Why Athletes Get Sick, How To Biohack Survival, How Often Do You Need To Workout & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, why Athletes Get Sick, how to Biohack, Survival Box. Breathing 101. How often do you need to work out? Can you eat a kombucha? Scoby? And much more.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Rachel, you ready to talk morning routines?

Let's do it. What have you got?

All right, cool. I got. I got a good one for you this morning. So I've been getting into this thing called Kundalini Yoga. Have you heard of Kundalini yoga before?

I have, yeah. How's it going? How do you like it?

Well, it's very cool. It's this idea that you have all this energy kind of coiled up at the base of your spine and traveling through your body, almost like through your spinal cord, you know, up into your head and out through your fingertips. And by doing the right type of breathing and the right type of movements, you can actually activate this energy to start your day. And you can also, in the same way that, like, acupuncture and stuff like that works on certain chakras of your body, you know, like your liver or your heart or your kidney, certain movement patterns combined with certain breathing patterns in Kundalini allow you to pretty much just like, open up every organ that you want to open up to start your day.

Nice. And how's it going?

It's really cool. So I discovered this when one of my friends taught it to me down in Kauai, Hawaii, where I was at a couple of weeks ago. You know, you may recall that, you know, that was where I recorded the podcast with Laird Hamilton that we released a few weeks ago with. With Laird and Gabby. And that was where, you know, I met the guy who I am getting on the podcast to talk about the use of medicinal mushrooms and cannabidiol. And anyways, though his. His girlfriend basically is a Kundalini Yoga expert, a Kundalini Yoga guru. And both he and she taught me some cool routines that I've been doing. So that is one of my favorite. Twice a week now go to morning routines so on Wednesdays, which happen to be the day we record this podcast, and Sundays, I've been doing Kundalini yoga. So I do the whole Kundalini Yoga. And. And then, of course, just because I'm Mr. Greenfield, I finish up my kundalini with 30 burpees and then my quintessential five minute cold soak slash cold shower.

I just love that you have to suffer. You just have to make yourself suffer.

Well, it's not about suffering as much as this, frankly. Well, it's two things. It is fitness, right? It's the fact that I'm still traveling around the globe doing these masochistic things. And by the way, for those of you listening in at the time this podcast comes out, I'm heading down to Miami tomorrow to do the South Beach Triathlon, right? So I can't just do Kundalini. I gotta jump around and run and stuff like that. And then the other thing, Rachel. And don't laugh, folks, if you're listening in, but I love to eat. My wife makes delicious food and I'm a foodie and I love to cook. And frankly, I always have to throw in a little bit of extra calorie burning as well to keep up with my palate, if you know what I mean.

I do know. It's totally fair enough. I love food, too. And it's worth every burpee.

Yeah. Oh, and by the way, the kundalini yoga routine that I do, it was custom designed for me. So what this gal does is she has a 15 minute phone appointment with you and then custom designs a kundalini yoga routine based on A, the amount of time that you have available and B, which kind of like chakras you want to open up and how invigorating versus relaxing you want the yoga to be. So I'm actually, I'm creating a page. It should be up by the time this podcast gets released or shortly thereafter, but I'm creating a page@BenGreenfieldFitness.com CustomYoga. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Custom Yoga, and it's a little page where you can hook up with her to create your own customized kundalini yoga routine if you so desire. And if you want to get all woo woo like me, but you just have to promise that you're going to. If you are a Ben Greenfield fitness listener, do your 30 burpees and do your cold soak after.

News flashes.

Well, Rachel, today's news flashes start off with a really, really important note for all the sickos out there.

The sickos, all the sickos, all the.

People who get sick a lot. Athletes, athletes specifically, they just came out with a study that looked at why athletes get sick.

Wow.

Yeah. And they actually went all the way to the top. They looked at Olympic medalists and in this case, elite Norwegian cross country skiers. And so they looked at all these skiers, these elite athletes, and what kind of things influenced them getting sick. So are you ready to hear what are the main reasons that athletes get sick?

Yes.

All right. So number one over and above everything else was air travel. Oh, wow. Because of like the packed airplanes and the dry air, the stress of travel, the disruption of the circadian rhythm, et cetera. That was number one over and above everything. And so takeaway message for that would be if you are an athlete or anybody, right, who cares about travels a lot, who travels a lot and you get sick, pay attention to, you know, the previous podcast that we've done on things you can do about jet lag. You know, like some of the biggies are too. For example, you know, use light therapy, right, like blue light therapy when you get to where you're going, and use this concept of sulfur based antioxidants, which are the kind of antioxidants that work really well when you travel. We're talking about things like broccoli and cruciferous vegetables and if you want to even, you know, just, just mainline, you know, supplements like glutathione and N acetylcysteine. But you know, a lot of these, these anti jet lag strategies can work, work really well. But that's, that's one thing that they found was air travel was a big one.

That's crazy.

Another one that they, that they found. And, and we'll link to the full article if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com349 will link to this news flash and everything else that we talk about in the episode. But another one that I thought really leapt out at me was the fact that the athletes who had a lower risk of illness had what they refer to as a high training monotony. What that means is that they had a lot of like, consistency in terms of working out very similarly day after day, like having like these tried and true routines that they followed rather than say, I hope you're listening in all you crossfitters, throwing some like random crazy workout at your body every single day that just consistently throws your nervous system and potentially your immune system a curveball, you know, so it looks like having Some form of. Of consistency or. Or habitual routines in your exercise regimen appears to be better for you. If immune system and, you know, perhaps getting sick tends to be a weak spot for you, tends to be your kryptonite. So. So stay off airplanes and also engage in boring training is kind of the message. So far.

It doesn't sound so fun, but let's keep going.

Well, those are actually the really the main two things that I wanted to point it out. There's a lot of other things. Well, here I'll bring up one more.

Since you're pregnant, since I asked, Rachel.

Vitamin D levels, that was another biggie. That was another real biggie. And again, when I look at the blood and the biomarkers of a lot of the athletes that I work with, or a lot of folks know that I'm a consultant for Wellness fx, which is a company in the US that allows you to test your blood and then they have this dashboard for you and they connect you with a practitioner. And. And I'm one of their practitioners, and I tend to look at the blood and biomarkers of a lot of the crossfitters and triathletes. And what you want to look for with vitamin D is a level between 40 and 80. Once you get above 80, there is actually an increased risk of mortality with vitamin D. And once you drop below 40, there's also an increased risk of mortality and immune system deficiencies. But what I find is that in many, many athletes, I tend to see scores that are right around like 25 to 35, around in that range. And one big, big reason for that not to get too geeked out.

Which means we're gonna get too geeked out.

Yeah. Really, it is. Yeah. To get too geeked out. Who am I fooling? We love to get geeked out. The idea here is the idea of the pregnenolone steel. So what that means is that a lot of the precursors for hormones like testosterone and progesterone and a lot of these anabolic hormones that you'd want to have, what happens is that vitamin D gets shuttled towards cortisol formation rather than towards the formation of a lot of these more anabolic hormones. And so I tend to see this 1, 2 combo of hypercortisolism and low vitamin D levels. And of course, one of the things that you can do in addition to putting out the fire by lowering stress and by engaging in a lot of cortisol lowering strategies, is to just dump a little bit more fuel into the equation by getting your hands on vitamin D or getting more sunshine or even. Here's a little known way to get vitamin D. You probably know about this one since you're a vegetarian. Rachel. Mushrooms. Mushrooms are a really, really good source.

Of vitamin D. Did not know that.

Mushrooms soak up vitamin D. You can leave mushrooms in the sunshine. And shame on you as a vegetarian.

For not being right. I know.

And they soak up vitamin D and you can actually eat mushrooms. And mushrooms are like a vitamin D collector if you leave them in the sunlight. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

But only the ones that have actually been soaking vitamin D. So I should grow them at home, let them soak up the vitamin D and then eat them. Not just the ones from the store.

Uh huh.

And give, give them little chairs out in the patio, bikinis and hats and let them.

We're joking about this, but I would totally do it.

Soak up their sunshine. Okay, so another, another interesting article that I came across that I wanted to, to highlight was something in the Atlantic. It was an article in the Atlantic called, great title here. The Quantified Whelp. The Quantified Whelp. And what this goes into is this whole obsession with, you know, everything from sleep quality measuring apps to every other form of self quantification out there. And what they looked into was what effect that actually had on people, you know, people who are wearing things like pedometers and self quantification devices during exercise. And what they found was that in many cases the people who were tracking steps and the people who are tracking sleep, they actually tended to find these activities less enjoyable. It seemed to actually turn exercise in some cases, and even sleep in some cases, into an experience that stressed people out.

It's interesting because this post created quite an uproar on Facebook between people who said that quantifying actually enhanced their life and others who said, I can totally see how that's the case.

Yeah. Well, I have begun quantifying sleep and perhaps I'm not one of those people for whom, you know, consistent biometric scanning creates issues, but I've actually enjoyed it quite a bit. I know you and I talked about on a previous podcast where your husband Jake wakes up and one of the first things he does is rolls over and looks at how he slept that night. Right. And because I'm now using this new ring, it's a special ring with an internal computer on it, and it's called the Aura, I'm working on a big blog post right now about sleep quantification and, and what I've been experimenting with for everything from heart rate variability to this ring. I've actually been enjoying the process of rolling over in the morning and looking at like sleep latency and sleep quality and sleep efficiency and readiness to tackle the day based on sleep. So for me, I like it. But at the same time I find, for example, just yesterday experienced this on a bicycle ride. When I am looking at cadence and wattage and spe, I lose track of the beauty of the trees and the sunshine and the grass. And you know, for me, during exercise, I still like to exercise naked. Not literally, although sometimes literally, but I like to unplug. And this is quite relevant actually, because you probably know this, Rachel, but we have a podcast coming this Saturday about the man who quantifies everything. He is a guy who literally tests every self quantification device on the face of the planet. He and I had a very interesting discussion that I'm going to release this Saturday. But I think it's interesting that it looks like for most people, metrics, obsession more sucks the enjoyment out of life than increases enjoyment of life.

Yeah. And I'm curious, Ben, with your sleep tracking, do you find that if you don't have a good night's sleep and you read it in the data, that it then causes you any sort of anxiety for the day?

Yes, it does.

Yeah, it does.

Well, even with heart rate variability, right. Which is a measurement of your nervous system. So I wake up and for five minutes I measure the strength of my sympathetic and my parasympathetic nervous system. And if it's weak, always in the back of my head, even if I feel really good. Right. I second guess whether or not I should be doing my 30 burpees after Kundalini. But the idea is, I mean, there is some credence to that. I find that if I push through and I ignore the data, even if I feel good, injury or illness, some kind of nagging ache or pain does set in within two or three days. So there is something to be said for the fact that sometimes listening to your body is not enough. And sometimes you do actually have to engage in better living through science and pay attention to the data. As annoying or unnatural or unanswerable as that might seem, there is something to be said for some of this data. I think we just have to walk a fine line between making sure that we're mindful of our environment and we're soaking in the sunshine and the fresh air and the trees and everything like that and enjoying that and also not exposing ourselves too much. To, like, Bluetooth and WiFi and all the radiation that comes along with these devices, but then also, you know, taking advantage of what science gives us in terms of being able to make smart, educated decisions about things like training and sleep.

Totally love it. Yeah.

So there you go. A couple of other interesting news flashes, and I'm going to even throw in one extra since we. We didn't have a Q and A last week. So one was a really interesting study on the effect of dha, docosahexaenoic acid. So this is what you would find in, like, well, primarily fish and fish oil. Also in algae, Right. Like spirulina and chlorella, those little bits of energy that you can eat that turn your mouth completely green. And have you ever actually eaten algae, by the way, Rachel?

I haven't.

No. I don't think I have guests at my house right now. I have guests staying at my house right now. And I was munching on some energy bits last night. These are, like, the little chlorella bits. I munch them like popcorn in the evening because they're actually a really good source of dha. And frankly, compared to gnawing on a piece of fish in the evening, more pleasant for me if I'm sitting around. But they. Do they dye your mouth completely green, so you have to do a mouth rinse.

Do they dye your teeth green?

Dye your teeth Queen. And. And my wife will not kiss me or really. Or really engage in any other evening activity with me if I've been eating algae. So I need to. I have to choose my battles wisely. Yeah, it's one of those things where you have to predict. You're like, well, we're probably not gonna get it on anyways, so let's go with it. I'm just gonna eat my algae. Yeah, let's just go with it. Anyways, though we digress. There was this study that they did on a head trauma in American football, also known as the NFL. And what they found, I take it back, this one was actually the NCAA Division 1 college football players. However, of course, we know that in both the NCAA as well as in the NFL, there are some serious issues with traumatic brain injury. A topic near and dear to my heart right now, because I don't know if I mentioned this on the podcast of late, but I have a broken eye right now. I got hit really hard sparring in preparation for a kickboxing fight. And right now, if I blow my nose, my entire right eye swells up with fluid. Wow. Yeah. I have what is called an orbital fracture. And so I myself have had a pretty serious brush with traumatic brain injury in the past couple of weeks anyways though. So this study looked at the use of DHA and they, they fed thesethese football players basically high dose DHA, so about 6 grams. So in a typical fish oil capsule, you're gonna find about a gram of dha. So this would mean, for example, taking like six of those fish oil capsules that you take, even though the label says take just one or two, you know, we're talking about a lot more than that. And what they found was that supplemental dha, especially in higher amounts, attenuated what is called serum neurofilament light, which is, and serum neurofilament light is a biomarker of axonal injury, okay, traumatic brain injury, basically injury to the axons in the neurons in the neuronal cells of the brain. And they found that DHA could be used prophylactically to help to decrease the amount of buildup of this neurofilament light in response to getting hit in the head or tackling or concussions or things like that. So takeaway from me is that in the same way that I've mentioned before on podcast that one of the best things you can do going into something like a soccer game or football game or a fight is to ensure that you're really adequately hydrated because your brain needs this cushion of hydration around it to help protect it. It looks like DHA and especially high dose DHA could be another really potent strategy if you're about to engage in anything that risks head damage.

Is there any, is there any kind of issues with taking it high dose liquid poo?

No, seriously, that's. I, I remember once someone sent me a bottle of this stuff. It was an EPA DHA supplement. It was made, I think it was made by a company called Stronger, Harder, Faster. I, I think that was the name of the company. And they sent this to me. It was a bottle, right? And I just thought it was like a, you know, like a little five hour energy drink type of thing. I figured it was like a drink that was spiked with a little bit of DHA and epa, but, but the entire drink was just oil. It was designed to be consumed over the course of like 10 days. And I just, I, you know, I sucked it down and I drank it. Within an hour I was, I was evacuating my bowels quite in, in quite an invigorating manner, which would be a.

Good idea if you're On a football field.

Yeah. Anyways, those 6 grams of DHA is nowhere near that amount. I mean that, you know, taking six fish oil capsules, that's not gonna give anybody the rights.

Okay.

You'd have to take a lot more than that. So. So there you have it. Get your hands on some fish oil or some algae, you know, spirulina, chlorella, stuff like that. Good form of DHA as well. Flaxseeds, chia seeds. They argue that, you know, that's a good source of these type of things, but really it's not. The, the alpha linoleic acid in those type of sources doesn't get converted to DHA very much at all. So if you're vegetarian or vegan, you need to use an algae source, and if you're omnivorous, then you should just use fish oil and, or algae.

Good to know. Thank you.

Yes. And then finally, kind of related to neuronal health because this is definitely something that can help out with traumatic brain injury as well as with a variety of other really cool, positive physiological adaptations. Cold exposure. So, you know, we've talked about cold thermogenesis and cold showers quite a bit and we'll even have a special announcement coming up soon about cold showers here in about five minutes or so for those of you listening in. But what, what a recent study looked at was whether there was a way to enhance the anti obesity like the fat burning benefits of cold exposure. Right. Because people are doing like cryotherapy chambers and cold showers and cold soaks now for of course, fat loss. And I've talked before on the podcast about how there are certain things that can enhance the utilization of fatty acids or the burning of fatty acids when you are cold. Caffeine and or green tea are two perfect examples. Bitter melon extract is another example of something that you can take in supplemental form prior to a cold soak or a cold shower to enhance the fat burning effects of it. You know, when you're looking at heat or sauna, a niacin, high dose niacin can increase the, what's called the lipolytic or the fat lysing effect of a sauna session. And so there are a lot of things you can take prior to cold exposure or prior to heat exposure to enhance the fat loss effect of something like that. Well, this recent study looked at the combination of cold exposure and the supplementation with capsanoids. Now capsinoids are a component of hot peppers, capsaicin, cayenne pepper, things like that. And what they found was A significant conversion of white adipose tissue, right? Like storage adipose tissue, the bad stuff, into a metabolically active brown fat, which is the stuff that takes calories and just converts calories into heat. That's something that occurs anyways when you do something like regular cold showers or cold soaks. But it turns out that the use of this combined with something kyani with like capsinoids and actually enhanced the effect.

Wow.

Yeah. And you know what's really interesting about this is there are recipes out there where people will make something like a cup of anti inflammatory coffee or tea. And I've talked before about putting turmeric or curcumin in coffee as like a really good neural anti inflammatory. Like if you wake up and you have a hangover and you put some turmeric or some curcumin in your coffee, it can help out tremendously. Well, you could also, for example, if you wanted a really kind of pants kicking cup of coffee, that could also help you burn more fat during a cold shower. You can make your cup of coffee and then you can put whatever superfoods you want in there. Let's say you're going to maybe put some chaga in there or some chocolate stevia or maybe some turmeric or some cayenne and you just use one of these little latte frothers, right? Or you know, you could blend it or immersion blend or something like that. But a lot. You know, one of these little handheld latte frothers is so easy to just stick in the mug and, and froth it up. And you can add cayenne for like a spicy cup of coffee. And it turns out that that may assist or does assist with the conversion of white fat into brown fat. So there you have it.

And so we drink it before we get in the shower, not while we're in the shower.

If you wanted to replicate this study, yeah, you'd have it before. But I would hazard a guess that if you put it into your body at any point that you're cold because in many cases you stay cold. Right. For a while. If you're taking a five minute cold shower, sometimes you'll be cold for a good 30, 45 minutes. You're getting all those effects for a long time after you've had the shower. You could take it afterwards too. So there you have it.

There you have it.

What do you think, Rachel? Time for some Q and A.

Time for some Q and A.

Let's do this.

Listener Q and A.

Hi Ben and Rachel. It's a sea Bass from the Great White north had a question. I have an interest in bushcraft and survival type skills. I was wondering, are there any biohacks say you had nothing on you, just the clothes on your back, you got lost in the woods. What kind of tips and tricks would you have for somebody who got in a situation like that? Any kind of biohacks that would help you out in that situation, be it, you know, getting a fire going and using the charcoal as a. To clean your water or to clean your system out after drinking bad water, Something like that. Yeah, it would be cool to hear what you have to say about that. And it would be especially cool if in the future you could get someone like Bear Grylls or a Survivor man or just any survivalist on a podcast as a special guest and do a whole show on survival and bushcraft. All right, well, would love to hear your opinions on that. Thanks. Awesome podcast. Hope to hear a lot more from you. Thanks.

I actually, you know, it's kind of funny. I was having a conversation at breakfast this morning. I have. I have a visitor. I have a visitor to my house. Did you listen to the podcast? It's at BenGreenfieldFitness.com deepsleep I did about this new device that you put on your collarbone to knock out migraines or to help you hack your way into your delta sleep, your deep sleep brain waves far more quickly. This guy who I interviewed way out in the backwoods of B.C. in the middle of nowhere, he actually, he had to come to the US with his family because they're still US citizens. They can only stay in Canada for X amount of time and they have to come back over the border. He just happened to come to Spokane. So he and his family stayed at my house last night. And we were sitting at the breakfast table talking and we came to the conclusion that I think that we have a lot of listeners to the podcast who are what we would call redneck biohackers, which is kind of like what he and I are, right? We live out in the middle of forest.

We hunt like survivalists.

We hunt, we fish, we're kind of off grid. We have Social Security numbers, but wish we didn't. Like, we're like redneck survivalist.

And it's not in a derogatory way. It's in a loving way.

So this podcast, maybe we should just change this to the redneck biohacking Podcast.

That would be sick.

This podcast is for all you redneck biohackers out there. And yeah, I love this Question from Sebastian. And honestly, you know, like creating a fire and using charcoal to clean your system afterwards, I wouldn't say that that's something I would recommend. You could try it. Now, I have used charcoal before to filter water, but I do have a few tips I could throw in there. Now, I'm going to start by saying that there are a ton of survivalist tips that you can use, and I'm just going to give you a few. A few cool ones that I like, as well as a couple extra resources for you. So the first one is something that we've mentioned before on the show, and that's knowing how to take the piss out of yourself, literally. So this was an idea presented by the fastest person to have ever run around the world, a guy named Kevin Carr, who circumnavigated the entire globe in 621 days, running 16,300 miles through 26 countries around the world. And one of the things that he found was that he had to figure out a way to cut his water usage down but still allow his body to stay cool. Well, it turns out that while drinking your own urine is highly not recommended, that's actually a good way to dehydrate yourself or to give yourself ammonia toxicity. What you can do is you can carry a little spray bottle with you or a Nalgene or whatever else suits your fancy, and you can take your urine on a hot day and you can use your urine to cool your body by covering your torso and your legs with urine throughout the day by spraying it on your body. And especially if you are running for long periods of time or moving for long periods of time in the heat, this can be a useful biohack to stay cool and to use your urine in a very creative and sustainable manner. So that would be the first thing that comes to mind.

Kevin Carr, I swear to God, you have some balls to run around spraying yourself with urine.

Urine recycling. So get yourself a spray bottle. That would be number one. Take notes, people. Take notes.

Very important.

Okay, so urine recycling. Okay, the next one that I'm going to give to you would be, you'll love this because I'm sure you have a few of these lying around. Rachel. Tampon survival.

Tampon survival.

Survival.

That's a theme.

You would be surprised at the number of survival uses for tampons.

You're welcome, Ben.

I actually have what's called a bug out bag. You ever heard of a bug out bag?

No.

Okay, so this is a bag. I keep it in a special place in my house. And I'm not going to tell you where so that no stalkers come and steal my bug out bag so that they can screw me in the event of a zombie apocalypse. But the idea is that you have this bag in your house in which you keep your most crucial survival items so that if, if crap hits the fan, you can actually take that bag and have everything that you need to survive. You just gotta run out your back door and out into the wilderness.

And is that bag just full of tampons?

Yeah, it's just a bag full of tampons. That's all it is.

Well, I'm kind of curious.

No, I mean, you know, it's got like a fire starting kit and, you know, knives and magnifying glasses and everything like that, and some dehydrated meals and a, you know, water filter and all that stuff. But tampons. So for example, a tampon in the wilderness can be used as a medical bandage. Okay. And accounts of that date back to World War I, where they, they actually use tampons quite a bit to tape over wounds and even to shove into bullet hol bowls. Right. As improvised dressings. But it can also be used as a water filter. So a tampon can actually be placed over the mouth of a water bottle. Right. And used to filter out large particulates that would come from drinking water. So you push them into the neck of an empty water bottle and then you poke a hole in the cap and then you put water in the other side of the water bottle and the water filters through the tampon and then out into whatever container that you want to store that water in, and it can be used to make crystal clear water.

That is genius. Absolutely genius. Aren't tampons full of really bad chemicals? Not as bad as drinking dirt water.

I'm not sure. I'm hoping that most of our listeners use organic tampons that are chemical free. But I mean, if you had to choose between whatever you'd find in a tampon and say, giardia, I, I'd honestly go with a tampon. Tampons make excellent fire tender. I mean, like, you can get some of the best fire starter on the face of the planet. It doesn't, it doesn't hold a candle, pun intended. To tampons. So tampons actually work quite well as some of the best fire starting tinder on the face of the planet. So what you can do with this, this whole tampon, using it as a survival straw filter, is to hold that up next to like a mud puddle and it'll remove a lot of like the sediments and the particulates if you wanted to. To suck water through the tampon. Although I'd just. Just for the record, I own something called a life straw that works probably much better than a tampon, but should I not have that life straw available, I would use a tampon. And then finally, is the life straw.

In your zombie apocalypse kit?

Is it in my zombie apocalypse kit? Yes, I have two in my zombie apocalypse kit, actually. And then finally, the string attached to a tampon is a cotton twisted cord. And that's usually about four to six inches of twine. And you can use that cordage to make a deadfall trap. I don't know if you've ever made a deadfall trap before, but it's where you prop up a log and then you tie a couple of sticks together. And what happens is if you place a little bit of food kind of down by that string and a small animal comes along, you can crush the animal with the log and actually have yourself a little mousey to eat that you caught with a tampon. So the list goes on and on. I'm actually going to link to an article in the show notes chock full of about five or six other uses that you can use for everything from fishing and using it as a bobber to using a tampon as a waterproof match and fire tinder case. But check out the link that I'll put in the show notes because there's an excellent article over at the Art of Manliness of all places about how to use a tampon for survival. So that'd be number two, in addition to cycling your own urine. Okay, but you know, we've talked about piss, we've talked about tampons, so we might as well move right along and perhaps talk a little bit about the use of a condom for survival. Are you familiar with this, about how to use a condom?

I am not familiar with how to use condoms.

Well, if you have enough condoms, you can survive in the wilderness for years. This is a. Well, this is a well known fact among survivalists.

Wow.

Or at least among.

Is it really well known?

Well, condoms can provide you with food, with water, with fire, and with shelter.

That's oil to live.

So first of all, condom makes a very decent water storage container. You'd be surprised at how much water you can actually store in a condom. Two or three full condoms can give you enough water to last a week. Yeah, you'd be surprised at how big a condom can get, especially a Magnum. So condoms can be used to hold water. Condoms can also burn. A latex condom, kind of like a tampon, will light up instantly, making it excellent fire tender. Okay, so you got fire from your, from your condom, you got water. Condoms are also watertight by nature, very similar to the wrapping around a tampon. And so you can use a condom to safely carry dry tinder, right, like red cedar or little sticks or things that you want to burn later on. And in a pinch, you can even use condoms as a rope to tie up shelters. You can tie condoms together. You can kind of like wrap them a little bit, and they actually are surprisingly strong, assuming that you're not springing for the cheapo generic brand drugstore condoms, but getting the good stuff like Trojan Man. And you can actually even. Don't laugh. You can make a slingshot out of a condom and I will put a link in the show notes to teach you how to do that. But you just need two condoms and a couple of sticks and you can make a slingshot capable of wounding or killing a small animal. So.

This is an epic conversation. I'm sorry.

So we've got piss, we've got tampons, we've got condoms. We've got all of the parents who are listening with their children having to make a lot of explanations to their kids right now. But I've got another cool one for you. I will, I will stray now into the land of the appropriateness. And that would be ice Fire. Okay, so if this. So this would be. If you're stuck in a really cold place. And this is something that I studied up on a little bit when I went and did that Spartan agogy because I wasn't sure what they'd have us to do. But I knew it was going to be cold and I knew there was going to be ice. You can actually get an ice lens. So basically you take a chunk of ice. Ice and you twist a chunk of ice basically around the, on the edge of a pipe. And the circular pipe edge carves away all the chunks and the irregularities of that, that chunk of ice. And you can use the edge of that pipe to create this perfect little ice sphere. Okay, so it's like a circle of ice that you've created by using a pipe to like chip away at that ice. That ice sphere works just like a magnifying glass and can be used to start a fire. It captures the sun's light and focuses the sun's light onto one point, just like a magnifying glass. And as we know, if You've got some tinder, and you focus it onto one point, and it's dry and flammable. You get a flame, and you can start a fire.

Okay, fascinating.

So ice, urine, tampons, condoms, ice. Okay, I've got. I've got. I've got one more for you. Okay. And now we're gonna delve back into the potentially offensive category if combined with some of these other things. And that would be spit. Okay. Surprising how much that we use in the bedroom can also be used to survive in the wilderness. But have you ever heard of spit fishing?

I haven't, but I'm already imagining.

Okay, so here's the deal. If you need a fish, but you don't have any fishing gear, all you need is your shirt and enough saliva in your mouth to be able to spit. So spit fishing can allow you to catch minnows and small fish. And then, of course, you could use your condom or your tampon or whatever to cook them or your ice. But what you do is you wade out into the water and you lift the front of your shirt, and the front of your shirt is going to be like a net under the water surface, and then you spit. Now, minnows and very small fish get attracted to spit. They think it's food, and then they cluster in front of you, and you can jerk your shirt up out of the water, and your shirt will have these tiny little fish in it. Wow.

Have you tried that?

No. Dang, no. This is just something that I know about in the back of my head, should I ever have a need to catch small fish. I'm one of those guys who's more likely to find a throwing stick and throw it at a squirrel before I'm gonna wait out in the pond and try and catch a fish.

Yeah, because you could use your little. Your little fishes as bait in a trap to catch a squirrel as well.

Yeah. Yep, exactly. So there you have it. And finally, a couple of resources like I promised my friend Neil Strauss. He's perhaps most well known for the book that he just wrote called the Truth, which is chock full of his strange sexual escapades and his search for love. But he also has a little bit more practical book called Emergency. The name of the book is Emergency. This book may save your life. And in the book, he trains with American Indian tracking skills. He learns how to train with the special forces. He learns urban escape and evasion. Really cool book. I'll link to it in the show notes. And he's an excellent author, so it's Actually, really fun to read, but it's called Emergency by Neil Strauss. Good book. Neil is a friend of mine and I love how he goes. He really, really engages in very intensive immersive journalism, and so his books are fun to read. And this one's kind of a white knuckle journey through America's heart of darkness, because he's pretty much just like scrambling to survive in all these strange situations. So that's a good one. Read that one. And then also, I just interviewed the one guy I know who is probably the best wilderness survival best badass who I am acquainted with. His name is Aaron Snyder, and I have a podcast coming out with him in two weeks. So stay tuned for that episode because we talk about what he puts in, like his quintessential pack for surviving in the wilderness. And he's got some stuff in there that I'd never heard of, but that I plan on adding to my repertoire. So I'm going to keep that a secret for now. But listen to the upcoming episode with Aaron Snyder in which we covered not just wilderness survival techniques, but also Aaron's journey into the realm of illegal performance enhancing steroids and what he discovered along the way. So it's actually a pretty entertaining episode. So that being said, I may have, in my response to Sebastian, said enough to need to mark this particular podcast episode as explicit. My apologies to children listening with parents who now have to explain the wonderful world of tampons and condoms. But enjoy that, and in the meantime, I suppose we can move on.

Hey, Ben, this is Mark in Chicago. Really appreciate the podcast and everything you do for us. Quick question for you on box breathing. I've heard you talk about it before and I've been experimenting with it at work, serving stressful meetings, things like that, even when I'm doing my Mwave 2 HeartMath training device. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on the protocols for box breathing, when you would want to use it, how often you'd want to use it. Any more information on that you can provide would be great. Thanks.

Wow, this question seems so. So pleasant. Nice compared to the last one. So, box breathing. Well, first of all, just to put this in context, this was the very first form of meditative breathing that I taught to my children. And whether it's box breathing or whether it's the type of intensive breathing that you do in something like Kundalini yoga, where you're doing lots of fire breathing. And almost like this Iceman guy, Wim Hof, he does this type of breathing where he Heats his body and shuts down inflammatory cytokines. And there's even some really cool research on breathing, deep breathing, specifically the type of breathing you would use in box breathing. It can change your genes. So there's this concept of epigenetics, the ability to express certain genes. And specifically with box breathing and deep breathing for relaxation, they've shown that it changes the genes related to inflammation, related to oxidative stress, and related to cellular metabolism. And so what this means is that you can actually change the expression of certain genes to allow yourself to do things like shut down inflammation, to shut down oxidative stress, to increase cellular metabolism. So we talked about earlier, like, why athletes get sick. And one of the reasons being jet lag. Well, one of the reasons jet lag makes you sick is because of the amount of oxidative stress you experience when you're hurtling above the earth 40,000ft high in a small metal tube. Now a small metal tube with a bunch of wifi signals bouncing around inside it and people trying to get their cell phones to work when they have one bar when you're 10,000ft high. And all those other issues that happen on an airplane. Well, the idea is that meditation and deep breathing has been proven. This is science, to actually decrease a lot of that oxidative stress. Wow. And to actually change your genes that you're not just doing it while you breathe, but you're also doing it, you know, just the other times of the day when you're not doing this deep breathing.

So can you, can you do too much breathing? Say pranayama?

Yeah, I mean, like, well, pranayama. No, like Kundalini yoga. Like this morning there was a period of like, for, for the particular routine that this gal has designed for me. Her name is Summer, by the way. The what? What Summer designed for me was a routine. And I told her, I was like, I really want to be hypercharged in the morning. You know, I don't just want to sit cross legged and stare off into the trees breathing for a half hour. I wanted. And so it's intensive. Like, I work up a big sweat, similar to what I get in a sauna when I'm standing outside doing this routine. I'm twisting and the arms go up and down and I'm doing like this. But there's one period where for almost four minutes, it's just this fire breathing, right? Like the Wim Hof style fire breathing. And yeah, if I were to do that all day, that's activating the sympathetic nervous system a little bit. So, yeah, you can totally fight and flight your way with breathing a little bit too much. But parasympathetic nervous system activity is enhanced through this practice of box breathing. Box breathing is something you could do to settle yourself down before you go to sleep at night to get into deep sleep more quickly. It is something that you could do when you are stressed out. It's something that I will do when my heart rate is high right before I shoot, when I'm preparing for like the train to hunt competitions that I do, where you're shooting a bow and arrow and trying to get your heart rate down after your heart rate is elevated. It's something that I learned from Mark Devine, who teaches these SEAL fit courses. He works with Buds candidates and Navy SEALs and some of the most badass folks on the face of the planet to teach them how to relax in combat situations. And box breathing is his go to form of breathing to learn how to survive when the going gets tough. When I'm immersed in very cold water, I do box breathing. And that's one of the things that I teach to my kids when they go out and do the cold pool soak with me. And again, that's something that I like, is it's very easy to teach to adults or kids. And box breathing is very, very simple, whether you're using it for pre cold thermogenesis, pre cold shower, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, combat situations, stressful situations, traffic, etc. And it's called box because you imagine that there's a box. You close your eyes, you imagine there's a box and you breathe up one side of that box, right? So usually it's about a four count, but there's some free divers to enhance their breath holding that will do like a 20 count. But four counts a good place to start. So you go four count up one side of the box. One, that's a four count. And then you hold for a four count. Hold 2, 3, 4. And then you breathe out for a four count down the other side of the box, 2, 3, 4. And Then you hold for a four count across the bottom of the box, 2, 3,. 4. And so what you do once you've done that over and over and over again, as you generally do box breathing for about three to five minutes, I find that's kind of the sweet spot. I've found that it increases heart rate variability. When I use the app to measure my heart rate variability, as I'm doing, can enhance oxygenation, like I mentioned, it can decrease cellular inflammation if you just throw in a quick cycle, right, like I am, I've just crested a hill. And I know you're not a hunter, Rachel, but this would be an example. And I'm hunting. I need to get my heart rate down fast because there is an animal that I'm tracking that's right there. I can just really quickly go, okay, here we go in hold. And the heart rate will drop like 10 beats during that period of time. It's crazy.

Crazy.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. So that's box breathing. I mean, it's not rocket science, right? It's pretty straightforward. Now, what I use to teach my kids that and also to give myself, like, a little chime that will. It'll make a chime for up the box, then a chime for the top of the box, then a chime as you go down the box, then a chime across the bottom of the box is. There's this app called Pranayama. I'll link to it in the show notes. It's free. I believe they have, like, a paid upgrade to where you can customize so you could have, like, if you wanted to set it for, like, whatever, two seconds up, six seconds hold. Two seconds down, six seconds hold. Or, like, play around with different holds. You could suppose that would be more of a rectangle than a box. But, yeah, I mean, the idea is it's very simple to learn. All I use is that Pranayama app. It works just fine. You don't need an app to do it. Obviously. It's, again, not rocket science, but, yeah, primarily I'll use it for very stressful situations where I need to get my heart rate down quickly. I will use it to activate my parasympathetic nervous system when I am cold or when I am hot, incidentally, like in the sauna when it's getting really, really hot. And then I will also use it prior to bed or like, if I wake up in the night and I want to use some type of a breathing technique to help myself sleep, I'll do that. And yeah, those are the primary situations in which I use box breathing. I mean, pretty straightforward, really. I wish there was more to say. I suppose if I were going to say one other thing, the biggest mistake I see people make when they do it is when they get to the top to the hold. Like up to here, they'll just hold. But what you're supposed to do is let your breath float, right? So you breathe in. You let the breath just kind of float in that hold, and then Same thing. When you exhale over the four count and you hold the exhale, the breath just kind of floats in that exhale. Does that make sense?

That is. And it does. And it's a really beautiful visualization as well.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's how you do it. There you go. Easy peasy.

Hey, Ben and Rachel, huge fan of the show. I actually got really inspired to do more endurance type activities based on your show. You guys have just been absolutely amazing and I love listening to your podcast. On my way to class, my way to work during, you know, long and during workouts. So keep it up. Thank you so much. I just want to ask your opinion, though, Ben. You know, I've often seen these little, like, I guess, daily things to do where it involves, you know, some people do like 300 burpees a day, some people squat every day with a barbell. I've even seen some people do like lengthy jump roping sessions, like upwards of over 30 minutes. I just want to get your opinion on, you know, kind of if there's any detriments to doing those sorts of things or, you know, are they really that good? So, yeah, just your overall thoughts on things of that sort. And if you have any others, please, please share. Thanks, guys. Love the podcast. Keep up the good work.

Well, this is kind of relevant to what we talked about with athletes getting sick.

It is, yeah.

Yeah, because it. Because, I mean, based on that study. Yeah. If you're using the same routine every day or some semblance of the same routine, you have less ability to get sick.

Well, that's an upside. Is there any sort of downside with.

Like, the repetitive motion getting bored to death?

Yeah, yeah, big downside.

I mean, like, so I'm a fan of habits, right. There's a really good book called the Power of Habits. You know, blah, blah, blah. Everybody knows that habits are good. So, like, I do 30 burpees a day. I actually just posted to Instagram because my kid, my kids do it now. So if you go to instagram.com BenGreenfield BenGreenfieldFitness, where I'm always posting crazy stuff. My kids and I do 30 burpees a day. And they only count if we all clap together. Right. So you gotta do them perfectly. You know, one person counts as 1, down, 2, out, 3, push, up, down, 4, push, up, up, 5, stand, 6, jump and clap. Right? And so we do 30 burpees a day. Another example would be every single morning when I get out of bed, I do the same 10 minute stretch routine while the coffee is on. Just like a habit, right, like every single day. But then my workouts, right, like my main workouts, like the hard workout I might do in the afternoon or the evening, that, that changes, that fluctuates, you know, significantly from, from day to day.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, it does, it does kind of vary a bit. So the idea here is this. I say why not have the best of both worlds, right? So you have those little habits, like every time I go to the bathroom I'm gonna do 25 body weight squats. Or every morning I'm gonna do 30 burpees on my little 10 minute yoga routine. Or every day, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Between April 1 and April 21, I'm going to take a cold shower. But basically you have these little things that you do every day. But then your main workout needs to introduce some amount of variety because different parts of your physiology are going to respond to different routines. Now, I wrote an article about this, but for example, when you are working out, there are certain activities that you can engage in that are going to target specific physiological parameters. Okay, so for example, VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen that you can utilize. Well, based on research, one of the best ways to activate and maximize VO2 max are high intensity efforts that are approximately 4 minutes long with full recovery after each of those efforts. And so if your only workout every day is say like a 30 second effort, you're not targeting your VO2 max system.

Yeah.

So in my opinion, and based on research, at least once every one to two weeks, you should have a session that is comprised of a series of four minute very hard intervals with full recoveries between each. Okay, so that would be one example. Another example would be increasing muscular endurance. The amount of lactic acid that your muscles can tolerate and the amount of lactic acid that your muscles can buffer. Well, for this, it's a completely different series of scenarios. For this, you generally exercise for somewhere in the range of 30 seconds to two minutes, because it's going to take about 30 seconds to begin to produce lactic acid. And anything longer than 2 minutes generally drops you to a low enough intensity to where you aren't producing much lactic acid. And for this you'd use a 2 to 1 work to rest ratio. So an example of this would be, for example, you've got a series of 10 minute long sprints that you're doing with 30 seconds of recovery after each. And same thing, you would do something like that once every One week to once every two weeks. And that would target a different system. Right. But if you were to only do that lactic acid effort, you wouldn't be targeting, say that four minute system that's going to target more VO2 max adaptations. Okay. And then of course you have your muscular strength and your muscular strength is not going to be targeted by either of those sessions that I just described. And in this case, for muscular strength, you would want to have say one day per week or two days per week where you're doing a series of heavy squats, heavy deadlifts, heavy cleans and heavy overhead push press.

Right.

Let's say five sets of, five repetitions of each of those. And, and that would be a session that again, you wouldn't want to do every day because there's some pretty significant recovery implications. Yep, Both musculoskeletal, which typically takes about 48 hours or so, minimum, and then neuromuscular, which takes even longer, you know, 72 hours to a week to recover from a neuromuscular standpoint from something like that. But basically the idea is that you would also want to include something like that. And by the way, little bit of a rabbit hole here, but when we're talking about musculoskeletal versus neuromuscular recovery, you'll know when musculoskeletal recovery has occurred because you're not sore anymore. Neuromuscular, that's where it returns. So like remember when I was saying your heart rate variability? You measure that and sometimes even though you feel good, it's low, and then you go out and you push through and you get injured. That's because in many cases your musculoskeletal system is recovered. So it's like your body's telling you to push, but if you don't measure your nervous system and it's not recovered and it takes longer to recover than the musculoskeletal system, you can often dig yourself into an over training or injury or illness hole pretty easily. So that's the idea behind that. Musculoskeletal is different than neuromuscular, a couple of other systems, mitochondrial density. So mitochondria, the power plants of your, of your cells, you can create new mitochondria. That's called mitochondrial biogenesis. And that's a very, very cool adaptation to be able to get from training. But you don't get it from any of the sessions that I've just described to any significant extent. What research has shown is that to induce mitochondrial biogenesis you need a series of about a half a dozen or so very, very short intense sprints, right? 10 to 30 seconds in duration. And so that would be another session to include in your training, right, like once every week or once every two weeks. But again, you're hitting a different physiological system by targeting mitochondrial biogenesis with these shorter 10 to 30 second all out sprints. And then finally you've got like your stamina and your ability to enhance fat burning efficiency. Your ability to be able to move aerobically for long periods of time without exhaustion. And that would be more of like a longer session, right? Like that would be your morning fasted 45 minute walk or your afternoon Sunday three hour hike, right. Or maybe a Saturday long bike ride. And that would be a completely different system. And again you get some people and this is a thing you see among like triathletes and marathoners a lot where they're just doing like their, their hour and a half long bike ride or run or swim every day. And that's the only system that they're working. So the idea here is that if you're doing the same workout every day, it's very unlikely you're targeting each of these different physiological systems. So I am a fan again of having habits each day. Like yeah, you do your 30 burpees every morning, or you do your cold shower every day, or you do your 10 minutes of yoga, you know, each, each morning. But then you also hit each of these other physiological systems in a systematized manner throughout the rest of the week. Now I have a full article about how you would string all these different components, right? Like mitochondrial density, VO2 max, lactic acid stamina, fat burning efficiency, et cetera. How you would link those all together, I will link to that article in the show Notes for you, Kyle, for anybody else listening in. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 349 I'll have a link to that. And it's called how to look good Naked and Live a Long Time. And it's both an article as well as a link to a full 12 week training plan that kind of links all this together. Because it's one thing to understand, it's another thing to actually, as you know, implement. Because the last thing you want to do is be a smart cookie who is fat eating Doritos in your mom's basement. So understand that it's not just about understanding, it's about implementation. But that's, that's the resource I would point you towards so hopefully that's helpful. And now you don't have to do 300 burpees a day anymore. Hi, Ben. Hi, Rachel. This is Rick from Oregon. My call is about Scoby's. I wonder if Scoby's are good to put in your green drinks or your protein drinks and also if you can chop them up, put them on a salad or such. Thanks for the call. I appreciate you. Thank you. Did you listen to my interview with the Kombucha Mama?

I did.

I like that released. And she makes dried fruit roll ups out of the little Scobies for her kids. And, and for those of you listening in who don't know what a Scoby is, first go listen to that podcast episode. It was very recent. It was the one I did on Kombucha. Or go to the Ben Greenfield fitness website, do a video would do a search for Kombucha or for Kombucha Mama. But Scoby, Scoby actually stands for something. Did you know that? It's not just like a, like a word like booger?

I did, but I always forget what it is.

I don't. It's called symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. Symbiotic colony of bacteria and Yeast. Because that's all it is. Just like a bunch of really, really healthy bacterial species. It's like a. It's like a giant booger shaped probiotic is what it is.

It looks so much like a bulga.

And it has so many different forms of bacteria in it that do everything from like, kill candida to repopulate your gut. I mean, there's a reason it's a freaking like, you know, Eastern European slash Russian superfood. And then of course, as you know, once you combine it with tea and with sugar and you ferment it for a couple of weeks, you get kombucha. Kombucha. But then you still have this Scoby left over and it keeps growing and they keep growing.

And then you get to a point where you're like, what am I going to do with all of these?

And my wife gives it away to friends to start their own kombucha. And then it keeps growing. It's like something out of an Alien movie.

Do you think that they would just like, eventually take over the world?

I think they will. I think they will.

I think you should write that they're.

Going to fight the apple nano robots.

You should make river and Terran fight them in the forest.

I should write a book about the Scobies versus the robots. Wow.

I just gave you gold material.

And we aren't high or anything, just so you know. Like, we're just. We just have a cup of coffee and launch into this.

It's Chimera coffee, though.

Yeah, Chimera coffee. Okay, so this symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, it's. It's a biofilm. It's. It's a. It's a living species of yeast and bacteria. And again, for those of you who have, like, yeast infections and fungal infections on Candida, yes, you can still drink kombucha, and yes, you can still eat the sco, because it actually, it helps to fight a lot of these bacteria. It's extremely alkalinic. Like Hannah, the kombucha mom and I talk about in that podcast. You can use it as, like a band aid because it's almost like a living skin. So you can use it to heal the skin from burns and wounds. And the other thing that you can, of course, do with it is, is you can eat it. You can eat it. Now, I recommend that you actually make a recipe out of it rather than just, like, chomping on it. And because I know this podcast is getting a little bit long, what I'm going to recommend, I'm going to cop out on you a little bit here, Rick. But, dude, you need to get the Big Book of kombucha, and you need to listen to that kombucha podcast that I did with the Kombucha Mama, in which she gives her recipe for turning a scoby into a dried fruit. Do I. Or a dried fruit roll up. Do I eat the scoby? I eat the little bits and particles that are, like, at the bottom of the kombucha bottles that my wife makes. I don't mind eating those slimy bits, but no, I don't grab the whole freaking frisbee side because they get big. I don't. I don't get the whole frisbee size scoby and just, like, munch on it. I don't do that. But you could. You could, and it would not kill you, and it would actually be quite good. If you need to repopulate your gut bacteria, it may. I don't know what it would do to your. To your poo.

That could be a fun experiment for you.

Let us know how that goes for you, Rick. But anyways, yes, you could blend it. You could chop it up, you could put it in a salad. Go ape nuts with your scoby, dude. And by the way, folks, if you're listening in and you have your own little scoby eating tips to add, feel free to leave them in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 349, where you can access oh so many more links and goodies. That being said, I think it's time to give something away. Rachel, what do you think?

Yay.

Yes. My favorite time.

Let's do this. So this is the part of the show I always feel like I should talk like Mr. Rogers and we should play piano when we do this. This is the part of the show where I take off my cardigan and my shoes and toss them over my shoulders. And we get into today's itunes review. So if you like the podcast, go to itunes. Leave us a review. Say something nice. Leave us five stars. Spread the love. Spread the karma. And if you hear your review, read on the show. All you need to do is email gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's gear@greenfieldfitnesssystems.com and we will send you a gift pack full of goodies like a Ben Greenfield fitness Tech T shirt and a water bottle and a beanie and everything else that makes your life better, makes your life meaningful, makes your life not suck anymore. So, that being said, we have a review left by Akinzia. Rachel, do you want to take this one away?

I do. All right. It's titled Can't Wait to Get Alone in My Car with Ben.

I hear that a lot.

I listen to Ben in my car, and I feel like I'm 16 when I first got my driver's license. Making excuses to go somewhere, anywhere. I've learned so much on nutrition, sleep, crazy biohacking things, workouts, fasting, and so much more. I just started putting the avocado seed in my smoothies, but I haven't been able to stomach eating chicken bones yet. You rock, Ben. And I am beyond grateful for the time you spend delivering us fantastic content. I have your book, but I really enjoy listening to you and your discussions with other thought leaders. I have listened to other podcasts, but not one can compare to you. Thank you for making a difference in my life.

That was like a love song. It was.

And I think it was because of the way that I read it, though. I really put heart into that one.

And she's putting avocado seed in her smoothies. That's hardcore.

Well, we're assuming it's a girl, but it could be a guy.

Well, Akenzia, I can't wait to get alone in the car with you. But in the meantime, if you or anyone else listening in wants to access today's show notes or learn more about getting alone in cars with me or Rachel, this is getting weird. Whoever you prefer, go to BenGreenfulFitness.com349 a couple of other things. I am headed off to Florida to write a story on spearfishing. I'm going to be hanging out with the editor of Spearing magazine and working on a really cool article for those of you who are interested in like, free diving and breath holding and eating tasty fish. So stay tuned for that. That means in lieu of next week's normal Q and A, I've got a fantastic episode coming up with yet another redneck biohacker on transcendental meditation. And finally, for those of you who live in Miami, and if you're listening to this episode close to when it comes out, drop me a line because I'm coming down to try and dominate the South Beach Triathlon. So I'll be down in Sobey, as the cool people say. And that being said, I think that about wraps things up. Rachel, Am I correct? Am I forgetting anything?

Only sign up to the Cold Shower Challenge starts on the 1st of April. BenGreenfieldFitness.com ColdShower that's right, get some later.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.