EWOT Explained: Oxygen, Mitochondria, and the Road Back to Resilience

Welcome back, Senergy listeners. We are so happy to have you here today. Today we are exploring a topic that sits at the intersection of movement, recovery, performance, and longevity. So you're gonna have to listen up to this one. Most of us really understand that exercise is essential for health. I know you do. But many people find themselves asking a really frustrating question. Why am I doing all the things right? Exercise, eating well, paying attention to sleep, and still bouncing back the way I used to, or not bouncing back the way that I used to. Whether you're an athlete noticing slow recovery, someone navigating midlife changes, or a person dealing with chronic illness and fatigue, there may be an overlooked piece of that puzzle— oxygen. Joining us today, we are so, so excited to have Brad Pitsley. Founder of 1000 Roads and advocate for exercise and oxygen therapy, or EWOT. Today we're going to explore how oxygen influences energy production, recovery, resilience, brain function, and healthy aging, and why movement may be even more powerful when we optimize the body's ability to utilize oxygen. Let's dive in today. So welcome, Brad. We are so excited to have you here today.

Thank you, Lori and Kelly. I appreciate it.

In the month of August, we always highlight movement is medicine, and we truly believe that. Lori and I both come from a background of probably over-exercising, marathon running until we just absolutely couldn't anymore, unfortunately. And so I don't think many people have heard of exercise with oxygen. They all know we should be exercising, but what is EWOT? What is exercise with oxygen? And what got you into this?

Yeah, it's exactly what it sounds like. You do exercise, generally cardio, but you can do other exercises for about 15 minutes while you're breathing near pure oxygen. And while it sounds really simple, it's incredibly powerful. I got into it because I had a really bad health challenge. Probably 15 years ago, I started to get, arthritis was diagnosed as autoimmune arthritis. Um, I was put on these arthritis medications and they would wear off and then I'd be in a worse place than where I started. Um, and I kept getting on this treadmill several times over and, and kept getting worse and worse until all of a sudden, um, I was diagnosed with melanoma. And I knew that that was one of the side effects of the medication. And so I went back to my rheumatologist and I kind of said like, what do I do here, doc? I'm like, if I keep taking the meds, I might die of cancer. And if I don't, I'm going to die like crumpled up in a corner. And like, I don't really like either one of those. So is there a third way out of this thing? And he kind of like looked at me. He's like, nah, we'll do a different drug in the same class and we'll hope for the best sort of thing. I think you'll be fine. And I walked out of there and I was just like so scared. I had like this flash forward to like, here I am on my deathbed of cancer saying, I shouldn't have listened to that doctor. And so I started looking for what I called my third way out and, you know, Googling, trying all sorts of things, becoming a human pincushion as I was. And I kept getting worse and worse, went from arthritis to like really severe foot pain. I can't really even describe this to people who haven't experienced it, but the best way I can describe it is it felt like the bottoms of my feet were beaten with a meat hammer and every step was tender and painful. I couldn't even get out of bed to go to the toilet in the middle of the night without putting shoes on. The backs of my legs were stiff, probably like if you women had run several marathons in a week, probably about that stiff every morning. And, you know, the rheumatologist didn't even believe that had to do with my arthritis. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease and a co-infection called Bartonella. And the doctor who diagnosed me recommended I try exercise with oxygen therapy and other mitochondrial kind of help. Now, at the time, it was probably a decade or more ago, no one was talking about mitochondrial health. It's become a really big thing, thankfully, nowadays. And I didn't really believe it would do anything, so I kind of poured into it and really did a bunch of research. I always joke I'm a recovering engineer, and so I didn't mind getting into the technical details, and I was shocked at what I kind of found. So that was kind of the road that got me interested in EWatt. And then it came time to look at my purchase options. And at the time they were just so expensive. They were like $10,000 for a unit. And when you've tried so many things, the thought of plunking down 10 grand on an experiment, like last 99 didn't work, like 10,000 for another roll of the dice. There wasn't any information online about it. There were no customer reviews or success stories. The only people talking about it were the folks that wanted to sell it. And a lot of them was like filled with hyperbole, mega awesome, this super turbo great that, you know, and it was like, okay, that anything that's using all these hyperboles probably isn't real. And so I kind of did more research and figured out how to build my own. And that's what I did. It really helped. It took a little while for it to kick in, but it really helped. And I came back about a year later and my doctor walked in the room and he was just shocked at what he saw. And he was like, are you using the oxygen? And I said, I am. And he's like, wow. He was like, you look great. He's like, who'd you buy it from so I can tell my patients? I said, I just kind of made my own, doc. And he looked at me, I was joking, a horn was coming outta my head. He's just like, is this guy real? And after he wiped the face off, he kind of just looked at me and said, well, would you consider making them for my patients? And that's, you know, how we got into business, I guess now since 2018.

Incredible story on many levels, right? I mean, how many times do we hear our own personal stories that landed us at that place of what are our options?

Yeah.

And so many times we have been inundated with so many things that cost a ton of money. And by the time, I don't know how exactly bad you felt, but it sounds like you felt really bad at that point. You've already exhausted so much money on so many things and it's that one more thing. So seems like you're pretty innovative.

Well, I, you know, necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. And that was kind of me. The things I tried before I got there, my family will tell you, I ate— I did all sorts of weird diets. I ate all sorts of crazy things. I tried all sorts of supplements. I mean, so many things. I recently sat down and I wrote a list of the things I could think of off the top of my head. I just spent like 10 or 15 minutes and there were over 200 of them on that list in just those 15 minutes. And that's the stuff I can remember. You kind of do things and for to get. So I'm sure there are many more on there, but yeah, it was kind of interesting.

I think as you tell your story, people listening are gonna identify with that, especially people that have been chronically ill for a prolonged period of time. You know, you explore, you try one thing, you try a supplement, you try a different diet, and oftentimes they work some, you know, they get you maybe to the next level, but not quite there., right, not quite over the hump and back to a place of resilience. So help us understand a little bit, how does exercise with oxygen work? I think we all know that when we exercise, we increase our oxygen intake, right? Aerobics. But how does adding concentrated oxygen to a workout improve our function and our resilience?

That's a great question. And I think the easiest parallel or, um, thing for people to understand is think about hyperbaric oxygen. So hyperbaric oxygen, what you're doing is you're inside of a tube and they pressurize it and you're breathing pure oxygen. So a few things are happening when you do that. Number one, normally at sea level you're breathing like 21% oxygen, so it's 4.5 times as much oxygen. Um, number two, the pressure is forcing more oxygen through your lung membrane and into your blood. So that's kind of a push more oxygen in scenario. What we do is the exact opposite of that, which is we use cardiovascular exercise to pull more oxygen in. As you noted, when you start exercising, your body immediately recognizes it's gone into an energy deficit. Like, we can't produce enough energy to keep up all of this activity. And the gating factor on producing more energy is oxygen. So immediately your body says, we need to— increase oxygen intake, circulation, and delivery. And so, you know, you start breathing faster and deeper, your lung membrane thins out to allow the diffusion of more oxygen through it. The capillaries near your lungs become engorged with blood, some of them that normally don't have blood, so there's more gas exchange happening. And then your heart starts beating faster and deeper, your blood vessels dilate. And actually, one of the interesting things is your blood pressure goes up, your systolic blood pressure when you exercise. Now we all think, uh-oh, high blood pressure bad, but in the case of exercise, it's really a physiological adaptation because when that pressure goes up, it's forcing more of the gas, more of the oxygen out of your blood and into the tissues. And the greater the difference between the pressure in your blood and the pressure in your tissues, the more of a forcing factor to force those gases deeper into the tissues. So we're taking advantage of that, um, to drive more oxygen in. And so, in a 15-minute session, you can literally take in as much oxygen as you normally would in almost a full day. And so, it's an astounding amount of oxygen. And because it's in 15 minutes, it's something that's very repeatable. When I was really sick, I always joked around, not really even joking, but I always called them the ceremonies. Every night, I was counting pills and I was mixing potions and I want to do an Epsom salt bath to detox and the sauna for this, like all the things and you're piling them all on and it becomes time and time again, people just get up to here and even if it helps, you're like, it's 6 hours of my day. I need time for me to live my life. And so, then you just throw the baby out with the bathwater sort of thing. And so, that's kind of one of the cool things about exercise with oxygen is it's just a 15-minute protocol to get— a ton of different benefits.

Whereas hyperbaric is very time-consuming, extremely costly, and many people can't tolerate it.

You're exactly right. And you're actually— the, the thing that people aren't aware of is you're fighting your body in hyperbaric oxygen. So what happens is you drive a ton of oxygen into your blood, but your, your body is so intelligent, and so it notices, hey, there's too much oxygen in here. And so it does what it can to minimize the amount of oxygen that's being delivered. It causes vasoconstriction, causes your blood vessels to constrict. And so you're literally fighting your body. You still net-net get more oxygen to the tissues, but it's against your body's kind of wishes. Whereas here, when we're doing it, we're basically leaning into our body's physiological adaptations from exercise. So, um, that's why instead of spending 90 minutes in a hardshell hyperbaric chamber, we can get as much oxygen in just 15 minutes.

Yeah.

So, Brad, for our listeners that are on here today, super intrigued about— obviously, most of them are already doing some of the foundational things that Kelly and I talk about all the time— what you eat, what you drink, how you sleep, move, and think. But maybe they're doing the exercise, but they really haven't thought about the importance of oxygen. So how would you describe the importance of oxygen to a person's health?

It's so amazing, actually. There's a gentleman named Arthur Guyton. He wrote the medical textbook called Medical Physiology, and every single doctor since the 1950s had to use this in medical school. And the quote I love from him is he says, at the root of all disease is a lack of oxygen at the cellular level. Okay, great. But like, I'm breathing fine. What are you talking about? Right. This was kind of the light bulb moment for me. Um, is if you go put a pulse oximeter on your finger and you measure it, most of us will measure 98, 99, 97%. That means your red blood cells are saturated with oxygen. No problem, you've got plenty of oxygen, why would you need more? But the real problem is, as we age, this thing we now refer to as inflammaging, this increase in inflammation throughout the body, is affecting all of our tissues. The problem is our capillaries, which are the end runs of our circulatory system where we exchange nutrition and where we exchange oxygen, those become, um, hampered as we grow older. So what happens is this inflammaging causes the lining of our capillaries to become swollen, and, uh, the microcirculation is what it's referred to. And now when the microcirculation becomes swollen, it's a huge problem because In our best, healthiest state, our capillaries are actually smaller than the red blood cells that need to deliver oxygen to the tissue. And the only way we're getting oxygen to our tissue is that red blood cell folds up like a taco to fit into the capillary. And so when you introduce any kind of swelling, any kind of inflammation, all of a sudden you've blocked off the delivery of oxygen to the cells. And all those cells downstream they be— they go in what I call like a brownout. They go into a low-power mode. They're no longer getting sufficient amounts of oxygen, and so they, they move from aerobic respiration to anaerobic respiration. And that just simply means they start producing energy without oxygen. And the problem with that is it's about 18 times less efficient. They can produce only about 5% of the energy they produce when they're getting oxygen. So now you've got these cells that are basically in survival mode. They can't even do their foundational, um, you know, processes. And on top of that, they're producing a massive amount of metabolic waste. So anaerobic respiration spits out a lot of lactic acid and other metabolic waste, and it needs oxygen to break it down further. But there's no oxygen, so it just builds up. All these toxins build up inside the cell wall. Now they cause a bunch of free radicals, which causes more damage, which causes more inflammation. It ends up being this thing that I like to refer to as the doom loop. Like may be a strong word, but that's my moniker for it. We have this inflammation in our circulatory system. It's blocking oxygen. Now, our cells are in a low-power state. They're becoming toxified by all this lactic acid and metabolic waste. And that also includes other exogenous toxins that they now are not going to detoxify because they don't have energy.. And now these waste products are causing more inflammation and more damage. It starts damaging the mitochondria, and then it becomes this circular sort of situation where that leads to more inflammation, less oxygen delivery. So this is happening to all of us as we get older, but it's happening at an accelerated rate in almost everyone who's dealing with a chronic illness.

Yeah, I, I think you just said a mouthful, and I can just feel our listeners go, oh my gosh, what is the way out, right? How do we help resolve this? Because to your point, it's all part of aging. And I'm not going to say natural aging, I'm going to say USA aging, aging the USA way, right? I don't think there's anything natural about it, but it does happen if we're not careful and we're not really looking to modify some of those risk factors. But what is the way out? Like, what is the— what are the steps that someone, whether they're an athlete and they're just trying to get their their gain back or whether they're someone that's falling into that chronic disease state and they can't, that's a slippery slope.

Well, so if we go back to the birth of EWOT, what I call the godfather of EWOT was this man named von Arden. So von Arden was a German physicist and inventor. He invented like the scanning electron microscope. And he, um, he also is, um, involved in the commercialization of the very first television sets in the 1930s. So he gets to the 1960s and '70s and he starts looking at, uh, um, some research, and he becomes interested in the links between cancer and oxygen. And so he, he comes up with this idea, what he called multi-step therapy, which we now call EWOT. And he started having people do EWOT while he was measuring their different physiological responses. And what he found was he noticed this, um, capillary swelling and how it was choking off oxygen delivery. And he found that by doing an EWOT session, he could cause this anti-inflammatory reaction in the lining of the capillaries, the endothelial cells, and that reopened those endothelial cells so that it could establish, um, more youthful blood flow. So he had elderly folks who were very inflamed do it. And he had them just do a couple sessions and he had them come back many weeks later and they had still reestablished normal blood flow. And so that was kind of the big aha that said, hey, this is why EY. So how EY simply works for most folks looking to do it for health, I mentioned it's a 15-minute session. Generally it's cardiovascular exercise, but it can be other things too. We have folks doing it with weightlifting, We have sick folks doing it walking on a treadmill or an under-the-desk pedal bike or even a rebounder. We even have really sick folks who can't exercise doing it with just like an infrared blanket to get their heart rate up while they're breathing the oxygen. And you're just going to do a 15-minute session and you're going to do it— we recommend you do it 3 to 5 times a week. You know, generally, like any exercise, I recommend you take a day or or 2 off a week just to allow your body to rest and recover. But there's really not a whole lot of danger or risk with it. We've— I mean, there's even folks who are in some of these alternate cancer centers who are using it 3 times a day, which I think is overkill. But so, yeah, it's a pretty simple protocol. It's something you can fit into your life. And for me, I laugh because it was actually a time savings. I used to do 30 minutes of cardio and then I moved over and when I started doing EWOD, I just do 15 minutes. So it was like net-net, I got a benefit out of that, not just in my health, but also in time savings.

And the challenge is, as you mentioned earlier, you know, a lot of the previous equipment that's out there, even when I started looking at doing EWOD, the things that I was seeing was they were expensive. So you've developed your company. 1000 Roads, correct? Can't wait to hear about the name of that. We have to go back to that. But you have a system. Tell us about your system. You know, how much room does it take up? Like, what's the reason— the about expense of— because I know everyone sitting here is probably doing like I am, like, I'm next for that. And I know Kelly already has one, so, you know, she's always ahead of the curve on that.

So So let me first describe what an EWOT system looks like. So there's two ways you can get oxygen. One is you can get an oxygen bottle and have it filled, or two is you can use a device called an oxygen concentrator. Now, if you were trying to do exercise with oxygen with one of those big oxygen bottles, it might last you a session. So you'd be running with this thing in your tank to an oxygen supply store every day, which is not realistic. Second— second way you can get oxygen is this device called an oxygen concentrator. And what it does, it takes the oxygen in the room, which at sea level is 21%, and it purifies it to 93%. They're often used for folks for medical issues. If you've got emphysema or COPD, um, ours is specifically made for exercise with oxygen therapy. Now, the challenge with these things is they can only produce 5 or 10 liters of oxygen in a minute, um, and when you exercise, you can easily use 50 or 60 liters per minute, so they can't keep up with you. So what we do is we fill a reservoir. So the device itself is pretty small. It's like 12 or 15 inches wide and 9 or 12 inches deep and maybe 18 inches tall. Little R2-D2 looking thing you roll around, plug it in. The reservoir you fill is large. It, it's about 1,000 liters. So if you think about a 2-liter bottle of soda, 500 of those. So it's about 6 feet wide and about 5.5 feet tall. And you effectively fill it up. It looks like a large pillow or a large balloon. You fill it with 1,000 liters of oxygen and then you hook a hose up to it and hook that hose up to a mask and put the mask on and breathe the exercise— breathe while you're exercising through it. So the mask is kind of interesting as well because it has something called a two-way non-rebreather valve, which just means it's got two valves in it. When you breathe in from the reservoir, one valve opens and allows that 93% oxygen in. And then when you breathe out, it shuts and another valve opens. So you're exhaling into the room. So the next breath is not your exhale gases. It's still 93% oxygen.

Interesting. So someone who is a really high fitness level and in comparison to someone who is a low fitness level, is there a right way to start?

Well, what I— there is a right way to start. And I'd say there's really two paths. If you're really healthy, basically you can get on and start doing it. My recommendation is work yourself up towards 70 to 80% of your theoretical max heart rate, and you can do the math on that. It's just 220 minus your age is your max heart rate, and then you multiply by 70 or 80%. And the reason I like that is the more we get you exercising up to a point, the faster your heart's beating, the more there's vasodilation, the more all these physiological changes of exercise are helping us deliver more oxygen to the tissues. However, when you start getting extreme and really pushing hard, you start to develop all sorts of oxidative stress on the body and wear and tear on the body. And so most folks are looking to do this for general wellness, for health, or even for chronic illness recovery. We don't wanna push into that red zone, right? We don't wanna redline it because we're just gonna tear ourselves down. And in fact, many folks when they're starting, they, they're not gonna do 70 or 80%. We have folks, like I said, who will start just walking on a treadmill, gentle stretching, whatever they're physically able to do. And the thing they're gonna notice is their cardiovascular conditioning is gonna improve rapidly, much more rapidly than if they were just doing exercise alone. And it's a combination of cardiovascular endurance improvement and mitochondrial energy production efficiency growth that will cause them to be able to do more and more energy over time. And so we have folks who start really slow and low and they come back to say, I just ran my first couple miles today, I can't believe I'm here, sort of thing. So that's the vast majority. If you're really sick, the one, the one watch out is there can be a detoxification reaction. So oxygen is an incredible detoxifier. Um, in order to get a lot of chemicals and metabolites out of our body, our body uses oxygen to oxidize them. The oxygen literally helps us break those chemicals down in order to— for the, the elimination organs to be able to eliminate them out of the body. Now, when you haven't had oxygen and all of a sudden you flood your body with oxygen, now your body's like, oh, We've got some oxygen to detox. It's also like, hey, we've got energy. Remember how we were in this low energy state? We had all this metabolic waste. Oh, now we've got energy. Let's dump all this junk out because it's not helpful. And if you, if you start too quickly and you're really sick and you start dumping too many toxins into the bloodstream, it's more than your elimination organs can handle. And so it just builds up inside the bloodstream and then you'll start feeling like, like a hangover, like you have a bad flu. You have headache, you'll be lethargic, you know, brain fog. So you don't need that. It's not beneficial. So if you're really sick, we often recommend you start very slow. It can even be starting with stationary oxygen, working your way up to 15 minutes, and then slowly swapping in 1 minute for— of exercise for 1 minute of stationary and working backwards to get to a full 15 minutes of exercise over a period of weeks. So just depends where you're at.

So, Brad, for the person that typically has post-exercise fatigue and malaise, is that kind of what you're describing? It happens like the next day, or is that something that typically happens immediately?

It can be that too. So it's kind of two different things. The malaise is often from you've outrun your mitochondria. So in other words, you've exercised, you've burned all this ATP, the energy source of the body,, and now you're in energy deficit. And so your body in its infinite wisdom's like, look, we're gonna put you on the couch for a couple days here while we catch up. And, and so you're feeling terrible and it's your body's way of signaling, hey, that was too much. This is similar, but it's more caused by toxins. It can happen shortly after, but I do find that sometimes it can, you have to wait up until the next day to notice it. So what I tell folks when they're starting, is do, do your first EWOT session, start low and slow, listen to your body, and then wait and watch your body for the rest of that day and then the next morning. And if you don't feel anything by the next morning, you're generally in the clear. It's not going to, you know, show up 2 days later sort of thing.

It almost sounds like the difference between push-crash, right? Push-crash and Herxheimer.

Yes, Herxheimer is exactly what I'm talking about.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I would imagine that it is very, very important to kind of almost like you say, start low, go slow. We talk about that all the time in reference to any changes, right? The body is a machine and you don't want to throw everything in at the same time and change all the variables. You want to do it slow. But even for a person that I'm sure is high performing, I think there's probably a lot of reason to even go slow with this too, because it's a different modality.

That's right.

It's something they haven't been using. So do it, wait a couple days, or do it, wait a day, see how your body responds, and then add. So sounds reasonable.

Absolutely. I mean, I know I'm guilty of wanting to get better when I was at my sickest as soon as possible. So I was of the mentality, well, if 5 is good, 11 must be better, you know, sort of thing. And I push myself many times too hard. Um, and that's one of the things you learn in your healing journey, whether you like it or not, is sometimes your body speaks you, sometimes quietly and sometimes loud, which is exactly what our listeners—

that's why I wanted to go back to that, because we, Kelly and I, are definitely— we can raise our hands to that too, right? If, you know, if this is, if this is good in this amount, this is going to be better. Just do more of it. So, right.

So Lori, Lori kind of alluded to it earlier, but I want to dig into your story about the name of your company, because I do feel like that probably has something to do with your list of things that you wrote down, of all the things that you tried?

Kind of, yes. It is definitely related to that. So, you know, it also is kind of a, you know, spiritual might be a little bit strong, but not overly strong for it. But when I was at my sickest, you know, you start having conversations with your maker. You start negotiating, like, if I ever get out of this, why me? You know, all those conversations when I was at my worst. One of those kind of promises I made was like, man, if I ever, you know, just get me better, like I'll help 1,000 people get better. And so that's the thousands in it. The other thing is when I was sick, I always felt like I was bleeding in the water and everyone was a shark circling around me like, oh, give us $50,000 and you can try this thing and see if it helps sort of thing. And everyone claimed that their thing was the thing and that's the only thing. And so, you know, it's been my experience that everyone has to travel their own healing journey and their own path. And I wanted to honor that and not say that we're the only thing. I feel passionate about it, but I also recognize it's not the right thing exactly for everybody. And so that's where we came up with it, is it was a— it was kind of wanting to pay it forward and help other people. So when the doctor asked me, he said, you know, would you consider, you know, selling it to my patients? My first response was like, no, Doc, I'm still on the healing journey. I've already overdone myself in the past. I'm gonna kind of be selfish and just focus on me. And I did for a few more months. And then I ended up going through a career transition and I had some time and I thought about it and I was like, well, could I, should I? I thought to myself, I'm like, why would I? You know what I mean? Like, and to me, it's like when you go through something like that and you've been through like a traumatic experience in your life and it's thrown all this upheaval and you've spent many hours asking why me, the only goal when you're in that is I just want to go back to my life the way it was, right? I just want to go back to— I want to rewind the tapes when it was good and not this difficult time. But when you start getting better, you realize you're never going back there. Like, that, that part of your— that chapter in your life is shut. And there's things you were doing then that were horrible There's things you were doing that you just don't like anymore. In my desire to create meaning from my experience, that's what really motivated me is like, hey, how can I help other people? How can I make meaning out of all the suffering that I had to deal with and other family members, my whole family had Lyme, and help other people and not just shut the book and go back to the way life was before and say, well, that was a crappy 10 years. You know, sort of thing. Like, that just didn't— that didn't make sense to me as I was writing my, my story of my life, right, is just to walk away and try to forget it.

So I love that, you know, Lori and I often say the right tool at the right time. And so figuring out helping patients, and a lot of what we get to do, we get to— we're honored to do— is sit with patients wherever they are in their health journey and help them make decisions about what is the next tool, what is the next modality, What is going to give you the best result for the time that you're in right now? So I love that you said that. The other thing that I love that you said is just the giving back. You know, I think when you do walk through something like that and you come to the realization, I think we all do if we've had a chronic health issue, is that we, we always are trying to get back to that marathon runner or that century rider or whatever that was where you felt our best, trying to get back there, but there's no way of going back. And I think through giving back to others, you know, sometimes that can fill that void of wanting to go back. Like, so much wiser than I used to be when I was doing all those things that was potentially hurting myself at times. I don't wanna go back there, but I wanna be even better. And so I love that you brought both of those things to light because those are things we talk about all the time.

That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, like, um, you start to realize, and if you like, on my healing journey, there's the physical healing, which is incredibly important, but there's also this emotional and spiritual component to healing, and like evaluating who you are and how you got here and what needs to change. And none of us like change as humans, right? Like, we're fighting, kicking, and screaming, but it's like, hey, I have to take ownership for my part in getting sick, and it was a big part. And like I need to do something different. Like, and then you kind of settle into what different is. At first you're like, this stinks, this isn't the old way. And then you settle into, you're like, wait a second, there's a, you know, there's a lot of greatness in what I'm doing now and where I am now. And I don't, you know, I don't always need to be where I was when I was, you know, that old place. And so, you know, I've replaced old habits with new habits, and those are, those are great. Now when I get older someday and I have to give up these new habits, I'll probably be kicking and screaming there.

So I want to fill our listeners in to a little secret, because Brad mentioned change and how we don't like change, but our ability to change and adapt is the number one predictor for our survivability. So anytime we start feeling like that whole change thing comes up in us and we don't want to change, just reminding ourselves, like, our ability to change and adapt has everything to do with how we survive.

Resilience.

And thrive. Yeah. And become resilient, yes.

Absolutely. And I always tell my children, I always say, look, change is hard because you— when one door closes, another door opens. The door that closed, you know exactly what you lost. The other door that opened, you can't see it yet. You got to wait for it to develop. And so you're sitting in the space where you're like, I lost the thing, and you don't realize what you've gained yet. And so that's like, that's this challenge we have as humans, is you can't see the future. And so at the moment of loss, whatever that loss is all you feel is the pain of loss without the joy of what you just gained.

And embracing that as an opportunity, right, to grow beyond, right? Using that, not becoming the victim, but the victor over those circumstances. And it all has to do with the position and a posture of our mindset.

And it's the important thing I think is actually looking back, right? It's remembering where you were. Go look a year ago what you were, what the loss you felt about something or 2 years ago. And then think about what literally opened up for you when you lost all those things. And then all of a sudden, you're like, "Yeah, that happened." And you start seeing patterns in your life and you become a little less stressed about, like, is everything going to work out the way— like, it's going to work out the way this— at some point, your whole story is going to be written and it's going to be written perfectly, whether you like it or not. You know, you just have to accept that that's part of life. If you don't have good things, you won't have bad things. But then You know, those are two sides of the same coin. You gotta have bad things to have good things.

And you won't appreciate the good things unless you've walked through the tough things. I mean, you're in light company here. So I mean, this story is incredible. I love that, you know, that we have the opportunity to do what we do so that we can give back, right? Like that's the joy of getting up every day is that we can do that. I have to ask the question on age. So when I think about EWOT, and I think about incorporating this, is there a too young or a too old to incorporate uot?

There's really not. We have young kids using it. I've got some therapists who are using with young kids with autism and other disabilities. I've, I've had parents who have young children with Lyme disease using it. I always think the hardest part with the kids with autism is how are you keeping that mask on? You know, and they tell, you know, someone tell me like, "Oh, just tell them it's a Spider-Man mask." You know, so it's, you know, they work their way around it. Too old, not at all. We have, again, you've got to modulate your expectations of activity. And that's kind of the great thing about it is I say EWOT will meet you where you're at and help you right there. I mean, I said 3 to 5 times a week. I have folks who are just starting doing 1 time a week and they're getting great results off. Could they get more?

Sure.

But I always say perfection's the enemy of progress. And so it'll meet you wherever you're at, and it'll help you improve your health from there.

Yeah. So when we think, Brad, about time, we think about 150 minutes of aerobic activity, walking, cycling, whatever that looks like for each person. But when we're thinking about EWOT therapy, does that reduce the time needed to get the same gains? Have there been studies that tell us that?

Yeah.

Actually, the first answer is yes. I used to do a half hour of cardio, basically 5 days a week, and then I swapped over and started doing EWOT for 15 minutes. And I'll share some of my personal experience there in a second. But the very most amount of research on EWOT at all is actually from Olympic athletes. And, you know, so the governments of the United States and Russia— of course, Russia— have done a ton of research on athletic performance. And, you know, it consistently shows a lot of benefits to performance. We're talking VO2 max increases, increased speed, increased endurance, increased short-term memory. If you go to our website, we have a research page down at the footer. At the very bottom of it, we have all these athletic benefits and all the cited research on it. So just to a ton of research. As a matter of fact, I just had a lady contact me. She'd bought a system just a few months earlier, and she was using it with her daughter in high school, and her daughter was a track star. And she was telling me, she's like, her leaps this year was incredible. And, you know, she got within 0.1 seconds of making it to state, which was, you know, kind of unfathomable for her at the beginning of the season. I just want to tell you, this was crazy. Her only regret is that she didn't find it until senior year. Um, but my story is, um, I was about a year into this and I went to that doctor's office and that same visit he noticed how much better I was and asked me if I'd make them for his patients. He told me he bought this thing, um, this very expensive testing device called a bioenergy tester. It was like $25,000 or $50,000. And he said, I want to do it on you. I want to get you in my database for my other patients. I just have a feeling. And I was like, okay. So basically they took a bunch of vitals, breath rate, breathing rate, carbon dioxide and oxygen gas exchange, pulse, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, stationary. And then the lady put me on this bike and she said, the bike is going to be an endurance test to failure. And I didn't know exactly which metric meant failure. Maybe it was breathing rate or VO2 max. Carbon dioxide, whatever it was. She said, "It's going to take 8 to 12 minutes. It'll progressively get more and more difficult." And so, I got on this bike and at 8 minutes, I didn't feel anything. 9, 10 minutes, 12 minutes, uh. Kept going, 15 minutes, 18 minutes, 20 minutes. I think somewhere around 22 or 23 minutes, finally, I hit whatever she called failure. And I didn't think anything of it when I got off it because I work out 15 minutes every day, so what's the deal? I got off and this lady explained to me, she's like, "Are you an ultra-endurance athlete?" And I'm like, "No, I'm still trying to get better from chronic illness. I'm not doing anything to beat my body up." I'm like, I just do— I'm thinking EWOT in the garage 15 minutes a few times a week. What is she talking about? So she was shocked at it. I didn't really fully understand it, but I got this test back and you have to keep in mind a year ago I was having a hard time walking because of my foot pain and my stiff legs. When I first started doing EWOD, I was doing it on an elliptical machine and the bottoms of my feet hurt so bad that each of the pedals, I put one of those 1-inch thick gardening pads that you kneel on, on each pad. And I'd forgotten all about this till I found an old picture of it. You know, you just forget some of the stuff when you're that sick because that was the only way I could make it tolerable at the time. And now I get these test results back and I think I had a 50 VO2 max at the age of 40. And I looked it up and normally VO2 max is tested on a treadmill where you're using your larger muscles. So it's naturally going to be a little bit less when you do it on a bike like I was doing it. So there's like a correction factor and there was a university that had like a chart or a tool online. I think it may be Kansas where they could correct for it. And I looked at my VO2 max and it was like top 5% for my age category, not sick age category, everyone at age 40. And yeah, and I mean, like, I was looking at my mitochondrial efficiency and fat burn efficient, like, and like, there was like 100, it was norm reference. So you should be at 100. I'm like at 160 here and 210 there. It was like, there are these crazy numbers. And, you know, again, I wasn't trying to be an athlete at this point. I was just hoping to get my life back. So it has incredible athletic benefits and performance benefits. And it does save time because of that.. And so for most folks, that's what I say is like, if you can detox, it's anti-inflammatory, it's going to help your immune system, it's going to help you, it's going to help your athletic performance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you're doing all this in a short period of time.

So for our listeners, VO2 max is one of the key indicators for longevity. So having a higher VO2 max is really incredibly important. If you're looking for aging well, right? So are you a fan of the wearables?

You were heading where I was heading, Kelly.

This was a shameless question so that I could show my new Oura Ring that I just got yesterday.

She replaced her other one that she had had for many, many years, probably the very first batch from Oura.

I was gonna say, she's probably got the first one off the production line. Elbow and a couple people to get it too, right? Yes. I used to measure a lot of things, you know what I mean? I'd get on the scale every morning and measure and write it down. I would, when I'd ran miles, I'd write it down. Um, very metric driven. I used to love, get a lot of joy out of it. And then I realized I kind of tried to back off all that and, and pay more attention to how I feel about things. Um, just because I think for me personally, If I— if given metrics, I'll get myself wound up on them. And I'm like, you know, doesn't play with my physiology.

I can see that. I can see that. Just curious if there had been any studies that you knew of, or if you personally were having people encouraging them to track VO2 max, because it is a metric that they track on the Oura. And again, it's probably not perfect because obviously it's a wearable, but you're trending yourself. So if you're trending, you can watch your trends improve or not. Over time.

We have had folks like, and I think the Oura, I've also heard the, was it called the Whoop? Had a guy calling me telling me about he loved the Whoop and how he was seeing huge improvements in a bunch of metrics he was getting on the Whoop, including, I believe it had VO2 max on it. It's been a while since I've talked to him.

For our listeners in the Jackson metro area, we actually have a facility, Dexafit, that will measure VO2 max. So if you want to go in and professionally have your VO2 max measured, which I have done, It's not a bad experience. I think Brad explained it pretty well. You get on a treadmill or a bike, you get to pick your preference at this facility, and wear the mask for a particular period of time. And they, you let, you get to tell them when you tap out, basically. So it's really cool to see that number. And it did correlate pretty well with my, with my Oura.

That's awesome.

And we have the National Training Center, which is in Clermont for Olympians and things like that, people training. So they do quite a bit of testing as well.

Can a consumer go in? Someone off the street just go in and— that's good. That's good that they could do it.

Last I heard, unless they've changed that, but yes, they can.

That's amazing. Yeah, I love the VO2 max. I've thought about going back and doing another one myself, but it's a really good metric. And like you said, for folks who don't know, VO2 max just stands for the volume of oxygen, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can exchange, because literally Oxygen's the gating factor of energy production. So the more oxygen you take in, the more cellular energy you'll have, the more endurance you'll be able to perform. Because as we all know, if we exercise to our limits, eventually you get to a point where you go from aerobic respiration to anaerobic, where the muscles start burning from that lactic acid. That's— you've ran out of oxygen. So if you had more oxygen, you could push harder and go further. And that's actually why EWOT helps, is because you're getting this massive dose of oxygen, um, while you're exercising. And so they work incredibly synergistically. It's pretty awesome.

And a lot of the other modalities that are out there too, Brad, I've heard you talking about earlier, you were talking about people that didn't have the ability necessarily to do exercise incorporating things like the, the red light blankets simultaneous too, because we know what those do. I'm just curious, are there stackable things that do really enhance EWOT?

Yeah, um, my favorite is, uh, red and near-infrared light therapy. Those are our panels back there. We sell them because that actually is part of my healing journey as well. Um, what we've heard a lot— you probably heard something about red light therapy. You never heard of EWOT before you listen to this podcast, but you've heard of red light. Um, and there's tens of thousands of studies on it. And the reason why we need it, it's actually the most fascinating part of the story to me, which is when you go out in the sun, it's full spectrum, everything from the UV all the way to the infrared on the other end of the spectrum. And then we moved indoors, and so we were getting less of that. And then we start putting in LED lights, and they purposefully, um, block out reds and near-infrareds because the body experiences those as heat. So we're trying to be more energy efficient, and so we block out all these reds and near-infrareds, but it's not just light, it's a signaling for the body. The body uses those photons to signal, and the signals that our body takes from red and near-infrared is essentially it tells the mitochondria, the little energy production centers in our cells, to suck in more oxygen and produce more ATP. And so we stack the two together. What we do is we have folks do an EWOT session, and then immediately afterwards, like, don't cool down, don't go to the shower, immediately get underneath the red light, and usually actually it's a shorter session. So if you were to just use our red light panels on a normal day but without EWOT, we'd say do it 10 or 15 minutes. But when you do it right after EWOT, we actually reduce that to like 7 to 10 minutes. And so first you flood your body with oxygen, you're getting oxygen to places that maybe were struggling, and then you're telling the mitochondria in those cells that now have oxygen to take it in and maximize ATP production. So When your cells have all this excess energy, they're able to repair and regenerate. They're able to produce new healthy mitochondria. So we talked about how when they weren't getting oxygen, they become damaged by all the free radicals because mitochondria are some of the most fragile organelles in our cells. Now we're doing the exact opposite. We're sending this signal: produce more mitochondria because we have more oxygen to burn. We have, we have excess energy now to repair the cells, etc. The pairing is pretty awesome.

I love that. So I want to connect some dots for our listeners, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, Brad, but when I heard you describe kind of what happens with lactic acid formation, running out of oxygen. So for our athletes, or maybe even for our patients that are chronically ill that are trying to reengage with exercise, if you're noticing that you're super, super sore, for 3 and 4 days after exercise, that is an accumulation of lactic acid in your muscles. And that is a sign that your body is inflamed. Yeah, right. That's a sign of inflammation, that when you exercised and your capillaries could not uptake that oxygen and they ran out of oxygen, they produce lactic acid. So I want to challenge you to start really paying attention to that. It's not that you need an Epsom salt bath, and maybe that would help soothe you for the moment, because that was my go-to. I'll just go get in that salt bath, it'll be fine.

Totally.

Now push harder. Yeah. And so, and a cold plunge, right? Let's do that too. Um, and so it's a sign that, hey, we need to back up a little bit and see why do we have an inflammatory burden. Do you have some things that are underlying? Poor nutrition, a gut that's dysbiotic, a chronic infection like Lyme, a toxic exposure like mold. Like, are there things going on that have not been attended to? And are you just pushing yourself further down the road toward chronic illness where eventually you won't be able to do, right? Yeah. And I think you're— we're all in like company where we've kind of all landed there for different reasons and want to keep that from happening to anyone else, right? If we can do that. And so would you say that that's a correct assessment of what you were describing earlier? And would you add anything to that?

Yeah, it is a correct assessment for herself. The only thing I would add to it is, so the way lactic acid is produced, like you said, is so you're going through aerobic respiration, you run out of oxygen, it kicks on the backup generators and produces energy without oxygen, and that produces lactic acid and other metabolic waste. But that lactic acid is the burning, and the burning, the more it lasts, it's just the lactic acid is stuck in your cells and in your body, and it's waiting for there to be enough excess oxygen and excess energy to process it and get it out of the body. And that's going to take time. Now, while it's sitting there, it's causing more damage. So that burning you're feeling is actually more damage occurring right now. The way we get lactic acid out of our body is we use oxygen to oxidize it. And when we oxidize lactic acid, it actually produces more energy. So When we're producing energy using oxygen, it can briefly go through lactic acid and then we keep processing it to break it down further to get all of the energy out of it. And that's that kind of 20x energy multiplier when you have oxygen there. And so, that's what's really happening and that's actually part of— so, when you are exercising with oxygen, that is one of the benefits is you're less likely to have lactic acid. And if you do, you have faster clearance. And so it improves recovery as well as performance. So folks are using it on both sides of that spectrum.

Pretty incredible. I love kind of what was mentioned earlier, just as we were talking about the fundamentals of living well, what you eat, what you drink, how you sleep, move, and think. But what I hear you saying is EWOT isn't a replacement to those fundamental things. It's actually a multiplier of them. So this is something that when I think about exploring the things that are out there that really help change in a very vast way, it would be adding oxygen with exercise. Yeah. So I'm excited about it. I would love to kind of know just a little bit about the cost, if we could cover that. Yeah. Just a roundabout.

Yeah, that's, that's great. We have a system for $1,900 that's 5 liters per minute. And then we have a system that's $2,500. That's the 10-liter per minute. If you've got multiple users, you're going to want the 10-liter. If you want— it also gives you more flexibility on when you're going to use it because it fills that reservoir faster and it's a little bit more durable machine. The 5-liter is great if you're like chronically ill and you don't, you know, you're on a tight budget and you want to get going. No one was really offering 5 liters when we started. And so that was one of our first innovations is trying to bring down the price and make it more affordable for folks. And that's kind of a lowest point entry where more and more folks are able to do it.

That's incredible. It's incredible. So, you know, as we close, because honestly we could have you on here for a long time talking about all kinds of things because we are definitely very aligned, which is pretty exciting. It was good to have you on here. But if there's one thing that you would want people to remember walking away from this today,— and we think about every aspect of health, right, from energy to recovery to cognition and longevity. I think that one of the things that we think about, it really depends on the body's ability to efficiently, you know, utilize oxygen. So what would be, you know, what would be a word of advice? What would be what you would want our listeners to go away thinking about today or taking action on?

So I'll give you one factoid that I think was an aha moment for me when I read the research. Anywhere in your body where you have inflammation, you have low oxygen, and anywhere you have low oxygen, you have inflammation. Those are two sides of the coin that cannot exist one without the other. And so when you start thinking about inflammaging and this gradual growth of inflammation as we get older, that is literally a lack of oxygen at the cellular level. And so I don't know why folks don't connect that. I don't know why they don't connect the fact that you need to fix your microcirculation before you can worry about your mitochondrial health. But I think those are really important things. And then the third thing I would say is for healing is I think there's— and you spoke about it earlier— is it's a big component of mindset. And you have to not only help cleanse your body, but cleanse your mind of a lot of the thoughts and a lot of the patterns that got you in this place. You're going to have to change, but that change could be beautiful and it could be meaningful. Embrace it.

Yeah, for sure. So, Brad, how do people get a hold of you? What's your email address, your website, all the things? Because we know that they're going to want to reach out.

So our website is 1000Roads.com, all spelled out like the sign back here. And then you can hit us up at hello@1000Roads.com if you have any questions. And we'll put it— we'll send you guys a couple of links to put in there, including a special link for your listeners to save on the E-Watts system.

Oh, nice. We love that. Thank you so much for doing that. And thank you so much for your time today. You've challenged the way that I've been thinking about mitochondrial health and about microvascular circulation. So I appreciate— always appreciate that. You bet.

Thank you so much, Kelly and Lori Esarey MS. I appreciate you guys.

The Synergy Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor-patient relationship is formed. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions.