February 1, 2017

Podcast from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2017/02/364-becoming-super-ager-internet-food-get-lots-stuff-done-every-day-much/

[0:00] Introduction

[4:41] News Flashes

[7:01] Using HRV Training More Intelligently

[12:19] The Internet of Food

[22:35] Effect on Flickering Light on Alzheimer's

[26:34] How To Be A Super Ager

[31:54] Special Announcements/Gaineswave Discount

[35:25] Nutritional Therapy Association

[37:11] ZipRecruiter

[38:54] MVMT Watches

[40:14] Listener Q&A/Building VO2Max

[51:13] How To Be Super Productive

[1:14:02] Top 5 Anti-Aging Tips

[1:34:41] iTunes Review Giveaway

[1:39:02] End of Podcast

In this episode of The Ben Greenfield Fitness Show:

Becoming A Super-Ager, The Internet Of Food, How To Get Lots Of Stuff Done Every Day, The Best Intervals To Build VO2Max, Is Hydrogen Peroxide Therapy Safe, Top Five Anti-Aging Tips, and much more.

Ben:  Rachel, does my voice sound funny?

Rachel:  It doesn't.  Why?  Should it?

Ben:  I guess my voice probably always sounds a little bit funny.

Rachel:  Sounds a little funny?

Ben:  I know.  It's just funny.  I think my voice sounds funny.  I often hate to hear myself talk, but this morning especially.  I shouldn't say I hate to hear myself talk.  I just, you ever run into that?  Like you just make your voice sound funny?

Rachel:  All the time.  It's super cringey.  Sometimes when I play back these podcasts, I'm like, “Ugh!”

Ben:  Especially when I was a kid.  I used to hate to hear my own voice. But, no, this morning, I'm wearing an extremely, extremely tight belt that's decompressing my spinal disc.  It's called a, did I say my spinal (censored)?  I meant to say my spinal discs.  It's a decompression belt.  Have you heard of this before?

Rachel:  No.

Ben:  Dr. Ho's Decompression Belt.  Like three years ago, we talked about it on the podcast.  Somebody actually called in a question, like “have you ever heard of Dr. Ho's Decompression Belt?”  And of course, right away, I thought of some Asian dude like a white lab coat selling snake oil on the internet.  But I looked into it, and then I eventually bought one when I injured my low back, and I threw out my low back I think, I talked about this on last week's podcast, a couple weeks ago doing some gymnastics training.  And so I got this decompression belt because it tractions your spine.  So anytime you traction the spine, what that means is you're gently stretching the area between the joints so that they would then rehydrate.  And it's this belt, and it's got like a little pump, and you pump it up, and I'm wearing it right now, and it…

Rachel:  You pump it up tighter?  Is that what the pumps are for?

Ben:  It works!  It's not like a weightlifting belt.  It actually, as you pump it up, it expands like vertically, like up and down, so it spreads apart the vertebra and the space between the vertebra in your back, and it helps a ton.  So that's what I'm wearing right now, in case my voice sounds funny.

Rachel:  It doesn't sound that funny.  But are you finding any, are you feeling anything different when you have it on?

Ben:  Yeah.  Like zero pain, zero pressure.

Rachel:  Wow.  Very cool.

Ben:  And my back's at like 95% anyways.  It's almost healed up.  Anyways, I wearing my belt.  How was your weekend?

Rachel:  Weekend was awesome, Ben!  I actually saw you over the weekend.  We went to Jackson Hole for an event.

Ben:  Yeah!

Rachel:  Lots of fun, lots of skiing, lots of mushroom taking, which was kind of funny, but…

Ben:  You know what?  It was a nature experience.

Rachel:  It was.  Yes.

Ben:  Psilocybin, in addition to enhancing neurogenesis and neuroplasticity, which of course is why everybody takes it, just to build new brain cells.  We all know that.  Yeah, it can make skiing more fun.  (laughs) I think one of the texts that I received from you over the weekend was you looking for your husband because he and I were wandering around the Four Seasons Spa relatively high on shrooms.  It was an interesting weekend.  What happens when Rachel and Ben get together with our respective spouses.

Rachel:  With our partners.

Ben:  Yeah.  But, anyways, it was a good time.  Hopefully you've recovered.

Rachel:  I have recovered!

News Flashes:

Ben:  News Flashes.  I think we should get rid of the guy's voice and I should just sing it.

Rachel:  Yes.  Go on.  Do it.  I love your voice.  You have a great singing voice.  I've been hearing more of it lately, and I hear you're going to go to an open mic night.

Ben:  If you go to instagram.com/BenGreenfieldFitness, you can see my new music instructor, Mike Myers.  Not to be confused with the Canadian comedian.  It would be pretty cool though to get taught music by Mike Myers.

Rachel:  It would be.

Ben:  Especially if you get his Scottish voice.

Rachel:  Lots of fun stuff happening…

Ben:  Like an orange on a toothpick.  Got my baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back ribs!

Rachel:  It's not a podcast unless we get some fun accent from you.

Ben:  Mini-Me.  He could do the Mini-Me too.

Rachel:  We're so serious, aren't we?

Ben:  I'm taking uke and guitar lessons, and I am a huge fan of hiring an instructor any time that you want to keep yourself accountable, compared to, say, just going to internet YouTube videos to learn something.  So now I have a gymnastics instructor who's keeping me accountable.

Rachel:  That should be me.

Ben:  I have a music instructor who's keeping me accountable.  And I have a tennis instructor.  That was one of my goals for 2017 was to invest in myself, even though I'm a complete cheap steak, cheap steak?  So I'm wearing a spinal (censored) decompression belt and I'm a cheap steak.  I didn't even learn how to talk…

Rachel:  You're killing it!

Ben:  I know.  Anyways though, I'm a cheapskate and I kind of cringe thinking that, “Oh, I don't need an instructor.  I can learn this stuff for free myself.”  But once you hire an instructor, your motivation to learn goes through the roof.  And, of course, that can be said for music, for sports, for exercise, anything.  So I'm kind of hitting it on all three spectrums…

Rachel:  You want to know what my three are four this year?

Ben:  Go for it.

Rachel:  Spanish, which you have a very interesting news flash about, not Spanish in particular, but learning languages, writing, and art.  Taco drawing.

Ben: Mmmm.  Nice.

Rachel:  Yup.

Ben:  You could do all three.  You could write a Spanish painting.  I'm just saying.

Rachel:  (laughs) That’s me just biohacked my whole 2017.

Ben:  Shall we jump into, speaking of biohacking, our first news flash: HRV.  Of course, we get many questions about HRV, also known as heart rate variability, and there was a great article that we'll link to, as we link to everything over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/364, on how to use heart rate variability training more intelligently.  This was in Outside Magazine, and one of the things are, or several things that it goes into are some really good, I think practical tips, for HRV.  And the first is to, this is written by Alan Couzens, who's a pretty smart little cookie when it comes to exercise physiology, the first is to build a baseline.  What that means is that your baseline measurement might be different than say, mine, or somebody else who's tweeting, or Facebooking their HRV out there on the Internet.  So if the average data for one person is say, 90, and that's their baseline, your baseline might be 85, or 80.  But it's really important to get a baseline measurement and to spend some time when you first start tracking your HRV, which in my opinion is the best way to keep track of your nervous system and to predict illness or injury.  You'll start to see patterns eventually, but what's really important is to always capture the data in a similar context.  He goes into this in the article, for example, for me, I rarely take my HRV other than lying in bed five minutes first thing in the morning.  So that's really important.  You build a baseline and you take it at the same time when you take it.

Rachel:  ‘Cause you're just eliminating all of the variables.

Ben:  Exactly, exactly.  Another really important one that he goes into is that there are some very good athletes who tend to have low heart rate variability.  And in some cases, that can be because they specialize in their specific sport.  Let's say you have a football player who just trains purely for power and strength, and actually has very poor aerobic capacity, or poor parasympathetic nervous system balance.  Well technically, their HRV would be low.  The same could be said for a marathoner who specializes in aerobic and has poor power, poor strength, poor speed, poor sympathetic nervous system tone, but that's because they've chosen to have their nervous systems excel in something that dictates that their heart rate variability might be low, 'cause they're kind of like putting all their eggs in one basket, so to speak.  So that's another kind of important thing to realize is that depending on what you've chosen to specialize in, your HRV might be a little bit lower.

Rachel:  So comparing yourself to others is pretty irrelevant.

Ben:  Right.  Another important point that he goes into was to use your number to plan your workout.  So this should go without saying and is relatively intuitive, but you need to be able to adapt to what your HVR is telling you on the fly.  So what I mean by that is there are some days where I will wake up in the morning, and although typically my HRV is like 90 to 95, I woken up some days and it's like 75 or 80.  And sometimes I feel pretty good, but the HRV is low, and I guarantee that if I train through a low HRV, within two to three days my throat starts to get scratchy, a certain joint starts to feel a little bit tweaky, for me it's typically like shoulder, low back, or ankle, like those are kind of like my three weak links, and it's because I ignore what my nervous system is telling me.  Because a lot of times, nervous system morning signs precede musculoskeletal, or immune system warning signs.  And so don't just take your HRV and then ignore it, take your HRV and then know how to adjust your training on the fly.  Have those workouts you can pull out of your pockets where you can say, “Okay, HRV is low today.  Rather than having the Crossfit WOD, or going out and doing what my coaches told me, or doing what I've planned for the day for a heard workout, I'm instead going to do yoga, or sauna, or an easy walk in the sunshine, or something like that.”

Rachel:  And at this point for you, are there ever any anomaly numbers?  So do you ever get like a low score where it's actually not true and you probably could train the next day?  Or is it a hundred percent all the time?

Ben:  Yeah.  Because sometimes it can be suppressed when you've changed up your nightly routine the night before.  And in many cases, that has to do with stimulants, or drugs, or supplements that you may have taken.  One notorious one that will lower heart rate variability drastically would be an anti-histamine.  Let's say you're really stuffed up and you couldn't sleep, and so you desperately grab some NyQuil or something like that.  Well, that's going to suppress your heart rate variability.  And it's not going to suppress it because you're overtrained, or you're about to get sick or injured, it's because that's just what an anti-histamine does to your HRV.  So there are some situations like that, but usually you'll know if you drastically change something up the night before.

Rachel:  Right.  Alright.  Good.

Ben:  So if you did copious amounts of mushrooms or something like that, which, by the way, actually jacks up HRV, I've found.  Psilocybin is really interesting in that sense.  I don't want to give people, by the way, especially those driving their minivans with their children, the idea that we endorse the frequent use of mind bending drugs.  But at the same time, plant-based medicine is very interesting to play around with.

Rachel:  It is.

Ben:  Okay.  So the next thing that I wanted to get into was this really interesting article on the “internet of food”.  Did you see this one?

Rachel:  Fascinating article.

Ben:  It is quite fascinating.  What this article goes into, it was on Fast Company magazine, was DNA testing and how we can now use DNA testing in our quest for a perfect diet.  And it goes into several companies that are doing some really cool things.  For example, there's a company called Vitagene and they use DNA to discover nutritional deficiencies, and then they create like a personalized vitamin and mineral supplementation program based on your specific vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which I think is really cool.  I think it would be even better if they use like blood and biomarker testing in addition to DNA testing.  But there are other companies, like Viome, I was looking into the other day.  They look at your unique biology, your DNA, your microbiome, and then they use artificial intelligence to prescribe you, say, supplements, or dietary changes, or lifestyle changes based on that.  There's another one called Habit, and Habit is this company that has test the DNA and blood tests that they send to your house, and then you send those back, and they send back like personalized nutrition advice.  I've interviewed the folks at DNAFit in the past about this, and it actually is really interesting.  And later on when we talk about like enhancing your ability to have like a really good anti-aging protocol, I actually want to talk a little bit about how you can use this kind of data to age more gracefully.

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  But the article itself has some really interesting information too on gadgets.  Like there's this company called Nima, N-I-M-A, and they have this new portable device that tests food for gluten.  I can just imagine a whole bunch of people walking into restaurants with their Nima, testing whether or not their salad does have traces of gluten on it, and then freaking out.

Rachel:  Yes, exactly.

Ben:  Getting all of a litigious because there's a particle of gluten on their food from a stray crouton.  There's another company called TellSpec, T-E-L-L-S-P-E-C, that has this new gadget that will estimate calories, carbs, fats, protein, fiber, and glycemic load of any type of food, which is kind of cool.  I mean, you don't necessarily have to have a nutrition label.  You could just do that on say, an apple, or a piece of steak.  There's another one called MyDx, which stands for My Diagnostic, and it's like this little plug-in module that tests your food for pesticides and heavy metals.  And it can also test things like water, they can even test cannabis to see if it has pesticides or heavy metals in it, which is actually kind of an interesting point because I've found that more and more, when I look over the blood and biomarkers of people if they're doing like heavy metal tests and toxin tests, they test really, really high in cadmium, which you notoriously find in marijuana, 'cause a lot more people these days are using that as plant-based medicine because it's growing in terms of its legality but it is also really high in cadmium.  And so it's really interesting, this article, as far as like all these different like patented algorithms these companies are developing that allow us to use a combination of food sensors and technology to play around with the internet of food.

Rachel:  And I have a question about this because we get a lot of questions on customizing people's diets and what people should eat, and is it kind of, do you suggest that the first layer of customizing your diet is to get your DNA tested?

Ben:  I think that that is crucial.  I think DNA, so what I do with my clients, like if somebody hires me for coaching, we do four things: we do DNA, we do blood testing for things like thyroid, and lipid panel, red blood cells, white blood cells things like that, we do urine to look at hormones, like testosterone, cortisol, melatonin,  et cetera, because a blood test is only a snapshot, it doesn't give you like a running tally of what goes on all day, whereas peeing on a strip five times a day gives you that running tally, and then the last would be the poop test, the infamous poop in a hot dog tray for three days in a row and then send it off with the pre-paid FedEx label to tell you yeast, bacteria, fungus, enzyme production, et cetera.

Those four tests can allow me, when I get all those back into my e-mail inbox, my client will send me like they're log in for 23andMe, or their log in for Direct Labs, or wherever else they're getting these tests done, or WellnessFX, then I can look over all those and say, “Hey, your vitamin D is just fine.  You don't need to be on some vitamin D supplement,” or “You've got really low red blood cell magnesium, so we should get you on like a magnesium citrate before you go to bed at night,” or “You have the genetic marker responsible for causing familial hypercholesterolemia, meaning that you would do better on a higher fiber, higher carbohydrate, lower fat diet because you're a cholesterol storer.”  So, yeah.  It's also why I've never written, or haven't yet written, a diet book because I would only ever write a diet book that prescribes a diet that allows somebody to plug in all of these different parameters, and then tweak their diet according to their genetics, and their blood, and their biomarkers.  And I'm sure I could probably figure out a how to write a book about that, but for now, I don't know what would I call it, Rachael, if I did a diet book?

Rachel:  I don't know, Ben.  You're the genius here.

Ben:  Yeah.  “The Perfect Diet”.  That's the title of the article, “The Quest For The Perfect Diet.”  So there you go.  We'll link to that one in the show notes as well.  And speaking of diet, really great article on calories, and metabolism, and fat loss that came out a few weeks ago by a former podcast guest, and a friend of mine, Ray Cronise.  Ray's the guy made famous in Tim Ferriss' “4-Hour Body”, I think it was.  He's like the cold thermogenesis guy, the guy who hacked his body using things like cold showers, and shiver walks, and he was doing all this stuff before Wim Hof arrived on the scene.  It's not quite as sexy as Wim Hof.  He doesn't have a Polish accent with a beard.  He's just a…

Rachel:  Or the stark beautiful blue eyes.

Ben:  He's just a shaved bespectable, bespectacled, bespectacled?  Man.  Anyways though, cool guy.  And the article is fascinating.  A few the of the quick takeaways that he goes into is, first of all, he talks about oxidative priority of foods, meaning certain foods are burnt before other foods.  And the priority in which foods are burnt… let's say you're having these things as a meal, is first alcohol, alcohol gets burnt before anything else, then protein gets burnt next, and then carbohydrates, and then fat.  And each of these foods has a different oxidative potential in terms of the amount of calories that are going to be used when burning that food.  And he goes into how we can tweak our diets and tweak our ability to lose weight based on adjusting the amount of each of these foods that we're eating.

And then based on that, he's developed this thing called a food triangle in which he has foods with the lowest amount of what's called energy density at like the base of the triangle, and these would be things like leafy greens, and cruciferous vegetables, and stems, and bulbs, and mushrooms, and this is like the bulk of the dietary recommendations in the article.  And then we also have, kind of in terms of increasing energy density on one side, fruits, legumes, cereals, starchy vegetables, et cetera.  And then the other side, fats, and proteins like meat, eggs, dairy, poultry, fish, and shellfish.  And the article itself goes into how weight loss, or the ability to lose weight, is really based on the effects of these different types of foods, and combinations of these different types of foods, to shift what's called our respiratory quotient, which would be like how many calories we're actually burning when we're just sitting around and doing nothing at all.  And also the oxidative priority, like how quickly a food is actually oxidized in the human body.

So when we look at oxidative priority, right, like if we were to say, like eat a high animal fat-based meal with a couple of glasses of wine and some cereal, we'd get a whole bunch of energy density, and it would also have a high oxidative priority, and it would also result in a slightly lower RQ.  Whereas if we're engaging in things like intermittent fasting foods with high nutrient density and low energy density, we're all of a sudden equipping ourselves to have a high RQ and lower caloric intake.  The article's a little bit dense to get through, but it's really, really good and in terms of kind of understanding why basically a calorie is not a calorie.

Rachel:  Right.  And is there any fundamental takeaways for people who just want like snapshots of the easiest way to lose weight?

Ben:  Eat more vegetables and do more intermittent fasting.  That's really like the big, big takeaway.  Oh and if you're going to drink alcohol, try not to consume alcohol along with other foods because those other foods are going to get stored away as fat far more easily when accompanied by something that has a very high oxidative priority, which would be alcohol.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  And that's why I always have my nightly glass of elderberry wine on a completely empty stomach, usually after a workout.

Rachel:  There you go.

Ben:  Plus it makes me a much more fun guy to be around.  Spins the dials in my brain much more easily because I'm in an unfed state.  So there you have it.  Turn yourself into a cheap date.  Okay.

Another article that I thought was really interesting was something that was reported on, I think Radiolab did a story on this, it's this idea behind the flickering light, a new flickering light that could help to treat Alzheimer's disease.  And what they found, and this was admittedly in a mouse model, but still really interesting, at MIT, they found that flashing light at a specific frequency, in this case it was pulsed at about 40 Hertz, they were able to use these flashes of light to tune what are called gamma oscillations in mouse brains.  And what that means is they kicked the microglial cells in mouse brains into action, cause more neural activity.  And when you look at people with Alzheimer's, these gamma oscillations don't occur at their regular rate.  What they were able to do was basically reboot the activity of these microglial cells in mouse models and actually reinitiate the production of these gamma oscillations, resulting in an increase of alpha brain waves.  And all they did it with was a flashing light that they expose these mouse brains to.

Rachel:  Just a standard flashing light, or a standard flashing light directly into the eye?

Ben:  What they used was a flickering light.  I don't know if they used the eye or if they actually had like the top of the mouse, I like to imagine they had the top of the mouse kind of like cut off and the brain was there.  It's 'cause I like to imagine these complex scientific scenarios.

Rachel:  I don't like to imagine that.

Ben:  I'm not vegan.  I can imagine mice's heads…

Rachel:  Being chopped off?

Ben:  Yes.  You're banned from doing that 'cause you only eat veggies, no, I know you're eating fish now.

Rachel:  I am.

Ben:  But I hope you're not eating mice.

Rachel:  I'm not eating mice.

Ben:  Either way, I find this most interesting because I had some people on the podcast last year, the folks from Vielight.  And I actually wound up spending 1,500 bucks after I talked with them on this thing called the Vielight Neuro, because it does something almost identical to what they just found in this mice.  It's a near infrared headset and it uses something called photobiomodulation to stimulate the production of alpha brain waves and to stimulate the activation of mitochondria neural tissue, and in this case it's light energy, you stick this little probe up your nose, and then the headset goes in your head, and I'll link to this in the show notes if people want to see it looks like, but 10 Hertz is consistent with what's called an alpha wave oscillation rate.

So granted it's a little bit different than the gamma oscillations and the 40 Hertz that they used in this study, in this case the Vielight is alpha oscillation and 10 Hertz, but it's the same type of concept.  We can actually change our brain and increase the activation of neural cells with the use of light, and they've actually found that this can treat Alzheimer's disease.  Which isn't why I use it as a neurohack to actually improve alpha brain wave production, intelligence, working memory, all the other things that photobiomodulation can do.  And also nitric oxide, you get this huge release of nitric oxide in neural tissue, and that crosses your blood brain barrier and can actually act almost like viagra for the rest of your body in terms of opening up blood vessels and things along those lines.  It's a really interesting concept, this concept of using flickering light to change your brain.

Rachel:  That was going to be my question.  So the Vielight does flick, it is a flickering light?

Ben:  Yeah.  When you put it on your head, it looks like police sirens, kind of.  Like red police sirens, or red light special.  Go ahead.  What were you going to say, Rachel?

Rachel:  I was going to say you're always so ahead of the curve, Ben.

Ben:  That's right.  Always ahead of the curve with those heat gated ion channels in my brain.

Rachel:  And strange looking things on your head.

Ben:  That's right.  So the last thing that I wanted to mention is this article about how to become a super-ager.  I always, my, how's the saying go?  My ears perk up?  My eyes perk up whenever I see an article about super-aging and anti-aging, 'cause it's something I'm keenly interested in, not because I'm grasping at straws and trying to squeeze as many years out of my life as possible, although I kind of am, but I just, I really like this concept of enhancing the human body and brain to the extent where you can put as many quality years on your life as possible.  I don't think that you necessarily want to be like hunched over in a wheelchair at a 160, cold, shivering, and starved because you're engaging in fasting and a sedentary lifestyle, unable to move.  But if I can be strong, and vibrant, and lively, dancing when I'm 150, great.

So this particular article goes into the idea that they used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or MRIs to scan the brains of 17 different people who they called super-agers, and these are basically like old people who are really smart, and really active, and just kicking butt in life.  And they identified these brain regions in what's called the lateral prefrontal cortex, and what they found was a great deal of activity in those brain regions.  In short, even though the article is relatively long, what they found was that if you can somehow stimulate those particular regions of the limbic system, which are the major hubs for communication through your brain, then you basically become very much like one of these super-agers, or your brain becomes very much like one of these super-agers.

Well, one of the best ways to actually stimulate these particular areas of the brain is through either a.) vigorous exercise, or b.) bouts of strenuous mental effort.  And if you can combine the two, all the better.  Meaning if you can find activities that would, for example, challenge your brain and your body at the same time, that's one of the keys.  So like this afternoon, I have a tennis lesson.  I've been taking a tennis lesson every Wednesday afternoon.  And this guy Jeff at the tennis club, he runs me around, I'm huffing, I'm puffing, I'm trying to remember what he told me about my forehand grip and my backhand stance, while at the same time my heart's beating through the roof 'cause he's feeding a ball to the right, then feeding a ball to left, and bringing me to the net, and giving me an overhead, and we're going to back away to the net, then back to the baseline for the forehand, to the backhand, to the approach shot.  When I'm going through a situation like that, that is stimulating the hell out of my prefrontal cortex and achieving many of these same type of stimuli that they talk about in this article.

The same could be said for like a Spartan race, where you're under barbed wire, over a wall, climbing the cargo net, swinging across the monkey bars while at the same time, you're huffing and puffing, a strenuous exercise combined with mental effort.  Ping pong.  Ping pong players have been studied and they've shown that they're some of the smartest athletes on the face of the planet again, 'cause they're moving, they're active.  It's actually a quite strenuous sport at the higher levels, but there's also a great deal of mental chess involved.  So that's how you become a super-ager.

Rachel:  Or in the article, they say “do it till it hurts, and then a little more”, and they talk about like learning languages and math.  And I'm curious how intellectually comparable it is to do a math problem until your brain hurts versus run a Spartan race.

Ben:  Well, first of all, what they say is that you must expend, the way they say it in the articles is you must expend enough effort that you feel some “yuck”.  They say do it till it hurts, and then a bit more.  Now what was your question?

Rachel:  ‘Cause when I think about running a Spartan versus doing a math problem, how my brain fails is very different.  Not that I run Spartans, you guys.

Ben:  The key is to do both.  Like in the Spartan Races, they used to, and I was kind of bummed when they quit doing this, they used to have memory challenges.

Rachel:  Oh, wow.

Ben:  You'd pass by a wall, you'd like line up your race number, the last two digits of your race number with those two digits that showed on the wall, and then there'd be a saying on the wall, like “1-3-Dog-6-7-8-9”, and that would be at Mile 2.  And at Mile 10 you'd run by a guy with a clipboard, and you would have to recite that exact phrase back to that person, or your penalty was 30 burpees right, which is going to cost you like two, two and a half minutes in the race.  So it's really interesting how when you combine the mental and the physical exertion, you almost get a double whammy effect when it comes to becoming a super-ager.  So basically, Rachel, what you need to start doing is your Spanish and your writing while you're on like a recumbent bicycle or an elliptical trainer…

Rachel:  Doing high intensity interval training?

Ben:  Yup.  Exactly.  That's how you do it, baby.

Special Announcements:

Ben:  So, Rachel, remember how I went down to Florida and got my (censored) shocked?

Rachel:  Ugh.  Yes.

Ben:  Yeah.  That whole like sound wave, high frequency acoustic wave to open up all the blood vessels in my genitals.  I wrote a whole article on this over at bengreenfieldfitness.com how I came back with like increased vascularity, I think that night that I had it done, I, not that the purpose of the protocol is to wake up multiple times during the night with (censored), but…

Rachel:  But that happens?

Ben:  But I woke up like eight times during the night.  Either I got used to it, or the boner frequency slightly diminished to the point where it was a sane number of, I'm just going to see how many times I can say the word (censored) out.

Rachel:  In one episode?

Ben:  I don't know if that marks a podcast as explicit…

Rachel:  As explicit?  I think it really does.

Ben:  We need to bleep this out.  But anyways, it's called the Gaineswave, and it was invented by this guy named Dr. Gaines, who I actually, he was on the podcast, and I went down to Florida, and had this protocol done.  Literally like waltzed into his office, and went through this you know series of medical examinations, and then this nurse whisked me off into a room where they do this protocol on both males and females to enhance things like vascularity, and size, and feel, and sexual performance, and orgasm strength.  And it's this painless high frequency acoustic wave that opens up old blood vessels, and stimulates the formation of new vessels, and gets you all of these benefits without you having to take like Viagra, or Cialis, or any prescription, or any pill.  And the very cool thing is, I'm now two months out and I'm still having these raging hard ons.  And basically, that's the idea behind it is the results last for months, not like two hours like you would if you took Viagra.  What do they say when you take Viagra?  If it lasts more than five hours, it's a priapism?

Rachel:  Go to the hospital?

Ben:  You're supposed to go to the hospital?  So anyways, this type of shockwave therapy, they've used it in Europe for over 15 years, and it's now cleared by the FDA, and you can do it here in the US too.  So they're actually hooking everybody listening into the show up with a deal.

Rachel:  Nice!

Ben:  A hundred and fifty bucks off of what they call the Gaineswave Treatment.  It's pretty easy you text the word “Greenfield”, that's my last name, Greenfield, to 313131.  So G-R-E-E-N-F-I-E-L-D to 313131 and that automatically gets you 150 bucks off the treatment.  And if you decide you want to go to the Florida facility where I went had it done and go see Dr. Gaines himself, even though you can get this done anywhere in the US, they'll also give you a big discount at the Florida clinic.  You just need to tell them I sent you.  You can go to HealthGains.com and get the number for the Florida clinic if you happen to want to go to Miami and get it done where I got it done.

Rachel:  Very cool.  Do they have clinics like in every state?

Ben:  Yeah.  On their website, you could go search.  But really cool protocol.  They do like O-shots, and P-shots, and all sorts of kind of cool things like platelet-rich plasma injections into your genitals.  It's kind of a cool protocol.  So check that out.  In addition, a few other things, I'm going to be speaking, actually kind of your neck of the woods, Rachael, Vancouver, Washington, which is pretty close to Portland, Oregon, March 3rd through the 5th at what's called the Nutritional Therapy Association Conference.  So you can check it out at bengreenfieldfitness.com/NTA.  But the cool thing about these folks, the Nutritional Therapy folks, is they also certify you as a nutritional therapy practitioner, and they use a very, have you ever heard of the Weston A. Price Diet, Rachel?

Rachel:  Yes.  Yup!

Ben:  Okay.  So this is based on the fact you're using like real high quality, nutrient dense ancestral foods to heal the body.  So they're not talking about like whole wheat bread, and energy drinks, and power bars.  Instead, they focus on really nutrient dense foods, really ancestral foods, and you learn how to use those, things like fermenting, and soaking, and sprouting, and things like that to help people lose weight, or enhance performance, or even heal disease.  So it's called the Nutritional Therapy Association, and you can go to NutritionalTherapy.com to check them out and to get in one of their classes.  The registration closes very soon.  I think it closes at like February 6th, which is a few days after this podcast comes out.  That's for the classes.  You can get into the conference any time, bengreenfieldfitness.com/NTA.  But it's pretty cool.  The Nutritional Therapy…

Rachel:  Are all the classes in person, or can you do them online?

Ben:  You can do 'em online.

Rachel:  Nice!

Ben:  Yup.  You do not have to move to Vancouver, even though if you wanted to be close to Rachel, you could.  For all of you people…

Rachel:  We could go for coffee.

Ben:  All you people who are Rachel stalkers.  Also, this podcast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter.  Zip Recruiter.  Have you ever been to this website?

Rachel:  No.

Ben:  It's pretty cool.  So if you want to hire somebody, you go to ZipRecruiter.com, or in this case if you want to do it for free, you go to ZipRecruiter.com/first, and you can take any job, and you post it once, then what they do is they go to like 200 plus web sites and they repost your job to all those different web sites, like Facebook, Twitter, everywhere, but you just have one click on your end, and automatically, like all these qualified candidates start to roll into your dashboard, like your interface on ZipRecruiter.  So you have no pain in the butt in terms of your e-mail inbox getting blasted with all these random creepers who are trying to apply for your job, or unqualified candidates, or folks who are flipping burgers who really aren't qualified to say, I don't know, be a police officer or whatever job post you're posting to ZipRecruiter.

So it's really cool, really slick.  ZipRecruiter.com/first is where you can go if you like own a business and you want to hire somebody, it's well worth checking out.  Pretty cool site.  You can also go there to find a job if you want to as well, if you just like sitting on your butt in your Mom's basement listening to this podcast wishing you had a job, you can actually go to ZipRecruiter.com/first.  So check that one out too.

And then finally this podcast is brought to you by MVMT Watches, which my wife stole my wife.  Did you see my wife's watch when we were at Jackson Hole?

Rachel:  I didn't see it, but they're sexy watches.  So I totally understand why she stole it.

Ben:  My wife was wearing my, it's the leather band one with the white face.  And I don't know if you went to their website and looked at some of their watches…

Rachel:  No, I have.  Yeah.

Ben:  They are beautiful.  Beautiful watches on this site.  I love my watch, my one that my wife stole.  By the way, the model that I was wearing, if I could find it here on their website, I believe it was the Chrono, the Chrono, which is like the, it's the leather strap, it's the white face.  So that watch costs 135.  It would normally cost $500, but at movement watches, you also get 15% off.  So you basically get that for under a hundred bucks.  Free shipping, free returns.  Really cool, high quality, minimalist looking watches.  They look great.  Really clean design, you're going to get a lot of compliments on your wrist.  So here's the URL: MVMTwatches.com/Ben, MVMTwatches.com/Ben, and that gets you a 15% discount on a very cool little timepiece.  So I think that's about it for our special announcements, yeah?

Rachel:  Yes!  Getting to the question.

Ben:  Alright.  Here we go.  Question time.

Listener Q & A:

Mark:  Hi, Ben.  My name's Mark.  I love your show and all that you do.  I'm an age group competitive triathlete, and about three and a half months ago, I got in a bike crash in a 70.3 three race, broke my collarbone, and six ribs, and pretty significantly collapsed my lung on the one side.  Now in the last month or two, as I'm getting back into training and competing a little bit, I noticed a pretty dramatic change in my VO2max and my speed, particularly on the run, probably 15 to 20%, probably 5 to 10% in my swimming and my cycling.  And then I'd love to know just the best way and the quickest way to for me to get my competitive edge back, and get my VO2max, and ventilatory capacity back up to where it was before.  Thanks for all your help.

Ben:  Sounds like Mark got a little beat up.

Rachel:  Yeah.  It sounds like a really bad fall.  I'm sorry to hear that, Mark.

Ben:  Collarbone, ribs, collapsed lung.  Must've been booking.  You ever been in a bike crash.

Rachel:  No.  Thankfully.

Ben:  Yeah.  I've…

Rachel:  I'm actually terrible at riding bikes, so I shouldn't…

Ben:  I've made a lot of skin graft donations to the pavement in my days, 'cause I raced for a decade doing Ironman triathlon.  My worst crash though was when I was like 11 years old.  I got a concussion in a mountain bike accident.  And I've had a few concussions since then.  Remember when I went down to the Peak Brain Institute in LA and they did like the QEEG on me, like the brain mapping on me?

Rachel:  Yeah.  There was a lot of damage that came up.

Ben:  Yeah, they can show like all these areas where you have TBI, and I don't know if anybody, and I've got a repeat podcast coming up with them, with all this neurofeedback training I've been doing, flying the space ships with my mind at home.  I've actually, 'cause I went down there for a repeat mapping two weeks ago, I have gotten rid of almost every single fast beta brainwave area of my brain that was a result of some of those concussions and traumatic brain injuries.  So it's kind of cool.

Rachel:  That's incredible!

Ben:  You can actually rewire your brain.  But Mark wants to rewire his lungs, get his VO2max back.  So, yeah, it's kind of interesting 'cause you'd think you could just go out and exercise hard, and that would increase VO2max.  But it turns out that our friends in science, all those researchers in white lab coats making people puke on bikes, they've found that there are specific interval lengths that help with certain components of cardiovascular fitness and VO2max.  It's actually a specific length of interval, and a specific intensity of interval that's best for specifically increasing your maximum oxygen utilization.

Rachel:  That's helpful information to know.

Ben:  That's why they call me Mr. Helpy Helperton.  There are a variety of different cardiovascular components you want to train.  I have an article about this called “How To Look Good Naked”, but I could have called it “How To Ride A Bike More Quickly”, I suppose.  So first of all, there's this thing called muscle endurance.  Aerobic capacity.  That's basically the amount of work your muscles can endure, the amount of time you can kind of like go to battle while keeping your force output really high.  This would be like your tolerance to lactic acid, your tolerance to the burn.  That's far different than your maximum oxygen utilization.  That's more related to what we would call your lactate threshold.  Well, a perfect example of how to build that would be a Tabata protocol.  And in one of the more famous studies for increasing muscle endurance and tolerance to lactic acid, four times a week for four weeks folks were doing one single four minute Tabata protocol.  Have you ever done a Tabata protocol, Rachel?

Rachel:  I have.  Yes.

Ben:  I do them twice a week on the bicycle.  It's 20 seconds all out followed by 10 seconds of rest.  That's it.  So now that I'm doing gymnastics training protocols, I've been finishing up my gymnastics training protocol that I'm doing now twice a week with a Tabata set on the bike.  And the 20 second efforts are all out, the 10 second efforts are, you go completely, but you can do these with kettlebell swings, cycling, rowing, whatever.  But that's what you do for muscle endurance, okay?  So increasing the amount of work that your muscles can endure, those don't really increase VO2max.  They're not long enough to increase VO2max, but you don't want to leave that type of training on the table if you want to be a complete athlete, especially a complete endurance athlete.  So that's kind of like one component of these Tabata sets.

Rachel:  Okay.

Ben:  And I would recommend you do at least twice a week, up to four times a week as far as something very similar like a 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off for about four minutes.  Now there's also this other component that is also really not VO2max, but is another important component, and that's mitochondrial density.  So this would be, mitochondria are the power plants of your cells, and there's this concept called mitochondrial biogenesis, which is the creation of new mitochondria.  And all mitochondrial density is that simply means that you have as many mitochondria packed into your muscles as possible, and that means you can utilize more fat, and you can utilize more glucose to produce ATP.  So to do this, so whereas the Tabata set is like these really hard efforts with pretty short recovery periods.  So Tabata set's like a 2:1 work to rest ratio, to increase mitochondrial density is kind of the opposite.  It's 30 seconds or so of extremely hard efforts followed by complete recovery.

So an example of that would be twice a week, in the mornings, I get the eye crust out of my eyes, sip my cup of coffee, and I head out to the garage, and what I do right now is a half hour on the treadmill, and it's four minutes of walking.  So for me it's uphill walking, and then every four minutes, I do a 30 second sprint as hard as I can go, and then go back to walking for full recovery.  And that's it.  I just do that for a half hour.  That's a perfect example of how to increase your mitochondrial density.  So the hard efforts are really, really hard, about 30 seconds long, but then you have complete recovery after each one.  So again, it's a little bit different than the Tabata set, where you're going, and going, and going, and frankly each effort that you do, you're producing a little less power each time 'cause you're getting that very short recovery period.  Whereas these mitochondrial density sprints are all out with full recovery.

Rachel:  Right.  Got it.

Ben:  So you'd want to include mitochondrial density, you'd want to include muscle endurance type of training, and then the last thing, before I get to VO2max, would be you'd want to optimize your fat burning efficiency.  And this would be like those easy fasted fat burning workouts, or these aerobic workouts that are a little bit longer in length, preferably with minimal fuel coming in, and done at more of an easy conversational pace.  So this would be like you get up on a Saturday or a Sunday morning, and you do like an hour long bike ride on an empty stomach with a cadence of 90 at an aerobic heart rate where your muscles aren't burning, it's conversational, but it's also enhancing your fat burning capacity because you haven't like dumped a bunch of glucose into your body beforehand.  That's a perfect example of like a fat burning, and this is honestly the form of training that I think most people overdo 'cause it doesn't hurt like those other ones do, and you can just kind of zone out and do it.  But it also is something that's necessary, especially if you're doing it in like a fasted state to increase your fat burning capacity.  That would be kind of another piece of the puzzle to ensure that you have like a complete cardiovascular profile.  Right?

Rachel:  Okay.  Yup.

Ben:  Okay.  So then we get to VO2max, and VO2max, in terms of the studies that they've done on VO2max, the minimum effective dose for this is about four minutes.  So right around this four to six minute range is the sweet spot for VO2max.  And what you do is you go as hard as you can go for those four to six minutes, this would be your maximum sustainable pace that you can maintain with good form.  Could be on the bike, running, swimming, whatever.  And then you get full recovery after each one.  So a perfect example of a VO2max protocol would be five four minute efforts with four minutes recovery between each one.  So what does that come out to?  That's like a 40 minute workout right there, like a 40 minute VO2max workout.  And you only need to do that about once a week.  So a lot of people overdo these kind of things.  So like the muscle endurance, like the Tabata sets would be a couple times a week, the mitochondrial sprints would be a couple of times a week, the fasted fat burning session a couple of times a week.

But then a VO2max workout, you only need to do this once a week to build or to maintain your VO2max.  You could do a little bit more frequently now, but it's not necessary.  And as a matter of fact, in the study that they've shown, that it really shows that this can help, it was once every two weeks that they were doing this in soccer players to maintain VO2max.  If you want to build VO2max, I'd recommend you do it closer to every week, but you can get away with this even once every two weeks if you just want to maintain.  But again, it's four to six minute efforts, about a 1:1 work to rest ratio, and these efforts are done at an intensity to where you're not like completely looking like Bambi on ice by the end of the effort and just flailing…

Rachel:  All over the place.

Ben:  Yeah, exactly.  So you don't want your biomechanics to suffer, but it's hard enough to where you're pushing pretty hard and it's taking a lot of focus for those full four to six minute efforts.  And you do anywhere in the range of four to five of those, and that's it.

Rachel:  And so are these all included in your “How to Look Good Naked” plan?

Ben:  Mhmm.  Yeah.  I even outlined, they're all for free in that article I wrote.  If you want to go read the article, I'll link to it in the show notes over a bengreenfieldfitness.com/364.  I don't recommend you ride your bicycle naked, unless you have one of those cool seats with a little like hole in the bottom for your (censored), which they actually make.

Rachel:  I'd do it.

Ben:  Yeah.  They make like those split nose seats, and they work.

Rachel:  I'm not surprised.  There's the Naked Bike Ride that happens in Poland…

Ben:  I own one.

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  I swear by it.  Like those that's on all my bikes now.  I forget, I think it's Adamo.  They make the Adamo ISM seat, but it was designed like reduce prostate inflammation and reduce the propensity for men to have erectile dysfunction after long bike rides.

Rachel:  Yeah.  I did always wonder.

Ben:  Yeah.  But we digress.  We don't have to have every single topic get into (censored).

Rachel:  I don't know how it's happening.

Ben:  It just seems that we're straying that way on this episode.

Rachel:  There you go, Mark.  That's how you build your VO2max.

Ben:  Alright.  There you go, Mark.

Burt:  Dude, this is killing me.  I just got your weekly roundup and it's awesome, but I barely scroll down, and this is the million Dollar, 10 million Dollar question.  How do you get so much work done?  Like so many projects?  I just see interviews that you've done, which is fine.  You're sort of on other people's time, in a way.  You still got to prep for 'em.  And then you've done your own podcast, and then you've got articles, like a few article, and you're working on a chapter in your new book, and all that sort of jazz, and traveling.  How do you do it?  That's my 10 million Dollar question.  I'd love to know.  What are your secrets?  And I've read and I've followed your stuff before.  I've hired you as well.  But this is just mind boggling.  It's awesome.  I just want to be able to make my life.  Thank you very much!  And I love all your stuff.  And I refer to it all the time, and I send people it all the time.  Yeah!  That's all.  Thank you!

Ben:  It's because I take care of my body.

Rachel:  You do.

Ben:  It's also, actually, you know what my key to productivity is?  Is I'm a complete idiot when it comes to anything related to Hollywood.  I go to the movie theater about once a year and I watch TV about once a month.  So that's like one of my keys to productivity.

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  ‘Cause I just really don't know what's going on in Hollywood.

Rachel:  But you do read books.  You read a lot of books.

Ben:  I read a ton of books.  So I saw that Burt asked this question, and so I jotted down some notes about how yesterday went for me.  I guess this would have been Monday, we're recording this on a Wednesday, but here's like a typical Monday for me.  Because for me, it's all about habits.  It's all about routines.  So I set up every single day, and I have a habit, or a system, for that specific day, and it becomes automatic after a while.  Once you have a routine, once you have a habit, it becomes automatic.  And when that habit becomes automatic, then you get to the point where you can get a ton done in terms of, Mark asked about like interviews, and podcasts, and writing, and I'm doing music, et cetera.  So I'm going to walk you through what a typical day looks like for me.  Okay?  You ready?

Rachel:  I am so ready.

Ben:  Okay.  Here we go.  So, Monday.  I wake up at about 6 AM.  I roll over, and I put on that heart rate variability monitor I was talking about, and I test my heart rate variability while I'm laying in bed.  I also, on this little Oura ring that I wear that lets me know like my I sleep cycles and stuff like that, I also take a glance at my Oura sleep cycles.  So it's those are like the two little nerdy self-quantification things I do each morning.  But as both of those are downloading to my phone, I do my devotional and I do my gratitude journaling.  So I'm getting all of that done before I get out of bed in the morning.  I don't leap out of bed and check e-mail, or Facebook, or Twitter, or anything like that because that can suck you into like a 15 or 20 minute rabbit hole.

Rachel:  Yes.  For sure.

Ben:  I only check e-mail two to three times per day.  So I always batch e-mail, and all push notifications are turned off.  So Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of that, zero push notifications.  And, furthermore, if I am going to go check e-mail, I have one folder on the very top of my GMail inbox that is exclamation mark.  So that kind of lets you hack your e-mail inbox on the folder and ensure that anybody who sends you an important e-mail, you filter it so they go into the exclamation mark email inbox, so you don't have to filter through all the other unimportant e-mails to see the e-mails from important people.  Like you, Rachel.

Rachel:  I was going to ask, but I thought I'm going to keep my mouth shut.  I better be in that damn inbox.

Ben:  You're in the exclamation mark folder.  My wife isn't even in the exclamation mark folder.

Rachel:  Well, that's 'cause you work from home and she's home all day as well.

Ben:  Yeah.  Plus she never sends me important e-mails.  It's always like clean the garage.  That's not important.  I don't need to see that.  Anyways though, so I get all that done in bed, and the phone stays off aside from the Bluetooth function getting turned on to do the check.  So I don't take the phone off of airplane mode, 'cause then it's going to blow up, and there's going to be text messages, and e-mails, and all this other jazz.  I want do want any of that.  So I just put the Bluetooth on, do all the checking, and then I get out of bed and I head downstairs.  And the very first thing I do right now, this is not something I used to when I was younger, but I find that it helps now, is I have a foam roller sitting right there at the bottom of the stairs.

I take out the foam roller and I do a quick foam rolling session just on, I mean we're talking about like three to four minutes.  And for me, it's on any parts that I need to hit that are just feeling stiff that day from the previous day's work out.  And it's just like my little habit, right?  And honestly helps me kind of keep my body put together.  Because if you do the math, that comes out to like over 40 minutes of foam rolling each week that I'm getting in if I'm getting those little bits done each day.  I'm always about the little things add up.  And then these days, the thing I do right after I foam roll, 'cause my fascia's all kind of like worked out of that, is I've been hanging upside down for about five minutes from the yoga swing.  That's also hanging right there at the bottom of the stairs.

So it's habits, it's system.  The foam roller is right there in front of me, the yoga swing is right there in front of me.  I can't walk past it in the morning without doing it, so I just do it all.  And then I wander into the kitchen and I take my morning supplements.  So any supplements that need to be taken on an empty stomach.  Let's say I'm going to take a Qualia smart drug that day, I'd take Step 1 'cause that supposed to be on an empty stomach.  Another thing that I'll take on an empty stomach would be like the lemon juice and water for a little bit of alkalinity.  But it's always a big glass of water and whatever morning supplements I have.

The other thing I'm doing right now is I'm going through that whole like detox plan that we talked about several times on this podcast, that's over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/detoxplan, ironically enough, if you want to like dig into that one.  But that includes like this little packet of pills I take each morning.  It's like methylation support, and blah, blah, blah.  It's stuff that Dr. Dan Pompa has put me on for three months.  So I do that.  And then I put the coffee on.  So as the coffee, and for me right now, it's just a French press.  So that means I turn the boiling water on, and as the water is boiling, I do my stretching.  So I have this special series of stretches, usually for me it's either the gymnastics stretching that my new gymnastics coach is giving me, or it's these exercises from the Core Foundation book by Dr. Eric Goodman.  So again, that's just 5 to 10 minutes of stretching.  But it's just these little things.  ‘Cause again, that adds up to what?  Like over 60 minutes of stretching per week by me doing like that 5 to 10 minutes of stretching each morning while the coffee is on.

And then once the coffee is done, I grab it.  Usually I dump a few mushrooms in there.  Not of the variety that we were doing this weekend, but Four Sigmatic sends me stuff like chaga, and Reishi, and turkey tail, and I like to put some mushrooms in my coffee.  They're really good for the immune system, really good for cancer fighting properties, and all sorts of cool things mushrooms can do for you.  So I dump those into my coffee, usually about a teaspoon or so mushrooms, and then I sit down on my computer and I put, and this is where a good little biohacky, I put light in my ears and light my eyes, so I put the HumanCharger on my eyes, or in my ears, and I put the Re-Timer glasses on my eyes, and I just blast myself with copious amounts of light, which is a really, really good circadian rhythm jump starter, while I do my one big hairy audacious task for the day.  ‘Cause on Monday, that meant I had five e-mails that I really had to respond, sometimes it's an article I'm working on, sometimes it is my fiction book that I'm working on if there's a chapter that's just like hanging over my head.  The way I approach it is like if I were to go to bed right now and it were the end of the day, what's the one thing I'd smile about having accomplished that day?  And that's the one thing that I do as soon as I, so again, I'm not opening Facebook, Twitter, or anything like that.  I'm doing that one big, hairy, audacious task.  And that as I'm sipping my coffee.

So usually I'm sipping my coffee for like 20 to 30 minutes working on that one big, hairy, audacious task.  So once I finish that task, and again like on Monday, it was just five e-mails that were in that folder.  I had expected them to be coming, it has to do with this rebranding I'm doing right now for our business, but I just got those out of the way 'cause I knew that my responses to those weren't going to be as good the rest of the day once all the other bullets started flying at me than in the morning.  So I do that.  Okay.  Then I go downstairs, I turn on the sauna, and then I go upstairs, and I go to the bathroom.  So while I'm going to the bathroom, the sauna's heating up.  And after I go to the bathroom, I go downstairs to the sauna, and this is almost every morning when I'm at home, 30 minutes in a sauna, and that's just with all my stretching, my yoga, my deep breathing, 'cause I find that when I do that, I'm destressed the rest of the day.  It sets almost like a standard for the rest of the day.

And then I go do my cold pool plunge, and what I've been doing now in the sauna is dry skin brushing, which is really good for the lymph system, really good for like self-love, and body care.  So I do my dry skin brushing and feel fantastic when I do that.  My skin feels fantastic too.  Then my cold plunge, and then I go back into the house.  Now by then, it's about 8, 8:30.  So the first two hours in the morning, I've gotten all my body care done, and I've got my one big, hairy, audacious goal completely out of the way, and I've got my devotions and my gratitude journaling, and all of the things that help me be me, they're done by like 8:30 or so.  And then, what I've been doing when I go back in the house is I've been using my vibrator.  Yeah, my vibrator.  It's a…

Rachel:  I'm guessing it's a foam rolling vibrator?  No?

Ben:  No.  It's called a MyoBuddy, and I've been basically using that, don't laugh, it's this new thing I'm experimenting with, but I use it on my jaw, I use it all over the top of my head.  And again, these are little things, which takes like 60 seconds, and it brings a bunch of blood flow to my brain, kind of similar to when I'm hanging upside down, but I do that all over my body.  It's kind of like that dry skin brushing, but it's like that on steroids.  And then I turn around after I've done that, and I make my smoothie.  My big morning smoothie, these days it's a little bit of the Pau d'Arco anti-aging bark tea, and a whole bunch of ice, and usual like five or six different good fresh vegetables from the refrigerator, and some nuts, and a little bit of dark chocolate powder, and a little bit of protein powder, and that's just all blended up, and I blend it really thick.  And along with that, I take any supplements that are best absorbed with food right, like my fish oil, and my creatine, and my multi-vitamin, and then I start work while I'm eating that smoothie, 'cause I like to eat the smooth like with a spoon, and it takes me like a half hour to get through my whole smoothie.  So from like 8:30-ish until 9:30-ish, kind of making breakfast, eating my smoothie.

And then once I've finished up that smoothie around like 9:30 or so, I go downstairs into my office.  And from 9:30 to 1:30, all push notifications turned off, nothing distracted me, I work like an animal for four hours.  I mean like an animal, like nothing, I'm like a horse with blinders.  I'm locked away in my office, nothing bugs me.  There are no social breaks, there is no chatting on the phone, there's just nothing.  Every single goal that needs to be done for that day I'm getting done for the next four hours.  I do take mini-breaks.  So about every 30 to 50 minutes, I will stop and I'll do some stretching, or I'll do some jumping jacks, or I'll do some pull-ups.  Here in my office, I've got kettlebells, I've got monkey bars to hang from, I've got a heavy bag to punch.  So I'll do little things here and there.  I even have a little manual treadmill.  So in many cases, I've got my, it's a Jabra 930 headset, and then I use this piece of software called Dragon Dictation, and so a lot of times, I can be walking on the treadmill, dictating e-mails, dictating articles, dictating whatever I'm working on for that day.  And that's typically what [1:03:58] ______, I'll walk on the treadmill dictating, or else I'm podcasting, or doing interviews, or doing consults with my clients, or going over blood and biomarkers of people, whatever.  But that's from 9:30 to 1:30.  And again, full on, no distractions.  I don't go out and have lunch with people, I don't do coffee with people, none of that.  It's just hardcore.  So those four hours are hyper productivity.

And then I emerge from the office, bedraggled and the just like completely, honestly, I'm spent.  Like I've been working my ass off.  It's like after I finished a workout, right?  So I come up and I'm finally ready for lunch, and lunch is almost the same thing every day 'cause I'm not a big fan of decision making fatigue.  I grab some miracle noodles, which are almost like my version of pasta, and I fry those up in the cast iron skillet with a whole bunch of vegetables, and usually like some eggs or sardines, some kind of good protein, some fats like some nuts thrown on top.  And then while I'm eating lunch, I go through the things that I've been ignoring the rest of the day that kind of sort of are work, but kind of sort of aren't, Facebook, Twitter, stuff like that right.

So during lunch, again, I'm getting things done, but it's those little things that I just, I've been ignoring the rest of the morning.  After lunch every day, I go upstairs, I've trained my body to just pass out and fall asleep for 20 to 40 minutes.  So I lay out BioMat, I fall asleep.  When I used to work in an office, I'd do the same thing, but I had this little spot underneath my desk, and a sleeping bag, eye mask, and earplugs, and I just curl up under my desk, and fall asleep.  20 to 40 minutes.  That's it.  I just trained my body to do it.  So by that time, considering that it takes me about an hour or so to have lunch, to take care of everything I'm taking care of during lunch, and then get the nap in, I've got about an hour when I wake up from that nap to play catch up.  I have identified that the afternoons are not my most productive time.  That's not when I'm most creative, but I am able to take all those random tasks.  So usually the afternoon is when I dive into e-mail for about an hour and just do a huge batch of e-mail, and I realize that I've got about an hour in there to catch up on all the e-mails and everything before my kids arrive home from school.

And then when my kids get home from school, and this is at about 3:50 PM, I have a good hour or so to just be with them.  Legos, talking about their day, reading the books they got from the library, just quality time with the kids.  Sometimes I'm leading them through a workout, sometimes we're shooting the bow, sometimes we're walking outside.  And then eventually, my kids leave, 'cause they always have some type of afternoon activity.  Sometimes it's tennis, sometimes it's jiu-jitsu, sometimes it's piano, whatever.  So they leave, and so I have, from about 4 to 6 PM, when they're gone, 4:30 to 6 PM, around there, anyways, that's my time to do my workout.

So in the late afternoon, early evening, I do my workout, and then I come in from my workout, and usually I've got a little bit of time before they get home from whatever it is they're doing, their after school activities.  And so it's during that time, before dinner, when I'll do like ukulele, when I'll do guitar, when I'll sip that wine I was talking about, and just kind of get some little like relaxing things done right before dinner.

And then we always have dinner as a family, usually we eat sometime around like 8 PM or so as a family.  And again, I don't take a lot of snack breaks nothing like that.  So I got my lunch at 1:30,  I've got my dinner around 8, I've got my breakfast around like 9:30, and dinner is always like salad plus some kind of meat that Jessa makes like roasted chicken, also some sourdough bread, sweet potatoes, stuff like that, and we always play a game during dinner as a family.  So it's like Table Topics game, or Cash Flow for kids, which is a great game to teach them about money, or we'll do Pictionary, or we'll do like some kind of like Dungeons and Dragons kind of card game, but we always play a game together as a family during dinner 'cause it's just like a fun, we gather around dinner, we take a long time to eat dinner.  So we're usually at the dinner table 'til almost 9, like playing games and eating together.

Rachel:  How many hours is that if you're there 'til…

Ben:  What's that?

Rachel:  How many hours is that if you're there 'til 9?

Ben:  We usually start dinner about 8.

Rachel:  Okay.  So that's an hour.

Ben:  Yeah.  And that'll include like all the little things that we're doing, talking about the day, stuff like that.  And then the kids literally just brush their teeth, take their vitamins, and go to bed right after that.  We go up in bed, I usually will play them whatever song I had been working on the guitar that day, we do like our gratitude, we go around the room, everybody says what they're grateful for, we pray.  And then by that time, it really is about, by the 9, 9:15, they're just like lights out.  So we finish dinner, they're in bed, I then spend about a half hour getting any last things done for the day, dive into the e-mail inbox one more time, make sure there's no little fires I have to put out, even though I now have e-mails that go out to every member of my team telling them not to e-mail me important things after 9 PM.  So I know that when I dive into my e-mail inbox at 9 PM, like there's not going to be like some huge fire I have to put out.  And then that's about 9:15, 9:30, and then I head upstairs and I read for 30 to 45 minutes, and fall asleep.  And that's it.

Rachel:  All right.  I have a bunch of questions, Ben.  Three variables and then three principles that I picked up from that.  So the three variables are travel, sleep, and family.  Does travel ruin this routine?  How important is sleep for this?  And how do you deal with things coming up with the family that are unplanned?

Ben:  So travel, I have my, very similar routine: get up, stretch, coffee.  Like everything is almost the same when I travel, except of course there are little modifications when you're traveling.  Like often, instead of a smoothie, I'm mixing some meal replacement powder up in a cup.  But same thing, it's the same sequence of events, wake up, HRV, devotions, journaling, stretching while the coffee in the hotel room is on.  So I try and maintain that same semblance when I'm traveling.  Same thing when I go to bed, reading, et cetera.

Rachel:  So are you packing just tons of stuff to take with you as well?  So you're always pre-planning your travel very thoroughly.

Ben:  Yes.  But I only travel with a small backpack, the ukulele attached to the backpack, and my book bag, which easily holds a Kindle, my computer, and a few of the little random biohacking things, like the heart rate monitor, the glasses, and the Re-Timer. So I travel very light.

Rachel:  Okay.  I feel like we could do a whole another podcast on that.  So then, sleep.  How important is sleep for this?  What happens if you get a bad night's sleep, all that sort of stuff?

Ben:  If I get a bad night's sleep, sometimes the nap gets elongated.  So I always wake up at the same time, it's just a slightly longer nap if I have a bad night of sleep.

Rachel:  Okay.  And then family, what happens if things come up that are kind out of this routine?

Ben:  Like what?

Rachel:  Like if the kids get sick and they say home, if Jessa can't take 'em the afternoon like activity that they do?

Ben:  Typically when a kid gets sick, they're just at home hanging out with me when I'm doing what I'd be doing anyways.  And when I need to take them somewhere, usually that something will fall out of the routine.  It means that some e-mails will get shoved to the back burner and taken care of the next day, or often I will substitute, let's say a longer workout, let's say I had an hour long workout planned, it turns into like two back-to-back Tabata sets.  So all of a sudden, I've got 50 minutes freed up.  So those are the type of things that will often get sacrificed if there's things that need to get done with the family.

Rachel:  Interesting.  And then, so a couple little principles that really stood out to me.  One was this concept of little things adding up every day, and I wondered how that applies I mean physically and mentally.  I feel like to go from writing a 15 minute session on your fiction book, to like doing a workout, to doing like the next mental task, that constant chopping and changing of things has always felt really under productive to me.  But for you, it sounds like it's really productive.

Ben:  You only do one thing at a time.  Ever.  It's task switching that recruits way more, drains more mental willpower, and also decreases the effectiveness and the quality of a task.  However, task switching is different than multitasking.  So I can switch from writing a fiction book, to doing a workout, to heading up stairs and making lunch, for example, and I can do a high quality job at all of those.  Whereas if I try to do all three at once, write, make lunch while I'm talking on the phone, while I'm glancing at e-mails, that's where you start to run into issues.

Rachel:  Interesting.

Ben:  Now if I could throw in a few…

Rachel:  I'm so fascinated by this.

Ben:  Few last things.  First of all, I've written articles that detail, in great detail, my morning routine, my afternoon routine, and my evening routine, and I will link to all of those in the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/364.  I also just finished a little e-book which is the most updated version of my entire routine, and that is called “Daily Routines: A Practical Handbook To Optimize Your Body, Mind And Spirit“. It is seven bucks.  It's a little e-book, and I will put a link to that in the show notes as well, in case you just want to have that on your Kindle, or your phone, or whatever, and you want to optimize your body, mind, or spirit.  So check that out.  Oh, and then finally, and Rachel knows this, I often will log my entire day on Snapchat.  Literally.  My phones just out logging every little thing I do.  And so that's over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/Snapchat if you just want to see a lot of this stuff live as it happens, if you're just a complete stalker like that.  So there you have it.

Tyson:  Hi, Ben and Rachel.  My name is Tyson Brown and I am 21 years old from Sydney, Australia.  I'm currently a personal trainer and I love health and fitness.  And my question for you guys is how can I live to 120 years old.  You probably don't hear this from a lot of 21 year olds, but I know that I want to live past a hundred year old mark, and I want to do everything possible in order to do that.  So is there anything you would recommend doing earlier in life that you wish you might have done to help you improve your longevity?  I love the podcast, I love all the knowledge you share, I love sharing it with my clients.  And hopefully you guys can put this question on the air.  Thanks a lot, and I look forward to your answer.

Ben:  This is really interesting, stuff that he wonders, if I wish I would have done early in life, to improve my longevity.  So first of all, let me start here.  I've got a couple of really good anti-aging podcasts and articles.  Like for example, there's one called “11 Ways To Age Like A Bad-Ass”, and in this one I interviewed this guy named Mike Greer.  And I first met Mike when I did a live event in Spokane, Washington, and we're doing morning workouts.  It was called the “Become Superhuman Live Event”, and I had people come in from all over the globe to speak, like that Ray Cronise guys I was talking about earlier, I'm trying to remember who else was there.  I think Jack Cruse was speaking, and Dave Asprey.  It's kind of cool.  I think my cortisol levels went through the roof running a live event.  I realized I'd rather go speak at events rather than actually put them on, at least for now.

But anyways, this guy wandered into one of the morning workouts that we were doing and just proceeded to destroy a handful of like fit young guys and girls who were doing like burpees, and lunges, and push-ups, and Turkish get-ups.  He had like his Ironman shirt on, and he was tanned, and looked great.  So I figured he was like some 50-year old triathlete, workout enthusiast.  And then I found out that he was 75 years old, and he's a great grandparent, retired lieutenant colonel, a former football player, a seven time Ironman triathlete.  This guys is just doing everything.  He's the president and CEO of the Obstacle Racing Association, he's in the Texas Triathlon Hall of Fame.

And so I interviewed him on a podcast.  So first of all, go listen to that podcast 'cause he talks about everything from how he really prioritizes like living an active sex life is like way high up on his list.  He is totally opposed to this idea that stress shortens your life.  He actually purposefully stresses himself, kind of related to what we're talking to earlier about being a super-ager, because he realizes that all those hormetic stressors like keep you on the edge, and actually make you live longer.  And so you definitely should go check out the interview that I did with him, which I link to in the show notes.

I also have this article called “Anti-Aging Secrets From Five Of The Fittest Old People That I Know”.  And in that article, I go into a few concepts.  First of all, how one of the most important activities to decrease the rate at which telomeres shorten, which you can measure, by the way, I actually have an interview, a podcast interview coming up soon with the folks from TeloYears, where we talk about how you can now measure your telomere length and kind of track whether what you're doing is actually working from an anti-aging protocol.  But I go into how heavy strength training is really consistently the one single form of exercise that has been shown to be the most effective form of exercise when it comes to anti-aging.  And I don't need to kick that horse to death, 'cause I've talked it about a lot before.  If you're not already lifting heavy stuff, you need to be.

Rachel:  Literally why I started going to Crossfit.

Ben:  Right.  Exactly.  But I interview Charles, or I talk about Charles Eugster on there, who is Britain's top sprinter.  And for him, he just basically scoffs at anything low fat or fat free.  So he eats a ton of like really fatty yogurts, and cheeses, and eggs, and stuff like that.  Laird Hamilton's was to learn new stuff, and that dude's always learning new things, always challenging his prefrontal cortex.  And I even get into how you need to challenge your temporal lobes, your parietal lobes, and your cerebellum based on lessons learned from this brain expert named Dr. Daniel Amen.

So check that part out.  I talk about Mark Sisson and his concept of lifting, moving, and sprinting at least some point every day.  I go into Don Wildman and how once a week, he'll do what he calls “the hardest workout in the world”, which I've done in Malibu in his basement, and it actually is a really hard workout.  But if a 75 year old can do it, you can probably handle it.  So check that out.  And then finally, one of the Fit old women.  Olga Kotelko, one of her tips is that she gives herself, almost every day, this full body foam roller style massage, which actually is, speaking of my daily routines, one of the reasons that I hit my fascia everyday.  ‘Cause the fascia's is still linked to your neurotransmitter production, and endorphin release.  It's sounds kind of stupid, but it does add up.  So go read that article I totally didn't do it justice.  Just now I skimmed over it in like two minutes, but probably one of the best articles, if I don't say so myself, that I've written on anti-aging.  So check that one out.  And now a few the things that I wish I'd been doing for a longer period of time that I do now, or that I wish I had done when I was younger.

Rachel:  Now it gets juicy.

Ben:  Okay.  So, now it gets juicy.  The first one is something I now drink every day.  I take Pau d'Arco tree bark, which you can get off of Amazon, and I'll put my recipe link in the show notes.  It contains beta-lapachones, which, and I have spoken with the person who introduced me to this tea, Dr. Mercola, and he's explained to me how important it is for the mitochondria.  It contains precursors to NAD, which is kind of like the darling new molecule of the anti-aging supplement industry.  It stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide.  Normally pretty expensive to get this in injections or supplement form, but you can get it for pennies on the Dollar by getting bark tea, and what I do is I blend the bark tea with a fat, and I usually use a sunflower lecithin, which contains a lot of what's called phosphatidylcholine, which makes phospholipids, which basically allows for you to absorb these beta-lapachones much better, and then I add organic turmeric powder to it.  And I simply blend it, and that is the base for my smoothies each day.  So I drink that stuff every day, Pau d'Arco bark tea.  That is number one.  I feel amazing when I do it, you can feel it seeping into your veins, and I wish I'd been doing that for the past decade.

Number two, is over the past year and a half, I have begun a practice of both transcendental meditation and kundalini yoga.  And both of these have been shown to increase cerebral blood flow, both of them decrease salivary cortisol, both of them work on many of the same levels that a lot of these other anti-aging practices work on in terms of decreasing the rate at which telomeres shorten.  So transcendental meditation, do I do it for twice a day for 20 minutes like my instructor told me to?

Rachel:  Probably not.

Ben:  I do not.  I do it about three times a week for 10 to 20 minutes.  Kundalini yoga, I do some variation of that almost every day when I'm doing that sauna that I talked about, or when I'm traveling, and I'm in the airport, and I need to do a body weight workout.  Kundalini yoga and TM should be weapons in your tool box for anti-aging, and you should learn both if you're serious about anti-aging.  So that would be number two would be transcendental meditation and kundalini.  I know that's almost two things, it's cheating, but that's it.  Gratitude journaling.  Gratefulness has been shown over and over again to result in biological and physiological responses that result in a longevity enhancing effect.  I don't need to go deep into the science, we don't have time to go deep into the science on this podcast episode, but a.) if you're not already gratitude journaling, you need to be, and then b.) my exact protocol does not involve lots of daily affirmations, lots of “I'm so great, so wonderful.  Me, me, me.  I, I, I.  I'm good, I'm great, I'm wonderful.  And gosh darn it, people like me.”  I don't do that.  So my daily journaling is this: I ask myself three questions, I then respond to these three questions.  A.) what truth that I discover in this morning's reading, because every morning I read a devotional, and I find that if I know I'm going to need to answer a question afterwards about what I read, I'm less likely to sit there picking the eye crust out of my eyes kind of skimming over it, and not paying attention, and much more likely to actually absorb what I've read.

Rachel:  Very smart.

Ben:  B.) The next question is what am I grateful for today.  That's a pretty straightforward one, but crucial.  And then c.), and this is really crucial I think, who can I pray for, help, or serve this day.  So every day, there is one person, this morning, it was my dad.  So what did I do during breakfast this morning?  I didn't like go mow my dad's lawn.  That doesn't mean you have to do that, but I texted my dad.  I said, “Dad, I love you.  I hope you're having an amazing day.  Let me know if I can help you with anything today.”  That's it.

Rachel:  That's awesome.  Very cool.

Ben:  Boom.  And you can pick a new person everyday, it could be the same person for a week in a row if you really want to bug 'em.  But gratitude journaling, and I will put a link in the show notes, I'm actually designing a journal that uses my exact journaling system 'cause I mean anytime I do something myself everyday, I figure there's a need for it.  So I put a link in the show notes where you can go, we're going to launch the journal on Kickstarter and in a couple of months.  But if you're interested in that, that's the third thing.  So we got the Pau d'Arco bark tea, transcendental meditation/kundalini, gratitude journaling.  

The next would be genetic testing.  I wish I had done that sooner rather than later.  So I did a 23andMe genetic test, and let me just give you three examples of things that I've changed in my life that are going to help me live longer based on that test.  A.) I've found out I have a higher than normal risk for type II diabetes.  So I switched to a lower carbohydrate intake, I switched to saving the majority of my carbohydrates until the end of the day, when I'm in a more insulin sensitive post-workout state, and I also consume lots of supplements that help with insulin sensitivity and blood sugar control.  The top three being bitter melon extract, Ceylon cinnamon, and apple cider vinegar.  And I would not have gone out of my way to do that unless I knew that I had this really much higher than normal risk for type two diabetes.

I also found of that I have a higher than normal risk for prostate cancer, and so now not a day goes by when I don't go out of my way to eat a fresh handful of cherry tomatoes, or a fresh tomato, or some other source of lycopene.  And I tend to try and cook it if I can because that concentrates the lycopene even more.  So, again, I wouldn't have done that had I not gotten a genetic test and found out that that's something that's going to help me live longer.  And then the final is that I, through DNAFit, which is the company that I exported my 23andMe results to, I discovered that I have a lower than normal production of glutathione and super oxide dismutase, two of the most potent antioxidants that you need in your body for optimal health.  So now I use glutathione, or glutathione precursors like sulforaphane, or broccoli sprouts.  Now what I do is I hack it once a week, I do an actual glutathione injection into my right butt cheek, and that's, by the way, speaking of the Health Gains company, I started doing that based on the recommendations of Dr. Gaines down at the Gaineswave clinic.  And so he wrote me a prescription for injectable glutathione.  So I just inject it once a week, but again, not something I would have done had I not known that my own production of it was really low.  So that's another thing, is glutathione.  So those are three examples of things that I wouldn't have done had I not known about these genetic predispositions.  So that's number four.

Rachel:  Four.  Very important.

Ben:  Now number five is, in terms of…

Rachel:  I like this one.

Ben:  In terms of partying.  So I used to think that the only way to have a good time was to drink alcohol, and alcohol, from an inflammatory, from an oxidative, and from a hormonal standpoint is one of the best ways to age yourself very quickly.  Your husband actually asked me this because he was hung over when…

Rachel:  Yeah.  He does not do hangovers well.

Ben:  Yeah.  So we were at the Jackson Hole airport, we rode to the airport together, and he's like, “Ben, when was the last time you were hung over?”  And I couldn't remember because it has been an extremely long time since I've ever had more than two drinks of alcohol.  The only way I spin the dials in my brain are using plant-based medicines.  So for me it's either psilocybin or marijuana that I use.  Far less damaging from an oxidative standpoint.  And frankly, if I need to fall asleep at night, or I need to relax, I just use CBD.  Cannabidiol not only relaxes you, and targets your endocannabinoid system, and has a lot of the same effects that people go after when they're taking alcohol, anti-depressive, anti-anxiolytic, sleep enhancing, et cetera, with none of the side effects.  As a matter of fact, what I want to play for you right now, there's a really good YouTube clip, I'll link to this YouTube clip in the show notes, but  we'll play it for you right here.  And this just goes into all the anti-aging, neuroprotective, anti-inflammation, cellular energy enhancing properties of using something like CBD, which by the way, is still legal everywhere in the world as long as you get it from hemp not from marijuana, and something that I take every day rather than alcohol now.

YouTube Clip:  Well, I think when you look at what are the pieces that will make me as healthy as I can be.  So to me, adding CBD is really a beneficial piece.  I mean vitamins and minerals, we all sort of know, yes we do that, a lot has to do with what we eat, and when we eat, and are we getting good probiotics.  I mean there's a lot of pieces to this.  But I think CBD, because it potentially prevents so many problems, that adding that in a very small amount, you don't need a lot, four, five, six milligrams a day can be enough as a preventative to really help.  So you can get topical products with this, creams, lotions, there's shampoos, conditioners.  There's all kinds of applications that, since you absorb it transdermally, you're going to get small amounts through that, and we don't really get much of that in our normal diet.  So when you look at, okay, it's neuroprotective, it's anti-inflammatory, it modulates your immune system, it protects your gut, it protects your heart muscles, it increases cell energy, it helps you recover after exercise.  So for athletes, it can be a big deal because it can increase your performance and your body's capability to perform.

Ben:  So that's the deal with CBD.  I would definitely be using.  And then I use the CBD capsules, I also use the CBD vape pen.  I'll go back and forth between both, but I do that instead of the salt-rimmed margarita.

Rachel:  Yeah.  CBD is such an all-rounded.  That's what I love about it.

Ben:  I swear by it.

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  Can I throw in a sixth just for the fun of it?

Rachel:  You can.  Go on.

Ben:  So I'm going to throw in a sixth, and then I'm also going to give you another bonus.  I'm going to link you to a great article that came out at the end of 2016 on the future of anti-aging because that goes into everything from like CRISPR and editing disease out of your DNA, to like a new brand of drinkable collagen, to the lab grown hearts and kidneys.  Like it goes way above and beyond what I'm talking about in this episode, but go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/364, and check that out.

Anyways though, the last thing that I want to talk about that I wish I had done but that I really can't do is banking my stem cells.  So here's why that is.  So the idea here is that stem cells are a type of cell that have the ability to differentiate into any other type of cell in the body.  So at the beginning of its life, a single cell has like this nucleus, and cytoplasm, and cell membrane, and then it can go on to replicate and create every other cell in your body.  And that single cell has your entire genetic code in it.  It can produce everything that defines every other specialized cell in your body.

So it can differentiate into skin cells, heart cells, muscle cells, kidney cells, you name it.  And you have these stem cells, they reside in your bone marrow, they're in your fat, they're in every single tissue compartment, and when you are young and you get damaged, let's say your kidney gets damaged, or your bone gets damaged, or muscle gets damaged, stem cells get mobilized the side of damage to repair.  And this capability slows dramatically as you age.  As you age, you simply, you lose much of the ability for your stem cells to be able to do that.  Now the idea here is that when you are born, you're at a point near biological perfection.  Meaning, if you're born and you're able to somehow gather up and capture all those stem cells when you're born with all their original uncorrupted DNA, and then have those around for potential use in the future, that's a really, really smart anti-aging protocol.

Rachel:  Very interesting.

Ben:  And we now live in an era where you can bank your kid's stem cells, you can bank a baby's stem cells.  And there are a variety of companies that will do this now, but I wish I had done this with my kids.  I'm going to bank their teeth stem cells.  I'm very interested still in banking my own stem cells, but, and comment in the show notes by the way if you have any ideas for me as far as a company that can do this, 'cause I've approached the Human Longevity Institute, but I haven't heard back from them.  But there's a whole bunch of companies that, if your children or your grandchildren are relatively young and you want to a bank their stem cells, this works more for when they're born, there are a number of different companies that do this, one of them is called Life Bank USA, it's about two to five grand to actually get the stem cells.  But I actually really wish that when I was much much younger, I'd have banked my stem cells, and I still want to bank my stem cells, I just, I haven't yet found a good source to do it, so I'm still looking.

And again, like if you're ahead of the curve of me on this and you have you have a resource for me, or anybody else listening in, to bank your stem cells, then let us know on the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/364.  But if you are planning on having a child soon, or you have a relatively young child, check out Life Bank USA, and they can actually bank, your children or your grandchildren's stem cells, and I'll definitely make sure, I'll pay for my grandchildren to have it done when River and Terran have their kids, and I'll probably bank River and Terran's teeth, or bone marrow stem cells, pretty soon because we've been talking about it recently during our dinner talks.  But that's the last thing is stem cell banking.  So I'll put links to that in the show notes as well if that's something that you're interested in doing.  So those are the biggies, those are the biggies when it comes to anti-aging.

Rachel:  Tyson, you're the most forward-thinking 21 year old I've ever met, and you're an Aussie, so I like you.  But there you go.  That's how you can live to 120.

Ben:  With beautiful, baby-like skin.  So there you have it.

Rachel:  Alright!

Ben:  Well, shall we give something away before we end this show?

Rachel:  We definitely should give something away.  It's my favorite part.

Ben:  So if you want to win something, and you want to spread good karma and support this show, you can go and leave an iTunes review.  And you can do that over on of, all places, iTunes.  Just do a search for the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show, or we'll link to it in the show notes.  But if you hear your review read, then that means that you qualify to win a gear pack.  You didn't qualify, you won a gear pack.  And all you need to do is email your t-shirt size to [email protected], that's [email protected], and we will send you a cool beanie, BPA-free water bottle, and a killer tech t-shirt that you can take with you to the gym to show off your guns or whatever else you want to show off when you're at the gym.  So we get our review, it says “Education for life”, five star review by Droid kids.  Kind of a long review, but do you want to take this one away, Rachel?

Rachel:  Yes!

Ben:  Read in your most exciting Rockstar voice.

Rachel:  Aussie accent voice?  Alright.  “I considered myself a well-informed, educated, relatively healthy individual.  When I listened to a handful of these podcasts I realized I was a complete neophyte.  I have now been anointed.  I have conversations with licensed dietitians and personal trainers that have never heard of half of the current health trends that Ben is routinely covering and presenting to the listeners through a series of fascinating articles, guests, and best of all — personal experience.  Contrary to what many of the haters say, Ben isn't solely peddling products for personal gain on his show.  He has sponsors, some really good sponsors actually, and some that I care not to patronize.  You do not have to listen to the first 5 minutes of the show if you don't want to hear about items Ben uses to make a living and proliferate his cause of promoting functional, sustainable, and truly exceptional life choices.  Anybody that feels they are being sold to just by listening to his sponsors should never turn on a TV or walk into a store.  You can decide for yourself what to implement into your own routine to improve your future self.  Great show, nice guy, this will make you smarter and better.  Just listen.”

Ben:  I like how he's preaching about how you shouldn't skip the commercials.

Rachel:  (laughs) I like that he has our back.  Thanks, Ben!

Ben:  Actually, I like the guy.  I learn a ton from my own commercials, 'cause random people like, shocking your (censored), who would have known about that unless they decided to advertise on the show.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  So, yeah.  And watches that actually look good on me.  I'm just saying, like some of the stuff is actually pretty interesting, like even the commercials, if I don't say so myself.  Anyways though, that all being said, Rachel, thanks for coming on the show today and sharing all this stuff with me.

Rachel:  Ben, thanks for having me.

Ben:  And if you have questions, comments, feedback, et cetera, just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/364 where you can access the show notes for today's show, everything from Dr. Ho's Decompression Belt, to the “How To Look Good Naked” article, to my book on my daily routines, to banking your own stem cells, and much more.  Check it all out, bengreenfieldfitness.com/364.  Over and out.

 

February 1, 2017 Podcast: 364: Becoming A Super-Ager, The Internet Of Food, How To Get Lots Of Stuff Done Every Day & Much More!

NEW! Click here for the official BenGreenfieldFitness calendar of events.

Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the tab on the right (or go to SpeakPipe), use the Contact button on the app, click Ask a Podcast Question at the bottom of this page, or use the “Ask Ben” form at the bottom of this page.

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News Flashes:

You can receive these News Flashes (and more) every single day, if you follow Ben on Twitter.com/BenGreenfield, Instagram.com/BenGreenfieldFitness, Facebook.com/BGFitness, BenGreenfieldFitness.com/Snapchat and Google+.

• Dr. Ho’s Decompression Belt
• Excellent @outsideonline article on HRV and how to train with it more intelligently.
• Great article on the “internet of food” and DNA testing for diet.
• Probably one of the best articles of the year on calories, metabolism and fat loss VIA @raycronise
• Healing Alzheimer’s disease with light:  – (this is the device I use)
• How to become a super ager

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This podcast is brought to you by:

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NEW! Click here for the official BenGreenfieldFitness calendar.

–January 20th-22nd: Brain Optimization Summit. 31 doctors, scientists, biohackers and nootropics professionals reveal lifestyle habits and supplements that improve mental performance. Check it out by clicking here!

–March 3-5, 2017: Nutritional Therapy Association Conference in Vancouver, WA: Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA) offers Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and Consultant certifications that teach how to use nutrient dense foods as the key to restoring balance and enhancing the body’s ability to heal. I’ll be speaking at the conference! Tickets are on sale now. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/NTA to register and tell them I sent you if you want to get their VIP treatment.

Did you miss the weekend podcast episode with John Doulliard? It was a must-listen – “Eat Wheat: A Scientific and Clinically-Proven Approach to Safely Bringing Wheat and Dairy Back Into Your Diet.” Click here to listen now or download for later!

Grab this Official Ben Greenfield Fitness Gear package that comes with a tech shirt, a beanie and a water bottle.

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

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Listener Q&A:

As compiled, deciphered, edited and sometimes read by Rachel Browne, the Podcast Sidekick.

The Best Intervals To Build VO2Max

Mark says: He loves the show. He’s an age group competitive triathlete and 3.5 months ago he got in a bike crash where he broke his collar bone, 6 ribs and significantly collapsed his lung on one side. Now in the last month or two as he is getting back into training and competing a little bit, and he’s noticed a pretty dramatic change in his Vo2 max and speed, particularly on the run, probably 15%-20% and probably 5-10% in swimming and cycling. He’d love to know the best and quickest way to get his competitive edge back and get his Vo2 max and ventilatory capacity back up to what it was before.

In my response, I recommend:
–How To Look Good Naked article

How To Get Lots Of Stuff Done Every Day

Burt says: He just got to the weekly roundup and its awesome, but he’s barely scrolled down and he has a 10 million dollar question. How do you get so much work one? There’s so many projects – he sees interviews you’ve done, your own podcast, articles, working on a chapter in your new book, and traveling, how do you do it? He’d love to know, what are your secrets? He’s read and followed your stuff before, and he’s hired you as well, but he wants to be able to make it his life. Thank you very much and he loves all your stuff!

In my response, I recommend:
–My book: Daily Routines: A Practical Handbook To Optimize Your Body, Mind & Spirit
–My morning routine
–My afternoon routine
–My evening routine

Ben’s Top 5 Anti-Aging Tips

Tyson says: He’s 21 years old and from Sydney, Australia. He’s a Personal Trainer and loves health and fitness. His question is how can live to 120 years old? You probably don’t hear this from a lot of 21 years olds but he knows he wants to live past 100 and he wants to do everything possible in order to do that. So is there anything you recommend doing earlier in life that you wish you may have done to help you improve your longevity? He loves the podcast, the knowledge you share, and he shares it with all his clients. Thanks!

In my response, I recommend:
–Future of Anti-Aging article
–11 Ways To Age Like A Bad-Ass.
–The Latest Longevity Research & 5 Anti-Aging Secrets From Five Of The Fittest Old People On The Face Of The Planet.
–My Pau D’ Arco bark tea recipe
–TM & Kundalini
–Gratitude journaling
–23andMe and 23andYou (e.g. prostate cancer, diabetes, low endogenous glutathione production)
-Less alcohol, more CBD (YouTube video link CBD for anti-aging, neuroprotective, antinflammation, cell energy, etc.)
–Stem Cell banking