February 27, 2016
Podcast from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2016/02/how-to-use-pemf-athletic-performance-enhancement/
[0:00] Introduction/Nuts.com
[1:58] Organifi Green Juice
[3:09] Kimera Koffee
[5:03] Introduction To This Episode
[6:36] Paul Becker
[8:32] How Paul Began To Delve Into PEMFs
[14:04] When Paul Discovered PEMF
[18:09] EarthPulse vs. PicoTesla
[23:14] Why Produce ATP While Asleep
[30:56] Cell Phone Frequencies vs. PEMF Device Frequencies
[35:58] Holding Up The Devices Magnets To Injured Body Parts
[38:32] It's Effect On The Nervous System
[43:09] The Full Pro System
[54:54.8] End Of Podcast
Ben: Hey, everybody. It's Ben Greenfield. Before we jump into today's podcast, I wanna tell you a little bit about my nuts because this podcast is brought to you by nuts.com. I recently made an order from the nuts.com, and for this order, I chose, drum roll please, macadamia. Now a lot of people throw macadamia nuts under the bus because we're used to seeing the very calorie-rich, chocolate-covered version that our relatives bring back from their yearly vacation to Hawaii, but it turns out that if you moderate them, macadamia nuts are actually an excellent source of a ton of different nutrients.
I've been putting them in my smoothie. I love the crunch, I love the flavor, and they actually have a few cool benefits. For example, macadamia nuts have a huge amount of flavanoids in them, and flavanoids help to prevent your cells from damage, they can have a little bit of an anti-aging effect, they have about 7% dietary fiber. So they're a really good source of fiber, which means they can increase satiety. Again, they can increase satiety if you eat like five to seven macadamia nuts. Don't eat handfuls and handfuls to increase satiety. That would be something else called calories increasing the satiety. Copper. It's got a lotta copper, a chemical that your brain cell uses to send chemical signals. So, that's kind of another cool component of macadamia. Phosphorus, manganese, high levels of saturated fatty acids, so it's a really good nut if you're into being in ketosis or doing a low carb diet.
So, you can get these, I get them, from nuts.com. nuts.com, and nuts.com has a pretty cool offer for us. So you get four free samples when you order macadamia nuts, or any other nuts, from nuts.com. You get to choose from over 50 different samples. They're just gonna throw 'em in there, into your order. That's over a $15 value, and you get all that when you go to nuts.com, and click on the mic, and use discount code Ben. So nuts.com and discount code Ben.
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And now on to today's episode all about a geeky thing that you can put under your bed that will turn you into a completely unstoppable superhuman. Here we go.
In this episode of The Ben Greenfield Fitness Show:
“While it's helping you sleep, it's stimulating the mitochondria so that the mitochondria utilize oxygen more efficiently.” “…produce less oxidative waste so your oxidative stress goes down and the ATP levels will just go through the roof.” “Delta sleep has been associated with all of those things. We don't have delta sleep, your immune system goes to heck, your memory's shot, you're not producing as much hormones as you should. Basically, you're gonna break down if you don't have enough delta sleep.”
He’s an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America’s top personal trainer and one of the globe’s most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. “Power, speed, mobility, balance – whatever it is for you that’s the natural movement, get out there! When you look at all the studies done… studies that have shown the greatest efficacy…” All the information you need in one place, right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.
Ben: Hey, folks. It's Ben Greenfield, and it was about three years ago that I head the inventor of this device called a Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy, or PEMF device, on the show to talk about how PEMF can actually change your brain waves while you are sleeping, how you can place these devices near your body while you're sleeping to actually do things, like activate delta brain waves or theta brain waves. Really cool stuff. I've talked about it like in the sleep hacking chapter of my book, “Beyond Training,” in multiple articles that I've written at Ben Greenfield Fitness. And also, by the way, if you wanna go back and listen to the podcast that I did on how PEMFs can help you sleep, you can just go hit the show notes for the podcast you're listening to right now. And you can grab the show notes at bengreenfieldfitness.com/earthpulsepodcast. That's bengreenfieldfitness.com/earthpulsepodcast.
Well, the inventor of that handy-dandy little doughnut-shaped magnetic device is who joined me for that original PEMF and sleep episode, and I've brought him back today. His name is Paul Becker, and Paul has been researching quite a bit into the use of PEMF, not for sleep, but for performance. He's been looking into how you can actually use PEMF as an ergogenic aid, and being somebody who is always wanting to keep you on the cutting edge of the latest, greatest biohacking gear and tools, this one definitely is something that we gotta talk about. So, Paul, welcome to the show man.
Paul: Thanks for having me back!
Ben: Yeah. My pleasure.
Paul: I've been looking forward to it.
Ben: Before we delve into, kind of a review of what PEMF is, I'm curious if you can go over your story. You have kind of an interesting story of how you began to delve into this stuff 'cause you're not like a doctor or like a traditional, like dyed in the wool university researcher, or something like that. Can you kinda tell your background of how you discovered PEMF?
Paul: Yeah. Well, I had graduated in law school, and I went to Pepperdine Law School and had somewhat of a major in Entertainment Law, Specialization in Entertainment Law. So I was living in Las Vegas with my band when I was trying to study the bar exam, and run this band, bartend graveyard shift at like two or three different bars in town, and I stumbled into this Whole Life Expo in Las Vegas in 1996. I went there for the UFOs and the alternative energy, and I was reading the program and there's this guy that claims he's got the cure for AIDS. This is in '96, right? So HIV is like huge.
Ben: And I gotta interrupt you, but like when I go to a lot of these health expos, I always walk in with one eyebrow raised really high. ‘Cause there really is a lot of kinda like pseudo-science and woo woo stuff that goes on at a lot of these. Was it kinda way at this Las Vegas conference?
Paul: I mean, there were some really interesting stuff in the alternative energy field and some guy from, retired Air Force Colonel. You see him on all the YouTube UFO stuff and, I forget his name, [0:10:20] ______ . Amazing slides, and presentations, and stuff. Anyway, so this guy is Bob Beck, and you can look him up on YouTube. He's dead now. I think he OD-ed on colloidal silver. Literally.
Ben: Holy cow.
Paul: ‘Cause I had a friend who actually knew him. He used to have coffee with him and he said, “Toward the end, I just kept telling him, ‘Bob, lay off the colloidal silver…' “
Ben: Seriously? That's like a perfect story for someone. It's sad that he died, but at the same time it's kind of an ironic way to go, being in the alternative medical field, to die from colloidal silver.
Paul: Yeah. He was in such bad shape when he stumbled into the stuff himself that he probably wouldn't have lived too long 'cause he hadn't started using the blood electrification and all of this stuff. So I go into this thing, and this guy claims he's got the cure for HIV. And basically, it was a story about these guys from Albert Einstein Medical College in New York, and they invented this, and patented this thing, and proved that it worked. Like it stick needles into the artery and the vein, and then run current. Use the needles as electrodes and stimulate the blood, and this would inactivate the virus.
So long story short, the guys like, “This is the holy grail. You blood electrify yourself, you kill all the virus and bacteria,” and I bought it. And I was just like, “Holy [censored]. This makes a lot of sense to me. Just electrocute these very, very small foreign bodies in your body, and it's not harmful to you, but it just destroys them.” So I bought his little system in 1996, and I've not had the cold or flu since. Now it's 20 years later, 2016. So I haven't had a cold or flu in twenty years 'cause I carried…
Ben: This was a PEMF device?
Paul: No. This was an electric stim device.
Ben: Okay.
Paul: And this is how I started to get into this. It was '96, I'm studying for the Bar Exam, which I passed that year, finally. My third try. But most of my time, I was investigating the history on where this stuff came from. I mean they were using electric stim back and electromagnetics back in the 1920's. In the 1800's when electricity was new, they were stimulating the body with these machines.
Ben: And is this like a different type of electro stim? Like for example, there's a device out there called the Compex, and there's another one called the Marc Pro, and those are popular among athletes these days for attaching the electrodes to specific muscle areas and causing them to contract. Is this like a different frequency that you'd use them on viruses, and bacteria, and stuff?
Paul: This is completely different. The science behind it, because I read a lot of the abstracts and some of the full papers, full body vibration, I think that's Russian, Eastern European technology, that makes you stronger. The muscle contraction, the electronic muscle contraction which you're talking about, that makes you stronger. It's very one dimensional stuff, where the PEMFs system, at least mine, it's a multi-dimensional thing.
You sleep on it every night, it helps you sleep. While it's helping you sleep, it's stimulating the mitochondria so that the mitochondria utilize oxygen more efficiently, produce oxidative waste. So your oxidative stress goes down and the ATP levels just go through the roof, at least based on this Tong study that shows under 10 Hertz stimulation, it triples nerve synapse energy, like in a matter of 5, 10 minutes.
Ben: Now before we delve too deeply into what pulsed electromagnetic field therapy does, I just wanted to mention real quick about this e-stim, because I know a lot of people will like scoff at whether or not viruses, and bacteria, and stuff like that can be sensitive to e-stim. But there's some really interesting research on PubMed that goes into even like novel treatments for HIV and how, for example…
Paul: And cancer? Cancer?
Ben: Yeah. And those cells seem to be very responsive to low electric potential stimulation. So this stuff, folks listening in, is not woo-woo. There's some really interesting studies on electrical stimulation, not just for muscle recovery, but also for viruses and bacteria. But still, that's not pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. When did this PEMF, which I'm gonna start saying just so this podcast isn't like super-duper long from me using multisyllabic words, when did you discover PEMF?
Paul: I had just come back from India. I was there doing, I had done this micro-current, still electric stimulation device. And while I was in India, with a lot of time on my hands, waiting for the prototype, I was doing research. My dad had died of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's syndrome. He was perfectly healthy. They put him on statin drugs. In four years, he was dead. But that's another story. But I was trying to figure out why the electric stim that I was using on my dad had no effect.
So I was doing research, and I stumble into this line of research using pulsed electromagnetic fields for Parkinson's disease. So I'm just like, “Holy crap. I missed the boat. I was really close, but I wasn't where I needed to be.” And I'm reading these studies, and there's a whole chain of them. Guy named Sandyk, Sandyk, he was in Long Island. He did, I dunno, 20 or 30 studies using his little pico Tesla, which is like a thousand times less strong than the EarthPulse. It sounds ridiculous, but I think that mathematically, they're figuring what the magnetic field was in the center of the head or something, pico Tesla. It's so small, it's like you need a jet laboratory, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory equipment to measure it. It's like, I think they came up with pico Tesla mathematically or something.
Anyway, they're amazing studies. I ordered the whole full-text studies, I got back to Florida, still didn't have the prototype of the e-stim machine. And I'm looking at these full-text and these people's faces, and I'm going, “That's my dad right there.” And then literally one day later, or six hours later, the person's face is completely changed. Like the smile on the side of their face goes up.
This technology, if there was a level playing field, and it wasn't slanted heavily against alternative stuff, this stuff would win out every time. I mean it's so much better than chemicals and the pharmaceuticals. It's mind blowing. You catch a cold, you stim yourself, the cold goes away. You start catching the flu, you feel like you're getting sick, you start to cough up loogies, you put yourself up to an e-stim, and the next day it's gone away. It's crazy stuff. People just need to learn about it.
Ben: Now you just said like when you're sick, you hook yourself up to an e-stim machine like this. You were talking about like…
Paul: Yeah. The Beck device. The original thing. The guy that said, “This is the cure for HIV.” That thing, it kills whatever's trying to take your body over, that's in your blood, that's floating past those electrodes, you hook 'em on your wrist. I just wear it to sleep at night.
Ben: But that's different than an EarthPulse, right? The Beck device?
Paul: Yeah. Totally. But I'm just like a lot of people…
Ben: Where could people find more information on a Beck device?
Paul: The internet's loaded with it. There's just tons of videos of him that goes back to like the 1970's, like the early VCR days.
Ben: Okay. Gotcha.
Paul: Yeah. People should check it out. You'll never get sick again.
Ben: Okay. Cool. I'll hunt down some resources for folks on this Beck device. But in the meantime, once we get past like e-stim for bacteria, and viruses, and sickness, and pass like a Pico Tesla form of pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, what next? Because I know that you've basically, and I have one of these EarthPulse machines, and I sleep with it, but you keep talking to me and you've sent me a few e-mails about how I could use it to enhance things like mitochondrial density, or reduce oxidation, and produce like an ergogenic effect. So can you first go into what exactly is the difference between this PEMF that is put out by this EarthPulse device like this and Pico Tesla, like tiny little PEMF that you were talking about?
Paul: And let's say the mats as well, okay? You take a 20 minute session on a mat…
Ben: Is that like one of the BEMER mats?
Paul: Yeah. Or any of the mats. There's 50 of them. Your body gets a little bump. What we're talking about with the EarthPulse is, thing is in your bed all night. And while this thing is entraining your brain into a more deeper state of sleep, the same frequencies, and this is like some natural law, those same frequencies, and these are the frequencies that the Earth puts out itself, if we had a clean environment, we had Schumann waves. Schumann waves are, most of the Schumann spectrum is in the delta, theta, and alpha range, right?
Ben: Yeah. The Schumann range being like what you'd get exposed to if you're walking barefoot on dirt, like outside, or like camping, and sleeping on the ground.
Paul: Right, exactly. If we had no radio frequency, pollution, and stuff, because now the magnitude of that stuff, it's like, the analogy is trying to listen to a flute in a platoon of bassoons or something. It's behind, it's now a background noise to the RF. So we're being tuned up during the day time. And so when we go to sleep at night, and plus all the electronics and everything that we're exposed to all day, and the blue light from the screens and everything else, you know were a wreck. So we can't sleep well. But the ergogenics comes from while you're sleeping and conserving energy, your cells are producing more and more ATP from the oxygen that you consume.
So, instead of wasting the oxygen and creating a bunch of oxidative waste that turns into oxidative stress and potentially disease, inflammation and then potentially disease, the oxygen that reaches the cells in the dilated blood vessels, because PEMF dilates your blood vessels, so you've got much better blood flow, that oxygen that gets to the cells gets burnt completely, when nearly as completely as possible.
The studies that we hang our hat on, so to speak, is a guy named David Hood that showed that 10 Hertz tripled the two key enzymes responsible for oxygen metabolism and the oxidative phosphorylation process. One is the pacer of the Krebs Cycle and the other is responsible for dragging the oxygen molecule through the mitochondrial membrane. And if oxygen gets there and doesn't get burned, then you have oxygen leakage is what they call it 'cause the oxygen molecule didn't go through the burning process. Now that is a free radical that needs an antioxidant to quench or you start creating inflammation.
Ben: So basically, I mean like a big part of this comes down to understanding this whole concept of like Physiology 101, and what's called the electron transport chain. Because when you're creating ATP, electrons are basically passing along this chain and oxygen is getting consumed, converted into water, and hydrogen ions, and like ATP, is a byproduct of that.
Now what you are saying is when you expose the body to specific Hertz frequencies, for example, while you're sleeping, and let's say you can't like go outside and sleep on the ground, or it sounds like from what you're saying, even if you go outside and sleep on the ground, you're still getting to exposed to like all the power traveling back to substations, and radio frequencies, and all the annoying side effects of living in an industrialized society, unless I guess, you're deep out in the wilderness, what you're saying is that you can expose your body to these frequencies while you're asleep when you're like putting one of these magnets underneath your mattress? And that is essentially enhancing your mitochondria's ability to convert oxygen into ATP as you are sleep.
Paul: Exactly right.
Ben: Okay. Now I know that folks are probably wondering this right now, so I'm just gonna ask you. Why the heck would you wanna produce ATP while you're asleep?
Paul: Because, when you're sleeping, this is when you're synthesizing hormones, your body's repairing itself from daily wear and tear, and also from injuries, and injuries you don't even know you've got, you've got memory consolidation, and your immune function. So delta sleep has been associated with all of those things. We don't have delta sleep, then your immune system goes the heck, your memory is shot, you're not producing as much hormones as you should probably. Basically, you're gonna break down if you don't have enough delta sleep.
In fact this one woman, Eve Couter, C-O-U-T-E-R, I believe, she did a study with healthy college kids and they rigged them up so that as soon as they started to go into delta sleep, they would be awoken slightly, not totally, but they would be jarred a little bit with a little vibration or something that caused them to go back into theta mode. So within, I think it was 7 to 10 days, 60% of those kids had elevated blood sugar. So they showed that lack of delta sleep in as little as 7 to 10 days could cause you to go pre-diabetic. That's how important delta sleep is to body repair and function. So during sleep, you've got all this ATP going on. So your body is repairing itself like mad.
I mean you asked like how I stumbled, I mean I stumbled into this stuff. I didn't research it. It wasn't my goal to like create this device that fixed my shoulder after 22 dislocations, and my right knee that clicked for like 15 years. I wasn't aiming for that. I was shooting for a Parkinson's thing 'cause I saw my dad go down the tubes. And this could have helped him and I didn't know about it. So I brought somebody, by hand, physically delivered them to the doctor in New York. I saw them get better on the Parkinson's. He had to go back to Florida, couldn't have a device because the doctor wouldn't sell him one. He said, “No. You gotta come back every few months and get your treatments.”
So he asked me if I could build something. So I said, “Yeah. I think I know enough about the stuff that I know what to do and it might work even better.” And it did. And that was because I honed in on this EarthPulse, this 9, we didn't talk about this, 9.6 Hertz, which this character Bob Beck, the guy that did the blood stimulation that I stumbled into in 1996 at that Whole Life Expo, I heard him on a podcast, say that he drove stakes, a metal rod 20 feet in the ground, hooked it up to an amplifier, and then ran it through a frequency counter, and found that the Earth itself, the terrestrial planet had a resonation at 9.6 Hertz. So I had already known that there was a pattern around 10 Hertz. 10 Hertz always seemed to work best whether it was optic nerves generation, arthritis, tendon problems, broken bones. The Russians kicked out 10 Hertz long before anybody else had. They were doing studies at 10 Hertz in the 1960's, I think.
Ben: So when you're saying 10 Hertz, one thing that comes to mind for me is a lot of times you'll hear like about 8 to 12 Hertz is what would stimulate your alpha brain waves, like concentration, focus, and being in the zone. But wouldn't you wanna stimulate those while you're asleep? Wouldn't you want like more delta waves when you're asleep?
Paul: So it's a phenomenon. I have to say, it's very surprising even to me since 2002. I'm into my 14th year now, sleeping predominantly at 9.6 Hertz every night. Andrew Marino that did a lot of research with Robert O. Becker of the Body Electric. Robert and Marino once said that 10 Hertz was like the crossover frequency where people, once they reach 10 Hertz, they would slide through theta. It was like a gateway of frequency or something they called it. It's very odd. You would think after 14 years if I was suffering from no delta sleep, I would have symptoms of it. But I don't seem to.
I just turned 58, most people are surprised when they hear that. I don't feel I've aged much at all. The last two years were pretty rough. I got poisoned, I had staph infection in my eye, almost went blind. So it's been a rough two years. Almost perfect comeback. My abs aren't quite as, I'm not as proud of them as I'd like to be. It was my goal by Christmas, by New Year's, I was gonna have an eight pack again…
Ben: We can talk about that off-air, man. I can help you out with the ab component for sure. But I have some more questions though. I have more questions about PEMF, but…
Paul: I'm sorry to ramble. I'm sorry. I know I'm rambling. I apologize to the audience.
Ben: (chuckles) It's okay. I'll loop you back in. I'll reel you in, dude. So we've got this repair of mitochondria while we're asleep. Obviously, mitochondria is pretty important for athletic performance, and you've got some really interesting research. I'll link to in the show notes for people who wanna listen in. But for example, there's one by James Tong who saw a tripling of nerve synapse energy and a doubling of mitochondrial density with exposure to 10 Hertz frequency.
There's another one that shows a fourfold, this was a study by NASA, a fourfold increase in rate of tissue regeneration and repair, again with exposure to this 10 Hertz frequency. There's a bunch of other studies, and I'll link to them for those of you who are all engineer and technically minded and wanna look at some of these studies, but a question that I have it for you, Paul…
Paul: The interesting thing is you don't have to sleep at 10 Hertz to get these effects. I had one 65 year old guy who's like 275, trained in his gym who's an ex-football coach, slept at 1 Hertz. It was the only thing that would make him sleep. He went from a bad shoulder and a bad back, he could barely do, I think it was eight push-ups, and then within three weeks, he was doing 21 pushups sleeping at 1 Hertz. So 1 Hertz is not optimal, but it'll make you sleep.
Ben: So what it comes down to is there's like an optimal Hertz, and then this 10 Hertz is kinda the optimal. But if any exposure to a form of pulsed electromagnetic field therapy can at least assist you with mitochondrial repair and mitochondrial density?
Paul: In this range. It seems like when you get to 20 Hertz, the mitochondria start to drop off. 15 Hertz, actually. It seems to be the cutoff. There's a bell-shaped curve at 10 Hertz. At 5 and 15 Hertz, you've still double the tissue regeneration. At 10 Hertz, according to NASA, it was four times the tissue regeneration. So based on that bell-shaped curve, I would say about 20 Hertz, you wouldn't want to go over that. Because then you're causing stress on the cell, and there are studies that prove that. They actually cause stress.
Ben: Okay. And that's actually what I wanted to ask you, Paul, was because cell phones produce PEMF, right?
Paul: It produces EMF.
Ben: How is the frequency from a cell phone different from like a PEMF device?
Paul: Okay. Most of these devices, my device specifically, is very, very, very, very, it's called infrasonic, 'cause you can't hear it. It's below 20 Hertz. Cell phones, and microwave ovens, and WiFi, it's RF, radio frequency. And that's worse for you than EMF, which straight EMF is like what comes out of your wall current, through the wiring in your house. That's 60 Hertz in the United States. 60 Hertz, but RF is gigahertz, and higher. I'm not even sure 'cause I'm not that knowledgeable about this stuff, only that it's not good for you.
Ben: Okay. Gotcha. So we've got, basically, this doughnut-shaped, it's like a doughnut-shaped magnet, and I actually have two of them, and there's this little handheld device that controls it. That's basically what the EarthPulse is, you set it on a specific frequency, you put it under your mattress while you're asleep, and you get exposed to this PEMF while you're asleep. Same as you would get exposed to if you were just like laying on the ground outside. But they also sell like these Earthing mats and grounding mats. Now you had brought up mats earlier, but I didn't quite get my head wrapped around how this is much different than buying one of these Earthing mats off of Amazon for example.
Paul: I walk barefoot everywhere. I was a surfer, always in the ocean. Very well-grounded. My shoulder was destroyed. 22 dislocations over 16 years. Grounding didn't fix my shoulder. This device, when I realized that it made me sleep, and I was testing. First time I tested it, I fell asleep on a pot of coffee only an hour and a half before I got home. So I lay down, woke up three and a half hours later and felt like a new man. Like my head was all like, I can't really put my finger on except to say that I was well-grounded. Not from the grounding sense, but I felt grounded like martial arts grounded.
I went out and walked around the pool like a tight rope, and talked on the phone, and called the Parkinson's guy and said, “Yeah. I think I hit the nail on the head with this thing.” So I started sleeping on the machine to see what would happen like 'cause I was amazed at how I would lay down, I would wake up six hours later and I'd be on the run, and feeling amazing. And then after three days, ache from the shoulder started to go away. At three months my shoulder was healed. I mean, yeah, I was taking joint formula, but I've been taking joint formula for 10 years before that.
Ben: It's is it because it's pulsed? Is it because of the way that the electromagnetic frequency's released that it's different than grounding or Earthing?
Paul: It's an active thing. Grounding is more of a discharge of static electricity. They've done some stuff, I've read some things that insinuate that really what's going on is you're discharging static electricity. Yeah, you're picking up some electrons from the earth, but there's not a whole lot of stuff going on. This is very active. This is a rhythm that's going through the mattress, through your body, and out the other side at a specific frequency that we're biologically tuned to. And that's why when they do these 10 Hertz studies, they almost always work. Very few failures at 10 Hertz. And if it is, it's because it was too short of an application time or something. And that's why these, the mat systems were not designed for long period use. And the waveforms of those systems are not optimized really either. Some of 'em are alternating currents, they're going north, south, north, south. Others have a very sharp sawtooth wave. Sawtooth's not so bad, but triangulated wave, and these are expanding and contracting fields.
So when you really get into pulsed electromagnetics, there's only a couple of us, a couple of the manufacturers that actually pulse it. When you discharge into a coil as steep pulse, a strong pulse, it creates a magnetic field that expands to infinity. It goes like a radio wave. It goes forever. And so, that's why when you actually have a true pulsed system, it's just so much more powerful than ones that have sine waves and funky sawtooths and whatever, because they're not popping. They only expand and contract as far as the magnetic field expands, and then they go back to square one and expand again.
Ben: That makes sense. I've got some other questions for you about this thing. First of all, you told me, and I've tried this out a few times but I wanna clarify, you can take these magnets, whether you're using two magnets with the device or one magnet, and you can hold them up to different body parts that are injured. Is that correct?
Paul: Yeah. When I healed my shoulder, I did no local application because I was kinda in disbelief that my shoulder was getting any better. So I just kept it under the mattress, I played around with putting it further away from my body, but I never did direct application on the shoulder until sometime later when I reinjured it. And I'd realized this is a lot better when you put it directly on an injury than if you wait several days or whatever to get the effect.
Ben: Do just like hold it up against the injury for a period of time? Or how does that work?
Paul: ACE Bandage is the best. I've designed the coil I could've had an ice cold coil, I didn't want an ice cold coil. So it's designed to generate a certain amount of heat, and then hopefully this year I'll release the far infrared cover for it so that the heat generates far infrared. Working with some far infrared ceramic material to see if we can actually get any far infrared from that heat. So, any way…
Ben: That would be actually pretty cool. But like if I have like an infrared sauna, for example, I could bring my PEMF device in that and I could ACE Bandage it to like an injured shoulder, or an Achilles, or something like that, and actually increase the rate of tissue repair by using it that way?
Paul: Sure, you could. But the more efficient way is you go in there and then after you shower and you get ready to go to bed, you ACE Bandage it to the shoulder and you put the controller on the floor, next to the bed, run the cable out, and you sleep with it all night like that.
Ben: The whole time you sleep with it, it's safe?
Paul: Yeah, man. I've got guys that…
Ben: So it's not like ultrasound where it's gonna cause tissue burns if you leave it in?
Paul: No. Not at all. I've got some miracle guys that were crippled and healed themselves in no time at all. One ripped his bicep out of his, I'm not a doctor, so where the bicep ties him to the elbow.
Ben: Right.
Paul: He ripped that out in an industrial accident and he was back to work in five weeks instead of physical therapy at three months. He was back to work in five weeks, five weeks post-surgery.
Ben: Okay. What about the nervous system? Because, like I measure my heart rate variability every morning. I've measured it with and without the Earth Pulse on, and I'm curious like how it actually interacts with the nervous system and how it might affect something like heart rate variability?
Paul: Well, I've got a guy, are you familiar with the Sweetwater System?
Ben: Oh, yeah. Very much. We've had him on the podcast a few times.
Paul: One of my biggest fans in Sweden, he's like 38, or 39, or 40, or something. He's like a Muay Thai kickboxer. So he's an instructor and he told me that even the difference from the V4 that he had, the single magnet system, and the two magnets system, like he saw a huge gap up in his HRV. Like that Sweetwater tells you whether you can workout or not. He says that he hadn't had a day that the thing told him he shouldn't work out since he'd gotten the Pro system. I don't have a lot of research to go on. All I can say is it looks like it beneficially affects it. I know it increases VO2Max…
Ben: I'll link to it in the show notes for this episode, but you've got a few good screenshots on your website of somebody who looks like he sent you in some HRV info.
Paul: That's him. Yeah, that's the guy. That's it.
Ben: Yeah. I'm looking at right now. It's a pretty decent spike when he puts this thing on, which is actually been pretty impressive, really, that it seems to be affecting the central nervous system positively in terms of like an increase in his frequency strength.
Paul: He's not wearing it while he's doing the measurement. That's just him using it at night when he sleeps.
Ben: Yeah. Now there's different settings on the actual device. Like you've got Sleep 1, Sleep 2, and Sleep 3, and Sleep 4. Can you kinda clear up exactly which one you recommend? Or are they all 10 Hertz?
Paul: Okay. They scan back and forth the sleep modes. What we did, we just came out with a basic model a few months ago that I got rid of all the modes 'cause I only use the manual mode now because I sleep at 9.6 Hertz exactly.
Ben: Yeah. That's all I used to do for a long time when you sent me, like you had all these different modes. I just put it in a recovery mode and left it there all night.
Paul: Right. But manual mode boots to 9.6 Hertz exactly. It stays 9.6 parked on it until the timer runs out. And so recover mode scans down a half a Hertz and it goes it goes from 10.1 Hertz down to 9.1 Hertz, but it stays in the center at 9.6 half the time. So half the time, you're on 9.6, and the other time you're floating back and forth.
So when I came up with the manual mode, because I wanted to go back to the days when I had a system that was exactly 9.6 'cause I wanted to play around with it and see what would happen. So I start sleeping on 9.6 Hertz, and I find myself waking up on my own six hours in. And I haven't been doing that since I had the analog system, which I could keep parked at 9.6. Recover mode, I could sleep eight hours like a hibernating bear. I could sleep 10 hours if I set the timer long enough. ‘Cause it gets to the end and wakes you up 'cause it goes to alert mode. So then…
Ben: Do you use it every night?
Paul: Every night, man. Unless I get stranded away from home, if I'm overnighting somewhere, I take it with me.
Ben: Okay. Got it.
Paul: And now I've got it hooked up to that voltaic battery system, so it's always plugged in. If we have a power failure, it still runs all night. So I pick that thing up, wrap the coils around it, and throw it in my bag, and I'm out the door. But, yeah. I mean, listen. When we get back to, just real quick on the ergogenic stuff. People should go to the ergogenic page and just read those e-mails. I don't even know, have you been over there and read those e-mails? They're mostly Tom, Dick, and Harry's and then there's some people that are some professionals, common professionals.
Ben: Yeah. I checked 'em out. You did a good job pasting 'em in to show that they're actually from legitimate…
Paul: People, right? I mean, yeah.
Ben: Yeah. Actual people. ‘Cause a lot of these websites you go to, and they're like testimonials written by, let's just say, it's questionable copywriting that looks like somebody actually got hired to write a testimonial. It appears all you've done is just like copied and pasted, it's a little bit hard to read and scroll through, but it's literally just a crap load of copied and pasted e-mails from folks who are using this for like their Crossfit WODs, their triathlons, powerlifting and it is pretty impressive.
What I wanted to ask you next, Paul, was there's a way that you can actually, you can double up the effects, right. Because with the way that I have is I have two magnets and then like a headphone splitter. And so I'm using magnet kinda like under my neck and upper torso area while I sleep.
Paul: We never got to the Full Pro system that's got two full power magnets.
Ben: So tell me about that.
Paul: Yeah. Okay. What you’ve got is the V4, and soon as you put two magnets into one jack you end up dropping the power, you get more power from the two magnets in total, one is less powerful. So the V5, if you get a splitter, an upgrade, a splitter and magnet upgrade, you now have two magnets that are as strong as your system is with one magnet. But if you have the system with the two jacks and you have two magnets, you've got two magnets that are 30% stronger than your machine if you just got one magnet in. You get two magnets, 30% stronger than that. And then it's like a cocoon that you crawl into at night. From head to toe, you're just, I dunno. Even after 14 years, I can feel it. The EP is, EarthPulse is something you really can feel.
Ben: Yeah. I'm looking on your website right now and you've got five different versions, but it looks like, so you said you use yours in manual mode most the time, and it looks like you've got one version here, it's got two magnets and then it doesn't come with the 10 programmable modes, but it has that manual frequency mode. That one's called the Pro Basic. Is that the one you're talking about?
Paul: Yep. That's the one, man.
Ben: That's the one I need to use?
Paul: That's all you need.
Ben: Okay.
Paul: That's all you need. You could have a critical accident and they'll tell you you'll never play ball again, and you'll come back from it. As long as your nutrition is good and the surgeon was good, they put you back together again, you'll bounce back from it. It's absolutely amazing what the body will do if it's got the tools to do it. And you can take all the nutritional products that exist on the planet to heal yourself after a traumatic injury, and you just will never heal as good as new. But with PEMF, you throw that into the equation, and then you'll be absolutely astounded with what can happen.
Ben: You're not supposed to, and I don't want to scare people away, but I think you told me this when I first got the device. You're not supposed to hold it up to your head, right? Like put it up against your skull?
Paul: No. It's the South Pole, the south polarity. If you have the ring on, the dual polarity ring which is really for a local application. So you have a North Pole in the center and it's surrounded by South Pole, and it creates a very strong field gradient right there where the injury is. And it helps to exchange ions, like a magnetic pump, so to speak. But not opposites are attracting, North's pulling in south polarity and the south that's surround it is pulling out the inflammation and the waste product and such. So that dual polarity ring, I don't like near the head 'cause I find South Pole gives me a headache.
If the magnet, if I'm sleeping with it under my pillow, after I got poisoned, I had really bad tinnitus, I had headaches for like months, so I slept with it under my pillow for months. Probably 18 months 'cause it's 21 months now since the poisoning and tinnitus is almost gone. I'm back to sleeping with my magnets under the mattress full-time now. But I slept with one or two magnets under my pillow every night to try and get rid of the tinnitus, and try get rid of the headaches, and try to detox my brain, 'cause I couldn't walk down the hallway in my house without bouncing off each wall once.
Ben: Got it. So if you're gonna use it on your head like that, just take the little ring that goes under the magnet off?
Paul: Yeah. I got guys that play ping pong, like professional ping pong. They'll do a session direct to the head, like 20 minutes before their game. (laughs)
Ben: Wow.
Paul: Ping pong, man. Those guys are lazing fast.
Ben: So for those guys, where are they putting it? How are they using it prior to just like going out and competing?
Paul: They're laying down on wherever they find a spot to lay down, and then a power outlet, and they just put it under the occipital, at the base of the neck.
Ben: Okay. Got it. Cool. Well, I've been taking notes as you've been talking, Paul, and for those you listening in, you can go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/earthpulsepodcast, that's bengreenfieldfitness.com/earthpulsepodcast, to read some of the research and the previous episode where Paul and I really delved really, really deeply into sleep, and then we talked a little bit more about mitochondrial density and the ergogenic effect.
But if you want to look at how it affects your sleep cycles too, you can you go back and listen to podcast. I'll link to that, along with some of this research that NASA has done, some of the research on mitochondrial density, and then also some of the research on electrical stim for virus and bacteria. And just to clear things up, it sounds like, if you're listening in and you wanna get an EarthPulse, probably the V Basic Pro is going to be a good combination of, and correct me if I'm wrong, Paul, kinda like simplicity, 'cause it's just manual mode, but also power, 'cause you've got double magnets. Right?
Paul: Yeah. If you wanna sleep in delta, you set it at 3 Hertz. I wrote a paper, a couple of papers on, this new one's gonna be called “Pythagorean PEMF” 'cause I've been doing a lot of numerology, which sounds crazy 'cause I never believe in that kinda stuff, but based around tuning and like Himalayan bowls, and chanting, and these healing tones, and things, and it seems like 9.6 Hertz fits into the sacred geometry of all of these things very nicely.
So if you're gonna sleep, and not at 9.6, use a harmonic of 9.6. Like use 4.8, which two times 4.8 eight is 9.6, right? Or use 2.4, which is in delta mode. You can even go to 1.2, and because we use a square wave, we're creating harmonics. And these harmonics fit into the sacred geometry of things if you're willing to look at esoteric stuff and Phythagorean math, and geometry, and stuff…
Ben: Yeah, dude. I've delved into that stuff. I went to like a crystal bowl healing session back in Vermont. Super-duper interesting stuff. Like you can literally, kinda like holotropic breathwork, like you can go to a whole different place mentally just going through one of those crystal bowl sessions. I've also done one of those deals where they do, it's not a didgeridoo, or maybe it is a didgeridoo, but where they just like blow this thing all around you. You just get immersed and blasted with sound waves. It's pretty crazy what some of these waves can do.
And I've experimented, I actually haven't talked about this on a podcast before, but I've even experimented with that sacred geometry stuff you're talking about, and I have to admit I did not like that. I had, you familiar with like a DHT dump where your body just releases a bunch of the same stuff you'd release if you were on an ayahuasca trip? I was not ready for that. I put these sacred geometry, they're like, basically, for people listening in, and I know that this is kind of a complete rabbit hole, but I put these posters under the bed and on the wall, and I really did not know what I was doing. It was kinda like doing ayahuasca if you don't know what you're doing, and I just had horrible like lucid dreams. Really, really bad lucid dreams.
And I eventually, I got rid of them, and then I did research later on and found out that what typically happens is you go through like this period of time where you have this DHT dump, and then eventually the nightmares and stuff go away as you almost like detox your brain. But that's stuff is super intriguing. I've had to be kind of careful talking about it too much on the podcast 'cause I get called out all the time whenever I start to bring up this stuff that doesn't have a lot of peer-reviewed research behind it.
But man, it's really interesting, like healing bowls, healing sounds, sacred geometry. Like obviously we could do a whole different podcast on that, and maybe we will. But in the meantime, Paul, thanks for coming on the show, man.
Paul: Hey. Do you wanna do a coupon?
Ben: Like a coupon for folks to get the EarthPulse?
Paul: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah, man! What can you do for us?
Paul: The basics, they'll lean toward the basics, consider that sort of on discount already. So 15% for the month.
Ben: Seriously? Yeah, dude. Let's do it. Fifteen percent until the end of, well this podcast, for people listening in, this podcast is released on February 27th. How long do you wanna make coupon available for?
Paul: ‘Til March 31st.
Ben: Okay. What's the code? You tell me and I'll put it in the show notes for folks and announce it right here.
Paul: gfitness.
Ben: Bgfitness?
Paul: Bgfitness.
Ben: Bgfitness. This is good podcasting right here folks. We're actually making up discount codes for you as you listen in. So BG Fitness gets 15% off on EarthPulse, if you get it between February 27th and March 31st 2016. Is that correct?
Paul: Yeah. Lower case. Lower case 'cause I think it's case sensitive.
Ben: Okay. Lower case, bgfitness. That's actually really good deal. Sweet. Dude, thank you! That's awesome! And I'll put all this on the show notes too and the link, but bgfitness, folks, 15% off. That's actually really good deal. Cool. The show notes are at bengreenfieldfitness.com/earthpulsepodcast if you wanna check this thing out, or get 15% off of it, or just delve into the research, or go leave me a nasty message about my woo woo talk of sacred geometry.
Paul: Or mine.
Ben: Yeah. Either way though, if you do leave a comment, either Paul or I will jump in and reply. And, Paul, thanks for your time today and for coming on the show, man.
Paul: Hey, thanks for having me again. It was fun.
Ben: Alright, folks. So this is Ben Greenfield and Paul Becker signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com. Have a healthy week.
You’ve been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Go to bengreenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.
Last week, I introduced you to a little device you put on your collarbone to help you with sleep. The device uses something called “PEMF”.
But I’ve actually been digging into PEMF for quite some time.
As a matter of fact, it was three years ago that an inventor named Paul Becker joined me for a podcast entitled “How Something Called Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy Can Make You Sleep Like A Baby (And Do Much More Than That)“. In it, Paul talks about a special “PEMF” device called “The EarthPulse“.
I also mention my own use of this little doughnut-shaped magnetic device for enhancing sleep in the sleep-hacking chapters of my book Beyond Training and also in the recent article 5 Biohacks To Beat Insomia, Sleep Better On Airplanes, And Shut Down Stress.
Today Paul’s back.
But he’s not here to fill us in on how PEMF can make us sleep better.
Instead, we’re going to talk about the legal performance enhancing effects of PEMF, and exactly how to use something like The EarthPulse for way more than sleep.
During this episode, you’ll discover:
-How electrical stimulation can be used to kill bacteria and viruses…
-How to triple your mitochondrial density while you are sleeping…
-Why earthing, grounding and sleeping outside on the earth is much different than use of a PEMF device…
-Why the PEMF emitted by a device is different than what is emitted from a cell phone…
-The correct way to use PEMF to increase rate of tissue repair…
-How PEMF affects the nervous system and HRV…
-And much more…
Resources from this episode:
–Athletic Performance Enhancement results with EarthPulse
–Information on specific harmonics in Earthpulse
–Sensitivity to electrical stimulation of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 and MAGIC-5 cells
–David Hood (1989) 10 Hz triples 2 key enzymes responsible for oxygen metabolism
–NASA / Goodwin (2003) 4x Tissue Regeneration and Epigenetic Effects of 10 Hz PEMF
–James Tong (2007) 10 Hz Triples Nerve Synapse Energy & Doubles Mitochondrial Density
Do you have questions, comments or feedback for Paul or me? Leave your thoughts below, and click here to learn more about the EarthPulse PEMF machine, or to get one for yourself now (use coupon code “bgfitness” to save 15% anytime between February 27 and March 31, 2016).