Nerdy Ways To Lose Fat, Build Muscle & Maintain A Nice Body As You Age.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, it's easy sometimes for a senior to go out and walk or hike or ride a bike and swim, and it can feel hard to strength train. But it's such a potent age reversal.

Tactic when we store our fat. Maybe, just maybe, it's biologically set up for us in a sense that we can unravel and utilize that fat a little bit easier. Or when I'm on a lower fat day where I know the fat is coming from my own body fat tissue. So what I recommend people try is.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

Mike check mic check1212 oh, sorry, I didn't see you there. I was just checking my mic. Yo. This is Ben and today's show is a little bit different. It is a focus on longevity, fat loss and muscle gain and how to achieve all of that with kind of the minimum effective dose. But it's actually a lecture by me. I say lecture, that sounds boring. A solo sode by me and by my brilliant guest, Tom us DeLauer. So before we jump into the goodness and don't press fast forward, gosh darn it, because I have important things to say. For example, my brand new book Boundless just launched and is available for pre order. This thing is already selling like hotcakes all around the world. 608 pages. Shocks me how many people actually want to read a book that is that comprehensive. It's almost like the four Hour Body on steroids with no offense meant to Tim Ferriss. It's just, it's a big book and it's hardcover. 608 pages, beautiful diagrams, illustrations, a complete research based guide to boundless energy at your beck and call anytime you want it. And thousands and thousands of dollars worth of bonuses on the book launch website, which is@boundlessbook.com boundlessbook.com so you can go check that out@boundlessbook.com this podcast is also brought to you by Kion. Kion is my playground for creating amazing supplements functional foods. We have a super tasty, coconutty, chocolatey, salty goodness energy bar full of clean energy. We've got antioxidant rich coffee that absolutely will knock your socks off in terms of the flavor profile. Especially when you have a piping hot cup of coffee with one of the Kion clean bars that's a perfect brekkie. And we have fat loss supplements. We've got immune system boosting supplements, joint support supplements, tons of Great content. It's all yours for the taking at get.

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Well, hello, you are about to HEAR A special two part episode featuring me and my guest Tom DeLauer. We are going to be filling you in on everything you need to know about how to burn fat and build muscle with the minimum effective dose of training. And particularly you're going to get tips on how to maintain muscle mass and functional athleticism even as you age. So you hopefully know who I am. Thomas has been on my show three times. Three times. I'm going to link to all his other podcast episodes where we talked about everything from curcumin and inflammation to the ultimate alcohol mitigation guide to everything you need to know about magnesium supplementation. We covered all that stuff in previous episodes, so go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Tom and Ben that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com tomandben if you want to hear those previous episodes or if you want to delve into the show notes for anything that Tom and I chat about today. So who is this cat? Well, Tom is considered to be one of the world's leading experts in the world of chronic inflammation and the response of the human body to a low carb ketogenic diet. He was a 280 pound overweight corporate executive and he transformed his body. He's been a on the COVID of multiple magazines.

He's completely amazing in terms of the way that he actually transformed himself and did it the whole time while being a busy corporate executive. He's going to share a lot of those tips with you today, but even before Tom fills you in, I want to delve into what I have for you. Now this is a topic that I address in detail in my new book@boundlessbook.com this whole minimal effective dose of training, maintaining functional athleticism and a nice body as you age. And this is important because my entire book is built around building kind of the optimized physical and mental and spiritual state to give you boundless energy at your beck and call whenever you want it, quickly and safely and preferably without oodles and oodles. Of hours spent in the gym. So what I want to start with is this. Your muscles go through a process called sarcopenia. As you age, your muscles become smaller and weaker with age. Research suggests that a key part of that decline occurs due to the muscles mitochondria, the primary engines of energy production, Degrading over time, Getting less dense, getting less efficient. Now, what they have found is that older individuals are able to improve strength by about 50% to levels that were only about 40% lower than those of younger individuals by specifically training their mitochondria. And that might not sound like a lot, but it's a lot when you take into consideration the comparison between seniors who strength train and those who do not. As a matter of fact, muscle biopsies from strength training seniors show a reversal of the Expression profile of 179 different genes associated with age. Genes that are different down regulated with age get upregulated with exercise, and genes that are upregulated with age get down regulated with exercise. So when it comes to mitochondria, specifically, strength training can reverse the mitochondrial decline that occurs by nearly 40 years, meaning that folks who are 70 years old can present with mitochondrial profiles Similar to Those who are 30 years old, with a proper strength training protocol set up. Now, exercise, of course, doesn't just affect mitochondria. It promotes the growth of fat, burning fast twitch muscle fibers. It protects DNA from the wear and tear of aging by acting on telomeres, the end caps of your DNA. And they even did one fascinating study where they measured telomeres in twins to determine the effect of exercise on aging. And what they did was they found that telomere lengths decreased with age, which is no surprise. And this was a study of over 2,400 twins. But what they found was that the twins who were physically active had longer telomeres than their sedentary counterparts. And those who had more than three hours of vigorous physical activity per week had the same telomere length as folks who were 10 years younger than them. That means that people who don't put heavy physical loads on their body can be biologically younger. I'm sorry, people who do put heavy physical loads on their body, rather, can be biologically younger by 10 years. And because these subjects were twins, that means this effect wasn't due to genes, but the lifestyle factor of exercise. In other words, long story short, when one twin exercises significantly more than the other, that twin that exercises has longer, more durable telomeres. They did another study in mice where they replaced slow twitch type 1, muscle fibers with the type of strong fast twitch type 2 muscle fibers you'd get from strength training. And then what they found was that the addition of the strong fast twitch type 2 muscle fibers, which they turned on by activating a muscle growth regulating gene, allowed these mice to become far less obese and far less insulin resistant compared to just having type one muscle fibers. Which means actually that strength training when it comes to age reversal and is probably more important than chronic cardio and chronic endurance training. Now this is important because it's easy sometimes for a senior to go out and walk or hike or ride a bike and swim, and it can feel hard to strength train, but it's such a potent age reversal tactic. And there's one other study I want to share with you before I get into some nitty gritty tactics here. And this looked into reports of abnormally short telomeres in the skeletal muscle of athletes with exercise associated fatigue. So they wanted to determine whether chronic hard exercise could negatively impact your muscle telomere lengths. So what they did in this study was they compared telomere lengths of power lifters who trained for about eight years against healthy active subjects who didn't have a history of strength training. There was no abnormal shortening of telomeres in the power lifters. And in fact, those lifters telomeres were significantly longer than those of the control group and were positively correlated to the lifter's individual records in the squat and the deadlift. In other words, the, the stronger you are, the longer your telomeres can be. So that also means that when it comes to lifting, compact, wiry, explosive, powerful muscles like those that a powerlifter has are probably even better than big, bulky, bodybuilding esque muscles. So let's take this out of the petri dish and into the real world now and look at whether strength training and powerlifting actually has made people live longer. Well, one study looked at older adults who met twice weekly strength training guidelines and they showed lower odds of dying overall. Research also has shown that regular exercise, of course, as we would expect, causes reduced risk of early death, reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, reduced risk of diabetes, and reduced risk of cancer. And one study at Oxford university and over 80,000 people found that people who play racket sports like tennis or racquetball on a regular basis reduce their risk of dying prematurely by over 47%. And the next most beneficial exercise turns out to be swimming, which reduces the risk of dying by 28% and then cycling at 15%. But there's a little Less research on strength training. However, they have shown the benefits of strength training on strength, muscle mass and physical function and a reduction in diabetes, osteoporosis, low back pain and obesity. And a more recent, larger study on more than 30,000 people on the mortality effects of older adults who met strength training guidelines, which was at least twice weekly strength training sessions had a 46% lower odds of death. Okay, 46% lower odds of death overall, 41% lower odds from cardiac problems, 19% lower odds of dying from cancer. So when I look at all these studies, what does this say to me? Like when we get down to the practical nitty gritty, lift weights, play a racket, sport, swim, ride a bike. And those would probably be like the best things that you could do as you age if you really want to get all the proven longevity enhancing benefits. I'm going to say that again. Strength, train, play a racket, sport, swim and ride a bike. Like those would be your top picks if you're going to choose anything to live longer. Now the other thing I wanted to share with you was some of the secrets that I include in my new book that I'm going to get into in brief, that I learned from a lot of older people who have shown themselves to be extremely fit and kind of have cracked the code on how to stay fit as you age. So one is Charles Ueckster. Charles Ueckster. And he has since deceased. But he was a bodybuilder, he was a public speaker, he was a rower, he was an entrepreneur, he was a fashion designer, and he was a well decorated British sprinter. He held records in the 60 meter, 100 meter, 200 meter. And while we of course saw that he strength trained and that he sprinted, which is really crucial for maintaining muscle mass and hormone levels as you age. He also said this regarding his diet. He said variety is key. I start every day with the protein shake because as you get older your protein synthesis no longer functions as well. I avoid sugar and eat lots of meat, especially fat. I've been on a fat trip lately. Piles of fat. I was in the supermarket the other day and was perplexed to find yogurt with zero fat. What on earth is that? The idea of a nutrition pyramid where at the top is a little fat and a little meat and at the bottom is a lot of carbohydrates. Is, excuse me, bullshit. Our theories of nutrition have resulted in a pandemic of obesity. Could you imagine a hunter gatherer enjoying a low fat yogurt? So this dude was into a higher fat diet. And it's likely that if you come from a Northern European ancestry like Charles, you probably would also thrive on that type of approach. Are there some people who may not do with like a high saturated fat intake? Absolutely. But this gives us clues when we look at particularly the area, the world Charles came from and what worked for him. And if you want to learn more about ancestral diets, go listen to my recent podcast with Dr. Michael Smith, because we talk about this stuff in that show about how to choose a diet that's right for you. Next, there's Laird Hamilton. So what I like about Laird is his best anti aging secret, that he actually shared this on a video when I was down at his house in Kauai. He keeps learning new stuff and if you go into his garage, it's chock full of like unique toys that he's invented to attack ocean waves in different ways, like, you know, jet skis and foil boards and balance training devices. And he's always delving into all these different things. And we see this also in a book by renowned neuropsychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen. And he identified four different areas of the brain that you need to challenge. The prefrontal cortex, which is improved with things like meditation, crossword puzzles, Scrabble and chess. The temporal lobes, which would be like learning musical instruments. The parietal lobes, which would involve things like juggling and map reading and like spatial coordination. And then the cerebellum, which is activated by things like dancing and yoga and tai chi and coordination games like the racket sports that I mentioned earlier, even table tennis. So Dr. Daniel Amen's book, Change youe Brain, Change youe Life is really good because he gets into tactics and how to activate each of those different lobes. But ultimately, in addition to eating real food, preferably with ample amounts of natural fats, tip number two is to learn new stuff constantly, just like Laird Hamilton does and still does. Or did, still does. Next is a tip from my friend Mark Sisson. He's got one of the finest six pack abs you've ever seen, mid-60s. And his secret is, and this is going to be something I already mentioned, he doesn't engage in long, slow, chronic cardio. He does short, fast, all out sprint workouts about once a week, all year long, ultimate Frisbee, high intensity treadmill intervals, hard uphill cycling. He also does, and he doesn't do that a lot. He's doing that like once a week. He also does intense sessions of heavy full body weightlifting one to three times per week. And then in between, he just avoids long, unbroken periods of sedentary time by doing things like treadmill workstations and relaxing paddleboard sessions. So his whole philosophy is lift, move, sprint. Okay, so we got eat natural fats, learn new stuff. Lift, move and sprint. And then there's Don Wildman. Don Wildman. He recently passed, but I first learned about him in Vice magazine, and I'll link to the magazine article called the Hardest Workout in the World that he would actually do three times a week. And I've been in his basement in Malibu and done this exact workout. And I can feel the lactic acid just oozing out my pores. And. And I would say that's probably a little much. He probably didn't need to go to that level, but he did occasionally do epic and scary things. He would do paddle boarding and big wave surfing and helicopter snowboarding. And I think every once in a while, like having some kind of adventure or epic thing that you do about once a year, that's also a really cool way to keep you training, keep you motivated, and keep you young. So do epic things and get them calendared on a regular basis. Next, there's Art Devani, and he did a fabulous podcast episode with my friend Tim Ferriss in which he outlined his exercise strategy, which is called eccentric training, which has a potent effect on growth hormone and testosterone levels. This is also known as negative training. So to do a negative deadlift, for example, you would set the bar at a certain height, like up on some blocks or elevated platforms. Platforms. Then you'd lift the bar, you'd step back, and then you'd lower that bar to the ground as slowly over as long a period of time as you can. They even sell machines now, they're called ARX Fit machines that do this for you through, like a chest press, a pull down, a squat, a deadlift, et cetera. And what they've shown is that eccentric training can double the stem cell counts in your muscles. It can cause proliferation of stem cells, and these stem cells can then exit as satellite cells, which are crucial for muscle regrowth after any exercise. And that's what eccentric exercise does for you, in addition to this potent hormone response. And Art would do this for 10 to 15 minutes every day, working a different muscle group. You could also use, like, if you read Doug McGouff's book Body by Science, you could do a super slow routine like this just one to two times per week. So Art did a lot of that, and he did a lot of postural training, like standing with his back to a wall, arching the back, keeping the head and shoulders back against the wall, then walking away from the wall without collapsing the spine and neck. And I have over a 90 page chapter in my book Boundless on just posture and symmetry alone. But this idea of eccentric muscle training and doing it frequently was one of Art's keys to staying young and staying strong. And then there's for you ladies out there, there's Olga Kotelko. Kotelko is her name. And there's this really good book called what Makes Olga Run? The mystery of the 90 something year old track Star. And here's one of the biggest takeaways for me. Olga did a very good job going out of her way to stay recovered and stay supple. She actually kept an old empty wine bottle beside her bed and used that to do like a foam roller style massage on her muscle, her fascia, her joints. And what I do is I have the book Becoming a Supple Leopard in my living room, along with all these different lacrosse balls and foam rollers and things like that. And I use that as like a cookbook in the morning. I set aside 10 to 15 minutes every morning. I protect that time, it's usually while the coffee's brewing. And I use that time to free up any little muscle in my body that needs some work done on it. So by the end of the week, I've spent 75 minutes staying, as Kelly Starrett says in his book, Supple, Staying Supple. Okay, so stepping back and looking at these folks again, we eat natural fats and real food constantly. Learn new stuff, lift, move and sprint. Rather than doing chronic cardio. Put epic things on your calendar occasionally. Make sure that a lot of your training is eccentric, like through that lowering negative load with a heavier weight. And then finally stay supple and do some kind of foam rolling or lacrosse ball work or mobility work on a regular basis. Okay, so those are the biggest tips that we get from a lot of these fit old people. Now the last thing that I want to mention to you is two different strategies in addition to super slow training and kind of like that explosive, powerlifting style training that I think can be very, very effective as a strategy to maintain muscle or to even build muscle with age. Now, by the way, before I give you these two tactics, if you really want to wrap your head around how to do super slow training effectively, and most of my clients do one to two of these sessions per week, read the book by Dr. Doug McGuff called Body by science. Okay. And if you want to do the type of explosive body weight training that I do and that a lot of my clients also do, I'll put a link to the New York Times article, the Scientific 7 Minute Workout. It's a 7 minute, very explosive bodyweight workout. And I'll typically have the folks I work with do that seven minute workout, take a brief breather, and then do it one more time. And the folks who really just love to work out, I'll have them do it twice. Okay, so everybody's doing explosive bodyweight training and like super slow training with a real emphasis on the negative part of the lift. Okay. And then finally, I've got two little hacks for you before I turn things over to Tom. Number one is they found that electrical muscle stimulation, particularly electrical muscle stimulation on your legs, in which you're literally hooking up electrodes to your legs to activate more muscle fibers than you'd normally be able to recruit, activates a large number of androgen receptors and results in a very good testosterone and growth hormone response after the workout. And I again, really like that as almost like a time hack or a hack that you can use when you're injured. Now, I own something called a new fit for this, and that thing can simulate a 600 pound squat. So you can literally do a full body strength training session on that thing. But what I like to do for just the best approach is I put it on my legs. I do a really hard workout on my legs one or two times a month on that thing. Very, very good way to make sure that you're constantly training your central nervous system to recruit these muscles that normally otherwise would not recruit. And then the second thing I'm a big fan of, especially as you age, is heat stress. Heat stress prevents muscle loss by triggering the release of heat shock proteins. And these heat shock proteins have been shown to not only be associated with a steep increase in longevity, but also the maintenance of muscle, even in the absence of strength training. They also can cause an increase in growth hormone blood flow to skeletal muscles and a lowering of blood glucose, along with a building of new red blood cells. So a regular sauna practice is, in my opinion, especially if you can get a quick cold soak after integral and crucial to maintaining muscle and staying very healthy as you age. Okay, so let's review before we turn things over to Tom. First of all, we know we need to strength train as we age. We also know that racket sports, swimming and cycling are very effective. We know that we need to Eat real food, do epic things, learn new stuff. Lift, move and sprint. Train eccentrically and stay supple as we age. Next, if you're going to choose any two forms of strength training, especially as you age, as the most effective way to use your time, I recommend super slow strength training with the real emphasis on the lowering eccentric motion of the lifting phase. And also short, explosive body weight training sessions that are done very quickly and powerfully. And then finally, if you want to throw the two best biohacks into the mix, if you were going to choose any, choose a really good electrical muscle stimulation machine and a really good sauna practice. Okay, so I dig the idea of playing football with my grandkids when I'm 90, free diving when I'm 95, and hunting an elk when I'm 100. And I use the same tactics that I just described to you in my own protocol to keep myself young. All right, so we're going to turn things over to Thomas for his tips. But remember, everything Thomas talks about, everything I just got done talking about, you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com TomAndBen and then in very great detail in my new book@boundlessbook.com Hey, I want to interrupt today's show to tell you about something that I use, use anytime. Anytime I can't get in sunlight, I use this to help me sleep at night. 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You know, there's a lot of things that I learned when, when I was overweight and a lot of things that I've learned, obviously through becoming somewhat more of a. I guess you could call me a biohacker, but I don't even really use that term for myself. But the sad truth was since I was in that corporate world for so long, I needed to find ways that I could change my lifestyle in small incremental ways that wasn't going to just make me a whole new person. I needed quick ways to Sort of change how I ate or quick ways to change just my habits. So the whole purpose of what I want to talk about today is how busy people, how people that are stuck in just kind of the minutiae of the day can break out of that and start having some. I don't know, I'd almost call it nerdy ways to lose fat, nerdy ways to get healthier. I don't want to have this all be based upon losing weight or getting fit or burning body fat, because I think there's a lot more to, well, life than that, but a lot more to just the depth in which we look at health than just that we have to look at. Okay, well, do we get an emotional ROI on the changes that we're making that allow us to be better with our family? Does it allow us to make better use of our time because we're thinking clearer? And I know that Ben talks a lot about blood sugar control and keeping things balanced in that sense, just because it keeps you level headed and it makes your decision making process that much better. And quite frankly, that's the first one that I want to start with. It's nothing crazy and it's echoing some of the stuff that Ben has talked about. One of the big things that I do is in the morning, I do whatever I can to keep my blood sugar as stable as possible. So whether that means I'm fasting or whether that means I'm only consuming some fat and minimal protein and definitely minimal carbohydrates, any one of the likes makes such a big difference. I find for me personally, and when I was 280 pounds, that one of the biggest things that messed my days up were when I would have even a remote blood sugar spike in the morning and then I would have some form of crash later in the day, it would just really throw me off. And there's so many different studies that back up, you know, drops in blood sugar and ghrelin response and all these different hunger hormones and things that we have to pay attention to. But the simple fact of the matter is, is that I think a lot of it comes down to just insulin response and taste too. It's like you get the taste of something that causes a blood sugar spike and you're going to naturally want to eat later. Call me crazy, but I feel like this subconscious desire to eat that we may not even realize as a result of our blood sugar dipping a little bit actually interrupts our thought process, interrupts our thinking. So for me, I was in a high stress Corporate kind of private equity world. And here I was overweight, and even when I was trying to make healthy changes and I was trying to eat clean, I was still eating lower glycemic carbohydrates in the morning. And for me, that just messed me up. I found that three hours later, I didn't actively feel hungry, but I felt something interrupt my thought process, something interrupt my thinking. And it was really frustrating and I couldn't really put my finger on it until I got more in tune with my body and I got more biohacky and more nerdy looking at that. So my first bit of advice for, for people that are just trying to make one or two small little changes is keep protein to a minimum in the morning, keep carbohydrates to a minimum in the morning, and ingest fats that you know are going to work with your body. Well, okay, A lot of people will do MCT coffee. They'll do things like that. I have some issues with just adding MCT to coffee because MCTs trigger a catecholamine response. Now, don't get me wrong, MCTs are great and they have their purpose, but if you are just relying on that, you have to remember that you actually get a little bit of an adrenaline spike from mcts. That's what can wreak havoc on some people. If you ever wonder why the digestion issues occur with mct, it's because it absorbs so fast. Now, when you have anything that absorbs that fast, you're going to potentially trigger any kind of adrenaline or catecholamine response because it's absorbing so fast. Studies have shown that there's actually a resting metabolic rate increase that occurs when ingesting MCTs simply because of the adrenaline. So that being said, MCTs have their place because they can boost your resting metabolic rate. But mcts can also mess up sort of.

That mental continuity that you like in the morning. I prefer having MCTs a little bit later in the day. We can talk about that later. But that's just some food for thought. So maybe tone it down with maybe some ghee, or tone it down with maybe more of a coconut oil versus straight up mct. That's just at least what I've experienced. Now another piece that I want to talk about. This is so funny because people don't usually want to do this because it seems. Well, men don't usually want to do this because it seems so non masculine. And that's paying attention to things like foam rolling in the morning. And I'm not talking about doing this from a flexibility standpoint. Again, one of the things that Ben and I have even talked about is that you can't necessarily just mash a muscle with foam rolling and massage into being more malleable.

A lot of it takes just biomechanics, but also being able to move through a full range of motion. So I'm not talking about foam rolling from the sake of trying to get more flexible. I'm talking about foam rolling to try to stimulate lymphatic movement. One thing that people tend to forget it is that fats often get mobilized through our lymph system, but so does, obviously, our lymph. And our lymph is what is allowing our immune system and white blood cells to ultimately circulate and do their job. It's a little bit more complex than just that, but for all intents and purposes, and we have to remember that when we are talking about circulating blood, we have a heart. We have a heart that beats. A heart that beats and allows us to pump blood throughout our body. Okay, that's great. That means we can be sitting down, totally sedentary, and still pumping blood, for the most part, to our extremities and wherever it needs to go. Now, what about lymph? Lymph does not have its own circulatory system. It doesn't have a heart. Okay. Your lymph, which, again, is what's responsible for moving so much of your fat and your lymph fluid and white blood cells, it requires muscle contraction to actually have anything move. So it needs your muscles to relax and contract to essentially pump the lymph through the body. Now, when we take into consideration that fat is mobilized in the lymph, you can start to understand that. Wait a minute. It would be a good idea to get this mobilized. That way, things can circulate through the liver. They can circulate where they need to go to ultimately get processed. It's pretty wild. Not to mention, of course, you have, you know, sort of the fascia side of things, too. Okay. Because the fascia is where our lymph nodes sit. And foam rolling actually allows oxygenated blood to nourish and hydrate the fascia, therefore boosting the lymphatic drainage. So it's your body's ability to essentially flush toxins. So it can help relieve pain that way, too, Especially when you're starting to lose weight, you generally have more toxins that do get liberated. Okay, I can digress for one moment here. When people talk about. About the ketogenic diet and they talk about the keto flu. If any of you are experienced with keto or you've heard of the keto flu, then you know what I'm talking about. People start the keto diet and all of a sudden they get flu like symptoms. I am a firm believer that people that have a large amount of toxins and excess amounts of fat soluble vitamins stored up in their fat get more intense keto flus as they start liberating more of these fats because then it's liberating more of these toxins. Well, we have to keep things moving and if we get in the habit of, of foam rolling then we can actually prevent this. Now I'm not talking large investments of time here. I'm talking, I'm literally talking three to five minutes of targeted, mainly rolling out the lats, latissimus dorsi and trying to get the lymph nodes kind of under the armpit a little bit more. It's an area that quite frankly hurts a little bit when you roll it out, but it stimulates so much energy. It's really wild. And part of me thinks that it's the pain threshold. There's a lot of studies that show that brain derived neurotropic factor BDNF and just boosting our neurotransmitter function in our brain and boosting nerve growth factor in our brain too comes as a result of being up against high levels of lactate. So for example, heavy resistance training or high intensity interval training can boost BDNF levels because you're having to withstand this high amount of lactate. Now, pretty fascinating stuff. I think it's really interesting. But I also think that it has something to do with, with pain. I really do. Because we have pain receptors, pain sensors in our brain. Obviously when we get headaches, we can literally feel them. And I think that when we allow ourselves to go through some pain, it triggers our brain to actually grow. It triggers these bdnf, it triggers this nerve growth factor. And part of it could be a lactate issue, part of it could simply be pain. That's a little bit of my theory and sort of a hypothesis that I've had. But anyhow, the point is it really sleep makes a big difference. I mean this lymph is ultimately bathing our cells, providing them with nutrients and oxygen and picking up tons of unwanted substances. I mean we're talking bacteria, we're talking all these different things. So something to just consider there. Okay, the next thing that I want to talk about is utilizing A sauna, strategically. Okay. What I don't want you to do is get in the habit of using a sauna every day unless you have a very strict regimen that you want to follow with it. Okay. It can vary widely, but it's all about heat shock proteins. And I'm sure Ben has talked about this before, but heat shock proteins are really fascinating things. They're also known as stress proteins, and they're highly conserved and they're present in all organisms and cells in all organisms. So they're very prevalent. They play very critical roles in what is called the folding and unfolding of proteins. So they allow proteins to essentially unfold, to be able to change or adapt to stress. We have these little folds of proteins inside our cells, and it's complicated to explain, but basically we want those folds to be able to be unfolded and folded back up at the right time. So when we look at it with heat shock proteins, like when we're under stress from heat, what happens is you have an expression of these heat shock proteins, and they help protect the cell by stabilizing the unfolded proteins, giving the cell time to repair. So we think saunas are great because we sweat and we detox. I don't even know if we really detox. I mean, I'm sure there's some fat burning that occurs and that probably causes a detoxing effect. But I think the biggest thing is it's the hormetic effect. You're placing the cell under stress to the point where it actually activates a specific protein, heat shock protein, to protect it and boost your immune system, but also creates a more resilient cell that is ultimately stronger. And everything in life is about adaptation and stress and trying to make sure that we are constantly getting enough stress to stimulate our muscles and stimulate our body to withstand that stress. Then when we get back, by contrast to normal life, things don't seem so bad. So if you stress your body physiologically by sitting in a sauna for a few minutes at high heat and doing some isometrics, or doing some intense workout or doing some form of box breathing or whatever, you can make it so that by contrast, the stressors of your day just don't seem so bad. Now, interestingly enough, there was a study that was published in the Journal of Athletic Training, and I found it really interesting because they took a look at 25 younger individuals and they were volunteers, and they had them sit in a heat stress chamber with or without heat. So 73 degrees Celsius versus 26, I believe it was and they did this for 30 minutes on separate days. So they took a look at blood samples from a subset of 13 participants, so seven men and six women before and after exposure to heat stress. So they wanted to kind of see what their baseline was. What they found was that after 30 minutes of heat stress, body temperature measured ended up increasing 0.8 degrees Celsius. Also, heart rate increased linearly by 22.4 beats per minute. And then we had systolic and diastolic blood pressure decreases. But we also had increases in heat shock proteins. So we had heat shock proteins level increase by 48.7% and ultimately heat stress 53.9. So long story short, the increase in norepinephrine and prolactin increase in the plasma ended up causing the HSPs to be able to do their job and really have a massive effect on the body. So really powerful for those nerds out there. Basically what it means is there is definitely an effect on heat shock proteins. There are multiple studies that show that heat shock proteins have powerful effects on autophagy, on just our cells resiliency. Now another thing is starting to measure your heart rate variability based on your workouts. This is a big thing. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it because quite honestly, it's not an area that I am an intense expert in. It's just an area that I've been dabbling in to try to just get the most out of my life. See, I run multiple businesses. I have a busy life, I have a busy family life, I have a good number of employees. I'm not just tooting my horn here. I'm just being realistic. I'm a busy guy. And it's quickly hit me after having kids how much time shrinks on you. So I'm constantly trying to find ways, okay, how do I know when I'm working out at the right time and how do I know when I should be taking a rest period? And that's where I discovered heart rate variability. And I started messing around with it and using things like the whoop and the oura ring and trying to determine basically heart rate variability is all about trying to make sure that you're always training when you have the right recovery. Okay, so heart rate variability, it's an analysis and a way to observe the action of the parasympathetic nervous branch of our nervous.

System.

System. So it's all about restoration and recovery. And while the body's stress, the sympathetic whole kind of fight or flight branch of the nervous system is more active and the parasympathetic branch is tuned down a little bit more. So performance is gradually restored as you start to recover. And with parasympathetic activity rising to a level where it should be. So what we're trying to do is find that way to balance that know when we're sympathetic and know when we're parasitic. Sympathetic heart rate variability does that. And that's the simplest way. So the trick is to have a good balance between the two nervous systems. As a healthy person really has a strong sympathetic and parasympathetic. What I ultimately encourage everyone to do here to keep it simple is start wearing a whoop or start wearing an OURA ring and read up on heart rate variability. It has saved me so much time in terms of working out when I should be working out and taking days off when I should be taking days off. Because as you get lost in the stress of life, sometimes you cannot ascertain what is stress physiologically and what is stress mentally and mental stress will manifest in physical stress. Especially if you're just in the smorgasbord of chaos and stress in a corporate world, you just don't. It just always happened to me that way. I could never tell, am I over training with my workouts or am I over training just because I'm stressed? And another one that I really want to talk about, but there's two more things that I really want to focus on, but one is dry fasting. And I say this with a full disclaimer. Dry fasting is intense, but dry fasting is also a way that I think you can improve your body's resiliency and allow your cells to get a little bit stronger. And I earnestly believe that I've had a good deal of fat loss success by implementing short bouts of dry fasting. So dry fasting is believed to cleanse the body quicker than water faster due to one big thing. It's molecular water. Okay, so dry fasting forces the body to obtain water from its own cells. Whereas normally with water fasting, you're providing the body with water from an exogenous source. So damaged tissues, we're talking fat deposits, edemas, tumors, they're eliminated significantly faster when it comes down to dry fasting because the body starts to burn everything that's non essential and harmful to the body. Basically, we have our own molecular water. So during a dry fast, the body survives on what is called molecular or endogenous water, or some call it metabolic water. This water is made up Just molecularly, right? We have hydrogen and oxygen in our body. Well, fat cells are a lot of hydrogen. So when we're having to make molecular water, we're breaking down fat that has a lot of hydrogen and combining it with oxygen that we breathe to make water. It's pretty amazing, right? So we can make some water. Now, it's estimated that, you know, different variations of how much molecular water we're estimated to make per day. The simple point here is that when you do this dry fasting, it's theorized that you're going to recruit more fat. Now, there's not a whole lot of scientific evidence or scientific literature published in peer reviewed studies or journals or anything talking about dry fasting, but when you actually look at the molecular side of things, it's just an interesting thing to look at. Now, I say it again with a grain of salt and the full disclaimer that it's intense. It may not be for everybody, but the reason that I say it is because you listening to this podcast are busy people and it might be a way for you to shock your body enough out of kind of this funk that you're in and just do a 10, 12 hour dry fast where you don't eat or don't drink for 10, 12 hours. Now, I can say on this podcast that you should do what works for you, but I can say from my own experience that I've done 36 hour dry fasts where I don't drink water or eat any food for 36 hours and I come out of it feeling totally fine. And I've done DEXA scans afterwards finding that I've actually dropped over 2% body fat doing that. And I'm already pretty lean, so it's aggressive for me to lose that. Now, that's my own experience. It's pretty wild stuff. So I just recommend that you at least do some research. That, and I've got some videos on YouTube and I'm sure Ben's talked about it a little bit before as well.

And the next thing that I want to talk about is really a simple one, okay? And it's all based upon this study that was published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology. When you train in a fasted state, you really do get a lot more of a benefit in terms of fat loss. Okay. What happens is you have intramyocellular lipids, and these lipids are fats that are inside kind of your muscle tissue, right? And they serve lots of purposes. They serve to, to be an immediate source of free fatty acids. For beta oxidation or they serve as possibly even lubrication. They're still kind of investigating what all these IMTGs, intramyocellular triglycerides or intramycellular lipids do. They're fascinating things. But what it's been theorized as well is that you have fat that stores in general white adipose tissue and then it migrates over to intramyocellular triglyceride fat content as someone becomes more active. So in essence, you work out, you utilize some of the IMTG content in the muscle that burns up and then it recruits from your stored body fat and puts it into the muscle again. Well, it's been found that when you are training in a fasted state, you utilize significantly more of your intramycellular triglycerides than if you don't train in a fasted state. So it ultimately does increase fat loss. But the cool thing is there's data that shows you have a direct increase in the fat that's being utilized from a respective muscle. That doesn't mean that you can site reduce. Now, there are some studies, I can't remember the specific journal, that show that sight reduction is plausible simply because the thermic effect of a muscle contracting and expanding and potentially generating more heat. But it's pretty minuscule. Okay, you can't just sit there and do a bunch of side bends and get shredded obliques because you're going to burn fat there. It's negligible. But if you're already lean, you might find that, yeah, you know, improving your capillary density and improving.

Blood flow to a specific area might get you a little bit leaner in that area. The other thing is you have this P70S 6K phosphorylation. Now that is going to allow the muscle to actually grow more. So when you have this activation of P70S 6K, that allows a muscle to, to basically be more anabolic and get more muscle protein synthesis. So not only do you burn more fat, but you actually absorb more of your post workout if you train in a fasted state. Not to mention, I think you're going to remain a lot more mentally acute doing that as well. And one more thing, as far as training goes, there is a strong benefit to training upper body high intensity interval training. So I love high intensity interval training anyway. I love all kinds of training. I actually think, I think if I can be completely honest, some forms of high intensity interval training are overrated. I feel like there's no good substitute for just good old fashioned, moderately high Constant steady state activity for 30 minutes or so. I feel like the fat recruitment in that is just phenomenal. But high intensity interval training is also really, really powerful. And I recommend doing it with your upper body simply because it's harder, in short, for the heart to push blood through the upper body than it is the lower body. Okay? We have smaller arteries, we have less capillary density, so it means that it needs to essentially create more perfusion, and that's hard. The heart has to work harder to pump blood there. So you actually get the heart rate higher and you get more of a perceived workout and more of a workout in realistic too. Not just perceived by doing like, like some high intensity battle ropes or some rowing or maybe some burpees. People think that burpees are tough because of the plyometric effect. Burpees are tough because you're having a plyometric effect on the upper body. So again, when it comes down to just getting a quick workout and getting something quick in, if you have upper body high intensity interval training in, you will get the heart rate nice and high, you will get it where you want and you will get that brain derived neurotropic effect. It's really powerful stuff.

Last thing that I want to leave everyone with is of course messing around with different forms of the ketogenic diet. I have to get out on my kind of random horse here for a second because there's so much research in the world of the ketogenic diet. And it's kind of frustrating because keto is just heavily marketed and I feel like we miss the real points with keto. I feel like so much of our focus on just the fact that keto is a fourth macronutrient. Ketosis is a fourth macronutrient. It's a way to burn fat. What's really interesting is if you experiment with different forms of keto, like keto, where you alternate days with your fat intake, right? So maybe one day you have a high fat intake, one day you have a lower fat intake. I personally feel, and I've noticed with myself that the days where I lower my fat content and allow my body to pull, pull fat from my own stores, I am utilizing, I feel like I'm utilizing that energy better. I have more energy and more mental clarity on those days. And maybe it has something to do with the fact that it's gone through a level of processing. This full disclaimer, this is complete hypothesis. Okay? I have some stuff to back it up partially, but there's a complete hypothesis and it's just interesting. It's food for thought. And I at least encourage people to test it out when we store our fat. But maybe, just maybe, it's biologically set up for us in a sense that we can unravel and utilize that fat a little bit easier. So once we are utilizing stored fat for fuel, we tend to feel better. And I found this with lots of people that I work with and lots of clients and myself. If I give myself exogenous fats, then sure, I'll get energy and I can create ketones, but I feel like I don't get as much men boost from that as I do when I'm fasting or when I'm on a lower fat day where I know the fat is coming from my own body fat tissue. So what I recommend people try is alternate day, high fat, lower fat. So one day keep your fats where you normally would with a ketogenic diet, and another day keep your fats really low and just see how you feel. And you might also be really impressed with your body composition results because there's this fallacy out there that we need to constantly be flooding ourselves those fats. It's okay to be in a calorie deficit and let your body use energy from your stored fat tissue as long as maybe at the end of the week, net, net your calories are where you want them to be for the week. Right. So maybe on the days that you're higher fat, you keep your calories a little bit higher so you compensate. There's no way that we can possibly tell what our thermic effect or BMR is at one very exact second in time. It's pretty hard to balance and figure that out. So the point is, one day you can be in a deficit, one day you can be in a surplus. Your body clock doesn't necessarily reset at midnight. It doesn't start at zero every single day. It's just interesting and something that you might want to experiment with. I could go on and on when it comes to this stuff, but I want to be respectful of everybody's time. And I think that if this is something that's great for people and people are getting some benefits out of these quicker hacks, I'd totally, like, love to do more, but I want to keep respectful of everybody's time. So there you have just a few ways to get the most out of your day. You're a busy person, you're busy, want to get on with your life, and you just want to know a few hacks So I appreciate having the opportunity to be here on the Ben Greenfield podcast and I look forward to helping everyone out in whatever ways. And Ben, thank you very.

Much.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.