Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Interview With Ben Greenfield on Optimizing Training, Recovery, and Health

Episode Date: December 24, 2014

In this podcast I interview bestselling author and competitive triathlete Ben Greenfield and we talk about the difference between overtraining and overreaching, the easiest way to know when your body needs a break, effective recovery strategies beyond simple nutrition and rest, maintaining peak brain health, and more... BEN'S WEBSITE: http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/ GET FIT GUY PODCAST: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/get-fit-guys-quick-dirty-tips/id371750376?mt=2 Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hey, it's Mike, and I just want to say thanks for checking out my podcast. I hope you like what I have to say. And if you do like what I have to say in the podcast, then I guarantee you're going to like my books. Now, I have several books, but the place to start is Bigger Leaner Stronger If You're a Guy and Thinner Leaner Stronger If You're a Girl. I mean, these books, they're basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle, lose fat, and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live

in the gym grinding through workouts that you hate. Now, you can find these books everywhere. You can buy them online, you know, Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and so forth. And if you're into audio books like me, you can actually get one of them for free with a 30-day free trial of Audible. To do that, go to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash audiobooks and you can see how to do that there. I make my living primarily as a writer, so as you can imagine, every book sold helps. So please do check out my books if you haven't already. Now also, if you like my work in general, then I think you're going to really like what I'm doing with my supplement company, Legion. As you may know, I'm really not a fan of the supplement industry. I've wasted who knows how much money over the

years on worthless junk supplements and have always had trouble finding products that I actually liked and felt were worth buying. And that's why I finally decided to just make my own. Now, a few of the things that make my supplements unique are one, they're a hundred percent naturally sweetened and flavored. Two, all ingredients are backed by peer-reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself because we explain why we've chosen each ingredient and we cite all supporting studies on our website, which means you can dive in and go validate everything that we say. Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in the studies proving their effectiveness. And four, there are no proprietary blends, which

means that you know exactly what you're buying. Our formulations are 100% transparent. So if that sounds interesting to you, then head over to legionathletics.com. That's L-E-G-I-O-N athletics.com. And you can learn a bit more about the supplements that I have as well as my mission for the company, because I want to accomplish more than just sell supplements. I really want to try to make a change for the better in the supplement industry because I think it's long overdue. And ultimately, if you like what you see and you want to buy something, then you can use the coupon code podcast, P-O-D-C-A-S-T, and you'll save 10% on your first order. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let's get

to the show. Hey, this is Mike Matthews from mostforlife.com. And in this episode, Most of All Life mended in one of my cool stuff the week posts he's also a coach a speaker and an iron man triathlete you can find him over at bengreenfieldfitness.com and also you might be familiar with his podcast which is pretty popular called the get fit guy podcast ben's a consultant for a company called wellness fx and also nutritionist and kind of head coach over at Pacific Elite Fitness. And as you'll see, he knows his stuff. And also I like that he lives this. I mean, he's a competitive athlete, so he's trying all kinds of things. And in a lot of cases, it takes time for scientific research to catch up with people that are kind of on the cutting edge of trying everything that they can get their hands on to improve recovery,

improve performance, and that also track their performance and track their health quantitatively, which we're going to be talking about in this podcast. Hope you enjoy the episode. And if you do, head over to Ben's website and you can get on his list and start checking out his stuff as well. Thank you. All right. Hey, Ben, thanks for coming on the show. list and start checking out his stuff as well. Thank you. All right. Hey, Ben, thanks for coming on the show. Hey, thanks for having me on, Mike. Yeah, sure thing. I look forward to going over some of this stuff. Mainly,

I want to focus on some of the stuff that you talk about in your latest book, which is doing really well called Beyond Training. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So in the book, you talk a fair amount about overtraining and kind of under-recovering. Yeah, yeah, for sure. training side of that equation first. So what are some of the kind of easy to spot reliable indicators of overtraining that we can watch for in our bodies that don't require fancy gadgets or you know, Jedi sixth sense or something? You know, if you're not paying attention to actual self quantification using something like heart rate variability or you know like well i think that's a good one i mean at least that's an easy i know that there are some fancy

machines out there that okay all right so so if that if that counts because i was going to say you know that that'll cost you i mean you could literally get apps for like four dollars and 99 cents off of itunes it'll test heart rate variability like um zoomio makes a one called the stress check and it uses the little camera lens on your like your iphone so it's it's infrared um and it's not quite as accurate as wearing like a wireless heart rate monitor but a wireless heart rate monitor is going to be 60 70 bucks and something like that even those fit you know the activity trackers i think a couple of them on the market right now also have a heart rate monitor, and people tend to like those.

No, none of them have heart rate variability that I'm aware of. Oh, okay. Yeah, because what you'd have to have is an infrared measurement that goes through the skin. And there is the ability to do that on your fingertip with the camera lens on your phone. It's a little bit inaccurate. There is the ability to do that on your fingertip with the camera lens on your phone. It's a little bit inaccurate. But the only way to get it otherwise would be using a pretty fancy infrared sensor.

And there's a group out of Tel Aviv that's working with the United States Air Force, actually, to develop heart rate variability tracking for pilots to monitor stress in pilots. But their technology isn't really available to the masses yet once it is they'll be able to start putting heart rate variability tracking into stuff like you know fitbits and and wearables and even like bike helmets and stuff like that but it's it's still kind of in its infancy maybe it's just my ignorance of what heart rate variability is exactly then yeah it's that honestly like that's the number one way that i keep track of my own training status and whether or not i need to kind of like take a few days to super compensate and

recover or whether i can kind of throw a few more uh curveballs on my body on any given day but it's essentially the amount of time that occurs in between each of your heartbeats. And technically, that amount of time, that delta, should vary slightly from heartbeat to heartbeat. There should be slight little variations in heart rate variability, meaning a high amount of variability is a good thing. And if that's not occurring, then what that means is that your nervous system is not that robust. That the actual vagus nerve feeding into the SA node in your heart, causing like the pacemaker activity in your heart to take place,

the tone in that vagus nerve is off, either due to sympathetic nervous system overtraining or parasympathetic nervous system overtraining. So what that means is that, uh, your heart rate variability is either going to be suppressed and you'll typically see that in like, um, aerobic athletes, endurance athletes who are just like doing too much training, just like, it's just straight up like aerobic overreaching or over training. And then sometimes like you'll tend to see some, some decent heart rate variability, um, measurements in terms of high amounts of heart rate variability in like CrossFitters and athletes who are over-training with intensity. A lot of times their heart rate variability is high enough, but it bounces around

a bunch from day to day, meaning that the sympathetic nervous system is a little bit, uh, out of whack to use the highly scientific term term. It's a super easy way. I mean, like, heart rate variability, I would say, would be my number one. And how does that play out? So we get the app, we, you know, check. Does the app have it all built in? It would just tell us?

Or do we need to interpret the results? There are some apps like the Omega omega wave and the bio force and those will just like they're they're like green yellow red apps right like green is like go you're good to train yellow is kind of be careful today maybe make it an easy day where you know you're you're gonna either reduce weights or reduce intensity or reduce volume and then red is just like don't train today you know go take a bath or whatever. Cool. So that's useful also for just recovery purposes.

Cause I find that, uh, you know, the majority of my, of my exercise is intense weightlifting and that's, it would be a lot of the, a lot of my crowd, you know, are weightlifters. Um, and every couple of months, depending on what I'm doing, it could be every four weeks or so. And it's not every four and eight weeks. I just start to get a bit run down. I feel a bit, you know, fatigued in the gym, my weights go down a little bit less energy. And I always just kind of played it, you know, by that. And then I have to take a few days off and then I feel good again. Yeah, but I definitely pick up one of these apps. And I want to see how that correlates to

to actual numbers, you know? Yeah, and I've used my heart rate variability to really be able to pinpoint the fact that I can keep it pretty high with one full rest day per week and then one day of really active recovery methods I talk about in the book, like cold thermogenesis and hypoxia and sauna and things that are still making your body better, but that are not as intensive as weight training or road work or something like that. I also like a pulse ox. You can get a fingertip pulse oximeter at any drugstore and you want to look for a number, preferably that's about 96 up to 99% for your oxygenation levels. And that's, again, cheap, easy, simple. You roll over, you put that thing on, you check in the morning. And if it's suppressed, typically it's because you drank too much the night before or

you're, you're over-trained or overreached. And that's another decent sign that you should take a recovery day. Um, those are two pretty simple self quant devices devices. And then just like qualitatively, um, you know, you can always look at the things that you see about, like, I don't, I don't want to preach this stuff that you're reading about everywhere anyways these days. Like how much sleep are you getting and are you in a good mood? Is your appetite dysregulated? All that stuff is pretty intuitive, honestly. Yeah, the net effect is you just kind of feel like shit.

Yeah. You should check out – there's one website I like that kind of pulls in a lot of that intuitive stuff and actually gives you a pretty good running algorithm, like a daily score. And you just log in each day. It's like, how do I feel today? How did I sleep last night? How are my soreness levels, et cetera.

And that one's called RestWise. It's another one I talk about in the book in a little bit more detail, but it's just like 11 things that you kind of say each day. And it takes up about 10 minutes of your day. And it gives you this running score. you kind of say each day and it, and you know, it takes up about 10 minutes of your day and, um, it, it gives you this running score. Yeah. Eventually they're going to put heart rate variability into their algorithm too, but it's not in there right now, but pulse oximetry is.

Cool. That's great. I'm going to start doing that myself just because I'm, like I said, I'm curious on just putting some numbers to how I feel because I've always just kind of done it by feel or yeah I mean I guess there's also been like you know with for instance on on my bigger than or stronger program it just seems most people except for people that are brand new to it seem can they can go a bit longer but as once you get grooved in it seems every eight or nine weeks or so that's just when it's time to take three four days off or or or do it more like a deload where you're dramatically reducing the intensity of your workouts for for a week and then you feel good again you can get going so it'd be interesting to put some numbers to that yeah and i mean like for event-based athletes you're going to be doing those deload weeks

during a taper week typically right you know for for, I'm competing every four to six weeks, and so I've always got naturally worked into the competitive cycle, anything from a four- to seven-day taper going into an event. But for long periods of time, like let's say a winter off-season where I might have three months without an event, I personally find that I do better with one to two deload days a week and then consistent training with no full deload weeks rather than hard training, digging yourself into a super deep hole with daily training and then a full deload week.

So I like a little bit more of a micro cycle with like a three-day-on, one-day-off, two-day-on, one-day-off type of approach. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I do that as well where I'm not training seven days a week. There's just no way that I could. My normal week would be five or six days, depending on what I'm doing with my diet. Of course, if I'm in a calorie deficit, I'm going to be training a little bit less. Just overall, I have to reduce frequency and reduce volume a little bit. But you're, but your, your, your, your training main, are you doing, are you talking both weightlifting and endurance or just endurance? Well, yeah, I mean, I, most of my training really is a, is a pretty concurrent training approach just cause I'm right now I'm training for obstacle racing. So, you know, typical workout for me,

I'm, I'm carrying stones and tire flipping mixed right in with hill sprints and plyos. So, um, so, so for me it's, it's mostly combination training. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Okay. So that's, uh, that's great. That's on the, on the, you know, overtraining side. Now, what are some of your favorite ways to speed up recovery? I mean, obviously there's rest and proper nutrition. Everybody knows that, but what else have you found is a helpful for, for just getting your, not, it's not just your muscles, but like you said, it is your nervous system. And there are various theories out there

regarding is overtraining just a more of a mental thing or is it a central governor type thing? But I don't know, from what I've read on that, it seems like it's still just a bit confusing right now. And all we know is over time, as you push yourself, if you're not recovering adequately, you're not gonna feel very good, you're not going to feel very good and you're going to have to take some time off. Yeah. I mean, let me, let me first

clarify that most people aren't overtrained. It's very rare that I run into a truly overtrained athlete. And usually when you are overtrained, you are dug deep into a hole. Most, most people are overreached. Um, so you're, you're to that stage where the adrenals are still producing high amounts of cortisol. If you were to get a blood or a salivary cortisol measurement, you're still pumped up with cortisol, but you're to the stage where you've got chronically elevated cortisol levels, which are going to do things like decrease your cell receptor sensitivity to thyroid hormone. And they're going to decrease the ability of total testosterone to debind from sex hormone binding globulin so you have lower levels of free testosterone and kind of a little bit of a blah

feeling less drive sometimes a dip in metabolism from the thyroid issue but it's not true over training where the adrenals are no longer even producing cortisol. And you can't, like you can't, for example, mobilize liver glycogen unless you dump a bunch of caffeine into your body. And you can't get your blood glucose levels up enough to even feel like getting out of bed unless you're actually eating like higher amounts of carbohydrates. So you start to get like chocolate cravings and sugar cravings and fruit cravings and all sorts of nasty stuff happens when you're truly overtrained. And in a case like that, I mean, it takes four to six full on deload weeks and everything from like Tai Chi to nine to 10 hours of sleep a night to digging into things that actually cause the adrenal glands to start producing cortisol again, like ginseng and licorice root and all these herbs. So I mean, like most people honestly are smart enough to stop before they get

that far into a hole. Um, some of the things I like though, to, to keep yourself from getting there in the first place. Um, one from a, from a gear standpoint, um, I'm a big fan of cold thermogenesis gear or just cold thermogenesis in general. So, for example, like I'm wearing right now compression pants. And they're just like these super-duper tight compression pants because I spend most of my day at a standing workstation. But I can pack these with ice. station, but I can pack these with ice. So when I pack them with ice, that helps with, uh, with, uh, removal of inflammation and enhances recovery. Yeah. But it also, you're familiar with hyper ice and their products. Um, no. Oh really? Yeah. It's, it's, I, you'd like it. It's a iced compression wraps. Yeah. And, and actually you really, you really shouldn't ice without hydrostatic pressure from underwater in water or under a really steady flow of

water or basically like the compression sleeves. Like you should never just like ice your joints with like a Ziploc bag full of ice or some frozen vegetables or whatever. So compression with ice, I'm a big fan of that. I'm a big fan of the hyper icing. You should check it out. You'll like them. Yeah. I just made a note to myself to go check it out. Another one that I like is electrical muscle stimulation, like using a Mark Pro or a Compex, like if you're in a

car or an airplane or you're sitting around. My wife and I watched a movie last night and I had the Mark Pro running on my legs during the movie. I had a tough rock session yesterday afternoon with a weighted vest and, and, uh, you know, just knew I could use that extra recovery since I was going to be sitting around anyways. So I like electrical muscle stimulation. Another one I like is inversion.

Um, inversion tables are super easy to use, super easy to get your hands on. Those can help drain the legs really, really well. And like you hang from an inversion table for five to ten minutes and it can be a night and day difference, especially in any workout that you're doing speed for or running for. So from a gear standpoint, those are some of the ones I like, like inversion, cold thermo, EMS. There are some things that I do for sleep too. I sleep using this grounding method or

earthing method. A lot of Tour de France cyclists were the first athletes who used that to recover in between stages. What is that exactly? Just to explain for everybody. Basically, what you've got is an electrochemical gradient that tends to be best kept in balance when you're touching earth because you get a release of negative ions from natural geology and you know from the earth's magnetic field and when you aren't in touch with earth or you're flying or you're standing inside on concrete you're not really getting a lot of that natural recovery that would occur from a restoration of a normal electrochemical gradient. So you get that when you're sleeping and get this release of negative ions when you're sleeping. I use something called an earth pulse.

It just goes underneath my mattress. Another thing that I'll take naps on in the afternoon is something called a Biomat. naps on in the afternoon is something called a biomat and that's uh you may be familiar with like infrared saunas yeah sure releasing uh or for enhancing release of growth hormone and accelerating uh temperature and recovery yeah i talked about saunas in a podcast with uh dr ronda patrick if you're familiar with her yeah yeah and um yeah we she she's kind of more into like the heat shock proteins and cardiovascular effect of saunas. When you look at things from like a hormonal standpoint, there are some cool things that you get from infrared sauna exposure that you don't get from like a dry sauna or a wet sauna or just the pure heat. I've heard that.

I just haven't looked into the research. I just, you know, whenever I hear anything these days, I'm just like, well, it sounds good, but I don't know. Who knows? I have to see what kind of research is out there. Yeah, so I sleep on an infrared mat infrared mat. I don't sleep on it. I nap on it. And then I just, I just tuck it away and I don't sleep on it during the night because it actually can get kind of hot. You wake up at like 1am just covered in sweat. So, but I, but I do take naps on that. And then the other thing is from a dietary standpoint, I'm a huge fan of either nutrient-dense supplements or nutrient-dense food.

By nutrient-dense supplements, I mean things like phytoplankton. That's a bit like I do a few drops of phytoplankton every day just as a super, super dense source of cells. I'm also a fan of egg yolks, grass fed beef. I do a lot of liver, uh, to, to maintain levels of fat soluble hormones. Um, do a lot of, uh, dark, dark leafies, a lot of coconut oil, um, basically really, really nutrient dense foods. It's pretty rare that I, that I eat a calorie rich nutrient poor food.

Like, uh, I don't do a lot of, a lot of bread, a lot of rice, things of that nature. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I talk about, uh, cause you know, in the, in the bodybuilding or in the fitness world, if it fits your macros is all popular these days. A lot of people, you know, they real when, when they learn that when you're talking about a body composition, it's mainly just calories in calories out and then making sure you get enough protein. And then they use that as like, Oh, well, I guess I can eat a box of pop tarts a day and, and get lean without ever giving thought to the health side of things that food isn't just a food isn't just protein, carbohydrates, fat, that the micronutrients are, uh, just as important in the

long run. And yeah, sure. You can, you can lose weight and you can get lean and you can look okay eating junk food, but let's see how you feel in six months. Let's see how your performance is. Two perfect examples for that would be like, you know, high levels of chronically elevated blood glucose levels that you would get by just paying attention to macros and perhaps not paying attention to food quality

can actually adhere to cholesterol particles and when you get glucose adhere to cholesterol particles that allows a particle to become oxidized which allows it to dig into an endothelial skull uh cell wall so that would that would result in something like atherosclerotic plaque formations in uh you know coronary arteries for example right so that's that's been shown in research of high-carbohydrate diets, especially high simple sugar diets. Yeah, which is one reason why you can see athletes get blood clots, even though they may be extremely healthy on the outside.

Another result of that same type of glycation, which is what happens when sugar attaches to proteins or attaches to fats in your body, would be the formation of advanced glycation end products in neural tissue, leading to early onset Alzheimer's and neural deficits. That, again, can occur no matter how strong or lean you are. So, yeah, I mean, there's some definite kind of health versus performance tradeoffs when you look at things from, you know, that type of stuff is not just influenced by your macros and food quality, but also by, you know, other health choices like stress and the amount of sleep that you get and the amount of electromagnetic field exposure that you expose yourself to during the day and, you know, toxins and pollutants and all sorts of stuff. So yeah, I mean, if you really want to be a healthy athlete, and that's why the title of my book is Beyond Training, there's a bunch of stuff that goes above and beyond training. Because like I acknowledge in the first chapter of the book, like you can be a fantastic athlete and not pay attention to many of these variables. But that doesn't mean that the quality of your life from about 40 or 50 years old onwards is not going to totally suck yeah yeah i think of uh what is it he was an nfl player maybe as a wide receiver who a buddy of mine really

fall football lunch but a buddy of mine said he got traded to some team and he eats mcdonald's every day and his joke was like they're like oh, how are you liking it over there? And he's like, they have McDonald's everywhere. I love it here. And it's just like a genetic freak that at some point, though, his body is not going to – it's just not going to be able to do what it does. Yeah, I mean you see deficits that begin to – I mean like let's say like impotence or erectile dysfunction. Like that's a total canary in the mine. That's an indicator of an eventual decrease in your production of endothelial nitric oxide and your ability to vasodilate.

And the reason it's a canary in the mine is because erectile dysfunction often precedes heart attacks. Because you get a little bit of vasodilation to those blood flow regions in the crotch, and that's just a sign of the same thing going on up in the heart. Sure. And that's something that's influenced by food quality. It's something that's influenced by the amount of nitric that you can still be a great athlete with erectile dysfunction and then have a heart attack 10 years later. Bad sex and then death despite your performance or your body comp. Yeah, that's a good point. Another thing in the book you talk about is customizing your diet to fit your body and performance goals.

You talked a little bit about that in terms of how you eat. Is there anything else that you can tell us kind of more about that? Yeah, that particular section of the book is basically about, you know, for example, older athletes, younger athletes, females, vegans, et cetera, how to customize your diet. Like let's say, I don't know, a lot of people are talking about vegans and stuff these days so let's talk about like senior athletes for example like as you as you get older so you naturally produce less hydrochloric acid as you get older and uh hydrochloric acid is what's necessary to actually activate pepsin which is the enzyme that breaks down proteins and so you tend to see uh low levels of blood amino acids and inadequate protein absorption

in older athletes. Yeah, which is why research has shown they need more protein or that's one way of going about it. I guess if you're not going to improve the digestion, they got to eat more. Yeah, you either eat more or you improve digestion or preferably do a little bit of both. Right. You know, along with just chewing your food more completely. Incidentally, it helps to take more time to eat as you get older. So ultimately, customizing the diet for a senior athlete, that would mean doing something like eating lemons or taking a digestive enzyme prior to your main meals of the day when you may not have needed to do that when you were a younger athlete. And I personally do a gut test once a year,

and I'm starting to notice mild deficits in my pancreatic enzyme production and also a little bit of an elevation of fatty acids and triglycerides in my stool. And one of the things that can cause that are just the gradual enzymatic deficiencies that can occur as you age. So I'm being a little bit more careful. I buy lemons now whenever I go to the grocery store, and I have a little bit of lemon, like lemon juice and some lemon wedges before I eat. And I'm even starting to include digestive enzymes with some of my big meals just to help me along with that.

And that's one of the things you take into account when you're a senior. Another would be minerals. My parents do the same thing. I wouldn't say they're athletes. They've been in exercise their whole life, but they found as they aged that enzymes, where they would have never done anything for them or they never would have noticed it when they're younger, now they definitely notice it with certain types of foods. Yeah, exactly.

Minerals would be another. Just the basic loss of osteoblastic activity and bone mineral loss as you age. I'm a big fan of trace liquid minerals, sea salts, kind of going out of your way to get extra minerals in your diet, like that phytoplankton stuff I talked about and any other sea vegetables are really good sources of minerals. But kind of going out of your way as you get older to include a lot of those things in your diet is also a pretty prudent move to make. Um, and you know, just, just getting on enzymes, using lemon juice, getting on minerals, like those are some of the things that you should

think about doing as you age is just one example of, of a way you can customize your diet. Yeah, that's great. Um, you had mentioned veganism. We're gonna have to dive into it, the, the whole subject, cause we're kind of, I know you're, you have to, you have to be on another call soon, but, um, I get asked about it, you know, semi-frequently and what are your thoughts on, on, uh, vegan eating and performance? Cause I mean, there are of course, inherent, uh, drawbacks, then inherent micronutrient deficiencies that you're going to have to account for. And then there, you know, it's hard to balance macronutrients. Try to get enough protein without using a supplement and without exploding your carbs and fats.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. I would say there's a lot. I go over about 12 different kind of deficits and issues that vegans need to address in the book. I would say some of the biggies would be, and I test a lot of athletes. I work for Wellness FX, so I look at the lab profiles from a lot of athletes, both vegans and meat eaters. Vegans, I tend to see vitamin B12 deficiencies almost across the board. Yeah, that's true.

So that's one biggie is getting on a good B12 supplement and preferably something that's got a really absorbable form of folate in it. Another one would be creatine, like five grams of creatine a day. And you can find good vegan sources of creatine too. There's one – actually, I'm taking creatine right now. I use Creo 2 from Millennium Sports. That's a pretty good one. It's got some cordyceps in it as well. So creatine and B12 would be a couple.

Carnicine, that's another one that's found only in animal foods that if you're going to be a vegan athlete, you should consider supplementing with. And then DHA is another biggie for neural system integrity. DHA is huge for neural tissue. It's also really, really important for myelination. And if you look at the plant form of omega-3s, ALA, that's pretty inefficiently converted to DHA. Exactly, yeah. So using like algae. Do you just supplement with fish oil or what do you do?

You can use algae. You can use like a chlorella spirulina. Um, there's some, some pretty good, like a hundred percent organic sources of that type of stuff. You want to be really careful not to go to the bargain bin at the, at the super supplement store for, for those things because like they, they can be really laden with, uh, with heavy metals and toxins and stuff like that. So make sure you go organic if you go with a spirulina or chlorella, but that can be a pretty good source of DHA.

If you can convince a vegan athlete to use a fish oil or something like that, that's also a pretty good way to go. Yeah, sure. Try and hunt something down. I was just curious if you use it because I take fish oil every day and spirulina as well. Yeah. I do take fish oil. I do about four grams a day. Um, you know, I, I use chlorella almost every morning in my smoothie. You know, I usually have

a can of sardines over a big ass salad at lunch. So, you know, I, I really go out of my way to, to get the DHA in. Um, but yeah, I'd say creatine, carnosine, DHA, um, vitamin B12. Those would be some of the biggies um vitamin d would be the last one but you know you never want to take vitamin d unopposed without adequate amounts of vitamin k2 and vitamin a and that's one of the issues is that vitamin d can cause calcification and there can be some risks of vitamin d toxicity right right um if you're taking high amounts of vitamin d so i think the basic right like the simplest recommendation is just get your blood tested to see where you're at in vitamin D levels and get him up to, I guess these days that now the minimum you'd want would be a 30 NG,

what is it? NG per milliliter, I think it is. And then, uh, but then newer research shows that being upwards of 50 is actually probably optimal. Yeah. and in athletes, I like to see 40 to 80. And then most folks and even vegans can get around there with somewhere in the ballpark of 2,000 international units of D a day. But that needs to be accompanied in about a 1 to 2 ratio with A. So you should be shooting for around 4,000 of A. And then the other thing is vitamin K2, 100 to 200 micrograms a day of vitamin K2. That's kind of like the holy trilogy of fat

soluble vitamins right there is that two to one vitamin A to vitamin D ratio along with 100 to 200 vitamin K2. Yeah, that's exactly how I'm coming out with my supplement company, Legion, our multivitamins coming out and that's exactly what we have in it. Oh, that's perfect. Nice. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Okay, so last but not least, you talk about in the book about improving brain health and brain function. What are some easy ways that we can do this?

Neuroplasticity is a big one in making sure that you introduce variety and novelty and challenge on a regular basis. And that can mean straying outside the comfort zone of your sport a lot of the time. So for me, for obstacle training, I'm getting some walls and ropes and carries and stuff like that thrown at me. But I try and challenge myself in other physical and mental ways as well. So I play tennis twice a week so that I'm engaged in a ball sport that requires eye tracking and peripheral vision. And some of those skills I'm not developing with obstacle training. I took up golf recently again.

Yeah, golf is another great one. Yeah, exactly. Another thing that can help out with that is brain games, brain aerobics. So I like Lumosity and NBAC like when I'm standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the airport I'll whip out something like that rather than surfing through the emails on my phone just for a quick little brain training

I'm also a huge fan of music for that just listening to music and complex music can be pretty helpful for brain training, but I actually go out of my way to learn music. So I practice piano with my kids two times a week, and then I play guitar three times a week. And that helps me having to, it improves your visual perception and your eye tracking, having to basically look at the notes and go back and forth from the notes to where your hands are moving. But, uh, it's also incredible for learning and attention to detail, uh, memory, things of that nature. Um, and then the last thing that I do is I memorize stuff. So, um, the way that I personally do it is I'll memorize like

a quote or a Bible verse or something like that every morning. And I go back and try to remember that a few times during the day just to, I mean, it's just like your body, right? If you let your body sit in atrophy and you don't send it a message that it's got to stay alive, if you don't use it, you'll lose it. And it's the same thing with the brain. You just send your brain a message a few times a day that you're going to challenge it outside of what it normally be expected to do and you know it's a very very good way to keep your brain alive and you know i i get into a bunch of supplements and apps and hacks and stuff like that in the book but i mean like you know you look at things from a civil perspective just like some of those brain training apps like lumosity doing some music and then

making sure you don't get stuck in the comfort zone from a physical activity standpoint or whatever sport you're training for. Those would be some of the biggies. Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. I think that's great. I think it's similar with training where you're going to get the majority of your benefits from things like that. You can't just take pills. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, there are different nootropics and things that can improve cognitive function. But just like with training, you've got to do the work. And with the brain, that is doing the work. Yeah, and I think that's freaking ridiculous. Like the people who are infatuated with smart drugs

but won't go out of their way to just be uncomfortable. It's the same concept as the people who take the fat-burning pills and don't exercise. Exactly. One weird trick. Yeah. Okay, great. Well, um, this is awesome. Tons of good information here. I highly recommend you the listener that you check

out Ben's book. As you can tell, he's very smart and he knows what he's talking about and there's all kinds of cool stuff in this book. I actually recommended it on, I do a weekly series, like cool stuff the week thing where I recommend a book every week and some other various things. And I recommend it when it came out. Oh dude. it came out. Oh, dude. Nice. Yeah. Nice. So, yeah, thanks a lot. I know you got to run to another call. So thanks a lot for taking the time, Ben.

And I'd love to have you on again sometime. I like speaking with people that know what they're talking about. Killer, dude. Thanks for having me on, Mike. Yeah, sure thing. Hey, it's Mike again. Hope you like the podcast. If you did, go ahead and subscribe.

I put out new episodes every week or two where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www.muscleforlife.com where you'll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you'll also find a bunch of different articles that I've written. I release a new one almost every day actually. I release kind of like four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I'm involved in over at muscleforlife.com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.