October 16, 2013

Podcast #260 from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2013/10/260-33-question-extravaganza-training-nutrition-supplements/

[0:00:00]

Introduction:  In today’s episode of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast: 33 big fitness questions answered by Ben, a special “post Ironman Hawaii” recording with Tawnee Prazak and me, Brock Armstrong, top tips recorded live with other listeners of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast, and special guest appearances by Vinnie Tortorich and Jessa Greenfield.

Tawnee:  Who starts?

Brock:  Yeah, who does start in this case? I think let’s go, ladies first.

Tawnee:  Hi guys! Tawnee Prazak here, your host of Endurance Planet and…

Brock:  Brock Armstrong here from Ben Greenfield Fitness and

Ben:  I am Ben Greenfield. I am well on my way into a celebratory mode…

Tawnee:  Cheers!

Ben:  Post-Ironman Hawaii. Cheers! If you are lucky enough to be watching the video of this podcast then you see Tawnee, Brock, and me on camera stuffing our faces with healthy beverages…

Brock:  Smoothies all around.

Tawnee:  being a spectator’s tough, especially when I’m trying to cover the race…

Ben:  So tough.

Tawnee:  So tough.

Ben:  So today we’re all on our way to the post-Hawaii Ironman parties…

Brock:  I believe it’s called the Big Year?

Brock:  No the Big Chain Ring… Party with Maca…

Tawnee:  Who ended up not racing this year due to an illness. Decided…

Ben:  Can anyone name the illness?

Brock:  Epstil..

Ben:  Yeah, don’t kiss them.

Tawnee:  It’s like Mona.

Brock:  It’s like no kissing..

Ben:  Yes, it’s kissing disease.

Tawnee:  Yeah.

Brock:  Nobody’s gotten that since they were in grade 6.

Tawnee:  But he still comes out here to do business and party. ‘Cause Maca’s one of the guys who knows how to hang.

Brock:  He knows how to do business and party.

Ben:  That’s right. So, we’re gonna spend about the next 25 minutes or so for you guys, kinda laying out the ins and outs of kinda how my race day went with the goal of hopefully teaching you some lessons and let you know a little bit about you know, Ironman Hawaii and how the day goes and Brock and Tawnee are kinda in-charge here. We’re gonna do a little bit of Q&A style format. We honestly like aside from a very brief discussion over at breakfast this morning, I haven’t really told them my race much at all.

Tawnee:  And that’s why we’re gonna answer the question that you guys submitted on our facebook page but I decided I really need to hear the story. Like I’ve been waiting, waiting, waiting so I gotta hear it.

Ben:  So if you’re listening to this on Endurance Planet, just tune in to the Ben Greenfield Fitness episode this week and we also cover like 30 questions from you guys so…

Brock:  Maybe 40. It’s ridiculous.

Ben:  So let’s jump in. What questions do you guys have about race day yesterday?

Tawnee:  Well you did your BulletProof coffee so my question is, were you able to find grass-fed butter here ‘cause I wasn’t.

Ben:  Alright, so great question. BulletProof coffee, it’s a mix of coffee, technically, if you want to be all legal and not get sued by Dave Asprey’s lawyers. It is branded by the company, Upgrade Itself..

Tawnee:  Did you bring that coffee with you?

Ben:  Yes. It’s from altitude high in Costa Rica. Full disclosure. They actually sponsor me as an athlete…

Brock:  Otherwise it’s about $100 a bag…

Tawnee:  Dave Asprey always had to justify on this podcast…

Ben:  Yes.

Tawnee:  And I understand it but…

Ben:  It is why, if you’re watching the video right now, my nipples are the size of dinner plates. But it’s grown high up in the altitudes of Costa Rica and it’s low in microtoxins and mold and fungus and so you don’t get a lot of those cross in your blood-brain barrier. You blend that with about half a stick of butter and a few tablespoons of what’s called medium change triglyceride oil which is coconut oil that’s been centrifuged and concentrated so that the actual fats in the coconut oil that are easily utilizes energy are able to be taken up more quickly.

Brock:  For those of you who don’t know what centrifuge is, it’s spun around like crazy.

Tawnee:  And you juice that and what-not.

Ben:  It’s a giant-ass spinning machine so…

Tawnee:  When you juice, like make juices…

Ben:  Sort of. Just like Ironman Canada. That was I consumed prior to the race and just like Ironman Canada, just a great feeling during the swim. You know, zero blood sugar surges up and down, great focus, really nice settled stomach.

[0:05:95.4]

This is a bonus, if you have trouble with your morning movement, shall we say and you race morning…

Brock:  Same as Ironman Canada, Ben spent a good half-hour alone time.

Ben:  So I sipped my coffee, while I sit there, I mean full disclosure ‘cause this is the way things roll, I sit there, drinking my coffee, taking a crap for a good 20 minutes because I honestly don’t want anything in my system ‘cause I don’t wanna have to stop during the bike or the run to go to the bathroom.

Tawnee:  When do you start drinking the coffee?

Ben:  So for a race start, I will try and start the coffee about 2-2 and a half hours prior to race start so this race start…

Tawnee:  I thought you were gonna say start 6AM. I was gonna be like, seriously?

Brock:  7?

Ben:  I set my alarm for 4:45. I had the coffee ready rumbled, made the coffee, Brock walked out just as it was finishing, I dumped the coffee, and went in to take a dump. So that was breakfast.

Tawnee:  It all went smoothly.

Ben:  And I do highly recommend a huge change from the huge sweet potatoes that I used to recommend, the oatmeal I use to recommend, everything. Now that that stuff doesn’t work, but if you haven’t tried this yet, what happens is the fats in the butter and the MCT oil carry what are called the turpines in the coffee across your blood-brain barrier and this gives you a more intense feeling of focus.

Tawnee:  Seriously, you have to answer my question I asked you.

Ben:  And so, what was your question?

Tawnee:  Did you find grass-fed butter?

Ben:  Oh yeah.

Brock:  That was like an hour ago.

Tawnee:  I know. I like, we all know what BulletProof coffee is, right?

Ben:  So when you’re travelling,  you, when I race in triathlons, I ship my bike and so anything that is large like magnesium oil, sunscreen, stuff like that, that’s not bearing the 4 ounces, or that might be considered food, I put in my bike case, I’ve never had a problem. A big stick of organic grass-fed butter that was in my bike case.

Tawnee:  ‘Cause there’s once place out here, Island Naturals or something like that where I’ve been doing my grocery shopping since I’ve been here and they have organic butter but they did not have grass-fed butter and I think that would be the only place I would yeah. Okay, so you’re smuggling butter across…

Ben:  I’m smuggling butter… It’s actually Hawaii’s in the United States of America so…

Brock:  We don’t know why.

Tawnee:  Just ignore that.

Brock:  How did America get Hawaii? That’s not fair.

Ben:  Alright, next.. This is gonna be a 2-hour podcast at this point.

Tawnee:  I know right?

Brock:  I was gonna add something into the butter thing or the coffee thing.

Ben:  Well the swim, let’s move on to the swim.

Brock:  Okay.

Ben:  Lined up where I usually lined up, far left for Ironman Hawaii. Hopped on some feet and stayed on the same set of feet the entire race.

Brock:  By that he means he was swimming just back from the feet, in front of him… It’s the drafting technique…

Ben:  So my rule is if I’m drafting, and I try to pass someone, and I have to work very hard to pass them, I simply fall back and stay on those feet. I end up swimming at 102 which is my slowest swimming in Hawaii. I’m not sure it was because of the person I was drafting off swam crooked, I was gonna blame the whole thing on them.

Tawnee:  The water was very calm. I was out on the pier and it was very…

Ben:  I felt like it should have been a faster swim but either way, I felt like I didn’t work at all on the swim and I kinda sort wanted to feel fresh getting on the bike so I literally was not by myself the entire swim and was about 2 inches from a set of feet the entire swim and drafted the whole time.

Tawnee:  Okay so you got out of the water, you felt…

Ben:  And I sighted once during the swim. That’s it.

Tawnee:  That’s really…

Brock:  So you’re really trusting that person’s feet.

Ben:  When we got… Well they felt like they were swimming pretty fast so I trust they were swimming straight and…

Tawnee:  Did you happen to have people on either side of you or were you pretty much just like everyone?

Ben:  We were kinda working through crowds and stuff and so I trusted this guy and I mean, granted I was a few minutes slower I would have been but I was so fresh coming out of the water.

Tawnee:  Yeah.

Ben:  So yeah, maybe I tried to cop out by not trying to leap frog and move up to the crowd a little bit but…

Tawnee:  Something is good by some…

Ben:  Yeah, I felt great coming out of the water. So…

Tawnee:  Okay so as soon as you get on the bike, you’re feeling good, how does nutrition start in that?

Ben:  So I got my, we’ve talked about this on previous podcast, my Ucan SuperStarch mixed up with MCT oil…

Brock:  Oh yeah.

Ben:  Some amino acids and what else is in there, a little bit of X2 performance? And…

Tawnee:  You’re handing out the media room.

Brock:  Yeah.

Ben:  They were. X2 Performance is kind of like a sponsor for Ironman now…

Tawnee:  I didn’t take any.

Ben:  Anyways though…

Brock:  But you added extra stuff this time.

Ben:  By the way for those of you watching my video, I hope you like my barely washed off tattoos. Those are actually not permanent.

Brock:  He hasn’t showered since the race.

Ben:  Yeah, I haven’t. Anyways though, I use that filling mixture, had it in my bike bottle, and use that all the way up to Havi and felt extremely, kinda sluggish while I was riding out to Havi. Excuse me while I pour another bottle, another bottle, glass of wine, I would like you to hear that. Just some sound effects.

Tawnee:  What are you gonna do? Just make everyone jealous right now?

Ben:  That’s right. So…

[0:10:05.1]

Tawnee:  Is this stream live or are we…

Ben:  No, this is not live. Don’t worry. We can edit out all your cursing. Anyways though, I felt very sluggish, and by the way, Block, Brock, Block..

Brock:  Block.

Ben:  Brock has disappeared from the video because he’s trying to figure out how to plug in his computer. We’ve got 32%. We could…

Brock:  No.

Tawnee:  No?

Ben:  Well either way, while Brock’s out gallavancing…

Tawnee:  Sluggishly, if you feel really good on the swim, and you get on the bike you feel sluggish, what was your mind thinking?

Ben:   So usually during the bike, I have this like feeling of kind of like superiority like I just can go where I wanna go and I can hammer where I wanna hammer, pass where I wanna pass and I kinda felt single speed which is really really weird and I can only think of 3 reasons why that would be. Number 1, and this is something apparently Tawnee didn’t know until this morning. I though I told you this before ‘cause I knew I told Brock that this is my last Ironman triathlon that I’m gonna do. There are other things I wanna check off on life, spending more and more time now, homeschooling my kids, less time training, and I just, all respect to the people who’ve done 30, 40, 50 Ironmans, whatever. If you wanna grab my power, strip rock, you can try that one too. All respect to those folks but I just, I don’t really wanna be the 50 year old person who just keeps coming back to Ironman year after year and beating up my body with that sport. I wanna go back after national ranking in tennis. I want to focus on a little bit more on some of the music that I’ve neglected the past few years, I used to be in the music, for the past 4 years, haven’t been in a band after being in a band for most of my life. There’s just lots of things I wanna check off in life and so this was my last Ironman. That’s reason number 1 is I had a real goal going in of enjoying the day and I think maybe part of enjoying the day meant that I wasn’t as motivated to suffer hard. So that’s number one.

Tawnee:  I think that’s fair.

Ben:  What was your question?

Tawnee:  So do you think part of your reason to step out away from Ironman is the more you’re learning about the negative effects of endurance exercise on one’s body. Are you starting to become more of a believer in that, and just wanna be like, you’d obviously still be healthy and I’m sure you’ll still swim by but…

Ben:  I’m very very interested to see about after a year of not training for Ironman. What happens to my blood biomarkers that I tested…

Tawnee:  Right, because earlier this year you’re shocked by seeing results…

Ben:  Yeah, because despite my real focus on real food, nutrition, and supplements, taking care of my body, distressing everything, I have I’ve been concerned by some of the bio markers, some of the lab values, and I don’t necessarily see benefit. You know, I’ve been doing Ironman now since 2007 which is a ton of time but it was at 6 years so after 10 Ironman triathlons, that’s enough for me.

Tawnee:  I’ve doing triathlons since 2007. I can’t have imagined having done 10 Ironmans already.

Ben:  Yeah and lots and lots of other races and so this was my last Ironman and..

Tawnee:  What do you go out though?

Ben:  Yeah. Yeah, kinda. We’ll get to that.

Tawnee:  Okay.

Ben:  So I felt sluggish on the bike. Wasn’t able to kinda go with the packs of guys I would usually go with so big packs went past me and I was just like you know what, I didn’t have it in my legs today and part of me just didn’t really want to suffer so that was reason number one. Reason number 2 that I think may have been a little bit sluggish on the day was because if any of you follow my personal training protocol that I post to my website, ever since Ironman Canada, all that I’m doing was travelling in airplanes and train in hotel rooms and I think that that kind of wears me a little bit too and my training, I always viewed Hawaii as more of a fun race because frankly I don’t stand a huge chance of beating all the fast Austrian and German kids.

Tawnee:  So I listened to your podcast with Vinnie and Ritual earlier this year and they were both talking about when they release their books, the toll that took on their lives and you have to do…

Ben:  Book, book. Publishing a book on health like this ace like the least healthiest thing you can do is publish a book on health. My book released this week so beyondtrainingbook.com release this week on Kona, huge thanks to guy like Brock who played a huge role in like, you know, Brock was like handing out flyers and gorilla marketing…

Tawnee:  I saw him everywhere in Kona this week.

Ben:  But a lot of work on my part in terms of getting final manuscripts to the publisher and all that stuff and I don’t wanna be that guy who sits around making excuses but I think that affected my training a little bit…

[0:15:04.4]

Brock:  What is the difference between making excuses and having excuses? And I think these are legitimate excuses.

Ben:  Yeah, maybe.

Tawnee:  So here’s the third one I would really want to hear the story on the nutrition side of things like your special needs bag and…

Ben:  Yeah. So the last thing that happened… Alright so lesson learned, yeah, I make big mistakes sometimes. So I usually try and keep my fuel cold. I actually travel to Hawaii with a mini cooler and have it like on ice on special needs. When you turn around on the bike and special needs in my run bag is on ice and in my t2 bag, my bike to run bag is on ice. I didn’t do that this year. I think maybe it was because I was being cavalier, casual, whatever. But either way, when I got out to the special needs station at Havi to get my second bottle of “ketogenic” endurance pack fuel, the stuff was warm and it tasted like warm gasoline that mix of MCT oil and Superstarch fermenting in the hot Hawaii sun for 5 hours. Big mistake. And I was like there was no way in hell that I’m going to…

Tawnee:  Like if you were to say it tasted like anything, what would it taste like?

Ben:  It tasted like drinking hot oil. I took one huge swig and almost immediately got heartburn. And I like never get heartburn and so it was never good. So I pretty much was not doing the whole ketogenic thing from Havi all the way back into town and…

Brock:  So your entire nutrition plan…

Ben:  My entire nutrition plan was out the window starting out at mile 60 or whatever on the bike.

Brock:  So why did you switch to…

Ben:  I switched to Bonk Breakers on the bike, I switched to coke on the run.

Tawnee:  Did you feel sick because of that, because of what you’ve been doing otherwise?

Ben:  I all the way down from Havi I was like burping up. So it was a little different. It threw me off a little bit but when I split myself at Havi I already knew that I was a little slower than I normally been so that point I thought you know what, last Ironman, if I can beat 10 hours, I would be happy and so that kinda became the thought in the back of my head was have a good time and beat 10 hours and that’s it.

Brock:  Don’t drink warm oil gasoline.

Tawnee:  So what do you have on the run?

Ben:  So on the run, pretty much coke from the get-go.

Tawnee:  Every aid station?

Ben:  Really simple scenario. Get to the aid station, every other aid station. So you get to every other aid station about 8 ounces of coke dumped over ice, chew it like an ice slushie during a very very brisk 30-second walk and then break out on a run. And that was my protocol. Zero electrolytes. I would have actually have electrolytes but my electrolytes were mixed into my water bottle that I decided not to drink so there’s good proof though cause I didn’t cramp it all so good proof that you don’t need electrolytes even on a one day like Kona.

Brock:  We’ll get to it but there was some serious cramping eventually but we’ll discuss that later.

Ben:  We’ll talk about that because that may have been affected by lack of electrolytes but this is very weird. Tawnee didn’t hear about this, it’s kinda funny. I had a…

Brock:  I’ll put a link…

Tawnee:  Did you see that?

Ben:  An alien popped up on my stomach. It was creepy. So anyways though, so rode all the way back in from Havi, felt good but again just not the same popping legs as I usually have, I think like I bike what’s that, like 5’11” or something like that. Yeah so normally, being where I am right now, I you know, would have biked 450, 455-ish but it kinda was what it was and rode in the transition and felt good going into the run and knew that that even though I was on the best day of my life, all I need to do was run at 330, 340 marathon, kinda suffer through the Hawaii heat and I’d be able to enjoy my last Ironman, be able to smile at folks, love life and still you know, kinda have a decent race so oh the run…

Tawnee:  What do you think of the conditions because they were, I mean I was there… I’ve been here 4 times now so I’m getting kind of the idea of you know, what’s bad day, hard day, what’s like a mild day. It was a pretty mild day and everyone seemed to like that…

Ben:  Not a lot of winds…

Tawnee:  The cloud covered Kona fairly…

Ben:  It actually was honestly been a good day to PR like…

Tawnee:  Living on the car…

Ben:  Yeah.

Tawnee:  Women’s record…

Ben:  A lot of people PR-ed so you know, as it was, I was pretty fortunate to even go under 10 hours so yeah, so you know, just a little sluggish. The fastest day of my life, the run, pretty much like that every 2 miles run-walk protocol. You know run through one aid station, get to the next one, do a little bit ice, a little bit of coke, little bit of water, and then keep on going and rinse, wash, and repeat.

[0:20:03.2]

I usually pull the trigger as in coming out of the energy lab. I did one thing that I really recommend to folks. We even talked about it on the podcast but we said to put peppermint tums in all my special needs bag and in my T1 bag and my T2 bag. Brock and I for the youtube.com/bengreenfieldfitness video channel shot a what to put in your transition bags, 10-minute long video, that would be really helpful for any of you who wanted to do Ironman but what we didn’t talk about in the video was the fact that I did indeed put about 10 peppermint tums in each of my bags and those things feel really really nice. It’s like a breath of fresh air. Yeah they just, they help your stomach feel really nice and they’re just like refreshing, yeah it’s like popping mints.

Brock:  If you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and search for Stacy Sims, she actually talked about…

Tawnee:  Osmo lady.

Brock:  Yeah from Osmo. She talked about it on the podcast probably close to a year ago…

Ben:  Yeah.

Brock:  And yeah, it’s interesting that you finally got around trying it and it worked.

Tawnee:  So I have to ask because it’s you know, it’s the question that I know, that sort of stuff like did you wait ‘til the race to try that for the first time or did you practice?

Ben:  I tried it a couple of training sessions and in the end it did feel really nice. I’ve never, I probably ate about 10 of them during the race and I highly recommend carry my own bottle. Here’s the catch 22, everything I have was blended in those water bottles in run flasks so from mile 60 on the bike, the only things that I consumed the entire race was Bonk breakers, Coke, and Peppermint Tums. So that was my nutrition protocol.

Tawnee:  Wow.

Brock:  I love this stuff but I tasted the version that you did in Ironman Canada and it was gross already and this one was grosser and warm.

Ben:  You though this one was grosser?

Brock:  Yeah.

Ben:  Did you taste it fresh?

Brock:  No.

Ben:  It was good fresh. The reason why was that I did an hour-long consult with Dr. Peter Atia after Ironman Canada and we talked about why it was that I kinda sort of bonked a little bit in about 13 miles into the run and when you cited that I already took in about as many amino acids as I should have taken in so we added in a bunch of amino acids specifically from a company which I have no financial affiliation with, anything like that, it’s called BioSteel. So I did about 10 grams of amino acids so this was the plan per hour of that and then also we added in, from the nutrition plan, the plan was for the last hour of the bike to top off my glycogen stores about 600 calories worth of Bonk Breakers basically…

Brock:  Which is good that you had those…

Ben:  So at least I had those… I don’t want to look at a peanut butter and jelly Bonk Breaker…

Tawnee:  Loathe them on the course? No way, I should know this because I was working…

Ben:  It was peanut butter and jelly and I did at one point get a coconut cashew and it was…

Tawnee:  They did have a… They didn’t say they’d have that on the course.

Ben:  Well it was heavenly because after peanut butter and jelly all day, coconut cashew tasted really good.

Tawnee:  To me it’s just like cookie dough and obviously that’s what I ate the whole day yesterday.

Brock:  Potato?

Ben:  So Bonk Breakers by the way folks, they’re lactose free, gluten free, soy free. They’re a Ben Greenfield Fitness/Endurance Planet approved nutrition bar. They’re good stuff so anyways, the run. Pretty much stuck to my run as planned. I ran so my pace for a race like why Hawaii Ironman were the elements and heat are at play is I run at a pace that is slightly embarrassing if you’re running with your friends. That’s kinda like my rule. It’s like a pace that you feel like is a little bit slower than you would like to be running until you get to the point where you’re ready to pull that rip cold and go hard and for me that’s about when I have about 10k left coming out of the energy lab and that’s I followed that plan to the tee and ran at a pace that was manageable.

Brock:  When I looked at your run splits, that’s not…

Tawnee:  His were messed up I think. I think the tiny map messed up.

Ben:  Yeah first of all, Ironman live messes up run splits, the second thing is that I stopped at the special needs bag for the run for about like 2 minutes to get all my stuff on the special needs bag.

Tawnee:  Yeah cause like everyone’s last run split looked ridiculously fast like 4 minute mile…

Ben:  Oh we’ll get to that. Mine was fast. So I quit looking at my watch at mile 13 of the run.

Tawnee:  Did you get heart rate on anything?

Ben:  No heart rate. I race Ironman by feel.

Tawnee:  Yeah.

Ben:  So no heart rate, wasn’t even looking at time, and I was just like “you know what, at this point, I was just going to enjoy the day. If I’m running down a lead drive and I’m under 10 hours, great.” So I get to the top of Palani road, which is, for those of you who haven’t been in Ironman where it’s like it’s a little bit under the mile to go basically. It’s about 0.9 miles or so and somebody shouts out… Wish I could hunt them down and choke them…

[0:25:06.6]

Brock:  Or thank them.

Tawnee:  Yeah. That would have been different.

Brock:  Thank you so much.

Ben:  They’re like, “You’ve got 5 minutes to go under 10!” and I’m like this is almost a mile, I’m like, “Oh God.”

Tawnee:  And the best part of the race here is I’m sure like I mean…

Ben:  Well it’s the part that you wanna like be join yourself, looking good, maybe running your hands through your hair, making sure your hair looks good, zipping up your jersey, and I just took off like a shot and it was the most.. There’s a video on facebook.com/bgfitness of me crossing the finish line. Brock does like a quick 10-second interview with me and I’m like that was the toughest quarter mile of my life because when I turned on to Eli Drive, I looked at my watch and it said like 9:58:30 or something like that. Ran past my family, barely even acknowledged them, like ran to the finish line and finished 9:59:17.

Tawnee:  Wow.

Ben:  And I’ve never been that wrecked.

Tawnee:  But you got it.

Ben:  Because I’ve never really had to like sprint out…

Tawnee:  So that’s where that minerals, high-intensity interval training really paid off.

Brock:  There you go. Yeah.

Ben:  Maybe. And by the way, we’re gonna expound on my whole minimalist training protocol if you listening in to the Ben Greenfield Fitness version of this show, that will be coming out over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/260. The 5-hour plane flight back from Hawaii I’ll be answering about the 30 or so questions that you guys have asked about minimalist training, supplements I used, all that kinda stuff but we wanted to give you guys kinda like the 40,000 foot overview today. So yeah, and then, you’re right Brock. I did cramp. First thing I did was I went to the medical tent and I flopped. I pretended I was really hurting and I was surprised, they wouldn’t let me into the medical tent.

Tawnee:  You looked too good?

Ben:  No I was in the medical tent and they’re like oh you’re walking, you’re able to talk, so why don’t you just go walk around? I’m like seriously? I’m like, If I had a heart condition or something was really wrong with me, you’d probably think they’d let people in the medical tent.

Brock:  They probably listen to the podcast.

Ben:  Because and I’m serious. I really did, I really was having to be carried at that point.

Tawnee:  I just want to be cradled.

Ben:  So anyways…

Tawnee:  And Brock came in.

Ben:  They gave me some ice at least at the medical tent and then I went and then I sat down in the grass and then my body went into something like this full body cramp.

Brock:  Yeah. I did not know what was going on. He stopped talking, looked panicked, and just was lying there with his eyes bugging out and then I’m like, “What’s hurting? What’s going on?”

Ben:  And then Brock looks at my stomach and then right, for those of you watching the video, like right there…

Tawnee:  Wait.

Brock:  It looked like right under the…

Ben:  See it can move. We’ll move the mic a little bit here. Okay.

Tawnee:  Tragic.

Ben:  So right there.

Brock:  I’ll post a photo cause I did take a picture.

Ben:  It was like an alien head popping on my stomach.

Tawnee:  Dude that happened to me once. That happened to me once in a spring triathlon in T2 when I bent over to put on shoes, yeah.

Ben:  I thought I was having a hernia.

Brock:  Yeah, it looked like a hernia if it was lower, I would have been like okay hernia…

Ben:  And so I had all my like post-race swim bag stuff just like yard saled right there like phenocane and topical magnesium and like all the stuff that I…

Tawnee:  Meanwhile everyone else is eating pizza…

Ben:  Yeah everybody else was like pizza and pork and I’m like Brock, put magnesium on the ret. So Brock just like dodged a bunch of magnesium oil and put me down with magnesium and it was weird like there was, there was some, like a nurse or like a…

Brock:  No she was just a volunteer.

Ben:  Yeah, one of the volunteers was standing there and she was watching the whole thing and you could watch it, like it went from that big as soon as the magnesium hit it…

Brock:  It started to flutter.

Ben:  It automatically… It like fluttered really quick and then it went and then it went straight down.

Tawnee:  Was it your like…

Ben:  It was… My actual rectus abdominus was like, it exploded.

Brock:  It was crazy…

Ben:  It was really weird.

Brock:  Like literally I could see it start to quiver and then it just went bloop.

Ben:  So…

Brock:  Then I’m okay now. I got magnesium.

Ben:  So I guess the lesson learned is that maybe you don’t need electrolytes during the race but once you stop moving afterwards, you might go into a full body cramp.

Tawnee:  That happened, like something similar like that happened to me during T2. It was at the Palm Springs or the desert international triathlon a couple of years ago and I bent over to put on shoes and it was my first race of the season so my body is kind of in that shock and then all of a sudden that like bending over motion and like the flexing of my abs caused like that squeezed…

Ben:  Yeah, and that’s what like happened right Brock? Like I tried to sit up..

Brock:  Yeah.

Tawnee:  And I was like going like this and I had to stretch out like this and I felt like I had alien coming out.

Brock:  So lesson to all of the listeners out there, don’t try to sit up.

Ben:  Unless you want to give birth to aliens so…

Brock:  Don’t sit up or bend over.

Tawnee:  Okay. So the other interesting thing that you mentioned this morning over at breakfast was that actual breakfast this morning that was the first full meal you’d even eaten since the race.

[0:30:00.9]

Ben:  Yeah I don’t get so well.

Brock:  He had quite a huge bowl of…

Ben:  What happened was I had a bowl of rice with what did I put on that, sardines?

Brock:  Yeah you had some sardines…

Ben:  I had rice, some sardines, some nori last night ‘cause I knew I had to eat something…

Brock:  And then…

Ben:  And then also when we went to pick up my bike, I had an ice cream cone.

Tawnee:  I saw a picture of that.

Brock:  The ice cream cone was as big as Ben’s head.

Ben:  It was not that big. It was a double scooper from Bask and Robbin, it wasn’t huge.

Tawnee:  Did you get sugar rush from that?

Ben:  But…

Tawnee:  Was that like a sensation you haven’t felt in a long time?

Ben:  Probably it turned out about 1,000 calories after Ironman which is not that much. I personally go ape nuts like about 24 hours after Ironman about now.

Brock:  Yeah you really haven’t stopped eating today?

Ben:  Today I’ve been eating gluten power breakfast and I ate and then I’m how far into this bottle of wine. Wow, this could be a bad night. I’m only a quarter in this bottle of wine.

Tawnee:  Pace yourself homie, we’ve got things to do.

Ben:  We’ve got a long night tonight.

Tawnee:  Brock’s finishing his bromer thing here so I’ve, since we’ve started this podcast, I’ve had this much I mean…

Ben:  You know, I’m a total…

Tawnee:  I don’t want to embarrass myself…

Ben:  Let me show those of you watching the video, if you have…

Tawnee:  I know how this works.

Ben:  If you have bengreenfieldfitness.com/premium as where you can get the video, you can see here I’ve consumed about a quarter bottle of wine, maybe, quarter bottle, and I’m already lightheaded so that’s how much lightweight I am after I…

Tawnee:  How many listeners are we losing right now because of this?

Brock:  No, we’re gaining.

Tawnee:  Gaining.

Brock:  ‘Cause we’re getting more charming.

Ben:  What we’re doing is diluting the quality of our listener base. We’re stealing all of…

Tawnee:  Thank God we’re gonna be visiting Vinnie Tortorich..

Ben:  Yeah we’re stealing all of somebody else’s listeners. I don’t know, somebody who has a…

Brock:  I’m sure we’re getting better looking and more charming as we go.

Ben:  Well also I guess probably we’re sitting all…

Tawnee:  So I have a legitimate question for you guys.

Ben:  Okay that’s drunk.

Tawnee:  If you’re not gonna be doing the Ironman and endurance stuff anymore, are you still gonna stick to the ketogenic low-carb…

Ben:  I didn’t say I wasn’t going to be doing endurance stuff.

Tawnee:  Well then like…

Ben:  I’m doing like Isramen, I’m doing Thailand, I’m doing, like, I’m just not racing Ironman.

Tawnee:  Isramen is like longer than Ironman isn’t it?

Ben:  It’s like half.

Tawnee:  I thought it was longer.

Ben:  I hope not.

Brock:  So not a full Ironman distance.

Tawnee:  He should call Dr. Minkoff that he wrote the course system and have an early vacation.

Ben:  Yeah. I think I’m going to recover the race for ever mantra actually.

Tawnee:  So are you still going to stick to the ketogenic, low-carb, high-fat protocol or are you gonna be relaxed with it and still maybe do low-carb, high-fat?

Ben:  I was telling Brock about this so I’m starting into mass made simple as we get back.

Tawnee:  What’s that?

Ben:  Meaning my goal over the next 3 months is to put on 25 pounds of muscle. So what that means is that…

Brock:  So we won’t be able to…

Tawnee:  Wait so the camera can see…

Ben:  I used to weight 210 before I started doing triathlon. I weight 175 right now.

Tawnee:  Let’s see my shoulders compared to yours, they’re tiny.

Ben:  So over the next 3 months, goal is 25 pounds of muscle and I was telling Brock this earlier that the amazing thing about being on a mass gain protocol is you can eat pretty much anything you want and it turns into muscle. So I will watch my carbohydrate intake just because it’s healthy to so anyways…

Tawnee:  Yes.

Ben:  But I will not be going out of my way to be ketogenic because I don’t need that level of fat-burning efficiency because I’m not going to be doing ironman.

Tawnee:  What about those who don’t do Ironman, who just think it’s a healthier way to be like plenty of people are starting to do?

Ben:  It’s not. It’s a cool trick to have in your back pocket if you have a long day of exercise to do. It’s not necessarily done, I mean from a health standpoint, like limiting your carbohydrate consumption, avoiding lots of sugars and avoiding lots of starches doesn’t get necessarily beat out by some kind of a strict ketogenic diet. At least as far as any research study has shown.

Brock:  So you’re talking about more like a Jimmy Moore sort of approach?

Tawnee:  What does Jimmy Moore do? I’m sorry.

Brock:  He wrote the cholesterol…

Ben:  Jimmy Moore does a ketogenic diet. What I’m saying is that I am more of a fan and there’ll be more. If you’re listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness version of this episode, there’s gonna be more on just eating real food at the end of this episode or if you want a hint now you can go to tinyurl.com/justeatrealfood but I’m gonna be taking more of the approach of just eating real food and limiting starches and sugars and if I were to ever advice someone to do Ironman or write out an Ironman training protocol and nutrition protocol, which I will continue to do. I would still be coaching, will still be going to Ironmans, all that jazz. Ketogenic, fat burning, metabolically efficient diet, whatever you wanna call it, still an extremely handy and healthy diet to have for Ironman but I’m not gonna lie to you, it takes a ton of self-discipline and you need to be in it for a long haul meaning like 1-2 years to really make it work well.

[0:35:12.3]

Brock:  Jack Cruze says more like 3.

Ben:  Well it depends on where you’re coming from. You know, so for me personally, I’ll limit carbohydrates and be careful with starches and sugars and contain a high amount of fats, moderate amount of proteins, low amount of carbs but…

Brock:  How about gluten?

Ben:  I ain’t gonna be pulling out the ketone blood strips or breath tests anytime soon…

Tawnee:  I think that’s fair and probably more relaxed, stress-free way for you to be right now.

Ben:  It’s a good way for me to get 7os big.

Tawnee:  70s big?

Brock:  I gotta know what that means.

Tawnee:  Like muscle tee is you know…

Ben:  I’m gonna get swoll biatches.

Tawnee:  Yeah.

Ben:  So anyways, we are getting close to the time where we have some serious partying to do. Brock is going to the Ecomo Kai… Is Ecomo Kai the welcome banquet or the awards banquet? Brock is gonna go to the Ironman awards banquet and give it a try. I’ve given him my VIP ticket to see if he can sneak into that. Well the VIP section has better food.

Tawnee:  Oh does it? Yeah, every time I’ve gone there I’m like…

Ben:  And alcohol.

Tawnee:  Sketchy. Yeah the alcohol, yeah, it’s complimentary with tickets…

Ben:  And then Tawnee and Tawnee’s boyfriend who has been sitting silently across from us…

Tawnee:  Yeah come around. Come around the back here.

Ben:  Everybody who has not yet met Tawnee’s boyfriend…

Tawnee:  They’ve seen pictures of him on Endurance Planet.

Ben:  Yeah so this is John. He’s double feasting right now.

John:    They’re empty.

Ben:  Empty beer bottles. And then my beautiful wife Jessa who’s inside.

Tawnee:  If you see me smiling, waving in this direction, because Ben’s kids have been playing right there and building forts and it’s actually extremely adorable so I can’t help but gravitate towards that.

Ben:  So anyways, Jessa and John, Tawnee and Brock and I are gonna go and paint Kailua Kona red tonight so we’re gonna get going but for those of you listening in, thank you for listening in. I promise again that if you’re listening to this and you feel like many of your questions have not been answered, if you’re listening to bengreenfieldfitness.com/260, we are going to be answering them in this episode. If you’re listening to this as part of this week’s special episode of the Endurance Planet’s sports nutrition release, just surf over to episode 260 at bengreenfieldfitness.com and you’ll get more of that stuff. Hopefully you’ve been enjoying all coverage from Kona week. It’s finally coming to an end. We cannot guarantee there aren’t going to be crazy instagram and facebook photos posted tonight.

Tawnee:  Did you see how many followers we’ve gotten on instagram this week?

Brock:  No.

Ben:  We just launched instagram like 5 days ago.

Tawnee:  Yeah. It’s blowing up baby. I’ve been having a good time with that and I thank you for all your comments and follows and it’s been real fun.

Ben:  Thank you guys for all of your support. We would never be able to come to Kona, sit on the porch, get drunk, and podcast without you.

Tawnee:  Oh God. That… You can’t say that. Everyone is right now officially not a listener anymore.

Brock:  We’re never getting money again.

Tawnee:  Never get anyone.

Ben:  Seriously, we’ve been working our asses off all week…

Tawnee:  Like I said to you guys on Friday night.

Ben:  Trying to deliver mad value to you and this now is our chance for R&R.

Tawnee:  I haven’t been resting whatsoever.

Ben:  Yeah.

Tawnee:  And I’m not complaining but yeah, you definitely don’t get to rest a lot here. It’s been a grab.

Ben:  It actually is kinda far…

Brock:  I had my first good night’s sleep last night since we got here.

Tawnee:  I was out there finishing ‘til almost midnight.

Brock:  Oh wow.

Tawnee:  Yeah.

Ben:  I slept with my kids the night before Ironman because my wife was at the Thank-God-I’m-Not-Wasted party.

Brock:  She with me.

Tawnee:  With us.

Brock:  I got her loaded.

Ben:  Yes.

Tawnee:  Anyways, I think we should turn this off now.

Ben:  This is degrading. Let’s go ahead and press the stop button. Thanks for listening you guys. Let’s get a little clink. Cheers to Kona.

Brock:  Cheers.

Tawnee:  Cheers to kona beers.

Ben:  Hey what’s up it’s Ben Greenfield and I am here with Vinnie Tortorich and we’ve got reason number 178 that you need to listen to Vinnie’s brand new book Fitness Confidential. Vinnie what’s up?

Vinnie:  How’s it going Ben? Thanks for having me on again.

Ben:  You know right before we recorded this? You told me something I didn’t know and that was that you cut a bunch of useless boring content out of the book that you actually included in the audiobook.

Vinnie:  Yeah and as a matter of fact it wasn’t useless and/or boring. We cut it out, it was one of my and Dean  Lorey my co-writer, it was one of our favourite pieces of material but we felt like anything in a book that we didn’t feel made the book flow exactly like it should flow we cut out. As you know, the book reads very very fast.

Ben:  Oh yeah.

Vinnie:  And we both at the very last minute, as much as we love the story, we cut it out of the book.

Ben:  Okay so give me a hint what’s the basics of the story that you cut out.

[0:40:00.0]

Vinnie:  We’re basically talking about the Beverly Hills types. Actually the hidden hills types and if everyone knows, it’s where the Kardashians and all those people live. You know, I work up in that neighbourhood and everyday, all day and I was talking about the different parties they go to and how they throw their own parties and how they have their own red carpets out there as if they were you know, bigger than they were. We cut that whole little section out. I could have written a whole book on that. It just didn’t flow with the rest of the book; that was taken out.

Ben:  Either way though, there you have it folks. Insider sneak peek into Hollywood Hills. Another reason go to get Fitness Confidential. Hey, we’re gonna put links in the show notes but you can get it on Audible, you can get it on Amazon, you can find it on iTunes and this is one of the best books I’ve read all year by Hollywood celebrity trainer Vinnie Tortorich. Vinnie, thanks for that extra tip.

Vinnie:  Thank you Ben.

Listener Q&A:

Ben:  Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield here and if you’re a regular podcast listener, you know that the past couple of weeks of podcasting of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show have been a little irregular or shall we say, we’ve been doing lots of travel. I just raced Ironman Hawaii. My podcast sidekick Brock was down here in Hawaii with me and as a matter of fact, this particular recording that you’re listening to is the Q&A section of basically the podcast that we strung together from a lot of content that we gathered while we were down here at Hawaii. So I gotta be straightforward with you. I race Ironman less than 48 hours ago. I’m a little bit knackered, shall we say. I’m sitting out here, literally on the porch, the patio, back in our condo here in Kailua, Kona, the same condo that you may be well familiar with if you’re watching the video version of this episode or you watched the video version of the last episode which you can get over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/premium. If you hear golf carts, cars, lawn mowers, kids, stuff like that, that’s probably why but hopefully it’s a nice quiet evening for us here, for me to answer your questions on all things fitness, nutrition and training related and today we’re gonna have a little bit of a bends towards Ironman of course just because that was kind of a big thing on the radar this week. So I wanna get a couple of quick announcements for you. Actually really I just wanna give you one big announcement and that is that I had the great privilege at being able to present at something called the Real Food Summit and my presentation was entitled the Real Truth About Workout Fuel: How to Say Goodbye to Engineered Franken-foods and Eat for Exercise with Real Nutrition. That’s a mouthful. Pun intended. And I was part of an online summit that was free that has 29 other nutrition experts from around the globe teaching you a ton of cutting-edge things about real food. Basically, real food solutions for fat loss and anti-aging, living disease-free and essentially kinda getting past all the stuff that big food companies and the FDA and mainstream medicine kinda don’t want you to know so I’m gonna put a link to that particular summit on the show notes. It’s called the Real Food Summit and I will put a link to that in the show notes or if you want, you can go to tinyurl.com/justeatrealfood. How do you like that? Tinyurl.com/justeatrealfood. Okay, announcements out of the way. This is gonna be a very jam-packed Q&A because I’m gonna respond to all of the questions that you all left over on facebook.com/bgfitness and also on the facebook endurance planet page. I’m not exactly sure how many questions there are but it looks like right around 30 or so so this is gonna be a little bit more of kinda a rapid fire style podcast so if you’re ready, let’s go ahead and jump right in. So we’re gonna start off with Kelcey’s question. Kelcey says, “What specifically do you do or not do as far as active recovery?” Well Kelcey, I’m a big fan of doing as many things as possible to beat what’s called delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMs and some of the things that have been shown to be most effective in helping you to recover as quickly as possible in terms of actual research studies that are out there.

[0:45:04.1]

One is warm water immersion. Okay so I will go and hunt down a hot tub or some kind of like a sauna/vaw type of environment and even more effective than that is criotherapy or cold water immersion. And even more effective than that is going back and forth between warm water and cold water and you can do that in the shower, you can do it by alternating between cold pool, hot pool, that type of thing. So that’s number 1. Number 2 would be massage, massage therapy with a foam roller, lacrosse ball, or a massage therapist and for me, usually post-Ironman triathlon, it’s a massage therapist, ‘cause frankly I just don’t feel like rolling around and fighting a foam roller so to speak on the living room floor after I’ve done Ironman. And then finally one thing that I found that helped out quite a bit was high dose curcumin and there is specifically a supplement that I double up on for my few days after Ironaman called Phenocane and it’s kind of like a natural alternative to Ibuprofen so that one’s called Phenocane. You can get that one up at Pacific Elite Fitness, you can do cold-hot contrast therapy just in your shower and then soft tissue work or massage works really well. So those are my active recovery techniques. Dan says, “I’m Interested in what the 8-9 hours of training consisted of especially with your twins. What exercises did you focus in the gym or at home? How much swimming?” Swimming is a time killer for me. By the time I travel to the gym, change, get in the pool, swim, get out, etcetera, great question Dan. So I, those, some of you may know, I did minimalist training for Ironman Hawaii. I trained about 8-9 hours a week and most of that was out of hotel rooms, hotel gyms, and kind of on the go. I was travelling, launching a book, and kind of doing quite a few things in the month leading up to Ironman Hawaii. Typical week for me, just to walk you guys through this super quick. About 3 30 minute swims, all consisting of very fast 25, 50 and 100 meter repeats and I never go to the gym or take time to go to the gym unless I’m doubling up workouts. So a swim was always followed or preceded by a weight session or I would bike to the pool or in some cases I would run to the pool, swim, run back, but ultimately, swimming especially for triathletes could be a big time suck so when you’re going with minimalist training, because you are having to typically go to a gym to swim, unless you have an access to an open body of water nearby, it’s always combined with something else. So typical week for me was Mondays, I would bike to the pool and swim, Tuesdays I would do about 20-30 minute high intensity interval run on the treadmill and then lift some weights and then Wednesday I would do something similar, bike to the pool and swim. Thursday again I’d run or play some sports like tennis or basketball and do weights again. Friday was kind of an easy day typically yoga, foam roller, things along those lines. Saturday about a 60-90 minute run and then Sunday about a 1 and a half to 2 hour hard bike ride indoors typically using something called Sufferfest videos and then on either Saturday or Sunday I usually try and throw in another hard swim if time permitted and I was able to swim by the gym. Sometimes just bringing my kids to the gym, letting them play in the kiddie pool next to the gym while I throw in my quick 20-30 minute swim so that’s what minimalist training kinda looks like and you certainly have to go into the pain cave but that’s kinda a glimpse into what my week of training look like for something like an Ironman so you know, just super duper consistent, that’s key. Sam says, “How did you mentally feel before, during, and after the race? Mental fog, strength enough to push it, strong enough to keep run technique good, zoning out, …all that jazz?” Sam. My number 1 thing that I do to distract my brain when the going gets tough which is typically, you know, for the last couple of hours of that race, as boring as this sounds, I will count to 100 over and over and over again and I will even play games you know, I’ll say I’ll make it to the next aid station and I’m gonna count to 100 and then I’m gonna make it to the next aid station and then I’m gonna count to 90 and then the next aid station I’m gonna count to 70. And I just do, as a car alarm goes off, I just do very very kinda boring, repetitive type of things like that to distract my brain when I start to go hard but that’s really the key is that I pass a ton of people in about the last hour of Ironman because up until that point, for me it’s just a matter of you know, being, managing the race and being kinda of present mentally and not pushing so hard that I’m not present mentally.

[0:50:08.6]

So you know, during a race, there’s just so many things going on, other competitors, you know, volunteers, spectators, your family, stuff like that, zoning out has never been an issue for me, pardon me for being blunt here but if you’re zoning out during Ironman, I think that if that’s happening to you, you’re either hypoglycaemic, your blood sugar’s dropping and you need to eat more or else you’re mentally weak and you need to do more meditation, more yoga, more things like heart rate variability training, biofeedback using something like the Heartmath Institute. Go to heartmath.org  to see what I’m talking about but we live in an age where we’re being constantly distracted, multitasking, shifting focus and it does make you mentally weak when it comes to say buckling down and focusing for 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 hours, you know, during something like an Ironman triathlon and occasionally that mental fog sometimes is hypoglycaemia but sometimes it just is you need to do mental training and not just physical training. There’s a really good sports psychologist who actually works with our teams at Pacific Elite Fitness. His name is Chris Jansen. He has an entire program called Inner Game Training. It’s the best I’ve ever seen when it comes to really helping you dial in that mental component so if you go to Pacificfit.net you can check out Chris’s program. It’s called Inner Game Training and he works with inner consults with he’s got some preset programs that he runs you through kinda some flexibility in terms of what you can do so check that out. Bryan says, “I’m guessing you don’t count calories. Does this translate to race day? Was your fuel all carb? Was there any fat in your fuel?” You probably at this point in the podcast already know, if you’ve listened in to some of the stuff we went leading up to this point, that I fuel with primarily medium change triglyceride oil which is fat plus a little bit of amino acids and a little bit of Superstarch. On race day, it comes out to 200-300 calories total per hour for an Ironman triathlon. And that is because I’m fat-adapted and I’m using fuels that allow me to tap into my own fat stores. Normally, if I’m relying upon carbohydrates, I would eat about twice as many calories as that but that is the nice thing about the metabolic efficiency and using fuels that allow you to tap into your own body fat is that you don’t have to consume about half as much fuel as you normally would. So Peter says, “Did you hit a ‘wall’ at any point? I noticed you slowed to a 9 minute pace at about 17 mile mark.” Peter the reason that that shows up on the race split is that is the point where you get your special needs bag and I took about a good 2-3 minutes to kinda go through my special needs bag, grab some peppermint tums, grab some, what else do I have in there, some X2 performance, I had to adjust my shoe laces right there, so usually in an Ironman, there’s a certain point in the race where you get to that special needs bag and that’s where you slow down but no, other than that, I didn’t bonker hit a wall or anything like that during the race, it was just kind of a steady pace during the full Ironman. So Mike says, “What ‘under the radar’ supplements did you take and what changes to that protocol would you adjust?” So Mike the things that I took that I think probably Ironman triathletes might not know about, one is marketed as an anti-aging supplement, it’s called oxilo acetate. If you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and you do a search for oxilo acetate or search for anti-aging, you’re gonna find this stuff and what it does is it allows you to convert lactic acid that you produce during exercise into usable glucose and so if you’re eating like a high-fat diet, it actually allows you to generate your own carbs essentially. So that’s one kinda under the radar supplement that I kinda use. Another under the radar supplement and I don’t know if this is a supplement or not, but peppermint tums, to coat the stomach and give you a really really nice feeling in your tummy during the race so that’s another one that I’ve been using a little bit more recently and it works quite well. What else under the radar? I take Chinese adaptogenic herbs about an hour before the race in the form of something called TianChi. I also do a shot of this stuff called, it’s basically hornet extract. It’s an amino acid that allows you to tap into your body’s own fat as a fuel. It’s made by a company called Vespa and so those are some of the big ones. Oxilo acetate from an anti-aging supplement, I use the upgraded anti-aging supplement, Chinese adaptogenic herbs, peppermint tums and hornet extract.

[0:55:04.2]

Those are some of the kinda under the radar type of supplements that I use. And they all work great. I wouldn’t adjust that protocol other than make sure that you don’t just stuff peppermint tums into your jersey. I did that and they dissolved as soon as water hit them. Make sure they’re actually in like a film canister or a noon container or something like that so. JT says, “Do you cycle carbs? Was it a window of time or just one meal a week?” JT, for the 12 weeks leading into Ironman Canada, I ate a high-fat diet with pretty much only one or may have been 2 days where I actually ate carbs liberally for the entire 12 weeks. I was liberally more slack leading into Hawaii. I had probably what you term a cyclic ketogenic diet where about 5 days a week, I eat a higher-fat intake and only eat maybe 75-100 grams of carbohydrates a day. But then on those bigger days like that Saturday where I did a 60-90 minute hard run, or the Sunday where I did a 1 and a half-2 hour hard bike, little bit of extra rice or sweet potato with dinner, little bit of extra red wine and some dark chocolate, stuff like that so that was a little bit of the change that I did and it just you know, for me it was just having a few more varieties when it comes to nutrition and being able to add in those carbs and I also wanted to experiment to see if it had an effect on body temperature and thyroid and I did indeed see a surge in my body temperature suggesting that there probably wasn’t enough carbs present in my strict ketogenic diet to allow for the adequate conversion of T4 to T3 and so that affected my thyroid a little bit so that was another reason I added in the carbs did about a 14-day morning what’s called an axelari and oral body temperature test and noted have a pretty significant effect on my temperature so. Aimee says, “Was there any part of your nutrition or training that you feel better served you in Whistler vs. Kona and vice versa?” Aimee in the video and the podcast that I did with Tawnee and Brock that is either directly coming after this Q&A or you already heard it before this Q&A, not quite sure yet ‘cause we’re stringing this one together, that question is kinda answered. I had some issues during the race in Kona, just some tactical errors on my part where I wasn’t able to use some of my fuel and I ended up using Bonk Breaker bars and Coca-Cola for much of the race during Kona. I felt much better doing kind of more of the ketogenic Ucan Superstarch thing in Whistler than I did using that Bonk Breaker/Coke approaching Kona. I also did not have a very happy tummy for a couple of days after Hawaii whereas after Ironman Canada, I was fine so and that was because of all the fermentation that happens from all that carbohydrate that you have to eat so Mike says, “At what level of base fitness can you begin minimal training?” Mike this is a question a lot of people wonder about like do you have to have some kind of a big aerobic base to go into a minimal training. The answer is no, you actually don’t. You can start in a minimal training right away. The human body is extremely good at endurance. Read the book Water Logged by Tim Noakes. Wrap your head around how naturally talented the human body is at endurance. All you need to do is make sure that you’re physically active throughout the day, standing work stations, not standing for long periods of time, kinda trying to simulate this whole hunter-gather type of approach you know, I talk about a lot of this in my new book over at beyondtrainingbook.com but if you do all that and just kinda put some icing on the cake so to speak with some high intensity intervals combined with that, works really well. So you can actually, you can jump straight into minimalist training assuming like you don’t have like a sedentary desk job. If you have a sedentary desk job, you either need to hack your life so that you’re using things like standing work stations etc., you know, treadmill work stations, commuting to work on a bicycle, you know, staying active through the day, or you need to do extra aerobic base training on top of high-intensity interval training if you are kinda painted into the corner where you have a sedentary job. In my opinion if you have a sedentary job you should start looking for another job in terms of what it does to your quality of life and your potential for longevity. Alright, question from Andrew. “Some more information about extreme isometrics please.” Andrew, extreme isometrics are a form of training in which you hold positions like a squat position or a lunge position or a push up position for 60 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes. What happens is if you hold that position, you build up a ton of lactic acid in the tissue and then it teaches your body how to buffer that lactic acid more efficiently.

[1:00:13.2]

Now what I do is I will throw in a bout of extreme isometrics say, extreme isometric squats or extreme isometric lunges after a bike ride or after a run or an extreme isometric push hold after a squat. For Kona, I did some of that stuff in the sauna too and that’s pretty much it I mean it doesn’t get even more complex than that but I just basically use them almost as finishers to main sets that I was doing or main workouts I was doing just like finishing the workout like a run and doing a 2-minute isometric lunge hold per leg and it really helps your body to be able to buffer lactic acid more efficiently and it is pretty tough. Your muscles shake quite a bit when you’re doing that. Kurt wants to know “how much brick training did you do?” Now for those of you who don’t know what brick training is, brick is when you’re doing bike to a run. Kurt, I don’t enjoy bricks that much. I think I’ve done maybe 3 brick workouts the entire year and for me that means I’ll do like that hard sufferfest video bike ride like 1 and a half to 2 hours and then I’ll run for 10, 15, 20 minutes off of the bike and I never endorse running any longer than 60 minutes after a hard bike ride. For me I’d rather do my brick training by racing and that’s just me. I just… When I finish a hard bike ride I like to be done rather than throwing on the shoes and going for a run during my training and if I’m going to do a brick workout, I usually just hop into a print triathlon or an Olympic triathlon or something like that. Kevin says, “what changes did you make to pre-race and in-race nutrition from Ironman Canada to Ironman Kona?” Kevin hopefully, I kinda addressed most of those questions at this point between this podcast and the video that what I did with Tawnee and Brock that comes after or before this Q&A but I really did not change up much at all. You know, Bulletproof Coffee for breakfast, Ucan Superstarch, MCT oil, added in a lot of extra amino acids, about twice as many amino acids as I normally use and also really topped off the gas tank a lot more in the last hour of the bike to make sure that I didn’t experience any kind of bonking issues during the run. Excuse me. And that’s about it. So really, only a few slight changes. I was under pressure shall we say from some biohackers to go as far as to order what’s called beta hydroxyl beauterate salts which are a concentrated form of ketones to elevate my blood ketones really high during the race. Honestly, with all the travel and everything I was doing leading up to this race, never had the chance to give any of that stuff a try so I thought about kinda throwing those into but ultimately the biggest change was more amino acids like 20 grams of amino acids per hour mixed with about a serving of Ucan Superstarch, a tablespoon of MCT oil per hour, toss in a little of that wasp juice, tossed in some of the X2 Performance about 1 X2 Performance every 3 hours or so and that was it. Jim says, “Do you think that old school long training such as the hours put in by Dave Scott and Mark Allen would have put you at the top of your age group or even above given your obvious physical abilities?” Jim, that’s called polarized training. Maffetone style training. If you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and you do a search for polarized training, you will see that I have indeed written articles about how effective that form of training is. If you have the time to do 20, 30, 35 hours a week to do most of it like 80% of it aerobically, to throw in about 20% or so high-intensity intervals, yes, that’s like a gold standard, professional, triathlete training program. But I personally have no desire at this point in my life to really pursue a career as a professional triathlete. I have a lot of other things going on in my life from homeschooling my kids to writing books and articles to running my businesses and I absolutely could have gone faster if I have put in hours and hours of training but that’s just not my gig, that’s not my wheelhouse. I coach some people with that approach and they do really well but ultimately for me, It’s really not my cup of tea because it’s really not on the radar so to speak for me to try and like go be at the top of my age group in something like Ironman Hawaii. I just don’t really have the time to do that at this point in my life.

[1:05:06.8]

So Joel says, “What was the extent of your running and biking lengths?” Joel, for Ironman Hawaii my long run was about 9 miles, my long bike was actually 1 and a half, actually it was a 2hour ride in there, 2 hour ride in the indoor trainer with a sufferfest video. I used sufferfest. They got a workout called Blender. They have another one called oh gosh what’s it… If you go to sufferfest, actually if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and do a search for sufferfest, I’ve written like a review of all their videos and there’s 2 in there that are 2 hours long so for Hawaii, 9 mile long run and a 2 hour hard endure bike. Kate says, “You recently mentioned in Endurance Planet episode a new amino acid supplement you were going to use.” Kate, yes. I used about 1 packet of it per hour to top off the master amino pattern amino acids that I use and the name of that amino acid supplement was BioSteel. It was recommended to me by Dr. Peter Adia and it’s just a bunch of branch-chained amino acids mixed in kind of a précised ratio for endurance specifically so it’s called BioSteel was the name of that stuff and so I did about 10 master amino patterns per hour plus one of those BioSteel packets per hour so. Heidi says, “What are the top beginner mistakes made during a triathlon for example when the man who is in the lead coming out of the water but couldn’t find his bicycle the commentator said beginner’s mistake. What are some others?” Biggest beginner mistakes. Number one would be using new protocols or new food during race week because you get into pressure, see other people using something and wanna try something new, etc. And so you do it and it messes you up so you don’t stick to your plan. Number 2 is not knowing the course, getting lost, having a volunteer point you the wrong way, and you have to know the course. It’s your responsibility and I’ve had a lot of people who kinda don’t know where they’re at during the race or get lost or you know, get dinged with losses in time just because they don’t know the course. It’s your responsibility to know the course. So number 1 is trying new things during race week, number 2 is not knowing the course and I would say that If I had to name a third, it would probably be going out too hard, too early, and fading too fast. It’s a really cool feeling to be able to pass lots of people at the end of a triathlon rather than to go out on a lead and then feel like kind of a loser for the last hour ‘cause you’re walking so. Darren said, “How did your weekly average hours break down in terms of weight room, swim, bike, and run?” Kinda similar to the other question I got David, my weight training workouts are about 30-40 minutes long, my swims are 20-30 minutes long, my bikes are mostly commuting with one and a half to two hour ride on the weekends and then my runs were 2 20 -30 minute runs on the weekdays with one of those sometimes being tennis or basketball and then the other run is 60-90 minute run on the weekends so. Matthew says, “What kind of strength training sessions did you do?” Matthew, I did one heavy strength training session on a Monday which was a, actually no, it was on a Tuesday. 5 x 5 which means like 5 sets, 5 reps of squats, overhead press, super slow push-ups, lat pull downs or pull-ups, lunges and then some type of a core exercise so one that was heavy and then the other day I would do body weight stuff like suspension trainer, gym stick, TRX, that kind of stuff so that was pretty much how I split it up for the weeks leading into Kona. Not that works pretty well for me, it was just you know, easy for me to wrap my head around so one heavy strength day, one kinda more body weight type of day so. Scott says, “Suggestions on the best way to heal a strained calf. 2 weeks up to my race.” Scott, best thing you can do with the strained calf is a combination of topical ice plus electrostimulation. If you don’t have an electrostim unit and you plan on being in this sport long-term, just go buy one. Compex makes really good electrostim units. You’re gonna fork over $500-$1000 but you’re gonna save yourself lots of trips to the physical therapist and you’re gonna speed up your healing time dramatically especially when you combine electrostim with ice. That’s the number 1 protocol I can give to you. If you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and you do a search for recovery, I’ve got a ton of other things, I’ve got an entire section of the book Beyond Training devoted to this but those are the main things.

[1:10:02.6]

Shelley says, “What did your weight training program consist of?” Kinda already answered that question Shelley so we’ll skip over that one. So hopefully you already got that one. Jared says, “I’m interested in someday doing a full Ironman but so far I’ve only done a sprint triathlon. Do you think there is any advantage to training for and racing the individual events like a marathon, 112 mile bike, 2.4 mile swim, before going all out for an Ironman?” Yeah I think you definitely have a mental advantage if you have maybe run a free standing marathon. If you’ve done a long open-water swim race and if you’ve done a few bicycle centuries before you do Ironman. Like if you’ve actually gone out and competed in those events individually, it gives you a really good training day and it also really helps you out mentally so I absolutely, I do recommend that for sure. And it’s easy to do if you go find a local outdoor calendar for your area. You can usually find an open water swims, century bike rides, you know, 25ks, 30ks, marathons, something that allows you to, you know, at some point, you know, 1, 2 years leading to an Ironman that you targeted to actually go out and take a flavour of what each of those distances actually feel like on their own so. Brandon says, “On thermogenesis, since you went from a sauna to a cooler area, I would assume that a bigger temp difference had better effects. Say hot/cold shower vs. a warm/cold shower.” I’m not quite… Oh and he says, “What is your reason for using cold adaptation as you don’t seem to have much fat to lose.” Okay so if I understand Brandon’s question correctly, first of all, when you’re doing something like cold thermogenesis, cold bass, cold showers, stuff like that, it’s not just for fat loss. You actually get better cardio-vascular capacity and a better ability to move blood flow around your body when you do stuff like that so ironically, cold thermogenesis actually helps you to be able to handle the heat better because you can shuttle blood around your body better. Now Brandon also says, “since you went from a sauna to a cooler area, I would assume that a bigger temp difference had better effects.” I have no freaking clue what Brandon… Oh I see what he’s saying. Okay so when you’re doing like a hot-cold shower treatments, I’m a big fan of, for hot, going as hot as you can handle and for cold, going as cold as you can handle. Now Ray Cronise who is the NASA materials engineer who recommends contrast showers for doing things like fat loss says you only need lukewarm water and luke cold  (if that’s a word) water but I like to do as hot as I can go to as cold as I can go maybe because I’m just a more-is better kind of guy.  I just feel it more when I do that so Eduardo says, “Congratulations on Kona Ben. Will you be putting out a soup to nuts outline of your plan? Week by week nutrition, exercises, etc.” Eduardo, we will be doing, in addition to what you’re listening to right now a premium podcast over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/premium where I actually lay out kinda like exactly what to do if you wanna kinda biohack Ironman for 4 weeks, 3 weeks, 2 weeks, 1 week, and the last few days leading up to the event as well as the event day itself, and that’s also gonna be available as a hidden chapter for anybody who orders my new book at beyondtrainingbook.com so kinda like the best 1-2 combo you could have right now if you wanna get your head full of all the knowledge that’s necessary to really do well at Ironman but have a lot of time left over your life for lots of other stuff and also stay as healthy as possible would be to sign up for the $10 a year program at bengreenfieldfitness.com/premium and then grab the new book at beyondtrainingbook.com. Alright, Christopher says, “with a change to a high fat diet, did you have before and after blood work completed to see if there were positive or negative effects. I asked because I was on statins before and I am afraid to go high-fat and have my cholesterol and triglyceride numbers go up.” Christopher first of all, read the brand new book by a guy named Jimmy Moore called Cholesterol Clarity because ultimately if your cholesterol levels go up that in most cases, is a good thing as long as your triglyceride levels aren’t going up too okay. So first of all, go read that book, Cholesterol Clarity or go listen to the interview that I did with Jimmy Moore on cholesterol and that’s really, that would really be eye-opening for you and you’ll also learn a lot of things that are interesting when it comes to kind of like helping your body to bounce back from having been on statins.

[1:15:04.9]

Now as far as blood work, I am going back in for blood work in about 2 weeks to see what effect kind of like stopping training for Ironman has done to my testosterone, cholesterol, inflammation, thyroid, things of that nature. But as far as before I even switched to a high-fat diet, the only blood work that I ever had did show that my cholesterol levels were under 200 which I wasn’t happy with because cholesterol levels under 200 are associated with lower IQ, lower testosterone levels, lower vitamin D levels, etc. So I’m actually quite happy that in my recent blood work, switching to a high-fat diet, I’ve extremely low triglycerides, very high HDL, high total cholesterol count and low inflammation and that’s kind of a really really good scenario for like good brain function and good nerve function so kinda flies in the face of a lot of stuff we hear about cholesterol but that’s the way it is. Alright, Kyle says, “Do you think you could have seen a noticeable improvement by adding just 1-2 extra long sessions a week on top of the minimalist training that you did?” Kyle, short answer is yeah, absolutely. If I would have gone out and hammered a 5-hour bike every weekend and then a whatever and then you know, gone 2,3 hours on the run, what I have possibly been able to race closer to say like 9 hours than 10 hours, absolutely. What I have missed a lot of time with my kids, what I have missed a lot opportunities to learn new songs on my guitar, what I have not learned the new recipes to cook, what I have not been able to spend as much time homeschooling, what I have neglected my business and my clients, yes. So you know there’s always tradeoffs. For me, it, you know, it’s just not worth it to me to go out and be riding my bike 5 hours, doing these super long runs and it also just wears you down, you get injured more easily and frankly for me, I feel like I’ve been able to live life to the fullest while still racing a decently fast Ironman and I’m happy with that like that’s great for me so yeah, I could absolutely go faster if I trained 25, 30, 35 hours a week but not as significantly faster as would be… Let’s put it this way, unless you’re going pro, the payoff really in my opinion isn’t worth it so, unless you’re getting a paycheck when you cross the finish line. Damien says, “Among all of the non-conventional training techniques that you use, which one do you think has the most positive impact on your performance?” Gosh, I would have to say the biggest one would be staying on my feet all day and using this greasy and groove protocol of like you know, 5 pull-ups every time I walk under the pull-up bar in my office. 20 body weight squats every time I go in and use the rest room. You know, hanging from an inversion table after I spent all day long on my feet. Saving my workouts for the end of the day after I spent all day long on my feet. Basically, biohacking your life so you’re staying as active as possible so that your trainings, your actual training that you do, can be short and sweet, that’s the biggest unconventional training that I use. I like don’t sit you know, I try and simulate that whole hunter-gatherer moving approach all day long and that hangs in my primal endurance, you know, my natural endurance capabilities and then, like I mentioned earlier, you just throw a little speed, power, and strength as icing on the cake on top of that and it works out really well. Just take some lifestyle changes. So, you know, when it comes to like you know, standing work stations, treadmill work stations, or pull-up bars in the door of your office, you know, stuff like that, there are some folks who you know, will even like keep like some heavy stuff around to lift and swing like you know, a few kettlebell swings here and there, a barbell in your garage, you can go and dead lift a few times a  day, so you just trying to hack your life and fool it into thinking that it still living in a little bit more active format than say post-industrial sitting at a computer might be considered so. Kevin says, “any ideas or resources for maximizing swim training in an endless pool?” Kevin, about a year and a half from now I’m gonna have an endless pool. I’m working on kinda putting one as an addition to the house that we’re gonna be moving in to. Having swam in an endless pool before, the fact is you can set it to push a current against you that puts you at a certain 100 meter phase like you know whatever, 13000 or 14000 or whatever. Best way to train in an endless pool because it can be incredibly boring to is just get it and set it in a hundred meter pace that you wanna swim at for your race and do like half of the race distance or a third of the race distance at that pace and so it’s like steady state training at race pace and honestly, that’s the way that I plan on training when I get an endless pool is just putting on an underwater mp3 player, setting it up as whatever, 12000 meter pace and see if I can hold that for 20 minutes and then just calling it good so I don’t really feel that interval training is necessarily as easy to do in an endless pool as much as like steady state training at a pretty tough pace and you could even use like a wetronome which is a special kind of metronome that you can put inside your swim cap to keep your stroke rate up when you do that so.

[1:20:52.3]

Paul says, “I take it, your 8-9 hours of training a week didn’t include weight training.” Paul actually it did include weight training so Kevin says, “how far out from Ironman do you start sauna/cold thermogenesis?” Kevin what I do is 4 weeks out, I will start into my heat acclamation, sitting in a sauna about 3 times a week, reading magazines for 30-40 minutes, listening to my mp3 player, just kinda sitting there. Now that, I don’t count in that 8-9 hours of training a week so that is just you know, I subscribe to some magazines and I you know, once I get all my magazines, I take them into the sauna, sit in there for 30 minutes until I feel my heart rate is popping on my chest and that’s my heat acclamation protocol and I start that 4 weeks out from a hot race so. Dan says, “I’m interested in…” oh wait, I already answered that question Dan. He says, “I’m interested in what the 8-9 hours consisted of especially with the twins.” I think that was the first question I answered. Darcy says, “What did you eat/drink the day of the race?” Darcy we already pretty much laid that out. You know, Bulletproof coffee, MCT oil, Superstarch, all that jazz. When I crossed the finish line, I drew on the day I had a bowl of white rice, sardines, and an ice cream cone. So there you go. Thomas says, “Your minimalist methods and hack combos helped you with your under 10 hours finish in Ironman Hawaii. What do you think you could have changed as far as training and recovery/supplementation to place higher?” Thomas I could have not raced the other Ironman, Ironman Canada, so close to this race. I could have not packed a book launch and a ton of travel in between the 2 races and that’s about it, you know. But again, I’m not getting a paycheck when I cross the finish line and I’m not a pro. I have a business, I have a family so for me, it would have taken more focus in terms of just like staying on the home front and focusing on the training, less on playing strings and automobiles so you know, it is tough to hack together Ironman training and high amounts of travel but you can definitely do it using a lot of these protocols you know, and this is the stuff I talk about in the podcast, in the Beyond Training book, it’s all there, you know, and so if you’re busy, you can definitely still do an Ironman in a respectable time. I mean you may not be able to go pro but you can definitely do well. A question from Amad. Amad says, “What are some of the negatives of a ketogenic diet?” Amad, besides missing out on pizza and pasta and you can get pretty good rice pasta and kinwa pasta and gluten-free pizza by the way. Negatives would be that hit on the thyroid I mentioned and it takes a while to adapt to a ketogenic diet so for the first 4 weeks, sometimes 6 weeks, sometimes 8 weeks, you’re a little bit blah and in some cases it can take you nearly a year of eating a high-fat, low-carb diet before your body really builds up enough density of mitochondria for you to be able to thrive on that diet so that, you know. So the negatives would be, you gotta pay attention to your thyroid to make sure that’s not taking a hit. You know, eat lots of liver and organ meat, sweet bread, stuff like that. After Ironman Canada, this is something I haven’t talked about before, after Ironman Canada, just to cover my bases, I actually started taking a supplement called Thyrogold which is a desiccated thyroid gland extract just because I was travelling so much. I wasn’t able to eat organ meats and so I was literally using a desiccated thyroid capsule called Thyrogold and it’s not cheap, it’s like 60 bucks a bottle but that was what I was using to support my thyroid leading to Ironman Canada because of my lower carbohydrate intake and inability to eat like some of these primal ancestral foods so those are some negatives and then the last thing would just be you know, the amount of time you got to put in before a ketogenic diet starts to pay off.

[1:25:09.1]

Last question here from Eric, Eric says, “What’s the long term effects of such an approach. I noticed from your results after Canada, the hormones were a little off.” Eric, long term effect of Ironman training period and I remember, I’d worked as a practitioner for Wellness FX so I looked at the biomarkers, the blood biomarkers of cross fitters, triathletes, all the active individuals that they send my way. Across the board when you’re depleting your body day after day with hard workouts, it’s usually lower testosterone, lower growth hormone, lower insome like growth factor, lower thyroid levels, higher TSH which is the inverse to thyroid, so high TSH means low thyroid and vice versa. Kind of high levels of inflammation a lot of times elevated liver enzymes because of a lot of the processing of the high calorie intake that you put in the liver through and then, what else, sometimes a little bit of acidity, low CO2 because of the amount of acidity that builds up in the body due to exercise. Those are some of the biggies. I can tell you right now that I’m done with Ironman and done with Ironman training, you know, like I mentioned earlier I’m going to go back and do a lab test after my body has a few weeks here to recover and rebuild and I’ll publish those lab results out to bengreenfieldfitness.com and you’re gonna see everything from a jump in testosterone to a renormalization of thyroid, to a drop in inflammation to an increase in alkalinity to drop in some of those liver enzymes. It’s gonna be really really interesting and I guarantee that you’ll see that stuff, it’s just that I’ve seen the numbers of the people who do the Ironman training and the crossfit training, etc. and the numbers of people who don’t and some of this stuff is necessarily healthy, mitigating the damage, you know, I don’t wanna kick the horse to death but that’s the entire reason that I wrote this Beyond Training Book is to show you how you can do this kinda things that may not technically be all that healthy for you but if you’ll gonna do ‘em I’ll show you how to do them the right way and minimize the damage and still achieve amazing feats of physical performance without destroying your body and your mind and neglecting your family and your job, your friends, social and stuff like that. So, and again not to harp on your morale but it’s head beyondtrainingbook.com. Can you tell them that I’m excited that my book is out by the way so you can check that out. That is about all the questions. I didn’t count how many we did just now it sounded like 30 or somethin’ I think, I’ll double check. So, be sure to check out that Real Food Summit that I mentioned over at tinyworld.com/justeatrealfood be sure to check out audiblepodcast.com/ben and at audiblepodcast.com/ben you can grab Vinnie Tortorich’s new book Fitness Confidential, you can grab Dr. Kharrazian’s new book Why Isn’t My Brain Working. There’s a lot of good books out there right now so check those out and I hope that this was informative for you guys. Remember to leave the podcast a ranking in iTunes and finally grab your free gift over at giftfromben.com. There’s a special video from Brock and I over there that I think you’ll enjoy quite a bit. Quick a little 30 minute video we shot for you, so this is Ben Greenfield over and out from Ironman Hawaii. Time for me to hit the sack and get some much deserve post Ironman sleek. Thanks for listening!

Brock:  Are we in good harmony?

Jessa:  Hello! We’re on. We’re live guys.

Ben:  Hello! We’re on, we’re live.

Jessa:  Hey, hey!

Ben:  Hey, what’s up? This is the voice of Ben Greenfield and I’m sitting here in the King K lobby with a bunch of podcast listeners and also a few special guest namely a female voice you might be familiar with.

Tawnee:  Hey folks, Tawnee Prazak here, host of Endurance Planet.

Ben:  And a complete clown nerd who you also might be familiar with.

Brock:  Hi everybody! Brock here.

Ben:  What we wanna do for you guys is part of this special episode is we’re gonna go around the room with the few of the people who are here with us today down in Hawaii. Ironman volunteers, spectators, racers and they’re gonna share each of them their top health fitness or nutrition tip with you so that you kinda learn from some people because I know you get super sick of Brock and Tawnee, and I and our voices inside your head all the time.

[1:30:00.0]

So we’re gonna give you some fresh voices today. So, we should start with  Mrs. Jessica Dawn Greenfield sitting right here.

Jessa:  Oh yeah, lovely. Alright, gonna like it. My big tip would be food prep, always having good food prep around you, easy and accessible.

Ben:  What did you prep for us at the condo Jessa?

Jessa:  Well, I didn’t really prep a lot for you in the condo because I’m in a different place.

Brock:  Fail.

Ben:  Actually we have like sardines, nori, white rice. Yeah, actually we’ve got a refrigerator stack full of real food back at the condo.

Jessa:  Yup! But we’ve got a hit with a couple of good restaurant.

Ben:  Alright sweet. So Jessa’s tip is to prepare real food unless you’re travelling in which case she failed. No, she actually did we had flax crackers that we brought from the house and home-made yogurt cheese that we saved Brock’s ass we’ve got off the plane, whatever. Alright, let’s go to Jayme right? Okay so, Jayme, introduce yourself, where are you from.

Jayme:   This is Jayme Tratone from Michigan. I come here to see these guys in Kona and they hand me a microphone. So…

Tawnee:  We like you.

Jayme:   I’m pretty much a newbie, I’ve been doing this maybe 2 years and I bet this thing working on is consistency, keeping the training consistent and just keep going everyday and just trying to build upon.

Ben:  What’s the biggest thing that you found that helps you to be consistent with your workout everyday?

Jayme:   My planning, write it all down on a calendar, it helped.

Ben:  At the beginning of the week you write it all down?

Jayme:   I write it down like months in advance.

Ben:  months in advance?

Jayme:   Yeah, I have it laid out what I want to do.

Ben:  You use like evernote or training peaks or something like that?

Jayme:   Excel.

Ben:  Excel? Yeah.

Jayme:   Pretty much I have this little calendar and I just jot down what I wanna do and then that’s what my rough outline and then I lay it out as I come to it how I’m feeling that day.

Ben:  Awesome! And you’d have a pretty good success during the past years so you’re telling me? 2 years?

Jayme:   Yeah, pretty good. I used the tryro program and that was just huge help, it showed me how to lay things out and I mean, add some muscle and get a lot stronger, just got to work on speed now.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah gotta get fast. Cool! and you’re volunteering here at the race.

Jayme:   I am volunteering, I’ll be at Kauai koloa. You guys are wonderful!

Ben:  Awesome, sweet!

Jayme:   Alright.

Ben:  Sure! Thanks Jayme. Alright, let’s go over to Ferdinand. You wanna give a real tip? I know Ferdinand ‘cause I came down here 2 years ago to Kona and give a talk about health to you guys. Where was the Energy lab? The…

Ferdinand:   It was a… our telescopes, the Canada…

Ben:  Yeah, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. I remember I was super nervous ‘cause people watching via satellite or whatever, and we, yeah which is interesting and here’s one, so that’s where I met Ferdinand and here’s Ferdinand.

Ferdinand:  Actually for me, coming from Endurance Planet, one of you and Lucho, the Maffetone, yeah, Mop Training is one thing definitely and from you guys I know this is anything dealing with health and fitness and I’m taking on like the high fat low carb so that’s one thing that I’m taking from you guys but there’s so much information, I don’t know where to begin.

Ben:  Can you give an example of like a Maffetone style workout that you do that’s like what are your key workouts.

Ferdinand:   The long run. I know, every weekend I try to get out and do a long run just keeping that Math heart rate going.

Ben:  And for people who aren’t familiar with the math heart rate, do you just take a 180 and subtract your age or do you take a test to find out?

Ferdinand:   I do more the 180 minus my age but I’ve done some testing to see if I can kinda get that but for me it’s pretty close. Yup, it’s pretty close.

Ben:  That’s really helped you with like long runs and stuff like that ha.

Ferdinand:   Yeah, yeah.

Ben:  Cool. Nice, nice. Alright, that’s a tip from Ferdinand using the Math method to find out what your heart rate is for long run. Alright, here we go. Next up…

Reed:   Yeah, it’s Reed from Calgary. I’ve been a listener for a while here, down here supporting my younger brother who’s 22 Keaton and hopefully has a great race. I guest from you guys one of the things I’ve picked up being a newbie to the sport is not let strength training go. It’s amazing what keepin’ twenty or fifty push ups a day and getting some body squats in can do for a guy. I definitely notice when that’s out of the program what will happen and how injuries will flare up. I guess my little thing is I just try to take everything I hear from Endurance Planet or BG Fitness podcast and try to take out things that I can fit in to my life and apply on a daily level and not try to overcomplicate it so far it’s a… looking like it’s going on a right direction and hopefully there’s plenty more ground breaking theories and experiments to come.

[1:35:03.8]

Ben:  See you heard it from Reed, jack out 50 push ups a day. That’s a trick and this guy got guns so, he knows what he’s talking about 50 push ups and Reed’s little brother right or big brother.  Keaton, here’s Keaton and he’s racing.

Keaton:   Yeah, I guess how I got here would be fallin’ on Ben’s minimalist training. I‘d like to do short, fast swims, super hard short bikes like the suffer fest videos and the short high intensity runs with a long run every week or two and yeah, how fat, low carb diet. This pretty much it just listen to you guys, endurance planet and BG fitness and trying to be like you guys so. Everybody except Brock, just kidding.

Ben:  And by the way, I should mention a good visual maybe we toss a picture up on the show notes for this podcast but I think half of us are wearing nerdy compression socks which is about the most geeked out triathlon pride that ever saying but it’s alright. Everybody looks fit which is good. So, here we go.

Frendo:   That’s a great segue. My name is Frendo Malvany, I worked for imagine swimming at Children’s Swim School in New York City and I try not to geek out too much. I like to listen to your Endurance Planet podcast and other podcast so that I know what’s out there, I try things out when I learn about Rich Roll with vegan for 3 months and my grocery bill shout up comfortable to my rent which is impressive when you live in New York. So then I figure out what’s really essential from that vegan approach, I took mostly the whole food thing from it, real food, and apply that to my life and my training plan and everything going forward. When I’m travelling I won’t stress too much out about getting the finest freshest organic whatever but this time I went to Cosco got a bunch of frozen spinach, frozen berries that kind of thing that I know last me for the entire 12 days I’m here and yeah, that’s basically it sustainability same thing with training make sure I’m not doing too much so that I can have consistent training across the board.

Ben:  Nice, nice. Fantastic! Anybody else here wanna give a health fitness nutrition tip. I saw somebody sitting on the couch but he looks like he ran away as soon as we started recording so let me surf over the Tawnee Prazak here so that you don’t think that this is one big sausage fest after just the Greenfield. Although kind of is. Let’s hear Tawnee’s top tip.

Tawnee:  Okay so mine is pretty easy right now. It’s get good rest and quality sleep and I say that because I’m on my 6 day in Kona and I’m starting to burn the candle at both ends and I’m starting to feel the effects of not getting good rest and realizing how much I appreciate getting that 8 hrs night or whatever it is for you whatever your formula is but when you start to not get that how much you start to suffer and I’m ready for a nap already and so I what that ‘em…

Ben:  Nice, nice and that is one that’s so hard for those of you who maybe have not, you know, I know some of you who’s listening in might not be interested in triathlon at all and some of you really are but when you come down to Hawaii, it’s really weird this is a… it’s kind of a difficult place to sleep and to rest because there’s that combination of so much going on, you are being out of your time zone and also sometimes the weather, the heat, we don’t have air conditioning, all these variables that really keep you from sleeping so I mean, go listen to the last week podcast the time you’re listening to this Brock and I did podcast #259 if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/259 on travel, jetlag, sleep, stuff like that and yeah, super important when you’re not doing stuff. So, how about Tawnee’s boyfriend John, you wanna contribute to tip man? You in? He’s a triathlete, he’s a  kick ass race car driver, he just did his first ironman, let’s hear what John’s tip is.

John:   Well, listen to Tawnee Prazak I think that’s a…

Tawnee:  Yeah, I think living with me is definitely kinda improved your health and fitness.

John:   Yeah, I’ve seen to do pretty well, I don’t know, I mean you know, all the advantages you know, though different our race you are willing to be trained with. How people trained change them a lot trying not a good idea, the other one is, I don’t know, squeezing a lot of people training in last minute that is always gonna worries me especially down on a lead drive get’s really crowded and wear your helmet.

Tawnee:  I know, it’s simple things so many people I’ve seen not wearing helmet.

Ben:  Guilty as charged.

John:    Better than that, as I said it’s a… make sure you  gettin’ your calories and I know my big issue racing is just having so much fun forgetting to eat, forgetting to drink whatever I’m gonna do so get a plan, stick to it and a, you know, hopefully have a good day.

[1:40:02.7]

Ben:  Sweet! Alright, we’ve got another listener/racer/guy in compression socks. What’s your name, where are you from and what’s your biggest tip?

Ryan:    My name is Ryan Former, I’m from the Philadelphia area in Pennsylvania. The biggest tip I think that really gained from listening to you Ben for the last few years is, to really stay consistent. I loved it when you had Sami Inkinen on that really really find to hit me just stay consistent doing not in small amount of volume but being super targeted day in and day out so really… my lead up for this, I just been doing  10,12 hrs a week every week for the last 40 weeks or so.

Ben:  Right, right. So much easier to get in like an hour a day than it is to get 3-4 hrs every 2 or 3 days. That’s my big thing is… I had a consistent day in and day out. Yeah, and for those of you who don’t know the Sami Inkinen podcast, if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and do a search for s-a-m-i  i-n-k-i-n-e-n I think he’s racing this weekend. I’m pretty sure he’s down here. A guy who works really really well like wins Ironman full on like overall as the age group around like 8-10 hrs a week for training and he talks some cool strategies on there so. Sweet, thanks Ryan.

Ryan:   Sure.

Ben:  So we’ve got 2 other probably the coolest guys here at the Ben Greenfield Endurance Planet meet-up. Their names are River and Terran Greenfield and they’re gonna tell you what their favorite workout is. What do you guys think, favorite workout, you wanna do that? Want to tell the microphone what your favorite workout is, This is Terran Greenfield. Terran say hi.

Terran:   Hi!

Ben:  What’s your favorite workout or your favorite healthy food to eat?

Terran:   My favorite workout is push ups.

Ben:  Push ups, nice. He likes to crank out and what’s your favorite healthy food?

Terran:   Carrots

Ben:  Carrots. Alright, River how about you River what’s your favorite workout?

River:   Uhm, push ups.

Ben:  Push ups too of course and what’s your favorite healthy food?

River:   Uhm, salad

Ben:  Salad. Wow! My kids are really creative. Push ups and vegetables people. Push ups and vegetables so there you have it, five year old wisdom. Did we get Brock’s biggest tip yet and my kids do cannibal swings and medicine balls slams but apparently it’s push ups. Alright let’s hear from Brock.

Brock:  Okay, being a guy who’s born in Northern Alberta and lives in Canada, my biggest tip is get ready for the weather ‘cause I’m not even racing this weekend but I just all I do is walked down to get a coffee and I’m covered in sweat and exhausted ‘cause it’s just when you come from a completely different climate here and Ben talks about this a lot doing the workouts in the sauna, doing the workouts with the humidifier going…

Ben:  When I’m in sauna, I read in sauna.

Brock:  You have worked out in the sauna in the past but really like getting ready for the climate is huge ‘cause it can just take it out of you especially for nutrition wise your body is spending so much time trying yourself down and you’re not able to absorb the nutrition and that just leaves to no good. So get ready for the weather, that’s my tip.

Ben:  Well, cool! Oh crap we weren’t recording, alright guys we’re gonna do this. No, I’m just kidding. Well folks if you’re listening to this and you know obviously we at Ben Greenfield fitness we’re putting out a content for you whether you wanna do in triathlon or an Ironman or just like shed a few pounds and get healthy, if you’re weren’t familiar with Endurance Planet and you heard Tawnee over at enduranceplanet.com that’s really a lot of good interviews, and news and advice for marathoners, cyclist, swimmers, runners, traithletes, everybody like that. Either way head over to enduranceplanet.com to check out that podcast and you may be hearing this interviews there as well we decide to publish them over there too. Head over to bengreenfieldfitness.com remember to leave an iTunes review if you like this podcast and stay tuned to twitter and facebook and we’ve got links for those on both our websites, enduranceplanet.com and bengreenfieldfitness.com if you wanna kinda get in on the next meet-up that we do on the next city that we happen to wind-up at. Who knows where the heck that might be but we’re always doing something so thanks for listening and in the meantime it’s Ben, Tawnee and Brock and the entire crowd here. Say “Hey” everybody. Aloha and Mahalo!

 

 

Oct 16, 2013 Podcast: This slightly out of the ordinary podcast features 33 big fitness questions answered by Ben, a special “post Ironman Hawaii” recording with Tawnee Prazak and Brock Armstrong (three of them pictured above), top tips recorded live with other listeners of the BenGreenfieldFitness podcast, and special guest appearances by Vinnie Tortorich and Jessa Greenfield.

To get the full video version (including boozing and more shirtlessness by Ben) of the Tawnee/Brock/Ben section of this episode, go Premium now by clicking here.

Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the tab on the right, use the Contact button on the app, click Ask a Podcast Question at the bottom of this page, Skype “pacificfit” or use the “Ask Ben” form… but be prepared to wait – we prioritize audio questions over text questions.

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Special Announcements:

If you want to grab Vinnie Tortorich’s new audiobook Fitness Confidential: you can get it on Audible by clicking here, get it on iTunes by clicking here, or get it on Amazon by clicking here.

February 6 to March 6, 2014: Want to get into the Perfect Health Diet retreat in Austin, Texas? Click here for all details. Ben Greenfield will be presenting at the Feb 6-Mar 6 retreat.

If you’re looking for a topic we covered in the past – we have released the Ben Greenfield Fitness Top Hits, Vol. 1 on iTunes.

AudiblePodcast.com/Ben is the place to go to get an audiobook of your choice, free, with a 30-day trial.

And of course, this week’s top iTunes review – gets some BG Fitness swag straight from Ben – leave your review for a chance to win some!

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Listener Q&A:

Resources mentioned in the Q&A section of this episode include:

• The Real Food Summit – 29 presentations jam-packed with real food instructions, recipes, knowledge and the shocking truth about real food that big food companies & modern medicine don’t want you to know.
• The Endurance Pack from Pacific Elite Fitness
• Oxaloacetate Anti-Aging Supplement
• BioSteel supplement for amino acids
• Ben’s Minimalist Training Protocol for Ironman Hawaii
• The “Beyond Training” Book
• Visit BenGreenfieldFitness Premium to get access to the wacky video pictured right and much more!

Kelcey Reina
What specifically will you do or not do as far as active recovery?

Dan Springborn
Interested in what the 8-9 hours consisted of especially with the twins. What exercises did you focus in the gym or at home? How much swimming?

Sam Nicaise
If you are still podcasting – same question from IMC, how did you mentally feel, before, during, and after the race. Mental fog, strength enough to push it, strong enough to keep run technique good, zoning out, …all that jazz?

Bryan McCrystal
Im guessing you dont count calories. does this translate to race day?. was your fuel all carb?? was there any fat in your fuel?

Peter Bandettini
Did you hit a “wall” at any point? I noticed you slowed to 9+ minute pace at about 17 mi.

Mike Davis
What “under the radar” supplements did you take and what changes to that protocol will/would you adjust?

Warren JT
Did you cycle in carbs? And was it a window of time or just one meal a week ?

Aimee Decaigny
Was there any part of your nutrition/training that you feel better served you in Whistler vs Kona, and vice versa?

Mike Russell
At what level of “base” fitness should we begin minimal training? Or is it appropriate to go couch half/full marathon on minimal?

Andrew Jones
Some more info about extreme isometrics. I got a lot of chronic injuires/tightness going on… is it a good idea to do something like a 5 minute squat for this?

Kurt Man
Anthony How much Brick training did you do and how far? And was your brick training just bike/Run. Great job and thanks for all the help you give!

Kevin Gossett
What changes did you make to pre-race and in-race nutrition from Ironman Canada to Ironman Kona? What changes would you make now, if any, now that you have completed Ironman Kona?

Jim Herman
Do you think that ole school long training such as the hours put in by Dave Scott and Mark Allen would have put you at the top of your age group or even above, given your obvious physical abilities?

Joel Meoak
What was the extent of your running and biking lengths?

Kate Criswell
You recently mentioned on endurance planet a new amino supplement you were going to use. Can you tell us your thoughts on it and is it something you’d take for every workout or just race day.

Heidi Ray
What are the top ten beginner mistakes during a triathlon? For example, when the man who was in the lead coming out of the water couldn’t find his bicycle, the commenator said “beginner’s mistake.” What are some others?

Darren Touchton
How did the weekly avg hours break down in weight, swim, bike, and run? (2) Did you bring any one of those to the full distance leading up to Kona? Congrats again!

Matthew Ingram
Interested in type of strength sessions (heavy strength, high intensity circuit etc.)?

Scott Hanley
Suggestions on best way to heal a strained calf two weeks out from a 70.3? I have access to a sauna, high elevation river and natural hot springs.

Shelley Walton
What did your weight training program consist of? How many hours per week did you weight train and how much time did you allocate to each session?

Jared Green
I’m interested in someday doing a full Ironman, thus far have only done a sprint tri. Should I try doing run only races, like half/full marathons, or open water swims,etc before training for all three at once?

Brandon Lawrence
On thermogenesis… Since you went from a sauna to a cooler area I would Assume that a bigger temp difference had better effects, say a hot/cold shower vs. a warm/cold shower. Am I correct? Also, what is your reason for using cold adaption as you don’t seem to have much fat to lose.

Eduardo R. Lorenzana
Congrats on Kona!! Will you be putting out a soup to nuts outline of your plan? Week by week, nutrition, exercises,etc?

Christopher Allen
Congrats on Kona!!! With a change to a high-fat diet, did you have before and after blood work completed to see if there were and positive or negative affects? I ask because I was on statins before and am afraid to go high-fat and have my cholesterol and triglyceride number go up.

Kyle Parzich
Do you think you could have seen noticeable improvement by adding just 1-2 extra longer sessions a week on top of the minimalist training you did? Also since you raced a late season IM to qualify, do you think you would have performed better at Kona if you qualified at, say IM Texas?

Damien Teney
Among all of the unconventional training techniques you used, which one do you think had the most (positive) impact on your performance ? Hard to know without repeating the experience many times, but I’m sure you can make some guesses!

Kevin Gossett
Any ideas or resources for maximizing swim training in an Endless Pool? I don’t have the same feeling that I have in a lap pool.

Paul Carroll
I take it your 8-9 hrs training didn’t include weight training?

Kevin Gossett
How far out from Ironman did you start the sauna/cold thermogenesis? Did you add the sauna because of Kona’s hot conditions? I know you’re a component of cold thermogenesis but not sure if you regularly include a sauna protocol. I’m assuming most of your training was interval/intensity based.

Darcie Gurley
What did you eat/drink the day of the race? How did you feel? And are you going to be going ketogenic for your next one?

Thomas Howell
Your minimalist training methods and hack combos helped you with your under 10hr finish. What do you think you could have changed as far as training and recovery/supps to place higher? Do you feel you would have placed higher with a larger training volume?

Ahmad Fahmy
What are some of the negatives of a ketogenic diet?

Eric Lafontaine
What is the long term effect of such approach? Noticed from your results after canada hormones where a little off.. I can see performance benefit, what about health. The long ride.

Read more https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2013/10/260-33-question-extravaganza-training-nutrition-supplements/