Barbell Shrugged - [Rebuilding Health] Behavior Change, Transformation, and Regenerative Medicine w/ Dr. Anthony Balduzzi, Anders Varner and Doug Larson #718

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

Today we're speaking with Dr. Anthony Balduzzi, a weight loss expert, and doctor in naturopathic medicine. Dr. Anthony is the founder of The Fit Father and The Fit Mother project, and has helped over 40,000 people lose weight and get healthy without following fad diets or spending countless hours in the gym. Anthony is a former national champion bodybuilder who has used his unique blend of knowledge and experience to help men and women all over the world, in over 100 countries, to lose weight, keep it off, and perform at peak capacities.    Connect with Dr. Anthony Balduzzi Website Instagram YouTube Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram

Shrugged Family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, Dr. Anthony Balducci is on the show. You may have seen him if you are a frequenter of the YouTubes, because this dude has a massive channel called The Fit Father Project, which, you know, being a dad, liking fitness. Turns out YouTube's very good at stalking me, which is where I found a lot of Dr dr valducci's content wanted to get to know him a little bit better just because he's got a massive channel puts out tons of good information um what happened was he's got an actually phenomenal story um and you're gonna learn a

lot about behavior change transformation uh regenerative medicine uh it's a very very cool story uh i know you're gonna be listening to this on podcast so you won't be able to see the cringe in Doug and Travis and my face as he's telling one of the stories in here about really a very nasty

ski accident that he had even just talking about it right now on the show intro and my face just curls up because it's a really nasty accident and his recovery story is Um, even just talking about it right now on the show intro and my, my face just curls up because it's a really nasty accident and his recovery story is, is very inspiring and led to much of what he does professionally now. So it's a very cool story. As always friends, you can get over to rapidhealthreport.com.

That's where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Maddix, Dr. Anthony Balduzzi. For all of you other 40-year-old fathers in the world, you probably know him because YouTube has targeted you as well as it has targeted me from the Fit Father Project. We were just talking pre-show. You have an awesome story about kind of how you got into this space and some of the injuries, and we're going to dig into regenerative medicine. But I'd

love to hear just where this journey started for you because we got some habit changes to get into, but where did this fitness journey start for you? For sure. First off, guys, thanks for having me. This is super cool to be here. I have a ton of respect for everything you guys do, and I feel like this is like the cool kids club for deep level fitness discussion,

so I'm in it for the morning. There we go. I was born in upstate New York, and I had a pretty average childhood playing outside, doing stuff like that with my little brother. What was unique about my childhood, though, is I saw my dad's health basically deteriorate the whole way. He busted his butt to provide for the family. His health was on the back burner. And I don't know exactly how it all lines up with the exact dominoes of the situation,

but he got a cancer diagnosis in his late thirties and ended up dying when he was 42. So I watched my superhero, the guy I looked up to most of my life, basically just like, you know, shit, shit, the brick, he died, you know, he withered away. And it created such a massive impression on my mind, because I was nine years old, right before he died. My 10th birthday was a couple months later. And like to be there to not have your dad, you know, at that moment, that was like the worst birthday of my life. But a switch flipped in my brain, my mom gave me a pair of my dad's old dumbbells. And I've just kind of made a commitment in myself that I was going to try to start to train in my mind to get stronger than cancer.

But intuitively, what I was doing is I was starting to heal because I recognized very early that when I started to lift and exert this energy, like I started to feel better, maybe a little bit sense of control, maybe the endorphins and keflins and just neurotransmitters. But I started to feel like I was taking all this anger. I had all this sadness and channeling it productively. And I'd hide the dumbbells under my bed, put on my little Walkman with the God smack. I stand alone track and just like do curls and pushups. And, and, and, you know, I started to get stronger. And, you know, as I got into high school, you know, when I started to heal and process this a lot more, I was actually quite

strong because I've been training for like three, four, five years. I wrestled, I got into some weightlifting and I started to realize, man, I actually got a little bit of an aptitude for this. And as a young guy, when you start to build muscles, I went to an all boys Catholic school. There was no girls. So you either like did well at school or you played sports and you try to get huge. And I was like on the latter side of things. So I just want to get jacked. And I did. And it was a beautiful experience. And bodybuilding kind of captured my heart, this idea that you could take your body to like a high degree. And I now recognize that a lot of my drive to look a certain way was really masking a

lot of that pain I had for my dad trauma. Like I welded up, I decided to become like the man and drive forward really hard. And I use that energy productively. I competed as a competitive bodybuilder from my late teens through my mid 20s. I did like maybe 10 to 15 shows did very well, won about half of them. And then I, you know, at a certain point, I guess my drive for doing another contest prep, but just like waned as you do so many of those things and only starve yourself so many times for sure. And you, you scratch the itch, right? You know, you get better,

you get better and you hit a peak and then you're getting marginal incremental improvements. But the benefit of that is I learned how to take my own body at a very high level with my training, my supplementation. And I was natural about 80% of the time in the last 20% when you're in the game long enough, I started playing around with some different things. Right. When you get those like marginal returns, you go, I think I need help. For sure. And I was more successful as a natural bodybuilder to be honest because the gap changes dramatically when you cross over into the other world and yeah because then you gotta be willing to go too far right and you're a young guy on peds competing against guys in their 30s and 40s on peds with 10 more years of training and like probably better

genetics and willingness to do you know whatever there's so many too many bodybuilders dying lately like well i am powerlifters for all that for that matter so but it was it was a cool experience because it was actually before like instagram fitness was really big and it was like bodybuilding.com had this thing called body space which was like their version of my space i don't know if you guys remember that but like yeah i started posting like my my contest prep photos out there and like it actually got some traction it was my first like experience being like kind of internet famous. Cause I had like a top profile there for a while. I started getting those weird fan mail stuff.

Like flew me out and I got to go on stage and go to some expos and, and stuff. And it was, it was like, wow, there's a whole world of like actual business and creation on the other side of this, not just necessarily being an athlete. And funny enough, like just, you meet people in the industry. When I was competing in my twenties, I actually hired Lane Norton as one of my coaches before he was super famous. I doubt he even remembers me, but he gave me macros, told me what to do and I got in good shape. So that was, that was fun. I met, I met Lane Norton in the same, around the same time when I was at my peak in powerlifting, we were both sponsored by the same company, but he was just like the little guy there

and now he's like the big guy. So yeah, it's cool how that all comes together. Right. I love the dude. So for sure. And then, you know, when I was, I went to university of Pennsylvania, so I was at like East coast Ivy league, you know, top level university. And he was cool. Cause I got to see a lot of like advanced medical stuff. I actually worked in a neuroendocrinology lab where we were working on mTOR stuff like before, like it was all super big and we were injecting these mice and doing different knockout stuff. And the mice would have blocked myostatin and they get huge and jacked. So it was like a cool like experience of like starting to get some genetic side and then the bodybuilding. And then I told my mom I wanted to get a PhD, but you know,

if any PhD is listening, please don't take offense. My mom has very particular opinions, but she's like, PhDs are just people who sit in ivory towers and do jack shit. Like, you should go and be a doctor. And I didn't want to go traditional doctor. Galpin, that's you, buddy. He's talking to you. He just talked about Lane Galpin. No, these guys are actually really doing a lot of stuff.

And that's my mom's opinion. That's my mom's opinion, not mine. She was right back then. I think back then she was probably right but things were about to change yeah with the internet right now with phds can make make all share the information so much more than just you know sitting and trying to get grants and stuff like that right but i ended up getting you know through through a move back home after being east coast went to naturopathic medical school and like for those that are not familiar there's three kinds of doctors in u.s

traditional mds there's dos well there's chiropractors too, which would be like the third one and the naturopaths are NMDs. And we practice holistically, you know, we prescribe medicines and stuff like that. We're not licensed in all the States, but we really like bring in treating the whole person. Prevention is the best cure and use a lot of like natural therapeutics. And right now it's funny as a naturopath watching the medical landscape, because this whole functional medicine space is now just like the MDs bringing in the natural therapies. And we're all kind of like meeting in the middle on like what really works and moves the needle. So it's beautiful to see, but I got to really appreciate, and this kind of brought in a

little more of my holistic thing. I was had a very fitness macro kind of mindset, macro and programming. And now I started to learn like how the body worked in its totality, started to understand like natural law and how like to be optimized when you need to be synced up with all these cycles of what's going on in nature. We're talking about light, temperature, you know, foods, immune system, all this stuff on a deeper level. And around this time in medical school, I was building the fit father project, you know, with the memory of my dad, because I saw in clinics, so many people just like my dad, they didn't always have cancer, but they were getting wrecked because they couldn't maintain a fitness routine amidst the busyness and chaos of

life. And so I started to be like, how could I take my methodologies that I learned from a young age in my bodybuilding and actually make them sustainable for dad. So much different training than we would do much different meal planning, but started to do that and get clients and kind of fast forward. And maybe we'll talk about injuries as we've run around a hundred thousand guys in over a hundred countries through the fit father program, and they've lost hundreds of thousands of pounds. And it's just kind of like my work to help busy dads, because right now it's, there's so much stress and pressure that if you don't do anything, you're just going to be end up

like the statistics, like over 50% of guys have cardiometabolic disease, overweight, obese, you know, not the people that listen to this, but like the average people. And I want to help fix that. Well, some people listening to this are trying to like change their lives. So not everybody is, is fit and jacked at listening. So this is going to be good. Cool. I actually, uh, you were mentioning, uh, pre-show again, we were talking about, uh, kind of periodizing, uh, habits and, and how do we progress that? I mean, you're meeting people that are kind of in that big weight loss phase. Their blood sugar probably looks like crap and cholesterol, the lipid profiles are off. How do we start to not throw the whole kitchen sink at somebody and

say, just go change? But what is the path that actually gets people to results? It's a great question. I'll give you like our take of how we do it, which is one way that works. And I'm sure there's many ways that work. Our exact process is the first thing when someone comes into our communities and our programs, like the first thing we do before we actually give them a meal plan is we go through some deep mindset work that culminates in writing a mission statement. Because what I learned and I studied some psychology in my undergrad too, is like... Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to

rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And Then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your

concerns. Then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible.

And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. Because what I learned and I studied some psychology in my undergrad too, is like, effectively, it's not that we lack information that why we're not successful. It's like we lack the ability to create sustainable habit change. And a lot of that is not just due to our prefrontal cortex. It's like the deep limbic areas of our brain that need to get aligned. So many people have the logical fallacy that their health and fitness is like one circle over here and the rest of their life is another circle. And that leads them to the experience of feeling like I don't have time for this

because they're two separate things. So we need to help people psychologically collapse that distinction. And we do that by helping them write down what their core values, the things they actually care about. So maybe being a good parent, making good money, pursuing some hobbies and passions, their spirituality and faith with God, whatever that is for somebody and show them and help them make the neuro associations of how their health is connected to all those things. Like how is your health affecting your ability to be a parent, to do perform well at your job, you know, to actually be feel aligned in integrity with the things that you say you believe in, in your faith. Like, so we're collapsing some of those distinctions. We're also going through the

process of boosting up the pain, like really future casting, like what happens if you don't make change because the human psychology has this like very future casting, like what happens if you don't make change? Because the human psychology has this like very short-term myopic bias. Like we don't like to react. We don't really predict long-term problems as well as we react to short-term stuff. So we need to make that present reality of what doesn't happen really real. And then we culminate in writing a powerful mission statement of what someone's going to do for 30 days.

So we like to create these short-term containers in the beginning when coaching our clients and be like, look, you have the rest of your life, but we want to really focus on this initial 30-day period, write a commitment for this, and just focus because you want to get enough buy-in psychologically that they feel like they can actually do it. Not like a six-month, 12-month program, which can happen in time, but we believe like launching a rocket, it needs that initial momentum to get out. And then it's a lot easier once you're at a gravitational pull. So the mindset work is primary. The second aspect is we believe that people like kind of like how the body's laid out on the structure of a skeletal system and then muscles move the bones. I think that nutrition in the daily routine around nutrition is like the skeletal system

of someone's success. Like everyone wants to jump and start to do workouts when they're out of shape because they think that exercise is going to do it. And obviously exercise is super important, but what we found with clients is nutrition is probably 80% of the body recomp battle. Like if someone's does increases, they're walking, does workouts, maybe one to two times a week, you know, and obviously more would be beneficial and dials in their new eating. Like they can lose a ton of weight. And so people who feel time strapped, getting nutrition on point. So what we do before we talk about foods and stuff is we help someone establish a meal timing schedule set up. Like this is you proactively deciding when you're going to eat. This is the scaffolding every single day when you get into the dojo of your life,

what you're going to work on training on. So some people it's intermittent fasting. Some people, they make breakfast with their kids. So it's an eight noon, three, six kind of like standard thing. Some people eat one meal a day. Some people work night shift, third shift, but either way, it's a proactive schedule setup. And this is massive because the way to create change is like to win every day and to try to win every day. So this gives someone a behavioral hook to kind of like re-get into. And then, because we believe that front-loading consistency is important in the front part of the day, we're busy parents. We're trying to do a lot of stuff with our work in the mornings, our kids, like we standardized the first one to two meals of the day and just like set them in stone.

Variety is fine. You can have that for dinner, but the first two meals of the day, get make those freaking turnkey because no matter what happened yesterday, you have always have something to come back to. And typically those meals are like, if it's a meal one, it could be like eggs and fruit. It could be a protein smoothie. If you're vegan, vegetarian, it could be a power overnight oatmeal. Like there's many options of what it could be, but it's easy to digest, high in micronutrients, protein, fiber, healthy fats,

and it doesn't take much time to prep. So getting this nutrition scaffolding in is massive. We obviously talk about meal prep. We have portion guidelines and stuff, but the second part is the nutrition. The third part is daily walking. We are huge proponents of helping people meet baseline activity. And I think from a benefit of just feeling it's something that people can do, they can accumulate steps and activity and formal workouts. We make the distinction between walking and workouts. And we have everyone check that walking box. Ideally, that could be like a morning walk. You're getting sunshine and some of that circadian regulation from the light in your eyes and your skin. It could be after a meal, which can help regulate blood sugar. But either way, people are starting to work their psychology where they're

checking boxes. Like I got my morning water. I got my walk in today. You know, I got, I got, you know, these kinds of things and that gives them the sense that they're winning. And that's actually what's rewiring the neuropsychology look over a course of time. And then the kind of exercise that we program in a couple of times a week is like metabolic resistance training, basically dumbbell kettlebell complexes, which there's many ways to train, but we find that it's, it's easy enough for people with a pair of dumbbells or kettlebells in the comfort of their own home to get a great workout that improves their strength, flexibility, and cardio in 30 minutes with joint friendly motions that improves their mobility over time. So that's kind of the, the recipe wrapped in a community of coaching and accountability.

Yeah. I, uh, the, the more I live this life with little children and a wife and a business to run. Um, so many times we hear people say like, prioritize your time. Nobody ever talks about energy. Nobody ever was like, my biggest resource is energy. Do I have the actual energy to be patient with all of the things that need to be. And I, I don't drink really at all anymore, but sometimes I'll go have a couple. And then I have this thing called the hangover the next day. And that is like the closest that I can feel to what it would be like to be

unhealthy on a day-to-day basis. And you can't do anything. It is so hard to get up and motivate yourself to get going, to be patient with your kid. I just turn TV on and I go, look, I don't have it today. How, when we start to implement this process, are people able to see changes week, two weeks, how long before they go, holy crap, like I can actually go live my life in a empowered way because I've just got energy to get up and go. I'll tell you, there's a couple layers of energy in my experience. There's like physiologic energy, which is maybe a byproduct of the tone of your nervous system and how well you produce ATP.

There's also like psycho-spiritual energy where you just like are driven by a massive cause or passion, like the single mom who somehow burns it through because she can take care of her kids or something heroic that you have to accomplish that gives you a sense of energy. I think our mission statement kind of helps activate a little bit of that reservoir. I think getting up every day, drinking 20 to 32 ounces of water with minerals, which is a habit we implement and walking and getting some sunshine taps into the body's internal pharmacy in a way that produces a lot of energy. We tell people to bleed through the nose, drink water and get some sunshine in the morning that that changes things pretty substantially. And when you standardize meal one, and you're not getting inflammatory crap or dysregulating blood sugar crap, which most people eating too many carbs in

the morning and stuff like that, you'll be shocked how good you feel energetically and getting a lot of the inflammatory foods out. I think the first thing people see before massive weight loss is in the one to two weeks, they feel like they have less bloat and more energy. So, you know, you can do that. And obviously the sleep's a huge thing. And circadian rhythm balance is a huge thing. And, you know, the tone of your nervous system is a huge thing, but energy tends to be something that at least in our program, people get quite quickly. And that changes in stages. If you're a parent with very young kids, you know, look, it's just the nature of the beast, right? For a while, if you're not sleeping well, you're not going to feel that energetic.

Yeah. I'd love to dig into how kind of like the mindfulness journey plays into your clients, into yourself. Is there like a meditation piece to what you have going on in that? Really, really being able to focus on how your body feels, maybe setting like a clear focus and direction of what where you want to be. Just getting rid of all the the junky old stories and actually centering yourself around just feeling better. Yeah. Well, I like to think of it a couple of ways. Like one, it's kind of like we go to the dentist once in a while to get like a deep clean. And then we also have to brush our teeth every single day. I don't know how much I buy into the dentist, by the way.

Yeah. Twice a year. Once a year. Just mandated. Yeah. Once I think is acceptable. Yeah. But the point being is like, I think they can do a little thing that I have. No, I get it. But the point being is like, sometimes it's good to do like a really deep clean, you know, go deep on some things. And I think that's kind of like the mission statement type stuff that we have people do periodically is to like really deeply connect. And then on a daily

basis, we're, we're always connecting. And I think like the affirmation of getting up in the morning and even drinking the water is like, I consider it like a subtle prayer. It's like you wake up and you're like, this is good for my body. This is fundamental today. I'm choosing health. And you're doing a particular action early in the day. It starts to reaffirm this. And me personally now, I don't dictate what our clients must do on this kind of like meditation spiritual front, but my routine is I'll get up and drink water and I sit down in a little chair that I have in the room next to my bedroom and I meditate for a number of minutes before I start my day and actually end my day with some meditation. And this is kind of a fundamental premise now for like these more optimized people. I believe that the length of your lifespan is completely dictated by how much

you can maintain parasympathetic tone. And I think that the animals that live the longest have the most parasympathetic tone. A tortoise moves very slow and lives for 150 years. A mouse is always thinking it's going to be eaten, has a high heart rate, always in sympathetic drive, lives for 18 to 24 months. Obviously, there's a genetic component to that. But like if we can keep the body in a parasympathetic, activate occasionally during workouts, that's massive. And I think that's where practices like mindfulness and meditation are huge.

And if you can bookend your days in the morning, you can kind of set this more tone for just checking in with your breath, straight spine breathing. And then in the evening, you can kind of like unwind and let things go. It's going to over time really tweak and change the parasympathetic tone. Mindful eating is another thing that I'm sure people listening to this podcast can start to do more. You want to bring more mindfulness in, you're going to be eating a couple of meals per day, start to chew your damn food. It's good for digestion, but also even just the noticing of that process. So we can add more things to the routine. We can also just add more awareness to the things that we're already doing,

you know, and then, and then connect with them in a slightly deeper way. Yeah. I think Paul check was the guy we, we interviewed a few years back that said you're supposed to chew the liquids and drink the foods. So you're, you're able to mash everything up instead of just drink your solids and chew your liquids. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. That's a great point. Yeah. Let me ask you about these habits. Do you, do you subscribe at all to like, you know, the atomic habits, James clear, you know, I think he does a really good job of like,

you know, creating, you know, habits around other habits that you already have. Like you're stacking for sure. And the goal is to get a health routine that integrates with your life and your family's life. So that's why you got to understand one of the big times that your family life is kind of converging where all your routines typically in the morning and it's school pickup or the evening time. So like those times need to have a very like integrated routine. So it comes down to when do you exercise? How does that play in? When are you drinking your water and moving? How does that relate to your kids? Completely stacking in those particular episodic times. And then I guess when we look at our lives, it's a series of days and our life then becomes

a series of months and years. We've got to focus on winning the days and also moving with the change of the seasonality. Like your routine of your health changes when your kids are out of school. It changes when it gets colder outside, like it's starting to do right now. And so being able to ride those ebbs and flows is what helps you stay sustainable over the long haul. I mean, that very simple statement just gave me like the best ideas about, you know, I spend time every morning with my kids, but you know, what do we do? It would be much better if we created activity. And the funny thing is, is that my, my boys want me to go work

out with them downstairs every morning, but I'm like let's just hang out but that is hanging out like yeah that's a great but hanging out with your friends your whole life i know so going downstairs all of a sudden if i train with my kids it's not hanging out with my friends i know i feel like i don't want to be down there coaching them but like i just need to go down there and play with them that's as brilliant. We do that outside. You're right. But it's getting colder.

This is getting harder. But like, you know, we spend our time playing basketball, you know, soccer, which is funny me out there playing soccer, but I'm trying. Yo related to the phases or seasons of life, as you just mentioned, uh, uh, prior to, uh, starting the recording, you mentioned the term periodization, which we mostly associate with programming and exercise and whatnot, but you were talking about periodizing habits. Yeah. Dig more into that. How do you periodize habits? For sure. I think that initial phase of when you're starting,

like, so the first training block, and as I've kind of described in this sense would be getting your mindset and your nutrition routine locked in and on place because with those are the two biggest drivers. Then you start to layer in the next level of like formal workouts, which is going to be any kind of higher intensity workouts in a good program that you want. That's like the next layer that you add into the schedule. Past that, we start to add in more advanced habits. We start to get people in like months two and three of our programs to start doing some 24 hour fasting once or twice a week really great way to like you know obviously there's a lot of hormonal and metabolic benefits but it also helps control calories it's not too hard for people to do and then once people have a little more you know like they have more experience with that you can

layer in like more advanced habits so the workouts get more intense you maybe try a three-day fast maybe you try carb cycling but like these things are not introduced in day one, they're like adding layers to a foundation. And again, the foundation comes down to mindset, nutrition and sleep and daily activity is the baseline, higher intensity exercise there. And then I think now you're playing in the realm of optimization, which comes down to supplements, more advanced training, more advanced fasting and stuff like that. But like, we layer them in in a time crunch and time layer where people have like built up and have some competence for the two days per week 24 hour fast like how's your success rate with that like is that something where people they

hear that and they go yeah i could do that or is that program once we program once a week like we program once per week training we say once per week on a 24 hour fast is what we aim to have people do from months to on, on the program. And like, not everyone does it, but I think many people who have played around with some intermittent fasting, fine. They can shift dinner a little bit later and, you know, like skip it and then, you know, skip breakfast and lunch and have dinner, you know, a little bit earlier and they're

fine. I think people find that fasting is intimidating at first, but the dinner dinner fast after a while seems like a quite easy habit for people to adhere to. It's a great way to course correct if you ever overeaten. So we also teach people like we give them the concept of tools like when you inevitably overeat or have a free meal or something like this, or just feel like you're off off track, we give them a toolkit about how to course correct, increase the water, do a 24 hour fast the day afterwards, do some activity that's going to burn up some of the, some of the extra glycogen that you've stored from, from the heavy free meal. So they start to think of this as like the SOS, like routine that they can kind of deploy.

And that's key because like, like an airplane flies, it's okay to drift, but you don't want to like, you want to minimize the drift and course correct. So people can do the 24 hour fast. Some people who love it so much then choose to do more into a week. Um, and that's effectively you're, you're kind of like at that point, carb cycling without like really modulating any of the other macros more intentionally. And that can be cool and beneficial for some people. Yeah. For people, but when earlier, when you, when you mentioned nutrition as the first place to start, I love nutrition as the first place to start because it doesn't require more time out of your day and it gives you energy. Yes. And it gives you energy. But yeah, if you start, if you go to somebody and say, okay, we got to work out five days a week now,

well, now you've got 90 minutes out of five of your days each week that you have to find, find that time. But the fasting thing you get, if you're a busy person and you fast for 24 hours, you get back a lot of time because you don't have to worry about meal prep and cleanup and actually eating the food. Like you get back a lot of time because you don't have to worry about meal prep and cleanup and actually eating the food. Like you get back a couple hours a day, really. And it's the easiest one to actually stick to. It takes no knowledge of nutrition. You just don't eat for a little bit.

And there's all that stuff, but those are reasons that I do like it sometimes. You're becoming mindful of your hunger signals too, which I think it's one of those emotions that like we are used to feeling like when we feel angry, we observe that. And sometimes we don't react. Many people are so trapped with their hunger signals due to habits that were like, they start to feel hungry and they immediately feel like it's something they need to act on. Fasting actually helps create a little more mindfulness where like you experience hunger, but you have a like overriding commitment

to this. And so it can actually help you on a psychological basis over time to help to understand I'm actually hungry. Am I a little stressed right now? Am I just eating because of boredom? And like, that can help a lot because a lot of people end up doing that because for a stress relief, but fasting can help recalibrate that, you know, neurologically. Yeah, I like that. Yo, change the direction here. I'm really curious about this. So before the show, you also talked about regenerative medicine and that road that you've been down now. You have a story about getting in a horrific skiing accident, which led to some of this. Can you dig into that story?

For sure. My last year in medical school, I go on a skiing trip with one of my good friends. We're in Durango, Colorado. I've been skiing my whole life. Grew up on the East Coast, grew up a little bit in Canada. And just like bodybuilding and weightlifting, a lot of my ego is kind of tied into skiing in this day, this particular day, I had an intuition. I needed to slow down. We were, we were ripping just me and him dudes in our late twenties. And I was skiing really fast and I caught an edge a little bit.

And I flew into this, like this other run, like almost like flew off the run into like a mogul patch. And I caught my leg and I was like, man, that could have been horrible. Like felt like a tweak my hammy a little bit. And I'm like, I should really slow down. Like, what am I doing? I'm not training for the freaking Olympics, but like I didn't, I put the music on, kept on skiing really hard. And there was a particular run. It wasn't exactly like a double black diamond or anything. It was just a blue run, but it had like a hill that was very steep. But what I was doing, I was jumping at the peak of that steep hill and floating down like 10, 15 feet. I do it the first time and I think I'm hot shit. So I go back up the lift to do it another time. I have headphones on, I'm ripping probably

like 30 plus miles per hour. And I do the jump except in the air, my skis cross a little bit. And when I hit the ground, they blow off and I am just getting thrashed, tumbled is all I kind of remember. And I ended up slamming into a tree about 30 miles per hour. It hits my right femur and my femur explodes into like six, seven pieces. And anytime I hear a femur, I know that's like a tree trunk in there, especially if you have weights, that thing, that's not the biggest bone in the body for sure. And I was doing a lot of squats. I mean, at that time I could probably squat 405 for 10 so i had some strong enough right and so beefy and big like when i think it might have saved my life because i did all the squats but anyways if i'd hit that anywhere else i just would have instantly died broke my arm come up wake up in this like tree well my leg bent

sideways backwards around there and like you know someone thankfully saw me they they got the ski patrol do he need to cut his leg off? That whole ordeal. And I had an emergency surgery, two of them in the next couple of days at Durango. And thankfully, they have good orthopedic surgeons at the base of ski mountains. Go figure. But they ended up like rich ones, rich ones. Yeah, for sure.

Right. I mean, yeah. So like some of the best orthos are right there as ski runs. But all they could do for me at the time, and this kind of really started like my spiritual and regenerative journey is they cut my knee open and they put a rod in the middle of where my femur should have been. And they just left the floating bones around it. Like there's nothing more that they could do. Like they used to put like meshes around on the inside, but like, that's a huge problem. Cause then you have a freaking

mesh inside your muscle and your bone capsule. So they just like leave the rod in there. And then over the next, you know, year or so they just allow the bone to form this super callous bone around that. So my life changed immediately, you know, when I had that injury, you know, the, the pain was tremendous for sure. But also I think the identity crisis was massive. I built my body up so much. I was running this fitness business and then to like almost kill myself strictly because of my ego. When I had an intuition was like a really powerful experience that started to lead to a spiritual awakening and get me very dedicated to look at like, how could I actually heal my leg? So I got deep into all things. The first thing you do when you're in that much pain, you know, and after you have the surgery is you learn how to meditate.

You learn how to be with what is to become more mindful and to be into your body to use the will to direct healing in a sense, like, could I actually feel and, and kind of tell my body in a subconscious way to speed up healing? And what do I do with all this pain, just like to understand how to breathe and to be with it and to accept it, because you can't deny when you're in that kind of state, there's no running from it. So it brings you to this place of radical acceptance. And it also starts to break down all these attachments that you have there. You really believe that you are the body and that your body is this particular way. And I realized, man, I have a body and it has changed and I was the cause of this. So there was just a lot of processing. My leg heals over the next year and it heals up short and heals up about an inch short,

an inch and a half short, which is kind of problematic. If you've ever had a short limb, cause you know, you're walking around, your hips are all jacked up. And I used to wear a lift in my shoe. And this is before I had to, an inch and a half is a lot more than it sounds. It's like, I mean, centimeters make a big difference. A lot. Yes. Yeah. So I experienced all of that and I had a number of surgeries to like get screws out and hardware in and out. And I had a number of surgeries to get like get screws out and hardware in and out. And I had six surgeries on the leg over the course of time just to correct all sorts of things. And when I was about to have my daughter, I had a vision that I was going to be able to stand on grass with her holding her as a baby. And I had two equal length femurs.

Like that was something I'm like, I'm young. I want to be able to experience this. And so I sought out some leg lengthening surgeons down in Florida called the Paley Institute. And they specialize in limb lengthening, um, mostly for like young kids with actual congenital deformities, sometimes for traumatic adult injuries, like my case. And the other bucket they serve is people cosmetically who want to get any limb longer. They can do femurs, tib, fib, or even your arms too. So I had a bunch of friends. So imagine this we're down in, you know, the process of lengthening is amazing. So first I got to get that old rod out of the middle of my femur, which they basically take a hammer and hammer on the upper hip for five hours to get

that thing out. Cause it's all the bone had grown around that space for the last like seven minutes. For sure. That's as good as they can do to hammer that thing out right so they cut my knee open take that rod out then they they saw my leg in half like my femur in half so that they can put the they put the other rod in the the lengthening rod and that rod has a little magnet in it right where they saw the the thing and then every day use this device. That's a big rotating magnet device. You put it on your femur and you press the button and three times a day, it'll rotate this magnet, which telescopes that rod and increases that rod length. And you can only go, they figure out the exact amount that you can do to grow the bone. So the soft tissue

actually accommodates and grows with it because, you know, and in the while you have to go to PT every single day so they can actually stretch the soft tissue to accommodate the lengthening so you have a bone that's chopped in half you're in this pt i lived in a uh basically like a motel with all the other people going through limb lengthening they put all of us on a bus we're all in wheelchairs or whatever and take us down do the pt so that was like a refugee camp of limb lengthening i know it was crazy we looked like if looked like a bomb went off. A bunch of people limping with one short leg. Exactly.

Until they get kicked out when they get to healthy length. Exactly. And I was the good one because I only had to get one leg lengthened. A lot of these people were getting cosmetics. You were probably the most jacked one in there, too. I was. I was doing my push-ups, whatever I could do on my own time. He's an overachiever. He's still doing upper body workouts.

How expensive is this thing? Well, mine was covered by insurance, but to get, to get your femurs lengthened, it's around a hundred grand each, each for your femurs. And you can do it multiple times, but you can only do it a hundred grand. We'll get you probably about three inches, but you can continue to do it. So we have, there's a number of people, like there were some friends I met there that were like four, 11, five foot. And they're like, you don't realize how much of a problem this is. I, women won't look at me or talk to me and i just want to be 5 4 and i this changed my life and some of my friends yeah yeah some will but i mean this

was their experience and they and they they got it there was other guys they're like just classic 5 10 male was like dude i just want to be 6 you know, Hey, you're willing to go through the pain. Can I ask one more question about this? Are athletes getting in this? I'm just curious if you're a five, 10 basketball player. Yeah. You're just like money. It's five, 10 and six, two is a big difference.

The rehab is not worth it. Like having gone through it, it's just not worth it. And you just don't get the same amount of function. All right. Cause here's what happens when they keep your bone exposed as you're lengthening some of your marrow is kind of floating out into the just the cavity where the leg is and can form all sorts of like just aberrant bone so i had a bunch of jagged bone and stuff like this just like that formed in my femur and inside my muscles and eventually that dissolves but it's

like stabbing you it's just not worth it from the rehab you cut you cut this longest bone and you're the hardest bone in your body so it's just like it's not worth it you. It's just not worth it from the rehab. You cut, you cut this longest bone and you're the hardest bone in your body. So it's just like, it's not worth it. How long is the rehab for most people? I mean, yours, I feel like would be longer. Cause you, yeah. I mean, initially, right. You get the leg lengthening for about two months. Like that's at least that's the amount of like I had, then you have to keep the rod in there for at least a year to allow it to consolidate. And then they take it out. And when they took my rod out, they cut my knee out. They made me open,

pulled the rod out and shaved down my femur and cut my quad open to shave down all that bone. So then it's another long. Right, another year. Yeah, it's not worth it. You're right.

And then you're cutting your knee open all these times. If they can go through the hip, it's easier. But just a crazy situation, right? I mean, to feel all that. And you're getting knocked. You're getting put under

every single time oh boys if the next time you see me if i'm six foot you'll know what happened i heard i met this guy on zoom and uh now i'm not i'm six foot at 50 i had a growth spurt i'm a late bloomer i'll go back to to Appalachian. Give me one more shot. I got eligibility left. Yo, with all this rehab, you were also doing some stem cell type treatments as well. Is that right? For sure.

Yeah. This is what I want to hear about. So, okay. For somebody else. I really got into optimizing healing. And here's what I did. First off, I think like nutritionally, you just need to eat like really nutrient dense food. So

everyone's talking about the collagen rich foods, the bone broths, the liver, the good natural anti-inflammatories, high quality proteins, like all that's valid. I played around with some peptides, although the severity of my injury that didn't move the needle for much at me as much, but the BPC one five seven TB five hundred like inject those for sure. But I got like a number of stem cell treatments as well as PRP treatments to help the bone regrow.7, TB-500, like inject those for sure. But I got like a number of stem cell treatments as well as PRP treatments to help the bone regrow. So in the initial phase, after I had my injury and I had my original rod in,

we would PRP those injury sites. I think probably every three months or so, I'd get a PRP treatment and that helped regrow a substantial amount of bone. So PRP, for those who are not familiar, you draw the blood, you spin it down and you basically take out the activated area of the platelets and the growth factors and inject those and it causes an inflammatory response that basically tells the body heal this area and that's like a step up

from the prolotherapy which is basically just using a sugar or dextrose solution so prp is good because that's some growth factors stem cells are even more powerful and there's a couple ways that you can get those uh some very trendy stuff's going on right now where people are talking about VSCLs. These are very small embryonic like stem cells. These are found in the blood. They're tiny cells. They can turn into anything. And some doctors right now are pulling those out, hitting them with a laser to multiply them and injecting them back in. I've had okay experience with that. What I actually literally had yesterday before hopping on with you guys today was a bone marrow aspiration stem cell treatment, which I think is the one that I do recommend the most. This is where they actually go into the top of your hip, your iliac crest,

take a needle and puncture it with a, it's really crazy because they numb you up and then they take like a dry, a screwdriver more or less with a needle and they drive into your, into the iliac crest. And then they, you weird pulling sensation is they draw that marrow out of your hip and then once they get all that those are real live cells with all the growth factors and the stem cells and they can inject those anywhere orthopedically it's cool because it feels at least my experience today just having had it yesterday like i'm standing up like my hips a little bit sore um but it seems like a lot less inflammatory than the prp prp is really great for like tendinopathies in the elbows, in the shoulder, tuning up ligaments and stuff like that. And I think

if you have anything that's inside the joints, like osteoarthritis, you're older, some articular damage, like the stem cells are a lot more potent. And these treatments, typically a stem cell treatment should run you around $2,500 to $3,500 if it's a bone marrow aspiration. Um, and it's like relatively, it's kind of painful, but not like crazy painful. And it heals you for, you get a long prolonged healing effect. So you put these in there and they're going to heal you for, you know, months and months and months after the fact. I'm also a big believer in using pulse electromagnetic field mats, PEMF mats. Like these are really good for increasing blood flow and just stimulating the healing by using frequencies that are really biocompatible. So I have a mat that I laid on

a lot, especially as I initially healing my femur. And they have a lot of research on this, like to non-union fractures and growing bones. If you can actually run some current electricity through the bone, it'll help heal it. And the PEMF is like a, an analog of that. It's not actual like electricity. It's not like ACDC, but it's creating a field that stimulates all the bone cells and the chondrocytes. The other thing I think is fascinating about healing is, uh, is, is from the work of, uh, Dr. O Becker. Uh, he's basically a guy that did the world's this book called the body electric. Uh, it's fascinating. One of the things they found is they were doing some experiments on frogs. Frogs have the ability to naturally regenerate their limbs. And what they found is that when they took frogs and they cut

the motor nerves going to, I'm sorry, they cut their motor and the sensory nerves going to the femur, the frog's leg would not regrow. Okay. So you remove the motor and the sensory nerve to the leg, the leg will not regrow. If you just cut the motor nerve, but leave the sensory nerve, the leg will regrow even though the frog can't use it. So, but if you cut the sensory nerve, the leg will not regrow. And what this tells us is basically that sensory input is what really helps drive the healing cascade. So anything you can do, rehab exercises are obviously good because they increase blood flow. They get that neuromuscular reeducation, but really what it's doing is providing more sensory input. And one device that I use to create a lot of sensory

input is called a new fit. It's a newbie new fit. It's a, it's a, it's an electrical stimulation device that can drive a lot of sensory information from electrical pads in the area is basically helping connect the nervous system to an area. Cause what happens when we have any kind of serious injury is we get neurologic inhibition in that area. Like the body wants to protect itself. So it downregulates the nervous system. So you need to like reeducate through sensory input. And so that's also been massively helpful. I know I've chatted for a bit on this, so I'll pause if there's any questions. Now I'm going to check out the new fit. A lot of athletes are using it

mike tyson's got one you know i think uh and that thing's crazy because it's um you can set the frequency on that device to whatever you want it to be so like 500 hertz frequency is very big for sensory and it feels like really intense sensation but it's really good for healing or you can crank it down to 40 hertz which basically creates a massive amount of muscular tension without any joint load. So like you can, you can basically do the equivalent of the attention you, the attention you get from doing like a near one rep max, um, just from the electricity with no joint load. Uh, and you can move against that eccentrically. So the kind of like muscle gains you can get from that thing training are pretty insane. It won't give you all the strength adaptations because you need to load the joints properly and and also understand the movement patterns but like holy crap can you blow

up on that thing if you're looking to rehab and train but it's a it's a very expensive unit you're you're like a decade into this rehab on after this injury then yeah for sure yeah nearly 10 years yeah yeah does it uh does the the of, do you ever hit an end or are you constantly going to be looking for the next peptide and the next way to improve this? Like, does it ever get to a hundred percent? Yeah, I do. I do believe, and this is, I'm glad you brought this up. Cause it's a little bit of the mindset. I do believe it gets to a hundred percent, but I become so patient through the process. Cause it's been so long that I haven't put a timestamp on when it does. And I'm grateful. I'm not like a running back that needs to get back in like, you know, 12 weeks to like continue the season or something like that.

Like have time when you have a serious injury, you're dancing between like holding a powerful vision for what you want to experience, but also having radical acceptance for what you are experiencing. And I think that healing actually comes again in this parasympathetic accepted state. So for me, I'm like, if I, it's a weird dance where I have to be like, if my leg does not improve and this is it, like, I'm actually, I'm good with it. You know, I'll find a way to continue to be with this as is and find that, find the good that comes from this. But I also at the same time holding like the desire for more, but it's not coming from a place of like lack, just like, ah, I'm here. I'm going to continue to do my, my rehab exercises and continue to push it and we'll see what's possible.

So you got to kind of hold these seemingly conflicting things in your mind. And that's, that's a big part of healing. I'm curious with the parasympathetic thing. I'm like, um, like, what are some of your top, like, I guess, exercises or, you know, plans you might give to one of your, your people that would help with that? Because it's well-documented that, you know, heart rate variability is a big indicator in longevity. So I'm curious. HRV is going to be a, like an indicator of how parasympathetically dominant you are. That's really what it's, what it's showing you. Exactly. Well, I think like there's a couple of ways to approach it.

Like, I think we want to approach it physiologically. Like, but I think more importantly, it's like mentally and psychologically, like meditation and some mindfulness practice where you actually start to sit and pray, like helps you relate differently to all things. When you start to understand yourself is not just identified with all the things

that are happening, but being in that seat of that observer. Like, I'm not saying I'm always like cognitively dissociate from everything that's happening, but if you sit enough in meditation, you realize that thoughts come and go, feelings come and go. And it allows you to just to be at more peace with anything that's happening. So you're not having as much of a psychological reaction to things. Obviously that's gotta be key and primary to the closer you get to nature and into natural

cycles, like outside sunshine, breathing air, feet on the ground, like that increases parasympathetic tone like crazy. Like even seeing green, like the color green, the frequency of green when we see this increases parasympathetic tone. When people go take nature walks, they get out in like the native EMF of like outside in the forest, they feel freaking phenomenal. Breathing through the nose, proper nose breathing, which is going to be good for the nitric oxide system as well as parasympathetic is massive. And then I think watching your stimulant use, you know, so like everyone's got their own, how much you can use, if at all, is going to be a big part. Cause like if you're taking stimulants constantly, right, you're going to be putting the system into a certain amount of drive. Yeah. And then like the, the looking, making sure you're very entrained to the proper light

pattern. So in the morning you're getting sunshine on your skin and your eyes, you're guarding against blue light at night. Like, cause otherwise you're getting active signals during a time when the body's supposed to be at rest. Here's another thing I'm going to say, like, we're going to learn more about like the melatonin story is way deeper than we understand. We make melatonin in the gut as well as in the brain. It is so fricking important. And like, it's not just like we take this thing cause we have jet lag or helps us sleep. Like melatonin is so primary for brain health and actually like as just a general system regulator, like it's our, it's our master nocturnal hormone that is produced in like all areas of the

body. So I think the more we learn about that, keep going. I'm so interested in this. Yeah. So we just found the melatonin is made in the digestive tract as well as the pineal gland. The pineal gland obviously is one area that we have this in the morning when we get sunshine in our eyes, the eyes being an extension of the brain, it signals areas of the brain to increase serotonin. This is the stuff that we try to increase when people have depression, we give them serotonin enhancing drugs. Your brain literally makes serotonin in response to sunshine that makes you feel freaking happy. Later in the day in the brain,

that serotonin can be converted to melatonin. Melatonin is like super anti-inflammatory. It interfaces with those microglial cells, which are your immune cells in your brain that clean up all the garbage. And we see people who have neurodegenerative diseases. They typically have lower blood flow to areas, but they also have these plaques that build up.

When we have the microglial cells at night and they can clean the brain and get rid of that. They work with melatonin to make that whole signaling work really well. And then, you know, it's just like, this is like some really deep stuff. And this, the blue light, it's not just on our eyes, our skin through melanin. Melanin is a full spectrum photoreceptor. We know that melanin absorbs all wavelengths of light it involves infrared all the visible up to the uv obviously because it helps us make vitamin d

but even the blue light that's blasting from our stuff that hits our skin is influencing our clock genes negatively probably disrupting melatonin to a certain level but also just giving our body an active signal in a time we need to be at a rest signal and you want to jack up your nervous system like and also look i'm talking speaking as a good naturopath if we're going to look at optimizing the body we need to look at the highest order of things and on this planet one of the highest order things possible is the sun the great generator of all the eminence of light that all life here uses to capture and convert energy so like the human is is no different from that there's this guy a neurosurgeon named dr jack Jack Cruz, who's like on a fricking crusade to like tell people about

melanin, how the melanin leptin melanocortin system is massive. And his old premise is that we need to fricking get out in the sun a lot more, get midday UV breaks, get UV on the skin and in the eyes and get into cold because the melanin system works better when you actually have cold exposure and therapy, just like we cool semiconductorsin system works better when you actually have cold exposure and therapy, just like we cool semiconductors and they work better when we're reading computer chips and plants like the body semiconductor machinery and the melanin proteins work better in the presence of cold. So there's this whole chronobiology stuff's nuts. You're in Scottsdale and you have, I lived in Pacific beach for like a decade in California.

And there is a piece of me that misses that sunshine for sure. So much. And like, I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina right now. And there was like a day and it happens. It's like September 4th. And all of a sudden the earth just goes and it moves a little bit. And all of a sudden you feel it go like five degrees cooler. The sun doesn't hit you the same and my whole existence starts to decline and i go no i need

shirt off i need lots of sun on me tons of just soaking this thing in like nature's energy source i need it for sure and living in socal for decade, it is so noticeable that I do not get the same level of sun. Like so noticeable. It is like a daily impact as the fall hits. I'm like, I was actually like on a walk with my wife yesterday and I was like, sucks. I can like feel the sun like four o'clock in the afternoon. I can feel that the sun is not hitting me like it normally does. Like I feel like when you're in Scot the afternoon, I can feel that the sun is not hitting me like it normally does. Like, I feel like when you're in Scottsdale, when you're in Arizona, SoCal, wherever it is, and you're in that sun, like the most perfect sun every single day, come out of it. You're like,

this is my body's missing something. And it literally is just, I need that energy. I want to absorb it all day long. Let me share a couple of things for those people who live in the Northern Hanford sphere, especially during winter time. Like I want to explain sunlight because I think most people don't even know this. The sun's light that we perceive is only about 40% visible light. It's about 50% infrared light. This is what actually heats the planet and what we experience. When we're missing the sun, a lot of you're missing a lot of infrared inputs. So like it's a really good idea for people who want to optimize seasonally to get a red light and infrared light panel and get it during those initial times, probably in the

morning. And maybe even the evening would be like two really good times to do that because the visible light's only a part of it. And then the other 10% of light is UV light. And the UV light is the only kind of light that makes vitamin D. So people who get outside in the morning sun, which doesn't have a lot of UV index based on on how where the sun is in in the sky you actually don't get vitamin d production from that you get it from midday sun so for you it's probably supplementing with a good amount of d3 getting infrared light having that and then really protecting your light at night by getting like no blue blocking all the things and wear a long sleeve shirt if you're watching tv or something like that all i actually i've always wondered about the light at night, how much of it actually,

when it, um, like you can put the eye mask on and that probably solves 90 plus percent of the problems. Um, but how much of that actually like it hitting your skin makes a difference. It does. I don't know if it's like, I don't think it's as important as the eyes in terms of just the photoreceptors in the eyes are obviously the best ones we have, but it's something. Um, yeah. Anytime people are we have the control it's something um yeah anytime people are like oh it's so nice it's finally we finally don't have the heat and i go

how about 105 with humidity every day i want it i want all of that natural yeah um so california but yeah travis one last thing because i know we're almost at that time but you asked about parasympathetic. I think like actually the using hot and cold, which insofar as light is a high order signal for the body, the whole point is homeostasis, right? This whole system is just trying to regulate. So any stressor that moves the system off that creates a compensatory response in the immune system and the nervous system.

I think using those is a great way to train your body to be more parasympathetic. Like the sauna obviously works. I think the cold time is even more potent because you get in there and you learn how to like actually relax in the presence of a quote unquote stressor. Right. I mean, like that, that carries with you throughout the day. but you you said get your feet on the ground are you talking i'm talking grounding and earthing brother like barefoot picture get all those feet people come to your instagram man they love it for sure damn we went there huh i have my feet are yeah i got some kind of nice looking feet i'm not gonna lie um all right so people on instagram are crazy all right so here's the deal i mean like i'm just gonna get a full-blown our bodies are completely electrical you guys know this like all of our cells use minerals to create electrical gradients effectively water itself and this is you can get into going on a rabbit hole on like the fourth phase of water it's a book by gerald pollock basically he says that

water has four phases not just solid liquid gas it has a gel phase when water's in contact with hydrophilic water loving substances it it changes its structure in such a way that it's kind of between an ice and a water it gets organized and it creates a battery where electrons can flow this is all to basically say that we have a bioelectric system we know this and the earth has natural resin metals in it. That's conducting electricity. And when we connect to that, it helps us particularly blood clump, blood clotting, which is a big thing that a lot of people see. We get these Rouleau formations where those red blood cells, which are donuts, toroidal donuts that have a natural charge. They clump up when they get like depolarized in weird ways. They know that earthing and grounding actually helps like

establish healthy blood flow, which I mean, if you're in any kind of athletics, you do not want blood that's clotting. You want blood that's well-formed and flowing really well. Yeah. So you live. Yeah. Yeah, sure. And so, and then I'll like, I'll open up this can of worms to the last minute. Non-native EMF is a legitimate factor in health and athletic performance. Phones that we're having, Wi-Fi routers, the presence of these fields open up voltage-gated calcium channels

in our cells, allow calcium to rush in, which actually creates different secondary byproducts that can damage DNA. We also know that it backs up the mitochondria and the electron transport chain

does not work as well. There are over 3,000 published studies on this stuff. And I have a presentation if you guys personally want to watch this. It's an hour with all the research documents. I'll send it to you. It's a freaking rabbit hole.

But like the EMF stuff, I think like the more you can keep yourself around native EMF and around non-native EMF, that's going to be big. People who are on non-native EMF, like tend to be a little more anxious, have insomnia and a lot of other issues. I think anything that has taken us out of the woods,

probably overall, is not advancing us outside of over connectivity and being more productive in our work. For sure. Also great, but maybe not on the health side. Yo, this has been fantastic, man. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Um, where can people learn more about you? So fit father project and fit mother project are two businesses I run for dads and moms over 40. So fit father project.com or fit mother project.com and Fit Mother Project are two businesses I run for dads and moms over 40. So FitFatherProject.com or FitMotherProject.com. And our YouTube channels are another cool place to check out.

We have hundreds of videos across the two channels. So YouTube Fit Father Project or Fit Mother Project and we'll come up. Yeah, you're probably like 100 million views or something crazy on there, right? Yeah, between the two channels, we almost have a million subscribers. So go us. Pretty pumped on that. Very cool. Coach Travis Mash.

This is the first one that like, I didn't take notes from my athletes, but I took it from myself. That was really good. It was nice to meet you. So great to meet you. I'll definitely be following. And like, I would really like to see that in your one hour.

I'll send it right away. Yeah, my presentation and feel to share with your community. If you guys love it. I for sure will for sure. Oh, mash elite.com or go to matcheliteperformance on Instagram.

Doug Larson. You bet. On Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. Anthony, appreciate you coming on the show, man. You brought up a bunch of novel topics, which I really, really appreciate. Thanks, Doug. Thanks for being here. You bet. Yeah, this was great. I've seen you so many times on YouTube, so to actually hear kind of the backstory

and dig in was, was really cool. So I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged to Barbell underscore shrug. Make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside rapid health optimization will receive.

That's over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends. We'll see you guys next week.