Doubling Your Testosterone Levels, Tactics From The World Of Speed Golf, Primal Endurance & More...

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. And I usually don't really mention this, but I had a thought the other day because I was looking at my own app. I'm pretty narcissistic. I was actually scrolling through. I believe I was on the toilet scrolling through my. The Ben Greenfield fitness app, which is free, and I realized, like, that app has freaking every, like, all the show notes, all the links, all the discounts, everything. So you actually can just like be a complete idiot and not have to remember any of the links that I mentioned on the show. If you have the app on your phone or, I mean, if you go to the fricking show notes that I mentioned too. Like, I put. I spend a copious amount of time on those show notes. It takes me like an hour to put them together after I talk to a guest, just keeping track of everything they talked about. So use the app and use the show notes if you're not already, because it will vastly improve your experience with the podcast. It'll step it up. Otherwise, the podcast kind of sucks. Honestly, that's not that bad, if I don't say so myself. Today, I'm talking about doubling your testosterone levels and primal endurance and tactics from the world of all things speed golf with Brad Kearns. Pretty cool, dude. This podcast is brought to you by Gainswave. And Gainswave is a non drug treatment protocol that gives you better erections and for both ladies and for gentlemen, better sex increases orgasm intensity, like through the roof. And all it is is 20 minutes. Use acoustic sound wave therapy. You go into one of their clinics, any of their clinics, and they just blast your crotch with this focused pulse of energy into your nether region tissue, and it breaks up in old blood vessels and it makes them more elastic and it stimulates the growth of new blood vessels and it makes you feel like a young horny teenager again, honestly. So you get 150 bucks off of Gainswave. And the way that you do that is you text the wor. Greenfield to 3131. 31. Text the word greenfield to 3131. 31. I also wanted to mention this stuff called Lean. It's a formula and I've got it on my website. And it's one of those few things I take every single day before dinner. I take two of them because it has rock Lotus in it, which just clears up your liver. It's like a daily liver tonic. Not that I ever drank or ever use any substances that my liver would ever have to process, but let's say That I did this would basically keep my liver clean every day. I attribute it a great part to my consumption of the rock lotus that's in this stuff called lean. And then it's also got wild bitter melon extract in it. The same stuff that you see people using, like an Okinawa to lower their blood sugar after a meal and. And also enhance longevity. So it's basically a combination of rock lotus and wild bitter melon extract. That's it. Very simple, very clean, allows you to blast away blood sugar after a meal, supports healthy liver function. And because it reduces your glycemic variability, like how much your blood sugar fluctuates, it's also fantastic for general longevity. So it's one of my daily staples. People ask me, like, supplements, do you take all day? And, you know, in addition to my. My morning fish oil and multivitamin, I always take this stuff before dinner, always. Anyways, you get 10% off, go to GetKion, get K-I-O-N.com getkeon.com and use code BEN10. BEN10 gets you 10% off. And like I mentioned, I'll also put this in the app and. And you can find the app for free on the itunes or the Android Store or Google Play or whatever they call it nowadays. It's just the Ben Greenfield app or the Ben Greenfield fitness app or something like that. But it's handy. I was scrolling through it the other day, I'm like, damn, I forgot how handy my own app is. And then also you can go to getkion.com getkion.com and use code BEN10 to save 10% off that lean stuff or anything over there at GetKion, get K-I-O-N.com all right, let's go talk to Brad Kearns, baby, in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

So I was taking the heart rate down from 140 to 130, and about six months later, my testosterone doubled and it came up to the 99th percentile of males aged 20 to 29. When you're metabolically efficient, you have a nice range where you don't have to obsess on your daily dietary patterns. So, you know, some days I might have a big omelet for breakfast, and I might even have some chocolate at 10:30 and a big salad for lunch. And other days I might not eat anything till 2pm he's an expert in.

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

Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And my guest on today's podcast is a guy I don't think I've hung out with since I was swimming. Laughs with him down in a pool in Mexico at a. At a special retreat down there put on by our mutual buddy Mark Sisson. One of these Primal Con retreats, Where was that at, Brad? Was that? Tulum. Tulum, Mexico.

The Dreams resort in Tulum. It was my favorite of all the nine Primal Cons because for the first time, I didn't have to worry about feeding everyone three times a day. And so the previous events, like, all I did and all our staff did was, like, make smoothies in the morning, clean up, get ready for lunch, serve lunch, clean up, get ready for dinner. And, you know, eating was a big part of Primal Con. So when you go to these resorts, it's all inclusive. I mean, it was like, I remember going to the sushi place. I don't know if we hung out there, but, you know, we went in, we ordered, like, a sashimi plate, and they served it and we ate it, and we're like, can we have another one? And they're like, sure. And they just kept serving us fish all night, everything included. It was like, you know, I think we. We wore out our welcome by the end because we. We ate more than we paid.

I think we were one of the few groups there, though, who was like, between the meals, just basically hanging out on the beach, playing lifting rocks, and sprinting. So we were. We were practicing what we preach, eating copious amounts of food and training. So. And I actually want to get into, like, diet, because I know you've done some new things with your own training. But I need to give you a formal introduction, though, because a lot of you who are listening may not know that Brad's kind of like one of the masterminds behind the Primal books that come out.

From marksdailyapple.com, they've got a whole publishing company that Brad is involved with. He co authored the Keto Reset diet with Mark Sisson. If you're listening in, you may have heard me interview Mark about that wildly popular ketogenic eating strategy. We talked about primalcon, the health and fitness retreats around the world that he helped to put on. And he does a lot in terms of online multimedia educational courses too. He's even got a new one on endurance that we'll talk about later. But he also, this is where Brad and I kind of have crossed paths or at least have similar histories. He was one of the world's top ranked professionals in triathlon. He had like 30 wins around the world on the pro circuit. He competed for nine years as a pro triathlete. He won the World Duathlon Series championships. He won two national triathlon championships. He was one of the last American pro males to place in the top five in the ITU world championships. He holds the world record still for Hawaii ironman for the 24 and under age division. So the dude has a pretty intense history as an endurance athlete. And now he competes in speed golf and we're going to talk about that a little bit. But you basically play golf as fast as possible and he's killing it there. He's winning a bunch of pro golf tournaments. He's one of the top competitors in the world. He's also a high jumper now. He went from being a triathlete to a high jumper, which I find crazy because I used to be able to dunk a basketball before I competed in triathlon. I totally lost my vertical. So I want to hear how you got it back, Brad. So we'll delve into that. So now he's a top ranked high jumper too. So the dude's got it going on. Brad, welcome to the show, man.

Oh my gosh. I think you just set the record for the most glowing and spectacular introduction. And most people will just read the bio that I wrote very cleverly and I fall asleep in the middle of it.

But uh huh. I get it.

What an honor to be on the show, man. I appreciate it. And we, we have so many topics to talk about. We're just gonna hit this thing hard.

Dude. I'm actually stoked. So you gotta tell me and everybody listening, how the heck does speed golf work?

Oh, my favorite subject. You're lighting me up right out of the gate. And it's such a wonderful sport. It's very underground, grassroots sport. Not many people even know about it, but it's pretty simple. They have a tournament competition where you time yourself on the course. You're running from shot to shot carrying just a handful of clubs and they count each minute and each stroke and they add them together to get a speed golf score. So my best performance in my life on the pro circuit was third in the California Speed Golf Championships early this year. And I shot a 78 and it took me 47 minutes. So you add those together and that's a 125 is my speed golf score.

So what would be a normal score on that course if you weren't playing it super quick? Like, what would be a good score?

Well, that's the crazy thing is that the speed golf gets you into this zen, like, you know, blissful state where you're just reacting to what's in front of you, you're not thinking and getting overly analytical. Like so many golfers where they sit there and they look at the wind direction and they model these pro players on TV who are so good and have such precision and they get too much into their head and they make mistakes. So when I'm running through the course, I actually play just as good or just maybe, maybe a little bit worse than if I'm taking four hours with all my clubs. I only carry five clubs and I'm running at a pretty aggressive pace around the course to finish in 45 minutes for a regulation championship 18 hole course. But that day that I went out there and shot 78, I can't do a whole lot better than that, even on a good day of a regular golf round. And so that's the beauty of it that most people that participate, they find they're just free swinging and the tension is gone and they step up to a long putt, which you can't prepare or rehearse very well for a long putt. You just have to feel it in your, in your body and stroke the ball. And that's where, that's where it's so much fun. And you also get a great workout, unlike, you know, the sport of golf is no workout. So I like to go out there right before sunset.

Well, I get bored during golf. That's what I was gonna ask you. When do you actually hit the course to where you're not like annoying people and just playing through the whole time?

Yeah, that's the thing. It's not a very social sport because you gotta play basically by yourself because you don't want to hit your partner in the head because you're, you're going at a high rate of speed and then you have to wait till the course is empty. So what I do is I go like a half an hour before dark and most of the people are gone. And that's when I'll go off the first tee and I'll Shuffle along and I'll make a quick nine holes in 30 minutes. And then it gets dark or, you know, in the tournaments, we go off obviously first thing in the morning. And so once you're, once you're launched off the first hole, the regular players can tee off all day long, but, you know, we're done and having breakfast in under an hour. So that's like one of the best parts about it.

And you still pay the normal course fees, right? If you, if you show up and you play it just as quickly as you're playing it, you, you, you will still pay your full 18 hole fee, but you just kind of show up either before everybody else does or as everybody else is finishing correct.

And you're also taking care of the course. This is not like crazy hockey puck golf. Remember that each stroke counts the same as a minute on the course. So in a minute, you know, I can run 325 yards, which is the length of an entire hole. So if I miss short putt by being careless or rushing, I just lost myself, you know, a massive amount of time that I can't hardly make up running. So you really have to play good golf. You have to get, you know, shooting near par to compete against these guys that are top on the world circuit. And that's what makes it a really fun challenge, is you got to have that fitness base and, you know, to be able to not fall apart on the 13th hole from your legs caving in. But you also have to, you know, be strategic, hit the ball straight, and then use only five clubs and so work on these in between shots that are so difficult.

How do you get your heart rate down before you shoot? Because I do these bow hunting competitions, right? It's called Train to Hunt. And it's very similar, actually. You're doing an obstacle course race with your weapon, and then you're stopping at certain points on the course after you've been barbed wire crawling and sandbag carrying and climbing up mountains to stop and shoot at different targets. And it's actually, again, kind of similar. Like, your total score is the time you took to complete the course, but also your accuracy, right? Like how well you did hitting the animal in the vitals versus missing versus a wound, et cetera. And it's hard to get the heart rate down. What are your secrets for getting the heart rate down after you've been running at that fast of a pace before you hit?

Oh, my gosh, that sounds like such a fun sport. That's incredible. And just like in biathlon, people are familiar with the Olympics where they cross country ski and then they stop and shoot a target. And if they miss, they ski a penalty lap. And they're trying to stay calm for that thing. Really. My heart rate's not dropping much. And the funny thing is, Ben, in practice, I will keep my heart rate on to make sure I'm doing an aerobic workout. You can't race around the course every day. So a lot of times I'm just jogging and I'll notice that. I'll jog up to the ball, I'll be under my maximum aerobic heart rate. I'm sure we'll talk about that fun stuff later. So I'm under 130, and then I'll stop, get my club swing and hit the ball, and my beep will go off. In other words, the act of swinging and hitting a golf ball elevates my heart rate higher than it was when I was jogging the 250 yards to go get my shot. So you're basically in. You know, it's kind of a. For me anyway, it's pretty much of an anaerobic threshold, you know, effort there for 45 minutes. And some of the guys that are better players than I, that are true par golfers, they will take that little extra beat of time because they know that they can hit that chip, you know, within three feet instead of six feet.

That's what we do for, for the train to hunt competitions. You take the extra 15 seconds to let the heart rate get down slightly and to get. And to get your aim to the point where the pin's not moving around too much. And usually the time it takes to do that is well worth, you know, compared to, to taking a poor shot. So when you're, when you're training, though, are you doing a lot of, like, on, off training? Because, for example, like, you know, I've been doing some workouts that, that Mike Salimi, who's the world's top competitor in kettlebell clean and jerk, has given me Kettlebell clean and jerk. It's crazy. You do. You do 10 minutes of as many cleaning jerks as you can do, and he's got like two 72 pound kettlebells, and he does something like 58 reps, something like that in 10 minutes. It's nuts. Mike Salimi is his name, and I asked him, I'm like, hey, I want to try out some of your workouts, see how you work. And it's very interesting. He'll do like high intensity kettlebell swings or kettlebell snatches. Or kettlebell cleaning jerks. And he calls that the working out. But then he does working in, in between each, where he'll step away from the kettlebell after like a 20 to 30 second explosive work session. And he'll do like some really slow, like tai chi or qigong type of movements, right? Like, like pushing hands or like really slow, like, like squats where he'll, he'll draw an imaginary light orb in the air and, you know, like this, this kind of like Eastern fusion of hardcore Western training. So it's on, off, on, off. And I'm curious if, when you're training for something like speed golf, are you just, are you just out there golfing or do you have certain sessions at the gym where you're. You're training in a certain manner like that?

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it's such a question for athletes in a variety of sports to ponder and how to put the pieces together to make really the sum of the parts and training better than the whole. And I remember back in my triathlon days, I started so long ago, I'm not even sure if those results still count. Can I still call myself a triathlete? It was a distant memory. Now I don't feel like a triathlete, but I'm glad you recited those because the older I get, the faster I was. That's one of my mottos. But anyway.

When you're training for that daunting challenge of three sports, we had this mentality that the more mileage we could accumulate, that would be the secret to getting the highest performance level. And now we're getting a little more sophisticated and rethinking some of these things in how we train. And particularly I think the importance of recovery and just taking time where you're not actually swinging the club every single day. Because the nervous system sometimes copes with information during rest periods. And so you're actually becoming a better golfer on those three days that you didn't touch the club because you're coming off a binge of playing a lot or hitting a lot of balls, and then it rains or it snows and you're sidelined. And then I find many times I come back and I have this refreshing kind of perspective. And my body's working better than it ever has. And the things that I was working on before and stuck on, like I wasn't getting my hips through quickly enough. And then everything was just grooving because of the ups and downs of, you know, the general training pattern. So I'm a Big fan of that. Same with swimming. I remember there were guys on the circuit like Ken Glah, who swore that if he missed one day of swimming he would lose his feel for the water. And I found sort of the opposite. It might be an individual thing, but, you know, I'd find that I'd jump in the water after taking the weekend away from the pool and just have a little more spark in my step. Same with high jumping, which you mentioned in passing. And I've discovered that the harder I train for high jump at my age, I'm 52 now, the worse I do. And I'll pull a muscle or I'll just start to regress in my performance. If I look over, you know, a four week period where I'm getting out to the pits with more frequency because it's the proper weather or whatever and you know, the explosiveness required to jump and leap over a bar where it's a single, you know, it's a one rep max to get off the ground and clear a bar that's near the height of my head. It requires so much, you know, downtime where I'm just taking care of my body and perhaps jogging or doing these basic fitness routines where I'm not, I'm not torching my legs with heavy squats or that stuff.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean that, that's just like basic periodization really. But like, I'm curious about the actual training session itself. Like, like when you're, when you're training, I don't know if you do train aside from just like playing golf. But when you do train, do you have like any, any special ways you're training your body in terms of like on, off or, or intervals or rests or special tactics or breathing techniques that you use to kind of get your body to go hard and stop and recover quickly and then go hard and stop and recover quickly?

Not really. I'm going to give you my Lance Armstrong answer when I asked him about his mental training techniques and he said, nah.

I just go out there and hit it hard and I prepare and that's my mental training. And the same for me, I go out there and I play speed golf. But the one thing that's, I think relevant and important to everyone is that when you're training you want to have it to simulate your competitive experience. So you want to be kind of associating with what you're doing rather than solving work problems. And so when I go and play golf and I have a one foot putt to kick in, which most Golfers just give it to the player. They say, that's good, and you pick it up. That one foot putt, I realized and learned over time that I have to take that very seriously and pretend that I'm in a competitive tournament for the world Championship. Because if you don't allow your nervous system to have significance and consequence, your practice will not translate into results. And Christopher Smith, my speed golf guru up in Portland, Oregon, one of the top golf teachers in the world and also one of the greatest speed golfers of all time, if not the number one speed golfer in history. He is really big on this concept called context specificity. So that means if you're out there with your bow and you're calling it a practice session and you're indiscriminately firing at things and playing with different finger positions, that's not really a simulated competitive experience. And they've even done studies like on the practice putting green on the golf course, where a guy who's trying to make ten three footers in a row, let's say, thinking that's a really relevant practice session, different parts of the brain will light up from when he's on the 18th hole trying to sink that three footer to win the $20 bet. It's a completely different nervous system experience because you're giving yourself no consequence and allowing your mind to wander or whatnot. So I take every single putt and every single shot really seriously when I'm on the golf course and of course on the range, you're working on stuff or you're looking at your left wrist and listening to what the pro told you. But the golf course is like a sacred place. So I don't give myself any putts or hit any goofy shots for the sake of entertainment value, right?

Every shot counts. That's like what I do with the trained on stuff when I'm in season is I only take 10 shots a day. You know, a lot of people are shooting like 40, 50, 100 times a day, but every single shot, I pretend it's an actual live animal that will suffer if I don't kill it.

Right?

Wow. So I go straight for the vitals every time. Every shot I breathe beforehand, I focus and, you know, it's kind of like what you just alluded to, right? You paint actual consequences for yourself when you have to combine things like accuracy and fitness. And, you know, some, some of that too comes from having been a tennis player. And that was something I want to talk to you about. Because when I was in, in college, Dude, I was, I was a tennis player, I could dunk a basketball, I powerlifted, I did bodybuilding and then I got an ironman and as you know, you know, super slow twitch sport, you lose a lot of the power and the fast twitch muscle. But I noticed that you, as I mentioned, you got into high jumping. And I'm curious how you, how you found that process going from being an endurance athlete with a lot of slow twitch muscle to being able to get your vertical. Did you have to work hard to get your vertical back after being a slow twitch athlete for so long or is that just natural for you?

Yeah. Here's what's really weird and I think it opens up a couple interesting points. One of them was the DNA testing that's now so popular. I did DNAFIT and I came out to a ratio of like 56% strength power and 44% endurance. And it was absolutely shocking because, you know, I made my living for nine years doing what would anyone, you know, should be properly classified as an extreme ultra endurance event. Anything from two hours up to nine hours.

Yeah, well, Brad, I did that test and I was at 85% power.

Oh my goodness. Yeah, that's amazing. And so, you know, having wish I'd known that starting out because it would have informed my training patterns to be even more fluctuating with stress and rest rather than, you know, the test out as a mule where they're 85% endurance and they just get on their bike every day and ride for five hours and they're no worse for the wear and that's actually the best protocol for them. So I always found myself, you know, requiring more recovery time than the next person getting sore and things of that nature which indicate that you have preponderance of fast twitch instead of the slow twitch which doesn't get that stiff or sore. And so I had some, you know, lingering fast twitch abilities that you know, basically are muted out when you're doing that endurance training. But you know, it'd be nicer to honor though, honor that genetic predisposition and you know, choose accordant workouts even if you're training for endurance events. I mean, you know, the jumping up and down the box, like the CrossFit endurance premise, you know, that you can kind of hack the long hours with some intensity stuff and get a relevant benefit to, you know, running a marathon if you go and wait, if you go weight a squat bar and do some heavy squats, it's kind of like what's happening at mile 20 is the theory, the way I think of it. And so, you know, it's probably a good idea for certain people to mix it up.

I'll put a link in the show notes for people to this paper and this DNAFit website. But they published a really interesting genetic based algorithm for personalized resistance training where they found that when you get your fast twitch, slow twitch muscle fiber tested and you train based on that, meaning if you're slow twitch, you do higher rep, lower resistance, more endurance anaerobic work. And if you're fast twitch, you do more power and fast twitch based work training according to your genetics, results in a shockingly higher fitness response, particularly for strength and power, meaning if you're a high fast twitch muscle athlete. And this influenced me, right, because I was at the time that I got the test, I'd lift weights, I'd do things in the 10 to 15 rep range. And now I'm all creatine phosphogenic. 10, 30 seconds, 4 to 6 reps, in and out super quickly, unless I'm trying to put on a bunch of mass and hypertrophy. And there's a really significant effect when you train based on your genetic propensity for fast twitch versus slow twitch.

Yeah, it's fascinating. And Andrew Steele, the guy who got me involved with DNAFit, he's one of their, one of their principals. And he actually was an Olympic 400 meter runner. He made the semifinals in Beijing running 44 seconds for 400 meters. But he tested out with a high percentage of endurance fibers also. And the interesting thing for him was he made the semifinals in Beijing, ran 44 something and then decided that, you know, to break through and go for the gold in his home Olympics in London, he would start adding more explosive training because that's where he was kind of falling short, was out of the blocks in the first hundred. And he was known for a guy with a great kick down the home straight because he had that amazing endurance and all he did was destroy his body with adding on the explosive training that the next athlete might benefit from. And that's when he found DNAFit. And they said, dude, look at this. And so, you know, even at 400 meters, which is an extremely high intensity rapid, you know, rapid fire event, guys with endurance genetics can excel, but they have to adapt their training accordingly. So to answer your question, since I'm not doing a good job so far, more rambling and having fun, but you know, my high jumping.

First of all, I don't have many hops, so if you search YouTube and look at Brad Kern's high jump, you will see a guy with, I think, pretty darn good form. I can bend over that bar, but I don't have that explosive jump. I could never dunk a basketball nor a golf ball, but it was, you know, such a fascinating event to try to gain competency in and improve that technique with whatever jumping ability I had. So I'm mostly relying on, you know, the timing and the rhythm of, you know, getting a proper run up because it is probably the most complex event in track and field because you have an angled run up and you're transferring, you know, out of a vortex and trying to jump over a bar.

It's a fascinating challenge. And I was never good at it. Like in high school, I was probably good for a girls varsity athlete, but not for guys because I was a skinny.

So for you it was, it was more about just form more than it was some special tactic to increase your fast twitch muscle fiber after finishing with triathlon.

Yeah. And all I noticed was, you know, not being a.

Guy who's, you know, competent with fast twitch training or explosive training. I made that mistake. Kind of the endurance athlete mentality applied over to high jump where, you know, I can take 20 jumps in a practice session, no problem. And even sometimes I've had my 20th jump, be my best. And if you talk to a real high jumper, get a real high jumper on the show, they'll say, oh, you know, seven jumps and that's it for a practice session, then your legs are trashed. And that might be a really explosive athlete that, you know, can jump seven feet. That might be true for them. But, you know, I realized like applying that endurance mentality to, you know, a peak performance goal that was high intensity in nature. You really have to be patient and just not hit it hard very often and allow those workouts to absorb and benefit over time. But it's, you know, Usain Bolt talks in his autobiography about being lazy and flaking on workouts and all this commentary, you know, self reported commentary. And I remember Malcolm Gladwell brought this up too. It's like, okay, wait a second. This is the greatest human athletic specimen that we've ever seen in our lifetime. The fastest human being to ever walk on the planet earth. And he's reporting that he flakes on workouts and he's lazy. Maybe he's onto something. In other words, maybe most of the athletes in the world are perpetually over training in most every sport, including track. And maybe this is the guy who's reached the highest level of human performance ever by just picking and choosing his spots and you know, most of the time cruising or just dialing it back a little bit until he gets to the big stage.

Right. It's that concept of slowing down to go faster. And I know that's kind of part of the way that you train and what you and Mark actually preach. And for you, for speed, you know, you talked about speed golf is just like balls out for 45 minutes. Are you really for most of your training sessions just going out and going slow? And if so, kind of a two part question here. How are you quantifying how slow to go?

Yeah, good one. If you're endurance athlete, pay special attention, you know, shoot it down from 1.5 speed down to regular speed because it's a really important concept for everybody to learn.

When you're in this game for a long time, you realize that type a competitive instinct, the willingness to suffer and all these things that we bring to the table as endurance athletes. Because who the heck is attracted to a crazy event like an obstacle race or an ironman or a marathon than someone who's got that predetermined sort of suffer gene. And I was willing to do as a young man, you know, whatever it took to compete on the circuit and to be the best I could be and to challenge the top guys. And so I, you know, I had no problem going out there every day and just suffering and upping the pace if it was necessary or attacking the hills and doing all these things. And I realized that it hit, you know, a very disturbing and unfortunate dead end relating to illness, injury, breakdown and burnout. And so halfway through my career, I had to have sort of a revelation and come to the mirror moment and say, look, you can't work any harder, you can't try any harder, you can't sleep any longer. I was sleeping half my life, Ben. For the nine years that I was on the pro circuit, I slept 10 hours every night faithfully. And I had a two hour nap every single afternoon. And if I missed my nap, I was cranky and my swim workout suffered in the evening accordingly. And so, you know, it was an all in proposition. But I had to learn the hard way that slowing down is a gateway to improving your aerobic development, improving your ability to metabolize fat for energy out there on the course and all the things that you've been a pioneer and a leader in in recent years and calling attention to the importance of that. But you know, when you slow down, you allow your body to progress with fitness without the interruption of the stress response and the, you know, the high stress of workouts that are even a little bit too hard. And I talked to Dave Scott on my primal endurance podcast recently and he made this great quote of kinda hard. And so think of that in your head when you're going out and doing these kinda hard workouts. Those are the ones that over time will bury you because they're just stimulating the stress hormones, they're exceeding your aerobic limit so that you're burning a greater percentage of glucose rather than fatty acids. And all these things contribute to a high risk of decline and regression in fitness or immune response. And then secondly, you don't become as competent at burning fat. So over time, if you're out there for one hour, two hour, three hours, whatever, you're going to get beat by an athlete who has a superior engine that can burn that abundant fuel source rather than the precious fuel source that's glucose.

So how are you quantifying it? Well, like what, how do you know which heart rate is kinda like your money zone to train at in order for you to go slow to get faster?

Well, we've been, you know, talking about this, debating it for 30 years now, since I got my first polar heart rate monitor, which was the size of like today's mini iPad.

I think I've seen those. They're like dictionaries, rectangle shape.

And we're really strong on the pioneering work of Dr. Phil Maffetone and his very, very simple 180 minus age formula, which is 180 subtract your age and that's your aerobic limit in beats per minute. So If I'm, let's say 50, I'm lying. If you listen to the show carefully. But for argument's sake, 180 -50 is 130 beats per minute. And somewhere around there, it's not an exact science, but it's important to respect this and be conservative instead of aggressive here. Somewhere around 130, if I start to drift above that, it's not difficult. There's not at all that strain of, you know, when you hit your anaerobic threshold and all of a sudden you can't breathe very well and you're feeling your muscles, it's really imperceptible. But somewhere around there, you start kicking into a greater percentage of glucose being burned. So you're spiking glucose metabolism and your fatty acid oxidation has peaked around there and then it drops on the graph. If you're envisioning a Bell curve. So you're burning more calories per hour the faster you go, obviously, but you're changing over from predominantly fat to more and more glucose. You're drifting in a little bit of stress hormones into the bloodstream. Because even a workout that's kind of hard, that's up at 137 or 142 or 148, I'm still not suffering of any nature, but I'm doing something different metabolically. And over a six week or a six month or a six year window, this is where you're going to struggle and suffer because of your competitive instinct that wants to have that sensation of getting a decent workout every time, rather than understanding what it's like to build your aerobic system at a comfortable pace where you're just, you're trotting along, you don't feel like you're getting a workout, but what's going on side is a wonderful, wonderful sensation. And then. Now here's the funny thing. People hate it because it means they have to walk instead of jogging or means they have to jog instead of run at their usual speed. But if you're driving around Portland, Oregon, and you're lucky enough to see Galen Rupp running on the shoulder of the road, which my aforementioned Christopher did recently, and he's like, that guy's got good form. And then he drives up to him and there he is, one of the greatest distance runners in the history of America, bronze medal in the marathon. But when he's running at aerobic heart rates, he's running five, 30 miles, so he looks like he's flying. So we have this image of the elite athlete pushing themselves really hard every single day and running 5 minutes, 30 seconds per mile. But for him, that's the same as a jog walk for the average person who's out there pursuing these competitive goals. So you have to get in your mind that it's all relative and your maximum aerobic heart rate, whatever it is, if it means that you have to brisk walk instead of jog for a while, that's your ideal training point to build your aerobic system without the interruption and risk of breakdown.

Yeah, it's very similar to what I talk about in my book. This concept of polarized training that you see most of the top, especially endurance athletes in the world doing, which is about 80% of their training done at this very low frequency and then about 20% down at a very, very high intensity. And that's actually where I think, Brad, most people listen to stuff like this. They make the mistake of their easy sessions actually dialing that in, figuring out the 180 minus your age. I mean, none of that is, is, is too hard to figure out. But then what they do is they don't go deep enough into the pain cave during the 20%. Like people just don't go, I, I think hard enough during the high intensity training. You know, for example, like in many cases, I'll be walking during the day on my walking treadmill, I'll be getting chores done outside. I'll be just doing all this low level stuff to count as my aerobic training because frankly, I just don't have much time to train. Right. So, so all my aerobic stuff is just life. And then when I hit it for 20 minutes or 40 minutes or whatever my workout is for the day, I hit it frigging hard. And what I find, you know, when I, because I coach some people, you know, I look over their data, they'll do like their, their aerobic stuff pretty well. They'll, they'll do a decent job staying in that zone, staying conversational aerobic, playing by the rules. But then when they, when it's time to do the interval training session or the harder stuff, they'll maybe hit their lactic acid threshold right where the muscles are burning and you're breathing, but you're not deep in the pain cave. Or there'll be what we might call a zone 3 or zone 4 heart rate versus a zone 5 or a zone 6. Have you found this to be the case? The inability or the mistake of not going hard enough when it is time to go hard?

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because first of all, the routine you describe sounds so freaking fun and so much more exciting and inspiring than going out there and going kind of hard day after day and just beating up your body and torturing yourself. So the concept that just walking around and living an active life can get you fit is now scientifically validated that your aerobic system is getting developed even when you're at a walking pace, even if you're a fit athlete. So it totally counts toward your score as an athlete and then having to summon that competitive intensity and know that you're going to hit it hard, but it's not going to last forever. It's going to be, you know, 18 minutes of good stuff and then you're done. To me, it's just so much more easy to motivate for and celebrate after rather than the image of struggling. So I find that's the Case with a lot of people. Andrew McNaughton talks about this too on our podcast a lot where, you know, he's coaching people and saying, okay, it's time to step on it now. And they're actually, you know, I'm speculating, but it's like they're scared to go that hard because they have in the back of their mind that they're used to getting up the next day and going kind of hard. And so it's like, right, you have.

To play on both ends of the spectrum to be able to dig deep enough to go hard. You have to be well recovered. It's the way you feel if you've got a busy Saturday and Sunday and you don't get any training and you wake up on Monday and you're like, dude, I want to crush it, right? Like, that's how you should feel for those high intensity training sessions. And you only feel that way if you really, truly go aerobic when it's time to go aerobic and go hard. When it's time to go hard.

Hey, I want to interrupt today's show.

To tell you about the sunshine in your pocket.

And I have to talk in a really happy, annoying voice when I talk about sunshine, because you can't talk about sunshine and feel depressed anyways, though. So there's this thing that you can put into your ears. It's a bud in each ear and what it does is it creates this calibrated white light that passes through your ear canals and interacts with photosensitive proteins on the surface of your brain. And when that happens, you get increased energy levels and improved mood. You get a release of serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline. Reduces the effects of jet lag, jump starts your circadian rhythm, like, allows you to get to sleep better later on in the day when you use it in the morning. This device does everything except your laundry. It's called the Human Charger. The Human Charger. And you can get yours for 20% off. You just go to humancharger.com Ben and enter code BEN20 to save 20%. That's humancharger.com Ben and use code BEN20 to get 20% off. Also, you've no doubt seen a mouth watering healthy smoothie or acai bowl on Instagram or on Pinterest or whatever site that you browse for healthy foods. And maybe you thought, that's the kind of thing I should be eating, but who has the time to make that every day? Wouldn't it be great if I could Just get all those picture perfect nutrients without having to hit the farmer's market and chop up a million billion fruits and vegetables. Well, now you can get all your superfoods super fast with this thing called Daily Harvest. They literally send superfood eats straight to your door. We're talking like smoothies, activated breakfast bowls, nice cream vegan sundaes made with coconut milk. Everything comes perfectly ready to blend, ready to heat. You can keep them in the freezer. It's organic, it's unrefined. Yes. It looks as amazing as it tastes. You can actually see all of the whole ingredients when you open the cup. And they freeze all of their ingredients at peak freshness, which seals in the nutrition value. And then preparing each of the cups that they send you is super easy. It's insanely easy. You just add water, or if you're feeling fancy, you can add like coconut milk or almond milk. And it's ready in 30 seconds, literally. And you don't even have to go to a super expensive juice store or the smoothie store or make up your own recipe in your blender. It's actually really, really cool. You guys have got to try it. It's delish. Go to daily harvest.com but it's daily-harvest.com, right? There's a dash between daily and harvest. Daily-harvest.com and you get three items free when you get your first box. And the way that you get that is you just use promo code Ben. So go to daily-harvest.com daily-harvest.com and then use promo code Ben and enjoy all those tasty cups that are coming your way now.

And one thing that I noticed, Brad, that I think Mark talked about this was how you noticed a pretty significant increase in testosterone when you kind of like sucked it up and lowered your training intensity and did a lot more of this aerobic training. Is that true?

Yeah, it was wild. I mean, it was a trip. And I think now I can give a plug for. I have a little blog that I don't pay much attention to, but I did write an important article about.

Testing and coming out below the normal level of free testosterone. The important one, the circulating testosterone. And I was below the range. So I was a clinical hypotestosterone person that was a candidate for replacement therapy and all that crazy stuff. And this came on the heels of a training period where I was doing speed golf and coming out from having not really trained for 20 years any significant amount in aerobic work. And all of a sudden I was putting in Some pretty good miles running the course a lot. And my heart rate was indiscriminate and getting up there into the 140s because I was calculating off percentage of max heart rate, which we now frown upon just because of this example. Like you can get too high of a heart rate if you have a high max heart rate and you're an old guy like me. So what happened was I dug myself a nice little hole over a period of several months and decided to switch gears and return with much slower paced workouts. So I was taking the heart rate down from 145 to 130 and about April to October, what's that? Six months? Six months later my testosterone doubled and it came up to the 99th percentile of males aged 20 to 29.

Do you remember what your numbers were like where you were at?

Yeah, my free testosterone was 10, 15 or something. And then my serum. There's different every time I test like a different lab gives me a different range of numbers. But I remember it was like 14.8 or something with the range being 5 to or 6 or 7 up to 20, something like that. I'm not doing precision, but it did double. I remember that. And that in five months time, going from a guy who, you know, it could be a candidate to a guy who's 50 years old and putting up teenager numbers, it was like a miracle. And all I did was slow down and possibly add a couple other things like maybe lowering the.

Carbs in my diet and get drifting more toward keto, which we've had such a fascination with now, Mark and I, with the recent book. But you know, there's things you can do that are so powerful and have such an instant effect that it really is, it should be the central focus of. If you're thinking that you're doing everything, try slowing down and see how that works.

Yeah, I'll link to that article in the show notes. By the way, for those of you listening in everything that Brad and I talk about, including the new endurance course that he's teaching online, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kerns that's K E A R N S BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kearns and you can access the show notes. See, like that Brad, I actually named an entire webpage after you.

It's incredible.

Love you. That much I know.

Basically world famous. All other things being equal. World Wide Web.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I know that the keto diet has been kind of a horse that's been kicked to Death. You know, you and I were talking about this before we started recording how, you know, a lot of what's going to be said about the ketogenic diet is kind of been said, but at the same time, I'm curious in terms of things that haven't been said or anything novel or groundbreaking that you did from a dietary standpoint or have done to see the success that you've seen in everything from speed golf to high jumping. What have you learned and what have you done when it comes to any nutrition or supplementation modifications you've made that you think people should know about if they're already kind of up to date on becoming a fat burning machine or eating a ketogenic diet, for example?

Yeah, now we're getting into some. Some fun stuff. And, you know, we spent so much time obsessing on this, Mark and I, working on the, the Keto Reset diet project. And I know before we got on the air, you said, I'm so sick of talking about, you know, the ins and outs of diet. Let's talk about other things. And it's like, yeah, I mean, don't.

Get me wrong, I appreciate it, but, like, I hate, like, for me, if I'm listening to a podcast, I hate to hear the same thing said that I heard on 10 other podcasts. Right?

Yeah. And you know what? I went to the first ever ketocon. It was a nice effort in Austin, Texas, by Brian Williamson to pull together a conference of great speakers talking about keto. But by the midway point of the weekend, after we'd had 12 speakers talk about the particulars of the ketogenic diet, I almost lost my lid. It was so informative and such excellent work. But at a certain point, it's like you have the concepts down. You're either going to implement them or not. I gave a motivational talk called Get Over Yourself and How We Suffer From Obsessive Self Importance. You can look for it on YouTube because it was just kind of trying to shake up the room a little bit. But there's some important points there that you can definitely get too deep into this. You can get too obsessed with it. You can create psychological stress on the idea that you're not adhering to your stated goals and we don't even know what the relevance is. But back to the topic of your question. One of the things that's really hot on our minds right now is, are there different paths to follow based on your answer to some overarching questions? One of them is, do you have excess body fat? That you'd like to remove or not. And if you answer yes, we're going to sort of take your hand and lead you down a different path than if you say, no, I'm good. I just want to delay aging, jump over the high jump bar and kick some butt. In speed golf, there's possibly a totally different set of questions and answers and trials and errors that you're going to go through. And in my case, my blood works great. My triglycerides are half that of my HDL and all those other fun things. My testosterone was coming along from good to great in that range as I test and retest all the time. And I, you know, I want to continue to pursue peak performance goals and delay aging. And so, you know, I experimented with deep immersion into keto for 140 days while we were writing the book and testing my finger to the extent that I got scar tissue on my bloody index finger and writing down these numbers and going, all right, you know, what does this really mean? And I feel fine. But I also feel fine when I kind of depart from that strict adherence to keto and allow my carb intake to drift up into what Mark Sisson is now calling the keto zone. He probably put that sound bite in the show. But when you're metabolically flexible, when you're metabolically efficient, you have a nice range where you don't have to obsess on your daily dietary pattern. So some days I might have a big omelet for breakfast, and I might even have some chocolate at 10:30 and a big salad for lunch, and other days I might not eat anything until 2pm so there's not a lot of regimentation to it. And I can thrive under both circumstances because I've done that hard work to escape carbohydrate dependency, which is kind of the first and foremost goal. So I think if we're sitting down with a listener and asking these questions like, hey, are you carrying excess body fat? Be can you skip breakfast and feel functional and cognitively sharp and actually maybe do a workout even, and then sit down to a nice lunch without feeling famished and tired and hungry and cranky, and if you're having some indications that you're metabolically inflexible, that you're carbohydrate dependent, then the keto reset journey is probably a bucket list item for everybody to just fine tune and improve your ability to burn stored energy rather than rely on ingested calories. But beyond that, I think.

It'S getting cute here on the Cutting edge, where there's just so much talk about these sound bites that I come across. Like, if you ingest 15 to 20 grams of carbs right before a workout, you'll get a performance boost. I'm like, what about if you ingest Skid Row's Slave to the Grind from 1993 before a workout? You'll definitely get a performance boost when you play that. And it's a little bit too much of kind of. I don't know what to call it. It's just sort of self indulgence over obsession, whatever.

Now how about things like fasting before a morning workout? Those type of things. Because some people have found that they've experienced a decrease in testosterone from doing hard workouts while fasted. I know my friend and a guy who's been on this podcast before, Dr. Michael Ruscio. He found that when he would do a lot of these workouts, fasted or wait for a long time after workout to eat, he did see better body composition. But his testosterone went down, his libido went down. I'm curious what you do as far as fueling for some of these workouts when it comes to timing.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And I read the rationale why and it makes sense. And then you hear Art Devaney and Mark and others talking about these amazing autophagy benefits of especially pairing fasted workouts. Workout pairing workouts with fasting. So I think there's some individuality here where you have to test things out and people like Dr. Kate Shanahan making really simple and.

Large observations like when your glycogen is depleted from an intense workout and those glycogen suitcases are open, the ingestion of carbohydrates during that time is going to have a different effect on your body than if you slam them at your morning breakfast at the hotel with your oatmeal and orange juice and brown sugar and toast with jelly on it. So I think the timing is a big factor. And when you're around workouts, you have a little bit more flexibility to either one. Work fine. For me, I can fast for several hours after my highest intensity sprint workout that I do, or I can come home and have a big recovery meal. And I'm not sure that.

There'S a huge disparity in the long term consequence. But one thing we talked about offline is coming out of this strict keto period, just for no big reason, I decided to loosen up the purse strings and throw in the corn tortillas back into the Mix and the occasional popcorn enjoyment. And eating more dark chocolate and more nut butters and things that were probably taking me out of that strict keto limit of 50 grams a day.

And which I do. Which I do every day, by the way. Do what every day? At the end of every day, I just eat whatever I want. I mean, good, good clean food. But yeah, my body feels amazing. I sleep better, my testosterone stays elevated. So, yeah, at the end of every day, unless it's a super easy week or unless I'm traveling and sitting on a plane all day or whatever, like whatever my wife puts on the table, if it's like a freaking giant ass grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup on her sourdough bread with some parsnip fries on the side and a big glass of wine. Like, I'll go total carboholic in the evenings especially.

Yeah, I love that, Ben. I think that, you know, I've had a similar sensation. Like, I remember we were in Vegas a month ago and I had. I went to the famous chef. What's his name? The hamburger guy. Oh, Gordon Ramsay's restaurant. They had a big hamburger and they had these sweet potato fries coming in that were dusted with powdered sugar. And they were so fantastic. I had two orders and this was like 11:15 at night after watching a show. And it tasted so good. I slept fantastically. I sprinted up the hotel stairs for a great workout the next morning. And, you know.

The enjoyment factor is also part of the picture. And you're talking about, you know, Jess is making something good for you. You enjoy it, you're having good times, you're watching a good show on Netflix. I Curb youb Enthusiasm. Sorry for the commercial, but things work out fine. Now, if you're frustrated and you can't get this excess body fat off and you've tried everything or you say you do, maybe we have a different sort of experience for the next 90 days or whatever. But I think in general terms, I've actually gone on to this next phase where inspired by Dr. Tommy Wood, nourishbalancethrive.com and all the great stuff they're doing. I have some shows with him on primal endurance.

They're super smart. He's really cool. We were just hanging out in Iceland.

Oh, great. Yeah, the conference there. But he said, look, you should probably eat more food. You should probably get more nutrition into your body due to your athletic training regimen, and you're trying to do crazy stuff as an old guy. And so he inspired me to get going on this morning, green smoothie with all the powders that they sent me and the particular nutritional supplements that they identified for me and the Primal Fuel, the great meal replacement, and then a whole bunch of frozen green produce. And so I've gone on to that kick instead of the fasting kick, where I'm just waiting till noon to eat anything. And I didn't have big complaints when I did the fasting kick, but at this point I feel like I can perform and recover, especially from intense workouts, a little better by upping my overall nutritional intake.

Yeah, that's exactly what I found was doing that big morning smoothie versus the I can't get by with the whole cup of coffee and ketones thing unless I'm not training. But I hit it pretty hard and I like to have me a good sized breakfast. Although this morning was an exception. I had to I do a lot of these blood tracking tests. And so I had a test this morning. I had to drive to the Quest labs to get done. And so I was running tight on time for the podcast. And this is what I'll occasionally do is I'll just make a cup of coffee. And I usually do decaffeinated coffee just because I don't really get too far down the caffeine bandwagon. But like this morning, I blended up my coffee with some coconut manna and some almond butter and a couple of scoopfuls of this dark drinking chocolate and some chaga mushroom. And I just kind of sipped on that during my entire first podcast that I recorded this morning. So even if I'm not doing my big smoothie, I put a copious number of calories into a mug and sip it. So I'm right there with you. I feel a lot better when I take that approach. And by the way, for those of you listening in, you should go listen to the podcast I've done with Tommy. I'll link to it in the show Notes where we talk about a lot of these kind of concepts.

So, yeah, and speaking of the other side, when you're enjoying yourself at night, you know, I want to put another plug in for that enjoyment factor. And if I know there's some talk about not eating after dark, Dr. Panda's work is so impressive and other people are making that same contention. Or that carbs could have a more deleterious effect at night because you're not moving after that. But you know, if you want to enjoy yourself and you report, you know, no adverse circumstances or effects after, that's great. But you do want to be aware and see how things work for you. And you know the old example of the hangover, it's like, was it really worth it to over consume a poison to the extent that you have a hangover, or could you, like, want to rewind the clock and stop at that. At that second drink and have a lovely old time without the adverse side effects?

Yeah, I absolutely agree. And for me, like, sitting down with my wife and my two little boys at dinner and not being that guy who shoves my plate away and turns up my nose because the macronutrient count is not ideal for me, it's not worth it. I like to sit there and enjoy dinner with my family. And that's the time of day where even though I dial everything in up to that point, I let myself go at dinner and I just hang out with the family and have fun.

One other thing I want to talk about was we have a lot of listeners who are into gear and tools and biohacks and even different forms of exercise equipment, right? Like, whether it be kettlebells or vibration platforms or whatever. Do you have any little pieces of gear or tools or hacks that you use that you found to be really efficacious for you in your training?

Yeah, I don't.

Aside from that little. Aside from that little. How many golf clubs do you carry? Five golf clubs.

I got my five golf clubs. Loving those. I don't like to. I like to make sure the connotation is healthy. When we use a term like hacks, which we can understand the meaning, but when you try to apply that to me in a shortcut, I don't like that type of thinking. So I like to think of an advantage or a strategy that works. One thing I'm getting into now is jumping into the cold tub, because the research is fascinating and I'm looking for a way to. I want to wake up every single morning and feel really sharp and alert. I don't like to have that 75% feeling that I get a lot of times, especially at my age. So. So I'm looking for fun ways to do that. And my high school buddy, Dr. Dave Cobrin, huge commitment to fitness, Southern California guy, and he has an ice machine set up right at his master bedroom bathtub. So he dumps a couple ice blocks in. He runs two miles at sunrise at a very slow aerobic pace, and then jumps into the tub for five minutes. And he reports that after that minimal fitness activity, not very time consuming, he feels like a million bucks the rest of the day. So I'm playing around with the, the cold soak. I know you got the river there in your backyard or close by, right?

I have the river and I have a 19 foot endless pool also. Oh, nice that I had a crane dropping in a forest by my house. I jump in that and I just don't heat it at all. But yeah, I mean, a lot of people don't know, like, you can get these ice makers off of fricking Amazon. Like, you know, they're not quite as big as the commercial ones, but you can, you can have access to ice more readily than you would have if you were just like swinging by the gas station and grab a couple of bags. And I love that approach. Just like having something cold that you can jump into in the morning. Although my strategy, some people call me a wimp for this, but I like to hit the sauna and then hit the cold soak. So I, you know, I kind of get my sweat on and I'm nice and toasty warm. Then I go jump in the cold pool and I, I feel a lot better. And because I'm still pretty skinny, I got low body fat percentage. I'm not cold for so long after, I hate to shiver for half the morning. I'd instead like to get all the nitric oxide benefits and blood flow benefits without actually suffering for hours and hours after my cold soak or my cold plunge.

Wow, that sounds fun. Yeah, I wouldn't mind trying that too. I mean, the shivering is definitely a concern for me. It's happened a couple times and I'm like, is this good for me? I can't remember. I know there's something about brown fat where you're shivering and you're doing this and that, but it is.

But it's just annoying. It gets distracting. When you're trying to get work done, all you think about is staying warm. So I'll occasionally throw on. They make vests. The company Cool Fat Burner makes a vest that you can pack ice into and wear during the day. And you can take that on or off and then kind of warm yourself up after you've taken it off. But yeah, ultimately I draw the line when it comes to just like shivering for hours. Unless I'm getting ready for an event where I have to do that. Right. Like, I did the Spartan race back east where it was 38 degrees below zero for like three days. And I did like a full month of just like super cold stuff leading into that. I even got weird looks from my neighbors because I'd go On these underwear runs through the snow with just my, you know, with my shoes on and my underwear and a little beanie cap and some gloves. But I don't do stuff like that unless it's sports specific. Right. Unless there's an actual event coming up where I need to use those skills.

Right. You got those hormetic stressors, you know, that have a positive end benefit, but if you're in the cold too long, you have the opposite effect and you catch a cold. So it's tricky, fun stuff to play with. And yeah, I wouldn't mind that reheating on the other end. So if anyone listening is in the hot tub business and you want to sponsor Ben and I with a.

Get a sauna dude. I helped Mark get hooked up with one of these clearlight saunas. Talk to him, go try his sauna out next time you guys are hanging.

Clear light saunas.

Nice. It's an infrared sauna. My wife and I were in it last night, actually. It's just perfect for toasty warmth in the morning or just chilling and relaxing in the evening and kind of activating the parasympathetic nervous system with some of the warmth and the light sweat. Hey, one other thing I wanted to ask you about was something I alluded to. This online course that you're doing, I think. What's it called? The Primal Endurance Mastery course.

Correct.

Okay, so is that just basically, like all these concepts that you talk about, from like, ketosis to aerobic training, et cetera, laid out in a special curriculum, or what exactly are you doing with that course?

Yeah, the goal here was to just broaden the learning experience that you get from a book, because reading a book is great. Mark and I wrote this book called Primal Endurance, and we put our heart and soul into it and. And talked about all our life experience in the endurance sports scene and tried to be completely comprehensive where we're talking about the aerobic base building, the introduction of intensity in the proper manner, periodization to properly balance your year, all the complementary things like recovery techniques and mobility flexibility exercises. So, you know, the book is a nice journey for the endurance athlete of any sport in the endurance scene to learn how to do it right and to preserve your health while you're pursuing these ambitious endurance goals. So, you know, starting from the book, to enhance that educational experience, we kind of brought the book to life with this huge library of video instructional and informational videos that you can access online by enrolling in this course. And so I traveled around the continent for a year and talked to many of the world's leading experts in endurance training. Many of the great all time athletes like Olympic gold medalist Simon Whitfield, two time Ironman champ Tim Debum, Olympic gold and silver medalist McKeely Jones. And we had some amazing insights just sitting down with these folks. I'm sorry I didn't get up to Spokane, man. The next time we'll make that part of the plan. We'll jump in the river, we'll try not to shiver, we'll freestyle rap at the end of the show. Yo, back to the topic.

I love it.

I didn't want to drop it. There we go. So when you do this primal endurance online course, you get insights from a couple dozen of the world's leading experts. Diet training, we got Maffetone on there, we got Kate Shanahan, people that I've mentioned during the podcast here and then primarily me and also a little bit of Mark. But I walk you through every single topic and every chapter in the book. So if you're too busy to read, like I still, I gotta admit man, I got beyond training at my bedside and I'm like part way through it. But there's so much information thrown at us each day that sometimes the video instructional experience, educational experience is appealing and to different types of learners. You know when you're talking about improving your running form and having an explosive takeoff with the foot dorsiflexed as you leave the ground, just turn on the video and I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about. Rather than trying to read the, you know, the, the technique instruction in a book.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. And I looked through the curriculum and I'll link to this in the show notes. You guys can check it out. But there's. You guys have interviews like four different interviews with, with Phil Maffetone, a couple with Andrew McNaughton, Debbie Potts, Gordo Baron, Mark Sisson, a bunch of pro triathletes. I mean it's a pretty comprehensive program. It's like all, it's like an entire book but broken into multimedia and interviews. So very cool. You guys have everything on here. Self myofascial release, Holistic method, Paul Lundgren on mindfulness and mindset. Bunch of drills and techniques for swimming. This is a cool resource.

Did this take a long time to put all this together?

Oh yeah. And it was so much fun and we totally over delivered. I mean it's a bit of an investment. I think it's 3:47 to sign up for the course but you have lifetime access to all this. And we have ongoing support on Facebook and doing other programs for the students. But I wanted to kind of help people take this journey and in many ways do as the experts say, not as some of us did, because there's a lot of pitfalls in the endurance scene from overdoing it, having an ill advised approach, not understanding periodization, buying into these flawed cultural notions that endurance training should be about struggling and suffering and all this stuff. You know, we want to clear the decks and say, look, you can balance a young, healthy family and a career and still do crazy endurance and feel that incredible achievements of doing something grueling and challenging, but you have to do it the right way. You can't fool around and have an indiscriminate approach here. So it's the same with, you know, listening to your podcasts and, and getting into the great material that you've prepared in written form and also in multimedia. And it's like, we have to get an education here and then go execute a focused plan. So I want to give people the ammunition and also the inspiration because like Mark says a lot, I could tell you everything you need to know in a couple pages. Slow the F down, limit your heart rate, take different periods of the year and take some rest periods and then take some intensity periods and then take some aerobic periods. You know, all this stuff is basic, but, you know, you need to be engaged and excited and enthusiastic. So that's why I got so many people on camera to, you know, talk about fun topics. Simon Whitfield gave me one of the greatest one liners. You know, we're sitting by the ocean in his home in Victoria, B.C. he's done with his career. He's got an Olympic gold and an Olympic silver on the wall or in the drawer. And I said, so what are you doing now, man? Like, what's your, what's your, what are your goals or what's your training regimen like? And he goes, you know, today I'm coached by my 80 year old self. And what he meant by that was he wants to honor his 80 year old self with his training decisions that he makes right now. He wants to promote longevity. He doesn't want to get injured. He doesn't want to overdo it. He doesn't want to get his mind warped by an overly stressful approach that he copped to when he was trying to go for the Olympic gold. You know, he had 23 people on his entourage that were, you know, counting on him to bring, bring the gold home. For Canada. A lot of pressure, a lot of stress, a lot of false starts and setbacks. And now he just likes to get on his paddle board and paddle out into the shipping lanes near Victoria, British Columbia. But you know, it's such the one liner right there was worth me taking the trip up there to interview him because you know, you got to understand the importance of being coached by your 80 year old self right now, whatever age you're at.

Yeah, yeah, I'll have to look him up sometime. He's actually not too far from me and he had reached out to me a while ago wanting to get together and hang out and do a workout or chill. So I'll have to reconnect with Simon. But in the meantime you have tons of solid guests on here, so I'll link to this for those of you listening in over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kearns I will also link to Brad's article about how he maximize his testosterone levels. My podcast with Mark on this Keto Reset diet. My podcast with Mike Salemi about his kettlebell clean and jerk training, the DNA fit, the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast with Tommy Wood, a whole bunch more. And of course this primal endurance mastery course. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kerns that's K-E A R N S to access all the goodies. Brad, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man. You're a fascinating cat. Everything from, from speed golfing to high jumping.

I gotta say Ben, that was one of the funnest podcasts and most engaging. I'm actually gonna go listen to it myself because we hit it hard.

That's pretty narcissistic, dude.

But you know, we had a lot of great information coming out and I think it deserves a replay because you add so much to the game and especially, you know, in that endurance community where people have been trudging out to Hawaii or whatever, these epic events for so many years and you're doing it with, you know, a completely refreshed approach and thinking in ways that, you know, we haven't. We're taking leaps now with thought leaders like you and I think it's really, it's really healthy for people to see a different perspective and know what's possible when they do things the right way and not get overly stressed or overly caught up in, you know, the over training notions.

Yeah, I love it man, your wealth of knowledge. So thanks for coming on. And again folks, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com K E A R N S for all the shownotes. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Mr. Brad Kearns signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.