March 5, 2014
Podcast from: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/fitness-podcasts/endurance-biohacking-tips/
[00:00] Introduction
[01:49] About Ben Greenfield
[06:16] On Physical Endurance & Strength
[10:10] Biohacking For Fat Burning
[18:35] On Standing Workstations & Breathing Techniques
[29:50] On HRV Tracking
[32:46] On Electromagnetic Frequencies, Anti-inflammatories & Isometrics
[40:19] On Oxaloacetate & Self-quantification
[48:38] On Plasticity, Soft Tissue Work & Quick Coherence Techniques
[58:48] Ben's PrimalCon Q&A
[1:05:11] End of the Podcast
Ben: Hola, amigos. This is Ben Greenfield coming straight to you from Tulum, Mexico, here at PrimalCon which is just what it sounds like. A Primal Conference put on by Mark Sisson and friends, and I happen to be here with Brock Jason Skywalker Armstrong, my trusty sidekick.
Brock: Hola!
Ben: And today, we are bringing you a special podcast episode of a talk that I gave on the last night of PrimalCon. Now the title of this talk was “10 Ways to Biohack Endurance” but it delves into topics that go way above and beyond just endurance. I get into anti-aging tips, fat loss tips, really powerful breath control techniques, how to instantly drop your heart rate, how to stop electromagnetic damage to your body, the best blood and gut test to get. There's a lot of good stuff, jam-packed into this episode, and we've got the show notes for you over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/primal. So what do you think, Brock, you ready to rock this thing out?
Brock: Si, senor. Rapido, rapido!
Brad: Ben Greenfield, all the way from Spokane, Washington, soaking up Vitamin D this week.
Ben: Thank you, Brad. And by the way, I don't care if you guys sit or not. You could stand and do jumping jacks and do your thing. I'm going to talk to you guys about 10 ways to biohack endurance, and I'm excited about this talk because whenever I present, I don't talk about something I've talked about before. I try and keep things focused on things I haven't talked about in the past or kind of new things that are hot topics at the moment or that I'm excited about right now. In addition to aloe vera cream which I'm extremely excited about, at this point in my life.
The talk is called “10 Ways to Biohack Endurance” but really the concepts that you're about to learn are not necessarily designed to, for example, be only applicable to something like an Ironman triathlete or a marathoner or like our traditional endurance athlete. A lot of these, or really all of these techniques, are going to help you out with cognitive performance, with anti-aging and longevity, with fat burning, and so there's going to be something for everybody in this presentation. I'll save questions until the end, I'm just going to blast through some of my top biohacks, and then anything you guys want to throw out about what I've talked about or something I haven't talked about, go for it.
Now just a quick little bit about me, who I am, what I do. This is what I used to be into. I was big in the world of bodybuilding and did a lot of weightlifting, a lot of training, a lot of power and explosive sports, and I got out of that. I got out of posing in stage in my mom's underwear. Actually in that photo, it doesn't even look like I'm wearing anything, I just realized that. Wrong direction, I think I'm holding this thing backwards. And then I put on Spandex of a different variety and started doing triathlon, and over the past eight years, did 10 Ironman triathlons and competed in the Ironman World Championships five times. And really a lot of what I've learned over the past few years have been things that I've learned to try and do as little damage to my body as possible, to try and perform at the highest level possible, and do so in as natural way as I can.
So, I've almost used Ironman triathlon as kind of a testing ground for a lot of this stuff that I teach these days, and now I'm getting into a different form of racing. This was a couple of weeks ago down in California. I've really gotten into obstacle course racing, and if you like to enjoy the finer things in life like crawling under barbed wire and flipping tires and jumping over fire that actually looks a lot scarier than it actually is. That fire's like two inches off the ground, but it looks good which is why I used it as the photo. Anyways though if you haven't done one, you should really try one, but that's what I'm getting into now is kind of that hybrid combination of strength and power and speed and endurance, so I'm always trying new things out. I just finished, in a shameless act of self-promotion here, a book which is at beyondtrainingbook.com. It's kind of a really heavy paper weight. My publisher describes it as a weapon. It's about a five-hundred and forty page, hard cover manual. Kind of a cookbook to nutrition, lifestyle training, a lot of the hacks that you're going to learn about today and just basically kind of my guide to mastering endurance and health and life and achieving amazing feats of physical performance without doing a lot of damage to your body in the process.
Now, whenever I work with someone who wants to improve their stamina, improve their endurance, their ability to go for long periods of time, their ability to even do something like burn fat efficiently, the first thing that I explain is that the human body is actually very, very good innately at endurance, and running for long periods of time on a treadmill or riding a bike for a long time, and I was joking the other day by the way when I got up and said I was going to be living down the gym on a bike. I'm actually a big fan of minimalist training. So I train about eight to ten hours a week for Ironman. My Ironman time is anywhere from nine-and-a-half to ten hours, and I'm a big fan of a minimalist protocol. Now the reason for that is the human body is really designed to handle going for long periods of time, and it doesn't have to be trained very much to do so. We're bipedal compared to say like a dog or a cat or an animal that might travel on all fours, and that means that our ability to cool our bodies is enhanced. We also, based on the fact that we are upright, we're better able to dissipate heat based on our surface area at a body mass ratio that we present to the sun, but we also sweat and many other animals pant. We don't have hair, we're able to cool ourselves through wind passing over our bodies as our skin becomes moist, and that's a big advantage for being able to go for long periods of time. A lot of animals can't do that. Humans have a very large leg length-to-torso ratio, that's another thing that helps quite significantly with stride length and endurance. We have a high amount of slow twitch muscle fiber, and we also have a tendon type particularly in our Achilles tendon and our ankle that allows us to bounce pretty readily off the ground. You may have heard of like plyometric training and even some method of strength training.
One of the reasons that those work for runners, cyclists, people who want to be able to go for a long period of time is because you're shortening the amount of time that your foot actually spends with the ground, but we're innately designed with some of those tendons or built with some of those tendons. Slow twitch muscle fiber capacity, that’s also synonymous with our mitochondrial densities, so our cells are equipped with mitochondria that's able to feed fatty acids into one end and turn ATP out the other end, and we have a very high mitochondrial density. Some people higher than others, but humans, in general, have a high slow twitch muscle fiber capacity. Our hips are built in a way that allows them to counter-rotate very efficiently. That's why one of the first things I do when I'm working with an athlete is I get their sacroiliac joint checked out to make sure that one side or the other isn't stuck, and it's actually quite common for people who run or who move a lot to have. An SI joint that's stuck, and a lot of times, that's sitting in combination with running or cycling or doing some kind of chronic repetitive motion activity.
Humans produce endo-cannabinoids, which when you produce them yourself, they're actually performance enhancing because they shut down pain. You can't get the same effect by say smoking them or eating a brownie, but endo-cannabinoids are something that your body produces itself along with endorphins. That allows humans to go for long periods of time, and then we also. you know if look at say a chimp, for example, they actually have a very small butt compared to a human and the size of our butt really allows us to engage in enhanced hip extension, which again makes a human being very, very capable of outlasting just about any animal on the face of the planet when it comes to endurance.
So for enhancing endurance, it's not that important to get out and run or ride a bike for long periods of time or something like that. It's important to engage in a lot of other activities like strength, power, speed, some of the things that you've gotten a chance to do this week, and then you simply place trust in the fact that your body is going to be able to go for long periods of time, and it works out very well and also doesn't cause a lot of the hormonal depletion and over-training issues that you tend to see with endurance training in particular. Now I'm just curious, as I'm talking here. Like I mentioned a lot of what I'm about to get into now is how to enhance fat burning and cognitive performance and endurance, etcetera, but how many of you are actually training for anything from a 5K to an obstacle race to a marathon to a triathlon, swimming event? Anything like that?
Okay, now how many in here are training for something that might require you to have stamina or physical endurance? Cross fit games, or some type of other feat of physical performance? Okay, so a handful, and the rest of you are just here because you have nothing better to do in Tulum, Mexico right now.
Alright so, let’s start off with my first tip. Fat oxidation, this is me lying on a table a couple of weeks ago down at the University of Connecticut getting a muscle biopsy, taken out my left thigh where they're drawing two-hundred and fifty milligrams of muscle out of my thigh to look at my glycogen storage in that leg, along with the blood draw for hormone analysis on the right side there. And this was after following a high-fat diet for six months to see if that actually allows you to oxidize more fat while you're exercising, whether that be endurance exercise or whether it be sprint explosive power, speed type of exercise. So I ran three hours on a treadmill, I did a very intense VO2 Max test, and they were actually testing my level of fat oxidation. I have the little scars right now on my thighs where they did a muscle biopsy, just like that twice on each leg. They actually paid me to do this, which was nice, they sucked fat out of my butt. They did a fat liposuction on the right side and the left side to look at fat content. So the reasons that I was doing that was because I had followed a high-fat diet for six months, and we wanted to see if that would enhance the body's ability to oxidize fatty acids.
Well when you're doing that, there are few 7things that help you along the way, and these are some of the things that I found to be necessary when you're actually eating a high-fat diet and trying to do as little damage to your body as possible. If you are restricting carbohydrates and trying to do as little damage to your body as possible because fat, as I think most of you know, I believe I'm preaching to the choir here. It's very, very readily convertible to ATP in your mitochondria. Burning fatty acids can create ATP, it can also create ketones which are used by things like your heart and your diaphragm as fuel, but there are some issues if you go too low-carb. There are some things that happen with caloric restriction that I'll talk about, and there's some things that happen with thyroid and with testosterone.
So a few of the things I used the past six months, to enhance my ability to burn fatty acids and feed some really dense sources of fuel into my mitochondria. One was MCT oil and or coconut oil. So what I found out during this experience was that you can tolerate right around one tablespoon per hour of an MCT oil or about two tablespoons per hour of a coconut oil and actually use that as fuel while you're out exercising with no deleterious effects. That's about where you get to before gastric distress sets in, and most of the studies that have been done on the use of medium-chain triglycerides, kind of agree with that. So about two tablespoons of coconut oil or around a tablespoon or so of MCT oil is one fuel that you can use if you're going out and wanting to put calories into your body, not to stress your body out with complete fasting, for example, but still allows your body to burn fats as a fuel. Kind of turn yourself into a fat burning machine, so to speak.
Amino acids, one of the things that happens if you exercise in a fasted state or if you exercise in a carbohydrate-depleted state or you're doing a high-fat diet is a lot of times when you're exercising your blood levels of amino acids can drop pretty low. Now some people will go out and they'll eat whey protein or even like meats. Egg protein powders, vegan protein powders, whatever, and the problem is that those actually have a digestive cost that requires energy. So one of the other things that works out really well, if you're eating a low-carb diet and working out is to use either (a) essential amino acids, or (b) branched-chain amino acids. Now branched-chain amino acids are things like leucine and isoleucine and valine. You can get them in capsule form or in powder form, and those can actually be burnt as energy. They're burn is up to 15% of your energy after you've been exercising for two or three hours, and all of the amino acids are used as a significant source of energy even up to that point. So going into a workout, like a fasted workout or a carbohydrate-restricted workout, and again, this would be an endurance workout or a strength, power, speed workout is going to be enhanced if you can get about five to ten grams of amino acids into your body. That's five to ten grams per hour. That's a really, really good performance hack that doesn't alter a lot of the fat burning that you're going after with restriction of carbohydrates.
Now for long workouts, there's a form of fuel called SuperStarch. There’s a company named UCAN, and a lot of their stuff has artificial sweeteners in it and they do have a plain version though. That's just a basic, a non-GMO corn-based starch that's released very, very slowly into your bloodstream. It's burnt very, very slowly. Now what most research says is that you need about 250 plus calories per hour of carbohydrate during exercise to be able to allow your blood-glucose levels to stay high enough so that your brain doesn't shut down. You don't experience central nervous system fatigue. If you're going out for long periods of time, like a two or a three-hour workout, that can happen unless you can get a slow bleed of this SuperStarch into your system. So for example, for Ironman triathlon, I can buy an amino acids, about five to ten grams an hour, about a tablespoon of MCT oil per hour, and then SuperStarches in the form of a high molecular weight starch. In this case, one called UCAN, all together in a bottle or a flask for longer workouts. So that works really well, it can also work well in the gym if you need a high-intensity fuel. I mean if you weren't going out for a really long workout, I would actually leave out the SuperStarch, and I would just use the MCTs and the amino acids.
Now there are a few other things you can dump in there if you really want to hack your endurance and performance. One is D-Ribose, which is a sugar that supports ATP formation. It's almost like a negative glycemic index sugar, very different than like glucose or fructose or something like that. So D-Ribose, that's something that you can get in supplemental form, Disodium ATP, which is basically another ATP precursor which actually keeps your energy levels up very, very high while you're doing a workout, that's another good one, and then caffeine. Some studies have shown to enhance the utilization of fatty acids as a fuel during exercise. My only caution would be if you're going to use this kind of a stack before like an afternoon or an evening workout, or you can just drink a cup of coffee in the afternoon. Mix it with theanine, like theanine from green tea. If you have a cup of coffee in the afternoon and you have difficulty falling asleep for example, you can actually take some theanine at the same time that you use the caffeine in the coffee. It balances that out, and you're actually able to sleep a little bit better. So now you can all have your mochas at five PM.
And then the last thing is organ meats. Now one of the things that I found, as I followed a high-fat diet, in this case I was on a ketonic diet, and there's a real difference between a ketosis and a low-carb diet, and that ketosis is about an 80 to 90% fat-based diet. That literally shoves your body into a very, very high blood level of ketones status. Whereas, a low-carb diet is technically 50 to 60% fat-based, and it allows for a little bit more carbohydrates. If you're kind of getting into the super low-carb range like five, ten, fifteen, if you're very active, even as high as 20%. A lot of times, you tend to suffer some thyroid and some hormonal issues that can be mitigated by eating things like liver and sweet breads or even like desiccated thyroid powder, but the reason for this is that when you have high levels of fatty acids circulating in your bloodstream, it can inhibit some of your cell receptor sensitivity to thyroid hormone. The other thing that can happen is if you don't have enough glucose, you can actually inhibit the conversion of inactive to active thyroid hormone. And so a lot of times, you'll tend to get people who are engaging in carb restriction or trying to enhance fat oxidation, they'll get cold really easily, their metabolism will start to go down, and in that case a lot of times, you do need to introduce a little bit of extra carbohydrates and or support the body with weekly intake of things like organ meats.
So those are some of the hacks that I found over the past six months to be really, really effective at turning the body into a fat burning machine during exercise. Now I am going to put resources and kind of notes up for you guys at bengreenfieldfitness.com/primal if you want to kind of dig into this stuff a little bit more and get like actual milligram values and stuff like that. I'm putting the notes in the slides up over there, so you can check that out.
So number two, this is another thing that I use quite a bit. What I found to be really, really effective, and when I wrote a post at Mark's Daily Apple a few months ago, I called this the ancestral athlete approach. It's kind of that idea of moving with light levels of physical activity throughout the day and hacking your environment so that you're able to do so. Basically standing for long periods of time, I again don’t want to preach to the choir and tell you all that standing is beneficial and up-regulates fat burning enzymes and decreases all cause mortality and things of that nature, but it's tough to figure out a way to do it all the time. A few things that I've really found to be helpful, in terms of standing for long periods of time so that I'm building up that natural endurance in my core, my calves, my legs, etcetera. One is an inversion table because your legs get really heavy by the end of the day. Now especially if you're doing like an afternoon or an evening workout and you're spending all day on your feet, how many of you in here, by the way, have a standing work station or stand when you work?
Okay. So you can get an inversion table, actually a lot of times what I found is rich people will buy inversion tables and then sell them on Craigslist when they realize they're actually not going to use these things at all. So they'll sometimes pay you to haul them, so you can get an inversion table. I keep one out in my garage, and I hang from it for about 10 minutes a few times a week or at the end of the day of standing on my feet to drain blood. It works better than compression socks, it decompresses the spine, even better than like a yoga inversion pose wheel, and it's really easy to learn how to use, and they're not that expensive. You can get them off Amazon for a hundred and fifty, two-hundred bucks, and that's a really good thing to have around if you're using a standing, especially if you have a home office. I don't know if your boss would be that happy about you dragging a big old inversion table and tossing it next to your desk or your cubicle, but at home it works well.
Compression socks also work well. If you're buying compression socks, get graded-A compression socks which actually have tighter restriction towards the bottom, towards your ankles and kind of loosen up as they get toward the top of your leg, and that engages your legs in like this pumping action that moves blood towards your heart. So if you're worried about veracious veins and some of the things that you see that really old waitresses have these. You know, like clumped up veins in the legs from standing on the feet all the time. Compression socks, specifically graded-A compression socks are a really good pick. If you want to combine compression with something like cold thermogenesis and burn fat and compress the legs at the same time, there's a company called One Hundred and Ten Percent that makes the compression tight and a compression sock that you can put ice leaves into. So you can decrease your body's core temperature, amp up calorie burning, and get compression at the same time that you're standing, if you want to kind of have your cake and eat it too. So that works really well.
For an actual upright desk, a couple of the brands that make versions that aren't just butt-ugly are Updesk. Updesk makes one that works on hydraulics. Theirs are pretty nice, they've got different levels, different sizes. There's a company called Focal Upright that makes a really nice standing desk as well, and I actually travel with one of these, it’s called a Mogo. It's about a two-pound adjustable seat that you can just fold up and put in your suitcase, and you can turn, for example, a hotel room into a standing work station or you can go to a ball game or a soccer game or something like that. You kind of sit back like this, it keeps your hip flexors open. It doesn't require you to necessarily be like this all day, but the Mogo made by Focal Upright is really good. And then also, there's a gal named Katy Bowman, and she actually sent me a poster a few months ago that has a photo of about 50 different standing positions that you can be in as you are standing throughout the day, and that's really important too, to keep a little chair or stool or something like that next to your standing work station so that you're able to put your body into different positions and place stress on different areas of your body throughout the day. If you were to go to her website, which is katysays.com, and do a search for posture poster, I think it's what it's called. You'd be able to find that, and I think she even has them available in her little store, she'll mail one out to you. So standing is another really good one.
Now breath work is something else that I found to be an incredible hack for cognitive performance, for focus, for destressing and for endurance. Now there are some different forms of breathing that work really, really well. Nasal breathing, when the air comes in through your nose, it travels through the turbines in your nasal cavities. It becomes humidified, and it becomes a little bit more oxygenated in terms of its ability to deliver more oxygen to your tissues once it gets into your lungs. Deep nasal breathing is a really, really good technique when you're working out, and when I weight lift, when I run, when I'm doing anything that's below about 80% intensity, I try and breathe through my nose as much as possible. You also get a lower cortisol response to exercise when you breathe through your nose, and so you feel a little bit less stressed out after the workout. So you can almost use like a weight training workout or maybe not one of the workouts that we did on the beach. Those are pretty intense, but like a weight training workout or a run or a bicycle, you breathe through your nose and it almost turns into like a meditative yoga-type of practice.
Another thing that I'll use is rhythmic breathing. Now there are two really, really good books out there that can teach you rhythmic breathing. One is called “Running On Air”, it's by Budd Coates, and the other one is “Body, Mind and Sports, and that one's written by John Douillard, and what these books teach you how to do is not only engage in deep nasal breathing but also engage in rhythmic breathing. Now what rhythmic breathing is, let's say you're going to sprint around the track? What you would do is you would take one breath in for two-foot strides and then one breathe out for one-foot stride. Now, the reason that you would do that is you're breathing in more than you're breathing out, and it's the act of breathing out combined with the foot strike or impact that places stress on the internal organs, especially your diaphragm and liver area, and it can cause everything from fatigue to side stitches to basically kind of getting out of the zone, like your alpha-brain wave zone while you're exercising it. This works really well for running or cycling or any chronic repetitive motion whereas the deep nasal breathing works for just about anything. But what that book “Running on Air” teaches you is how to do a three-two breathing pattern, a two-one breathing pattern. Excellent resource, it would take me 15 minutes to teach you guys ow to do it in full today, and learn how to rhythmic breathe is super useful.
I've decided that instead of teaching how to rhythmic breathe, I want to teach you how to power breathe, and we're going to do that in a second. It's what Iceman, Wim Hof uses to stay immersed in cold water for two hours. It's also really good at prepping you for anything hard that you're about to do: workout, cold shower, whatever the case may be, but before I talk about that, hypoxia is another technique that works really, really well to enhance red blood cell production, and that has a lot of really cool immune system enhancing effects as well. So I was down in the pool this morning practicing swimming underwater for as long as I could. I also have a front-mounted snorkel that I'll swim with, and again, I'll try and swim in cold water, so I'm combining cold thermogenesis with limited airflow, but a company called Finesse makes a snorkel. You can wear it while swimming, and you have an air flow restrictor on it called a cardio cap. This restricts oxygen that comes in, and so you're getting a little bit of the hypoxic effect while you're swimming. Really, really cool way to get some of the health effects of hypoxia without just holding your breath until you're blue in the face. Power breathing though.
Do you guys want to learn what the Iceman does to increase his body's core temperature before it gets cold? Okay, I'll teach it to you guys. It's going to work best if you stand up, so this is a really cool breathing technique. When you would want to use this is before a workout, when you want to get hyper-oxygenated. If you are going to a cold area, like you know you're going to be chilly and you just want to increase your body's core temperature or when you're about to do something very, very physically demanding, like it's your max squat day or max deadlift day. You've got a tough cross fit workout or something like that.
So the way that this works is you're going to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth as though you were breathing up a balloon. Okay, now practice that a few times. Once you get used to breathing into through your nose and out through your mouth, try to use the deep diaphragmatic, deep belly muscles as you do this. What we're going to do is we're going to do 30 deep breaths, and if you're listening to this you're not actually here at the workshop, you could just do this as you're listening. Thirty deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth in relatively rapid succession. Okay, relatively rapid succession, and as you do this, you want to imagine the warmth from the air going into your body and hitting every single area of your body possible. Now, I like to imagine the air that I'm breathing in as being like an orange or red color when I'm doing this exercise. If I'm trying to relax and I'm doing deep nasal breathing, I'll imagine that the air is more of kind of like a blue relaxing color, but for this particular exercise where you're trying to almost create inner fire, it works really, really well to imagine that more orange, red color.
So what we're going to do is breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. Thirty times, in very rapid succession, and then I'll be in touch with more instructions after we do that. So ready? And you could listen to my rhythm for knowing about how fast to go. Ready, set?
When you get to 30, that last one, let all the breath out. Completely empty the lungs, completely empty the lungs, see if you can hold it for 10 to 15 seconds or until you get that reflexive gasp of air. Hold it, you're completely empty. Hold it, hold it, and still imagine all that orange and red breath in your body. Hold it. Okay, now deep breathe in. Fill your lungs completely. As you fill your lungs, again imagine that orange, red color going through your entire body, and it's very common to feel a little bit dizzy, high, and kind of weird as you're doing this. There's a little bit of hypoxia involved as you blow off CO2. Hold that, you're going to hold that for 15 seconds. Okay, just 15 seconds for that deep breath. So the exhale you hold until you're completely out of air, but the inhale, you just hold for 15 seconds. Try and relax your body as you hold this, and then let out that air. Drop the shoulders, and relax. And we did that just one time, you can sit down if you want to. We did that just one time, does your body feel a little bit different? A little bit tingly, kind of?
Now what you'd do if you were going to do power breathing to prep yourself for something intense, you'd do that about three to four times through, okay? Three to four times through, it's called inner fire, power breathing, and this is what the guy who, like runs up Mount Everest in a pair of shorts does before he goes out and does that. Very, very cool endurance hack.
Okay, so next up is HRV tracking, have you guys heard of heart rate variability tracking before? So it's based on the concept of your heart-brain interaction and the fact that you have a vagus nerve that travels from your brain and your central nervous system to your heart, and your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system actually provide feedback into your heart that will influence the variability between each beat of your heart. Now that's a very, very fast 20 second overview, but there's a way that you can track your heart rate variability. And the reason that this is important is because by tracking your heart rate variability, you are engaged in the number one way to keep track of the actual health of your nervous system. Now there are a few apps that I found to be really, really useful for this. One is made by a company called Sweet Beat. What you need for this one is the app actually downloaded to your phone. This one works well with an iPhone. The omega wave and the Bioforce have an Android version, but you wear a wireless heart rate monitor as you do this, or you have like a dongle plugged in the bottom of your iPhone that will actually transmit. It's called Ant Plus Adapter, and this will send your nervous system signal of your heart to the actual app.
What I do with this is I track for about five minutes every morning. It tells me the strength of my sympathetic nervous system and the strength of my parasympathetic nervous system, and it will tell me, for example, if my heart rate variability is jumping around quite a bit from day to day that my sympathetic nervous system is beat up, and that I might need a rest from intense fight or flight activity. If the number is consistently low, that can be a sign that your parasympathetic nervous system is over-trained, and you might actually need to back off of long aerobic sessions or too much low intensity activity. I tend to see it in intense power strength-type of athletes. That heart rate variability tends to jump around a lot from day to day whereas aerobic athletes who tend to overdo it quite a bit tends to stay consistently low. It also tend to stay consistently low if you have adrenal fatigue or over-training or something along those lines. Very cool number to track. The cool thing is you can actually train yourself using something called an EM wave to have some amount of conscious control over your heart rate variability, and at the end of this talk, I'm going to teach you how you can drop your heart rate instantly by about 10 beats, just by using a technique that you can train yourself to do in even greater capacity by using this thing called an EM wave. I think it's about a hundred and ninety-seven dollars or so, but it's a device you can get off the Heart Math website. It's different than these other devices, in that it's a self-quantification, or these other devices are self-quantification devices whereas the EM wave too, will actually allow you to train your nervous system via something called biofeedback, and I'll teach you how to do one of the biofeedback techniques here in a little bit.
So next up is EMF. When you get a lot of exposure to electromagnetic frequencies, it can vastly affect the hydration and the health of your cell membranes, the hydration of your body and the health of your cell membranes. What I'm talking about are signals from WiFi routers, from cellphones, from cellphone towers, from a lot of this stuff that we're surrounded with on a daily basis. Now I've got all sorts of things that I go into, actually over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/benrecommends. I've got a list of twenty different things that I do in my house to mitigate EMF. Some of the biggest ones that I do, that I consider to be endurance hacks and health hacks that also help quite a bit with cognitive performance is number one, whenever I'm working near a WiFi router and I have an option to hard wire into that router via cable, I do it. So you should have like an Ethernet cable, stowed in your bag, your purse, whatever for when you're travelling. If you have access to the router to be able to plug in, and when you're working at home, when you're able to hard wire in, I know it's kind of a pain in the butt to do sometimes, but you want to hard wire into your wireless router. Actually if you really want to geek out on this, you can turn off the radio signal on your WiFi router if you want to actually have access to it going through the modem and not completely lose your Internet access.
So typically on most routers, you actually can hard wire into the router, and then go to the address. I think it’s 192.168.0.1, type in the username and password that's usually in the back of your wireless router, and you could completely turn of the radio signal for your wireless router, and just be hardwired into it. And at night, I turn that WiFi router completely off. The other things that I use quite a bit. These are filters, they filter dirty electricity. So here in America, about 70% of the power that travels back to the substations goes through the ground, and you get a lot of kind of electrical surges that can occur. So what I have is a set of these in each room, these green wave dirty electricity filters, and anything that's in the room, that's plugged in that's used frequently is plugged into that.
Another thing that I do is I sleep on something called a BioMat, and this is a recent discovery of mine. It's different that, have you guys ever heard of earthing or grounding? Things like that before, this is much different than earthing or grounding which is based off of magnets, and I'm a big fan of earthing or grounding. I do some of that as well, but I wanted to talk about some new things in this talk. So the BioMat is infrared mats, so it released infrared heat, but it also has what are called amethyst and tourmaline crystals in it which can actually help to release negative ions, the same type of negative ions that earth would emit. The same type of therapy you'd be getting if you were walking around barefoot on the earth, but this actually releases those and mitigates or almost like sucks out a lot of the positive ions that can build up when you are working on a WiFi router, working on a computer, get constant exposure to EMF. So these things are kind of expensive. If you were to get like a small version is a little under a thousand dollars, one for your bed is about 1,700 dollars. They have payment plans where you pay like hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy bucks a month to get one. I think it’s well worth it, I've noticed a huge difference in sleep quality and especially nap quality once I've started using one of these.
Then natural anti-inflammatories, the ones in particular tend to work pretty well when you're flying and you get exposed to a lot of radiation and when you're working on your computer and you get exposed to a lot of radiation, are any sulfur-based anti-inflammatories or antioxidants that would be, for example, like MSM is one, doing a lot of garlic and onions is another. L-glutathione is another really good one, like a sublingual L-glutathione spray, and then also curcumin, high-dose curcumin. Especially on days where you've been flying or days where you've been exposed to a lot of EMF. Generally in the range of one to two grams a day of a curcumin can work really, really well at mitigating a lot of the inflammatory effects of EMF, so that's another thing that I use quite a bit to decrease some of that damage. So natural anti-inflammatories work really well.
Now isometrics are something else that I do, and isometric basically build up lactic acid in the muscle because you're holding a position and not releasing it for a long period of time. Trapping all that lactic acid in the muscle, not allowing it to be milked out through the motion of the muscle. It's a very, very low impact way to train. It's also a really, really good way to teach your body how to get rid of lactic acid really, really quickly.
Now if everybody stands up again, I'll show you how to do this. So the best way to do or to learn isometrics is if you're able to find a little spot that you can get into a lunge, an example of an isometric hold would be to put one foot forward and one foot back, and rather than just dropping into a lunge, you want to think about using your hamstring, the back of your leg and the leg that's out in front of you to pull yourself down into lunge, don't rip your pants. Pull yourself down into a lunge, and once you've pulled yourself down to that lunge, you make sure that hamstring on the back of the leg that's out in front of you stays activated. Okay, you've got one leg extended out behind you, but the weight should not be on that leg that's extended out behind you. It should be completely on that leg that's out in front of you. Now what I would do instead of doing like a three-hour run to train for Ironman is all go on just like a thirty, forty, sixty minute run, but I will finish the run up, with as long as possible, an isometric lunge hold on each side to build up as much lactic acid as possible, and this injects a huge amount of endurance into the muscle. It's also a really, really good way to train through a specific range of motion. There are other isometric holds, you can come up or you can stay in it the whole time if you want to. About five to six minutes is what you want to work up to for an isometric hold. You can do isometric push-up holds, squat holds.
Now a couple of things that work really well to combine with isometrics. One is electrostimulation, so there are units out there. For example, this is me with a unit attached to my abs doing an isometric contraction combined with electrostimulation on my abs. But for example, let’s say you have a very small space to work out in, or you're at home and you want to get as much bang for your buck out of a workout as possible. You can go into, for example, an isometric squat position against the wall, and you can attach electrodes, and there are very affordable units out there. There's one called a Compex, C-O-M-P-E-X. There's another one called the MarcPro, and you can attach these electrodes, for example to your quads and your hamstrings when you hold the position for five minutes and deliver that electrostimulation, and it really maximizes the amount of lactic acid that builds up. So if isometrics aren't hard enough for you or you want to get as much bang for your buck and as much endurance as possible out of those legs, you combine an isometric hold with electrostimulation and you'll get the effects of a sixty-minute squat workout with just five minutes of isometrics with those electro stim patches attached. So MarcPro and Compex are two good advices for that. There's one called an ARP wave which I'm using in this photo. It's more of a professional version, it costs like thirteen thousand dollars. The other ones are a little bit more affordable.
Oxaloacetate is actually really good as an anti-aging supplement, but it also up regulates the conversion of lactic acid to glucose in the liver. So if you are producing a high amount of lactic acid, what you can do is convert that into fuel much more quickly by using this supplement called oxaloacetate. So it's really used traditionally to support the health of your mitochondria which is really, really good for anti-aging and longevity, but you can also combine it with something like intense workouts, anything where you build up lots of lactic acid, so intense workouts, squats, like isometric squats, electro stim. Any of that stuff works really well with oxaloacetate, and also if isometrics are too hard for you, just do super slow training where you're going to the gym and you're doing like 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down, that type of thing. What that does is it increases peripheral blood pressure and improves blood flow back to your heart without actually increasing central blood pressure and putting stress on your heart. So that's another really, really good way to actually enhance endurance and cardiovascular capacity and train strength at the same time. There's a guy named Doug McGuff who has a really good book called “Body by Science” where he goes into that technique, and that's a really, really good way to train. It's super slow training.
Okay, biohack number seven. Sorry about the blood, hopefully nobody in here faints, self-quantification. I do self-quantification, blood and gut testing. About four times a year, I recommend everyone do it at least once a year, some type of self-quantification. Now for a lot of the athletes who I work with, a lot of the really active people. Some of the most important parameters that I test or that I find to be consistently deficient in the people I work with. For blood, some of these I'm going to go through then I'll go through the gut ones too. For actual panels, the panel that I use with most folks in the U.S. is either the performance panel from a company called Wellness FX, or there's a company called Direct Labs, and they've got a really good one called a top ten panel that's usually on sale. It's about a quarter of the price that you'd pay the doctor's office for this range of tests. You print the requisition form that you get when you purchase it at Direct Labs. You bring it to the doc, they do the draw. You bring it to the lab, and they do the draw.
So for blood testing, some of the biggest ones are HSCRP. For HSCRP, if you're testing and you're finding levels that are consistently above about 0.2. You could be doing a better job controlling inflammation. Now a doctor wouldn't even say anything unless you're well above 1.0, but what I look for is 0.2 for inflammation. Okay, so if you're really serious about longevity, health, recovery, HSCRP, you want below 0.2. Thyroid, I usually look for a full thyroid panel, TSH, T-3, T-4 and reverse T-3. The most important number to look for as far as thyroid if you're an athlete in training, if you're doing a lot of things. You're physically active, you're concerned about metabolism or thyroid is you look at TSH, and the number I go for on TSH is 0.5 to 2.0. When I was doing a lot of endurance training before I started to eat organ meats, my TSH was up about five. And within about two months of introducing thyroid supporting foods, it dropped down to that 0.5 to 2.0 range. So really important to track TSH.
Magnesium tend to be deficient inn well over 75% of the folks whose blood panel that I look at, especially people who sweat a lot, who perspire a lot, who eat a lot of fruits and vegetables that aren't necessarily grown in really mineral-rich soil. So RBC Magnesium is another really important one to test. If you want to tell all of your minerals, a spectro cell analysis is really good. But if you just want to look at one of the most important ones, RBC Magnesium is a good panel. Vitamin-D, I like to see that between 40 and 80, and folks who go above 80 which I actually tend to see a lot and like the Paleo and primal community, these are typically people who are taking like 4,000 to 6,000 international units of Vitamin D plus a day. There's not necessarily a more is better effect with Vitamin D, and there actually can be risk of things like arterial calcification if you're taking too much Vitamin D.
So I recommend getting Vitamin D between 40 and 80. If you're going to take Vitamin D, make sure that you're getting adequate Vitamin A and Vitamin K at the same time. And then for hormones, for women, for female athletes, I look at estrogen, progesterone, DHEA and cortisol. In particular, those last two DHEA and cortisol, there's a test called the adrenal stress index. This is a salivary measurement that you can do, again, like a company like Direct Labs will have this. Its four cortisol measurements, six DHEA measurements, and it'll give you a really good idea of the way that your cortisol-to-DHEA ratios are fluctuating throughout the day. Excellent panel to run if you suspect at all that you have adrenal fatigue or over-trained or maybe you're with a coach and you're working with an athlete. That's another really, really good thing to look at. I run this panel a lot with the athletes I work with.
And then for men, kind of similar scenario, but I look at testosterone, sex hormone binding globulin, DHEA and cortisol as my top four hormones to test. One of the things that I really tend to see a big issue, especially in this community, when a lot of times, there's either caloric restriction or carb restriction occurring along with stress from either that kind of wanting to have it all attitude or working and working out type of attitude is you tend to see that low insulin levels and calorie restriction is inversely correlated to sex hormone binding globulin. What that means is that sex hormone binding globulin is going to rise the more that you cut of calories from your body, train and stress your body out at the same time, and the unfortunate thing about that, especially for guys to a similar extent with ladies, but guys tend to notice it more, is you get and inhibition of total testosterone to actually being converted to free testosterone because sex hormone binding globulin actually binds up a lot of the testosterone and keeps it from being active. So low sex hormone binding globulin levels, one of the first things that I do is decrease stress and increase calories and or increase carbohydrates in athletes, and that's one of the first things that I'll do when a guy has low T. Because usually if you test for testosterone, you'll see high cortisol, high SHBG and low free testosterone, it's really common. In women usually, it's either low progesterone or sometimes low testosterone as well.
And then also gut panel. Some of the top gut panels that I find to be really useful, especially in folks who are training a lot, some forms of bacteria can actually feed really, really well on ketones, and so I don't necessarily recommend something like ketosis or very low carb if you have candida or yeast or fungus issue in your digestive tract. I typically recommend adequate amount of carbs combined with natural things that control candida, which is going to be different in each person depending on the type of bacterial strain that you have. Some people respond well to oil of oregano, others stick to enteric coated peppermint, some to garlic, some to black walnut, kind of depends. The test that I run is through Direct Labs, it's called a CDSA 2.0, and that also includes a parasitology that also looks at parasites which tend to be a really big issue as well, especially if you tend to get insomnia, food craving, and stuff like that. So a parasite and a yeast, fungus, candida test, SIBO tends to be a really big issue, Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth, and that's different. A lot of the people think it's the same as like candida or yeast or fungus, but it's actually an overgrowth or colonic bacteria that is in the small intestine, and it typically really tends to be aggravated by carbohydrate intake, by fruit intake, even by some starchy vegetables, and that's an entirely different issue all together that you test via a breath test. For example if you go to breathtests.com, they have a test that they'll send to your house. You have to go over the guilt complex of the fact that you have to swallow like water bottle-sized solution of glucose or lactose, and then you basically burp gap, bloating and you measure for three hours, how much you're actually producing, and that's a really, really kind of gold standard test for SIBO, one that you can do in the comfort of your own home, but these are some of the panels that I'll use for self-quantification in the folks that I work with. And the reason that I recommend these is because typically it’s problems with these that I tend to see pop up most often with the athletes and the active folks who I work with.
Plasticity is really important, especially for endurance athletes who are doing like brain-numbing chronic repetitive motion type of movement, but it's also really important for anybody who kind of gets stuck in the rock. Whether it be with cross fit, weight lifting, any type of activity that you're doing, you must present your brain with new activities. And if you look at a lot of the anti-aging research that's done out there, there's actually a really, really excellent book that I just read that I would highly recommend. I read it on the plane down here, it's called “Why Does Olga Run”. One of the best anti-aging books I've ever read in my life. “Why Does Olga Run”, brand new book. But plasticity is a huge factor, doing things that challenge the brain. So a few other things that I do is on my Kindle, I have an En Back app installed which is basically a memory-training app. On my iPhone, I resisted this for the longest period of time 'cause I thought it was just going to be another kind of things to stare at that would keep me up at night or that would be another way for me to be holding on my phone all the time, but I actually put the Lumosity app on my iPhone, and I really like it. I play it just once a day, it only takes about five minutes or so. One of the best and easiest brain-training tools that I found, if you aren't going to do like Sudoku or something like that, music is also huge.
I go out of my way to play guitar at least three times a week, and both listening to music as well as playing music is incredibly effective for maintaining the neuronal network within your brain, basically staving off a lot of the plaques that form your brain as you get older. It's interesting in that book that I just mentioned, there were finding that a lot of older individuals had all the signs of Alzheimer's and neurofibrillary tangles and plaques, but they didn't actually have Alzheimer's because they had so much extra blood flow to the brain from these plasticity exercises that they were doing. So really, really important, you know the ball sports like tennis, like golf. You know a lot of people out there are playing things like beach volleyball and slack lining and beach bowling or lawn bowling. I mean these type of things are really, really important to do, all the more so if your main mode of exercise is chronic repetitive motion type of exercise because that's not stimulating to the brain at all. You do get that BDNF release, that Brain-derived Neurotrophic Factor release where it makes you smarter a little bit later on in the day if you go for a jog or something earlier in the day, even more than if you lifted weights earlier in the day because you free up a lot of that BDNF to travel to your brain, whereas when you lift weights a lot of it stays in the muscle tissue. But regardless of the BDNF release, you got to do things that kind of keep your brain turned on as well.
Okay, so number nine, soft tissue work. This is another really, really important factor, this also actually popped up in that book as well, that anti-aging work, but this is something I go out of my way to do. Twice a week, I do a full body foam-rolling session, I used to go to a massage therapist. I ran out of time to drive and sit for an hour and do the massage, so now, I just do full body foam-rolling. I use a lot of techniques from Kelly Starrett's, Becoming a Supple Leopard book, but some of the things that I do for soft tissue work, especially to free up fascia, which is actually involved in neurotransmitter release which is why you feel so good after to get a massage or after you get through the teeth grading of a foam roller session or something like that. You actually feel good because fascia can actually release neurotransmitters. It's really fascinating, it's not just your gut or your brain that releases neurotransmitters at your muscle fascia.
So I use a rumble roller which is a foam roller that has ridges sticking out of it. That's a really, really good device, beats the pants off of any of the foam rollers that I found before. The same company makes what you see here, it's called a beastie ball. Love the name because it really is a beast. You set it on the ground, and you can kind of roll around on it. Dig into your hips, dig into the backs of your shoulders, but that type of fascial work is incredibly important for both your brain health, for anti-aging, for decreasing risk of injuries and also for getting rid of a lot of the fascial adhesions and the cross-linking that occurs when you're exercising a lot. I keep a golf ball under my desk, and I do rolling when I'm standing. I'll have one foot on the golf ball, if you want a real test of whether or not you've done a good job with adhesions and mobility in your feet. If you can place two golf balls under each foot and stand on two golf balls under each foot, you've done a really good job on strengthening your feet and kind of equipping for things like barefoot running. On kind of getting a very, very good feel for the ground. So golf balls are really good, and then massage every once in a while, or if it's convenient for you, more often than that. There is, and Mark recently wrote about this on his website actually. It was a really, really good mental effect to massage therapy, and it can be very, very soothing, just the act of being touched by someone during a massage.
So soft tissue work, every Tuesday, every Friday, I'm on the foam roller for at least 20 to 30 minutes, put my MP3 player on, and use that rumble roller. Take out the beastie ball, hit a few spots that I know or trouble spots for me. And usually before something big like a marathon or an Ironman triathlon, I'm on there every day, and knock on wood, I'm rarely injured.
Okay, then the last thing is quick coherence technique. Now I told you that I was going to teach you how to drop your heart rate by about 10 beats within just a very, very short period of time, and I'm going to teach you how to do that here in just a second. The idea here is based off of what I explained to you about heart rate variability, the ability to actually consciously control the feedback of your brain and your central nervous system to your heart because your heart does have an electrical signal just like your brain does, and you can control that. So I'm going to teach you guys how to do this before we kind of start to wrap up here, so go ahead and stand. So stand in a very, very relaxed way, kind of like an anatomical position with your fingers turned out, your palms facing forward. Pinkies on the inside, thumbs on the outside. Drop your shoulders, relax your body. Close your eyes, start to find a very relaxed place. All your muscles relax, and here's how you do quick coherence techniques, and you're going to be able to teach yourself how to do this in literally seconds once you learn it once. As you breathe, deep nasal breathing, every single breath, you want to envision that air going straight to your heart, straight to your heart.
Okay, so feel your heart. If that helps, you can put a hand on your heart or your heart area. That'll help you kind of direct that breath into your heart area. Start to feel every breath going right into that heart area, and once you've done that and you've connected your breathing to your heart, the next thing that you do is you envision something that's really precious to you, something that you love. For me, it's the little blond heads of my two-year-old boys kind of snuggled up against my test. Might be a loved one, a spouse, could be a pet, could be just a really pleasant experience you've had lately, and what you want to do is envision that kind of floating right in front of you. And then you want to put it in your heart. Just imagine it going right into your heart as you continue to breathe into your heart. Feel it going into your heart, and then I want you to feel an intense feeling of gratitude for what you just put in your heart. Continue to breathe into your heart. As you do this, you should feel your entire nervous system relaxing, your heart rate dropping, and this is something you can use when you're stressed out, you can use it when you're amped up about talking in front of a bunch of people at PrimalCon. You can use it when you are about to do a hard workout, you can use it pretty much at any time that you want to decrease stress. Okay, go ahead and open your eyes. If you fell asleep, that's good. Okay, you can sit back down.
Now you can teach yourself how to do that in about 10 seconds, and if you put on a heart rate monitor or a heart rate variability monitor, you can observe your heart rate almost instantly drop when you do that. Okay, two other things that I use. Gratitude, gratitude training for decreasing the amount of cortisol that builds up when you're exercising a lot, incredibly important. So when guys come to me and they ask, for example, about increasing testosterone, one of the first things that I do before I talk about tribulus or maca or adaptogenic herbs or DHEA or any of these things 'cause I asked them about stress and about gratefulness. Okay, so incredibly important. I use something called a five-minute journal, I think it's fiveminutejournal.com to actually journal it, ask me what I'm grateful for at the end of each day. It makes it super easy for me. I write it down at the beginning of the day, it asks me what my intentions are for that day, what would make that day great, and it has a little motivational quote. That's it, it takes five minutes, and I do that while I'm doing my heart rate variability testing. So I don't walk around all day with all these straps and wires attached to me like a bionic man. It's just five minutes while I'm lying in bed in the morning, and that's it. Do my journaling and then do my heart rate variability tracking at the same time I'm doing my journaling. So that five-minute journal works really well, that's another thing that I highly recommend.
Okay, I just went over a lot of stuff, but a few resources, notes for you. You can find slides and everything for this over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/primal. My coaching and consulting, you know phone consulting. I work with people from all over the world. That's via the website, pacificfit.net. And by the way, these slides are all available. They're on my Slide Share page at slideshare.com or slideshare.net. If you go to Slide Share and do a search for PrimalCon, you'll find them there. And then my new book is a big book, it ships in a couple of weeks, and that's over at beyondtrainingbook.com. I went 55 minutes, I had an hour. I don't know if we have four-minutes for questions or if you want to move on. It's up to you guys, you got questions? Alright, let's do it.
Low testosterone women are trying to find what normal testosterone would be for men or for women, I pretty much go straight to what would be considered the top 10% for your quartile, and go off of that. I mean you can find ranges for women all over the place, I mean even like the Wikipedia site for testosterone. It has the chart for women, but you go to the top 10%of the quartile, and that's what you want to shoot for. As far as testosterone issues in women, usually I find that the biggest thing that goes hand in hand with is low DHEA, low progesterone, high cortisol, low Vitamin D and sometimes liver issues. Like basically the lack of the ability to metabolize hormones properly from the liver standpoint, and so a lot of times like a liver cleanse and acetylcysteine, glutathione, some good antioxidants, some chlorella, that type of stuff combined with destress. Adequate fats, adequate calories, Vitamin D with some Vitamin A and Vitamin K. That's usually like going down the right road for bumping up testosterone levels, especially in women who work out or are stressed a lot, so other questions. Bob.
The difference in benefits between a BioMat and Himalayan rock salt lamp, the BioMat releases infrareds right underneath you while you are asleep, and so you get that warmth. It's much, much different than standing next to a red light lamp. The actual wavelength of the BioMat and the infrared wavelength that it releases is a finer wavelength. So you get deeper penetration, it'll go about six inches into human tissue, and so you kind of get that warming from the inside out. It's not like microwaving yourself, don't worry, and then it also has crystals in it which a Himalayan rock salt lamp does not. But rock salt lamps are pretty good, like sitting next to a computer for mitigating some EMF. There's another one out there. It's similar to a rock salt lamp, it doesn't look quite so hippy on your desk. It’s this little white thing, it's called a harmonizer, and you could get those off of Amazon as well and I have one of those on my desk, too. Yes, question.
No training or training while you're healing the gut. The issue with healing the gut is in many of those things that I just talked about, you're talking about not only destressing the gut by not dumping as many calories into it, but a lot of times, something like a specific carbohydrate diet, an autoimmune diet, a gaps diet, and it can be hard on those diets to get adequate calories in your body to sustain physical activity. So what I generally recommend is yoga, mobility protocols, some Tai Chi or light movement, and usually, I mean the gut starts to reinvent itself within three days, so a lot of times, you can start to turn problems around pretty quickly, but most folks who have kind of that one-two combo of gut issues combined with some type of adrenal fatigue. Usually it's a good four to eight weeks where I step them back into yoga, mobility that type of thing combined with like a very, very clean lower calorie diet. So yes, question?
If you find that you have a histamine response to endurance performance, and that was a question whether or not someone who has histamine issues should avoid endurance all together, that would only be the case if you've already adjusted your diet from like a hypoallergenic standpoint. If you find that endurance exercise, whether it be the fight and flight response or the cortisol response still aggravates that and causes that histamine release, it may be something to avoid. But again, like some of the stuff that we talked about today like only training for aerobics when your parasympathetic nervous system is well recovered or doing like deep nasal breathing, rhythmic breathing. These are the type of things that keep your body from being stressed out while you're doing endurance exercise. And so you may find that the style of exercise and breathing that you do and when you train can affect things just as much as like a hypoallergenic diet. So we are one hour and one minute in, so let me think. One more question? Alright yes, lady in the back. I'm giving you another one.
So just for jet lag, okay. Best tips for jet lag would be sulfur-based antioxidants like I mentioned before, especially like a glutathione, onions, garlic, and stuff like that. Brush your teeth before you get on the plane. Touch something metal as soon as that plane lands. Like take off your shoe, touch the metal bar on the seat that's right in front of you. And then as soon as you get onto the ground, get barefoot in touch with the ground to release a lot of those positive ions that build up while you're in flight. Hydrate very well, very, very well. I mean like 20 to 24 ounces of water per hour, for any waking hour that you're on the flight. Exercise works really well, specifically exercise in cold environments for decreasing cytokines, decreasing inflammation, so like body weight squats and a cold shower, swimming in a cold pool. That type of thing is really, really effective if you're able to do an exercise session.
Liquid melatonin, when you get to where you're going to reset your circadian rhythm, like you take liquid melatonin, one to three milligrams from a dropper. Put it in your mouth, hold it for 60 to 90 seconds. That works really, really well if you combine it with a melatonin patch that you can put on an area of high blood flow like your inner thigh or your underarm. That's just for like two or three days when you get to where you're going. Two other things would be high-dose Vitamin C, so like five grams of VitaminC split into three or four doses throughout the day so you're really filing your adrenals back up with Vitamin C. And then also oxytocin is a really good anti-inflammatory. You get that from human interaction, from touch, from sex. So basically getting in touch with somebody, hug them, shake hands. You're married, so there you go right there. He's standing right behind you, so jump on him when you get to where you're going, and you should be good to go. Alright, cool. My time is up, so thanks for coming.
Ben: Alright folks, thanks for listening, and remember. You can get all the resources for this episode over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/primal, and we'll be back next week with another jam-packed podcast as well as a special podcast episode with a top secret guest this weekend. So tune in, and have a wonderful week.
Brock: Adios.
In this special podcast episode, which is a recording from my PrimalCon presentation in Tulum Mexico, you’ll learn endurance biohacking tips, anti-aging tips, fat loss tips and much more!
Topics I cover (slides below) include:
-Why the human body has natural endurance…
-Why the least important thing you need to prioritize is your stamina…
-6 ways to maximize fat oxidation…
-4 tricks to stand all day without getting tired…
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