What Is The Healthiest Nut? Advanced Strength Training Secrets, How Often Should You Eat Protein & Much More! Solosode #500

Ben Greenfield 0:00

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of The Boundless Life Podcast: what is the healthiest nut, advanced strength training secrets, how often should you eat protein, and much more. Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Welcome to what is actually, according to my calculations, the 500th episode of the Boundless Life solosodes — meaning I've done 500 of these all by myself, and I still can't talk properly or pronounce words properly on this show. There are actually many more podcasts than that. I've been podcasting since late 2007. Yes, I know that's about 19 years. I still suck at it, obviously.

But I actually owned the Endurance Planet Podcast, the Rockstar Triathlete Academy Podcast — back when I was a personal trainer running my fledgling gyms and training studios — and the Train for Top Dollar Podcast. And this podcast used to be the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, became the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast, and is now the Boundless Life Show — podcast experience, whatever we want to call it.

Which means that, according to my rough math — actually, let me reach over here and grab my phone, which is always not within reach when I'm podcasting. Let's do the math. Two episodes per week, so that's 104 episodes per year, approximately times 19: 2,166 episodes. Yeah, around there for this show, and then I think another 1,000 or so for the other shows. So I'm well above 2,000, and this is the 500th solosode.

So we're gonna do something very, very special — which is nothing — except, let's say, a drinking game. You have to throw back a shot of sparkling apple cider vinegar, or your favorite mastic-gum, unicorn-tear-infused mezcal liqueur, anytime I say: the show notes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/500. Drink up. Show notes are always juicy.

We're gonna jump into an interesting article that came across my plate. I get these for free, so I was very pleased to hear what may actually be one of the healthier nuts you can consume. This is based on a paper in the journal Nutrients entitled "Quantification of Phytochemicals, Cellular Antioxidant Activities, and Anti-Proliferative Activities of Raw and Roasted American Pistachios." Baby, that's right — pistachios.

The article goes into how certain fruits and vegetables are often thought of as high-antioxidant foods. But this study, conducted by Cornell University and published in the journal Nutrients, actually showed that pistachios are among the highest antioxidant-containing foods we can consume and can beat out blueberries, pomegranates, cherries, and the mighty beet. They also analyzed the makeup of pistachio phytochemicals — compounds within plants that may help to lower the risk of chronic disease and keep your body working properly. They looked at the antioxidant potential of pistachios and the anti-proliferative effects, which is a mouthful. All that means is they were looking at whether pistachio extract can help inhibit the growth of tumor cells — like breast, liver, and colon cancer cells.

They used different methods in science to measure antioxidant activity of certain compounds. In this case, they used what's called the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, the ORAC score, and the Cellular Antioxidant Activity, the CAA score. They found that pistachio was very high due to its natural vitamin E, carotenoids, phenolics, and flavonoids. Pistachios, in other studies, have also been shown to be very good for your gut microbiome. They help feed bacteria in the gut in a good way, without causing a lot of gas. And heck, they taste good.

I was at an auction for a local school — shout out to Logos School in Moscow, Idaho. Part of the auction involved a cake dash, where everyone at the table would come together and bid to be first in line to get some of the wonderful cakes baked fresh that day. I was able to secure a pistachio cake for my table. You never know, once you get past the outside beautiful layer of a cake, if the inside is going to be like a cheap cardboard-box cake mix or real dense, nutty, gooey, creamy goodness. It was the latter in my case. So I actually have about half of a giant pistachio cake in the refrigerator.

And perhaps more importantly, for those of you who fly on airplanes — depending on which class you're in, or whether the snack pack is sitting there free to take — nudge nudge, wink wink, hey, you paid for the ticket — pistachios are often in that little snack box. Considering they cost about $17.99 for a large bag at the airport bookstore or candy shop, grabbing a few bags on the airplane is a good idea. It's actually a habit of mine. I managed to score four small bags of pistachios during my flight home from Nashville a couple of days ago. So there you have it, and I'm healthier because of it, as we now know from this article.

Okay, so next up. This one's interesting, maybe because my friend Gary Brecka is now wearing a weighted vest everywhere. It's not like a rucksack vest — I think it's 10 pounds, called an Ion Vest. Maybe that 10 pounds can add up as far as a little extra gravity for the body, as I reported in another podcast episode a few months ago: increased proprioceptive awareness of the body in space, a bit of an effect on bone density, and of course, you just look like a superhero.

Well, the question is — and this is the question asked in a recent study — is a weighted vest as good as actual weight training when it comes to maintaining or building muscle? This was a 12-month randomized controlled trial in 150 older adults who were obese, who underwent a weight loss intervention and who wore a weighted vest.

Now the first thing you should note as a good little research student is that these folks were obese. The relative weight addition of a weighted vest on someone who weighs, say, 300 pounds is going to be much less significant than the relative added weight and potential muscle-triggering effect on someone who weighs, say, 170 pounds wearing a 10-pound weighted vest. Nonetheless, what they looked at was supervised weight training three times per week, or wearing a weighted vest daily for up to eight hours per day. They did increase the vest weight as the participant lost body weight — which is actually a little counterintuitive to me. It seems like the more you weigh, the higher the weighted vest should be. But they used the opposite approach.

What they found was that the actual loss of weight did not change between each group, but the resistance training group did a better job of mitigating the muscle loss that occurs with a diet- or exercise-based program. Meaning the anabolic or muscle-protein-synthesis-triggering properties of weight training are superior to those of wearing a weighted vest. That does not mean you should throw your weighted vest out, but it makes intuitive sense. If you're at the gym squatting, lunging, hinging, overhead pressing, pulling, chest pressing, and rowing, you're moving muscles through a joint range of motion that is higher than what you might achieve just walking with a weighted vest. You're causing more muscle tissue damage — eccentric loading, in most cases — which is what's going to trigger muscle growth, and you're training more functionally as well. With the weighted vest, really, you're just moving against a weight to burn more calories.

Now, if I have some friends over, I've got about five weighted vests, and there's not enough weights to go around but everybody can wear a weighted vest, we'll do squats and push-ups and lunges. I use a weighted vest when I go on fitness walks. There's a big hill — shout out to Saddle Ridge Hill behind my house — and I'll climb that thing. For example, every time I get to a mailbox, I do 20 air squats wearing the weighted vest, and then at the next mailbox, I'll do 20 push-ups, alternating back and forth going all the way up the hill. Coming back down, I'll do uphill-facing burpees and then mountain climbers, alternating between those two, all while wearing the vest. That's a way you can use a vest and get both strength training, a high calorie burn, and a little extra metabolic load.

But the main takeaway from this study is that you still need to do formal weight training in the gym if you want to stave off muscle loss with a diet, or if you want to build or maintain muscle, rather than just relying on a weighted vest. So there you have it.

All right, so this next one I'm pretty excited about. It's basically what I consider a really good walkthrough of what the future of strength training could look like. I've subscribed to the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research since I was probably, gosh, 19 years old. I'm 44 now — you do the math. I get this blue journal to my house every month and I read through it. It's not the only journal I read, but it's one I like. My personal training and strength conditioning certifications are through the NSCA. In 2008, I was actually voted Personal Trainer of the Year by the NSCA, so I've got a special place in my heart for the literature they put out.

The article was entitled "Maximizing Strength: The Stimuli and Mediators of Strength Gains and Their Application to Training and Rehabilitation." The short version of what these authors — Brad Schoenfeld among them, who's done a lot of the research on, say, high-weight/low-rep versus high-rep/low-weight training — is that you could potentially be leaving strength and muscle gains on the table, and there are ways you can enhance training to get more bang for your buck from the time you spend at the gym.

Before getting to the future stuff, the paper lays out what's happening mechanistically when you get stronger. Strength gains are triggered through a sequence of events: maximal mental effort, causing maximal neural activation of the muscle, resulting in a forceful contraction, concentric and eccentric movement (the positive and negative aspects of lifting and lowering the weight), full range of motion, and muscular metabolic stress. When you combine all of that, that's how we get strength gains quickly and efficiently. And of course, hearing all of that, I'm sure you can imagine you have to go beyond yoga, saunas, resistance bands, and following a Gwyneth Paltrow DVD.

So let me chunk these up into how the article describes them, and then I'll finish by walking you through what a sample week might look like if you were to use a lot of these strategies.

First: eccentric overload training. Your muscles can produce greater force during the lowering action — let's say dropping into a squat, or lowering a pair of dumbbells to your chest — than during the lifting action, the concentric action. During traditional heavy resistance exercise, your muscles are near maximally loaded during the concentric phase, but sub-maximally loaded during the eccentric phase. Meaning your muscles could technically handle a lot more when lowering the bar to your chest than when pressing it away. You're theoretically sandbagging half of the set — the hardest part of the rep — if you are not taking advantage of eccentric-only training, or what's called accentuated eccentric loading, where the load during the eccentric phase actually exceeds the load during the concentric phase.

A simple, low-tech method for this: lift bilaterally and lower unilaterally. For example, load up a leg press, push with both legs, and lower with one. Or on a machine that allows single-arm activation, press out and lower with just one arm. There are even better ways to do this. For example, variable resistance training using heavy bands — John Jaquish has something called the X3 Bar system, where you're pressing the band up, and if you slow the descent of the band during an overhead press, you get much more eccentric loading because you're struggling to keep the band from pulling down too quickly.

Bands like that are portable. There are also many machines now — the Tonal, for example, lets you increase force during the eccentric phase. The ARX is the one I use. It's a large machine, but it has a two-horsepower engine and will push against you just as hard as you push against it. When I do a chest press on the ARX, I can push as much weight as I want — but when it's pushing me back in, that weight can be 20, 30, or 40 pounds heavier, because it's matching my force output. The simplest way to do this: just lower the weight for longer than you lift it. A 2-4 tempo — two seconds up, four seconds down. By reducing speed during the eccentric portion, you trigger more of the muscle fibers capable of handling heavier loads. In many circles, this is called focusing on the negative phase of the lift.

Next: blood flow restriction. Blood flow restriction typically involves using pneumatic cuffs or bands — commercially available — to increase metabolic stress inside the muscle and enhance strength gains compared with low-load resistance training. You tourniquet — well, that's not quite the right word, because blood is getting into the muscle, it's just not getting out. When you use a BFR band, you trap metabolic byproducts in the muscle. Because the blood can get in but can't get out, you're building up lactic acid and all these metabolic byproducts inside the muscle. By being stuck in the muscle, so to speak, you trigger a greater anabolic response, and you can get a heavy-load training effect with lighter weights.

You could walk into the crappiest hotel gym — 20-pound dumbbells, a rusty elliptical, a half-pumped stability ball — put on BFR bands, do squats, push-ups, lunges, curls with the 20-pound dumbbells, and sprint on the elliptical. Your muscles think they're lifting a heavier load. You can get a really good strength and muscle-gain response. This is also useful if you're injured and can't lift heavy. An example protocol: choose an exercise, do four sets — 30 reps, then 15, then 15, then 15 — with 30 seconds of rest between sets, then move on to the next exercise.

The way I personally like to do BFR training — and I don't advise this because the protocols don't advise it — I'll cuff both my arms and my legs and run a circuit in a hotel room: 30 squats, 20 push-ups, 10 pull-ups on a door-frame suspension strap, 30 lunges, 20 dips, 10 overhead presses, for however much time I have, usually about a half hour. BFR bands are still, I think, underrated for producing strength gains with low load.

Next: motor imagery, or mental rehearsal. This sounds pseudoscientific until you read the actual data. Imagined forceful muscle contractions, performed in the absence of actual physical contractions — called motor imagery training — can increase strength over time, and there are actual physiological changes that occur, including central neural adaptations resulting in increased command of the muscle. Greater intensity of mental effort during motor imagery actually produces greater subsequent gains in strength. This is also known in some realms as psycho-cybernetics — books like The Inner Game of Tennis, The Inner Game of Golf. Practice your tennis swing in your mind while sitting on an airplane, and you could actually improve your forehand, backhand, serve, or drop shot. You're literally training your motor cortex and corticospinal tract to fire harder without actually loading the tissue.

Practical application: before each set at the gym, close your eyes and vividly imagine contracting that muscle. It doesn't have to be long — 20 to 30 seconds. Feel it from the inside, not watching yourself from the outside. Primes the nervous system. If you really want to amp this up, look into a company like Halo Sport, which uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to help you recruit even more motor units alongside visualization. That's the cutting-edge mental aspect of training.

Next: arousal. Not that kind of arousal — arousal as it relates to mental effort. The dendrites of spinal motor neurons generate a persistent inward current that facilitates descending commands from the brain. What this means is that you can amplify neural signals by psyching yourself up. How psyched up you are directly amplifies how hard your nervous system fires. This means that pre-lift protocols to enhance arousal actually work.

This could be — proceed with caution — aggressive music at 130-plus BPM, which has been supported in research. Powerlifters use this for a reason. Ammonia inhalants like smelling salts (nose torque is one you can find on Amazon — it will pack a wallop, and I don't recommend walking around smelling ammonia all the time, but it can help). Words like "attack" or "explode" — even cursing — have been shown to help. Controlled hyperventilation: three to five deep, aggressive breaths before you lift. Even a cold plunge before hitting the gym — just one to two minutes in super cold water, towel off, put on your clothes, start lifting. These are all physiological arousal mechanisms.

One more I'll throw at you, like I threw the Halo Sport tDCS at you: it's an app called NuCalm. You can use it for sleep, but they also have some very intense tracks that, for me, get me very pumped up at the gym. I rarely listen to music — I use it as an occasional drug when I really want to go hard, because if I used music all the time, I'd just overtrain. But basically, any of these things that psych you up: remember, how psyched up you are directly amplifies how your nervous system fires. Use that to your advantage.

And finally, the article gets into real-time biofeedback through electromyography (EMG). EMG enhances forceful muscle contractions during resistance exercise and over time gives you really good strength gains. There are now tools that use EMG — which stands for electromyography — to measure the contractile force of a muscle, and you can gamify this by watching on an app or a screen what your muscle is actually doing during a set. Some use a near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) device — like the Moxy Monitor or the Humon Hex. You clip it to the working muscle and watch oxygenation drop during sets and recover between sets. When you're not recovering fully, you're accumulating too much fatigue. That's biofeedback.

Another form: velocity-based training biofeedback — things like the GymAware or the Push Band. Those track bar speed. When velocity drops about 20% from your first rep, you terminate the set. The ARX I mentioned has a screen, so when I'm lifting, I can see when I'm producing say 60% or less of the force I produced on the first rep. That can be very motivating. Professional sports teams use tools like this — I remember when Eric Ferrán, strength coach for the Miami Heat, was walking me through their facilities showing me how they had devices that could monitor muscle oxygenation and contractile force in real time.

For some of you, you might be thinking, gosh, I just want to go crank out some push-ups at the gym. I don't want wires attached to myself. These are more advanced tools for someone with a lot of skin in the game, like a professional athlete. But if you'd like to see what's going on in your body while you work out, gamifying with biofeedback is very similar to what a lot of us already do — checking heart rate, HRV, or step count. This is just real-time biofeedback in the gym. Of all the elements in the article, this is probably what I've experimented with the least. I'd love to hear what devices you'd recommend that aren't too distracting but give you a great picture — ideally an app or device that tracks a lot at once, like muscle contractile force, muscle oxygenation, maybe some HRV or heart rate. Leave me a comment in the show notes, because I'd love to hear what you've discovered in the realm of real-time biofeedback during exercise.

So let's get into what a sample week might look like applying all of this. A standard split: Monday, lower body. Good idea to start with leg day — you've got the highest concentration of androgen receptors in your legs, and you get the hard stuff over with early in the week. Tuesday, upper body push. Wednesday, active recovery. Thursday, another lower body day with a different focus — if Monday was strength-focused and eccentric overload, Thursday might be more BFR-based volume training. Friday, upper body pull. Saturday and Sunday, you're golfing or playing pickleball.

Monday, lower body strength: do one to two minutes of motor imagery of your squat and deadlift patterns before you start, or 20 to 30 seconds before each set. Then: four sets of five back squats, four sets of five Romanian deadlifts, four sets of leg press, and three sets of 10 walking lunges per leg. For the back squat and Romanian deadlift, motor imagery before each set, and a 2-up, 4-down tempo. For the leg press, throw on BFR bands and do 30-15-15-15. Walking lunges: full range of motion, controlled tempo.

Tuesday, upper body push: motor imagery before every set. Bench press, lowering the weight much more slowly than you raise it. Incline dumbbell press — lift with both arms, lower with one to maximize the eccentric phase. Overhead press through full range of motion. Finish with BFR training for the triceps, something like a cable triceps pushdown. I'll put this full split in the show notes.

Wednesday, active recovery: maybe you're on a plane. Five minutes of vividly feeling a heavy squat, quads firing, bracing, the whole sequence. Five minutes of vividly feeling a heavy deadlift. Five minutes of vividly feeling a bench press or overhead press. Then go on an easy walk. That's your motor imagery day. Bonus points if you use tDCS like the Halo Sport on that day.

Thursday, lower body again, more hinging plus BFR: motor imagery, two-second concentric, four-second eccentric. Conventional deadlifts, Bulgarian split squats, maybe a Nordic hamstring curl, then finishing with leg extensions and leg curls wearing BFR bands, 30-15-15-15-15.

Friday, upper body pull: weighted chin-ups, a barbell row with explosive concentric and slow eccentric, single-arm row focusing on the eccentric, then BFR bands for bicep curls. I'll put a sample of that in the show notes. And throughout all of this, you're using physiological arousal mechanisms like deep bracing breath, music, or a cold plunge pre-workout, and vivid imagery before each set. If you just want to get very strong very quickly, that's a sample program you can follow.

By the way, shout out to my coaching team at JoinTriumphCoaching.com. We study up on techniques like this and incorporate them into your program. You get full accountability, Q&A, a workout library, a nutrition library. It works. Go to JoinTriumphCoaching.com and do a discovery call with one of our coaches if you want us to build a training program for you and take all the guesswork out of it. In the meantime, I'll put this program out there for free at BenGreenfieldLife.com/500.

Let's move on to the next topic, which pairs quite well with what you just learned, because it gets into protein — how much you should eat, and when. This is something I tweeted out — or X'd out, that doesn't sound right — on X.com/BenGreenfield. If you want to follow me there, I put out one or two research studies a day that I've come across.

This one was looking at calorie deficit and the best way to consume protein to maximize muscle protein synthesis when you're at a calorie deficit. I believe Brad Schoenfeld — the guy mentioned earlier — was actually an author, yes, him and Alan Aragon. They're two pretty respectable OGs in this area. It's a slightly older paper but a good reminder.

So let's say you want to gain some strength and muscle, which seems to be turning into the theme of today's podcast. This is not just for jacked meatheads. As Gabrielle Lyon recently elucidated on my podcast: muscle is youth. If you want to maximize anabolism and muscle protein synthesis, how should you spread your protein throughout the day?

My apologies that this is all going to be in grams per kilogram, but the conversion is simple — even simpler if you're an AI user, just run it through AI. If you're an American who deals in freedom units, the conversion is straightforward. Based on the current evidence, the conclusion of this paper was that to maximize muscle protein synthesis or anabolism, you should consume protein at a target intake of 0.4 grams per kilogram per meal, across a minimum of four meals in the day, to reach right around 1.6 grams per kilogram per day.

Quick napkin math: 0.4 grams per kilogram. I weigh about 80 kilograms, so that comes out to about 32 grams of protein per meal. What does that look like? More than you might think. Five eggs. A four-ounce chicken breast is around 35 grams. One and a half cups of Greek yogurt gives you around 32 grams. A bigger can of salmon — say, five ounces — is around 30 grams. Four to five ounces of ground beef or steak. Those are rough estimates. You could also do a 30-gram whey protein shake. Or do a chicken breast plus 10 grams of essential amino acids, pulsing a few grams here and there to top yourself off. By end of day, you're looking for 1.6 grams per kilogram, which is around 0.7 to 0.8 grams per pound.

That's more protein than I think a lot of people are getting, but it's doable, and you want to spread it across at least four meals. That doesn't have to mean a chicken breast every meal — a whey protein shake in the morning, a few eggs or a can of salmon, four to five ounces of steak at lunch, something between lunch and dinner like 20 grams of amino acids and some jerky, and then another 30 to 35 grams at dinner. That's roughly what I'd aim for at my size.

No discussion of protein would be complete without pointing out essential amino acids. I was recently listening to my friend Angelo Keeley, CEO of Kion, on the Habits and Hustle Podcast with my other friend Jen Cohen. I'll link to that in the show notes. Angelo was describing a study actually conducted by NASA. NASA had a problem: lack of gravity in space was causing astronauts to lose muscle. One of the things they investigated as a possible solution was essential amino acids.

They took — I believe it was around six or seven subjects — put them on complete bed rest for 28 days, given three meals a day plus essential amino acids twice a day. The group that received the essential amino acids lost zero muscle mass after 28 days of complete bed rest. The dose? Around 15 grams of essential amino acids per day. You want to make sure the ratios are correct — enough leucine and histidine. For example, the formula at Kion, which is the company Angelo and I own, has a really good ratio. There are other good brands out there — Perfect Aminos, First Form. I think Kion is the best because our ratios most closely mimic the amino acid composition that seems best for muscle protein synthesis. But whichever product you choose, 15 grams was enough to hang on to muscle in that state.

The way this works: EAAs can stimulate net muscle protein synthesis to a significantly greater extent than a meal with protein alone, because they're readily available and highly bioavailable. And don't confuse BCAAs and EAAs. BCAAs are just three amino acids — leucine, valine, isoleucine. EAAs are all nine. A scoop of Kion Essential Amino Acids is around five grams; a capsule is around one gram. I currently do four scoops pre-workout in the morning and about two scoops — around 10 grams — towards early evening. So I'm getting around 30 grams of essential amino acids per day. For reference, I'm about six feet tall and around 194 pounds at around 6% body fat.

I believe that paper on bed rest was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology and was conducted by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute.

So I'm actually running out of time for this podcast, so let's go ahead and call it there. I had a few other research studies I wanted to go through, and I'll save those for the next one. In the meantime, leave your questions, comments, and feedback over at BenGreenfieldLife.com/500. Hope you enjoy these little solo shows where I just dig into some research for you and occasionally do some Q&As. Hope this is helpful, and until next time, have an incredible week.

To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks, and content to become the most complete, boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

---

DISCLAIMER (FTC)

In compliance with FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items, but the price is the same for you, and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion LLC, the makers of Kion-branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support, and — with full authenticity and transparency — recommend in good conscience. I personally vet each and every product I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body, and spirit, and I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.

---