Why You Wake Up At The Same Time Every Night, How To Hack Your Nervous System, Is Your Fish Oil Bad & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, why you wake up at the same time every night. How to hack your nervous system, how to know if fish oil is bad, ways to increase grip strength, how to get motivated to exercise, 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 to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy, all the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. So, Rachel, does my voice sound funny this morning or does it a little bit?

Why are you wearing something really tight?

I'm being squeezed. I'm wearing, like a corset.

Oh, you are?

Yeah. I'm wearing one of these shirts. So the shirt that I'm wearing is called Align Med Aligned Med. So I got in a snowboard accident, meaning I went off one of my teeny tiny little jumps while snowboarding with my kids over the weekend and crashed and crunched into my shoulder. But, you know, I'm doing all the. All the usuals on it, you know, running electro stem and ice magnesium. Last night, I actually put some topical THC on it, which apparently is an anti inflammatory. I slept wonderfully, thank you very much.

Sounds lovely.

It actually was quite lovely. But now I'm wearing this shirt. It's called an alignment, and they say that it increases proprioception and that it has something called neurobands in it, which are panels of variable elasticity that mirror the contractive properties of muscle, along with a bunch of other little geeky terms they use in the marketing materials for this particular shirt. All I know is that it's extremely, extremely tight. And I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it somehow pulls my shoulder back, you know, and keeps it in proper alignment to help it to heal. So, anyways, yeah, that's. That's my fashion choice for this really.

Really high voice.

Phenomenal cosmic power. Itty bitty living space. News flash. By the way, before we jump into news flashes, Rachel, that was an Aladdin reference from the Good to know. Thank you, Disney cartoon. Aladdin. Yeah.

I wonder what was going on there.

The genie who has phenomenal cosmic power. But an itty bitty living space, which is how I feel right now, my entire upper body has an itty Bitty living space. Anyways, though we digress. So this is the part of the Ben Greenville Fitness show where we tell you all about the latest, greatest news, flashes and articles I discovered across the Internets this week. And we picked a few of them if you want. One every day, two every day sometimes. Where can they go, Rachel?

They can go to twitter.com BenGreenfield you can also get some really cool stuff on Instagram, which is more of like the behind the scenes what's going on in Ben's life, what it's really like to live with Ben and his family. And then you can also go to.

Not that anyone actually lives with me and my family. Well, but they can see what it's like.

Yes, yes, exactly.

Get what you're saying.

Or you can go to facebook.com BG Fitness Boom.

There you go. So this week, one of the interesting articles that I tweeted about was a protein in the gut that explains why some people can't stomach gluten. So you may be one of those people who breaks out in embarrassing farts when you visit the bakery, whereas your neighbor across the street can eat scones like they're going out of style. And the reason for that is that some people are sensitive to gluten and some people aren't. But what they found now is the actual protein that could be responsible for that. So what they found is that what are called gluten sensitive individuals, which are people who don't have, like, celiac disease or something like that, but just kind of don't do so well when they have, you know, whatever, bread, pasta and stuff like that, they may harbor high levels of a molecule called. Drumroll, please. Zonulin. Have you ever heard of zonulin?

I haven't, no.

It'd be a great name for a child. Zonulin in a science fiction novel. Yes.

So zonulin keeps things in place.

Yeah, yeah. Zonulin is a molecule that's linked to inflammation, and it's already been shown to be high in people who have celiac disease. But they've also found about 6% of people all around the world, the global population, has gluten sensitivity specifically related to this zonulin protein. So zonulin is an inflammatory protein that regulates leakiness in the gut. It opens and closes these junctions between the cells in the lining of your digestive tract. And when you have something like, let's say, if you've ever had food poisoning or you've had some kind of a bacterial imbalance in your gut, what Happens is you produce or you express more of this zonulin protein, which creates leakiness in the gut. If you've ever heard of leaky gut, zonulin is the protein that's responsible for that. And once you get that, not only can you have increased sensitivity to gluten, but you can also experience things like, you know, irritable bowel syndrome and constipation and all those type of things. So it turns out zonulin is the villain in this case.

Is there something that we can use to kind of help that?

Yeah, one of the things, and this is interestingly, one of the reasons why children who are breastfed tend to have fewer GI issues later in life, is because colostrum, which is the part of mammals, milk, Colostrum is a. Is a molecule that can assist with the closing of those gaps in the lining of the digestive tract when zonulin is present. It's almost like colostrum. This would be a great science fiction novel. Colostrum fight, Zonulin. Can you imagine? Great names. So anyways, colostrum would be one of those things that you can use. So if you've ever had food poisoning or you have some kind of a bacterial imbalance, or maybe you were just. You never got to take part in the joys of breastfeeding when you were a child, you should take colostrum. So colostrum, you can get it in, like, goat's milk. You can get it in supplemental form, powder form, capsule form. I've got a whole article I've written about colostrum that I'll link to in the show notes if people want to dig into that more. And today's shownotes are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 341Another Interesting. I've got a couple of things I wanted to talk about regarding sleep. So there was this new study that just came out a couple of weeks ago called sleep intensity and the evolution of Human Cognition. Now, this is something I've always puzzled about. Why my dog will, like, lie around on the living room floor and just sleep for what seems like half the day, Right?

All day sometimes.

But then it's not like he's running around at night catching squirrels. Like he's sleeping at night, too.

Yeah, he's just sleeping. That's, like, all he does.

Yeah. And you'll see this a lot of times, like if you go to the zoo, and it's not the kind of zoo where they tranquilize the animals, you'll see, like, the prim Activity of choice for most animals seem to be just like sleeping.

Hanging out and sleeping.

I was wondering why animals sleep so much, and sometimes I've wondered. I'm like, should we, as humans be sleeping more? Is this something that we're missing out on because of our busy lifestyles? Well, it turns out the answer is no. What this study found was that when you take humans and you compare our sleep patterns with everything from baboons to lemurs to orangutans to chimpanzees to hundreds of different other mammals that they looked at in this study that took place at Duke University, what they found was that humans are exceptionally short sleepers, that we get by on this average of 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night because we experience much, much more of this rapid eye movement sleep, this deep, rapid eye movement sleep where more neuronal repair and recovery occurs takes place. Yeah, yeah. When we sleep, about 25% of our sleep is REM sleep. And in most other animals on the face of the planet, REM sleep barely even goes above 5%. Wow. In terms of the amount of sleep. So it turns out that humans have this mechanism where we are able to have shorter amounts of sleep, but the sleep that we do get is higher quality than any other animals. And the proposed reason for this by the researchers was that shorter sleep could potentially free up time for humans to do things like learn new skills or forge social bonds, sharpen memory, boost brain power, all the things that kind of make us, oh, so much better than any other animal on the face of the planet. That allows us to do things like invent cars and nuclear weapons, build buildings.

And bridges and go to space. The moon and all that crazy stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat.

Most of us spend our free time doing.

Yeah. So humans sleep more efficiently. Isn't that cool?

That's fascinating.

Really?

Yeah.

I thought that was really interesting. And so I don't feel guilty anymore when I see animals sleeping a lot, because my sleep is a hell of a lot better than their sleep when I actually do sleep. And science. That's science. That's right. But there is this one thing that I've always puzzled about, and this relates to the last little news flash that I wanted to bring up today, and that is that I will sometimes have periods of time. I don't know if this happens to you, Rachel, but I've talked to other people. This happens where you wake up at the same time every night.

Yeah, no, it doesn't happen for me, but it happens for my partner, actually.

Okay. Yeah. So it'll happen for a certain amount of time where like last week there were three nights in a row where I woke up at 3am and I'll have some periods of time where I wake up at like 1 or 2am and I've been able to identify specific patterns. Like sometimes when I wake up around like midnight or one, it's because I just didn't eat enough that day. And I know it's a dip in blood sugar, it's hypoglycemia. But then sometimes when I wake up at 3 or 4am, it's after I've had more than one glass of alcohol or serving of alcohol. Sometimes I'll wake up at 4 or 5am and I'll be really sweaty and hot. But sometimes these will happen multiple times in a row. Well, there's this very interesting article, and this one, I will totally admit this is not clinical research. This is more of an article that talks a little bit about Chinese medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine has something called a meridian clock. And what a meridian clock is, is it's all the 24 hours of the day and the specific organs that tend to dominate in terms of activity during those different parts of the day. So you've got like your small intestine and your bladder and your kidney. So for example, if you. And I'll put a link to this clock because it's really interesting. So if you look at like 2am, for example, 2am would be when the liver meridian would be most active. And that is when issues with the liver, such as liver toxicity or perhaps the use of pharmaceuticals, things of that nature, would wake you around 2am and actually this particular chart goes even one step further and links specific organs. And this is something again related to Chinese medicine. Specific organ dysfunctions are related to specific emotions. So when you look at the liver, for example, the emotion associated with the liver is if you have struggles with your overall vision for life or your internal plans. Like if something is unclear in terms of what your vision is for life at that point of your life, then that 2am wake time or liver issues would be two reasons that you might be waking up frequently at 2am so.

Let me ask you, then it's your liver that's waking you up at this time, isn't it?

Well, if it was at 2:00am, yeah. I mean, but for me it fluctuates. I mean, just like everybody, for me lately, like I mentioned last week, it was about 3am, kind of 4am ish. Like in that range, when I look at the Chinese meridian clock. And again, I know there are some of you scientists out there snickering, but at the same time, I don't completely.

I'm down.

I don't completely eschew Eastern medicine. So 3 and 4am Would be the lung.

And what's the emotion associated with the lung?

So the emotion associated with the lungs is understanding what is of true value and also communication and relationships with the outside world. So it's really interesting.

Yeah. And it's a great kind of framework to really assess your life on a lot of different levels, which I.

It is, it is. And me just the way I think, I tend to go more towards the physical, the biological, and I'm all emotional.

Let's talk about emotions.

So for me, the more interesting part is, okay, what did I do to my, to my lungs? Did I, you know, did I inhale something? Well, here's the interesting thing. Last week I was. And I don't want to completely sound like a, you know, like a pothead or something like that on this show, but I was experimenting with this new. It's, it's like a vape pen, but it's a specific kind of a vaporizing pen that you use to like vaporize substances. Like, you know, there are these substances in, in the whole, like marijuana market, there's one called called wax and another called crumble. And I, I was basically messing around with these and just seeing, you know, what it was like because I'm just constantly using my body as a guinea pig for, for everything. Everybody else, cold thermogenesis, to, to supplements, to, you know, not a lot with pharmaceuticals. I'm pretty careful with those. But yeah, so last week I was doing a lot of vaping and like combusting and I'm wondering if that particularly affected my lung meridian. And that is why I was waking up frequently between 3 and 4am so.

Yeah. Well, there you go.

So, interesting stuff. And I'll link to this whole meridian in the show notes for those of you who want to go off the deep end of the woo woo. But now that we've gotten the woo woo out of the way, let's go ahead and jump into this week's special announcements, shall we? Listener Q and A. Hey, Ben, how should I go about balancing out my parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system? What should I eat and how often should I exercise? And does weed help? Thanks. Well, Rachel, this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. The nervous system.

Yeah. I'm fascinated to hear what you have to say about this.

Well, the nervous system in particular. So let's start here. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system are technically referred to as your autonomic nervous system. Your autonomic nervous system. And it's very, very interesting because your nervous system is something that a lot of people don't pay attention to because you can't feel it quite as well compared to, say, like your musculoskeletal system. But the recovery of your nervous system and the balance of your nervous system are, in my opinion, just as, if not more important than what's going on with your musculoskeletal system or your fascia or your connective tissue. And that's why every morning, the one thing that I measure before I get out of bed is my nervous system. I use a heart rate variability measurement and that looks at my sympathetic nervous system, the fight and flight branch. It looks at the parasympathetic nervous system. It tells me the balance of my nervous system before I even get out of bed in the morning. Because that's something that I want to track. I want to track how foods, supplements, exercise, sleep, everything affects my nervous system so that I can make good choices in life. Because if my nervous system is strong, frankly, when you look at something like the zone, that area that was originally discovered in athletics, but that now extends to all different areas of life, it is the specific state of mind that you can be in when you're creating a huge amount of alpha brain waves and when you have easy focus throughout the day, whether it be during a workout, whether it be playing sports, whether it be writing, consulting, talking on the phone, doing emails, whatever. Being in the zone is a low stress, high productivity state and you can't do it unless your nervous system is.

Okay, question. Can you actually feel your nervous system at all? Like, is that so something like anxiety or fear or something like that? Is that actually feeling your parasympathetic or sympathetic nervous system?

Yes, it is. So that's a great question, and that's a good jumping off point to talk about the difference between the two nervous systems. Don't hit fast forward, by the way, if you think. I'm just going to say your sympathetic is your fight and flight and your parasympathetic is rest and digest. Because I'm gonna fill you guys in on a little bit more than that. A lot of things that fly under the radar when it comes to your nervous system. And I'm also gonna give you some pretty cool information about how to hack your nervous System. I wanna give you guys the best information. You know, I know last week we had a pretty extensive discussion about Alzheimer's and hacking cognitive performance. This week we're gonna talk about your nervous system.

So we're about to get real nerdy, right?

We're about to get nerdy.

Let's do it.

Strap on your propeller hats. So the sympathetic nervous system is one branch of your autonomic ne. The sympathetic nervous system is the one that basically, like I mentioned, is referred to as your fight and flight nervous system. But it specifically is involved with the release of catecholamines. So you've got these catecholamines that are excitatory, like epinephrine and norepinephrine and dopamine. And those get released by your adrenal glands and or by your nerve tissue. And they act as what are called sympathomimetic hormones, sympathomimetic hormones or neurotransmitters. So the sympathetic nervous system is involved in the production of both hormones and neurotransmitters, and they are excitatory. They keep you awake, they prepare you to basically go. Now, the interesting thing is that the sympathetic nervous system is heavily involved in inflammation and the immune response. Meaning in the case of an overactive sympathetic nervous system or a sympathetic nervous system that is overstimulated, you tend to have a high amount of immune response to, for example, foods. That same inflammation can cause the overexpression of the zonulin protein that we referred to earlier. Which is why too much exercise or stress can cause you to be allergic to things that you would normally not be allergic to or can cause you to have adverse reactions to specific foods that you would normally be allergic to. It's also why, if you're going through a period of heavy stress in your life, it is advised to simplify things like the diet because your gut is going to be more leaky, you're going to be more susceptible to reacting to both inflammation as well as immune system, essentially. So the sympathetic nervous system can definitely get overexpressed. If you have too much stress, too much exercise, you're going too fast, you can create that. That inflammation.

Is it important to stress the sympathetic nervous system at all?

It is important to stress the sympathetic nervous system. It is important to, I should say, to train the sympathetic nervous system to activate the glands and the organs that defend your body against attack. That is actually what's called the hormetic response. So when you expose your body to sane amounts of exercise, cold, heat, even Radiation, interestingly, like small doses of radiation, such as you would get from rocks, from sunlight, things like that, you're activating your sympathetic nervous system, and you're allowing sane production of some of these excitatory neurotransmitters that allow your body to have a trained, robust stress response. But over activation of the sympathetic nervous system is when we get, for example, overactivation of an autoimmune response, overactivation of inflammation, too much of that adrenaline rush, et cetera. So we don't want overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system. When we look at the parasympathetic nervous system, it acts quite differently than the sympathetic nervous system. So the parasympathetic nervous system consists mainly of just one nerve, your vagus nerve. It's one of your cranial nerves. It's the largest nerve, and it owes its name. This vagus nerve refers to the wandering course that that nerve has throughout your body, kind of along your body. So it originates in your brain stem, and then it passes through your neck and your thorax to your abdomen. And it has a bunch of branching off fibers to a ton of different organs like your heart and your lungs and your GI tract and your pancreas. And unlike the sympathetic nervous system, which produces a huge variety of excitatory neurotransmitters, there's really one primary neurotransmitter released by the parasympathetic nervous system, and that's choline acetylcholine. So all the branches of this vagus nerve will release acetylcholine. And it has different effects on all these different tissues. But generally it will act to shut down inflammation, to decrease the immune response, to cause everything from, like, peristalsis or movement of foods through the digestive tract to occur, to assist with sleep occurring, et cetera. So basically, innervation of this vagus nerve kind of like settles you down. And you can certainly have overstimulation of the vagus nerve. You can have overstimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system pathways. And that can actually lead you to just basically be. Be lazy, be too rested and digested. So in the same way that you can overstimulate the sympathetic nervous system, you can also overstimulate the parasympathetic nervous system.

Does overstimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system have any biological, like you said, it could cause you to be lazy. But does it have anything biological? Like the sympathetic nervous system causes inflammation? What does the parasympathetic nervous system do.

Primarily, you'd experience lethargy and fatigue if you had an overstimulated, imbalanced parasympathetic nervous system. So case in point, let's talk about quantification of this. If you were to measure your heart rate variability every day. And the app that I use is the one that I helped to design, it's called the Nature Beat app. You can check it out@GreenfieldFitnessystems.com Naturebeat Full disclosure, that's my app, but it's also what I use anytime I design something, it's usually because it's something I want to use or access myself. And this heart rate variability app, what it will do is, for example, it's got two different scores. It'll give you your low frequency score score, which is a measurement of your sympathetic nervous system, and your high frequency score, which is a measurement of your parasympathetic nervous system. And if you've got, for example, an overstimulated sympathetic nervous system, sometimes what you're going to find is that that low frequency score, which is indicative of your sympathetic nervous system, it's very low. It's almost like your sympathetic nervous system is overworked. And so you'd have an imbalance. And you could see when you wake up in the morning, oh, hey, I've been really beating up my fight and flight nervous system too much. I am potentially going to get sick. I'm probably inflamed. I need to simplify my diet. I need to not do heavy weight training and high intensity intervals today. And today I might do yoga and sauna or something like that and vice versa. The same could be said for the parasympathetic nervous system. If you have a low parasympathetic nervous system score, a lot of times it's because you've been over training with too much aerobic activity, too much endurance activity, and you need to lay off going out for like a, you know, one hour long lunchtime run or something like that. So.

And what about high scores on both of them?

High scores on both of them would be good. That's generally what you want is ideally in an ideal state of rest, you've got a one to one ratio between low frequency and high frequency and you've got an equal ratio between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. So, okay, so how can we actually get into that balance? That's the question. Well, there are a variety of different tactics that you can use. So let's start and I know I get called out Sometimes for recommending a huge variety of supplements. And kind of like our discussion Alzheimer's last week, it's like everything that I discussed there in terms of increasing blood flow to the brain or improving cognitive performance, those would be things that you would pull out if you know that you've had like a traumatic brain injury, if you've been concussed, if you know you have hypoperfusion to the brain, if you know you have a high risk for Alzheimer's, et cetera. I'm not saying everyone on the face of the planet needs to take, like, you know, vinpocetine and ginkgo biloba every day. In the same way, if you find that your nervous system is imbalanced, you're under a state of stress of both your sympathetic or your parasympathetic nervous system or both, you may want to use some of these strategies that I'm talking about. So the first and probably the most standout strategy from a supplementation standpoint to balance the nervous system would be via the use of adaptogens. And the idea that a pill or that an herbal compound could somehow improve mental and physical performance was actually first experimented with via the use of an adaptogen. And this was in World War II when they were giving various stimulants to pilots and to members of submarine crews. And in some of the Russian military journals, you'll find the use of one of the first adaptogens that's mentioned in literature and that is Schisandra, which I think just has a great name that could be a comic book character, Shazandra, kind of like our friend Zonulin in Colostrum. Yeah, Schisandra. So Schisandra is an adaptogen and basically what it can do is it can help the body to deal with stress and generally allow the body to adapt to stress a little bit better. And what they found was that with Schisander particularly, this originated from the use or. Or its use by Russian hunters. This is why the Russian military began to use it, was they would use it to reduce thirst, to reduce hunger, to reduce exhaustion, and to improve night vision while hunting. And so this is why they started to use it in the. In the Russian military during World War II. And that's just one example of, you know, an adaptogen and the power of something like an adaptogen. The other things that Schisandra has been shown to do, for example, is to regulate the production of heat shock proteins, which would be like why you would go and do a sauna to improve your stress resilience. To heat or your stress, resilience to fluctuations in environment. So if you were going to go try to withstand extremes of cold or extremes of heat, or you find yourself very sensitive to cold or sensitive to heat, that would be a case where something like Schisandra as an adaptogen would help you out quite a bit. There are other adaptogens as well, and all of them act primarily via the release of what are called phenolics or triterpenoids or steroidal precursors. So they all assist with your stress response by producing specific compounds or molecules in your body that help with that. So some of the more well known, the more well known adaptogens would be, for example, rhodiola. Rhodiola is one that you'll see quite a bit. Eleuthero is another Ashwagandha, which we talked about earlier, that would be considered an adaptogenic. The Schisandra that I talked about, that's an adaptogen. But what you're seeing in addition to the heat shock protein regulation is they, for example, will modify the cortisol and glucocorticoid receptors in what's called your hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis.

So this is the part that, like, I love this concept of adaptogens, but I sometimes feel like, how can they be? They're like magical, you know, like, they do.

That's actually weird. Yeah, you read my mind. Because that's what I was actually just gonna talk about was cortisol and glucocorticoid corticoid receptors in your HPA axis. Those are the receptors that interact with cortisol. And what adaptogens have been shown to do is they will upregulate the density of those receptors if you need to have more interaction with cortisol. So, for example, if you've produced a lot of cortisol and you need more receptors to interact with those cortisol molecules, the adaptogens will increase the density of receptors responsible for interacting with cortisol. Or conversely, if you're creating less cortisol, they'll downregulate the expression of those receptors. And so essentially what's happening is you are, if you're in a state of low stimulus, low cortisol production, et cetera, adaptogens can slightly upregulate cortisol production. Or if you're in a state of high cortisol, excessive cortisol production, it can actually downregulate your sensitivity to or the production of cortisol.

That actually blows my Mind a little bit. Like, I know I'm not the most scientific person, but it just seems like a little fairy.

It's the same reason that when you eat a plant that has been exposed to a high amount of environmental stress, a wild plant, you will produce more endogenous antioxidants in response to the consumption of that plant that's been beat up. That's a little bit more of a hardy plant compared to say like a plant that is domesticated. It's why eating a wide variety of foods can be so helpful, especially when it comes to the plant kingdom, because you actually equip your body to better be able to withstand stress. And adaptogens acts very similarly.

That's fascinating.

Yeah, it's cool stuff. So I mean essentially what you eat can allow you to adapt to stress and can allow you to balance your nervous system. We see a lot of other things with adaptogens. For example, they help with the production of nitric oxide, they assist with the synthesis of ATP. There's actually a very, very interesting study, or not really a study, more of a meta study that's been done on adaptogens and all of the different proven clinical effects of adaptogens. And I will link to that particular study in the shownotes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com BenGreenfulFitness.com 241 if you really want to look at the clinical studies that back up the usefulness of adaptogens. So if you look at, for example, here's another very, very cool thing about adaptogens you look at like Eleuthero. Eleuthero is another one that you'll find in adaptogenic compounds. They did one study on 6,000 different subjects aged 19 to 72. And what they did was they looked at their cognitive performance in normal conditions and in stress conditions. And so for example, they would look at these folks mental work capacities in high temperature environments, under periods of forced work, under loud noise conditions, under motion sickness, under heavy physical burden, under like deep sea conditions or underwater conditions. And what they found was that the use of Eleuthero in all cases increased mental work capacity when under periods of heavy stress. And that's particularly done via modulation of the nervous system. So they found very similar results in terms of stress adaptation and cognitive function under stress with rhodiola. That's another big one. Schisandra, like I mentioned, wakefulness, even night vision. It's really, really interesting what a lot of these adaptogens can do.

Compare it all the people who are under stress who are using adaptogens cognitive ability versus the people who weren't under stress or using adaptogens.

Right, exactly. They use both normal and stressful work conditions.

Wow.

Yeah. So really, the two main areas that adaptogens are going to work upon are they're going to increase attention or endurance in situations where performance would normally be decreased by a lot of stress. And then they can also help to increase relaxation and the ability to be able to withstand excessive sympathetic nervous system activation in response to stress.

When you talk about excessive sympathetic nervous system activation, I think about monks.

Not monk fruit, but not monk fruit.

But this is a theme in today's podcast is monks, they sit and they meditate all day. Is that going to have any kind of bad ramifications biologically?

What do you mean meditation?

Well, yeah, I mean if you just like is that over, like, is that like over activation of the parasympathetic nervous system.

It technically would involve. So a monk would have an under trained sympathetic nervous system. You would not want to bring a monk into battle with you. But most of us, in some ways.

Well, you wouldn't want to anyway because they're not going to be very helpful.

Right, Exactly. So yes, you can excessively meditate, you can excessively yoga, you can excessively use your gratitude journal to the point where you are abandoning and ignoring your sympathetic nervous system. But if you have, for example, a very, very low frequency score when you measure your heart rate variability, or you've got a very kind of beat up underactive sympathetic nervous system, or not a beat up, but an underactive sympathetic nervous system, you'd actually want to, to train your sympathetic nervous system. Or you'd conversely want to do a lot of yoga, meditation, et cetera if you had a very beat up sympathetic nervous system. So ultimately, adaptogens we talked a little bit about like Ashwagandha, that green juice powder we were talking about before. What I personally do is one packet of Tianchi, which has Schisandra, Rhodiola, Eleuthero, Ashwagandha, pretty much every adaptogen on the face of the planet. I have a really comprehensive podcast with the formulator of that particular adaptogenic herb complex that is one that I use about five days of the week. So I don't do the adaptogens every day. But I do live what I consider to be. Everybody thinks this about themselves, I guess what I consider to be like a slightly higher stress lifestyle.

I don't think that about myself.

I'm just like, I'm Hardwired to just go, go, go from the minute I get up. And I find that these adaptogens help me. So in the, like the mid morning or the mid afternoon, I will use a packet of the, of this adaptogenic herb complex. And so that's one way that I keep my nervous system balanced.

So for someone like me who's wired to be mindful, mindful, mindful and go slow, slow, slow, it would also help me.

Not as much as it would help. I've found it better for cases of sympathetic dominance than parasympathetic dominance, frankly.

All right, basically just need to go and run a marathon is what you said, Right?

Right. Now, when we look at the parasympathetic nervous system, in many cases, if you're parasympathetic dominant, sometimes it doesn't just mean that you're living a very relaxed lifestyle or that you're doing plenty of yoga and meditation and gratitude journaling. You will also see that in a situation of parasympathetic dominance, that can be related to like chronic fatigue syndrome or like low levels of energy due to nutrient deficiencies. Now in a case like that, I actually recommend folks who feel like they're just lethargic, unmotivated, et cetera, that you look at the potential for micronutrient deficiencies. You'll also tend to see higher levels of toxic metals when you do like a hair mineral analysis. There's a very interesting article by a gentleman named Dr. Wilson that talks about using a hair analysis to look at both sympathetic dominance as well as parasympathetic dominance, particularly looking at sodium to potassium ratios. And this is really interesting, but what they've found with hair mineral analysis is that if you have an elevated sodium to potassium ratio, which would just basically be an electrolyte imbalance brought about by mineral depletion of the adrenal glands, that that would be indicative of sympathetic dominance. It's basically one way, by looking at the minerals that are in your hair, to figure out if you are exhausting the minerals in your adrenal glands from too much sympathetic nervous system activation. And then conversely, what you'll tend to see in a hair mineral analysis with parasympathetic nervous system dominance, that would be not a good thing, like lethargyne, fatigue and stuff like that, you see a higher level level of toxic metals and a lower level of micronutrients.

So it's basically a way of figuring out whether your parasympathetic dominance is a positive or a negative thing, Right?

Exactly. And I've done a whole podcast on hair mineral analysis. I've personally done a few different hair mineral analysis myself with Dr. Wendy Myers, the gal who I did that podcast with. I will admit that the amount of clinical research done on hair mineral analysis is a little bit weak, but I wanted to bring it up because it is something that's used, especially in alternative medicine, to diagnose either sympathetic or parasympathetic dominance. Now there's more clinical research behind heart rate variability measurement than there is behind hair mineral analysis. And considering that heart rate variability measurement is instant and more easily accessible than going and getting your haircut, putting in an envelope, mailing it off to someone, and paying them to do a hair mineral analysis.

Right.

I'd err towards heart rate variability. But at the same time, I want to. I want to lay some of the options out on the table for our listeners and for people who want to explore a hair mineral analysis or who can't figure out why they have, for example, sympathetic dominance or parasympathetic dominance. It's one of the options out there. So. Okay, makes sense.

Yes. Thank you.

Cool. So what are some other things that we can do to balance our nervous system? I talked about adaptogens. There's also been quite a bit of research done on the interplay between the endocannabinoid system and the autonomic nervous system. Meaning that, for example, they did one study, a really interesting study, on rabbits and the interaction between the vagal nerve and transmission in the heart or heart signal caused by parasympathetic activation of the vagus nerve. And what they found was that when rats were administered cannabinoids, there was an effect, particularly on parasympathetic feedback to the cardiovascular system. And it actually caused an increase in heart rate variability due to better vagus nerve tone through the use of cannabinoids. Now, that does not mean that you have to use, for example, a THC or VAPE or weed or something like that to get the activation of these cannabinoid receptors. You could even use something like cbd, for example, which we've talked about before. But essentially what we're talking about is specific activation of the vagus nerve. They've also got another study called cannabinoid mediated inhibition of electronic optical potentials results in a reduction of noradrenaline release from sympathetic nervous system nerves. I know that's a mouthful, but what it means basically is that cannabinoids can decrease activation of the sympathetic nervous system. If you tend to have an overactive Sympathetic nervous system. And they've also found endocannabinoids to be able to regulate intestinal motility and the innervation of smooth muscles associated with your digestive system, system, your urinary system and your reproductive system. Which is why the use of weed or marijuana or CBD gives you better digestion, better poop and better sex.

Wow.

Yeah. There's.

What doesn't it. Dr. We're getting to that point.

What doesn't it do? So CBD and. Or marijuana, the use of adaptogenic herbs. That would be two things from a supplementation standpoint. One other thing from a supplementation standpoint that you could look into, and this is kind of an interesting one, is the use of nicotine. And nicotine can actually affect your cholinergic signaling. Remember that acetylcholine is the primary neurotransmitter that is produced by your vagus nerve or produced in response to electrical stimulation of your vagus nerve. And what they found is that nicotine can assist with activation of the parasympathetic nervous system and even modulation of inflammation, modulation of immune response and modulation of excessive stress with the use of like nicotine gum or nicotine patches, for example.

So this would be if you had. So if you had an overactive sympathetic nervous system, you would want to trigger a reaction from your parasympathetic nervous system to balance it out, Right?

Basically what it comes down to is if you were, let's say you're extremely stressed, you know you've got an overactive sympathetic nervous system, you know that maybe you have leaky gut syndrome, irritable bowel, a lot of other issues related to having an over activated sympathetic nervous system. Probably the holy grail for you to choose if you're just going to do a few things is you would take either CBD or THC and nicotine, so weed and cigarettes, kids, or healthier versions thereof, and then adaptogenic herbs like those are the, the top three that you would use. Now, kind of similar to our discussion on Alzheimer's last week, life goes way beyond just the use of supplements or oils or tinctures or herbs. And there are also, there are biohacking tools or pieces of gear or lifestyle adjustments that can be made that will affect the autonomic nervous system. So for example, there are three different things that in particular will increase the tone of your vagus nerve and that will remember, assist with not only the increase in your parasympathetic nervous system activation, but also help to balance out excessive sympathetic nervous system activation. So we're talking about increasing vagal tone, increasing the ability of the vagus nerve to be able to produce acetylcholine. There are a few things that can do that. One is activation of your mammalian dive reflex. And that's why free divers are so Zen.

That is awesome.

There's actually a direct correlation between being underwater and being relaxed underwater. And in particular, the use of cold water or cold thermogenesis. Right. Like cold water immersion. And particularly training yourself to be able to withstand the rigors of cold water immersion. That results in a significant improvement in vagal tone. And this can even be something as simple as a daily cold shower.

That is fascinating. So mammalian dive reflex.

Yeah, the mammalian dive reflex. I've got two podcasts coming up on it, so stay tuned. January 9th and January 16th, we have back to back podcasts with Brian McKenzie who runs the performance breathing workshops, and then also Ted Hardy who teaches the immersion freediving clinics. And we take a deep dive, pun intended, into the mammalian dive reflex in those upcoming podcasts. So stay tuned for that. But know for now that cold thermogenesis is one very good way to improve vagal tone. Another way to improve vagal tone is via neurofeedback. And in particular what that means is that you can, for example, attach a very easy to use cable to your ear, to the end of your ear to measure the amount of time spent between each heartbeat, your heart rate variability. And then the other end of that cable can plug into a computer like a piece of software. And there's one particular form of neurofeedback called the M Wave, produced by the Heart Math Institute. There are other forms of neurofeedback that can be done in a clinical study, which I talk about in my podcast with Dr. Andrew Hill. You can go listen to that. It's called QEEG analysis, an EEG neurofeed. And that's something you do more like a neurofeedback practitioner's office. But you can also do your own self neurofeedback using something like heart rate variability training. And like this M Wave, for example. It's made by a company called the Heartmath Institute, which has a lot of interesting information on neurofeedback and self neurofeedback. And that's another way that's been shown to improve vagus nerve tone would be via the use of EEG neurofeedback. And it's literally like you are connecting yourself to this cable that goes into your computer and then you're like Looking at the screen and trying to make flowers grow or trying to change the landscape by consciously altering your breath pattern and your thoughts.

Okay.

Wow. Yeah. So that would be quite useful for people who have sympathetic dominance. And then finally, really interesting.

Is it just like literally just thinking happy thoughts?

It kind of is that easy. Yeah. Thinking. Thinking thoughts of gratitude, placing them in your heart, et cetera. But it's one thing to grasp the concept of doing that and actually do it right. A lot of people will be like, oh, I know how to do that. But then they don't do it. You actually have to take time out of your day and go freaking do it. So there's also the concept that the vagus nerve travels through your jaw. And a lot of people, they have jaws that are out of alignment the same way that people have spines that are out of alignment. So you can have a jaw realignment done to improve the tone of the vagus nerve. This is something that a chiropractic physician can do. And you would want to find someone who is well versed in upper cranial craniosacral alignment of your atlas, your axis vertebral sections, and also your jaw to be able to. To analyze whether or not your jaw is out of alignment and to be able to realign the jaw. And by aligning your jaw, you can directly increase your parasympathetic nervous system activation, lower inflammation, lower highly sensitive immune system, and improve the vagus nerve tone.

I'm going to really quickly a little personal experience. I went to see a Chiro probably two years ago for the first time in like 10 years, and he realigned my sacroiliac joint, which is not up by your jaw.

That's down?

No, it's down. But I bawled my eyes out. I cried for a solid hour afterwards, and I had no idea why.

Yeah. The SI joint, especially in people who do chronic repetitive motion activity like cycling or running, it almost always tends to be stuck. You've got a gristly surface and then a smooth surface. And those two surfaces in the SI joint can tend to stick against each other and reduce mobility in the pelvis. And that can also affect your vagus nerves. That's very interesting, me crying.

Would that have anything to do with my vagus nerve?

Exactly, yeah. So you would have activated your parasympathetic nervous system. And I know for some of you who are like that sounds a little woo woo, that it's simply acetylcholine related. And what probably happened was you got a dump of acetylcholine by your vagus nerve.

Yeah. It was the weirdest experience.

Yeah. Okay, so we've got jaw realignment, we've got cold thermogenesis, we've got use of something like the M wave breathing. That's kind of a no brainer, like deep breathing. Setting the stage for breathing. So every morning I start off my day, while I am lying there doing my five minutes of heart rate variability measurement, I simply do deep breathing. And during the time that I do that, I'm actually gratitude journaling. So I've got a little journal that's.

Three things at once.

I know it's a lot of stuff to think about. You gotta breathe, you gotta write, and you have to allow your heart rate to be measured.

It's tough.

Smoke will come out your ears. No, it's really quite simple. You know, I literally just roll over, I put on the heart rate strap, it takes three seconds and I open up my door.

No, it makes sense. Otherwise you're just sitting there.

Start journaling five minutes. And I just make sure. Yeah. As I journal, you'll find. So shallow chest breathing activates baroreceptors in the chest responsible for producing cortisol.

Yeah.

Or even just like the normal absence of deep belly breathing that a lot of us engage in through the day that will activate cortisol release and activate the sympathetic nervous system. When I am lying in bed, what I find is that if I can set a standard for the rest of the day, day by, before I even get out of bed, breathing more slowly, having a lower respiratory rate, anywhere from eight to 12 breaths per minute, which you can measure, and you can measure that throughout the day if you'd like to, using like this, this app that I talked about, the, the Nature Beat app. If you just wear your heart rate monitor during the day to kind of see what your respiratory, what your respiration rate's doing, you can measure your respiration rate and ensure that your respiration operation is slow and deep throughout the day. And that really helps to keep your nervous system balanced. But I'm a big fan of setting the stage early in the day by starting off your day with five minutes of deep breathing. And the cool thing is that the other thing that's been shown to activate both vagal nerve tone as well as parasympathetic nerve activation is, and I know you'll like this, Rachel, because it's woo. Is gratitude. Gratitude practice. So when I will post my heart rate variability scores and this is where I get up on my soapbox and I sound like a braggadocious asshole, but it's simply the fact I'll post my scores and people will say, well, how do you get your scores so freaking high? Why is your nervous system so robust? Why are your scores balanced? Why is your heart rate variability so high? Well, if you look at what I just did, talked about, Rachel, I take adaptogenic herbs. I use cbd. I don't use nicotine. I would be interested to see what happened if I did, but I don't currently do that. I do deep breathing. I do gratitude, I do cold thermogenesis, and I've never done a jaw realignment, but I do deep mobility work twice a week using a foam roller and a variety of different lacrosse balls and tortuous devices. So of everything that I do just talked about, the only two that I don't personally use myself are a daily eeg neurofeedback. So I used to use the M wave quite a bit, and I don't do that anymore. I think I've kind of figured out how to consciously get myself to relax after using it for a period of time. So I don't do that and I don't do nicotine. But everything else I just talked about, I do every day. And I think it helps out quite a bit with the balance of my autonomic nervous system.

So you're our case study, basically. This stuff works.

Yeah, this stuff works. Exactly. Exactly. I will put links to most everything that I just discussed, from the M wave unit to hair mineral analysis to adaptogens, et cetera, in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 341 if you want to check it out. The one thing that I would ask you as a listener to do for us is because I actually have not yet done too much guinea pigging or experimentation with nicotine. If you have a good resource, a good clean source of nicotine, or I believe another source of that is nicotinamide. If you have some resources that you'd like to add in the comments section to help myself and other listeners out, feel free to surf over there and add in what some of your own feedback on nicotine would be. If any of you have used nicotine to improve the health of your autonomic nervous system. So that being said, Josh, I'm sure your ears are smoking right now and you're probably rushing out to find weed and cigarettes, so we'll go ahead and move on to the next question. But I hope that was helpful for you and anybody else who wants to balance your sympathetic and parasympathetic mojo. Hi, Ben, I have a question about rancidity of oils around the home. And how would you go about testing this? I'm talking about oils that you use for cooking, putting on your salads, even fish oils. I have a jar, a bottle of fermented cod liver oil that I've had in the fridge for about two years. And I'm not so sure if it's a healthy oil anymore to be putting into my body. Yeah, we'd like your insights on this. Thank you. Rachel, have you ever had the fish oil burps?

No, I haven't. Sounds gross, though.

So the fish oil burps are what keep many people from using fish oil or taking fish oil. The buy fish oil, they'll take fish oil, they get the fish oil burps, which are just literally what they sound like. It smells like a fish. What do you call where they cut up all the fish? Like a fish market. Basically inside of your mouth. Pikes peak when you belch. And so that's actually one sign that a fish oil can be bad. So you get fish oil in kind of two different forms. You can get them in liquids and you can get them in capsules. And I actually want to talk a little bit about. About two different forms of oil that I use in particular that I find are the most damaging to folks. A lot of people use them, and a lot of people do more harm than good when they use them. That's fish oil and olive oil. Fish oil and olive oil. So there's this idea of oxidation and the fact that a lot of oils can be susceptible to oxidation. Oxidation is just. It's like rush or like not rush, rust. You know, that stuff, that reddish orange stuff, rust. So oil can react with oxygen, and when oil reacts with oxygen, oxidation can occur. And one of the reasons that that occurs is simply the reaction of the bonds in, like a fish oil or an olive oil with oxygen.

So is this non capsule form only or does it also.

Yes, this can happen to both liquid forms of fish oil as well as capsule form of fish oil. And fish oil is. Are particularly fragile or particularly susceptible to oxidation. EPA and DHA are polyunsaturated fatty acids. That means they have multiple double bonds between their carbon atoms. So they're these big layers of carbon atoms and there's multiple double bonds. But this also makes them very unstable because double bonds can readily react with oxygen. And when that happens, you get unpleasant fishy flavors, you get odors. But more concerningly, you actually get damage. You get a bunch of free radicals when you come consume that fish oil. I mean, normally you consume a fish oil to decrease inflammation, to improve the availability of things like EPA and DHA for neuronal tissue, to improve the integrity of the myelin sheaths and your cell membranes. But if you're taking in an oxidized fish oil, you are in fact achieving the opposite effect. So when you know that oxidation occurs when oil comes into contact with oxygen from the environment, that should give you a pretty good clue about fish oil and some of the things that you need to consider when it comes to fish oil. Because there's several different factors that can be controlled to reduce the amount of oxidation.

And then how long does it kind of take? Is there a general throw out your olive oil or fish oil after this amount of time?

Yeah. So most fish oil products, for example, will state a shelf life of 24 months from the date that they're made. But that is a assuming they aren't opened and they aren't exposed to light and they aren't exposed to heat. And independent laboratory testing. You know, we did a podcast, for example, with the folks from labdoor. It's found that many brands don't meet that stated shelf life claim. And once something's been opened or exposed to light, typically oxidation. For a fish oil, for example, you're looking at 90 to 100 days. Even if it's got antioxidants and stuff packaged along with it, you don't want to like stock up on fish oil for more than about 90 to 100 days. Days. So right around that three month range.

Okay. All of my olive oils are way past.

Okay, well, we'll talk about olive oil in a little bit because if it's got enough antioxidants in it, you might be able to increase that shelf life a little bit longer with olive oil. Fish oil is actually a little bit more fragile than olive oil is based on the amount of those double bonds. So temperature is one big contributing factor for oxidation in oil. So when you get fish oil, it's best to store it in the refrigerator after you open it and to avoid allowing it to become exposed to heat. So that's one biggie. If you have fish oil, keep it in the fridge, or you can also keep it in the freezer, interestingly. And it will still get metabolized just fine by your body. Light can also cause oxidation. That's why you'll find most high quality fish oils are packaged in like those dark brown glass bottles or in something that's not translucent, that protects them against damage by light. You would never want to buy fish oil that's in clear packaging. Like never buy fish oil in which you can actually see through the bottle and see the fish oil. That's bad news bears. So you don't want fish oil that's in a clear container. So oxygen exposure can also be a catalyst for oxidation. And that's why you'll find some of the better fish oils. They'll actually package the fish oils and cover them with an inert gas like nitrogen at all possible points during the production of that fish oil. It's called nitrogen purging in the supplementation industry. And it is a method of reducing the oxidation of the fish oil. That's unfortunately something that you don't find a lot of fish oil manufacturers doing because it's expensive and it increases the price of the fish oil. And that's one reason that you get what you pay for when it comes to fish oil. Now, another thing that I think is quite handy, and this is something I mentioned when talking about Alzheimer's in last week's discussion on Alzheimer's. I talked about EPA and DHA are two very good strategies for reducing the risk of or slowing the progression of Alzheimer's, but that you must, must, must choose a fish oil or an EPA or DHA source that has antioxidants added into it so that those polyunsaturated oils aren't becoming oxidized. So the most common antioxidant that you'll find added to fish oil that is quite efficacious is called tocopherols. Tocopherols.

Vitamin that literally be in the ingredients list? Probably not.

Yep, it will be. Oh, well, Vitamin E would be another one. And another very good antioxidant that's actually one that you can also use as a standalone supplement if you get a sunburn or something like that is astaxanthin. Astaxanthin is another very, very potent antioxidant. The fish oil that I use is actually dark black. When you look at the capsule, it's a dark black capsule. The fish oil itself is a beige, clear ish color. But the astaxanthin is what makes makes it black. Because the stuff that I use is called super Essentials fish oil. I take two every morning and it's like a black capsule because of the. They actually have vitamin E, tocopherols, and the astaxanthin in that fish oil. So you want a fish oil. Again, that's not been exposed to a lot of temperature that's not in a clear container, that has preferably been mixed using nitrogen purging in the manufacturing process, and then it has antioxidants added to it. And if you've done all that stuff, you've got a pretty good chance that your fish oil is going to last at least that 90 to 100 days that it should. If you taste it and it smells fishy, the fishy smell is created via oxidation of those double bonds. So that's one thing. Also, if it tastes fishy, same thing. Or if you get fishy burps, same thing. So that's the main way that you can know if a fish oil is bad. If it smells or it tastes tastes fishy or, you know, it's been exposed to high temperatures or a lot of light or a lot of oxygen.

Okay, awesome. And what about olive oil?

So olive oil is very, very similar in terms of knowing if it's bad. You can look at the way that it smells and the way that it tastes. So what you'll find is that an olive oil that gets rancid and it's going to be the exact same mechanism of action as what would happen with something like a fish oil. But an olive oil that is rancid is going to smell like crayons or putty. If you've smelled either of those.

I have never smelled either of those.

You need to get yourself some crayons or putty. Get on the job. So it smells like crayons or putty. If it tastes like a rancid nut, like that acrid taste of a rancid nut, or it has a greasy mouthfeel, that would be the flavor of rancid olive oil. And every single time your olive oil gets exposed to air or light, just like fish oil, it undergoes oxidation and it will get rancid much more quickly. Which is why, again, olive oil should be in dark glass bottles, not like the clear bottles that you'll see a lot of them in at the grocery store. Definitely not plastic. And then also it should be stored in a dark, cool place, like the bottom of the pantry, for example.

So you wouldn't put olive oil in the fridge.

You could put it in the fridge because your refrigerator light turns off when you close your fridge. Believe it or not, it's magic. That light is not.

Well, I was actually wondering if it.

Would be too cold now. Sometimes. Yeah. Depending on the temperature of your fridge, it can make your olive oil hard. So.

Yes.

Yeah. So that's. That's Just gonna, gonna depend. Now the other thing is that there, there are factors that can influence the capability of an olive oil to go rancid, particularly the level of antioxidants similar to fish oil, and also what's called the chlorophyll content of an olive oil. The high, higher the quality of an olive oil, the higher the amount of chlorophyll that it will have, the lower propensity it will have for oxidation. Okay. Now there's also this concept of fusty oil. F U S T Y fusty oil. That'll happen if the olives sit for too long before they're milled, which can lead to fermentation of those actual olives. And when that happens, your olive oil is going to have like a fermentation smell to it. So it'll smell a little bit like vinegary or it'll taste a little bit vinegar vinegary. That would be a fusty olive oil. Is that bad? That would also be bad. That would be an olive oil that it's not going to have the flavor that you want. And it's also indicative that some oxidation has occurred. There are some other issues with olive oil. For example, mold. If it tastes dusty or moldy, that's another indication that the olives have sat around for too long prior to the making of the olive oil. And you'll find that done a lot of times with a cheap, inexpensive of olive oil. But those defects like a fusty olive oil, a moldy olive oil, or a rancid olive oil are pretty common. It's pretty common to have adulterated olive oils in the US And I've actually got an article that I've written about this over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and I'll link to it in the show notes. But they'll oftentimes take something that they've marketed as extra virgin olive oil and they'll dilute it with things like hazelnut or soybean or corn, corn or sunflower or palm oil or one of these other oils that is cheaper, that's less expensive, but that also increases the propensity of that olive oil to become oxidized, decreases the healthfulness of the olive oil, and it influences its taste.

And again, would that be on the ingredients list?

That would not be. That just comes down to you choosing a good source. I am actually, don't laugh. I am part of. So I've completely.

I'm already laughing.

I've completely outsourced my wine and my olive oil. So I get six bottles of wine shipped to my house each month. It is the low mold wine with grapes that are grown at high altitude. And it is the stuff that has higher concentration of polyphenols of flavanols. They ferment it for a longer period of time so there's less sugar and hooray for us. Less, more alcohol. And that stuff's called Fit vine wine. I've written an article on it. But extra virgin olive oil. I'm also part of an extra virgin olive oil club. So each quarter I get three bottles of olive oil, completely pure. It's from around the world. Like this last shipment was from Australia. Sometimes it'll come from. You're welcome, Chile, Spain, Italy. It comes with tasting notes. It comes in these dark glass bottles. It's extremely flavorful. You'll feel like every olive oil tastes like crap compared to this stuff. And it's not rancid. So that's. And I haven't outsourced my fish oil. I still have to order my own fish oil. But yeah, my olive oil comes once a quarter, three bottles, and my wine comes once a month. Six bottles. Yes. That means I drink more wine than I do olive oil. My apologies.

Thank God.

My wife goes through wine actually a lot faster than I do. She probably does. She does like a giant fishbowl sized glass of wine a night every night. I do like a smaller glass once every one to two nights. But ultimately, you know, that's kind of what you need to know when it comes to fish oil and when it comes to olive oil. I'll put a link in the show notes to the super essentials fish oil that I use as well as the article that I wrote on olive oil. But hopefully that gives you some good info on your. On your fish oil and your olive oil and how to know if the stuff is bad.

Hi Ben, it's Ann from Boston again. I'm calling because I recently started rock climbing in a gym and I wondered about it. I've been listening to your podcast for a couple of years at this point and never heard you talk about it as a sport. I wondered what you thought of rock climbing and what you would do in order to get really good as fast as possible. Thanks for the advice. Love the podcast.

Have you ever gone rock climbing, Rachel?

I haven't. I'm scared of heights.

Never. You've never.

I'm scared of heights.

What about like the itty bitty ones? Like a cruise ship? Like the itty bitty walls?

No.

Okay. All right. Well, rock climbing is actually it's a great sport. And I like to think that even though I haven't done a terribly large amount of rock climbing, I've done, you know, indoor rock climbing. I'll go about once a month. My gym has a rock climbing wall that I take the kids to, to Boulder, back and forth. I did a lot more rock climbing when I was a kid when the gymnastics facility. My parents put me in gymnastics, which was great, even though I still can't do the full splits. So it was potentially huge.

I was a gymnast. I can do the full splits.

Huge waste of time. But they had a rock climbing wall and I actually loved the rock climbing wall more than I did taking the gymnastics classes. But rock climbing has an interesting, interesting requirement when it comes to physiology, the physiology of climbing. There's actually a great research article in the Journal of Sports Medicine that was done in which they investigated the physiological response to rock climbing. And you kind of need like a unique, unique set of fitness parameters to be a good rock climber. And I'll go into some of the ways that I personally increase my own grip strength for like, Spartan and obstacle racing, which is quite handy to have increased grip strength that helps with everything from testosterone and growth hormone to your ability to be able to like, navigate like a monkey through obstacles. But also, of course, if you're going to be a rock climber, as you would have guessed, you want better grip strength. Or if you want to be like one of those little short Japanese guys on American Ninja Warrior that can like jump from one horizontal like two by four to another, like through the air and land and stick it and hold on. It's crazy anyways, if those are your aspirations in life. So physiological responses to rock climbing. First of all, oxygen consumption. They've looked at VO2 max, like your maximum oxygen consumption during climbing, and they found that you only reach about 40 to 50% of your VO2 max, your maximum oxygen consumption when climbing. So it looks like your lung capacity is not a factor at all when it comes to climbing. It's not a limiting factor. If you're training to be a climber, that should be pretty low on the totem pole, like increasing your overall maximum oxygen capacity. Now, what's interesting is there's two different types of VO2 max. You can look at overall VO2 max. You can also look at what's called specific VO2 max. And when they've looked at what's called ARM specific VO2 max, ARM specific VO2 max, that actually gets close to 100% in rock climb. Climbers due to. Yes, due to increased what's called anaerobic glycolysis in the hands due to, like, these repeated isometric contractions that rock climbers have to do. So what, this comes down to holding.

On for dear life, literally, Right?

Exactly. So it behooves you to more train your ability to hold on to something for a long period of time for maximal contraction, and also to train your ability to buffer lactic acid in the fingers and the hands. And I'll talk about how to do that in a second than it is to do repeated bike sprints or run sprints, for example. So even hard climbing, your oxygen consumption does not go up very much. Now, what does go up is your heart rate and your blood pressure. They found that heart rate will go up to 180 beats per minute during rock climbing. And this is a unique sport in that there's typically not such a stark differentiation between VO2max and heart rate, meaning the heart rate rises out of proportion relative to VO2max or oxygen consumption while rock climbing. And that's because of those repetitive isometric contractions of the forearm and the hand musculature. So your blood pressure and your heart rate rise steeply out of proportion compared to your oxygen consumption. And so, again, when we look at how you would want to train to be able to handle this, you would want to do isometric contractions hangs climbing, where your arms are often held above the level of your heart in order to be able to withstand that disproportionate increase in heart rate. So rather than increasing your heart rate by, again, doing, like, bike repeats or run repeats, you would want to increase your heart rate by doing isometric contractions. Isometric contractions. So, yeah, and again, this would be relevant to not just rock climbers, this would be also relevant to obstacle racers. And it's possible that part of that heart rate increase could also be explained by the physiological, or not the physiological, the psychological stress or the anxiety associated with, like, altitude.

Falling to your death.

Yeah, falling to your death and being shattered on the rocks below. Exactly. So another thing that they have found to be quite high in terms of its. Its millimolar concentration in climbers is blood lactate. So blood lactate will range from 3 to 6 millimolars. And even though that's not as high as, like, a marathoner or a cyclist, it's significantly high. And considering that in localized areas, it can climb higher than 6, like in the fingers and the hands, training yourself to be able to buffer lactic acid would be another Very, very smart strategy if you were wanting to become as good a rock rock climber or as good a gripper or as good an obstacle racer or as good an American ninja warrior as possible.

And how do you buffer lactic acid?

Well, one way to buffer lactic acid is simply to train with those kind of isometric contractions. And I've got a few good training tools or training aids that I'll give to folks in just a second. But interesting, they've even found that particular dietary components can help to buffer lactic acid. And while these would not be as important as some of the actual training methods, I'll talk about in a second the two things that can help with buffering lactic acid. One would be ensuring that your diet is not too acidic. So like an alkaline diet that's comprised of not too much commercial red meat, dairy, alcohol, caffeine, all of those notoriously acidic foods, and instead more focused on dark leafy greens, lemons and some of the citrusy fruits, you can download a whole app acid alkaline food chart and see which foods err towards alkalinic. And leading up to any event for which you've got a high amount of lactic acid loading, it can behoove you to definitely choose a more alkalinic diet. The other thing, interestingly, that we've talked about on the show before is baking soda loading with baking soda, which can give you the screaming chiznats and explosive diarrhea if you had. Yeah, but the way that you do baking soda is you just, you just use a very small half a teaspoon amount every 20 minutes for about two hours prior to an event for which you know you're going to produce a bunch of lactic acid. And that can actually significantly help to buffer lactic acid without producing GI distress. So you kind of like taper your doses over the course of about two hours every 20 minutes, about a little less than a teaspoon.

And you probably want to try that.

Before the big day, probably because nobody wants to poop with when they're hanging from a rock like 30ft above the ground on their friends who are belaying for them. So you not want to lose your friends via that particular method. And then finally, there is muscular fatigue that they looked at in this study of rock climbing physiology, and they found that muscle fatigue was, as you would have expected, one of the physiological mechanisms that causes failure during rock climbing in both the legs and the arms. So when we talk about muscle fatigue, we're talking about the ability to do repetitive contractions for anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes. Repetitive contractions of the legs and of the arms, because you're often doing that when you're, when you're climbing a specific route. So. And then, as you would have expected, they also found that in rock climbers, they have particularly low body fat percentages because of the need to, to have a really good power to weight ratio to pull yourself up a rock climbing wall or to propel yourself up a rock climbing wall. So they would tend to find about 4 to 14% body fat average for men and 10 to 20% for women. So paying attention to how many calories you stuff in your face could behoove you if you plan on climbing up a wall.

And a slightly unrelated question, but how good of an overall workout for health and longevity is rock climbing?

It's pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. So, so the area that you would be neglecting, as we've just learned about, would be your VO2 max. So if you're a rock climber wanting like a full, like, you know, a wide spectrum of physiological skills and like good overall fitness, two things don't get trained during rock climbing, actually. VO2 max. And then also surprisingly, flexibility. What they found in that study was that flexibility was not significantly different between elite climbers, climbers, recreational climbers and non climbers, including range of motion at the hip and range of motion at the shoulder.

That seems really counterintuitive.

It does, but it turns out that rock climbers don't have much greater flexibility than the general population. And so that would be another thing. Like if you are a rock climber and you're using rock climbing as one of your sole means of fitness training, you would also want to include some VO2 max sets, right? Like 2 to 4 minute intervals and running or cycling. And then you'd also want to include, you know, maybe a couple of yoga sessions a week type of thing. So yeah. So as far as some training tools, a few training tools, I can give you that I particularly do. First of all, we have an entire podcast on training grip strength and I'll link to that in the show notes. Like, we did a, we did like a full like half hour treatise on grip strength. So listen to that one. I'll link to it@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 3. But I'd also recommend two things I keep in my car. So I keep in my car a captains of crush hand gripper. So when I'm like sitting at stoplights or I'm driving around in my car I can do repetitive isometric contractions. I use that particular brand because it's well made, it's durable, and they sell them in resistances from like £50 all the way up to something just crazy, like £400. So you can literally, as you get better and better at one hand gripper, you can eventually go to Amazon and go to the next level up that's like 20 or 40 pounds heavier. In addition, because what you don't want is to create an imbalance in your ability to close your hands, you also want to be able to open your hands. And rock climbers, climbers, obstacle racers, American Ninja Warrior competitors, etc, who get elbow pain will want to know this. But you'll want to train your hands ability to open as well. And so the same company that produces these captains of crush hand grippers also produces these bands that are called expand your hand bands. Expand your hand and they're literally just like these little elastic bands that you open your hands against. So I keep both of those in my car and I'll go back and forth between the captains of crush and the expand your hand bands. In addition, when you're talking about elbow pain, there is a condition called golfer's elbow or climber's elbow. And it's pain in the medial elbow in the inside of the arm. And the way that you get rid of this is by doing what's called active release therapy on the inside of the elbow where you're pinning the tendons on the inside of the elbow with your arm bent and then slowly extending the arm. Now when you combine this with deep tissue massage up and down your forearm, you can keep it at bay. A lot of the forearm injuries and elbow injuries and chronic repetitive motion injuries that rock climbers get, and there is.

Go ahead, do they get it in their wrist as well?

More the elbow, more the inside of the elbow particularly there's one device called the arm aid and it's like the, it looks like a giant claw. And I own one, I use it almost every day because I do like, you know, tons of pull ups and swings and stuff like that for obstacle training. And it allows you to do that deep tissue work and your own active release therapy so you don't have to like spend a bunch of money and go drive to a massage therapist and get your forearms worked on frequently. And I really swear by it's called the arm aid. The arm aid. A couple of other things that I'd recommend. One is there is a company called Three Ball Climbing and they sell training devices, climbing holds, and things that you can even like take to hold hotel rooms or to other gyms. They'll sell a ball with a carabiner on the end of it that you could hang from a pull up bar at a gym. And rather than holding onto the bar, it's like holding onto a ball. You can also get these pinchers or what they call crimps that you can hold on to along with horizontal blocks like cliffhangers. And you can literally just build a little rock climbing gym at your house or have portable rock climbing gear that you can take with you when you're on the go. And when you just want to bring something to the gym. Yeah, you should check them out. It's three ball climbing.com three ball climbing.com.

And they just stick anywhere?

Yeah, you can just hang them from anywhere. So you can create your own rigs, hang materials. I learned about these from Casey, the American Ninja Warrior girl. We interviewed her for the Obstacle Dominator podcast that I do and she talked about how she'll use these three ball climbing timing tools to train for, for American Ninja Warrior.

Very cool.

So those can also be useful. And then the, the final thing that I recommend is just a lot of dead hang where you're, where you're just like hanging from a pull up bar. And this is something that I'll do is I'll put on a podcast or an audiobook and just hang for as long as I can.

And what's, what's a good hang time?

If you can get up to about like eight to 10 minutes, that's pretty good. Yeah, just, just be able to hang from a bottom for long. And that's training that isometric contraction, that lactic acid buildup, a lot of those things that kind of tend to fatigue while rock climbing. Now I've got one other rock climbing tip for you, and this would be 20 tips from top professional rock climbers. 20 tips from top Professional Rock Climbers. It's an excellent article and appeared on a climbing magazine. I'm going to link to that in the show notes for you, but there are a few real pieces of gold from that particular article. So for example, one is they'll recommend that you try some of your easier rock climbing routes once you've gotten them down wearing a weighted belt or a weighted vest to increase your grip strength. Another tip in there is to rather than just practice statically holding the wall to train a lot for jumping for and latching onto walls by, for example, training yourself to jump, hold onto A pull up bar and then drop from the pull up bar, then run it again, jump and hold onto it. You're basically training yourself how to dynamically grip in addition to being able to statically grip. So learning how to grab things, see them explode up to them and hold on to them. That's a technique that climbers will use quite a bit. And then another thing that they recommend on this particular article is the use of taping. So in many cases they'll tape fingers. They'll tape specific fingers to prevent tendon damage. You can take like kinesio tape and wrap the insides of the fingers. Especially if you're a new climber and you don't want to get like chronic repetitive motion injuries in your fingers. You can use like kinesio tape, like rock tape on the fingers to keep them from getting injured as you train your grip. And this would be especially useful for new climbers who want to climb but don't want to get like an overuse injury in their fingers or their hands. So I'll link to that entire article in the notes for today's podcast, but that would be a good one to go through. So there you go. Now you can be a monkey. And Rachel, now you have no excuse, aside from fear of heights to head out and hit the rocks.

Love it.

I'll do it.

Hey Ben, my name's Eric Andrus. I am a big fan of the podcast. I love listening to it while I work out and I constantly employ your helpful tips. I'm a host of a podcast that I call how to be a Grown up that I do for my high school students that teaches them that despite their economically depressed home lives, they should still care about their health, their wellness, and their purposeful direction in their lives. So my question to you would be this. I have quite a few students that struggle with the motivation to be active in their day to day lives for a myriad of reasons. And I'd love to know what is something that you might suggest to my students to get up off the couch, set down the video game controls and make a positive decision to be healthy. Thank you so much for what you do and for being such a powerful force for good and health in this world. You are a constant daily inspiration to me. Not just as a person that likes to be fit and does obstacle racing, but also as your work in the parenting sphere as well. You're awesome, my man, and I'd really love to know your opinion on this. So again, thanks so much.

Well, Eric sounds like a pretty nice guy.

Yes, he does. He sounds lovely.

Thank you for the kind words, Eric.

Sounds like you're doing some great work as well.

Well, check out your podcast how to be a Grown Up.

Love it. I need to know how to be a grown up.

Tell all the high school students in your life. I know. Seriously. I'm not a high school school student, but I could definitely use some advice on how to be a grown up. Still leap out of bed every morning feeling like a little boy. So anyways, how to Get Motivated to Exercise. I have an article about this and Eric, I will link to that article for you. It's on my I do a little five minute podcast every week called the Get Fit Guy Podcast and I did a particular episode on exercise motivation and I gave 10 exercise motivation tips. Tips. I'll give you the quick countdown now and then if you want to delve even more deeply into these tips, you can go over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 341 and check out the notes that I have there. But in no particular order of importance, Here are the 10 exercise motivation tips that I give in that particular episode. The first is caffeine. They found that about 100 milligrams of caffeine can stimulate the central nervous system to release adrenaline without overstimulating the nervous system and can actually improve motivation. It's not just a feeling. It's actually been proven that caffeine can increase your motivation to exercise. Not that I endorse a bunch of high school students running around with Red.

Bulls dosing on caffeine.

A cup of coffee from Starbucks can be helpful. The next and these are all things that have been proven to help with motivation. The next is to clip photos. So if there's a body or a look that you're trying to achieve, like a better butt or a flat stomach or more shapely calves, then you can look for photos of that look in fitness magazines or in books. And then you can clip them. And you can post them to your refrigerator or your bathroom mirror or wherever you tend to spend a lot of time looking at photographs. Your car, your rear view mirror, and hang a picture of Brad Pitt from your rearview mirror.

There you go.

Yep. Social accountability. Facebook, your own blog, Twitter account, whatever. Telling others about your exercise goals will create extrinsic motivation and the fear of embarrassment that you may be held true to those goals whether you did or did not achieve them. So that's another one. Get a Workout buddy. And to keep you from sleeping through a workout, there's nothing like knowing that You've got a friend tapping their feet waiting for you at the gym at 6am and that kind of accountability can be both annoying but also incredibly motivating. And that could be like a fitness group or an exercise club, like a master's swim class or a triathlon training group or something like that. Or it could also just be a fitness specific friend. So my next tip would be if you can't find a fitness specific friend, you can hire one. And I've found that some people, to push them over the edge, simply have to take out their wallet and hire a personal trainer. And even if for just a few sessions, a personal trainer can be an incredibly motivating way to have someone just go Jillian Michaels on your ass and get you motivated to exercise. So that'd be another one to do. Personal trainer make a plan. So even if you can't afford a personal trainer, avoiding decision making fatigue by having something written out. And this is a big one for me, when I roll out of bed every morning, I know what I'm going to do for that day. The only thing that would keep me from doing what I planned on doing for that day from an exercise standpoint would be if my heart rate variability score, which we mentioned earlier, is really, really low, in which case I would consider skipping that day's workout or substituting. But most of the time on a Sunday night, I have planned out Monday through Sunday and know what I'm going to be doing for my workouts, my exercises, my recovery, et cetera. So having a plan can be incredibly motivating and help you to avoid the decision making fatigue that keeps you from exercising. Next would be to keep a log. So that would be writing down, using a phone app or a diary or a log, keeping track of what it is that you've done. A lot of people just like get a little moleskin journal and take it with them to the gym or to their workout, write down what they did for that day, and it can be motivating to be able to look back and see the momentum that you've gained thus far.

Yeah, yep, yep.

Next thing is to take pictures. Not of other people like Brad Pitt or Kim Kardashian, but instead you would take pictures of yourself. So I will have some of my clients do this. My clients who have aesthetic goals, they will take a front picture of themselves and a side picture of themselves in their underwear or their skivvies and they will send that to me every couple of weeks so that they are being held accountable, not just to themselves for that aesthetic appearance they're trying to to achieve, but also to myself. And knowing that someone's going to be whipping out a camera and taking a photo of you once every couple of weeks can be incredibly motivating if your goals are aesthetic when it comes to exercise. Next would be the scale. And even though I don't particularly like scale, sometimes I think that they can make people too self critical, get too caught up in numbers, et cetera. Sometimes you just have to know where the dial is moving, especially if weight loss is a deal for you. So I'm a big fan of like these Withings scales for that purpose. That will tell you like your body fat percentage, which is important to make sure that even if the scale isn't budging from a weight standpoint, you might see that your body fat is decreasing, but also because those will like sync to an app that will, you know, when we talk about logging, keep track of your weight, your body fat percentage, allow you to have some quantitative measurements. So photos can show you the quality of your progress. But a scale can show you kind of like the quantity of your progress. And progress can be motivating, definitely.

Yeah.

And then finally a self talk. Really interestingly, they've shown that just going into a workout and having specific phrases that you say to yourself like I can do this, I got this. You know that Mark Divine, the Navy SEAL commander, he's got one that he does called, you know where he'll say easy day or looking good, feeling good ought to be in Hollywood. You know those type of phrases, believe it or not, those can help. And I've done that many a time. When getting out of bed in the morning or prior to starting a workout, I will simply use the simple three word phrase, I got this before I start. And even something as simple as that can be really motivating. So you can try that. If nothing else, I got this. It'd be a good one. So try out some of those tips and I'll put a link, Eric, to that entire article in the show notes, notes if you want to share that with some of the students that you work with and hopefully that that's helpful to you. So that was quite a bit that we went over just now in all of those questions. But head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 341 if you want to access the show notes for any and all of that. But we're not done yet.

We're not done yet because we had.

That final favorite part where we read this week's top review to you. And if you leave a review, if you go to itunes and you leave a review, not only does it vastly help spread the message of this show, but it also puts you into the drawing to where if we read your review on the show and you email geergreenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's geareenfieldfitnesssystems.com we'll send you a Ben Greenfield Fitness Tech T shirt. We'll send you a fancy BPA free water bottle and we will send you a beanie, a Ben Greenfield fitness beanie, which I've been wearing quite a bit when hitting the slopes. And if you just can't wait for your review to be read, you can actually buy any of that stuff. If you go to bengreetlefitness.com gear you can buy any of that stuff for yourself. It's like 40 bucks or something like that to just get the whole package, the shirt, the bottle, the hat sent to your house. You can support their show that way. You can also support it by leaving a review. And this week's review is a five star review from Anne from Germany which says great mix of information, useful tips, worth listening. She left this on Christmas Eve, December 24th. So she even went out of her way on a very important holiday to leave us a review.

That's very sweet, Rachel.

You want to take this one away?

I'd love to. All right. Ann says I find the 340 podcast on Fat burning efficiency, brain efficiency and thermogenesis highly informative. All combined, the topics made up for a pool of very useful information and must know for anyone who wants to look deeper into possibilities. A marathon podcast indeed. You're right, Ann, it was. Which will invigorate anyone who still is.

Shorter than this one.

Right. I thank Ben Greenfield for his dedication to his show, his passion for the sports and for the knowledge that he shares with all listeners. Love the show.

Thank you. Very sweet from Germany. So hopefully you will forgive us for producing yet another marathon podcast this week, but ultimately glad we could help with that pool. That pool of very useful information. Perhaps we should just start calling it the pool rather than the podcast Ben Greenfield Fitness Pool. So if you are listening in and you liked that, you can go leave a review in itunes. We'll put an easy link for you to do so along with with links and resources for everything that we talked about today. If you visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com 341 stay tuned for this weekend's show. A fantastic weekend podcast coming up on why some people who chase the silver bullet of health do more harm to themselves than good. And some really practical ways that you can avoid kind of getting dug into the hole of orthorexia or like a preoccupation with health and nutrition and fitness. Really interesting stuff. So that's coming up this Saturday.

And then next time you hear from me, I'm gonna be in Australia.

So Rachel's off to hang out with the, with the kiwi fruits, the monk fruits, kangaroos, the koala bears. I'm off to go traipse through the snow just because I can. And you are off with a head full of knowledge from the latest Ben Greenville Fitness Show. Check out the show notes BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week. You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sa.