well for me.

Yeah, I, I use them quite a bit. And there it's. Who's the guy? Meb. Meb Kovleski. I always pronounce his last name wrong. Koflowski. Whatever it is. The guy who ran the New York marathon, he ran them in compression socks and he wears those quite a bit and swears by them. And I, of course, use compression sleeves when I, when I fly all the time. And I actually just put them in my bag and just so I don't look like a complete tool walking around the airport, you know, I wait till I get on the plane and. And then throw on my compression sleeves. But yeah, there's a lot of claims out there that they do everything from increasing oxygen delivery to decreasing lactic acid to preventing cramps. And the thing is that the research goes back and forth on these. There's a few studies, like a few small studies that have found that compression garments increase performance when you wear them during exercise size. But they're typically with not a lot of subjects. And, you know, they're, they're really not the, the best studies on the face of the planet when it comes to, for example, the fact that none of the studies used a placebo group or a control group. So it was hard to tell if the, the increases were really from say, like compression gear or from the athletes say, like perception of the compression gear gear, like the fact that the athlete knew that they were wearing the gear versus a control group. That wasn't wearing the gear at all. So it's really tough in terms of putting your finger on the research versus using yourself as an N equals one experiment to see if they work for you. So most of the research either doesn't show performance benefits like acute performance benefits helping you in the moment to run fast or go longer or have an increased time to exhaustion, or the ones that do show a performance benefit don't really have a control group where they're done with very, very small amount of subjects. Now there was recently a really interesting real world study where they followed a bunch of athletes who were doing an ultra race in South Africa. And they found that the athletes who had compression socks, even compared to the athletes who wore like regular knee high socks or athletes that wore no socks, the athletes that had the compression socks on had significantly less muscle damage and recovered more quickly and also ran on average for the ultra race 12 minutes faster. And I believe this was close to the hundred mile distance for this ultra race. So that was kind of an interesting real world study. And the reason that they've kind of proposed that that happens is because, you know, you get better support of the muscle. So perhaps a little bit of increased basic, you know, stiffness. You know, if you look at a really fast runner, sometimes they do have slightly stiffer tendons, slightly stiffer hamstrings that help them to pop off the ground a little bit more quickly. Quickly. So the compression gear might possibly be offering that type of benefit. But then when it comes to bouncing back again for the next day's session, when you're running and your foot strikes the ground, the muscle is jiggling, so to speak, what happens is there can be a little bit more fiber damage than if that muscle were kind of held in place by something like compression gear. So it's possible that the decreased soreness or the decreased decreased perception of soreness or the decreased delayed onset muscle soreness or doms, might actually be caused by wearing a compression sleeve or wearing these, these compression socks. And it's important to realize that a lot of these are a little bit different than what you'd get if you were to say, like, go to your local medical supply store and get the old man socks. Like a lot of the compression socks, and especially the ones that have shown or hinted at any benefit in racing or in the lab, were at over 25, what's called millimeters or mmhg of pressure. And in many cases were these gradated compression socks that get like tighter at your ankle and then decrease as they move towards your hip. So it's. It is a special kind of compression sock that's thicker, that's gradated. So if you're going to do a compression sock or a compression sleeve, I'd go with a company like two Xu skins. The company that I work with is 110% meaning that I wear their stuff. And I wear that just because it allows you to put ice into the compression gear as well, so you can use it for recovery. Ultimately, though, if it works for you, I do it. And the cool thing is that it's never been shown to have any harm. Like, it's never, ever been shown to make you slower. So that's kind of the important thing to realize, too, is that there's no risk. I mean, it's not actually gonna, like, you know, make you slower or decrease your ability to recover.

And you'll look kind of cool if you wear them too.

Some would argue that you look like a combination complete tool and a triathlon geek or running nerd.

Well, you do look like a. Yeah, you do look like a geek or a nerd, but a cool one, actually. If you go over to the Ben Greenfield fitness app for the iPhone or the Android, I did a video. If you're wondering what the heck a compression sleeve or compression sock looks like, I did a gear review of the Pro compression stuff over there, so you can pick that up and take a look at it.

There you go. You can see Brock modeling his compression.

Gear, looking like a nerd and a geek.

Yes, Mr. Greenfield, I was wanting to know. My name is Robert o'. Dell. We were trying to figure out the best way to approach some getting into shape and better things. And with all the stuff that's out there today. And I know you use the Med X machines or like them, but other things too. But we were wondering about machines and the kettlebells and the free weights, but if there's any way, give us a call or get something to us. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you. So the. The Med X that. That Robert mentions, I actually have. I don't use that. That's the one that's recommended by Doug McGuff, who's the guy who wrote the book Body by Science, who I've interviewed on the show before. He's the one who does the super slow training protocol. And he uses, you know, that's the protocol where you go like 10 to 30 seconds up, 10 to 30 seconds down, and he uses that machine called the Med X weight machine to do something like this. I'M personally not a huge fan of machines and rarely if ever go near machines at the gym. I don't have a machine at my home. I have a. But like if you open up my closet just like a bunch of random workouts ear spills out and I can tell you exactly what I have in my home. Although like I like I mentioned earlier when I go to the gym at this point it's pretty much just like a barbell with weights on it. You know, because we're doing that, that mass made simple program, which really actually is pretty simple. It's a barbell with weight and you're doing squats and presses and everything workout same order, same everything, exactly every single, single time. So what I do have at my house though, if you were to open my closet and just kind of go through all the workout gear, the random workout gear that I've tried that I kind of swear by is I have a kettlebell and it's just one of those monkey faced kettlebells from Onnit. I have also a Mace from Onnit, which is this heavy kind of deal that you swing around. And what else do I have? I've got the gym stuff and I'll put a link to all this stuff. I'll just list off everything in my home gym and link to it for you if you want. I've got the gym stick which is this tube that has like elastic bands on either side of it. And I like that when I can't get to the pool to do kind of like a swimming type of workout, you know, with overhead presses and kneeling presses and upright rows and that one kind of simulates swimming a little bit. I have got a few fit 10 which is the device I can attach to my door and it allows me to do sprints in place. So if I want to do like a series of 10 by 30 second sprints and don't want to hop on a treadmill or go outside, I can do those like right in my office.

Tether yourself to the wall.

You tether yourself to a door? Yeah, and just run. And you want to make sure that there's nobody on the other end who's going to open the door or else you're going to run right through the wall. All I've got a suspension strap which is kind of like a trx. The one I have is called a Mosfit suspension strap. I'll use that a lot more often in the summer. I'll grab that strap, head out to the backyard and just do, you know like single leg lunges and push ups and stuff like that. Using a suspension strap. I've got the little mini band I mentioned this earlier. It allows you to kind of tie your ankles together and do like monster walks, sidewalks. Like basically it's a really good way to strengthen your hips. I've got a weighted vest which allows me to just like for example, I worked out yesterday and my workout was I put on my weighted vest and I put on the other thing that I have in my little home gym, set up my elevation training mask. So that allows you to kind of simulate being up around 18,000ft. Put on my weighted vest and my elevation training mask and just went for a hike. And that was my workout yesterday. So it takes a normal restful nature hike where you'd be enjoying the birds singing and the wind whisping through the trees and instead turns it into just like this suffer fest where you're covered in sweat and hoisting this 40 pound vest up a hill while breathing through Batman like mask.

Terrifying to all the poor children you happen to come across.

You look like the terrorist on the trail. Exactly. But I've got that stuff tossed into my workout closet just so I can go out and just kind of ruck around and hike and make it a really hard hike. I've got a stability ball so I can just basically do some balancing based exercises on that. I do a lot of hip hikes and abdominal work using the stability ball.

Is that one of those half balls or is that one of the full balls?

No, a full ball. A full ball. And then I also have the half ball, the Bosu ball that I can jump on and do balance exercises and that's about it. I mean to put all that stuff together that I just talked about, I mean you'd be looking at like around 250 bucks or so. But again, if you're trying to like build muscle or build strength, none of that stuff is heavy. It's not like with a gym stick and an elevation training mask you're going to be able to put on strength. So I still drive to the gym to get heavy power.

Block dumbbells go up to £50. So yeah, even with both of them, still only £100 is not quite enough to really do some hypertrophy.

Yeah, but I mean if you just want to get lean and stay fit, I mean that that's the kind of stuff that I have around my house probably if you had to have me, like if you, if I had to buy one machine and I am thinking about like putting maybe in this, in a new home gym that I want to build, build potentially like one kind of like full body exercise machine. I would look into the one called the ARCS Fit. I got a chance to work out on this. It's called ARX Fit. Well, I'll link to it in the show notes or you can check out arxfit.com I worked out on one at, at Paleo FX and it's, it's one that I think Keith Norris uses. He's kind of big in the Paleo community for, for what's called his efficient exercise program. And what it does is it adjusts your resistance as you're going through a motion and can provide really, really high resistance. So you know how, like when you're swimming, Brock, if you were to move your hand through the water, like the faster or the harder you push your hand through the water, the harder the water is gonna push back against you, right? It's called like a, like isokinetic resistance. Resistance is what we call that in, in biomechanics. This is very, very similar in that as you get stronger or weaker as you progress through a movement, the machine automatically kind of adjusts the resistance as you move through. So not only could it be used for like that super slow protocol that we talked about, but it could also be used for you to like, try really explosive, powerful movement and experience increased resistance no matter how hard you work against the machine. So that one's called an ARCS Fit. They have a home unit. They also have a really cool, like, professional unit that has like these pneumatic adjustments and like a computer that allows you to, to like program in an actual exercise program. It's got like a touch screen. And I think it was the professional unit that I was able to get a chance to hop on and use at PaleoFX. And they've even got like, modes that you can put it into where like, it will resist you so much that you're pretty much just doing like a max effort isometric contraction and, and you can program it to, to only have resistance when you're going through the negative portion of the lift or only have resistance when you're going through the positive effort of the lift and there's no eccentric contraction involved. So it's really cool. So it's called an ARCS Fit. And I guess if I had to choose one machine, if you're gonna, you know, force me, use one machine at like a home gym, that's the one that I would, that I would look into using.

Sounds like Exercising in quicksand?

Yeah, kind of, but. But kind of cool. And I have no clue how much they cost. I'll have to look into it, but I'll put a link in the show notes. I would imagine that professional unit is like a few thousand dollars, but the home one might be a little bit more affordable.

So ar, I'm gonna say it's a hundred bucks.

There you go. Hey, Ben and Brock, this is Sol.

Here from sunny Santa Fe. I love your podcast and I just.

Joined your inner circle because I can't get enough of your stuff.

So here's my question.

The Kenyans just swept the New York City Marathon. They won both the men's and the women's divisions.

So I got curious because I keep.

Hearing that the Kenyans win all the time. So I looked in Wikipedia and I see that between 1997 and 2013, Africans, mostly from Kenya, but also from Morocco and Ethiopia, have won 13 out of 16 New York City marathons. In particular, this was in the men's open division. Everybody, of course, has their own opinions about what makes the Africans marathon winning machines. And of course, I'm very curious. Ben and Brock, what do you guys think is their secret sauce? Thanks.

If we knew the actual definitive answer to this question, I think we would have quit our jobs a long time ago.

That's right. Well, you certainly don't see Moroccans and Ethiopians winning powerlifting competitions. That's true. There's a reason for that. Really good book that goes into this is the new book by David Epstein, the Sports Gene. Have you read that one, Brock?

No, I haven't.

No.

I gotta check that out.

Awesome, awesome book. You know, I don't know if that one's over on audible, but either way, that's a really good book to pick up. The Sports Gene just goes into what makes people who are good at specific sports good. And for example, when we look at the role of genetics in something like a Kenyan population, they've got really thin ankles and they've got thin calves. And that's important because when you're running, your leg is like a pendulum. So the more weight you have, the farther away from your center of gravity, the more difficult it is to swing that weight. So if we're talking about, like, running, you know, put on a couple of, like, two or three or four pound weights on your ankle and go out and go for a run. And that's kind of the difference between, say, like, the average person walking around and the size of their ankle and the size of their cat. Calf and like one of these Kenyan runners or the Ethiopian or the Moroccan runners and the size of their ankles and calves. So if you look at them just from a genetic standpoint, the way that they're actually built, that's one thing that you can look into. Now, the other thing, and I'm going to link to this excellent podcast that was done by a radio lab, and it's called Cut and Run. And what that podcast gets into is it starts off by talking about the runner, Kip Kano. You remember Kip Kano, Brock. He was the guy who had that 1500 meter upset in the Mexico Olympics, like back in the 60s. And the amazing thing was that he had a gallbladder infection before the race, which is incredibly painful. And it hurts the most when you're actually breathing hard, hard. And he not only won the race, but he set an Olympic record, kind of pushing through the pain of that gallbladder infection. And when you go and you look at the pain tolerance of a lot of these, like, Kenyan runners and these Ethiopians and Moroccans, one of the things that is traditional, like in this tribe that Ken Kano came from, is you get circumcised when you're like 14 or 15 years old. Yay. And the circumcision literally is this brutal ceremony where they actually, like, wipe stinging nettle under your genitals. And then they like, have this process where they like, literally, literally tie a string around your foreskin to circumcise you. And it's this horribly painful ceremony. And then they'll like. And they get into this in this podcast in really good detail. They cake mud on your face. And so if your cheek twitches or your forehead crinkles or you do anything that would show, like, your ability to crack under pressure, then you're labeled a cow and you're stigmatized by the whole community. And you even lose out on your. On your dowry, meaning your ability to basically, like, get money as you, as you marry and make children in the tribe. So they've almost like genetically kind of bred out the people who are more weak with this circumcision process. The other thing that happens is when you're circumcised, they take you to this hut on the outskirts of the village to heal after your circumcision. And when you leave the hut, you're not allowed to walk. So anywhere you go, you have to run. So not only do you have to run, you know, whatever, run to school, run to the grocery store, whatever, but you have to run with this Enormous amount of pain from the circumcision. And this has been a tradition for hundreds of years. And so what the philosophy here is is that they've literally bred mental tough toughness into some of these tribes that are showing a huge amount of dominance in these running competitions that really rely on you having a great deal of ability to withstand pain and have mental toughness and kind of keep going when the going gets hard. So I would say it's kind of a combination of that and genetics.

I don't know.

Did you have any thoughts on this one, Brock?

Not really. There's definitely a lot of genetics. They talk about just the size of the, the, of the individuals and the, the length of the hamstrings and Achilles tendon and stuff like that are just more built for that sort of. For running activity in, in certain populations. But yeah, I mean, you hear people talk all the time about how in Africa and they're, they run everywhere. Like they just have to do that to, to get to school or to do whatever. So they're just sort of born running. But I have heard, I think it was Hali Jebser, Lassie that was, that was interviewed and he was talking about how that's kind of a myth that they don't really run everywhere and they take buses and stuff just like everybody else. Or at least he did.

Well, they certainly have to run out of the hut when they're circumcised.

Yes.

And we don't do that here in America, at least not anyone that I know of. Maybe out in the sticks out in Arkansas somewhere. Maybe. You know, the other thing is the docks. You hear a lot of people talk about the diet and how they eat a high carb diet and lots of bananas and rice and stuff like that. I get asked a lot about my take on that and the fact that these people are succeeding in endurance sports on a high carb diet. And why do I recommend ketosis or why do I recommend getting in a high amount of healthy fats? Well, when it comes to that stuff, I would argue that the Kenyans are fast because of their genetics and because of their culture. But I personally suspect that the long term effects of a high carbohydrate diet is still something that could potentially cause deleterious effects down the road. That's number one. And number two, you're going to find that in a lot of these populations that have traditionally eaten a higher amount of kind of like good starchy carbohydrates like bananas and white rice and stuff like that they're doing some very interesting things like producing more salivary amylase to initiate breakdown of those carbohydrates so that the pancreas doesn't have to churn out as much insulin. They have a specific gut flora or bacterial profile that allows for a lower blood sugar response and better stabilization of blood sugar levels upon consumption of that carbohydrate. Like, there's some stuff that's kind of bred into some of these higher carbohydrate consuming populations too, that make them a little bit more bulletproof to high carb intake, so to speak. So that's something also to take into account too, is that, you know, it's different strokes for different folks. And, you know, that's why I think stuff like this 23andMe.com genetic testing where you can go and see whether you came from a high fat fish and egg eating northern European population versus higher white rice consuming Asian or islander type of population is kind of important when it comes to dictating the kind of diet that might work best for you.

Unless of course, the FDA shuts down 23andMe. And then in return case. That's.

That's right.

Not. Not going to help you at all.

They're shutting down things right and left. Silk Road, 23andMe. Not only can I not get my jeans tested, but I can't buy, you know, AK47s and crack cocaine anymore. So, yeah, it's horrible. Speaking of AK47s and crack cocaine.

Wait, who said anything about crack cocaine? What?

We did have a review that was left by a man who listens to our podcast with his young son.

Oh, itunes review.

An itunes review. So since we've talked about pot and the silk road and buying illegal drugs online, we might as well bring up the. The itunes review for this week.

Oh, he listened to it with his son.

He says awesome info. Mad entertainment for all ages. And this is a review that's left by Matt Gorston. We're going to read Matt's review here, but if you leave an itunes review. First of all, Matt, if you hear us read your review, send an email to Ben greenfieldfitness.com because we're going to send you the brand new BPA, free water bottle tech shirt and beanie that you can split between you and your son if you'd like or fight over who gets what. But also, I'm going to assume that Matt probably left this review before our episode that was marked explicit on sex. But here we go. I listen to Ben and brock with my 11 year old son while we drive to his parkour class each weekend day.

That's awesome.

By the way. I think that's awesome. That son is taking a parkour class. Yeah. He pays attention and asks questions about the topics. Matt, if he asks what the Silk Road is, is, just tell him it's this naughty boys, this old Chinese road. Once in a while just say it's a restaurant. Once in a while I can even answer him. Keep up the good work educating and shedding light on health, fitness, food and achieving. P.S. if you guys see this, do a segment on how bad bagels are to have each morning. My son doesn't seem to think he can live without them, so I can't.

Live without them either. I mean, what do you use for a hockey puck if you don't have a hockey puck around?

That's right. Matt and Matt's son. Yo, what's up? And to Matt's son. We didn't get his name, but bagels. Bagels will slowly kill you and destroy your life. So there you go.

First they'll make you dumb and fat.

Yes.

And then they'll kill you.

There you go. Go. So now you know how bad bagels are. And we've done our podcast on how bad bagels are. They are good though for hockey puck. That's probably true.

They're perfect for hockey pucks.

There you go.

Like street hockey or indoor perfect.

So leave your review over on itunes. Remember to visit giftfromben.com if you want to not only get free video from Brock and I, but also if you head over to getfrombben.com sometime in the two days after this podcast comes out, I'm going to be sending you out some other love on my birthday as well. So there's that. And then remember to visit audiblepodcast.com Ben and of course the links to everything that we talk about are over in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 264 what do you think, man?

Don't forget to raise a glass to Ben for his birthday and me for surviving 10 years ago so I could bring you some coffee. Quality jackassery during the podcast.

And with that, visit BenGreenfield Fitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice. It.