Barbell Shrugged - Barbell Shrugged  — Total Human Optimization w/ Kyle Kingsbury  — 325

Episode Date: July 25, 2018

Kyle Kingsbury is Director of Human Optimization at @Onnit and host of The Onnit Podcast. He is also a retired professional mixed martial artist, who fought at @UFC six years, and a former football player (Arizona State). While fighting at the highest level, Kyle became fascinated with nutrition, performance, and recovery. Since his MMA retirement, his focus has shifted to learning more about longevity, plant medicines, and inner peace. In this episode, we learn about his life in the octagon, the process of stepping outside the ring, his focus on human optimization, research and development at Onnit, the future of performance training, and much more.   Enjoy! - Doug and Anders Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs_kingsbury ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please support our partners! @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20% @thrivemarket - www.thrivemarket.com/shrugged for a free 30 days trial and $60 in free groceries @OMAX - www.tryomax.com/shrugged and receive a free box of Omega 3 Fish Oils @Onnit - www.onnit.com/shrugged for a free 14 pill bottle of the leading nootropic Alpha Brain and 10% savings on all purchases. ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Shrugged family, we're back, hanging out with Kyle Kingsbury this week. Had an awesome weekend again. Can you believe this is two weekends in a row? The Shrugged fam is just killing it over here on the West Coast. Viviana and I got invited to Laird and Gabby Reese's house this past weekend to go through the XPT industry weekend to check out all the things that they're working on over at XPT right now. Pretty revolutionary stuff going on. It's very interesting. Probably for the last three years, I've been kind of really interested in what the next level of training is. I have been, after 10, 11 years in the CrossFit world, I needed to grow out of that and find out what else was out in the fitness

world. A lot of what transpired in that was just kind of breath work, performance training on a level that was probably not based in speed and intensity, but in quality of movement, mindset, presence, mindfulness, things along those lines and being a lot more internal with my performance than focusing on purely the external. And it's been really interesting because as I've siloed these kind of pieces like breath work, lifting weights, understanding the nervous system, going from sport into the muscles and strength training, and then into kind of the joints, tissues, ligaments, mobility, stability, pieces like that, and then getting into the nervous system. I kind of siloed this training out, and it's never really taken shape. 10, 11 years ago when I found CrossFit, there was these pieces of my life that I was kind of training but missing, which really led to CrossFit and why I was so deep in that world. Coming out of college, I was dying to find things together and created a new sport for me.

And that new sport exploded into what it is today. Not just not because of me, but it was I was just an early adopter in that sport. What I found this weekend at XPT is felt very similar to that. I've trained the nervous system. I've been in ice baths. I've been in saunas. I've learned about heat shock proteins. I've kind of been in this idea of how do we train but not get our body to go into this sympathetic response? How do we maintain a parasympathetic response even though we're under intense stress? And they're doing it. Laird and Gabby have literally created a program up there at their home in Malibu in which they are testing the limits of human potential and doing it in a manner in which the most relaxed, calmest person wins. how you can be underwater running with weights and telling your body that you're going to be okay. There's no oxygen, there's no air, there's no anything.

It's just you, the weights, and you talking to your body telling it it's going to be okay. You're going to get to the other end. You have enough oxygen already. And you really find that the mental barriers that we all deal with every single day, the physical barriers, we have more in the tank. Spending a week up with Gabby, who hands down is probably one of the best coaches I've ever seen in my life. There's nothing more impressive than kind of looking up at a pool to a 6'3", just savage that has the most calming voice and is giving you exactly what you need to get through whatever workout

and training piece that you're getting through. Fully aware that she is putting in the work and has put in the work and has gold medals to back it up and just somebody that just really embodies what it means to be a coach. I only probably spent two to three hours specifically being coached by her, but when you're in the presence of people that just command a room and demand that level of respect and presence when you're working with them, you know why they're the best in the world at what they do. And very, very impressive what transpired up at XPT this weekend. It was an experience that really kind of combined a lot of the things that I've been working

on personally and a lot of the beliefs that I had put together in my own life and things that I had been training, but nobody had ever, I had never seen it in such a full and complete package as I did. So if you guys are able to get to an XPT event, um, we will hopefully be working with them in the future. And I know Viviana and I will be putting out a proof episode probably in six ish weeks, um, with all the content and the workouts. Um, but man, there's, there's some very next level conversations happening in that pool and with the people that are training up there. Um, and we're lucky enough to have Kenny Kane and Andy Galpin, who are very much a part of that conversation on our team here at Shrugged. And man, the level, the caliber of people that we get to hang out with here and converse with on a daily basis.

It is impossible not to be at the forefront of strength conditioning and just human performance on all levels from the brain, the body, the nervous system. Just, man, super grateful to be here and just be able to see what the future looks like and be a part of that conversation of the people that are really driving the conversation forward and just not accepting the status quo. It was something that I was looking for when I found CrossFit 12 years ago. And I feel very, very lucky and very grateful that I am seeing a small piece of it transforming in front of my eyes after, after being there this weekend and being around those people and understanding the vision and the mission and what they're trying to bring to the fitness world. So, um, they're probably not listening, but thank you to PJ Laird and Gabby for having

Viviana and I, uh, we had a blast and man, it was just so cool to see all the things that I've, all the questions that I've had over the last three years when it comes to training, um, and all the things that I've been putting together, just come together in one package that just really helped transform the way that I view training just in one short day. If you guys are interested in learning about more of this training piece, make sure you get into the Shrug Collective Vault. We have 11 programs in there from Olympic lifting, strongman, mobility, nutrition, food prep, everything is in there. There's 11 programs, three long-term programs, and eight, I did the math right, there's eight short-term programs. So short-term programs, you're looking at three months, they can be pieced together, they can be used as accessory programs or just use them as your own programs.

Squat programs, getting your first pull-up, all kinds of fun programs in there that you guys can add to your workouts or combine them together to create your own training program. Also, flight weightlifting, the muscle gain challenge, and the shrugged strength challenge. All 18 plus month programs. We already have a ton of results in our private Facebook group of people that are just crushing it. Get over to ShruggedCollective.com backslash vault. If you have any questions, hit me up on Instagram at Anders Varner. Send me a DM. I will answer all your questions. We can set up a call. We can talk about training. I love doing it. And it's just great meeting all of you guys. So shrugged

collective.com backslash vault. Also get over to Organifi.com backslash shrugged, saving 20% on your first purchase. We love these people every single day. I'm waking up, taking my green drink. I got my red and my gold for the rest of the day. I also love taking their gut health pills. Let's be honest. Organifi just crushes when it comes to really simple and effective ways to get the vitamins, minerals, gut health, all the things that you need that you are going to struggle getting in your daily life.

There just isn't enough time to be a part of the daily routine that you need to be in eating all the vegetables. Life is too fast. You're not thinking about your gut health all the time. You're not thinking about vitamins and minerals every single time you sit down to eat. But if you get your green drink, your gold drink and your red drink and take some gut bacteria, uh, gut pills, life just gets better. So get over to Organifi.com backslash shrugged, save 20% on your first purchase. Organifi.com backslash shrugged, 20% off your first purchase and enjoy the show with Kyle Kingsbury. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged.

I'm Anders Varner. We're here with Doug Larson. Mr. Strong Coffee in the house, Adam von Rothfelder. Yo. We're at Onnit Gym. There's so many Onnit things. Onnit Cafe. We spent all of our money on human optimization.

All the money is. All the money is. The peanut butter and jelly keto. We made it. Got in at 1 o'clock last night, three hours of sleep. We get to hang out with Kyle Kingsbury today. Really stoked to get into kind of the high-level MMA that you were training at for a long time and now a little bit of the longevity and the supplements training and just kind of those key pieces that you're taking forward and your ideas of longevity and how we how everyone

can start to think about training a little bit differently for the rest of their life yeah similar for me like i'm always interested to hear how people go from being a professional athlete to still continuing to train but at a at a lower level than they used to be where it's not their whole life but how do you still, but how do you stay healthy, how do you stay strong and athletic, even though you don't have that carrot in front of you of being the best fighter or the best hockey player or what have you. And, I mean, on that same level, I'm just as excited with the idea

of how your past as a professional fighter led into the idea of being the human optimization expert and the head of everything here when it comes to that and Onik. The head of everything. No, when it comes to... That's actually his title. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Director of everything.

It's on my business card. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Aubrey doesn't like it, but that's just the way it is. He gave me the title. I think he's cool with it. But I think a lot of people want to be like, oh, like, I'm in this spot and I want to get to this spot. And it's cool to see, you know, meeting you two years ago and then seeing like where you are today it's it's like a time travel

it's really cool hell yeah yeah so before we get uh too far down the rabbit hole on uh where we're at today where did this journey kind of start for you getting into the fight game a little bit and the training leading up to that um maybe maybe some of the mental pieces that go into being a professional fighter yeah uh well it did you, I didn't know that I wanted to fight. I fought a lot growing up. But it really transitioned after football at ASU. I played football, wanted to continue on in the NFL. But sitting on the bench, I saw that my odds were low.

Yeah. As in zero. That half percent of people that make it. Yeah. Well, I watch guys that started every game all four years on the defensive line not go pro. You know, so that's the jump that people have to make, that people don't really realize what it takes to get there. And I understood that.

You know, I saw the writing on the wall. I also realized that I didn't want to sit at a desk job and I didn't want to try to figure out what to do with a shitty degree. Can we say that on there? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always have to ask people because I curse so much on my podcast. You're allowed to hate on academics here. That's for sure.

So, you know, I was thinking about different things, and I just realized, like, I need to train still. I was going in. I went from training with Coach House, Joe Ken, who's, you know, an amazing strength coach. We're looking to get him on the show one of these days. Oh, yeah, man. I can set that up for you guys.

No problem. You know, he's a good friend. Our friend Travis Mass, an excellent weightlifting coach, has been trying to hook us up with him for a long time. We haven't made it. The schedule's worked. I'll make the call, man, for sure. But House has been instrumental in pushing me past what I thought my limits were.

You know, he took me whatever I thought my limit was, he got me past that over and over again until I realized there's no limit. And that's something I carried with me through MMA. But, you know, I went from training with him and the whole team, and you got guys pushing each other in the gym, and to now I'm running on a treadmill and lifting weights just for the sake of looking better. And it sucked. It really sucked.

You know, I missed that camaraderie and team, and I also missed the human interaction of what it was like playing on the defensive line, like your butt and heads with people every day. Physicality. Yeah, that was gone. Physicality is so real. What years were you at ASU? 2002 to 2005.

Oh, wow. And so when I finished, I took about a year off. I was pretty depressed and battled quite a bit in that, I won't go down the rabbit hole there but I did a solo cast for Onnit if you want to check that out going through the rabbit hole there and then mixed martial arts, started training just for the sake

of training and really loved it and went to a gym where the guy happened to have a small local promotion in Arizona and he was like dude, you're big, you're good-looking, you've got to fight heavyweight for me. And I was like, I don't know, man. I don't know if I want to.

I won't be pretty anymore. You're going to ruin it. This is the moneymaker. I need more sexy heavyweights. Man, I really don't know that I want to fight people that are trained professionals. I'm happy to defend myself in a bar or something like that. But he's like, just do it once. You know, get your feet wet.

If you like it, you can do it again. If you don't like it, you never have to do it again. I was like, all right. First two fights I won in under 30 seconds, and I was absolutely hooked. I mean, the feeling you have when you hit a home run is magnified by 1,000. Like if you knock somebody out, like that kind of control and domination was something I really craved, and it was at a time in my life where i wanted to beat the shit out of somebody so it paired well and um decided to really start training then um after i took my

first loss moved back to where i was from in the bay area and trained at aka which is one of the best gyms in the world you know kane velas Velasquez was there. DC came a little bit later. Luke Rockhold was there. You know, I mean, it was just, it was the right fit, you know. And it was a fucking hard deal. It really was. But it was beautiful because I learned so much. And that's what facilitated me wanting to learn more.

You know, I couldn't just spend time playing video games in between the practices. I had to read. I had to in between the practices i had to read i had to learn about mobility i had to learn about recovery i had to learn about diet health and wellness and nutrition to get any edge i could for competition so i could be the best version of myself and that's something that fighting gave me that i always have gratitude for you didn't have to but you wanted to yeah yeah well not a lot of guys i mean fuck cormier cormier is one of the best in the world and that dude plays video games every day. He's also an Olympic-level wrestler, so he can win with that shit.

I had more to learn, you know. I'm good friends with his trainer, and camp is very different than his life. The human optimization piece, though, that's kind of where your focus is now, and your training, the supplementation piece. But how has that transition been a little bit? I think as athletes, I think we all kind of get into this game, chasing athletics, and then we realize, like, oh, I've got to find a way to do this for the rest of my life. And we were talking pre-show injuries, things pile up. What does that look like for you now? Yeah, there's no doubt.

I mean, any time you try to peg that meter at full and keep it pinned as long as you can you're gonna over train you're gonna run into issues and that's why we see that in the sport of mixed martial arts so many guys come into camp and they beat themselves up you're just pulled in every direction you got a boxing coach that wants you to hit minutes jiu-jitsu guys want you in the gi you got to spar you got to wrestle you got to do so much you still got to get your weight training and cardio in, and it's just too taxing. So finding balance was key for me. Victor Conte, surprisingly, was one of the guys that taught me through blood work how to look at my body and really start to listen and pay attention,

know when to pull back, know when to relax. And Chuck Liddell. Chuck Liddell was the first guy I trained with that was Hall of Famer level that would take every Wednesday off. He would go for an easy run on the track. That was his middle of the week day off. And then he would still have a light practice Saturday and nothing on Sunday. And so I was like, man, if he can do that, then we can do that.

That was throughout his career, or that was when he was training with you a little bit later? Is he in his 40s when he's doing this? Man, he was late 30s. I mean, I trained with him his last two fights of his career uh lived with him down in san luis obispo trained with coach hackleman and i learned i learned so much from him there you know but i don't know i don't know what his training looked like early on in his career i'm sure he'd fine-tuned and refined some things over time but yeah that that really helped me and then you know you come out of

fighting and it's like okay i don't have to be at that level anymore. And it's funny because I hated high-intensity intervals at that point. I mean, I hated putting myself through the grinder because I had done it for eight years. So I got into, like, chi running, you know, like slow, nose-breathing, long-distance runs. I do it with my wife. Chi running. It's awesome. There's a book called Chi Running. Guys, watch. Chi running. It's awesome. There's a book called Chi Running.

Guys, watch me go slow. It's awesome. The Matrix. I really couldn't even call it running. It's more like chi, pace, walking, jogging. Like a moving meditation. Yeah. And so I got into that and got into powerlifting.

And powerlifting is awesome. You know, like I still like moving heavy weight. And I was training with Jesse Burdick for quite some time and really you know the guy taught me how to squat and I found so much beauty in his work because it wasn't just about getting stronger I mean I was building mobility at the same time my squat was getting deeper as I was getting stronger my body moved better as I was adding strength and size ultimately though still wanting to do jujitsu i realized like there is a point of diminishing returns with the size that i had put on so started adding in more high intensity intervals obviously coming here to on it uh has been a big change we've got every weird

tool in the fucking game here you know getting in with maces to open up the shoulders subscap i mean there's so much to the tools and uh I still power lift every now and then, not at the same pace that I used to. I think it's valuable. I mean, people need to pick up heavy shit. There's a no-brainer, you know. But at the same time, I really like, you know, employing some of the different, you know, kettlebell snatches, things like that, mace work, and just trying to adopt a little bit of everything so I'm a bit more well-rounded.

And then still incorporating high-intensity intervals, which I still don't like, but it's important. A lot of my friends that are getting older really find that only doing a heavy lift, like maybe even twice a month, is enough to maintain their strength without beating themselves up. Yeah, I think, I forget the guy's name, Doug McGuff, the doctor who wrote Body by Science. The back guy? The back doc? No, that's McGill. McGill, the doctor who wrote Body by Science. The back guy? The back doc? No, that's Miguel. Oh, Miguel.

I'm sorry, Miguel. He's the guy that's big on the ARCS trainer. I know Bulletproof Dave Asprey has been big on him, but, I mean, a lot of people have been big on him. He talks about, you know, if you go max effort, maybe one every ten days, do you need to work out? I'd rather work out just for the sake of getting the euphoria and the pump. Yeah, man, I enjoy it.

So it's not something where I want to pace that three times a month. But I like breaking that into different things. It might be jiu-jitsu. It might be yoga. It might be just jumping rope and shadow boxing. It might be a 20-minute high-intensity interval on an assault bike. But just mixing it up that way. A lot of people that have been training their whole lives like they get done competing but they still want to train every day just because it's like it's just what they do like it's who they

are they just enjoy it like they don't want to take the day off because they need to recover they want they want to go in and do something just because that's how they break their day up and it's like something fun to do and in a lot of people's cases it's like where they see their friends yeah i actually i don't see my friends today yeah i actually really struggle talking about working out sometimes because people think that there's some like magic thing um i have some big goal or something i'm like no no i just want to show up and be with my friends and have a real conversation with my body and it's it's really challenging to tell somebody that you don't really care about the result. You just want to be there and have things start adding up to a really healthy life.

I think that's the absolute key that most people miss. And Dan John said that was like one of his biggest tips he could ever give somebody is just show up. That's 90% of it. Just show up. You're beat up. Just show up. You're beat up, just show up. You'll warm up. You'll move your body.

You'll feel better afterwards. You're feeling great. Not sure if you want to max out. Just show up. Make the decision when you're warming up. It doesn't have to be something where it's like, man, all right, I wrote down my entire workout before I got here, and I'm going to be pissed if I don't get every set and rep in.

It's like, no, man, just show up. Just get through something. I'm reminded by this quote from John Berardi, forever for everyone for always. And we get locked in this psychological position that either causes us to fail or overtrain and eventually lead to injury. And it's like, oh, I can't.

Our introduction to training was in high school sports. And we trained so hard. And then when we go to college or if we're playing college sports, and we train like so hard and then when we go to college or you know if we're playing college sports and we train so hard in college and then we no longer have that allotment of time after that life is done and we can't even conceptualize how fitness happens if we don't have two hours to commit to it six days a week you know 100 effort and like getting over that i think is kind of the the secret to you know being able to show up and just like be happy with showing up yeah yeah and i find that you know especially having the podcast and talking with people on facebook live often with all the questions and i'm sure

you guys know because you've been in the game way longer than i have nobody the one thing we're all missing is time right yeah and so i know that now know, and I didn't know this in the past, but now I know I don't have to beat myself up to get results. And so with that, it's really rare that I spend an hour in the gym. The times that I commit an hour to training is for a yoga class that's 90 minutes or a jiu-jitsu class that's 90 minutes. Other than that, with warm-up, mobility, and stretching, and all that stuff pre and

post i'm maybe looking at 40 30 40 minutes yeah you know i can get a lot accomplished in that time if i'm efficient with it and i know what i'm going to and i think there's been a lot of freedom in that because it's not a huge time commitment obviously my desk is right it's it's in the gym so i can just walk right over and get stuff done but But I'm out of here in under an hour with 15 to 20 minutes of sauna post-workout. That's a pretty sweet deal. I'm about to get one of those after this interview. You know, you've had a lot of physiological, like you have a huge foundation where it's like, you know, other people that are looking for results

that don't have that physiological foundation. Do you feel like they could commit the same amount of time? And do you feel like that's like the case for someone who's like, I've never worked out before, and now this is what I want to do. Are they able to achieve and feel and get the results that somebody like you who's been doing it your whole life in that same amount of time? Well, I think that consistency is key for anybody.

And there's no real science that says if you go past 40 minutes into an hour and a half that you're going to get that many more gains you know what i'm saying like you might be more sore from the workout but truthfully i think it's better for people to if they could work out five days a week for 30 minutes that's better than crushing themselves three days a week yeah you know it just depends what your goal is. I mean, if you are trying to power lift, yeah, by all means, crush it. Get that in, work on mobility, have days off in between, fully recover, all those things. But if the goal is just to move better and to feel better,

it's better to do things more consistently, to keep showing up, and to have variety. Have fun. Yeah. Figure out a way to go and enjoy yourself. Yeah, fitness shouldn't be so damn serious. You mentioned training with Hackleman and Chuck Liddell. Some pretty decent mentors you've had in your life.

Yeah, I mean, we started. I mean, I'm going to name drop the shit out of some people right now. Do it. I love a name drop. I love a name drop. Killer. When I was on the Ultimate Fighter, Big Nog, Noguera. Ultimate Fighter, go ahead.

Yeah, he was one. Start the clicker. So Big Nog was my coach, and he brought in Anderson Silva. He was supposed to come for three days. He stayed for two and a half weeks. Lyoto Machida stayed for three weeks. I mean, we were surrounded by. What season was that?

Season eight. And, you know, just very fortunate. And I was a white belt in jiu-jitsu, so truthfully, I didn't pick up half of what I could have as a purple belt or a brown belt. But, you know, just an excellent way to be surrounded by top tier talent that could teach me a lot and soak that in and know what I mean those guys truly embodied what it meant to be a martial artist not just a fighter but to have that martial arts mentality and that was really special because I think that's lost quite often in today's fight game you know these guys really embodied what you think of when you think of like a guy like bruce lee yeah because chuck lydell was a coyote cushion right

it was now hit one of his original forms it was a form of karate of some sort yeah i think it was it used to just drop bombs on people starts with an s yeah yeah yeah that's right it's not coyote cushion no it starts with an s i don't know yeah come to me but. That's right. It's not Kyle Cushion. No, it starts with an S. I don't know. It'll come to me. But, yeah, that's Hackleman's background. Yeah, he got a black belt. Is that Shuttercon? Maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe.

Nerding out on martial arts. I think Chuck, all I think is, like, open hooks and big right hands. Yeah, especially in the early days of the UFC when he was just massacring people. It was like, what bar did they find him in where he killed every one of them? Then you realize, oh no, that guy's legit. He's been in the game a long time and he's very technical.

I know nothing about UFC, really. I just remember watching that guy. Oh god, that hurt. Training with those guys and having the mentors like how much time were you spending with those guys and what does maybe their day maybe not the day but the way that they are throughout their day like you're not just in the gym for a you know an hour 40 minutes whatever it is like this is a lifestyle piece and what are

those guys doing at the top level what are you doing at the top level when you're when you're in that life and making it it's a 24 hour a day process from what you eat how you train the mentality that you carry with you how much of that stuff is still with you and the way that you're going about you know the current current projects you're working on you know it's different for everyone chuck and a lot of the guys at aka have uh people do their food for them you know they get prepared meals. I never had that kind of finances to throw that out there. Plus, I also knew better than most of the people making the food just because it was a passion of mine. So I like being in the kitchen.

I like making my own food and making it fresh, not doing meal prep for fucking seven days' worth of food on a Sunday. But that's how they would eat you know scheduled massages stretching those kind of things and really it's just about incorporating as much in your off time for active recovery as possible you know the guys that just sit on their ass and don't do anything they're not getting better they're not helping their body heal as fast and I think at the very least you know getting some body work in between practices has become the norm and the standard now for high level guys um and again I couldn't you know it's not like I could shell out a bunch of cheese for Practices have become the norm and the standard now for high-level guys. And again, I couldn't, you know, it's not like I could shell out a bunch of cheese for a massage therapist to come over to the house.

So I'd be digging through becoming a supple leopard and getting up against the wall for some super couch stretches and things like that and just figuring out different ways I can open up my body using myself. And I think that's been an absolute necessity, especially being done with fighting. How can I open up my body and really work on myself without having to pay somebody a grip of cheese to get that done? I think that's been critical. But, you know, people do have to have fun. They have to learn how to play.

They have to figure out what works for them. And that could mean video games for one guy it could mean just sitting around with your family and playing games it could be watching your favorite tv show whatever but you got to have some type of downtime when i was fighting out in california we go to the beach all the time you know it's a 45 minute drive to santa cruz and my wife and i would go there and and just really unwind and get in the water and you know it's nice and cold too so we were getting some of those benefits before even learning about Wim Hof. And I think just a way to unplug, you know, a way to really reset the mind.

You can't all be fighting. You can't always be thinking about that. So how you differentiate, disassociate, and pull your mind out of that sphere is important. It's important for anybody to learn that with work because how often do we take our work home with us? I learned that from Ben Greenfield, who I find to be a huge mentor, but when I was at his house, I was –

Which is awesome, by the way. Yeah, he's a great dude, but I was asking him. I was like, man, I had this idea that you were kind of like Captain Fantastic with Viggo Mortensen. You'd have your kids completely off-grid and all that. He's like, no, I was homeschooled till you know through K through 12 and I realized like I don't play well with others so my kids they go to a private school I get all my work done at four so when they show up at home I'm 100% invested in them and that's where I teach

them the stuff that they don't learn in school I teach them bow hunting I teach them how to forage for medicinal mushrooms and different edible plants. And that's where I get to be dad. So I really took that to heart. Now when I get home, I'm not on my phone. I'm not looking at emails or checking the Slack app for those of us in the business world now. I'm not looking in at any of that stuff.

My phone goes on mute. I'll take a look at it before I go to bed and then just throw it on airplane mode, and that's about it. I get to be full-time dad when I get home, and that not only gives more to my son, but it gives more to me because I'm not pulled in six different directions at once. I can really just be present with him and kind of unplug from office life, which is oddly what I have signed up for.

A second ago you mentioned cold water and the benefits that you mentioned the benefits but there are benefits to that you mentioned Wim Hof and then earlier you mentioned getting into the sauna as a part of the end of your workout like what have you found with using heat stress if you want to call it that what have you found as the benefits to you personally for doing cold water and or sauna work yeah you know i mean i i had really found out about wim hof on tim ferris and then again on rogan's and gotten taking the deep dive on that uh obviously when i was with adam down at xpt they were really big into that you know you start the day with uh contrast so they've got a sauna that's juiced up to 220

degrees fahrenheit three ice baths at 33 degrees you know and you do three to five minutes in the ice bath, 10 to 15 minutes in the sauna for three rounds on an empty stomach. That's how you start the day. It feels pretty damn good. I don't have a sauna at the house. It's impossible not to wake up with that set up. You are awake. I'd wake up before those,

and he'd have us doing monkey chanting before you guys would show up. And we're like in the basement doing monkey chanting. I'd damn near pass out from breathing it'd be like let's get turned on let's get turned on me the monkey chant later oh yeah yeah i don't know anything about the monkey oh yeah yeah should we do it right now it was so we we would get in the breathing we'd get the breathing we and then he'd start making a noise like and we would start doing it we had to start copying them and then like in a group of like 10 people we all started like synchronously like at the same time changing our exact breath tone and it was it was like we didn't even know what was happening next

and then we'd all be in a different breath and like a different chant and it was like you know and uh there's bali is monkey chanting and that's kind of where they got it from that's awesome yeah half the time i'm in a room like that i'm wondering if like the whole thing's a big fucking joke or like like how much how much should i be invested in doing right now they get like am i being punked right now right we're we're in there and it's like to my right is you know this actor, this guy, this guy, and they're all like, halalala, halalala, halalala. And I'm like looking around like, holy shit, I'm like doing halalala next to like Superman over here.

Like what the, you know. Well, they're bought in. Yeah, exactly. I was at a conference one time and we were doing things like that. And then the guy told everyone to sit up straight in their chairs. And then he goes, repeat after me. And he was like, mmm. So now the whole room's going, mmm.

And then he's like, okay, now sway back and forth. And everyone starts swaying back and forth going, mmm. And I was like, okay. And everyone's kind of looking around like, should I be doing this right now? And then he's like, hey, now repeat after me. We are not a cult. We are not a cult.

And everyone's fucking laughing. Like, okay, okay, we were being fucked. Pickpocketed you while you were swaying back and forth. Like, where'd all the money go? Did you feel better when you were doing the humming? Well, I think at the time I was so like, just being like, okay, what the fuck are we doing? Is this when they started to cool down? I don't think I was feeling better.

I was more confused. Because there is some science on humming and chanting. Yeah. A mind-heart connection. Yeah, man. And so what happens is because you're slowing down your exhale, you're dipping into parasympathetic. So you literally shift the state of your being simply by slowing down the exhale.

And most people will teach you in yoga like four seconds in, eight seconds out, four seconds in, seven seconds hold, eight seconds out. Those kind of things all shift you into parasympathetic. But the longer the exhale, the more blood flow you get to the brain. So if you're going, hmm, you're literally getting more blood to the brain. So if you are bought in, obviously there's some placebo there. But if you're bought in, then you can start to feel that and sense that. As far as the hot and cold, man, I mean mean they're two of the easiest biohacks on earth

they really are we're designed to be to have temperature extremes you know we go from climate controlled cars to climate controlled office to climate controlled home and we never experienced that so as far and then going back to time i mean i've followed dr ronda patrick for years obviously she's big into the sauna there's tons i mean it just goes up exponentially the longer you're in it so 60 drop in all-cause mortality if you're in there seven days a week for an hour that's pretty cool yeah but again i'm not doing shit for seven days a week an hour at a time and i can get a lot of the benefits from five to ten minutes in the cold bath and as far as like hacking meditation like to anybody that's ever done a cold bath you realize you can't think about

a damn thing you're not thinking about your thing. You're not thinking about your wife. Yeah, you're not thinking about your kid being a jerk. You're not thinking about your boss yelling at you. Like, you are fucking in the zone. And it's an immediate hack. And you have to slow down. Because if you're huffing and puffing, you're not doing Wim Hof breathing in the cold. Because that moves the cold around.

That makes you more cold. You'll create shock in a way, too. And you're panicking in the fight, right? so you have to stay calm and present in the fight and by doing that slowing the breathing down breathing through the nose you dip into parasympathetic right so and there's a there's a ton of science on how much it raises dopamine and adrenaline which is obviously feel good neurochemicals but but boosts the immune system so lowering inflammation i mean you just you kill so many birds with one stone, and there's fat loss. So it's like that's a cute side effect that I'll take, you know, as a bonus.

Yeah, Steve McCotland talks a lot about that. Like all types of extreme physical stressors are extremely presencing. So it's a way to have some type of meditation without really trying to meditate. Yeah, you hack flow. And one of the beauties, I was just talking with this guy, Casper, who's one of Wim Hof's head trainers. trainers he came out from the netherlands to be on the show and on the on it podcast and he was talking about how the things that we do and we know this from jiu-jitsu adam but when you put yourself in a shitty spot when you put yourself in a stressor

the more times you navigate those waters calmly the easier that extrapolates out to everyday stressors in life. Right. So if I go into the cold bath, which is an immediate stressor and shock to the body, and I can learn to control my breathing and be present and find stillness in that, that really does go to everything, every other possible situation where I can find stress. If I can tie in that memory into my brain because neurons that fire together wire together, if I just take those deep inhalations in and out of the nose, the next time somebody cuts me off in traffic or my wife blows up for not doing something I should be doing. Which never happens.

It never happens. She's an angel. You're on your own on that one. I'm speaking about other people's relationships. But, yeah, the body remembers. You know, I take that nice deep breath in through the nose, out through the nose, slowly on the exhale, and it remembers the calmness inside the storm,

remembers the eye of the hurricane. And that shit goes to every possible avenue for stress. So there's so much to that. It's pretty easy to get that dialed in. You know, I was spending $60 to $80 on ice every time. I spent way more than $500 on ice in my lifetime. And Kelly Sturette and Matt Benson were telling me about, just get a chest freezer.

Get it on Craigslist. And ultimately, there's too many hunters here in Austin and Texas, so I just bought a brand new one. But it was $5.50, free delivery from HomeDepot.com. No affiliation with them. I'm not throwing out a sponsor here. I've got an affiliate link. HomeDepot, so get your two-by-fours.

Code word Kingsboo at checkout. I get 10%. They're like, who? Yeah, it was, you know, but having that, never having to spend money on ice, it's Energy Star efficient. It's not taking a ton. It hasn't added much to my electricity bill at all. Well, you only plug it in like a couple hours before, right?

We plug it in for, I think, six hours, three days a week. Got it. And that'll drop it into the 30s. My wife and I will warm it back up to the 50s. And we vary the time that we're in there based on how cold it is. But it gets the job done every time. So she does a lot of this with you? Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's so beneficial for the mitochondria. And talking about longevity like what do we do for longevity we understand everything looks at metabolism you know cancer is a metabolic theory is is beautiful right then we could begin to look at things differently and a lot of people don't want to go into a ketogenic diet but maybe intermittent fasting can be something that everyone does that has the similar benefits or better. And certainly accomplishable. Like if we narrow down that eating window and kind of reverse that,

we're not designed to wake up and eat all the way until we go to sleep. Little trick, doing that, combining it with some type of temperature extreme, we're influencing the mitochondria, and that influences all of our energy systems. You know, that's more cognitive energy. People talk about falling flat on their face in the afternoon. You probably ate a shitty lunch, you know, or you didn't get good sleep or your body's not tuned in to the environment. So getting some cold first thing in the morning can keep you energized all day long, you know, and that's, there's so many little tricks that we have that we just, we fail to implement because we know it's hard. Well, I mean, I'll, I'll speak on your abilities of you know practicing what you preach which is you know everybody you know out of the of the xpt uh

cast that at that time was so impressed with your ability to the cold the heat the water for a guy your size it was like something that you were like you know and then seeing you on the ground and being mobile and you obviously you know you obviously put a lot into it. What's interesting is how much of that I'd like to know came from, that knowledge came from either preventative or trying to recover from something. So it's like we learn the most from our injuries. And being a fighter, being at USC, and you're like, oh, I had to learn mobility. Was it injury and that stuff that kind of prompted you like down this road was there like injuries or was it you seeing people being injured and being like uh I need to figure this out no it was it

was definitely my own you know right when I got into becoming a supple leopard I had chronic knee pain from football and I thought I was going to need surgery but it was mid-camp and i was you know we we have the shittiest insurance on earth in the ufc so it was like wait till the fight then tell them you hurt your knee in the fight that way you can get it you can get surgery paid for yep and what's funny is you know i'm four weeks into camp and uh somebody hooked me up with the book i think tom my buddy tom lawler and uh started doing a lot of the different you know voodoo floss floss and lacrosse balls behind the knee where you sit on the ground and bring your heel to your ass for two minutes each side. Those are fun.

All of a sudden my knee pain is gone, you know, and it didn't come back. It stayed gone. And I still had a – let's take a look at the MRI, and they're like, well, you're bone on bone. You're going to need some type of knee replacement down the road. You're going to have have arthritis but guess what there is zero pain the more that i keep those knees working through oh okay you know maybe a little bone broth and maybe some mobility and then i have no pain have you had an x-ray since that all that you know to see like any regeneration of any sort

no mri is done but i mean i have I have literally have no pain in that knee from that you know it's like as long as I keep moving properly and keep that oxygenated and get the blood flow in there I'm good to go and so that was the first like there's there's moments in time that you have where things click all together and you realize like oh this is a lifelong practice you know and I think having tools like that the more tools we have in the toolbox the more we realize like we can ourselves, we can heal. I've needed surgery. I needed surgery on my right shoulder, becoming a supple upper,

something I lead heavily on to get back full range of motion. There's a time and a place for surgery, but I think the better we are at preventing that, the easier life is. That was a one-year layoff with the shoulder surgery. That was no joke. I think injury definitely created the necessity to learn that, that stuff. But, you know, when it comes to the cold, like just listening to Wim Hof, who's pretty damn charismatic, you know, he says, feeling is understanding, feeling is believing, just try it. And you start

doing 50 round or 50, 50 Wim Hof breaths all the way in, halfway out for five rounds, it shifts your neurochemistry. You feel high. That's why he's got the shirt, get high on your own supply. It works to change the neurochemistry. And you get up into the cold, all of a sudden you're less sore. You feel better. You have energy throughout the day, and it resets the circadian rhythm, so you sleep better.

You can go to bed earlier. I used to stay up until midnight or 1 a.m. every night, and I couldn't fall asleep. Now I can go to bed at 9 I used to stay up until midnight or 1 a.m. every night, and I couldn't fall asleep. Now I can go to bed at 9 or 10. Part of that is having a kid. Don't reset the circadian rhythm. When is bedtime? Yeah, the kids will lie.

I find myself sometimes like Doug just had one. Anders is about to have his first. My life is about to be over. No, it's just about to begin. Just starting and about to be over. No, it's just about to begin. It's just starting and about to be over. At the same time. Yeah, pretty much. But, I mean, I'll be, like, laying down on the couch with the kids

watching a movie at, like, 7 o'clock, and I'm passing out now. You know, it's just like, oh, my God, kids. Holy shit, you're exhausting. They're a ball of energy. We're going to take a little break. When we get back, you were talking about the hot and cold, but this is kind of just the surface level of the experimentation you do on yourself to test everything that's out there.

Yeah, we'll go deep. Let's do it. Cool. Shark family, hope you're enjoying the show with Kyle Kingsbury. Guy's such a savage, right? Going from MMA fighter, total gangster in the UFC. Now he is running the On It podcast and just on some next level stuff when it comes to human optimization. I want to give a shout out to our sponsors,

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Try omax.com backslash shrug. You're going to get a free box of fish oils. Try omax.com, T-R-Y-O-M-A-X.com backslash shrugged for a free box of fish oils. Back to the show. Welcome back to Barbell Shrugged. We're here at On It Gym. Kyle Kingsbury talking about some human optimization. You are the test dummy to everything you're doing to yourself.

The guinea pig, yeah. The guinea pig. Don't take that the wrong way. Oh, you're good. Some of it's probably more dummy than not. But, yeah, if this process starts at the very easy buy-in of hot and cold, the ice baths, maybe getting in the sauna every day, 10, 15 minutes, just to kind of start to adapt to these external stressors.

What's kind of the next level for you, and where can people take this? Well, I mean, there's really no to to biohacking as a term which i think is kind of a silly ass term but i mean um you know when i think of biohacking obviously there's there's hot and cold temperature stuff that's really just ancestral living you know if i'm thinking of like truly biohacking maybe that would look like something we're doing now with the vitamin IV treatments. And we've partnered with Dr. Craig Conover out of South Carolina, and he's amazing. He's a guy that worked with Ben Greenfield and a few other guys that I can't mention. And, you know, we're doing NAD Plus IV treatment, which is really cutting edge. And, you know, anytime I do something cutting edge for the life hack of the week through on it, everyone's like, yeah, put your fucking tin cap on.

And, you know, there's resistance there. There's resistance when I put on trans direct cranial stem on the dome. But, I mean, everything that I'm doing and promoting is stuff that I actually do. And it's also stuff that is backed by science. Otherwise, I wouldn't toy around with it, you know. So, I mean, DARPA, I don't know if you guys remember that Rogan talking about about radio lab doing a thing called nine volt nirvana in 2014 it's pretty cool they talked about um this reporter went to train with darpa for a sniper drill and she had never shot a gun in her life and they hooked her up with a with a sniper rifle maybe not a sniper. I think it was just whatever the military.

Yeah, like M16? There we go, yeah. So she's got the M16, and it's full weight, even though it's not shooting real rounds, and it's, I think, 20 targets throughout, and it's supposed to last 10 minutes. And she goes into total panic and hits maybe two targets. Then they hook her brain up and juice it full of the fucking electricity.

I've heard of this. Now people are doing it on their own. Yeah, well, that's where the video gamers are trying to make their own stuff. There's no real limit. Like that Halo neuroscience? Yeah, Halo is an advanced version of that. And you can use that for many different things. I mean, people are using it to learn second languages.

People are using it for balance training or learning new physical requirements, which would be something like sniper training. But DARPA's been using it. I mean, if the military's investing money in it, and they've been doing it for four years at least. If we're finding out about it. It's got some credibility, right? So, I mean, I get some slack for things like that when I recommend them.

But the low-tech stuff, you know, people seem to gravitate towards that more from our community. So if I show, you know, a simple farmer walk finisher, they're like, yeah, all right, I can buy into that. But, yeah, the NAD Plus treatment is a big one, and, again, that goes back to how we influence the mitochondria. It really pays dividends there. If I think of something like a dietary change like going keto, it's funny because usually people that talk about it, it's like, the holy grail, it has to be done. It's the best thing ever.

And I don't want to sound like a total evangelist and preacher when it comes to that. But, I mean, having taken quite a few lumps playing football since I was 10 and then fighting professionally as a light heavyweight in the same division as guys like Chuck Liddell, I took a fair amount of beatings. And I've never felt my brain turn on the way that it has from going low-carb and doing a ketogenic diet. That's just why I keep circling back to it. It's not something I stay in year-round.

I don't believe it's something for everyone. Certainly not if you follow a guy like weston a price and you look at you know different indigenous cultures and what they ate it's pretty wide variety you know if you're closer to the equator that's probably smaller prey chicken and fish and a lot more carbohydrates and those people probably aren't designed to do well on a high fat low carb diet but if you've got ancestry from northern Europe and different parts that are closer to the poles where it's colder, at least three months a year you went without carbohydrates because they weren't getting shipped in from Panama and Mexico.

They weren't? You can't get berries from Mexico year-round. There was no Apple. There was no Amazon. And there was no refrigeration. You think about it just in terms like that. It's like, all right, maybe this is a key to metabolic flexibility. Maybe this is a key to a lot of the health problems that come down to insulin resistance, like type 2 diabetes, even type 3 diabetes, which they're calling Alzheimer's and Parkinson's dementia.

Any of these things that we have seen skyrocket, you know, and most of the people listening to this show are probably in pretty good shape and don't need to worry about that. But at the same time, from a genetic standpoint, I read Wired to Eat by Rob Wolf. And just to start looking at my own, like, what is a good carb versus a bad carb? If I'm going to eat carbohydrates, I should know which carbs are good for me and which ones are causing inflammation and weight gain. And surprisingly, there was quite a few carbohydrates that I didn't tolerate well. White rice being the main culprit. But I can have a plate of sweet potatoes and yams covered in honey, and I look perfect. There it is.

When you say you don't tolerate them well, what do you mean? Get some sweet potatoes. I mean, so checking postprandial blood glucose, I would see it skyrocket, like way past pre-diabetic level. And that's two hours after you do a blood glucose reading like a diabetic would would i had already been doing that for blood ketones from doing the ketogenic diet and never really saw a reason to look at carbohydrates until i read wire to eat and i was like oh this makes sense if i'm going to eat carbohydrates i should know which ones are inflammatory and an issue and which ones are not because you know just just in the studies he did n equals one with him and his wife he saw

that he can't eat white rice his wife can eat as much white rice as she wants and she's fine hummus out of 800 people over 50 percent hummus you would never think to cause blood sugar spikes because of the fiber and the protein and the fat content which all is supposed to slow down blood sugar but that's not the case over 50 of the population that was studied had a huge blood sugar spike that put them in a pre-diabetic level so really knowing what's right and what's wrong and then also knowing like okay so i can't eat white rice but maybe after i crush myself in the gym it's okay to get the blood sugar spike before the anabolic window all that kind of stuff if you buy into that yeah and that's okay if i want to make my insulin jump to the roof for a recovery aspect so was the hummus due to the like the chickpea or was it due to like

the canola oil and the oils that they use inside a hummus good hummus they're going to use olive oil only but i mean i think it was just more to do with the population didn't tolerate that those carbohydrates well and that's probably because the 800 people i think were studied i think it was done here in the states so i'm willing to bet in you know greece and the mediterranean and different places where hummus is quite popular that they can get away with hummus a little bit better similarly to you know you look at why is white rice an issue for so many people but it's not for the okinawans and the japanese and the chinese well those people have been eating it longer like the chinese sure they are adapted to eat white rice and not have issues.

So I think just figuring out what's right for you, because there's no one right diet that's right for everybody, but that takes some due diligence and a little homework. Yeah, I mean, if you look in a textbook and you look at, like, potatoes versus hummus or just some type of bean, typically the values for how they're going to spike your blood sugar for potatoes is going to be like 98 out of 100 versus beans are going to be like 25 out of 100 as far as how it's going to spike your blood sugar. But those are averages.

There's going to be a bell curve and a spectrum there of how you respond to it. So unless you actually test yourself, you're going to have no idea how you respond to it. Yeah, you really can't go based off what everyone else is doing. And you really can't just say, like, most of my ancestry, I think, is from the equator. I can do better with carbs. Most of my ancestry is from Scotland, so I should do better with higher-fat meals. I shouldn't say we're all, but a lot of people that are here in the States are some form of mutt. And what you take, like, if my parents had five kids kids every one of us would look different genetically every

one of us would have differences in carb tolerances just because we have the same parents does not mean we take on the same traits and that's why taking a deeper dive into what's right for you is really important yeah so when when resist you know like i don't know when it was that i first started hearing the term being thrown around maybe like three years ago but resistant starches right so like feeding your gut biome and and everything and you know the three the two foods was that I first started hearing the term being thrown around maybe like three years ago, but resistant starches, right? So like feeding your gut biome and everything. And, you know, the two foods that are the highest in resistant starches, like cold white rice or like potatoes and like potato starches.

So those are different forms of resistant starch. You have like R2, R3. You know, resistant starch that's cooked and cooled would be one class. And, you know, obviously sushi rice's cooked and cooled would be one class. And, you know, obviously sushi rice falls into that category. That doesn't create a huge jump. It still is not, I wouldn't call that a health food for me. Right. But if I've put in work and I know I'm going to eat sushi at night or go to all you can eat sushi,

I'm damn sure going to crush it in the gym that day just to mitigate some of that and really have my muscles and liver screaming for glycogen restoration. Then I'm okay. I've covered some of the bases. Outside of that, looking at raw potato starch and green banana powder or green plantains, green bananas, that's going to be in a different category of resistant starch as well. And there's a lot of science that shows that helps feed the microbiome.

But the truth is, in my own studies, because, I mean, after I did a 50K ultra in ketosis, it was great. I was 238 pounds, finished the race, no problems. That's a large person to go that far. Kyle's running. Everyone is like, man, there's a bodybuilder running out here. He doesn't have a camelback. But it was funny because I'm not a bodybuilder, but to distance runners, yeah, I look like King Kong. Godzilla.

I was the only guy who intelligently did not have a camelback. Everyone else had a camelback. And so what happened was I had already had some bit of candida and parasites in my body. And when you run that long and you don't have enough water, the body will start pulling from different places like the intestines, which can immediately cause leaky gut syndrome. i had candida and parasites go systemic and it was really bad it took me a year to battle through that one thing i found was raw potato starch in particular feeds the bad guys as well as the good guys so there are some things that you have to play with and learn and i had to

learn that the hard way because i couldn't put my finger on it why i kept getting head colds and it was every time i would load up with raw potato starch wow so there are there are some things to that it's not like oh this feeds good bacteria you know x plus y equals z for everyone it doesn't necessarily there's many variables that play into those things and we find that out now you know i've interviewed dr michael ruscio who's a speaker at Paleo FX. He just wrote a book. I forget what the name of it is. But he's not only a gut specialist.

He's an autoimmune specialist. And one of the things we were getting into is that we're really in the infancy of understanding how the microbiome works. And you can't just look at a population of Africans and say, they have this in their gut, so that's what we should have to be healthy. It's bullshit. They have, they're also grounding every day. They're immersed in soil-based organisms, you know. Their water isn't as clean as ours, and they do fine with that. You're literally taught when you're there, like, don't step on their grass if you're American,

because you'll get, like, a parasitic infection. I mean, like, we're that different. Like, if we step on grass, we'll get a parasite. When I was in Africa, it was like, don't take your shoes off. I assumed. I was like, oh. When I was on safari, I assumed that I could just go drink the water, and our guide was like, don't even try.

You will die right away. There's no, like, yeah, there's no, I can't get you out of the jungle quick enough if you drink the water here. we are we're not adapted for the earth we live on anymore yeah i think it's really important too though uh that people understand like all these things that you're talking about and um they come with a context and you have to have this very basic level of like hormone levels when you eat a carbohydrate what what happens what is protein doing for your body how what is what is fat doing to your body and then we can start adjusting and turning the dials on these things because you're really talking about the

compounding effect of these tiny little things that you're already adding to a system that's been built for years and years and how you're able to really dial it in specifically to you. And I think that comes just, there's so much learning that goes on at the basic level before, and in the systems that you implement into your life before we start really dialing into like, am I going to go keto? It's one of the things that it's really strange that happens in nutrition. It was, it was like one of the things I noticed in the paleo diet when it first came out was a lot of the testing gets done on cancer patients, type two diabetes. And then all of a sudden a bunch of

performance athletes are in here killing themselves and they haven't had a carbohydrate in a year and they're wondering why they're so burnt out um how how do you kind of deliver that message to people and you're the things you're doing may not be the best for others so what does that conversation look like yeah and i get asked that question a lot. I think there's a couple things. One, if the goal is weight loss, it's hard to argue against a ketogenic diet at least periodically, at least for an 8- to 12-week stretch, and then doing some type of carbohydrate backloading after that. Once you've become keto-adapted and your body has metabolic flexibility, you've lowered some insulin resistance.

And going back to hormones, we're really talking about insulin here yeah you know if we eat every day we start the day with carbohydrates you know for breakfast carbohydrates for lunch carbohydrates as a snack before dinner i mean we put ourselves on this insulin roller coaster where blood sugar skyrockets insulin tries to match it drops blood sugar and then we're starved for carbohydrates again right so one of the things we talk about on the day on your life by aubrey marcus just released april 17th boom new york times bestseller list plug plug plug bang bang one of the things we talk about is is at the very least you want to do carbohydrate backloading at the very least you want to have either skip breakfast or have an optimized coffee you know know, loaded with fat and protein.

And then for lunch, you can have, like Mark Sisson calls it, a big-ass salad. Keep that lower in carbohydrates or some type of food that's lower in carbohydrates, higher in fat. You can get a shake, make your own shake, whatever the case is, or just snack on macadamia nuts, which are really high in great fats. And then save your carbohydrates for night after you've moved throughout the day, after you've had, you know, a good good workout and your body is literally craving that carbohydrate. And then you're not going to put that on as fat.

You'll be burning fat for fuel throughout the day. You don't have the roller coaster going on with insulin and carbohydrates. And I think that's a great first place to start for people. When you're talking about athletes that are getting into a ketogenic diet, obviously Steve Finney and Jeff Volek were working with long-d working with long distance runners and they saw hey it works great for those guys but people that burn things glycolytically i have a lot of fighters ask me like matt brown and different people can i do this in fighting and i'm like maybe maybe not you know like it's good in between fight camps to help the brain heal and lower inflammation but when you're burning that much carbohydrates at the very least you have to do something like targeted keto, which I think his name's Luis Villasenor, the keto gains guy. He's

been really big on that, and that can range based on how hard the workout is. It might be 10 grams of glucose for one person. It might be 20 grams of a different carbohydrate for somebody else, depending on how hard the workout is, but taken at the beginning of the workout, not an hour before, you can help balance that need for glycogen in a high-intensity interval training session, jiu-jitsu, things like that. It's something I've been playing with more to find the right range, so I'm still making ketones at night. But once you find that, you can have the best of both worlds. It's not have your cake and eat it too.

It's more like have your beet beet juice extract with the workout and and then stay stay making ketones by night and that's really the happy medium for me where i don't have to worry about added inflammation just for the sake of being able to to deadlift more or something like that you know i've done that before and it worked out really really well for me like i used to i used to compete in weightlifting in the 94 kilokilo class, weighing 207 when you weigh in, which you don't have as much time to weigh in for weightlifting as you do for MMA. You don't get that 24-hour period usually. But then I'd fight welterweight at 170.

I only had eight amateur fights, but one I would be bouncing back and forth between these two weight classes all the time, so I'd make big cuts to fight for MMA. And I would almost always only have the bulk of my carbohydrates, like 80% of my carbohydrates like 80 of my carbohydrates for the day were just like in my workout shake that helped me have the intensity that i needed for training but then the rest of the day my calories and my carbohydrate content was really really low and it worked out beautifully i on the other hand completely messed up my career by following lauren cordy aynes you know the the the athlete oh the failure time for athletes yeah i read that so you're just

cramming raisins down your throat well i mean i was i was ketogenic almost since 22 years old through like 28 and then like only doing like what lauren cordianza and just you know completely being you know having like adrenal fatigue and like i'd hit second round and i'd feel like my hands weighed a thousand pounds because i had no glucose left in me. You know, it was very wish I would have, you know, dove deeper into it before experimenting with like a professional career at the same time. Yeah, that is tough. But I mean, that's there's that was the learning. There's self-experimentation and learning. And, you know, I think there's just more there's more great information out now we're really in a beautiful time i i tell people to get the keto reset diet by mark sisson because it's the most up-to-date piece of material that i've read where they dispel a lot of the

myths you know can women do it will it influence hormonal changes and around you know the monthly cycle around having kids yes but only if you're going to the extreme. I never advocate a zero-carb diet. That's bullshit. That means you're not even getting cruciferous vegetables in, like kale and cauliflower and broccoli. And I think that's another key miss. A lot of people associate a low-carb diet with the Atkins diet,

which is dimmy dean sausage and boatloads of shitty protein and meat. If you're still eating grass-fed animals and things that are anti-inflammatory, you know, if you can get away with not all cheese is created equal. They talk about that in The Plant Paradox by Dr. Stephen Gundry. Most cheese comes from Holstein cows that are black and white cows because they produce the most milk. They create A1 casein, which is inflammatory. That's a case of morphine. When they talk about cheese being morphinogenic, it literally will

fit into opiate receptors in the brain. It's addictive. But Southern European cows create A2 casein. And for a lot of people that don't have a lactose intolerant, they're just fine with Southern European cow cheese. I myself am fine with that. I don't get stiff joints. I don't get stiff joints i don't

get beat up from it so there's there's different resources we can find to really fine-tune what's right for us but ultimately what is your goal you know you have to understand the why for anything if your goal is to be the strongest you can possibly be in powerlifting why would you do a ketogenic diet you don't need to you know but if your goal is to cut weight in between competitions then yeah go keto and come back to carbs and do better for it because your body will utilize those carbohydrates better yeah there's a time and a place for everything i haven't read i haven't read mark sisson's uh the keto reset but is it kind of does it go in the direction of leptin kind of like like getting the leptin cycle moving again yeah yeah there's i mean there's he he touches on the science from a lot

of things but the thing that i really appreciated about it was you know women can get away with that with moderate carbohydrates like and because they can get away with more carbohydrates like my wife can add 80 carbs a day and still produce one millimolar of ketones you know like she's still deep in ketosis nutritionally at 80 grams a day, you know, whereas that would be far higher than most men can handle. At the same time, they look at things like typically if I was to, you know, have a bad meal and get out of ketosis, what would be the best way to get back in to shorten that four-day span and cut it to a day? Most people would say go for, you know, like even Tim Ferriss has said, like go for a long walk. Walk for four or five miles.

That'll help you burn fat and get your ketones up. The truth is it'll get ketones higher because you're just burning fat, but that doesn't really get you back into ketosis quicker. High-intensity intervals do. You won't see your ketones go up because the muscle's burning ketones while you're doing that workout. But what's the fastest way? It's to dump all that glycogen out, get it out of the muscle,

get it out of the liver, and force your body to go back into ketosis quicker quicker and if you've done it for 8 to 12 weeks and you're keto adapted then you shouldn't have a problem making that change happen much faster and so that that gives people a little leeway like hey i want to go out to eat with my friends and i don't want to be a dick and i don't get like six tablespoons of olive oil added to my shitty salad like yeah you can have some fun you can live life as a human being and really not pay the consequences for it. I feel like up until this point you've already mentioned, like, dozens of authors and you understand their research. Like, is that something that you did on your own?

Like, you just read a lot on your own? You're always doing research? Did you actually have an academic background in some of this stuff, going through college and whatnot? College was communication and sociology and a little bit of philosophy and it's funny because podcasting now i i kind of do use my degree for for what i'm doing as a podcast host uh i was like a football player schedule yeah that was like a football player that was the football players whenever i hear a football player like a soccer player they're like keep you eligible

they're like i'm an i'm major. I'm like a communication specialist. It's like, what? What does that even mean? I have a 2.51. Perfect. That's over the hundredth. Yeah, exactly. I'm above 2.5.

But no, you know, I mean, it was really post-college in fighting where I decided, like I think the first thing was I read How to Eat, Move, and Be by Paul check yeah I did it I did an elimination diet realized I was gluten intolerant and that changed so much for me and I was like fuck man if that one little change can happen from food alone that really planted the seed for me to want to learn more and you know through fighting you know having I could literally look at that time clock in a 24-hour cycle. How many hours a day was I spending playing video games? How many hours a day was I watching TV and doing shit that was not benefiting me? And then can I shift that more towards something that's going to plant seeds for the future and really come back to help me long-term?

That ended my video game career. That literally ended that. My wife and I got rid of our TV a few months ago. It did totally end it. You were in a video game. That's right, man. And it's funny because I was in Mafia III as the main character. He was the face of Mafia III.

I didn't know that. I bought it just to play. I was like, I'm Kyle Kingsbury. I'm going to kill this motherfucker. I finally know what it's like. Every move in that game is me. I did all the 2K mocap for it. That's awesome.

And it's funny because I don't even have a PlayStation 4 to play. I played a game of my brother-in-law's. I got him the game so I could play it over there. That's funny. Yeah, I mean, that's really what sparked the interest to want to read and learn more. And then, you know, one of my favorite quotes is Bruce Lee's, it's not enough to to know we must do you know so reading and learning and then trying and implementing and refining and fine-tuning that's been the name of the game and the more i experiment on myself

like tim ferris does and like ben greenfield does the better the results you know because that teaches me what works for me and what really is impactful yeah and i think that's that's a lifelong practice. You know, there's no end game there. That experimenting on yourself, though, has also kind of led into your research and development and the product development for what you guys are doing here at Onnit. What goes into that process for you guys? And if you're allowed to talk about what you guys work on? Yeah, well, I can't give you too much info on stuff that we haven't created yet but we can definitely talk about the process you know

when aubrey brought me in here i thought i was just going to take over the on a podcast i didn't know you know he's i didn't know what the other things entailed but you know you didn't know his master plan yeah man hey why don't you just come and train a little bit he knew me better than i knew myself you know and i've been playing with supplements since Creatine 6000 ES from MuscleTech was out. I think I was 15 years old taking that like, whoa, I'm stronger. And so, yeah, I get to work on product development for supplements and for some of the food products we're designing right now is just as big of a passion of mine as the podcast is. And we do the social media and things like that.

That's fun, but, I mean, really it's about what stuff are we creating that has an impact on people. And it's cool because, you know, getting plugged in, we have teams for everything. You know, like it's not like I'm on my own in any one particular thing. And coming into these teams that have been working and already creating great products long before I got here it's been awesome you know they go to trade shows and they come back and just dump all the samples on my desk and say see what works you know and i'm like all right

well we got an idea for this product we got an idea for that product let's start combining shit and my desk is the kitchen you know and i'm on the lab and uh when i find something that works i pass that on to aubrey and a few of the other guys John Wolfe Primal Swolder you know and if we get the thumbs up then we pass it on to some of our athletes we work with Exos now they used to be API actually when I was at ASU that was their only location was right there in Tempe right by the football field and they work with you know some of the best pro athletes in the world I think they have 90 of the military contracts all special forces we had um 12 guys that are going in the nfl draft here but between their 400 locations i think they have 90 going into the league this year i mean they are they are performance so we've been working on things and we can talk about that like

most products we've created on it are a combination of different ingredients to create something new. And a lot of those single ingredients are things that are already backed by science, so it's not like we're taking a huge risk by combining them with other like-minded products to create something unique. But having Exos as a partner now, and we're providing them with all their supplements, we get to have the sports performance line. So that means back to the basics. We've created creatine monohydrate yeah right guys it's a whopper are we loading it still are we loading it still or no

no no good luck good no load but yeah it's it's funny because it's like man we really just i forgot about that so funny 20 grams a day then you can go into your base period then reload in six more weeks. But, yeah, so, I mean, it's funny because that's like the most bottom-of-the-barrel basic-ass supplement ever. Yeah. But they need it, and, you know, it's nice for our fans to be able to get that from one place. And I just like the fact that it is the most science-backed supplement ever created.

You know, and now they're looking at it as a nootropic because anything that feeds the mitochondria and creates more ATPp and influences the brain as well as the muscle and so that's cool to have that in-house i get it for free uh that's a sweet deal um you know making a electrolyte product that we came out with for exos as well that uses platinose it's a beet sugar lower glycemic index um but still helping with glycogen restoration things like that much higher levels of electrolycogen restoration and things like that. Much higher levels of electrolytes like magnesium and things we actually need in training than you'd get in Gatorade. So that's been a cool project, you know, and then really looking forward to the future.

We just got to go out to me and a couple other members of the product development team went out to New Jersey for Supply Side East, which is a giant convention where a lot of supplement developers will put in the research, get things patented, and then try to ship it out to larger companies like ours that have the marketing. And it's our job when we go through there to really have an idea of what we want to create and then just start to piece together all the parts to that, try it out, see if it works, and then pass that on. And I think that's been a cool process to be a part of.

That's very cool. Where can people find you? I am at Kingsboo, K-I-N-G-S-B-U, on Twitter and Instagram. I will not friend you on Facebook because I never go on there and I'm maxed out. But you can find us at Onnit. You need a fan page now, dude. I know. I do need a fan page, but I can't stand Facebook. If I post on Facebook, it's because I clicked the Facebook link on my Instagram post. That's it.

That's the only time I'm active there. And then you see all the red dots. You're like, get me out. I'm out. Go. That seems to be the standard now. I don't know very many people that use Facebook exclusively. It's all Instagram.

Push to Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. So we got that. We got at Onnit all Instagram. Push the Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. So we got that. We got at Onnit for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. I do the Onnit Facebook Live every other week now on Wednesdays at 6 p.m. Central Time. So that's a 30-minute Q&A.

People can just jump on and ask me any question they have on anything, supplements, diet, health, and wellness, plant medicines, whatever. Nothing's off topic. So that's been a cool one. And then, of course, check us out at the On It podcast. Available where all fine podcasts are located, such as yourselves. Von Roth. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Strong Coffee, tell us about it. We had some this morning. Freaking delicious. Thank you. Thank you. Stuff is killer. Time release, I'll do it for you. Stuff is killer.

I don't even know all the things. L-theanine, is that what we got? Yeah, we got L-theanine. I can do it for you. Stuff is killer. I don't even know all the things. L-theanine, is that what we got? Yeah, we got L-theanine. I can feel it right now. Yeah. That's why this podcast was so dope today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. L-theanine.

Sophisticated energy. Right? So it's L-theanine, coconut water extract, hyaluronic acid, MCT oil, and collagen all in cold brew instant coffee. So it's a 100% instant solution to most people's energy and nutritional needs. Great way to break your fast and kind of get things going in the AM. You can find me at strongcoffeecompany or at vonrothfelder. Dig it. Doug Larson.

And it's delicious. It is delicious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it is delicious. And, you know, to be honest with you, if I could just take a half a second longer, I'm always amazed when I give it to guys like you who, you know, strike me as somebody who's going to be like, oh, I'm a black coffee guy or I'm a this or I'm a that, and then you have it.

And, I mean, it is delicious, and it's sweet. You know, I jokingly say it's like coffee and donut had a baby, you know, and it's like it's that good, right? Dessert fucking. Think about it. T-shirt coming your way soon. T-shirt coming soon. So, I mean, it's been amazing and just kind of seeing the response from it.

It's been really incredible. And I'm excited for our other flavors that are coming out. We're coming out with an unsweetened. And then we're going to come out with a caffeine-free because Doug was telling me how much his wife. Half-caf. Yeah, his wife loves it so much. And he's like, I would drink this, but I don't want the caffeine. And all the other things inside of it are so beneficial that the caffeine is just kind of like an added bonus to those that need it.

Dude, the decaf can be what I drink before I go to bed as a little desserts fucking. Especially with L-theanine in there. Right? You've got to have it. What do you got, Doug? Obviously, you can find me on everything Barbell Shrugged and Barbell Collective. You can follow me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. Right on. Get into the Shrugged Collective on all the socials.

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