Barbell Shrugged - 128- Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health, and Life w/ Ben Greenfield

Episode Date: July 6, 2014

This week on Barbell Shrugged we chat with Ben Greenfield, former tennis player, water polo athlete, and bodybuilder turned biohacking ironman, endurance coach, author, blogger, and podcaster. That��s quite the resume, right?  Ben’s got plenty of interesting things to say, which is no surprise given his experience and wide-ranging creative pursuits. He can certainly talk training and human performance with the very best, but it was his perspective on general health that grabbed my attention initially.  Ben is the author of the excellent book Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health, & Life, which is amusing, because as he will tell you devoting huge chunks of time to sitting in front of a keyboard and writing extensively about health is one of the absolute unhealthiest things you can do. Extended promotional book tours and frequent promotional travel are certainly no better.  That’s bad, but did you know that intense exercise can be worse in many ways? As Ben will tell you, competitive athlete’s and WOD junkies don’t typically worry about metabolic dysfunction or obesity risk, but they are often chronically inflamed, their hormonal levels are usually disturbed, and their markers of immune system strength and circulatory function are typically far more out of whack than those of the “out-of-shape” general population.  This is not meant to discourage anyone. It’s just a warning. If you’re willing to do the work that it takes to be an amazing athlete, then do it! There’s no question that it’s worth it. Just take the lesson from an awesome coach who’s seen it all. More is not better.  If you want to both perform better and enjoy a high quality of life and health, then be willing to go above and beyond. Get your data. Monitor all key biomarkers very closely so that you can keep that high performance, meat powered hot-rod of yours tuned-up and running on all cylinders. Get as much information as you can, find your problems early, then act long-before your body begins to show those inevitable signs of wear and tear.  As cool as performance might be we don’t want to sacrifice out health and well being for it. We don’t want the wear and tear. But luckily there are some pretty quick and easy fixes, starting with making your living conditions as natural as possible.   Work and writing are great, but you really should be standing as often as possible. Move more. Stop what you’re doing for just a few minutes and go find something heavy to lift. Even a quick break for a few fast repetitions can work wonders.  When it’s time to train, train very hard, but do not beat yourself up with exercise. Go for the minimum effective dose that’s required for you to make progress. Afterward, get the rest and recovery you require, and for crissakes, eat plenty of real, nutrient dense food. If you’re into supplements, Ben’s list is a pretty damn good one. For those pushing the endurance limits, d-ribose can be great for supporting ATP production. An essential amino acids supplement, MCT and caffeine right from a proper cup of coffee also go a long way towards supporting optimal performance.  If you’re feeling sore and knotted up after you put the barbell down, then invest in some soft-tissue massage, or at the very least, make time to roll around on a foam roller hard a few times per week. Your beat-up and agitated muscle fascia and on edge nervous system will reward you generously with improved function and recovery. You might also consider monitoring your Heart Rate Variability (HRV), which as we learned withJoel Jamison on episode 120 of the podcast, is a tremendous way to keep tabs on your accumulating stress levels and choose the optimal time to train.  Yeah, training can be tough. But we can still push the limits and live awesome, pain free, healthy lives. It just takes some additional work, that’s all. A bit thanks to Ben for sharing his perspective.  For more great information from Ben Greenfield, make sure you check out his website atBenGreenfieldFitness.com. You can also find more great content and training tips on his YouTube channel, as well as on Twitter and Facebook.  Cheers,Chris Moore

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we talk to Ben Greenfield and learn how to use cutting edge techniques to transform your body, achieve your physical goals, and become superhuman. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson. We're down at Paleo FX in Austin, Texas. Big convention of experts that specialize in nutrition, training, and all sorts of other things. We're standing here with Ben Greenfield. You're a former bodybuilder, now endurance athlete. You've written some books. You've got a fantastic blog and a podcast.

So I think we'll be talking about your book a little bit today. Yeah, man, for sure. You signed it for Doug. I signed it. You feel so special. He was like, oh my God, Mike. He came up running. He actually skipped up to me, big smile, and said, Ben, sign this for me.

It's a very neat signature. It's very scribbly. It's not sloppy at all. No, no, no, no. Very legible. It's pretty close to my actual handwriting. I've got chicken scratch. Proof. He signed it. That's what happens when you write with a keyboard 90% of the time.

Dude, if I start writing with a pen or a pencil, by the time I get to my last name, on a form, my hand starts cramping. I forgot cursive so long ago. So can you give us a little bit of a history, your athletic history, any history at all, your education, whatever you want to tell us about. I was a collegiate tennis player and then got into bodybuilding after that. And, you know, I've always been a sports nut. So I played middle for the men's volleyball team,

played a whole set for the water polo team. Ooh, water polo, nasty sport. Rocks, though. Yeah. It's fun. It's fun. And then I got into triathlon. You know, I was an exercise science major in college

and got a master's degree in exercise physiology and human biomechanics. And, uh, you know, just because of that, you're constantly surrounded by, by sports and exercise. And so, you know, I've been at it for a long time. And once I graduated, uh, open a bunch of personal training gyms and studios and started getting into Ironman triathlon, pretty hardcore raced, uh, Hawaii Ironman world championships five times and did uh five other ironmans and 75 other triathlons around the world and um you know now i'm kind of getting into obstacle racing but okay about six years ago when my kids were born i i sold all my all my gym equipment all my studios and now i do uh i do online consulting. Uh, I write books like that when we have there and a blog and podcast.

How many books do you have? Uh, 14. So. Holy shit. I was thinking you were going to say like three. Big ones like that. It's like a 600 page book. Mm.

They're not all as big as that. And a lot of, a lot of my products are like, uh, they're like online products where you'll buy like, say like a triathlon training product and it's a collection of audios and videos and a training plan or i've got like a what's called the superhuman package which is you know 14 cds that are just you know performance and digestion and fat loss and stuff like that so some of the stuff aren't traditional you know book books but right something that doesn't take you as long as that took to make yeah that's a chore. Big, traditional printed books are tough. Like they say, one of the unhealthiest things you can do is write a book on health, right? I didn't know they said that, but yeah.

I've heard that a lot of times from authors in the health industry who go on book tour and spend their life on an airplane after they publish a book. The promoting of the book. Maybe not the writing of the book is so bad for your health it's a lot of people are writing too a lot of people get a deadline they just you know they freak out once that thing gets set in stone and it becomes very stressful so yeah were you a guy if you had a year to write a book or six months to write a book you wait until two months left and then you just crush the whole thing or are you pretty good about like chipping away i am a complete two shitty pages a day kind of guy. When do the good pages happen?

Yeah. Well, that's kind of the idea with that philosophy is the pages eventually become better and you go back. Like I'll publish a blog post, for example. And I think a lot of times my audience doesn't know this, but I'll go back five times and revise it. Like as I publish it and add research or fix typos. I've heard that before. You don't write a good book. book you rewrite a good book yeah seth godin's one of my favorite motivational authors and he's all about he's just like ship your product once it's ready ship it and it's never going to be perfect but you know get the thing out there and then you

know fix it as you go yeah that probably put out a 2.0 later yeah that holds a lot of people back especially well you know if you do e or something, that makes it even easier. Yeah, and it depends, too, on your product. If you're selling hip implants, you probably wouldn't want to do that. It'll be fine. Yeah, just get it out there. We don't need to test that any further. That's good.

So I was flipping through your book, and the preface of the book, you ask a question, is exercise unhealthy? And I haven't read it yet, so what's that all about? Well, we have so many people out there who are, you know, everything from weekend warriors to CrossFitters to Spartan racers to triathletes and marathoners. And the prevailing thought in fitness is still that exercise is healthy when in fact, you know, I, one of the things that I do is I look at the blood work and the biomarkers of athletes every single week. So I work as a consultant for a company called Wellness FX. And so what I look at are things like HSCRP inflammatory markers, testosterone, cortisol, sex hormone binding globulin, thyroid stimulating hormone, white blood cell count and immune system strength, hemoglobin, iron, ferritin.

There's all these parameters that are more out of whack in the athletic community than many times in the general population. So it's like athletes, they don't have to deal with cardiometabolic risk factors in many cases, like, you know, whatever, like super duper high body fat or insulin insensitivity from really surging blood glucose values. But there are a ton of hormonal and inflammatory parameters that truly make exercise unhealthy for many people and there are a lot of folks you know especially in our community people who are maybe kind of pushing things to the next level you're talking about maybe athletes that are pushing their performance yeah not just that i mean pretty much like people who are above and beyond zumba you know like there are there are folks who aren't

interested in in crossfit or triathlon or anything like that at all, who just go to the gym for an hour a day and they do stuff wrong. You know, they, they don't incorporate a lot of the recovery biohacks and, you know, nutrition and supplement type of things I talk about in the book. And they really are probably doing themselves less of a favor with exercise compared to them maybe using a standing workstation all day long so by the way i love that we're standing while we're podcasting right now that's cool yeah that's what i do at home and if i sit for longer than like an hour uh it adds 10 minutes to my warm-up when i gotta go exactly and that's that's related to this whole concept i talk about in the book about how to fix

this issue is really approaching things from an ancestral standpoint right you try and tweak your work environment and your your play environment your home environment so that you are in hunter gatherer mode all day whether it's like the pull-up bar installed in the door of your office or something heavy you can go out to your garage or your backyard and lift a few times a day the standing workstation or the moving workstation and then exercise is just the icing on the cake sounds like you're a big fan of like keeping your activity level up throughout the day. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Not like high volume stuff. It's not like you got to go out and push, you know, a 10 K run or anything like that. You're talking about just doing really simple to raise your, elevate your heart rate a little bit.

Exactly. So like when I do Ironman, you know, I I'll do Ironman between nine and 10 hours, but I only train eight to 10 hours a week. And most of my peers are out there for 20 to 30 hours a week because they have this approach that you, you exercise, you beat yourself up with exercise. You don't recover properly. You eat nutrient dense or nutrients, nutrient undense foods. I'm going to make up that word right on the spot. Calorie dense foods. Foods that are poor in nutrient density. And, um, and then you continue to just beat up your body with exercise without pulling out a lot of these things, you know, that I talk about in the book, you know, everything from cold thermogenesis to curcumin. I mean, there's so many different things that you can do to enhance recovery or to tweak your environment, to exercise less. And it's just a matter of kind of systematizing it and learning it. And, um,

you know, what I want to do is create kind of a cookbook for folks to be able to do that. What do you think is the, one of the most common mistakes people are making when they're approaching exercise that are kind of putting them in a dangerous zone when they exercise? Probably, uh, two of the biggest things are fascia and nervous system. So from a fascial standpoint, I mean, I'm sure you guys have probably talked about it before on your show, just the issue with cross-linking and fascial adhesions and so many people, you know, pulling that rope tight when it already has knots in it, you know, and, and that's a, that's a big big issue especially considering that um the integrity

of your fascia is is is pretty um pretty correlative to your ability to produce neurotransmitters and so a lot of times you can get things like depression and brain fog and inability to sleep that go hand in hand with these fascial adhesions so how would you how would you fix that problem well that type of problem i mean it kind depends, but you can look at everything from Graston technique to a lot of the stuff that Kelly Starrett talks about and his Becoming a Supple Leopard book. I mean, the way that I do it is I have a rumble roller and I hit it on Tuesdays and Fridays for about 20 minutes.

And then it's usually a pretty comprehensive deep tissue massage about once a month for around 60 to 90 minutes. But I stay on top of that. That's a system every single week. I keep a golf ball underneath my desk. And so when I'm standing around working, I'll roll that thing underneath one foot and transfer it to the other foot. So there's some, some element of deep tissue work, um, each week. And then from a nervous system standpoint, um, tracking sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system integrity is super duper important.

And in the age of heart rate variability and the ability to track that very, very easily via a wide variety of apps and sensors. Yeah. I heard about HRV for the first time, maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago. And then now it seems like everybody's talking about it, not just fitness, but like people who want to be more productive and as a maybe a business executive or something yeah exactly everybody's talking about it but you know i'd so here's the deal i mean you have to you have to quantify if you're going to use it and you have to get to know your nervous system so i have some athletes who if we test say heart rate variability and we look at sympathetic nervous system strength, which is essentially... Could you explain sympathetic versus parasympathetic for the folks at home?

Yeah, you've got your sympathetic fight-or-flight-based nervous system and your parasympathetic rest-or-digest-based nervous system. Both those elements of the nervous system feed into your heart's electrical pathway via something called your vagus nerve. And so what that means is if you measure the amount of time between each heartbeat, you can actually see how well both the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system are feeding into your cardiovascular function. So it's a really, really cool way to be able to quantify. It's one of the most important markers that you can take. And one of the most convenient ones you can take compared to doing like a, like whatever, like a blood testosterone, you know, evaluation every morning. This would quantify the stress level in your life. So this would quantify stress from aerobic overtraining. It would quantify stress from anaerobic overtraining, but it would depend

on, on what you look at. And that's what I don't like honestly about, about some of these heart rate variability apps or tools is they'll just say, anyone you want to call out? No, I'm just kidding. No. no and and a lot of them have the ability to be able to give more information people just don't really know how to delve into that that aspect of the app some training involved there yeah like i use one called a sweet beat app and it's kind of based off that green yellow red you know yeah you're stressed out you should be careful today you're not stressed out but i mean if you if you flip one of the screens and they're over and it goes into, you know, what I call geek mode, it'll show you what's

called your low frequency and your high frequency score. And the high frequency score is the strength of your parasympathetic rest and digest nervous system, which if low would indicate that you've over-trained yourself aerobically and your low frequency score would be the strength of your, of your sympathetic nervous system, which if low would indicate that maybe you've done too much anaerobic training. That's likely for me. I'm never going to overtrain aerobically. Yeah, so it's one thing to see, okay, my heart rate variability is low, I'm stressed out. It's another thing to know, okay, here's why I'm stressed out.

I ran too far, I did too much low-level training, or I'm good to go. I can go for a swim or yoga or something aerobic today, but my sympathetic nervous system needs a break. Do you think maybe, uh, in, in that context, if someone's a CrossFitter, could that decide whether they're going to do strength training today versus an aerobic session? Exactly. And so this, this starts to come down to genetics. I mean, do you, do you come from a maybe a maybe a more fragile genetic heritage um maybe you know kind of like a um a gatherer farmer kind of culture do you come from more of a hunter warrior background in terms of your genetic heritage and how many times can you get thrown across against the wall before you crack and so some people say like a crossfitter they'll

be able to go to battle every day there are some people that can do that and I'll look at their heart rate variability scores and their sympathetic nervous system, you know, 24 hours, boom, ready to go, ready to go. And you know, that, that's just the way that some folks are hardwired and then other people can handle to say CrossFit sessions a week. And that's all their sympathetic nervous system can take. And everything else is, you know, fascial work, yoga, low level, you know, like fasted morning, aerobic is, you know, fascial work, yoga, low level, you know, like fasted morning aerobic workouts, you know, easy swims, stuff like that. So, um, that's, that's another really important variable in addition to, you know, paying attention to your fascial integrity is this whole nervous system component and being able

to track it. So, you know what your body can handle, cause it's not going to be the same. I mean, if you're following whatever, you know, the wads, um, and you're just doing what it says every day, then, you know, it's not really customized to you. So, so you train any CrossFit athletes or you just consulting with them on this type of thing? Most of the work that I do with CrossFitters is via blood and biomarkers. So looking at what's going on inside the body and then, um, do you do that via wellness FX or is that separate? Well, I do both. I, some people will not go through wellness FX and some people will go to, to a wholesale lab

testing company like direct labs, for example, where you'll get a test and they'll send you a PDF with your scores and folks will hire me via my website to do a consult with them and go through their, go through their, their markers. And then other times I'll go through wellness FX, but, um, I'm doing a lot more one-off consulting with folks like phone calls with people than I am coaching. I only coach 12 athletes right now. Um, and most of them are doing, um, like triathlons, marathons. Um, a couple of them are not really doing anything except just wanting to, you know, look good naked and kind of be fit and feel good and live a long time. So earlier you said that you train only about 10 hours a week and most traditional Ironman athletes train maybe two or three or four times as much as you. So how is your training different than those guys? Uh, there's, there's a few different, different components of my training. One,

we already talked about, I've got low level physical intensity worked in throughout the entire day. And I don't count six hours of standing during the day as exercise, but I am using all those tiny feet and hip and core muscles that if I go for a run at the end of the day, allow me to run at a high intensity for 20 minutes versus going out and having to throw down, you know, two hours or three hours to get that, that time on the feet, so to speak. I use a lot of high intensity interval training. And I talk about this in my book, how when you look at upregulating mitochondrial biogenesis, which is the density of your mitochondria, the powerhouses of your cells that allow you to produce ATP, there's really two different ways to skin that cat. One is via

high intensity interval training that's going to upregulate what's called your amp K pathway and allow for you to, you to produce more mitochondria via that method. The other is via what's called polarized training, which is kind of an 80, 20 approach. And you see a lot of elite like Kenyan marathoners and Tour de France cyclists and folks like this using this approach to training, which is 80% of what you do is very low level intensity at a heart rate that's right around 180 minus your age so you know i'm 32 so i'd be going at at a heart rate of around 148 for something like that which for me that's breathing easy that's a conversational pace and then 20 is all out extremely hard and there is no gray zone no middle zone so if you're using that 80 20 approach

and you're a pro athlete with a ton of time, that's actually a pretty good way to train. And ultimately, if you're not going to use a minimalist training approach, you can get really good results with that. I use the complete opposite approach. I use very low level physical intensity, very, very low level, just by standing workstations and things of that nature. And then I do brief spurts of high intensity interval training typically at the end of each day. So between about four and 6 PM when central nervous system activity is peaked, when body temp is peaked, when protein synthesis post-workout will peak, when I am going to be eating more carbs, for example, with dinner anyways. So I time the workout in that window, do something very brief and intense.

So you're using HRV not just to decide whether to go hard that day or not, but also to what time of the day to train? Yep, exactly. Exactly. And there are... So you're wearing a heart rate monitor all day, every day? Well, they've got a patch now. It's in beta testing, and I'm one of their beta testers for a company called Vital Connect that has a patch now that you can just wear during the entire day. Yeah. has a patch now that you can just wear during the entire day. But what I'll do or what folks

can do right now is just a Bluetooth heart rate monitor that, that, that speaks straight to an app. Um, now as far as the, uh, the, um, the, the training component goes, there was one other thing I was going to say until you totally derailed me, Mike. That's what we do here. Anyways, I was going somewhere, but I don't remember the last thing I was going to say. Doug, can you remember? Can you save us? I don't remember where you were going with that. Maybe while we're thinking of it. One of those run on deals. Yeah. While we're thinking of it, what's an example of what your high intensity workouts look like? Like specifically. So, for example, a treadmill workout for me at the end of a day of time spent on my feet would be a 10 by 30 second sprint on the treadmill.

10 miles per hour, 10% incline, stepping off the treadmill for about 60 seconds and just, you know, walking the gym in between each and then coming back. um another example would be some real brief high intensity rounds like in my backyard where it's like kettlebell swing to jump rope to to ab rollouts to suspension trainer single leg squats just boom boom boom a few times through but typically some kind of a cardio burst like a swing thrown into some some slightly lower intensity sets to allow for recovery of the cardiovascular system and then back in. And then in the off season, both myself and a lot of the athletes I work with, we'll use a lot more kind of super slow restorative training where we're still getting a lot of peripheral resistance and peripheral blood flow feeding back to the heart. So we maintain a lot of cardiovascular integrity, but it's kind of like a Doug McGuff body by science type of protocol where it's super slow, you know, uh, five to six

sets, 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down, you're getting 120 to 180 seconds of time under tension, but at a very low intensity. And I'll use that a lot with folks who are either just coming to me, kind of getting back into exercise or starting into a routine or for somebody in the kind of needs a break in the off season, but for when we still want to maintain some strength. So is that kind of more towards, uh, looking at connective tissue there, like reducing injuries and stuff like that? Yeah, exactly. Um, kind of, kind of low impact. And also that type of training isn't that hard on the nervous system really. Um, it's, it's, um, so for example, like if I'll put on

my heart rate variability app and do a barbell squat, um, that when you look at heart rate variability score lower is worse. If you're looking at it from like a stress standpoint and a barbell squat is, is one of the lowest I've ever seen. You know, I compare that to a sprint and I'm still lower doing a, doing a squat in the gym, but doing this super slow kind of focused deep nasal breathing kind of, kind of work on, you know, like a machine, for example, um, that's pretty easy on the nervous system and it allows you to get some restorative exercise in. It's also pretty good if you've got, let's say, um, let's say like a CrossFitter who wants to get multiple resistance training sessions in during

the week, uh, get stronger, maintain maintain muscle mass but can't handle doing it all through via crossfit that's where you could take somebody like that and experiment with say like you know two wads a week combined with two super slow training sessions per week in a low impact manner yeah i had joel jameson he uh kind of recommends that for a lot of fighters too yeah uh and he's he's tracking hrv a lot too and he kind of is a bigger fan of the tempo stuff i think yeah i wish more people would get into uh and i talked about this a little bit in my talk the other day i wish more people would get into the water too because you can combine uh cold thermogenesis hypoxia and then low impact training and you can get a ton of benefit in the water with

something like that i mean like i was out in barton springs pool this morning so that was i think it was probably about 55 60 degrees in in that pool. So cold enough for some cold thermogenesis. That is cold enough. Shutting down some inflammatory cytokines. You know, I was in there for about 30 minutes. I did a lot of hypoxic sets, which means you're swimming underwater. You don't have to be, you don't have to be Michael Phelps snow to swim underwater, but you just do about 10 sets where you're going as long as you can on, on one breath. So that hypoxic training has a really good growth hormone boosting effect. The cold thermogenesis is really good for shutting down inflammation.

And then of course you're also just getting the low impact movement. So I think more people should tap into water. Exercising and healing. Yeah, exactly. So like I'm, I'm a big fan of water. I'm,

I'm building a house right now up in Washington and, and I've kind of got like my own little man cave next to the house, and I'm putting basically a little cold pool in there that's got one of those. It's like an endless pool where you can swim, but I'll be able to get in there and do hypoxic sets, get the cold thermogenesis. And for me, it's important enough to where I'm actually investing in one of those for my house versus buying a nice treadmill or something like that. So, wow. One of the other interesting chapters I saw in your book was to 21 ways to hack your brain. Maybe touch on just a few of those. Like what are your favorite brain hacks?

Yeah, I guess we could talk about like stacks. So, um, you know, nootropics or things that you want to, uh, want to start off a day with. Um a day with. There's probably, let's do three. I'm a big fan of Chinese adaptogenic herbs. There are blends out there. And, you know, you're looking at things like Eleuthero, Ashwagandha, Rhodiola, Vimposatine, Hooperzine, or Club Moss derivative. And've got companies you know like on it putting a lot of these things into their brain supplements I use one called tea and chi which is just like a powdered adaptogen that I'll dump into a glass of water kind of mid-morning on an empty stomach I like those because you get a combination of improving cerebral vascular flow you get some neuronal effect from some of the some of the neurotropics in there, like Hooper's aim, but then you also get the restorative adrenal effect when you use something like that. So for an athlete, you're killing two birds with one stone. So you're helping to produce more cortisol. If cortisol is too low, less, if it's too high and then getting the neurotropic effect.

Um, another one I really like is combining caffeine and L-theanine, especially for like afternoon doses of caffeine, because L-theanine helps to balance out some of the, some of the, uh, the anti-sleep effects that caffeine can have. And something that I've been combining that with in the morning is creatine, just about five grams of creatine, which is a nice nootropic, but also obviously has some really good research proven performance enhancing effects. Um, and then a stack, like if you just really i mean if if you've got a day you know like maybe paleo effects where you're just like going all day never stopping um paracetam aniracetam and alpha gpc is a pretty good combo so you can go to a website like peak

nootropics and get the stuff bulk um usually a two to one ratio of paracetam to aniracetam and then you throw in about 500 milligrams of alpha GPC cause you'll turn over choline in your brain. Super duper fast. Once you start into paracetam, you have to supplement with choline. You could use like, yeah,

you could use an alpha GPC as a choline derivative. So you could use walnuts or krill oil or something like that. But about 500 milligrams of alpha GPC works really well. And you can literally just like dump all that onto a digital spoon, dump it in your mouth, hold it for 90 seconds, chase it with a glass of water. And, um, you'll be rolling strong for about 12 hours or so. So if you're a CrossFitter and you're eating, you know, three to six eggs every day, you get enough choline from egg yolks. You're going to get a pretty decent dose of choline from that. Um, and you know, I've tried this with walnuts. I've tried it with eggs. I've tried it with krill oil, you know, for a phosphatidylcholine source. Um, I'm alpha GPC

is expensive, but you do notice a difference once you use that stuff versus like a food-based source of choline. So when you say a difference, can you, that's kind of an abstract term. What does that mean? It lasts longer. And I suspect it's because the choline from food sources is simply, you know, it's, it's like, you know know an apple has whatever 15 milligrams of vitamin c and you could also you know get five grams or 5 000 milligrams from a you know whole foods vitamin c source so it's it's just dumping a concentrated form of choline into your body i suspect that's where the difference is there might be some bioavailability differences between you know alpha gpc and choline from eggs but i'm not sure about that i've been i forget who i was talking to i was

talking to somebody that was pretty knowledgeable and they said that the eggs just weren't gonna cut it you have to almost supplement if you're gonna use an erastatam yeah so yeah that's that's all here so i mean like i've tried the whole food stuff like i have tried handfuls of walnuts and eggs and i've tried you know the krill oil and i mean that the alpha gpc works pretty well that um that tea and cheese stuff i talked about the chinese adaptogenic herb blend that has something called cytokoline in it which is a it's a it's a different form of the choline molecule and cytokoline if you can find something that has that and it works pretty well too in addition to something like alpha gpc cool uh let's take a break real quick when we come back we can talk

about uh performance supplements too this is andrea agar and you're listening to barbell shrug for the video version go to barbell shrug.com barbell shrug is brought to you by you to learn more about how you can support the show go to barbell shrug.com and sign up for the newsletter. And we're back with Ben Greenfield. We just, uh, finished up talking or kind of went over a few things for mental performance supplementation. Uh, what do you do for your, uh, physical performance supplementation? Oh, for physical performance, it, you know, it depends on the day. So, you know, I, I do a lot, especially for endurance performance with ketosis, which means that you are trying to drive primarily fatty acids through your Krebs cycle and producing ketones as a byproduct of that. And the cool thing is that ketones are a preferred form of fuel for the heart, for the diaphragm. So you're using a lot of these endurance-based muscles and giving them the fuel that they want.

And it's also a very, very stable source of fuel for the brain. So there's a little bit of a mental acuity and mental focus enhancing effect for something like that. The issue with doing that, though, is a lot of times when you are generating ATP through the oxidation of fat, you generate ATP at a little bit slower rate than you would if you were oxidizing carbs or glucose. So this is where micronutrients and smart supplementation can come in handy to give you a little bit of an advantage from that respect. One thing you should do is consider restoring either the precursors for ATP or else ATP itself so that you're generating ATP exogenously at a more rapid rate. I'm a fan, if you're going to do like a low carb, high intensity type of session for something like that

of a D-ribose, which works really, really well as an ATP precursor. And then you can also use something like disodium ATP, which you can buy in supplemental form and use that prior to a high intensity, low carb or high intensity fasted workout. A couple of other things that work really well in conjunction with that is about five to 10 grams of amino acids to stave off central nervous system fatigue. And branched chain amino acids like leucine and isoleucine and valine, those are going to feed directly into the Krebs cycle and actually be a decent source of energy. Whereas some of the other essential amino acids that you would get from an essential amino acid supplement, not a branch chain amino acid supplement, but basically it'd be an EAA versus

a BCAA type of supplement. Those are going to help a little bit more with staving off a breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue during like a fasted or, or a low carb type of workout session. So amino acids, D ribose, disodium ATP, um, caffeine can help a little bit with mobilization of fatty acid stores. So something like a, like a green tea or a caffeine source can be helpful. Um, and those are, those are a few of the things that work pretty well for something like endurance. I guess the last thing would just be straight up MCTs, like using an MCT oil. Caprylic acid is another good source of MCTs. Coconut oil is a less expensive source of MCTs. But the reason I say

MCTs is because those are driven past digestion and into the muscle for use as a tissue pretty favorably. If carbohydrates are absent, carbohydrates aren't absent, that won't happen. You know, if you do whatever a bulletproof coffee with a scone, you're pretty much negating all the effects of like a bulletproof coffee. I tried to get,

uh, some, some folks a while back. Uh, I was, these were not a fitness oriented people. Yeah. We were,

I was introduced into the bulletproof coffee and they started pouring sugar. Yeah. And there's, I was like, you're ruining it., and they started pouring sugar in theirs. I was like, you're ruining it. The whole idea is that you'd have just that. And then they were like, no, but it tastes better this way. I tried to explain the benefits of not having the sugar, and it didn't go over too well. The presence of exogenous carbohydrates completely negates the entry of MCTs into that Krebs cycle.

So you just shove it down the hatch. That would be for endurance, but there's strength stuff too. I'm a big fan of beta-alanine, L-carnitine, like I mentioned, just a straight up five grams of creatine on a daily basis. There's another one

that flies under the radar called oxaloacetate, which upregulates the conversion of lactic acid into glucose in the liver via something called the Corey cycle. And so that, that actually works well. Also, if you're going to do a high intensity interval training session in a, in a facet or a low carb state, but it works well for, for performance hacking as well. That's called oxaloacetate. Um, an example of something that you'd find that in would be you know we just talked about bulletproof coffee and um not not to kiss up to dave asprey too much but like he's got

a upgraded anti-aging i think it's called anti-aging product and that's got oxaloacetate in it for example um and you can also get it in supplemental form you know from from amazon part of his glutathione type or something different no No, it's different than glutathione. So I was wondering maybe he put that ingredient in his glutathione product. I don't know. I'm pretty sure it's not in there. I don't, I don't know if there would be any absorptibility issues if you mixed oxalacetate with glutathione, but it's, it's not in combination and if his products I don't know of. So, so the oxalacetate helps convert lactate back into glucose. So it, it basically helps kind of like beta alanine. It helps decrease muscular acidity so you can keep training harder for longer. Yeah. More or less. It's not going to speed up buffering of

lactic acid per se, but if you're buffering lactic acid well, which is why combining this with something like beta alanine is a good idea. then what you're going to do is take that lactic acid and convert it back into glucose. I haven't seen any studies on that, but I've never looked. Do you know any studies on that that you could cite that you know specifically what they use or how much they use? Not the titles of the study, but basically it has to do with restoration of NADH. And so, um, what you'd want to do is use a search term like oxaloacetate NADH on PubMed, and you'd be able to find some of this stuff. This originally, uh, was something that was used as an anti-aging kind of hack out of the, the, uh, Silicon Valley Longevity Institute, anti-aging folks over there.

I found out about it over at Dave Asprey's Bulletproof Conference, started using it in athletes and then, uh, you know, came across some, some good research showing its conversion. So it sounds like you're a proponent of, uh, like a ketogenic diet for endurance athletes. What about guys like, I mean, like, let's put it this way. If you're pretty serious and you want to like hack endurance to the max. Yeah. But I mean, like it's tough socially to, way. If you're pretty serious and you want to, like, hack endurance to the max, yeah. But, I mean, like, it's tough socially to pull off something like that, too. For mental biohacking, it also works really, really well. And, you know, this came up yesterday in our ketosis panel here at Paleo FX.

There may be some elevation of adrenaline during a high-intensity interval training and something like CrossFit as well if you're in a state of ketosis. But man, there are so many things you got to be careful with everything from thyroid dysregulation to, you know, low levels of blood glucose. So you get an absence of glycoprotein formation and your joints go to crap. I mean, like there's a lot of stuff you got to be careful with. So would you recommend a ketogenic diet to someone who's training three, two to three hours a day, CrossFit style type training? People who are training for competition. So we get, we get a lot of people that are training high volume, trying to follow a paleo style ketogenic diet.

And if you want, if you want every advantage possible and you're willing to eat a lot of organ meats, probably use something like a thyroid glandular. If you are going to be using some of the things I talked about, like MCT oils, D-ribose, disodium ATP, amino acids, you're willing to not go cyclic, which is going to throw you out of a lot of the benefits of fatty acid oxidation. So you can't have your cheat day on the weekend. And you're willing to stick with it for at least over six months. So you're getting a pretty big upregulation of mitochondrial biogenesis.

So you're actually churning out enough ATP from fatty acid oxidation. The answer is yes. The problem is most people aren't willing to kind of biohack to that extent. That takes a commitment. So most people probably shouldn't. Yeah. But I mean, if you're super serious and you want to do it, then go for it. But if, if you're just going to dabble with it, it's not worth it. Yeah. So six month commitment, no, no real cheap meals in there. Yeah. You gotta, I mean, you can have a cheat meal, but it could be like freaking,

you know, coconut ice cream, but not, but not like, but not like twice a week. Yeah. Yeah. How long? Well, I mean, once every two weeks or something, it depends. I mean, you, you can mix like, you know, caprylic acid and coconut milk and dark chocolate powder and some cinnamon, some stevia.

I mean, you can make good stuff and be ketosis, but you gotta be careful when you, you know, walk into an Italian restaurant. So yeah, most people aren't going to be able to pull that off. Yeah.

So if, especially here at paleo effects with all our paleo cookies, that's right. They're everywhere and they're delicious those cavemen man they've made some killer cookies back in the day but i was gonna say you have another another section of your book where you talk about lifestyle and i like i like all the the title chapters in your book they're they're very good headlines and they're all they're all very catchy you had one on in there about um like the the hidden killers

in your home or something like that like i know you got to go here pretty quick. Give us like your favorite killer in your home, whatever the hell that means. My favorite killer or my, or my, or my, uh, least favorite killer. Um, I mean, my, my home's kind of, kind of a biohacks to decrease a lot of, uh, a lot of things like EMF molds, toxins, things of that of that nature you know we use all organic cleaning chemicals and personal care products stuff like that um one of the things that we have in every outlet of our home is a dirty electricity filter to filter off electrical pollution just because of electrical surges that can happen as power kind of travels back to the substations i know you said in your talk you're talking about people having laptops on their like around their lap they

have like protective padding between between your laptop and your exactly so i use i have kids i use something called i use a hera pad for that the problem is like i don't use that much because i don't usually sit down with my laptop in my lap but like if i'm at a conference and i have to be sitting there with my laptop taking notes or something that's what i have out um but when i'm at my standing workstation working i ground my laptop you can like go to less emf.com and you can get a grounding cable. It's like USB cable. You plug that in the other end goes into the, into the grounding outlet. So that's, that's the, that's the one you would get rid of through the dirty electricity filter. That's not the one I would get rid of first. Um, standing here looking at the, at the huge Austin skyline, just electricity

came to mind. but yeah i mean like that's that's a pretty good one and then if you live in an urban area a hepa air filter with a negative ion generator is a pretty good pick so and what's the benefit of that um the benefit of that is that you're mitigating the effect of a lot of the positive ions that you're that are going to be emitted from a high level of electricity in the home or the office. And then you're also decreasing a lot of like mold exposure, you know, cleaning chemicals, stuff like that, that are floating around in the air. So you kind of kill two birds with one stone with something like a HEPA air filter with a negative ion generator. Are you part of like the new, maybe it's not that new, but like the no poo movement, nobody's using shampoo anymore, putting chemicals

on their bodies. It seems to be building right now. I use soap about once every two days. So I'm mostly a water guy. And then I use Dr. Bronner's. Um, usually I'll use something like coconut oil as an antiperspirant. So I'm pretty basic when it comes to that stuff. Um, I'm married, but I still get laid. So I don't think I'm too stinky. Yeah. Even though she has to, she has the choice. Well, cool. Um, where can people find more information about you? Yeah. I got a blog at bengreenfieldfitness.com published like a lot, a lot of stuff. Tomorrow's article is on, uh, a bunch of alternatives to spending nine bucks on Viagra. Uh, if you still want to, want to get big in the bedroom and And then my new book that we kind of talked about just now is at beyondtrainingbook.com.

Excellent. Thanks for joining us. Cool. Thanks for having me on, guys. You bet. All right, guys, make sure to go to barbellstrug.com, sign up for the newsletter, and we'll notify you whenever we post one of these awesome podcasts.