Episode #126 – Full Transcript

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Podcast #126 from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2010/12/episode-126-how-to-run-a-10-billion-dollar-company-division-have-a-family-still-stay-fit/

Introduction: In this podcast, how to run a 10 billion dollar company division, have a family and still stay fit; is it bad to do cardio after weights; can you teach your body to sweat less; substitutes for common supplements; how to detox your body; how often should you breathe while you’re swimming; should you exercise if you have adrenal fatigue; will a collagen supplement help sprains heal faster; non-surgical remedies for hernias, is it necessary to not to do aerobics if you’re doing high intensity cardio intervals; and is it OK for blood sugar levels to spike after a workout.

Ben: Hey, folks! Ben Greenfield here, enjoying my glass of carbonated sodastream water. I just actually got a sodastream for Christmas. My wife knows I love carbonated water. It’s not going to make it on my kitchen counter. I hope to tell you, guys, more about that in a future podcast. Maybe I can do a review on it or write a post on it over at the website. Anyways, today we have some fantastic questions from listeners as you may be able to tell from the introduction. We also have an interview with a guy named Chip Bergh, who is a very busy businessman who still finds time to do things like run marathons, and the panda podium at triathlons, have a family, and basically be a perfect example of how to stay fit and also have a successful life, so I’ll be interviewing him about how he does it and he’ll be sharing some of his tips and tricks, so you don’t want to miss that. Aside from that, we’re going to have a few special announcements and then move in to this week’s content of bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Folks, you’ve probably heard by now that the Inner Circle, the secret section of bengreenfieldfitness.com with a forum, with extra videos, with tons of bonuses, free signed books from me and lots of exciting new content from both myself and my wife, is now open. So be sure to check that out if you haven’t yet, at bengreenfieldfitness.com/innercircle. And speaking of the Inner Circle, the next free Inner Circle podcast is coming out next week and that is going to be a discussion of common unhealthy grocery shopping items and good substitutes for them. As well as some tips on getting your family and your kids involved in fitness. Over at the rockstartriathleteacademy there’s just a few more days where you can get in for $1 and also get access to some big bonuses that we’re including for end of the year membership drive in order to give you a good start to your 2011 triathlon season if you’re a triathlete.

And then finally, there are full transcripts of every single podcast episode that’s ever been done and I will put a link in the show notes along with everything that I’ve talked about on this podcast on the show notes.

Ben: Now, remember, if you have a question, you can e-mail [email protected]. You can call toll free with your audio question to 877 209 9439, or you can Skype to username pacificfit.
And the first question for this week comes in from Kelcey.

Kelcey asks: I’ve heard that doing cardio after weightlifting will stop certain enzyme activity and curb the “after burn” from a weight lifting session. What are your thoughts on this?

Ben: Okay. So this is kind of a classic cardio after weights or weights after cardio question. Now, the idea is this. When you’re training with cardio, it’s obviously going to typically be, for the purposes of this discussion, an aerobic cardiovascular session or a cardiovascular interval session that may involve a mix of easy aerobic and harder anaerobic intervals. When you train with weights, that’s primarily non-aerobic. Those are short bursts of energy, relatively short bursts of energy compared to cardiovascular exercise. So essentially, using two different energy systems and also training in two different styles: weight lifting being, of course, something that tears down muscles, causes a lot of muscle damage, a lot of fiber damage; and cardio being something might not cause quite as much muscle damage, but often burns more calories and stimulates the metabolism a little bit more.

So, the idea with cardio after weights is what people would argue is that, 1) it saves energy for weight lifting. So if you do cardio prior to weights, then you might enter into your weight lifting routine slightly fatigued, you might actually lift with poor form or you may not be able to exercise or weight lift to the intensity that you normally would. The next argument is that you might burn more fat if you wait to do your cardio after weights, because the weight lifting will have slightly depleted your energy store, and so then you’re going to be burning more fat than doing cardio. And then the people who argue that you should do the cardio before the weights will say that you’ll have fresh legs, so you’ll be able to do the cardiovascular exercise a little bit easier and maybe have better biomechanical form, kind of the same biomechanics argument that people say to do weights before cardio. And then also the idea that cardiovascular exercise is going to be important from a cardiovascular health perspective and should therefore be prioritized compared to weight training, which is actually, well, it’s a bunch of bonk. There is evidence that weight training is just as good for your health from a cardiovascular perspective as actual cardio exercises.

Let’s look at natural research study that investigated people who did their weight training and then went for a run, versus people who ran and then did weight training. And basically, the outcome of the study was that the amount of calories that you burn or your excess post exercise oxygen consumption was greatest, so total number of calories burned was greatest when the cardio was done before the weight training. So if you’re going to do a workout, and you’re going to combine cardio on the weight training, from a calorie burn or metabolic perspective, cardio before weight training would be superior.

Now, the next thing that they found was that physiologically, running after doing a resistance training session was more difficult, meaning that the rating of perceived exertion and also the amount of oxygen that was being consumed while running was greater after the weights, which means there may be implications there for running efficiency or even running safety. Meaning that you’re basically just going to have a harder time running after a weightlifting session, which makes sense because you’re biomechanically fatigued from the damage that’s been done to the muscle fibers from the weight training session.

And then the final outcome of that study was that you should perform aerobic exercise before weight training when you’re combining aerobic exercise and weight training into one exercise session. Now, I completely disagree with their statement about doing cardio before weights based on the effects of the study, or based on the outcome of the study. And the reason for that is this: it really depends on your goals. If you’re training for a marathon, if you’re training for something like a triathlon during which cardiovascular exercise and the efficiency, the economy and the skill of your cardiovascular exercise is important to you, you should always prioritize your cardio before your weights, because when you do weights before cardio, you’re going to affect your ability to properly perform the cardio and you’re also going to affect your ability to properly perform the cardio and you’re also going to affect your ability to have a high quality cardio session. If your goal is to get stronger, if your goal is to add muscle, or if your goal is to basically do anything for which weight training would be considered more beneficial, then you should prioritize the weight training session and save the cardiovascular exercise for after.

Now, getting down to the meat of your question to finish this thing up, when you say that the cardio after weightlifting session will stop certain enzyme activity, the reason for that is this. When you are doing any type of exercise, cardio or weight, you get elevated levels of an enzyme called glycogen synthase, which is responsible for taking while you eat after an exercise session and getting into the muscles for replenishment of energy and repair more quickly. When you do cardio after weights, you are basically depleting your muscles of some of the energy that they may need for repair and recovery. And if you are someone who’s exercising for a long period of time, say weight training for 45 minutes and then doing 30 to 45 minutes of cardio, you may end up reducing your ability to recover properly from the weight training session. Of course, the answer to that is to, if you’re going to do the cardio after weights, do a weight training session, eat something, such as a piece of fruit, a handful of nuts, or a piece of fruit with amino acid supplement or protein supplement, and then move on to cardiovascular training session. So ultimately, it really is a combination of both science as well as the type of training that has high priority for you that will affect cardio before weights, or weights before cardio.

Neil asks: I have done quite a bit of running in the past. I would like to do another marathon but feel I could greatly improve my chances of a personal best if I could limit how much I sweat. I feel that I was sweating excessively and wonder if this was a physiologically fixed piece of my make up or is there something I can do in terms of training, diet or supplementation to influence and limit my loss of moisture.

Ben: First of all, Neil, before I give you some of the ways that you could decrease your sweat rate, you need to know that sweat is something that’s crucial for cooling. In other words, when your body puts that moisture on the surface, if there is enough evaporation that’s likely to take place, and you’re not in excessively humid environment, that cooling is going to help you significantly. It’s going to help you more than it hurts you, assuming that you’re replacing the hydration that you’re losing, and you’re replacing the minerals and electrolytes that you’re losing. However, if you really do want to shut down your ability to sweat, or if you have a medical condition called hyperhydrosis or excessive sweating, there are some things that you can do.
First would be, of course, to use an anti-perspirant. Now, I am not a fan of the aluminum containing anti-perspirants because he aluminum can be a bit toxic in terms of presentation of a toxic metal to skin, which is basically one big amount. So I’d recommend, if you’re going to use an anti-perspirant, you just use baking soda, which is just as good as most of the anti-perspirants out there. It may not smell quite as good, but it’s going to still stop sweating. There are oral medications, for example, something called Robinul, which can actually stop or limit the amount of sweating that you do, and this is something that a lot of people use who, for example, experience excessive sweating on their hands, you know, who are those, kind of wet, clammy hands that you never like to shake when you’re out on public event. And so those use this medication to stop that excessive sweating, but there’s lots of side effects, like blurred vision and dried mouth. So I wouldn’t necessarily recommend medication especially if this is something that’s taking place during the exercise session.
Botox injections, for example, people who have excessive armpit sweating and don’t like to pit out under their shirts, you can get about 20 different injections into your armpits every 4 months or so and that can actually limit excessive sweating in the pits. And again, this would be more from a cosmetic perspective than it would from a performance perspective. But it’s a thought.

Something else called iontophoresis. Iontophoresis is basically this electrical current that gets passed over your skin. It’s not painful. It’s an electrical current that’s very light. But basically what it does is that it limits that ability of the sweat ducts to stay open. Basically blocks the sweat ducts that causes them to contract or shut, and iontophoresis is something that you’d have to do a few times a week. Each session would last for about 20 minutes, but that would limit your ability to sweat as well.

There’s a really expensive surgery that you could get called sympathectomy and what that would do is it would actually interrupt this sympathetic nervous system’s ability to cause you to sweat, and in a surgery, there’s basically this, it’s called endoscopic instrument and that is inserted into your body below your armpit, and essentially destroys the nerve that connects to your sweat glands. So you’re essentially shutting down a component of your sympathetic nervous system. Not something I would recommend but if you really want to stop this sweating, it’s an option. So in addition to some of those surgical or medical ways to stop sweating, a few of the things that you could do, as well, is make sure that you are at an adequate weight, meaning you could decrease your body fat percentage, thus increasing your ability to stay cool and you could listen to any of the episodes that I’ve done on fat loss for more tips on decreasing body fat percentage and then you could also engage in pre-activity cold water immersion, or cold baths or even a cold towel application, excessive use of ice and very cold water sponges doused on the head and on the shoulders, the back of the neck, or even put into your uniform or your running kit during exercise to keep the body score temperature down, which could also limit sweating, as well. I’ll be talking more about cold water immersion and the use of cold not just for sweating, but also for weight loss with… Tim Ferris will be coming in the podcast in a few weeks to talk about some of the methods that he used from the cold water immersion standpoint for weight loss and performance, so that should be an interesting interview but in the meantime, what I would recommend is that you not worry too much about the sweating that you take advantage of the use of some cold water type of supplementation, or ice bath immersion, or exposure to cold as much as possible during your exercise session, and then just make sure you hydrate and use proper electrolyte and mineral intake, and you shouldn’t have to worry too much about the sweating as actually causing too much damage.

Neil asks: I live in the Persian Gulf State of Qatar, and have very limited access to supplements. I’m listening to your chocolate milk feature on the podcast recently and would love to hear if you or your listeners have any other cheats like chocolate milk that could be used in the place of conventional supplements.

Ben: Neil is referring to the fact that it has been researched for a very long time that chocolate milk is just sugar and the protein from the milk is just as good replenishing your post exercise protein carbohydrate need as many of these engineered and expensive recovery powders that are out there as absolutely true. Chocolate milk isn’t the only thing. There are foods out there that could replace protein and carbohydrate in about 2:1 to 3:1 carbohydrate protein ratio. One example would be to have like a sweet potato or a gam with either chicken breast, you wouldn’t be getting a full protein profile, you could also do like a tablespoon of almond butter with about a medium sized sweet potato or yam, or a handful of almonds or walnuts or pecans, with one of those two, versus like a sweet potato or yam. You could do a piece of fruit with a handful of nuts, or get a piece of fruit with some chicken breast, typically about 2 to 4 inches of chicken breast. Believe it or not, quinoa, the grain quinoa, is in about 3:1 or 4:1 carbohydrate protein ratio and just having a bowl of quinoa, you know, putting a little salt and pepper, maybe a little amino acid, or something on there to make it taste a little better, would be a perfect, convenient, post workout supplementation. Ultimately, the 3:1, 4:1 carbohydrate proten ratio is not super important, unless you’re exercising again in the next 8 hours or so. So if you’re doing it 2 a day, you’d want to hit that ratio pretty closely. Lots of other things that you could do as a replacement for supplements. For example, if you don’t want to take a lot of fish oil. Fish oil is one of those things where it’s something that’s found in a lot of natural sources, wild salmon, grass-fed beef, omega 3 eggs, pumpkin seeds, a lot of people take about 2,000 mg of fish oil on a daily basis. Or you’re going to get about that equivalent in typical 6-ounce fillet of salmon. So it could be pretty easy to get your omega 3’s from those animal-based protein sources if you didn’t want to supplement with a fish oil capsule. Now, granted the fish oil capsules and a lot of the other supplements are good based on their convenience. But if you want real food, that would be an option. Post exercise anti-oxidants, you don’t necessarily have to take an anti-oxidant supplement. You could do berries, like blueberries are very high anti-oxidant source. And a number of dark-skinned fruits, a lot of dark fruits, dark vegetables are very good, just like a pomegranate. Dark vegetables like kale, watercrisp, spinach, brussel sprouts, a lot of these things are called super foods. They’re very high in anti-oxidants and also one of the other nutrients that your body may need to bounce back from exercise. So those also should be included in the diet on a regular basis, if you don’t want to spend money on anti-oxidant supplement. Creatin supplements, making sure you’re including animal-based proteins specifically on doing something like a lot of grass-fed beef, or bison or buffalo, would give you a lot of natural sources of creatin. For your joints, if you didn’t want to take like a joint supplement, a lot of these things like the capralex, for example, that I recommend that people take if they’re getting a lot of joint pain after exercise. Let’s get things like turmeric and ginger in it, and you could obviously go out to the store and buy turmeric and ginger and use those supplements on a regular basis in your cooking. You can do a lot of curry-based Indian-type cooking, and that would help a lot with things like an osteo-arthritic or cartilage type of breakdown condition. Immune system, you take for example, hyper-acidity in the body. Lemon juice. I’m using lemon juice before you eat. Lemon juice is very alkaline. You take something like garlic. Garlic is potent anti-microbial. If you’re using lemon and garlic on a regular basis you could probably get a lot of these in taking something like, you know, one of these immune system supplements that I take, such as Enerprime. Enerprime has got 32 different super food in it. But if you really wanted to, you can go out and buy those super foods one by one and include them in your diet. What we’re getting down here to, though, is matter of convenience and also the fact that there are some things that you simply would have to eat a lot of food to get quite a bit of. You take vitamin E, for example. The current recommended daily intake of vitamin E is about 200 to 400 IU. To get that from, for example, nuts, you’ll have to get about 40 cups of nuts to get that much vitamin E. Or you could do about 130 cups of brown rice. Vitamin C, the recommended daily intake, well ranges, but it starts off about 500 mg. You’re going to get, I think it’s about 6 or so from an apple, in terms of vitamin C content. So you’ll have to eat a heck of a lot of apples to get as much vitamin C as you’re going to get in about one pill. So, you know, a lot of these supplements are just jam-packed with stuff that you have to eat a lot of food to be able to get. And that basically brings us down to the reasons we take supplements in the first place. There are a lot of foods that do not have the nutrient content that active people need. Foods get radiated these days. A lot of foods are exposed to ionizing energy and radiation to extend their shelf life, and this destroys a lot of the essential nutrients that are in there. Environmental pollution can a lot of times leech quite a bit of the things out of food that we need in them, or introduce toxic supplements into food that we really don’t to be getting, and so a lot of times, we need to include things in our body that will help to detox some of the environmental pollutants that are going into food. We’ll talk about detoxing the body later on in this podcast. And we get genetically modified food. And genetically modified foods can have different nutritional values than in the type of foods that we were eating 100 years ago, prior to the introduction of genetic modification. Soil depletion and the use of aggressive farming tactics: polluted rains, the use of artificial fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, things of that nature, all of that can cause nutrient and mineral depletion in the soil, and so we get the foods growing in those soils, specifically fruits and vegetables, being slightly reduced to a lack of mineral or a lack of nutrients. When we age, we lose a lot of our ability to absorb some of the nutrients that we’re getting from food until supplementation may become more necessary. Stress can limit our ability to absorb nutrients from food. And a lot of food, frankly, is just less rich because of food processing and because of farming practices, because of the use of pesticides, and so you combine that stress with age, and then with the increasing need for nutrients based on exercise, we basically have this big picture of most people needing in most cases to at least be taking a few solid supplements. I tell people, if you’re just going to take anything, take some vitamin D, take a mineral supplement like a magnesium, and then get your hands on some type of a green supplement that is going to dump a bunch of super foods in your body. Just start off with those 3 supplements and you’ll be replacing a lot of what food may not be giving you.

Remember, if you want to ask a question via Twitter, just go to Twitter.com, follow bengreenfield.

onekread23 asks via Twitter: Do you have any suggestions on a holiday detox to jump start the New Year?

Ben: Detox in holistic health is kind of a coverall term that gets drawn around a lot, but basically, it’s a natural process. Your body can do a lot of detoxing or neutralizing or eliminating toxins from the body. Most of that’s done via the excretion of stool or urine, that’s how we pass a lot of chemicals or harmful compounds and nitrogens. But it is true that, especially if you haven’t been eating healthy or you’ve been having a lot of chemicals in your diet – pesticides, household cleaners, food additives, exposure to pharmaceutical drugs, pollutions, cigarette smoke, heavy metals. T could be necessary that you may need to introduce some type of accelerated form of detox, which is generally some type of a diet that minimizes the amount of chemicals that you take in and a lot of times, puts things into your body, either high fiber supplements or even colonics that dry or eliminate toxins by increasing the frequency of your bowel movements, or the amount of urination. So typical detox diet is going to be a high fiber diet that’s a lot of times lower in calories and usually accompanied by some things that will really flush you out quite a bit. So a lot of herbs that will essentially cause you to go to the bathroom a lot. So, one of the things that I recommend to people is colon cleansing kit, or body cleansing kit that was recommended originally on this show by Anne Lousie Gittleman, and I’ll put a link to Podcast No. 29 where Anne recommended this on the show. But basically, it’s this 30-day supply of capsules that have things like grapefruit seed extract in slippery elm bark, wormwood, pomegranate, peppermint, bromelaine, just a ton of anti-fungals, anti-bacterials and anti-microbials that you dump into your body to clear your digestive tract and your blood stream and it also help to aid digestion. For 30 days you take about 6 of these capsules per day. And you could absolutely shorten it and do it for 5 days or 10 days or 15 days, but they recommend a full 30-day protocol. I’m not convinced that you will necessarily need to do that. You can probably get this and split it into a couple of different detoxes that you do. Maybe twice a year, if you’re somebody who is exposed a lot to chemicals, or you’re concerned about the presence of a high amount of toxins in your body. And that particular kit also comes with a bunch of probiotics and what’s called a vermifuge tincture, which is basically kind of a cocktail of a bunch of added anti-fungals, in case you have some type of a candida infection in your gut. So essentially, you’re going to find yourself sitting in the toilet quite a bit if you started to cleanse or detox like this. But the idea is supposed to help eliminate yeast, parasites, worms and waste from your system and it’s called a colon cleansing kit. I’ll put a link to that in the shownotes. I personally don’t do a lot of cleansing because what I do is just a gentle day-to-day cleanse and the way that I do that is I take a probiotic everyday. I use the Capra biotics. I take a supplement called Enerprime everyday, which I mentioned has a ton of super foods in it but it also has high fiber source. It has inulin in it, which kind of keep stuff moving through my body. And then I take oil of oregano, about 2 to 3 times a week. And what I do with the oil of oregano, which is a potent anti-fungal and anti-microbial, is I put about 4 to 5 drops of that in a glass of water, and just drink that glass of water. So essentially, I kind of cleanse my body and detox my body on a weekly basis through the use of those supplements, but if you wanted to bring in the big guns and just fire away your body for this holiday detox, you would want to use something like the colon cleansing kit, and be prepared to be making multiple trips to the restroom for something like this.

Patrick asks: How often should one breathe when racing over a long course of swim? I’ve noticed short course Olympic distance athletes breathe very seldomly, every 4 strokes or so, but pro-triathletes breathe every stroke.

Ben: There have been studies done on breathing frequency when you’re swimming. And the idea is that the less that you breathe, the more lactic acid you’re going to build up during swimming. That makes sense because the breathing off of carbon dioxide is what can help to buffer a lot of this lactic acid that builds up in the blood stream. So the more you can exhale when you’re swimming, the more lactic acid you’re essentially going to be able to blow off. Now, the flip side to that is that breathing is inefficient when you are swimming. Every time you take a breath, you’re bringing your head up, the feet drops just a little bit, you present a greater surface area, specifically your chest to the water, and you can slow yourself down just a little bit. So the idea is that when you’re swimming for a long period of time, the other thing that you have to take into account is inspiratory muscle fatigue, meaning that every time you breathe in and out, you fatigue your inspiratory muscle a little bit. So when you are swimming and you’re swimming very, very fast, and you’re producing a ton of lactic acid, a lot of times, breathing frequently makes more sense. The reason being that, you’re swimming for a shorter period of time, you don’t have to worry quite as much about inspiratory muscle fatigue. And if you can get yourself to the point where through the mechanics of your breathing, you’ll be able to breathe very efficiently for faster, shorter swims like sprints or Olympic distance races, breathing more frequently is typically going to trump breathing every 3 or 4 or 5 strokes. I personally breathe every stroke during sprint on Olympic distance triathlon. Now, once you’re getting up to the longer races, kind of moving towards like a 3 or 4K type of Ironman distance, you’re going to start to risk inspiratory muscle fatigue and a lot of biomechanical inefficiency if you’re breathing every stroke. Plus, you’re also going slower, and so you don’t have to breathe off quite as much carbon dioxide and lactic acid. So I recommend you breathe every 2 strokes or 3 strokes. Four strokes is pushing it, but you could try every 4 strokes, as well, if you’ve got a little bit bigger lungs for those longer swims. Now, I personally, for an Ironman, I breathe every 2 strokes. For a Half-Ironman, I have a special type of breathing where I breathe for 1 stroke, and then I take 2 strokes, breathe again, then I take 1 stroke and breathe again. So my breathing frequency during a Half-Ironman essentially comes out to about breathing every one-and-a-half strokes. So I breathe every stroke during a sprint Olympic, I breathe a one-and-a-half stroke during a Half-Ironman, and I breathe every 2 strokes, sometimes every 3 strokes, during an Ironman. So that’s kind of a logic behind that.

Joy asks: I was recently diagnosed with adrenal fatigue. My doctor changed my diet, and I’m changing my lifestyle by sleeping 7 to 8 hours, as opposed to 4 to 5, and reducing my classes to lower my stress a bit. The doctor says that cardio is off the table for me, especially running. And I’m guessing stressful interval workouts aren’t allowed either. I can really feel the stress even when I climb the stairs. But I’m concerned about cardio restriction. Do I really need a year off in order to properly heal my adrenals?

Ben: Adrenal fatigue is kind of a catchall term. There is a disease called Addison’s disease where your adrenal glands essentially shuts down and really can’t produce the hormones at all anymore. But adrenal fatigue is basically when typically you’ve been stressed out a lot and you have been maybe exercising a lot, producing a lot of adrenal hormones, and you become fatigued because of this chronic stress due to your adrenal glands being unable to keep pace with this constant stimulation from your fight or flight based nervous system, your sympathetic nervous system. So what happens is as your adrenal glands become fatigued, they can’t produce the amount of hormones that they would normally produce in order to keep your body stimulated or give you energy. And so what happens is you get chronic fatigue. You get this foggy mental state a lot of times, you get depressed, you get a lot of aches, you get tired very quickly and you essentially have to kind of forgot how to reboot your body in order to shut down this amount of adrenal fatigue. So digging into this a little bit deeper, basically, the hormones that I’m referring to when I talk about the adrenal glands producing these hormones – there are 3 different types of hormones: the first would be what I call the glucocorticoids, which would be something like cortisol; and then also the mineralcorticoids, which would be aldosterone; and then your androgens, which would be kind of your sex-based steroid hormones, specifically DHEA and something called DHEAS. Now, cortisol is necessary in small amounts to allow your body to respond and adapt to the stress that you’re going to experience in your daily life. Your body’s going to produce a little bit of cortisol as soon as light hit your eyes when you wake up and cortisol will help to maintain blood sugar levels, promote a healthy immune system and kind of keep you a little bit alert during the day. Aldosterone is something that manages your blood pressure. Kind of works the balance of salt and water in your body. And then DHEA essentially helps with the precursor to testosterone formation, testosterone being something that can also contribute to your energy levels, sex drive, etc. So when adrenal dysfunction occurs, you’re typically going to get a drop off in each of this when you can’t produce cortisol, you don’t get that normal energy production that you’re going to get when you wake up out of bed in the morning. You’re going to get a drop in sex drive as you can’t produce your androgens. And then you’re going to get a drop in your ability to maintain your blood pressure, and a lot of times, fluid retention when you’re not producing aldosterone as you normally would. You can get any of these hormones tested – cortisol, DHEA or aldosterone – and low levels of any would kind of indicate that adrenal fatigue may be an issue for you. So what do you do? A lot of times you really limit the amount of hard exercise that you’re doing, you try and limit any amount of stress in your life. You really bump up the amount of sleep that you’re getting. You try and meditate, sometimes a little bit of yoga can help. And then a lot of times that you’ll take supplements to assist with adrenal fatigue, and usually, these will be like Chinese adaptogens, and some stress-relieving herbs, mushroom like shitake, or reishi mushroom extract, things of that nature, as well staying away from any supplement that’ll stimulate the adrenal glands, caffeine being the most common.

However, exercise can actually help to stabilize these hormones, and exercise can gently stimulate the adrenals, and essentially be one of the things that can help to reset biological system that has been fatigued in the wayt that it becomes fatigued in the state of adrenal fatigue. So light exercise, stress relieving exercise, breathing, introducing oxygen into the body, relieving some tension from the body, can actually be quite helpful. The issue is that someone with adrenal fatigue has to do this very, very lightly. For example, I had a guy who recently hired me who has just gotten adrenal fatigue. All we started out with was light stretching and yoga once a day for about 10 to 20 minutes, combined with about 15 to 20 minutes of very light walking each day. Nothing else. We’ll be doing that for 4 to 6 weeks and what we’ll be looking for is an increase through testing of those adrenal-based hormones. We want to see an increase in the cortisol levels, an increase in the DHEA, an increase in aldosterone, and then eventually, we’ll move that into light body weight bearing. That’s a little bit of resistance training. And then we’ll be able to eventually get back to weight training, cardiovascular intervals, which are great for cardiovascular health, weight management, longevity, but initially need to be limited as the body gets reset. So I would say in your case, you’re going to need to monitor your adrenals through testing, but light exercise would actually be fine. And even in people who are in deep state of adrenal fatigue, I find it that really helps with energy stabilization. Just a tiny amount of cortisol circulating and it helps to fight that fatigue that can happen with adrenal fatigue, assuming that you’re able to exercise without going too hard.

officialdillo asks via Twitter: Would taking a collagen supplement be of any benefit to the healing process of a soft tissue injury?

Ben: We’ve talked about collagen supplements on the show before. Collagen is that fibrous protein that’s found in skin, bone, tendons, cartilages, blood vessels, you teeth, it’s all over in your body and you can also supplement with it. There’s ground up chicken cartilage that you get, you can get shark cartilage. It’s basically just a component of bones ground up and then supplemented typically, orally, sometimes through a collagen-based cream. Most of the research that shows any efficacy for collagen has been done for arthritis or osteo-arthritis, and found some limited results. Meaning that some people have been able to feel lower levels of pain when they take collagen for an arthritic condition, and some people have not. The research kinds of bounces back and forth. From a wound healing perspective, though, specifically, in inflammation with sprains, strains, etc. There haven’t been any studies that have shown an increase in the speed that what your soft tissue injury could occur via the use of collagen supplementation. However, that being said, I personally, along with many other clients that I’ve worked with, have felt less pain from a sprain or a strain when taking a collagen supplement, such as a gluccosamine chondroitin type of supplement. Now that may b, for example, because one of the supplements or the supplement that I take for collagen source is called CapraFlex, and that has a lot of proteolytic enzymes and a lot of herbs in it, like turmeric and ginger and garlic, and some of the things that can kind of naturally help to relieve joint pain. And so that may be what myself and my clients are feeling more than the collagen, and the gluccosamine chrondroitin, that’s a met supplement. However, what collagen comes down to is if it helps you to feel better when you have a sprain or a strain, then it may be something that could work for you. But there’s just not a lot of evidence that it could speed up tissue formation or wound healing. So ultimately, what it comes down to is you’re going to turn yourself into a case study of one, to see if the collagen supplement would work for you. If you’re going to take a collagen supplement, I would recommend that you take something like CapraFlex. That’s what I found to be very, very effective for myself and my clients.
David asks: What’s your view on non-surgical remedies to inguinal hernias. Inguinal hernia is when a little portion of your bowel, or your large intestine actually all juice out through what’s called an inguinal canal. And the inguinal canal is this opening in the muscles of your abdominal wall as the abdominal kind of transitions into the groin. So what happens is that when a lot of pressure builds up, sometimes the large intestine can literally push through this portion of your abdominal wall down in the inguinal. And there is kind of two types of the inguinal hernia: the first is called the direct inguinal hernia and that’s when you have a real, real weak spot in your lower ab muscles and then you lift or you strain, or you cough, and a little bit of large colon kind of pokes through. And then indirect inguinal hernia is literally an anatomical condition that occurs when your inguinal canal fails to close before you’re born. That’s something that you’re typically born with and it’s something that’s a little less common than a direct inguinal hernia that occurs via essentially a combination of a weak core exercise, or over exercise, over build up of pressure during exercise. So typically, what’s going to happen with an inguinal hernia is if it’s significant enough to worry, you can actually, literally, feel or see a bulge in your lower abdominal wall and have a sharp pain associated with that bulge, surgery, a lot of times is recommended almost immediately because what can happen is a loop of your intestine can become trapped inside that hole in your abdominal wall that cuts off blood flow to your large intestine and then you got a serious medical condition going on. And kind of a back up of poo, which is not a good thing. So what happens is they remove the hernia and they stitch up and they close and they patch that inguinal canal and it’s a pretty quick surgery, a lot of times done as an outpatient surgery, sometimes blown out of proportion in terms of the inconvenience. It’s a pretty quick in and out surgery and fairly low risk. Now, some people do report that they have to take a lot of pain killers for a long time after surgery. Other complications could include some reduction of your sexual sensitivity, sometimes a little bit of incontinence, a little bit of an ongoing pain the groin and occasionally, they can be some nerve damage that causes tingling sensations on the legs, or thighs, or groin, and so for this reason, some people are into non-surgical management of hernia. Don’t get me wrong. If you’ve got a visible bulge, you probably need a surgery, and you need surgery very, very quickly. If you just got some slight pain down in your lower abdominal area that occurs when you’re doing things like sit ups or crunches or heavy amounts of coughing, you may be able to get away with a non-surgical approach. One example would be wearing a support garment until your body is able to heal itself. And that wall is able to kind of close on its own. Those are called hernia belts or hernia trusses. And those typically you wear for anywhere from 6 to 12 weeks, and that would be one option. Light strengthening of the pelvic floor and the abdominal muscles, or light stimulation of the pelvic floor and the abdominal muscles via, for example, lying on a crunch position on the ground and pushing your low back into the ground can help a little bit in terms of stimulating the abdominal wall to heal just a little bit. Focusing on eating foods that are easily digested, switching to primarily like a smoothie-based diet, staying away from foods that are going to cause a lot of gas, you know, doing a lot of beans, a lot of legumes, trying to eat foods that are a little bit less likely to be foods that you eat a lot of, so staying away from food that you tend to binge on, reducing the number of meals that you eat during the day. All of that can help a little bit in terms of reducing some of the internal abdominal pressure. But essentially, the term given to waiting for surgery for an inguinal hernia is called watchful waiting. And essentially, you just wait and you see if the pain goes away after a few weeks of essentially being careful with your diet, wearing a supportive belt and seeing what happens. Now the reason that I like this question is because I had an inguinal hernia before. And I did the method of watchful waiting. I wore a weight training belt tightly around my waist when I would go and do any type of exercise. Stayed away from crunches and sit ups for about 2 months, and was just very, very careful not to stretch my abdomen area. And within about, I think it was about 6 weeks or so, the pain started to go away and within just a couple of months I didn’t feel it anymore at all. And it was basically a slight tear of the abdominal wall, not large enough for the large intestine to be able to bulge through, and so I didn’t need to go in and take the risk of getting a surgery. So my view on it is that if it’s something that were not a visible bulge and it’s something that isn’t presenting a high amount of pain or discomfort that you consider a non-surgical remedy. But this is something you would really ultimately want to talk to a physician about before you make that final decision. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t tell you that for sure legally.

Graeme asks: I was reading an article about high intensity interval training and the sessions were typical, fairly succinct workouts but the writer said to do the session for a 2-week block every 2 days and not to do any aerobic sessions in between. He said, to get the desired effect of high intensity interval training, this was required. Do you agree or understand why the protocols suggest only doing high intensity interval training to the exclusion of other trainings?

Ben: Yes. The handful of studies that show high intensity interval training to be superior to aerobic training or to cause just as much fat burning adaptation or increase in mitochondrial density or decrease in cardiovascular risk compared to aerobic training have all been done with high intensity interval training versus aerobic training. And so the high intensity interval training that has been done is typically very, very hard exercises injected about every 48 hours into the routine. Problem is that, light cardio sessions in conjunction with those high intensity interval training sessions, has not ever been looked into. So people will see as they’ll see the study that shows the high intensity interval training every 2 days is getting just as good a result as aerobic training, and so they’ll say, well, therefore, you have to do it this way. There’s no other way to do high intensity interval training other than to go out and just kick your butt every 2 days with a very hard high intensity interval training and not doing anything else. But my personal experience, and the experience that I’ve seen for clients that I’ve worked with, very possible to go out and say, do a Tabata set, it should be one form of high intensity interval training, and do 3 Tabata sets a week. And also, do a few aerobic sessions a week and be able to get away with that just fine in terms of accelerated weight loss, accelerated calorie burning and also no risk of overtraining. Where you get into trouble is when you start to do high intensity interval training but you also start to inject say, medium-paced cardio intervals, or medium-paced cardio sessions in between of each of those high intensity interval training sessions.. What I mean by that is let’s say you’re going to do one of these high intensity interval training sessions that would consist of a very, very hard 30-second sprints. Each 30-second sprint separated by 4 minutes of recovery. And you’re going to do that 3 days a week. Well, in between each of those days, if you were to go out and do light aerobic session, that’d be just fine. But in between each of those days, if you were to go out and do say 30 to 40 minute kind of medium intensity aerobic session called a tempo session, that would be a situation where you would be introducing a possibility of an adequate recovery, muscle fatigue and a decrease in the ability to do the high intensity interval training session. So essentially, what it comes down to is that it’s okay to do high intensity interval training and cardio, as well, as long as the cardio is done primarily aerobically. And if you have somehow figured out a way to do both, then I can almost guarantee that you’re not going hard enough with your high intensity interval training. Most people really don’t go as hard as they actually went in the research. I mean, the research, we’re talking of people doing 140, 150% of the O2 mass, most folks don’t understand what that is. Forexample, I’ve been doing a high intensity interval training session twice a week, and it involves putting the treadmill at a 10% incline and 12.0 for speed, and doing 10 30-second sprints. And in between each 30-second sprint essentially walking around the gym for about 3 to 4 minutes and doing nothing. That’s what a high intensity interval training session looks like. Most people think it’s, you know, doing it sort of a jumping jacks. It’s really not. High intensity interval training is hard, hard stuff.

Jack asks: I’m a diabetic. I’m getting back to lifting weights. I just started on my workout routine again and I’ve noticed that my glucose is high after workouts. I’m insanely controlled of A1C’s ranging from 5.9 at my lowest to 6.2 of my highest. But glucose has been hitting the high mark after workouts. Just curious if I’m stressing my body too hard starting out again or if I should take things slower until my body gets used to the physical strain.

Ben: First of all, when Jack mentions his A1C’s scores. A1C is a measurement. It’s basically kind of like a snapshot of your blood sugar levels for the past 3 months. Because what happens is that when you consume too much sugar, it sticks to proteins in your body and these components, these red blood cells with sugar stuck to the protein circulate in the body for about 3 months before they die. And when the sugar sticks to these red blood cells, it gives the person who’s testing you an idea how much sugar has been around in your body for the past 3 months. A1C levels, being low, like around 6, would mean that your average blood sugar has been fairly low. So that’s good for a diabetic to tab an A1C score of around 6. For the average person, that still means that your blood sugar level is fairly high. But for diabetic having a mean blood sugar that’s having an A1C of 6 is just fine. Now, the fact that your exercise is stimulating your blood sugar levels to increase is fairly normal. When you exercise in response to adrenalin and in response to physical movement, your body produces something called glucagon. Glucagon causes your liver to take stored blood sugar or glycogen and release it as glucose into the blood stream, thus increasing your blood sugar levels. And that’s a good thing, because you need that, that added blood glucose for energy. A problem can arise if your body is not producing enough insulin, because what happens then is insulin is basically necessary for getting glucose into the muscle cells. And if you’ve got this high levels of circulating glucose after exercise, but as a diabetic, not enough insulin to take that glucose and get it into the muscle cells to be stored as glycogen, then you could put yourself at risk. For example, if your blood sugar level is getting over 300, if you’re feeling sick, short of breath, if you’re getting a lot of ketones in your urine, getting tingling pain, numbness in your legs, then you’re risking a very severe hyperglycemic reaction that diabetics need to be very, very careful with and you may need to supplement with insulin immediately, if you’re getting those types of blood sugar levels. But if we’re talking about a slight rise in blood glucose due to that normal release of glucagon and release of glycogen from your liver into your blood to give you energy for exercise, that’s totally natural. Non-diabetics get that, diabetics get that, and it’s something that should be expected. It’s really not a bad thing. As a matter of fact, the more you exercise, the better you get into shape, the more your body starts to rely on fatty acids, the less sympathetic nervous system response you get, or epinephrine response you can get to exercise, the less of a spike in blood glucose you’re going to see. And it is true that you may need to gradually increase your fitness if the type of exercise that you’re doing now is spiking your blood glucose up to dangerous levels. So yeah you may need to do less high intensity interval training or less hard cardio, a little bit less weight training and just to monitor your blood glucose levels, start off with aerobics, light cardio, light body weight training, gradually add some intervals and a little bit of weight training, and then gradually progress to harder intervals, heavier weight training, and by doing so, you will train your body to release a little bit less glucose versus jumping in to a hard and heavy exercise routine right away. So that would be my advice to you. Again, I’m not a doctor and you should know I use this medical advice, but basically, you shouldn’t be too concerned about blood glucose level rising during exercise. That’s normal. But row row, sharp and steep rise, it’s putting into a hyperglycemic range, that’s when you need to be careful. That’s where you may want to consider backing off the exercise to the point where you’re not getting that type of spike in blood glucose levels.

That wraps up the questions for this week. So we are going to have one special announcement and then move on to the interview with Chip Bergh about how to stay fit when you’re super busy.

Ben: Hey, folks! This is Ben Greenfield and I know that many of you are incredibly busy, but you also have a passion for fitness. Maybe you have a passion for running 5 K’s or weight training, or even doing something like Ironman Triathlons and marathons. Well, the gentleman who is on the other line right now is actually the president of a 10-billion dollar global business, Procter and Gamble, the president of the Male Businesses Division of Procter and Gamble. He runs that division and yet he still manages to be in remarkable shape. He does a lot of different events and keeps himself in shape. I’ll have him tell you a little bit more about the type of things that he does in terms of the competitions that he takes part in. But he’s learned a lot of things in his time in the trenches, and so I thought it will be interesting for you to get this man, Chip Bergh, on the line to talk a little bit about how he juggles all the things that he’s doing and still finds time to stay fit, still finds time for his 2-year old daughter, and still manages to even win in his age group in some events. So Chip, thanks for coming on the call today.

Chip: Ben, it’s great to be here, thanks very much for the very nice introduction.

Ben: Tell me a little bit more about the type of events that you participate in.

Chip: Well, I’ve always been an athlete, I guess, and I’ve gone all the way back to win an Olympic jib. The different types of sports I’ve done have changed through the years, but when I was in college, I took up running and after I got out of college, I started running marathons and 10 Ks all the way up to marathons. And a little bit later in life, in my 40’s, I sort of stopped doing marathons and I started getting into swimming, which led to eventually getting into triathlon, kind of in my early to mid-40’s. And now I do a little bit of everything. I do triathlons mostly during the summers since I live in the northeast. And the triathlons range from sprint distance all the way up to Half Ironmans. I haven’t quite gotten to the point of doing a full Ironman although it’s in my dream list. And I live in Boston, so you know, when you live in Boston you have to do the Boston Marathon, so I run one or two marathons a year. Those are getting tougher and tougher to do, I will admit, but I do manage to run those every year and I’m looking forward to running Boston again this coming April.

Ben: Cool. So walk me through a typical training for you in terms of what you tried to check off as far as like run or weight training sessions or whatever it is that you do.

Chip: Yeah, I guess I have two different types of typical weeks, or typical days. There’s the typical week when I’m in town, when I’m not travelling and out of town, and then there’s the typical week when I’m travelling. And the two are somewhat different although I really do make it a priority and important part of my day everyday to get my workout in. I do a number of work program, I will say, than I used to do in the past because I now work with a coach, an online coach, who regularly sends me my workouts. So there’s a little bit more regimen in it. It used to be I’d wake up and then it’d be like, okay what am I going to do today? So now, it’s a little bit more programmed. But when I’m in town, I’m watching that I’ve got a decent gym in my house, which includes an endless pool, so I can swim at home. So I will work out just about every morning during the week. I’m typically up somewhere between 5 and 5:15, down in the basement by 5:20 or 5:30, and I got, I can do the triathlon down in my basement if I want to. I’ve got an endless pool down there, I’ve got my bike on a CompuTrainer and I’ve got a treadmill. And I also have some pretty weight lifts down there, so I’ve got, in a relatively small space of about one-and-a half car garage, I would say, I’ve got everything I need to basically maintain my fitness and train at an intense level, I would say.

Ben: Will you say that’s fairly important thing is for people to enable themselves to have access to being able to work out without having to add in the management of say, going to a gym?

Chip: Well, having access, whether it’s a gym or your home basement, and having, not everybody can afford, everybody doesn’t have the kind of space enough to throw in an endless pool in their house. I’m lucky in that respect, but having access, easy access to the right kind of equipment so you can get your access to workout and it’s pretty important. You know, in Boston, it’s now dark until 7 o’clock or 7:30 in the morning, and it gets dark at about, it’s getting dark right now at 4:15 in the afternoon. So I do a fair amount of training in the winter, my running training on a treadmill. I try to go outside when I can, but… It is important, I think, that you have access. So that’s definitely one of the things that when we moved here, I made it a priority that I was going to find a space that would allow me to put a decent enough gym in my basement.

Ben: And for those guys who are listening in, you don’t have to, like Chip said, get an endless pool. My version of an endless pool is I have a couple of swim courts. I can do 5 minutes of simulated swimming and a 10-minute time travel on a bike, three times through. I get a swim-bike session in. But it’s the same philosophy that Chip is preaching: have it available.

Chip: My youngest son is 23 and he lives in Minneapolis. He lives in a one-bedroom condo, a year-and-a-half out of school or so, and he’s got his little space set up in his little one-bedroom condo. He’s got his bike up on a trainor and he’s got his weights in the other corner. He can get his workout in his living room if he has to. It’s important that you’re going to find a space and you’re going to find a way to make it happen. The other part of my normal, when I’m in town, our office space, we built a, you know, we call it a Boston’s best gym here at the Gillette World Shaving headquarters and so we got a phenomenal fitness center here which we installed when we moved the operation into this building. And during a typical week when I’m in town, I’m in that gym at least three days a week at lunchtime. Sometimes it’s four and when I’m really lucky, it’s five. So I make it a priority to kind of break my day up when I’m in town by getting another workout. So if I swim in the morning, I’ll run or I’ll do weights at lunchtime. If I did weights in the morning, maybe I’ll run at lunchtime. So it gives me kind of a second workout and it breaks the day up for me and it’s really an important part of my day. So that’s a typical week when I’m in town. When I’m travelling, it’s obviously a little more difficult. But I do make it a priority to get my workout. And in fact I have what I call my travel rituals, which everybody who works with me around the world know what my travel rituals are, and one of the rituals is, we’re not starting the day until 8:30 in the morning because if we start at 8:30, that gives me time to get up, get into the hotel gym or go to a nearby pool, whatever my program is going to be, and whatever city I’m in in the world. Get a good one-hour workout and get back to my room, shower around my email, get some breakfast in me before I head off and really hit it for the day. I make it a priority and I also make sure that I got to sleep early enough that I can get up at 5:00, 5:30, quarter to six, depending on what time the facility opens, get my workout in.

Ben: Yes. In terms of flexibility of your program, you mentioned you have a coach who’s giving you workouts, do you find it important to be able to kind of drag and drop them as you please, or do you really stress to stay adherent to it, very, very strict schedule.

Chip: Well, I try to stick to schedule that she sends me, but stuff happens, right?

Ben: Hope she’s not listening.

Chip: Yeah. But I do, you know, you got to be flexible. And things happen during the day or during the week and you need to make adjustments. I try to be smart about the adjustments that I’m making. I let her know of the adjustment that I’m making. She also has my travel schedule so she knows ahead of time because she’s developing my schedule when I’m going to be out of time, when I’m going to be in town. So she can work the program that way. I also know a lot of the hotels where I’m staying what kind of facilities I’m going to have and I try to build my travel workouts around what facilities the hotel is going to have along the way. So if I know a hotel’s got a great pool, I’m going to try to get in a lot of swimming in that hotel before I move on to the next city where the hotel might have no pool. And so it’s a little bit of common sense along with trying to make sure that I stay on track. Get the number of miles that I need to be getting. A lot also depends on where it is during the season, too.

Ben: It’s a valuable tip, actually. Planning blocks of training around what you’re going to have available to you. I know that’s something I built my athletes before where, when they’re travelling, pretty much what they had access to were running pads, we put they’re running block in right there, and they become a better runner during that week.

Chip: Exactly.

Ben: Let’s change pace here a little bit and talk about your diet and your nutrition. My next question before we talk a little bit about how you eat when you travel is in terms of all the different diets that are out there, paleo and 40-30-30 and you know, high carb low fat, low carb high fat, do you have a particular diet day you stick to or nutrition plan that you use?

Chip: Well, about 6 months ago, I became a vegan and so I’m now a pretty hard-core vegan. You know, initially, that posed some challenges when I was travelling, but I now found that if you just kind of stand up for what you want when you go in to a restaurant, just about any restaurant’s going to bend, you know, make sure that you don’t leave hungry or frustrated. So I stick to a very disciplined vegan diet. I mean disciplined is probably an adjective that would describe me, and I just try to get a good mix of protein and carbohydrates and fats during the course of the day. I do track what I eat. I track just about anything that goes down my throat to make sure that I’m getting enough calories, and to make sure that I’m getting high quality proteins during the course of the day.

Ben: Gotcha. Do you have like a recipe source that you use for vegan, like do you use Brendan Brazier’s book, Thrive, or anything like that?

Chip: I have read his book. I live in Boston and one of the, probably one of the best sports nutritionists in the country is here in Boston, a woman by the name of Nancy Clark, who also wrote a sports nutrition book and I met with her. When I became a vegan, it’s not that I needed to lose weight. But when I became a vegan, I lost about almost 15 pounds in the first 6 weeks or so, to a point where it kind of got scary. I went and saw her and the bottomline was I wasn’t getting enough calories. And that’s when I really started tracking the calories that I was consuming and am I getting enough high quality protein. Now, I’ve managed to put about 15 pounds back on and I probably hit my is really my right natural weight right now. So I do track what I eat. I try to mix things up to make sure that I’m getting a good ix of different types of both vegetables and different types of carbohydrates, a lot of complex carbohydrates. I used to drink a lot of protein shake and I kind of cut back on that trying to get as much protein as I can from real food sources.

Ben: I was going to ask you that in terms of that, especially when you travel, how often do you rely on engineered foods as a vegan food source? And if so, are there any that you would recommend?

Chip: The answer is I try to rely on it very minimally because it’s a pain in the neck to carry it around, but I do carry around a protein mix, which is vegan, with me when I’m travelling. I just carry it around in zip lock bags and I also carry some sports bars with me. and to be honest, they may even have a lot of egg white or something in it, so this is not like an ethical… I’m not doing this for ethical reasons or anything like that. If there’s a little bit egg white, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, but I do carry around sports bars with me because sometimes I would find myself in a meeting or something where the only thing they eat is meat or something like that. So I do carry that with me.

Ben: I’m just curious, say you walk in an outback steakhouse when you’re travelling, what are you going to tell the waitress there?

Chip: As a matter of fact, I do wind up at outback a fair number of times because I fly in and out of Cincinnati and there’s an outback in Cincinnati’s airport and normally, I’m on the last flight out and that’s where I’d stop and have dinner. And I can get a sweet potato there with no butter. I can get steamed broccoli, steamed veggies; I can get salads. That’s my point. I actually thought that I’d have a hard time keeping with vegan diet when I travel, and actually it’s not an issue at all. At most restaurants you do say, “I’m a vegan, no meat, no dairy, no cheese. What can you do for me?” Sometimes you’d be blown away by what the staff could put together. They take it as a challenge.

Ben: Yeah. You just have to think outside the box, huh?

Chip: Yup. Exactly.

Ben: Interesting. So in terms of any final tips or tricks that you would have for people who are super busy and want to stay fit, and maybe travel a lot and want to stay fit, do you have any other little tips or tricks that you use in your life that motivates you or keep you up to your goals?

Chip: I do. A big part of this for me is, because I was thinking about this as we’ve been talking, part of this is how I define myself. Right? I define myself as an athlete to some extent And I’ve got a personal mission statement. And the first line of my personal mission statement is to live life, and part of living life to me is being healthy, being active and being fit. I’m 53 years old, I’ve got a 2-year old daughter. I want to be around when she graduates from college. I’d like to be around when she gets married. I’d like to be around when she has kids. That could be 35 years from now. So I want to love a long, healthy life. And I know that, you know, staying fit, staying healthy, it’s going to increase my odds of being around in another 25 years or 30 years.

Ben: Yeah.

Chip: So one big thing is you got to make it a priority for yourself and almost make it a part of who you are. And then the second thing is you got to program it into your day. I don’t get out of bed at 5 o’clock or 5:30 in the morning to get my workout in particularly if I’m travelling. It’s not going to happen. And if it doesn’t happen 3 or 4 days in a row, then you got to start back up again.

Ben: Right.

Chip: So just make it a priority and figure out where on the calendar that particular day it’s going to fit in. And then you just got to be disciplined to make it happen.

Ben: Yeah. Well, fabulous advice, folks, from a guy who’s involved in a 10-billion dollar company, still manages to pull up marathons, triathlons, do very well in them, have a family and he’s got it together. So thank you so much for coming on the call and sharing some of the tips, Chip.

Chip: Thank you, Ben. Great talking with you.

Ben: Alright, folks. Until next time. This is Ben Greenfield and Chip Bergh signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

For personal nutrition, fitness or triathlon consulting, supplements, books or DVD’s from Ben Greenfield, please visit Pacific Elite Fitness at http://www.pacificfit.net

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One thought on “Episode #126 – Full Transcript

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